Comparative literature

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Â¡SubestÃ¡ndar!: Sub-standard small gauge cinema between Mexico and U.S.A. (1923-1960)
(2025-08-01) Pai, Gaurav; Tweedie, James; Mahadevan, Sudhir
At the core of this project, lies the mission to reevaluate conventional wisdom in the popular and scholarly discourses that miniaturized media technologies of the modern era are uniformly emancipatory, inclusive towards society, and offer unprecedented avenues against the hegemony of dominant media. I offer the example of the small gauge, amateur and semiprofessional, “sub-standard” film scene in Mexico during the middle third of the 20th century, and in the shadow of the mighty Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, which was the darling of global Spanish speaking audiences during this period. Mexico is a country that is the next-door neighbor to arguably the biggest originator of new technologies in the last century—the United States—and a former colony of Europe, which was the largest inventor during the two preceding centuries. But the adoption of this new Euro-American technology into Mexico, of smaller, portable, and easily operable cameras with projectors, using 16mm, 8mm and 9.5mm film formats—was rapid. I examine the life of small gauge film in Mexico and its humble role in the transformation of the country’s landscape as a result of negotiation by various social groups with the new machines. Stakeholders include movie studios, film stock companies, technical personnel, families and amateur filmmakers, military establishments, civil society organizations and others operating on either side of the border. I show that sub-standard film technologies helped nonprofessional filmmakers make films outside the hegemony of the mainstream film industry and hundreds of families record ordinary and special moments in their lives. Mexican governments also adopted them to produce educational, industrial, health and many other types of films, which were shown in nontheatrical spaces, and were aimed at state-directed “nation building,” especially for the rural poor and indigenous peoples. The document has an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion, and an epilogue. The introduction charts the rise of small gauge filmmaking in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and its flourishing during the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. It analyzes the politics behind imported technologies and its role in building infrastructures that sustained nontheatrical film cultures. The four chapters are my account of the archival evidence collected from periodicals, newspapers, and hitherto unacknowledged films spread across the Mexican and U.S. film archives on which I base my introduction. The conclusion evaluates the afterlife of sub-standard film in Mexico as a presumed ‘dead’ technology. The epilogue offers some speculations for amateur and nontheatrical film studies. This project seeks to think of small gauge machines as “technical objects” in what Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski have termed as “media infrastructures” and uncover contradictions in their ostensibly benevolent instrumentality. As against film as a medium, I focus on the film formats because as categories, they can be inclusive in expanding the reach of a technology, but invariably come with infrastructural riders that can restrict and pervert their end use. This document is an industrial, technological, social, and cultural history of nonprofessional film technologies between Mexico and the U.S. during the 20th century, and the adventures of a technology travelling from the Global North to the Global South. It simultaneously writes footnotes to the literature about Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age.
Feral Narratives: The Multispecies Worlds of Max Aub and Andrei Platonov
(2024-10-16) Gilbert, Erin Morgan; Diment, Galya; Bean, Jennifer
In the twentieth century, the definitions and capacities of language, symbolic reasoning, and representation emerged as central preoccupations in studies of modernity, while modernist literature and art brought radical new perspectives and forms into focus for new audiences. At the same time industrialization, urbanization, and compression of time radically transformed both human interactions and more-than-human relationships. In this dissertation, I investigate parallels between the more-than-human imaginaries revealed by the works of Max Aub and Andrei Platonov. Some of their most formally experimental fiction foregrounds the experiences of nonhuman animals and plants, positioning them as active participants in human history. In so doing, they allude to the more-than-human worldmaking practices running through literary history, while drawing on their own experiences and observations to explore multispecies survivance in the Anthropocene. Consequently, their richly intertextual fictions share a critical preoccupation with definitions of the “human” and “nonhuman,” the rhetoric ofanthropomorphism and dehumanization, and the intersection between utopian projects, knowledge production, and anthropogenic change. Their inclusion of plant and animal characters in modernist fiction, I argue, connects ancient more-than-human dialogic storytelling to the formal experimentalism of twentieth century literary practice, and in so doing, Aub and Platonov defamiliarize and ultimately resist hegemonic narrative production.
