Narration (Rhetoric)

This study articulates and accentuates the possibilities for women as suggested in Hillary Rodham Clinton's discourse on women's rights at the United Nation's Fourth Conference on Women. Such an endeavor is realized via ideological criticism, which emphasizes the ethical and political implications of discourse. Concepts which inform my analysis include constitutive rhetoric, the Second Persona, and the Third Persona. These tools help discover how Hillary constituted women while in China and expose the gender ideology that grounded her discourse. Her discursive fragments suggest that women's place in the world centers on their place in the family and men's place centers in the public domain. Traditional meanings of women and men are advanced and their rearticulation is hindered. If a meaningful emancipated community is to be realized, we must reconsider our conceptions of both women and men and evoke the power of subversive discourse.

Henry James's In the Cage offers a character, a young female telegraphist, who constantly applies theories to and comes up with interpretations of the people, objects, and events that make up the world outside her cage. The experiences she undergoes with the telegrams' ambiguous messages and her customers' strange actions compel her to weave an intricate drama that not only clears up the ambiguities but also allows her to play an important role. She creates a subjective reality through which she can embark on an exciting, dangerous adventure. This reality, however, is not immutable. When faced with new sets of circumstances, new flashes from the outside world, she struggles to re-work her interpretations and re-create her fiction; like Odysseus, she is forced to submit to an overwhelming external power and find a new path on which to travel.

Robert Browning's dramatic monologues often characterize the darker aspect of romantic love through speakers who demonstrate their devotion to violence. Exploring the innovations in discourse, Browning gives his narrators voices that allow them to speak from an ancient literary tradition. For Browning's speakers, words make the silencing of the lover either the act of ultimate devotion or the result of disappointed expectations. The narrator speaks of the absence of God, as when Porphyria's lover holds her body to him: "and yet God has not said a word!" With the poet's strong speech---in all his attractiveness, his destructive display of love and his dismissal of God---Browning has helped to create a discourse that has sculpted the literary force of the romantic killer. Three novelists in particular employ the literary force of Browning's experiments: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels. Intertextual comparisons among these narratives delineate how Robert Browning's innovation of the seductive antihero has persisted in literature.

One Track Mind is a world wherein characters, driven by their unique, individual sexualities, are both prey and companionship for each other. The resulting, incessant shifting between cooperation and competition comprises the dramatic action of the stories. However, more dramatic than much of the action are the stylistic shifts of narration---both within and among the stories. This diversity of narrative style, much more so than invocation of place-names, describes and defines the myriad landscapes of the world of One Track Mind: serene and absurd, lush and sparse, sincere and sardonic.

All narratives in which the human image is presented establish an interconnectedness of time and space, what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the chronotope. When Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables, he drew upon a historical chronotope originating in the narratives that accompanied the spread of Christianity, and which found its purest distillate in the genre of hagiography---the narrating of the lives of saints. When the mode of sacred time established in the conventionally brief hagiologic narrative, which depended on a linear progression having unity with God as its end, is integrated into the extended form of the novel, it finds itself at odds with the ubiquitous adventure time---the random disjunctions of time and space without which there is no plot. The delineated spaces of roads and gardens in Les Miserables serve to concretize the mediation between these two modes of time, resulting in the ordinary time of the novel.

This thesis shall produce the translation of six essays from Italian author Erri De Luca's collection PIanoterra (1995). De Luca's work often defies traditional attempts at translation due to its philosophical and polysemantic nature ; more than mere essays or accounts of, for instance, his involvement with humanitarian missions in Bosnia, his work consists of reflections on life and language itself. De Luca, himself a prolific translator from Ancient Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish, oftentimes emphasizes the origins of specific words, making carefully studied choices in his own writing. Therefore, in addition to the six carefully produced translations with special attention paid to De Luca's word choices and an awareness of the etymological weight each one carries, this thesis shall also provide a theoretical framework emphasizing a sense-based translation which will allow the freedom necessary to explore De Luca's polysemy as well as commentary highlighting the challenges encountered in translating his work.

High Summer is a manuscript-length compilation of narrative science essays that trace the relationship the narrator has with her father. These essays focus on the ongoing presence of drugs, their historical basis, and their pharmacological effects on the body.

As puzzle-driven, character based games, Portal and Portal 2, developed by the Valve Corporation, are not only pioneering in their use of narrative, but they also revolutionize the function of aporia. This thesis explores the role of aporia and use of the narrative in the two video games. It will be argued that the games possess a rigid narrative structure, but while the narrative serves as a peripheral construction, there are other structures that contribute to the experience of gameplay. The research aims to determine how the games adapt narrative and use it in combination with other elements to move beyond simple play and storytelling. As video games become more widely studied in academia, it is important that they merit and maintain standing ; Portal and Portal 2 not only provide a rich gameplay experience, but also offer a particular interaction not found in other texts.

Labor literature is in popular and academic neglect. I argue that labor literature's neglect is unjust, and I provide a way of examining labor literature that can rescue it from neglect. I shall be concerned with labor literature's academic decline due to its apparent lack of value according to traditional standards of literary criticism. I will argue that ethical criticism - criticism of literature that considers the ethics of a work as a part of its literary value - can reveal new complexities in labor literature. An ethical critical analysis of the representation of American labor movements and workers in noncanonical texts will show the distinctive ethical value such texts hold. I will argue that labor texts possess ethical value insofar as they help readers develop awareness of complex ethical issues posed by labor and community, and that the ethical value of labor literature provides a new reason to value such works.

I am living in a world of strangers. Growing up, I was told to never talk to them. As an adult, I have grown self-centered, spending my days filtering the external into my own internal truths. In doing so, a boundary has been set between my brain and everything beyond it. For different reasons I have stayed quiet over the years, and formed opinions of strangers by means of observation; but now, finally, I am reaching out. I am going to places I would not normally go to, slowing down enough to notice, and trying something different. I am trying to talk to strangers, trying to get them to open up to me in a world where a lot of us have curled the focus inward. I am trying to explore, trying to overcome, approach, dig deeper, and above all, learn something that makes each one of us familiar.