«Genre affords a theoretical and conceptual framework for knowledge production and knowledge distribution. Rhetorically, genre affords a political, artistic, and ideological tool that enables a rhetor to respond to personal and cultural anxieties. Geographies of the Mind: Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’s Antebellum Fiction examines ten of nineteenth-century American author William Gilmore Simms’s works, including three manuscript-only ones. Drawing upon rhetorical theory and narrative theory, this project uncovers the breadth of Simms’s rhetorical and literary practices within the confession narrative, the ghost story, the pirate romance, and the sentimental novel. I demonstrate that Simms’s texts both adhere to and subvert the boundaries of generic conventions and, in doing so, elucidate legal, psychological, and transnational concerns of the time. By focusing on the narrative spaces of Simms’s texts, I prove that Simms’s geographic spaces reverberate with hauntings that serve to mark moments of intellectual, personal, and historical disconnect, thereby voicing the disjunctive nature of antebellum southern spaces. By connecting rhetorical theory with literary and spatial considerations, this project offers a detailed analysis of Simms’s work, positing that narrative practices are dynamic and responsive spaces, ones that are reflective of and responsive to the geographies of the mind.» [Résumé de la thèse]
Format: Thèse
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“I Would Prevent You from Further Violence”: Women, Pirates, and the Problem of Violence in the Antebellum American Imagination
«“’I Would Prevent You from Further Violence’: Women, Pirates, and the Problem of Violence in the Antebellum American Imagination” analyzes how antebellum American pirate stories used the figure of the pirate to explore the problem of violence and the role women play in opposing violent men. This project joins ongoing conversations about women in the nineteenth century in which scholars, such as Nina Baym, Mary Kelley, and Mary Ryan, have made key contributions by recovering a domestic model of nineteenth-century womanhood. As my work demonstrates, antebellum Americans were similarly invested in a more adventurous, and sometimes violent, model of womanhood that was built upon the figure of the gentleman pirate and placed in opposition to violent men. I argue that it is important to think about the pirate story and the figure of the pirate, not only in the context in which it has come to be known—escapist fantasies written for boys and young men—but as a place where authors reinforced, modified, and established different models of gender roles. Frequently within the mid-nineteenth-century American pirate story, authors answered the question of who is allowed to be violent by demonstrating that women had the capacity for violence and constructing scenarios illustrating that women were often the only ones in a position to forcibly oppose violent men.The pirate story uniquely blends different narrative conventions: adventure stories that are often believed to appeal to male audiences and domestic scenarios that are usually understood to resonate with female readers. Although historical and fictional pirates of other eras and geographical locations have been examined, little scholarship has focused on piracy in the antebellum American imagination, even though the figure of the pirate continued to proliferate, especially in popular fiction, throughout the nineteenth century. My project addresses this gap not only by demonstrating the importance of pirates in nineteenth-century American fiction, but also by exploring how American authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, J. H. Ingraham, and Eliza Ann Dupuy, were responding to and revising earlier British depictions of the figure of the pirate by Byron and Walter Scott. In addition to its unique focus on pirates in antebellum American fiction, my project explores a body of popular texts that has been neglected by scholars. These ephemeral stories are difficult to obtain outside of archives and libraries; however, they were extremely popular in their own time. While scholarship has shifted to recognize the value in previously dismissed popular texts, story papers and shilling novelettes have not yet been thoroughly analyzed, and my project seeks to reintroduce a small portion of these texts through archival research centering on the work of Maturin Murray Ballou and Benjamin Barker. By placing transatlantic canonical texts in conversation with formerly neglected ephemeral mediums, I explore stories that resonated with audiences and proposed…» (Résumé
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La piraterie sur les confins «océaniques» du Ier au Ve siècle : enquête préliminaire
«Différents auteurs anciens ont mentionné, du Ier au début du Vème siècle, des expéditions de pirates germains vers la Gaule et la Grande-Bretagne, de pirates irlandais et écossais vers la Grande-Bretagne et éventuellement vers la Bretagne, ainsi que de pirates maures vers le sud de l’Espagne. Après le recensement de ces mentions, les traces du passage des pirates sont recherchées, dans les zones côtières des régions visées, à travers les dépôts monétaires et les destructions de villae, ainsi qu’à travers le mobilier romain trouve en pays barbare. Ensuite sont étudiées les fortifications édifiées par l’empire romain sur les côtes de l’Europe occidentale, ainsi que l’utilisation de la classis germanica et de la classis britannica. La dernière partie est consacrée d’abord à l’étude des textes anciens se référant à des bateaux, pour ensuite, après l’examen des épaves et modèles découverts en Europe du nord-ouest, essayer de déterminer quel type de bateaux les pirates avaient pu utiliser.» [Résumé de la thèse]
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Successful pirates and capitalist fantasies: Charting fictional representations of eighteenth- and early nineteenth -century English fortune hunters