Legal Imaginaries: Citizenship, Violence, and the Law in Contemporary Hindi Cinema
(2024-09-09) Dueholm, Amalie Goul; Mahadevan, Sudhir; Ramamurthy, Priti
My dissertation investigates the pedagogical functions of New Bollywood cinema from the 2010s. Situating the study at a historical juncture of globalised cinema, Hindu nationalist cultural politics, and neoliberalist economic politics, the dissertation studies empowering stories about female and homosexual desire that have previously been absent from mainstream cinema. The dissertation argues that cinema dramatises everyday encounters with the law by bringing legal debates on rape and homosexuality in India into public discourse. Through close readings that bring analyses of the aestheticization of difference in New Bollywood cinema into conversation with feminist critiques of the depoliticization of difference in mainstream social justice movements, the dissertation illustrates how cinema participates in the social processes of law by reframing controversial dynamics as problems that can be solved by the law. By attending to how access to law is conditional on a universalised, middle-class citizen-subject, the dissertation considers how cinema forecloses radical and structural critique asempowerment becomes an individualised project. At the same time, the dissertation offers two critiques of the legal project. Firstly, it demonstrates how law relies on violence, now displaced to the private sphere, secondly, by calling attention to the different iterations of the law and legal institutions across New Bollywood cinema it suggests how cinema produces an imaginary of law through suturing different, often heterogenous encounters of law together.
Mothering at the Margins: Place, Memory and Migration in Circum-Caribbean Women's Writing
(2023-09-27) Rubinsky, Leah; Handwerk, Gary
My dissertation investigates how contemporary circum-Caribbean women’s literary fiction is shifting ideas of motherhood by narrating mothering in ways that complicate traditional notions of place and nation. I examine place, memory and migration across the novels of three circum-Caribbean women writers, including Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, Colombian-American Patricia Engel and Colombian Pilar Quintana. Although each writes from a specific linguistic and cultural context, they all imagine fragmented, transtemporal, deterritorialized and deeply subversive mothering that contrasts starkly with the “good mother,” trope circulated in popular state and religious narratives. My textual analysis focuses on key literary moments in which subversive mothering unfolds within marginal and liminal spaces: in memories, across borders, at the edges of a forest, on transient coasts, in the womb and beyond death. Taken together, these authors articulate mothering as processes that occur not in or for nations but across them, unsettling and expanding our understandings of place and motherhood, and ultimately, opening up spaces in the literary imagination for grappling with histories of colonialism and displacement while offering the possibility of reconnection and healing.
"One Must Go Forth to Evil Houses": Kitsch, the Aesthetic Sense, and the Ethics of Negative Thinking
(2023-08-14) Anderson, Douglas Jason; Bean, Jennifer
The faculty of taste as a dialectical unity of sensual and moral pleasure (or displeasure), an idea first consolidated as an effective concept by Immanuel Kant, has been fully commodified by capitalist-consumerist culture. Algorithms track the minutest habits of our online footprints, accompanied by a vast and anarchic network of scheming profiteers sending constantly morphing sign patterns to our brains, designed to accommodate and alter the mapped trajectories of our desires. Beyond the virtual, ideas and products are sold on the basis of individual and corporate adherence to normative rules of thought and conduct. Surveillance capitalism, the recently termed phenomenon of “wokeism,” and religious fundamentalism (to name a few major coordinates of the present) all participate in and respond to these realities. It is in this medial and ideational landscape that the faculty of taste operates today and in which it must work to attain an ethical orientation, individually as well as corporately, personally as well as politically. But these developments cannot be disavowed, and these processes cannot be reversed, because they are the most forceful logical conclusions of the very Kantian transcendental aesthetic that gave their initial conceptual form to reality. Now, the very concept of taste itself, falsely concretized as “my taste” (or even “our taste”) by the widespread hagiography of the Self, must be undone from within, by returning to the sources of its current formations and determining the extent to which other possibilities are still salvageable from the ruins of its cultural degradation and authoritarian manipulation. And this then poses an important “why” question: Why did the Human Mind desire this atomistic interpretation of taste so intensely that it would develop it so extensively and so powerfully? (Answering this completely would mean something like revealing the actual beauty available in both capitalism and narcissism, which I am not prepared to do here.) Within the sense of “the aesthetic” conceived in German Idealism most prominently first by Kant, but significantly developed in its more properly Romantic mode by the underappreciated Friedrich Schiller, one finds that the emphasis in “the faculty of taste” does not lie on taste as much as it lies on faculty; which marks it as a function of reason, the faculty of desire bound by the moral mandate of the categorical imperative to act in accordance with duty. More recently, two modern ideas track the most contemporary developments of both “taste’s commodification” and “the faculty of taste’s ethical possibility.” These are, respectively, Hermann Broch’s conception of “kitsch” and Susan Sontag’s elaborations of “the aesthetic sense.” Taken together, these ideas offer a different characterization of late 20th and early 21st century cultures of expression than is available in the popular (and notoriously inarticulate) concept of postmodernism. This dissertation challenges the binary opposition of modernism and postmodernism by reapproaching some of the dominant aesthetic ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries. Sontag’s understanding of “the aesthetic sense” demands a refusal of periodizations of this kind and offers a model, shared by Broch and others, for an ethical engagement with reality, directed against “kitsch” through a value-based notion of truth founded in aesthetic achievement and aesthetic knowledge. It is an argument for an approach to media studies that grounds all understandings of aesthetics within the realms of both disinterested knowledge and ethical judgment.
