Format: Thèse

« Traditionally, studies on black culture have employed the study of folk figures such as the trickster and their aesthetic cultural productions as a major strategy to define what is distinctive about black culture. However, most of these studies were focused on race and nation. In addition to race, this dissertation seeks to expand conventional readings of oral traditions and folklore in black culture for alternative readings of gender and sexuality in African American texts. This dissertation explores the hermeneutics of hip-hop, black literature, and folk and oral stories to complicate the canons of gender, sexuality, and class. If we critically explore African and African-American models such as goddesses, trickster figures, and African American matrilineal folk figures from myths and oral traditions of the Black Diaspora, critics and readers can begin to explore sexuality and gender ideologies beyond those conceived through Eurocentric western canons of sexuality and gender. These endeavors of trickster-troping help formulate revised readings of complex texts in black culture. » (Résumé)

« This study is about tricksters and the conflicts they precipitate between oral and literary traditions. Greek Odysseus and Hermes, African Eshu, and Native American Coyote are all tricksters—guileful trouble-makers who inhabit and manipulate boundaries between cosmic orders, social divisions, and opposites like good and evil, order and chaos, meaning and nonsense. In the first chapter, I suggest that tricksters are inherently connected to the oral medium, personifying the elusiveness of the spoken word and the ambiguity and contradiction that, according to Havelock and Ong, characterize oral thought. But what happens to oral tricksters in literary narratives?

In the three following chapters, I analyze American, Russian, and Ukrainian texts where tricksters come into conflict with literary conventions designed to curtail ambiguity and generate self-consistent meanings. I begin with Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus folklore collections (1880 and 1883), where the author becomes trapped between desire and reluctance to subordinate African-American Brer Rabbit (who symbolizes tricky, confrontational story-telling) to an Anglo-American “plantation fiction” representation of story-telling as inter-racial communion.

Widely recognized as a trickster, Brer Rabbit establishes a paradigm for analyzing Slavic folk characters who have never before been interpreted as tricksters, the Russian royal impostor Pugachev and the Ukrainian Cossack Mamai. Aleksandr Pushkin’s historical novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836) narrates how a young nobleman Grinev transforms himself from a flat neo-classical fool into a cunning trickster, learning the art of equivocation from Pugachev, but then becomes trapped in limbo between these opposed character types. In Oleksandr Il’chenko’s “chimerical” novel The Cossack Never Dies (1958), it seems that tricky Mamai is reduced to a dutiful and earnest positive hero of government-sponsored Socialist Realism, but in a mind-bending trickster’s joke, Il’chenko makes Socialist Realism an instrument of its own undoing.

Like Harris, Pushkin and Il’chenko do not resolve tensions between oral tricksters and literary strictures in any simple, unequivocal way, but paradoxically oscillate between conforming to and subverting literary conventions, between re-creating tricksters and destroying them. And so in literature, as in oral traditions, the trickster challenges interpreters to read without reducing contradiction to self-consistency, but to derive meaning from uncertainty itself. » (Résumé)

« Scholarly examination of trickster figures has traditionally focused on analysis of the personality of the trickster as a type, or even an archetype. This dissertation sets out to try a different approach to trickster analysis, focusing on tricksterism as an activity to which any figure in a narrative or any real-life people in the folk tradition may have access. The dissertation makes case studies of two traditions. The first is Early Irish narrative, which derives from medieval oral tradition. In both the tale Fled Bricrenn and an episode from a life of St. Brigit, figures are revealed as behaving tricksterishly in culturally and naratologically significant ways, even though they are not figures who would be conventionally defined as tricksters. The second case study is of the fandom of the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slaver, the vampire character Spike, and actor James Marsters. This fandom has interacted directly with the producers, writers, and actors involved in the series, and contends with the series’ official creators in tricksterish ways to assert their own view of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its characters. The dissertation concludes that, while conventionally defined trickster figures are highly productive in popular traditions, the tricksterism practiced by unofficial tricksters can be even more disruptive and creative. » (Résumé)

« In modern Native American culture, a “trickster” trope often appears in myths, oral traditions, recorded narratives, ceremonies, and historical accounts, although its purpose and role in society is ambiguous. To the First Peoples who owned the myths, these stories had educational, moral, and spiritual purposes that explained the natural phenomena of their environments, their histories and backgrounds, and their cultural lifeways. Anthropologist Paul Radin noted that “few myths have so wide a distribution as the … The Trickster … they belong to the oldest expression of mankind.” Radin suggested that the trickster myth-figure “is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negotiator … He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.”

Despite Radin’s assertion that few other myths have continued with their basic content unchanged, this is generally not the case with the recorded trickster myths. In fact, as I will explain, many of the written trickster accounts have changed, changes that can be traced to the early contact accounts and descriptions recorded by the Europeans. In order to make sense of the modern trickster concept, and to determine if the missionaries and colonizers altered these myth-figures (whether inadvertently or not), I have sought the earliest forms of trickster, the tribal-specific, proto-trickster, human-animal myth-figures, and personified spirits that were collected by outsiders during early contact periods.