«Successful Pirates and Capitalist Fantasies investigates British pirate fiction during the emergence of capitalism. I initially began my dissertation with the intention of focusing on historical pirates, privateers, and common sailors (the men who “turned” pirate) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but after close readings of pirate ballads, rogue biographies, plays, novellas, and novels by (among others) Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Charles Johnson, and Jane Austen, I determined that this pirate fiction is not about the historical pirate at all; the deployment of pirate figures in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British fiction is an invented tradition of representation that has far more to do with British ideology—social, political, and economic structures within the homeland and throughout the evolving British empire—than it does with the historical pirate figure. From the first, depictions of the pirate abroad correspond to the desires of the emerging commercial and trading classes at home. Pirates understand the world’s trade routes, practices, and commodities better than most Europeans, and they become (for the emerging middle class) educational guides who inspire trading, investing, fortune hunting, and colonizing. Pirate fiction, which sensationalizes the fortunes that can be made in the East and West Indies, functions as a didactic tool, or a kind of chap book for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers.» [Résumé de la thèse]
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Defoe and the pirates function of genre conventions in raiding narratives
«Scholars have long recognized that the fiction of Daniel Defoe is much indebted to contemporary texts that were often non-literary. Understanding the nature of this indebtedness can assist in the interpretation of his works and can reveal his particular genius as an author. Interpretation and understanding of a work’s meaning depends upon situating it in appropriate context; failure to recognize the context and its influence promotes interpretation that can be merely subjective and that can minimize the role of the author in creation of the work. Recognizing the sources of Defoe’s borrowing reveals the meaning structures to which his works can be compared and contrasted for better understanding. Even his departures from his sources can serve to reveal Defoe’s vision in his works. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there were numerous accounts published chronicling the raiding expeditions of pirates and privateers, especially in the Caribbean and South Seas. When Defoe presents his own fictional raiding narratives, he engages the genre conventions that evolved for the factual narratives. The first task of the present study is to define the dynamics of textual interrelation, going well beyond borrowing of material and inspiration. The second task is to define the characteristics of raiding narratives, which exist as a sub-genre of maritime literature, which in turn participates in the very broad category of travel literature. Having established the genre conventions of raiding narratives, this study’s final task is to explore the relation of select works of Daniel Defoe to those conventions. The works considered are: A General History of the Pyrates, A New Voyage Round the World, Captain Singleton, and Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s narrative mastery in these works stems from his successful interrelation of materials, themes, and motifs from the raiding narrative tradition. Understanding how literary works interrelate genre conventions of other works, even non-literary works, can help free us from our own historically evolved perspective on the past. This can lead us from errors of subjective interpretation and lead us to fruitful exploration.» (Résumé)
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Prophets and pirates: The space of empire in British Romantic literature
«This dissertation explores what it means to speak of “space” in the age of empire, arguing that geographical practices are key to understanding the political and poetic practices of the Romantic period. Though I treat a number of writers whose relation to Romantic literature is in some sense “marginal”—including Joanna Southcott, Richard Brothers, Christopher Smart, and Olaudah Equiano—the project is organized around William Blake and Lord Byron, whose representations of prophecy and piracy model practices that challenge imperial space. The prophet and the pirate are either resistant or oblivious to the territorial designations of states and nations, the prophet making plans for the kingdom of God on earth, and the pirate declaring himself to be “of the sea.” Their practices of settling land and claiming ships in defiance of national authority are material interferences in the system of nationalized space. The prophet and the pirate are also connected, literally and symbolically, to the Ottoman empire: the prophet is anxious to convert the “heathen,” while the pirate is aligned with the Orient in eighteenth-century popular writing. I argue that the configurations and fault lines of Britain’s imperialism become more legible when read in relation to these connections. My dissertation therefore charts the potential of rogue travelers to delineate the spatial and imaginative limits of imperial expansion. The ever-present fear of Britons “turning Turk” speaks to the vulnerabilities of Britain’s imperial project: exotic “contagions” do not recognize national boundaries. Or holy ones, for that matter. If it was in Britain’s economic interests to imagine a Jerusalem “in ruins” and in need of (European) cultivation, what prophets planned was a city too temporally and spatially layered for territorial possession. And Barbary pirates, who preyed on European merchant ships in the so-called territorial waters near trading ports, proved the sea to be equally resistant to colonization. In different ways, both the prophet and the pirate—for whom space is not a fact but a practice—expose and disorganize the fiction of national space.» [Résumé de la thèse]
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Piracy, globalization and marginal identities: Navigating gender and nationality in contemporary Hispanic fiction