Archives of Post-Occupation: Indigenous Peoples and the Biopolitics of Modern Chile
(2023-08-14) López Vergara, Sebastián; García, María Elena; Reddy, Chandan
This dissertation studies discourses on Indigenous peoples in the aftermath of the late-nineteenth-century occupation of the lands of the Mapuche people in Wallmapu (historical and unceded Mapuche lands) and Selk’nam people in Tierra del Fuego by the Chilean state. It examines how discourses of Native recognition and elimination organized distinct yet connected colonial projects of territorial management. It traces these discourses across photographic collections, poetry, narrative fiction, testimonials, ethnographic studies, and state records to approach them as “archives of post-occupation.” It argues that archives are key cultural technologies for producing relations of colonial control and resistance. Two interrelated questions guide this study: How do state operations of colonial control that have differentially represented and managed the territorial management of the Mapuche and Selk’nam peoples articulate forms of recognition and extinction? And how does the examination of different experiences of colonialism reveal Mapuche and Selk’nam’s paradoxical re-appropriations of the vocabularies of colonial control to assert their opposition to and negotiation with oppression? Chapter 1, “Extinction: The Selk’nam People and the Writing of the History of the Occupation of Tierra del Fuego” examines the deployment of the discourse on extinction that narrated the so-called disappearance of the Selk’nam people in the historiography of the Tierra del Fuego to trace the relations of oppression that reproduced capital accumulation and Indigenous forced displacement in the early twentieth century. Chapter 2, “Life with Extinction: Selk’nam Life in 20th Century Post-Occupation Tierra del Fuego” draws on photographic records and declassified letters to argue that extinction created the logics of a mode of life that negated but did not eliminate the Selk’nam people. Instead, it paradoxically organized Indigenous forms of living that continued to maintain relations with Selk’nam lands and waters under conditions of oppression. Chapter 3, “The Mapuche Diaspora: A Political Theory of Autonomy, Territory, Nation, and Difference” reads contemporary Mapuche political writing about forced displacement as political and cultural theories that articulate projects of Indigenous emancipation. Chapter 4, “FÃ¼tra Warria: The Cultural Dynamics of the Diaspora in the Colonial City” reads union newsletters and an ethnographic study of Mapuche settlement in twentieth-century Santiago to study residual discourses on Mapuche difference in Santiago that express the political and cultural transformation of Mapuche migrancy in the 20th century.
Catastrophizing Humanism in Romantic Literature: Mary Shelley, Goethe, and Kleist
(2023-01-21) Shen, Jingsi; Brown, Marshall
This dissertation argues for a new notion of catastrophe as an affective encounter between human beings and an overwhelmingly unintelligible nature, which then creates new temporalities. It explores Romantic novels, poetry, drama, and scientific writings by Mary Shelley, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, places these texts within the context of the scientific discoveries and innovations of the late 18th to early 19th century, and looks at how the three authors charter their ways against, around, and amid these encounters and the consequent excesses of affects they produce. It argues for a reassessment of causality and proposes an atmospheric or emergent agency to describe how these affective encounters effect changes and traumas. Moreover, this study attends to the material continuation and tensions between the catastrophes that the texts seek to witness and the forms in which they attempt to grasp their objects, as well as the resultant cycles and practices of reading.
The Burden of a Song: Victorian Women’s Poetics, Silence and Dissonance
(2022-09-23) Lee, Hee Eun; LaPorte, Charles
This dissertation has explored the ways in which women poets manipulate and expand the scope of women’s poetics. Looking at women poets’ development of poetics in relation to voice, sound and music helps us to understand how they dealt with the frustration of expression and limitations imposed on their gender. The burden of song is a metaphor for how women poets worked to articulate their voices within constraints of the period. I have argued that Elizabeth Barrett Browning (sometimes here rendered EBB in accordance with scholarly norms) establishes silence as a powerful poetic voice by transcending the ideas of the womanly gender to remain silent. Silence, for Barrett Browning, enunciates to establish women’s vocation as a poet, used both as form and expression. Like Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti attests to silence – by speaking with flowers – and she too complicates the gendered botanical language by challenging the conventional system. Her floral language communicates in compelling ways that require careful reading to grasp the fuller meaning in her poetry. George Eliot rethinks musicality, the polarity between harmony and dissonance fuses into union for poetics and poetical form. In doing so, my work adds to the recent scholarship on women’s poetry that acknowledges the ways that speech is not necessarily coterminous with meaning or power.
