Literature, Comparative

The traditional, realist, dramatic concept of coherent character identity is ruptured by the two plays Les Chevaliers de la table ronde and El publico. Cocteau's and Lorca's works, which are usually labeled as surrealist due to their apparently disjointed nature, are actually embodiments of the poet-playwrights' continuing attempts to reveal that identity, including gendered identity, is a performance. The metadramatic elements of the plays such as discourse, costumes and gender are unstable and voluntarily changeable; they have repercussions beyond the proscenium. Cocteau and Lorca invite their audiences to consider the performative nature of their identities.

The search for all sources of The Romaunt of the Rose, the fourteenth-century English version of Le roman de la Rose, focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer. The authorship controversy is so divisive that prominent medievalists like Huot, Hult, Robertson, and Badel write long volumes on the Roman's influence without mentioning the Romaunt. Comparing Geissman's list of rime-borrowings with both poems' concordances is the only way to end the debate, because Chaucer is the likeliest author and one must start with the most compatible French and English texts. At present, the best way to test Geoffrey Chaucer's authorship of the Middle English Romaunt is through close examination of the French rime-borrowings most orthoepically comparable in both languages that the Middle English writer occasionally chose to translate rather than borrow. This selective borrowing suggests the translator's attempt to bring each term slowly into the English mainstream, by using it at first only in its literal sense.

Les Mouches is a modern reconstruction of the ancient myth embodied in the The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Jean-Paul Sartre not only rewrote the legend of Orestes; he remodeled it. Orestes is not just a new man; he is his own man. The play, therefore, is not a mere pastiche in modern dress. Sartre infuses Orestes with an unprecendented "Existentialist" consciousness, and this transformation adds new complexities to the ancient text. This Existentialist reworking of Hellenistic images is distinguished from the classically "tragic" elements in Aeschylus as well as later modifications in Sophocles and Euripides. Sartre's early introduction into the lore of Hellenism is considered, and a discussion of Sartre's theoretical and philosophical perspective on theater suggests which Greek elements Sartre was disposed to incorporate into his script.

Over the years the study of literature has shifted its attention from the author to the text to the reader and back again--all this in an attempt to understand what a text means and how that meaning got into the text in the first place. Wayne C. Booth's rhetorical model of interpretation, while excellent in its detailing rhetorical techniques and their effects on the reader, ignores both the active role readers play in interpretation and the creative power of language. This thesis takes a post-transactional approach to The Turn of the Screw and Lolita in an attempt to expose two blind spots in Booth's rhetorical criticism: his refusal to allow the reader into the creative, interpretive process, and his insistence on the author's use of clear, unambiguous language to produce a single reading of his text.

Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, is a well
organized and intricately detailed work which uses as its
basic metaphor the middle poem of the Divine Comedy by
Dante Al ighieri. Thematically, structurally, and
symbolically, Fitzgerald's novel parallels Dante's poem,
incorporating the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, the
Mirrors of Narcissus motif, Dante's idea of Amore, and the
symbolic figure of Beatrice. Critics have overlooked Dante
as a source for Fitzgerald's work and therefore have not
adequately explained the thematic concerns of this novel.

The purpose of the following thesis is to apply Umberto Eco's concepts included in his essay Intentio Lectoris, the Peircean notions of the relationship between the object, the sign, and the interpretant, and other essays that deal with the relationship between the reader, the text, and the author to two Latin American works of literature: one Mexican, Carlos Fuentes's "Chac Mool" and one Argentinean, Jorge Luis Borges's "Las ruinas circulares." The objective is to discuss the structural devices that guide the reader through particular interpretations, analyze the sociohistorical agents that influence the author as well as the reader, and pinpoint the difference between two possible types of interpretation, political and symbolic, based on two concepts pertaining respectively to "Chac Mool" and "Las ruinas circulares:" the statue of Chac Mool as the symbol of the Pre-Colombian traditional values and the dream as a symbol of the process of writing.

Using Marie-Laure Ryan's definition of the law of minimal departure, I propose an important addendum, the clause of congruency. It is necessary to delve deeper into the connection a reader makes with a textual possible world and its relation to the actual world. The textual world, with all its various rules and mores, becomes just as accessible to the reader as the world he currently resides in, so long as it flows along in a logical manner. It is only when something appears that is incongruent with the reader's understanding of the textual world, the reader is forced to dissemble his current textual world and build a new one. Ray Bradbury utilizes the clause of congruence to reveal meaning in three of his novels.