Moving away from theories that erroneously categorize these myth-figures and personified spirits into cross-cultural modern trickster, devil, Creator, and Great Spirit classification systems, I will present a clear representation of First Peoples’ actual beliefs. » (Résumé)

« Simultaneously culture heroes and stumbling buffoons, Tricksters bring cultural tools to the people and make the world more habitable. There are common themes in these figures that remain fruitful for the advancement of culture, theory, and critical praxis. This dissertation develops a method for opening a dialogue with Trickster figures. It draws from established literature to present a newly conceived and more flexible Trickster archetype. This archetype is more than a collection of traits; it builds on itself processually to form a method for analysis.

The critical Trickster archetype includes the fundamental act of crossing borders; the twin ontologies of ambiguity and liminality; the particular tactics of humor, duplicity, and shape shifting; and the overarching cultural roles of culture hero and stumbling buffoon. Running parallel to each archetypal element, though, are Trickster’s overarching critical spirit of Quixotic utopianism and underlying telos of manipulating human relationships. The character ‘Q’ from Star Trek: The Next Generation is used to demonstrate the critical Trickster archetype.

To be more useful for critical cultural studies, Trickster figures must also be connected to their socio-cultural and historical contexts. Thus, this dissertation offers a second set of analytics, a dialogical method that connects Tricksters to the worlds they make more habitable. This dialogical method, developed from the work of M. M. Bakhtin and others, consists of three analytical tools: utterance, intertextuality, and chronotope. Utterance bounds the text for analysis. Intertextuality connects the utterance, the text, to its context. Chronotope suggests particular spatio-temporal relationships that help reveal the cultural significance of a dialogical performance. Performance artists Andre Stitt, Ann Liv Young, and Steven Leyba are used to demonstrate the method of Trickster dialogics.

A concluding discussion of Trickster’s unique chronotope reveals its contributions to conceptions of utopia and futurity. This dissertation offers theoretical advancements about the significance and tactics of subversive communication practices. It offers a new and unique method for cultural and performative analyses that can be expanded into different kinds of dialogics. Trickster dialogics can also be used generatively to direct and guide the further development of performative praxis. » (Résumé)

« This dissertation investigates issues of representation surrounding the American Indian (NDN) and the mixedblood. By conflating images of the trickster as described by NDN scholars with the postmodern theories of Donna Haraway, I explore in my dissertation how the trickster provides a way of viewing formerly accepted boundaries of identity from new perspectives. As cyborg, the trickster is in the “system,” but it is also enacting change by pushing against those boundaries, exposing them as social fictions. I create a cyborg trickster heuristic, using it as a lens with which to both analyze how NDNs construct online identities and the rhetorical maneuvers they undergo. Moving beyond access issues, I show how NDNs are strengthening their presence through social media. Ultimately, I argue that the cyborg trickster shows how identities (NDN and non-NDN alike) are multiply-created and constantly in flux, transcending the traditional boundaries of self and other, online and offline, space and place, to allow for a new understanding of the individual in society and society within the individual. » (Résumé)

« My project examines the transformations of the Monkey King figure in both Chinese and Asian American literatures and cultures. A protagonist in the sixteenth century classics Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), the Monkey King is still a highly popular cultural figure in China today, thanks to the continuous retellings and rewritings of his story. As the adaptations both in China and the United States make the image of the Monkey King a multifaceted subject, I adopt different research approaches for the varied examples chosen for each chapter. My methodologies range from close readings of literary, visual and graphical works in relation to their broader socio-historical contexts, to a theoretical analysis of the ambivalent nature of the Monkey King figure, the process of translation and representation, as well as identity formation from the approach of performativity and national/cultural myth-making. This project crosses boundaries between premodern and modern Chinese literature, Asian studies and Asian American Studies, and translation studies and media studies.

The first chapter focuses on the literary use of the Monkey King in Asian American self-representation. Taking Gene Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese as an example, drawing on Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the “fixity” and the “splitting” nature of stereotype, I examine the intricate relationship between monkey, human and god embodied in the Monkey King image. The second chapter borrows the lens of western trickster theories to examine the Chinese mythical character in Journey to the West. I also bring in W.J.T. Mitchell’s picture theory in considering the multivalent nature of the Monkey King image and the reasons that this image is most suitable in representing the ethnic American.

The third chapter provides a (hi)story of the transformations of the Monkey King image, from a serious friar to a clown, and then from a trickster to a hero. I juxtapose two major changes in the growth of the image: how it is stabilized as a trickster in the Ming prints, and how the trickster is transformed into a hero under Communist politics. The fourth chapter analyzes the representation of the Monkey King image in American media. Focusing on cinematic works such as The Lost Empireand The Forbidden Kingdom, I examine texts from the approach of cross media adaptation and from the viewpoint of chronotope. » (Résumé)