Anywhere I Lay My Head: Politics and Poetics of Private Space in Early Soviet Literature and Film
(2022-09-23) Svetinovic, Slaven; Diment, Galya
In an article about his visit to Moscow in the winter of 1926-27, Walter Benjamin claimed that “Bolshevism has abolished private life.” Benjamin’s frequently quoted statement highlights a key feature of Soviet society in the post-revolutionary period: the attempt to politicize and “make public” almost all aspects of everyday life. As part of the campaign to create a “new way of life,” Soviet ideology and government policies sought to accomplish a dramatic transformation of basic features of private life and the supposed “bourgeois” values of privacy, family, and marriage. One of the most drastic changes was the policy of uplotnenie (alternatively translated as “consolidation,” “condensation,” or “tightening”), which reconfigured living space by dividing apartments and other dwellings, ultimately leading to the creation of one of the most potent symbols of the Soviet experience: the kommunalka, or the communal apartment. From itsinception and through the Soviet period (and beyond), the communal apartment would play a central role in Soviet life. This dissertation examines how popular literature and cinema of the 1920s, the period of the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), addressed this transformation of everyday life, and of living space in particular. Two broad questions frame my project: How is private space constituted and circumscribed in popular literature and film of the early Soviet period, given the intrusion of the state in most aspects of everyday life? What do some of the key literary and cinematic works of the NEP era tell us about the notions of the public and the private during this period of Soviet history? The “battle” for space – and more specifically, private space -- is a major trope in some of the most well-known works of literature and cinema from the first decade following the revolution. By focusing on the works of two writers of fiction, Yuri Olesha and Mikhail Zoshchenko, and one filmmaker, Boris Barnet, this dissertation examines the tension between the public and the private in the context of NEP and the ways private space functions as a site of negotiation between opposing ideologies and explores the role of literature and film as means of resisting and mitigating – through laughter, play, and parody – the shocks of such traumatic policies as uplotnenie.
Yellow Face, White Screen: Racial Performance, Media Technology, and Film Aesthetics in American Cinema, 1901-1949
(2022-09-23) Peng, Xin; Bean, Jennifer M
This dissertation studies the mutually constitutive ways in which a multitude of media technologies intersected with the racial formations of the so-called “Oriental” or the “yellow race” in the burgeoning screen culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Although yellowface performance was prevalent and conspicuous in this era of American cinema, this study focuses instead on how stars as well as ordinary people of Asian descent were recruited to perform Asianness as exotic – sometimes deadly – and explicitly racialized. The central claim of this dissertation is that these performances of Asianness and the racial and orientalist thinking underlying them were intrinsic to the conception of media technologies and film aesthetics, and formative, in particular, to the innovation of natural color cinematography, the transition to synchronized sound, the emergence of popular genres, and the consolidation of Hollywood’s hegemony in both domestic and global markets.
Saltwater Language: Making Sense of Ourselves Through the Science and Art of Marine Invertebrates
(2022-07-14) Krystal, Barbara Judith; Handwerk, Gary
Saltwater Language: Making Sense of Ourselves Through the Science and Art of Marine Invertebrates is an “undisciplined” project entangling the biology of four marine invertebrates (sea stars, crabs, barnacles, and octopuses) with a wide array of genre-crossing literatures featuring those real and figurative marine invertebrates to explore the question: what does it mean to be human? Though the question is large, and certainly not static, the impetus to separate being human from being animal via the messy character traits of consciousness, reasoning, morality, and free will is examined.I argue that marine invertebrates, the spineless, faceless, queer, biblically “teeming things” that deny any easy categorization of what it means to be “animal,” challenge the stability of human Othering and by default, challenge the stability of the traits defining what it means to be human. Marine invertebrates shatter the spell of essentialist thinking, requiring a deeper, interior inquiry and binding relations with the natural world. Each chapter traces the real and fantastical representations of a particular marine invertebrate to elucidate the innumerable threads woven together, defining the unending process of becoming human.
