This study traces the beginning of the Western awareness of the Islamic East from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. It touches specifically upon the Western spirit of intolerance toward the Islamic East. Peter the Venerable, a Spanish physician who settled in England…
"150" Result
Sort By:
This dissertation examines the parable as a modern literary mode against its ancient model. Why tell parables? How do we understand parabolic speech? How do parables mean when the conditions of reception change? What do parables, as the point where sacred and poetic discourse me…
Though scholars, performers, and classical enthusiasts alike recognized and praised the many facets of his compositional craft, Johannes Brahms's treatment of poetry in his Lieder has led to much conflicting assessments. The negative critiques exist partially because the majorit…
The purpose of this dissertation, Waves of Translation: Goethe, Hafez, Nietzsche, Zoroaster , is to explore Roland Barthes' theory of myth and Nietzsche's philosophy of the Ewige Wiederkehr as a framework for the study of world literautre. Chapter One, "The Inception of a World …
My dissertation focuses on the performativity of gender identity projected in German literary works around 1800. I focus on the one hand on definitions of essential femininity, and on the other hand, on the way these definitions are called into question through the strategies of…
The Magician in Medieval German Literature is an exploration of a number of issues related to magic and learning in vernacular German fiction from the Middle Ages. A close reading of medieval German narratives reveals that since magic was labeled demonic and unchristian by early…
This thesis examines the development of Yiddish literary culture in Montreal, Canada during its nascent period between 1905 and 1940. The focus is on Montreal's pre-Holocaust Yiddish literary life, and its proponents: A. Almi, Reuben Brainin, H. M. Caiserman, N. Y. Gotlib, Hersh…
Between 1961 and 1989, nearly 1.7 million Turks settled in the Federal Republic of Germany. By the official end of recruitment in November 1973, Turks had become the largest group of non-German workers residing in the Federal Republic. My dissertation, a cultural history, focuse…
The goal of this dissertation was to show Goethe's perception of Hafez through the translation and scholarship of Joseph von Hammer (1774-1856) and to explain Goethe's image of Hafez by showing the similarities between the two poets' centuries, personal lives, and philosophies o…
This dissertation examines representations of Muslim women in contemporary Germany and considers them in the context of the intensely gendered politics of cultural difference at work. It particularly addresses how immigrant women are understood as Muslim women. As a consequence,…
Most critical works on the seventeenth-century European representations of the Mughal empire, following Said's discourse of "Orientalism," argue that the natives are represented as barbaric/exotic "others". Further, like Said's, these approaches entail a homogenous idea of the "…
My dissertation explores the appropriation of Oriental imagery within Danish and Norwegian nineteenth-century literature and culture at large. This project problematizes Edward Said's binary notion of Orientalism and posits a more complex model describing how European countries …
Living a life "on the hyphen" -- as the Cuban-American critic Gustavo Perez Firma calls it -- or in a "third space" -- as the Indian literary theorist Homi Bhabha defines it -- has become the most common way to describe the condition of those identities in-between, to define the…
This dissertation takes up one of the most fraught areas of Europe, the Balkans. Variously part of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Byzantine Empires, and now often considered part of Central Europe, this region has always been considered Europe's border between the Orient and…
Karl May was one of the most popular German writers of the nineteenth century. In his famous series of novels, the Orientzyklus, his protagonist, Kara ben Nemsi, travels through a significant section of the then Ottoman Empire, encountering many of its various cultures. Much of …
The focus of my dissertation is the German-Jewish poetess, Gertrud Kolmar (born in Berlin in 1894), who died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1943. My particular interest is in Kolmar's re-workings of various contemporary spatial images that sought to define, confront, and manipu…
The ‘Third Balkan Wars’—as the sequence of wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia is sometimes referred to in the vast sociological, political, and journalistic body of works published since 1991—took place in a ‘new’, post-1989 Europe that was haunted by feelings of fear and ins…
The subject of migration and integration in contemporary German society continually provokes political and social debate, but fails to produce any practical, efficient result. Therefore, a new strategy for the creation of a multicultural society must be designed whereby the conc…
This thesis deals with the literary genre known as legend. During the Middle Ages legends were texts of purely religious character. However, the tradition of writing legends continues into the secularized Modern Age. By way of example, the "Legend of the Seven Sleepers" by Johan…