Format: Thèse

« My dissertation develops a transcultural model for literary movements by exploring the emergence of literary Romanticism in 18th-century Germany and its reemergence in Russian literature. By identifying key traits of a Romantic “imagination” in German and Russian literature, I reveal a modality that has continued to function in defiance of the traditional boundaries of literary periodization. In particular, my project attends to the Romantic topos of an aesthetic encounter as a historicizing struggle between memory and deception. I analyze these moments as a type of “Augentäuschung,” playing on the two semantic possibilities of this German term that can be understood either as “optical illusion” or, more literally, as a “deception/confusion of the eyes.” Synthesizing theoretical frameworks from Pierre Nora, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Aleksandr Veselovskii, I consider aestheticized encounters with female avatars of antiquity and the folk imagination within Romantic texts. […] The third chapter follows transformations of this motif into Russian Romanticism by unearthing sedimentations of aesthetic ambiguity in figurations of the Russian rusalka – a water demon from Slavic folklore – in representative works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol’, and Mikhail Lermontov. After first locating the rusalka in Slavic folklore, this chapter deconstructs literary figurations of the rusalka to pinpoint the inheritance of characteristics and narrative situations from similarly metamorphic Western figures of lore such as mermaids, sirens, and the Lorelei. » (Extrait du résumé)

« This dissertation analyzes Shakespeare’s oceanic characters in The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Using three distinct categories of aquatic creatures, I investigate Shakespeare’s conception of the sea as both a vast, physical body and a complex symbol of renewal, possibility, and transformation. Those I identify as “sea creatures” in Shakespeare’s dramatic works are not animal, but human characters with an intimate connection and understanding of the ocean. These sea creatures—sea dogs, mermaids, and amphibians—symbolically bring the sea with them as they navigate their respective plays, and they contribute to the concept of the sea as not only a paradoxical and transformative space like Shakespeare’s forests, but a space of supernatural and divine power. » (Résumé)

« This dissertation is a study of the migratory supernatural legend ML 4080 “The Mermaid Legend” The story is first attested at the end of the eighteenth century, and hundreds of versions of the legend have been collected throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. I explore a number of related questions concerning this legend: its development and dissemination throughout this geographic area, the meanings it conveys for its traditional audiences and performers, and its afterlife in contemporary media and literature.

The first chapter provides an overview of all the known versions of The Mermaid Legend, demographic information about storytellers and collectors, its typical forms, and the motifs or subtypes which are subject to geographic variation. I argue that the legend originated in Ireland or Gaelic Scotland and spread from Gaelic Scotland to Shetland and Orkney, and from there to the rest of the Norse world. My second chapter explores the relationship between The Mermaid Legend and other Irish and Scottish traditions about seals and mermaids. I conclude that they represent a stable body of belief concerning such beings, and relate to broader concerns about the relationship between humans and their environment. In my third chapter, I explore medieval and early modern Irish literary depictions of seals and mermaids.

The fourth chapter explores the question of the possible functions and meanings of the legend, at both the collective and individual level. I include two individual case studies of versions of the legend recorded from storytellers with large repetoires and sufficient biographical information: Éamonn a Búrc of Carna, County Galway, and Peig Sayers of Dún Chaoin, County Kerry. In the fifth and final chapter, I explore a number of films and literary works by Irish creators which retell or draw inspiration from this legend. I explore both the relationship between these creators and oral tradition, as well as the ways in which the legend is adapted to address contemporary issues and debates about transnationalism, gender, the environment, and more. » (Résumé)

« This dissertation offers a comparative literary history of the paradoxical encomium, a type of epideictic rhetoric that eulogizes subjects commonly considered unworthy of praise. Traditionally, the genre has been interpreted negatively as a superficial display of rhetorical skill and ingenuity and as a result it has received little scholarly attention. I propose a more serious reading of the paradoxical encomium, one that takes into consideration both its philosophical implications and its rhetorical heritage.

Using the literary motifs of the Siren and the Silenos as paradigmatic metaphors of the kind of interpretive problems produced by this genre, I trace the paradoxical encomium from its origins in fifth-century Athenian, sophistic rhetoric to the European Counter-Renaissance and Reformation. Sirens and Silenoi are useful hermeneutic devices with which to interpret some of the philosophical and rhetorical complexities of paradoxical encomia because the figures are the exact inverse of each other. If one reads a paradoxical encomium literally and is persuaded by its beautiful, rhetorical arguments, the text seduces the reader into an acceptance of its Sirenic song; alternatively, if the reader searches beneath the surface meaning of the text for a more figurative interpretation, he/she will respond to the paradoxical encomium as a Silenos-box, a container hiding marvelous truths within. » (Extrait du résumé)