Migrant Mothering in Spanish and US Fiction, 1990-2020
(2022-07-14) Toscano, Carolina Maria; Steele, Cynthia
This dissertation examines the intersection of migration and maternity in recent Spanish and US literature. Using intersectionality, matricentric feminism, feminist mothering, empathy, and Alcoff’s “the problem of speaking for others,” this project analyzes how immigrant mothers are portrayed in recent literature on both sides of the Atlantic. This project suggests that traditional representations of migrant mothers in literature at the end of the 20th century are being replaced or rewired with increasing examples of feminist, empowered, non-normative mothers and daughters during the first two decades of the 21st century in both Spain and the US. Chapter One examines more traditional representations of the migrant mother as the Virgin Mary in a novel by AmÃ©rico Paredes and three short stories by Francisco JimÃ©nez, AndrÃ©s Sorel, and Lourdes Ortiz. Using intersectionality, name, and object study, I observe how migrant mothers are depicted as hard-working, nurturing Virgin Mary archetypes deserving of admiration and empathy. Chapter Two explores the complex relationship between mothers and daughters in the context of migration with three novels by Erika SÃ¡nchez, Jennine CapÃ³ Crucet, and Najat El Hachmi. Using KristevaÂ´s definition of abjection and exploring images of the taboo, I note how the daughter characters, in order to define themselves, must first empathize with their mothers and understand the intergenerational traumas that are passed down in the migration context. The final chapter analyzes three non-normative representations of immigrant mothering that resist traditional definitions: voluntarily childfree, othermothers, feminist mothers and empowered mothers. These works are by Najat El Hachmi, Julia Ã lvarez, and Valeria Luiselli. They provide us with mothers who transgress traditional definitions of the “good” mother and test the boundaries of what it means to perform the acts of mothering (Thurer).
In Defense of the Imagination: The Historical Reciprocity of Shahrazad and Modern Storytelling in Arabic Literature
(2022-04-19) Althobaiti, Raja Moeed; DeYoung, Terri
By reference to The Thousand and One Nights, this dissertation limns a genealogy on the imagination, in Orientalism, as a site of struggle over meanings of change and transformation. This genealogy emerges with the translation of The Nights by the French translator Antoine Galland (1646-1715), who incorporates the text into Western modes of production that value unity and mimesis. This happens through his introduction of a narrative closure to the Arabic manuscript in which he transforms Shahrazad into a mother of three male children. In this closure, Shahrazad seeks Shahriyar’s forgiveness based upon her motherhood. The genealogy continues with Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), who, in his translation, exaggerates a layer of desire that has made his translation one of the most infamous takes on The Nights according to various scholars. Both Orientalists engage in a project of reproducing and taking editorial liberties with the text, while claiming it is representative of Arabic and Islamic cultures and civilizations. This foregrounds a discourse on the imagination that was eloquently articulated in the racist works of Ernest Renan (1823-1892) where he deems Semitic languages incapable of imaginatively producing high literary works of literature. While situating the logic of this Orientalist trend as a problem of rational and secular thought clusters that dominate the study of Arabic literature and Islam, a core intervention of this dissertation is to locate how the translations of The Nights, by Orientalists, have influenced the scholarly conclusions by many Arab scholars who investigate the text of The Nights later during the postwar period. Orientalist translations limit how Arab scholars approach change, transformation, and agency in relation to their respective projects. Also, this dissertation traces a wide range of debates and methodologies. The project contributes to the field by arguing that, while the study of The Nights has significantly improved since the late 1960s, the critical methods that dominate the study of Arabic literature need to be reconsidered, especially in terms of locating meanings of social change and transformation.
The Transforming Mediascape in Postwar Japan: A Media History of Oshima Nagisa
(2022-04-19) Kaminishi, Yuta; Tweedie, James
This dissertation traces a history of the transforming mediascape in postwar Japan by focusing on the trajectory of Oshima Nagisa’s multimedia collaboration. The project has two discrete but intertwined objectives. One is to detail the historical conditions of the transforming mediascape from the late 1950s by changing the way to historicize Japanese cinema and media industries from a cinema-centered history to a history of hybrid media relationships. The other is to portray Oshima not only as a film director who made a number of provocative and political works but also as a multimedia collaborator who engaged with progressive individuals and diverse media in searching for novel production systems, new audiences, and innovative ideas. Each chapter covers the emerging moment of new mediascape in roughly chronological order, from a subgenre created by journalistic media and a film studio in a time of crisis, to early TV documentary series and the debate about the political possibility of TV, to independent productions in the art theater movement, to international co-productions with emphasis on female reception, to midnight TV as a new platform for media intellectuals. Describing the above moments of transformation in tension with the existent industrial structures and the ways multimedia collaborations provided Oshima with new frontiers, this dissertation argues that the struggles to shape an alternative system in the capitalist mediascape were political practice in the media history of postwar Japan. For Oshima who started his career as a film director at the beginning of the decline of the studio system, it was an urgent task to form and develop new production systems through traversing multiple media industries. Reframing the history of the postwar Japanese mediascape through Oshima’s multimedia collaboration demonstrates that artistic creation and its political significance must be understood through not only completed works but also through the collaborative process between individuals, artworks, and media industries in the search for new communication.