«This study examines the pirate as a subject of critical inquiry from the perspective of Spain and Latin America, beginning with a history of Early Modern piracy and an overview of the vast corpus of Hispanic pirate literature from the fifteenth century onward. My analysis centers on literary texts published between 1992 and 2003, which are evaluated in the context of the historical narratives, images (such as lithographs) and Hollywood films that inspired them. I argue that the recent boom in pirate literature from Latin American writers is due to the effects of globalization, which has put local identities into question and heralded a new admiration for piracy as a form of resistance to cultural and economic domination. I expose the multiple forms of piracy that manifest themselves in these recent works, which layer contemporary identity politics onto Early Modern subjects. Identity theft, intellectual property theft, and copyright infringement are proposed as contemporary analogues to Early Modern piracy, as is the notion of “gender piracy”—a term I use to refer to the conscious appropriation of gender by the female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and their fictional counterparts in Hollywood film and Hispanic literature by Jorge Luis Borges, Laura Antillano, Carmen Boullosa, Zoé Valdés and Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa. The multiple crossings that occur in pirate literature—which transcend linguistic, cultural, national, and gender boundaries—are understood with the aid of transgender and transatlantic theories by Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, Judith Halberstam and Paul Gilroy, among others. Additionally, my reading of Zoé Valdés’s Lobas de mar is aided by the contributions of global theorists, such as Arjun Appadurai. I analyze Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme with the assistance of Chicana feminisms in order to discuss the main character’s articulation with la Malinche , Sor Juana and Catalina de Erauso—transgressive women of Mexico’s colonial history. Psychoanalytic feminism (Kaja Silverman, Cathy Caruth, and Laura Mulvey) is essential to my reading of male subjectivity in Carmen Boullosa’s Son vacas, somos puercos. Finally, my discussion of Mexican and Cuban nationalisms is enriched by the contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Benedict Anderson, and Walter Benjamin.» [Résumé de la thèse]
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Ye intruders beware: Fantastical pirates in the Golden Age of illustration
«This dissertation examines the cultural significance of the sudden and rapid proliferation of piracy and pirate illustrations that marked the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. During this “Golden Age” (c. 1880-1920) – an era that witnessed an explosion of magazine and book imagery – the illustrators Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, and Frank E. Schoonover turned away from the realities and histories of piracy and shaped instead a new, fantastical icon. Pyle, in particular, created this adventurer, immersing him –and vicariously, his admirers – in exotic, violent fantasy. Wyeth and Schoonover, Pyle’s students, followed in their teacher’s iconographical footsteps even as they developed their own individual styles. So powerful was the fantastical pirate’s appeal that he continued to generate excitement decades after the Golden Age in illustrations as well as in lucrative Hollywood productions. The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (2003, 2006, 2007) testifies to the hold the pirate maintains over the popular imagination.» [Résumé de la thèse]
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Unwired, the Ghost and the Automata, The: Utopian Reconfigurations of Collectives in Japanese Popular Culture.
«This dissertation argues that utopian configurations of collectives emerge from popular culture, radically challenging dominant structures of power and conventional conceptualization of collective formation. The underlying argument posits that social change is necessary in the face of the devastating inequalities and discrimination, as well as the crippling exploitation of people and nature rooted in capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and colonialism which reinforce and sustain systemic violence. It also suggests that utopia is a key conceptual tool for conceptualizing approaches to social change and that popular culture is a rich terrain for experimentations in such change. Ultimately, it propounds that a reconfiguration of collectives is a fundamental component enabling social change. I thus navigate the three intertwined problems of utopia, popular culture, and collectives, for they are not only interconnected in their conceptual influences and histories, but also in the possibilities they hold. At bottom, my intervention is informed by a utopian framework of social change, engages in an exploration into the depths of popular culture as a productive playground for such change, and advances speculations on new ways of being together. In this dissertation, I develop three interrelated and cumulative configurations of collectives through the analysis of three media and popular culture works of fiction. I begin by considering the triple negation of mediation, the state and ultimately the interface in the anime series Serial Experiments Lain (1998), giving rise to the utopian imagining of alternative collectives I refer to as the Unwired Collectives. I then turn my attention to multimedia franchise Ghost in the Shell and propose the configuration of Ghost Collectives built on two pillars: the Stand Alone Complex which emerges from the transmedial cyborgian structure of the franchise, and the Reciprocity of the Ghost which defines the operative logic of transformative reciprocal exchange at the core of this new configuration. Finally, I re-functionalize these core concepts in the cumulative notion of Automata Collectives developed from the radical negation of endings in the videogame Nier: Automata (2017) and leading to a reconfiguration of the temporality of active participation that allows collectives to persist beyond their own ending.» [Abstract]