My dissertation offers a combined genealogical and interpretative study of the way the distinction between human and animal is established and invoked in foundational texts of modern sovereignty. In ...four chapters that range from Hobbes' theory of sovereignty haunted by the problem of melancholy, to contemporary critical approaches to the relationship between sovereignty and humanism, my dissertation re-frames discussions about human domination over non-human animals and sovereign authority. It also makes novel contributions to the question of what it means to be a political animal. I call into question a fundamental assumption: the idea that we humans, in contrast to non-human animals and nature, are distinctively political because we possess logos (speech, reason). I find evidence in the texts that I study that the distinction between humans and animals established in these terms generates melancholy, as the animality of the human being (as well as non-human animals and nature) remains excluded from the realm of politics. My dissertation alerts us to the consequence of this exclusion: the constant return of the animal in the human city. The notion of lycanthropy is introduced as an articulation of melancholy and animality that accounts for the recurrence of the animal in the realm of the political.
“Aura, Ambivalence, and Allure: The Portuguese in Modern American Literary Spaces” argues that modern American understandings of self and national identity emerged in relation to changing depictions ...of the Portuguese. Authors treated include Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, Charles Olson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Elizabeth Bishop. While early twentieth-century American literature depicts Lusos as ignorant and swarthy figures, mid- and late twentieth-century texts dramatize the necessity of a Portuguese presence in catalyzing romantic visions of the self. “Aura, Ambivalence, and Allure” showcases how American writers of the late-nineteenth century through the present have gone from writing about the Portuguese, to writing through them, and, ultimately, to writing beyond the Portuguese. Drawing especially on the ambiguous status of the Portuguese as both “white” and “other,” writers used Portuguese surrogates to explore various forms of personal and identificatory transformation and renewal. The exploration of Portuguese presence—from the country, people, culture, and language—continues to shape and inform American literature and national identity.
The development of the sentimental romance of the 1830s and 1840s into the more sophisticated genre of song known as mélodie is often linked to Gabriel Fauré and Henri Duparc’s early songs. In his ...seminal study, La Mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc, Frits Noske did much to correct this limited model by discussing the works of composers such as Charles Gounod, Hector Berlioz, Hyppolyte Monpou, and Louis Niedermeyer. The author, however, failed to consider the early songs of the influential French mezzo-soprano of Spanish origins, Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910). These compositions, close to thirty songs in French, German, Italian and Spanish, reflect the scope of her international operatic career and her facility to absorb different languages, musical styles, and cultures. Investigating the genesis of the early songs and analyzing and contextualizing them are key goals of the present dissertation. I intend to demonstrate through the examination of primary source material that the construction by influential contemporaries such as George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, and Franz Liszt of Viardot-Garcia’s personality as cosmopolitan, versatile, and exotic qualified her in the eyes of the Romantic generation as a valid representative of the Other and thus a legitimate creator of a wide variety of musical styles. In particular, the consecration of young Viardot-Garcia’s fascinating musical personality in George Sand’s influential novel Consuelo (1842) determined the course and objectives of her career both as singer and composer during the 1840s. Through the publication of her two initial song albums, Viardot-Garcia contributed to the modification of expectations surrounding the typical French romance of the 1840s. Viardot-Garcia modernized its style by introducing into it foreign musical resources, thus liberating it from the formal regularity and musical weakness, which limited its expressive possibilities. The high quality of these publications in combination with the composer’s international fame pushed them into the vanguard of the revitalization tendency of French art song. Just as Berlioz and Gounod have been commonly embraced from the time of Ravel to our day as the fathers of French mélodie, Viardot-Garcia may now receive her own accolade as the mother of French mélodie.
In fact, as I pay special attention to Borges's translations of the poems from Leaves of Grass that have been connected to "Himno del mar," it seems significant, for example, that in the edition of ...Hojas de hierba which I am using there is no poem number 22 in "canto de mí mismo," that is, the exact same text which has been identified by a few of his readers as the main source of inspiration for his first published poem. Finally, as I ponder the dangers of reading and some of the invisible or subterranean struggles that seem to underlie the always delicate and complex relationship that binds (and separates) readers and authors, translators and originals, and as I try to come to terms with my own transferential bond with Borges and his texts, and, thus, as I become aware of my desire not only to learn from his writings, but also to somehow outsmart and frame him, I cannot help admiring his painful but undoubtedly successful lifelong quest to find his own authorial voice and to become a widely recognized "subject presumed to know," fully endowed with the power to seduce readers and to inspire them to study, interpret, translate, emulate, and even criticize him.
As a talent development professional, it's gratifying to know organizations are investing more in learning. Companies are spending billions of dollars on training in the US alone. Quantity, however, ...too frequently does not translate into quality. Return on investment studies reveal disappointing behavior change and bottomline results. Lack of management support often is cited as the root cause of people not applying what they learn to their jobs. It takes more than footing a bigger bill for training. If only managers would get engaged and do their part, has become a common lament. Enter Don Quixote. "Don Quixote" is a timeless saga by Miguel de Cervantes. Quixote loses his grip on reality and embarks on an obsessive quest to revive chivalry. On his journey, he spies a bank of windmills on the horizon. Perceiving the windmills as his enemies, Quixote engages them in an intense yet fruitless battle, leading nowhere.
This study explores Cervantes’ appropriations of the terminology and imagery of Catholic exorcists and demonologists in the Spanish Golden Age. The “lucid intervals” of Don Quixote, his constant ...sense that someone pursues him, and his explicit voicing of the words of the exorcism ritual can only be understood fully in relation to contemporaneous religious belief. This essay also argues that the devilishly-described Don Quixote exorcized himself. This action anticipated self-exorcism as preached by the Franciscan Diego Gómez Lodosa. In Cervantes studies, Don Quixote's selfexorcism will become paradigmatic of the autonomous action of this first novelistic character.
Cervantes and his work are relevant to scholars of English and American Literature because as a character, Don Quixote has permeated our culture. Less consideration has been given to the text as a ...construction of Miguel Cervantes' own ideals and opinions. Cervantes invites a reading from the self-fashioning perspective to show that the elements that are found in sixteenth century literary texts are also found in Don Quixote . In Don Quixote Cervantes fashions various personas to create a multi-vocal work. This thesis examines Stephen Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning as applicable to Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote . First it considers how Cervantes voices his interpretation of current events through, and by referencing, minor characters. Then it explores the selves that Cervantes creates in the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Finally, it discusses the persona of the Captive as he reflects Cervantes' self-fashioning as a military man.
Cervantes's Don Quixote has often been referred to as the first modern work of literature that thematizes fictionality. Heins seeks to discover what Wieland's novel Don Sylvio von Rosalva implies ...about how individual consciousness is formed and conditioned by the reception of art works. The two aspects of the novel, including the role of ideas, specifically about visual arts in the text and the importance of the debate about representations to the text's notions of subject-formation are also examined.