Expose and Punish: Trial by Moving Images in Revolutionary China
(2020-10-26) He, Belinda Qian; Braester, Yomi
My dissertation traces a history of how class struggle was made of and through moving images in China. Whereas many existing studies concerning socialism and leftist cultural politics treat class struggle as a given fact, my dissertation draws back the curtain on how class struggle was constructed in China. Much emphasis has been put on either the violent components of Mao’s class war or Chinese class struggle as a project saturated with displays, performances, and spectacles. However, the intersection of class struggle as both spectacular violence and spectatorial violence remains largely underexplored. Through historicizing the merging of violence and spectacle within an overarching class-coded system, however, my dissertation suggests the mutual constitution of image making and justice, upon which the project of class struggle was legitimized, and in effect produced everyday violence. Drawing on archives, fieldwork, and an audiovisual corpus, the project examines the mass production of what I call looks of enmities—penal spectacles, incriminating media, hate images, antagonistic ideologies, and encounters of watching-as-judging. Overall, the project is a dual history of trial as media and media as trial. Concerning the complex interrelation between photographic media vis-Ã -vis socialist criminal justice and violence driven by a singular and overarching system of partitioning coded in the term class, my dissertation intends to challenge established boundaries within which both film/art-historical scholarship and legal historiographies are usually approached and disseminated. I address the following questions: Historically, how did (audio)visual media and trial/execution, whether legal or extralegal, intersect in China? How did moving images enact and, in turn, shape punishment and the politics of enemy-making in the age of class struggle? Theoretically, (how) is justice visible? How does an image shame or judge, and how does cinema punish? Methodologically, what is the role of the archive in history, historiography, and historical thinking? How do archival images live their own lives?
Indelible Practices of Hope: Worldbuilding 1990s Los Angeles
(2019-10-15) Delgado, Andrea; Groening, Stephen; Habell-PallÃ¡n, Michelle
Indelible Practices of Hope: Worldbuilding 1990s Los Angeles explores the ontological implications of one generation’s cultural practice for communities of color in a diverse, multilingual urban hub. Defining hope as the creation of new possibilities, my research weaves together an analysis of media, literature, and cultural praxis. I show how shared strategies of radical worldbuilding, the hopeful envisioning of new worlds, connect seemingly disparate forms of cultural production. Embedded in a long historical analysis, radical worldbuilding uses narrative strategies as practices of hope to make decolonial visions a reality. In the first two chapters of Indelible Practices of Hope, I argue that Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues challenge their audiences through radical worldbuilding narrative strategies, compelling audience members to see their complicity in neo-colonialism. The second half of the project leaves traditional texts behind to analyze cultural practice as cultural production. The chapter, “This Bridge Called Instagram: Collective Worldbuilding through Analogue and Digital Convivencia” reads the digital archive that documents the 1990s party crew communities as curated by Los Angeles artist Guadalupe Rosales, showing how Rosales’ use of Instagram facilitates hopeful worldbuilding. Connecting practices from the 1990s to those in the twenty-first century, the chapter “‘Oppression exists, but not here’” | The Ovarian Psyco-Cycle Brigade and the Importance of Storytelling,” reads the work of a Chicana and Womxn-of-color bicycle brigade from South East Los Angeles, as resistance frameworks built via practices of hope. As an example, by subscribing to different realities, the meeting guideline and narrative strategy “oppression exists, but not here” enacts radical worldbuilding through the creation of a space that is supportive, equitable, and lifegiving; it is propositional, not only oppositional.
Urban and Rural Encounters in Chinese Postsocialist Film and Media
(2019-08-14) Morrow, Katherine Janice; Braester, Yomi
This dissertation examines mainstream popular forms of nonfiction film and media in postsocialist Mainland China. I trace how these programs reflect and shape contemporary Chinese visions of reality—in particular, how these programs capture China’s rural-urban divide, and the way it shapes social structure, class, and identity within China. The primary areas of inquiry include nonfiction viewer address, the adaptation of foreign media forms, and the consumption of images of rural space by an implicitly urban viewer. These popular documentary and reality television shows use an essentialized vision of rural space to instruct viewers in proper social behavior and orientation. While new media offers rural users themselves an opportunity to participate in the creation of the rural imaginary, the videos these users create complicate but do not efface rural-urban divisions. Each chapter focuses on a different television program or new media platform, and the dissertation proceeds roughly chronologically from television documentary in the 2000s to contemporary mobile video sharing on Kwai. Chapter one considers how a China Central Television (CCTV) documentary update program rebroadcasted and updated documentaries from the 1990s, a period of upheaval in the representation of regular people on television. These updates depict reform era change through a developmental logic that leaves little space for the ambivalence and varied perspectives the original films represent. Chapter two focuses on a Hunan Satellite Television (HSTV) reality program, X-Change, which was loosely inspired by the UK reality program Wife Swap. The HSTV show, which depicts urban and rural youth swapping places to learn from each other’s lifestyle, reinforces a spatially determined understanding of social division. Chapter three looks at how predominantly urban-oriented dating shows (focusing on Jiangsu Satellite Television’s If You Are the One) assist viewers and contestants alike in navigating a mediatized reality and use data and expert commentary to rationalize romance. Chapter four focuses on Kwai (Kuaishou), a popular video sharing application that is associated with rural users, and argues that Kwai is structured as a social space that allows users to engage in alternative forms of visibility.
A Natural History of Genius: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Totalitarianism
(2019-02-22) Naraghi, Yasaman; Searle, Leroy
The eighteenth-century concept of ‘genius’ evolved to strip ambivalent and communal qualities to prioritize the ‘man of genius’ over the merits of his work. A Natural History of Genius: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Totalitarianism shows how the resulting imitative quality of genius problematizes the political realm, as a charismatic figure in shaping the formation of the state induces an imitation of his ideologies. The focal texts, literary and philosophical, foreground the resulting tendencies toward totalitarianism. By shifting the emphasis to the intellectual work and away from the individual man, my argument enables a more supple and subtle critique of aesthetics and ethics in specific relation to totalitarianism. The introduction provides an overview of the historical, philological, and philosophical development of genius as a concept, paying close attention to the eighteenth-century debates around the function of genius. I trace how genius is stripped of its ambivalence in order to mark a chosen individual endowed with certain transcendental powers unknown and inaccessible to ordinary men. In other words, this introduction focuses on how genius becomes an embodiment of spirit and how this impacts our capacity for moral judgments. In the first chapter, “The Grotesque Genius: Moral Judgments and Normative Categories,” I provide an analysis of Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician (1929) in order to expand on themes of nationalism-cum-totalitarianism and the role of genius in creating totalitarian structures. This chapter is concerned with the imitative quality of genius and its influence on crowd psychology that limit freedom for making moral judgments. Furthermore, there is a correlation between genius and the grotesque which is discussed through the titular magician of Mann’s novella, Cipolla, for the purpose of thinking through what escapes normative categories. Michel Tournier’s The Ogre (1970) is the subject of the second chapter, “The Ambivalent Grotesque: Genius and the Problem of Signification.” This chapter emphasizes the importance of ambivalence in making moral judgments by drawing on the previous chapter’s argument relating genius and the grotesque. This chapter will thus consider how signs and symbols are read and misinterpreted; it focuses on the qualities we identify in order to make judgments as well as the ramifications of dismissing ambivalence in favor of singular (and easily digestible) meanings. The third chapter, “Acts of Responsibility: Not the Thought but Thinking Itself,” discusses Hannah Arendt’s work regarding moral judgments and personal responsibility. Much of this dissertation deals with the ethical and moral consequences of imitation (and more specifically, the imitation of the man of genius) and Arendt allows for such discussion in the context of political states. As suggested by the title of the chapter, Arendt’s concept of thinking is central to the ethical and moral questions around the imitation of a political leader’s will as an extension of the state’s will. Throughout this dissertation, I use the male pronoun to refer to genius. I would very much like to participate in using gender neutral pronouns in literary analysis so as to not contribute to the assumption of authorship as male. Unfortunately, however, the use of male pronouns is a deliberate choice that highlights a key aspect of genius. Genius is male.
Genealogical Modernism: Family Structures, Identity, History, and Narrative in the 20th-Century “Long” Novel
(2018-11-28) Gerhardt, Bradley; Searle, Leroy
“Genealogy” is a term which, in literary studies, is frequently associated with its philosophical context—a concept articulated by Nietzsche and Foucault—rather than with its more common usage, to describe the pursuit of particular family lines. However, I argue that the modernist authors I examine employ a “genealogical” method which combines an interest in the familial with a method that is theoretical. I examine six of the “long” novels of modernism—whose length typically precludes them from comparative study—and discuss the implications of their resistance to “official” histories, narratives, or concepts of identity. My first chapter considers Virginia Woolf’s The Years alongside Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and finds that they resist the “genealogical imperative” of a normative, apocalyptic family narrative by structuring their novels around gaps, discontinuities, and non-hierarchical relations. The consequence of these aesthetic choices is an open, generative form; the novels undermine authoritative accounts of “History,” and focus instead on domestic, relational histories. The second chapter considers Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, two novels which quite literally resist completion; I argue that both authors insist on a radical contingency in their works—created through anti-teleological, democratic, and inclusive reading practices—in order to problematize the abstractions necessary for any “systematic,” and therefore normative, account of identity. I then consider William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County novels, which do not to build one continuous narrative; I argue that his choice to fragment is one mode of genealogy, as he manages to interrogate both familial histories (through the Compsons or Sutpens) and social histories (of Jefferson), using a wide array of narrators to problematize the idea of a single, coherent moral standpoint. Finally, I turn to Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu to explore another mode of genealogy: stitching together disparate fragments into a composite narrative which does not do violence to their particularity. Proust’s method, I argue, generates endless possibilities for transformative readings; his comparisons, across time, space, and aesthetic mediums, emphasize the ability that any careful reader has to provide compelling, alternative genealogies of any familial or social context.
The Zagreb School of Animation and the Unperfect
(2018-07-31) Morton, Paul; Crnković, Gordana
University of Washington Abstract The Zagreb School of Animation and the Unperfect Paul W. Morton Chair of Supervisory Committee Gordana Crnković Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media From 1956 until 1991, a group of animators based at the Zagreb Film studio, in the Croatian capital, produced approximately 500 shorts, including avant-garde experiments, children’s cartoons, gag shorts, and sex comedies. Like Yugoslavia itself, the Zagreb School of Animation (as the animators collectively came to be called) challenged utopian ideologies and the East-West binaries of the Cold War. Their work transformed the cartoon from a cinema of attractions, which celebrated the technology which gave it birth, into a cinema of the laborer, which celebrated the humble artisan behind the technology. Animation, historically, has been described as a seamless marriage between mankind’s lost childhood, embodied by anthropomorphized animals, and techno-modernity. The Zagreb School, however, emphasized human fallibility and accepted technical mistakes, such as a stray line in a frame, or an imperfectly synchronized connection between sound and movement. Rather than the confident Soviet new man, the defining character type of the Zagreb School was the “small man.” This dissertation uses the “small man” to understand how the Zagreb School struggled with the major preoccupations of post-World War II Yugoslavia: fears of nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse, and the disorientations of urbanization. It explores how the Zagreb School re-imagined the animator as a figure who intentionally reveals the make-do nature of his working methods and the flaws of his finished project – hence the use of the term “unperfect” instead of “imperfect.” This dissertation involves a close formalist study of approximately twenty Zagreb School films, most of which are not currently in distribution. It draws on personal interviews conducted with surviving members of the studio as well as interviews conducted by other scholars, original Croatian-language scholarship, contemporary accounts of the studio and studio documents collected in a four-volume set published between 1978 and 1986. It draws on recent scholarship on the culture of the former Yugoslavia, as well as foundational texts in animation studies, particularly work focused on films from the US, the Soviet Union, and Canada. This dissertation begins with a capsule history of the Zagreb School, from its pre-history in 1922 and reaching forward into the 1960s and ’70s. It situates the Zagreb School within the culture of workers’ self-management, the policy of the former Yugoslavia which hoped to provide labor autonomy. It then argues that the small man is a self-portrait of the laborers in the Zagreb Film studio and explores how the small man attempts to achieve the ideal of unperfection. It explores how the Zagreb School situates the small man as a citizen of the polis at a time when Yugoslavia was rapidly urbanizing. It then turns towards the Zagreb School’s examination of war, and argues that the animators employ so-called “limited animation” to reinvent violence in the animation medium. It will argue that its conception of violence is part of a broader project to remember the traumas of World War II and warn of future conflicts and the specter of nuclear annihilation. A humanist socialism defined the philosophies of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Accordingly, the animators of the Zagreb School sought not to technologize the human, but rather to humanize technology.

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