Thesiss

In Jewish Studies in general and Jewish literary studies in particular, the autobiography has taken on renewed significance in the twenty-first century. A recent wave of Hebrew autobiographical writing has reinvigorated long-standing debates about the connections between family …

Mosaics of Identity: Reading Muslim Women's Memoirs From Across the Diaspora addresses Muslim women's life writing in transit since 9/11. This project follows the memoir boom fueled by many Middle Eastern women writers publishing in the U.S., Australia and Europe. By studying co…

This dissertation argues that American autobiographies from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries typically promote ideological programs, and that with the rise of secularism these programs are often haunted by the negative affects they must necessarily disavow. Throug…

My dissertation offers an analysis of childhood writing in Moroccan literature. It explores narratives entirely or partially dedicated to childhood written by both male and female writers and published during the second half of the twentieth century. This includes early works su…

This dissertation investigates Armenian literature in Turkish through the two authors Takuhi Tovmasyan and Migirdic Margosyan by analyzing their literary works with an emphasis on food. By putting the traumatic experiences and the memories of 1915 in the cultural contexts of dai…

This study of Abdelkebir Khatibi's autobiography, La Mémoire tatouée, addresses two specific questions with respect to autobiography: What does this autobiography tell us about autobiography in general and about its own status as autobiography? What is the relationship between K…

The purpose of this thesis is to examine Diana Abu-Jaber's memoir, The Language of Baklava, and its approach to the question of identity. To this end the thesis utilizes close reading of passages to explore the relationship between language and identity in the memoir. The thesis…

This study of the rhetoric of Arab American autobiography examines “the rhetoric of cultural encounter” in the autobiographies of three post-1948 Arab American writers: Edward Said's Out of Place , Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage, and Fawaz Turki's Exile's Return. The three autho…

At the end of “The Other Side/El Otro Lado,” Julia Alvarez writes of leaving the Dominican village where she has gone to sort out her divided Dominican-American mind. Lured back to the U.S. where she can have “a life of choice, a life of words,” she also hears the village muses …

The Hebrew Bible says relatively little directly about the inner thoughts and emotions of the prophets, yet it does use a variety of techniques to portray the prophets' distinct personal characteristics. Most prophetic books use a combination of third person narration and the pr…

This dissertation explores the poetics of loss in the autobiographical writing of Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Born in 1928, Wiesel spent his early childhood in the shtetl of Sighet, situated in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. In 1944…

During the 1630s, congregations began to separate from the established Anglican Church forming new autonomous groups. This study examines separatist and Baptist women s writings from this period, as they struggled under the persecution of the religious authorities and under the …

Background: Dementia is the biggest cause of death in the United Kingdom (Matthews, 2016). Early-onset dementia (EOD) is a subset of the dementias affecting people between the ages of forty-five to sixty-five (Mercy, 2008). People with early-onset dementia (PwEOD) can find thems…

This research examines the issues and visual processes that arise in the production of self-representations derived from literary texts. The construction of a series of photographic and video installations drawing upon T. S Eliot’s poem 'The Waste Land' (1922) allowed for the ex…

This dissertation studies the relations between Spanish Early Modern autobiography and its contemporary discourses, mainly historiography and fiction. It argues that in a time when autobiography is not a defined genre, writers who choose to narrate their lives do so in close rel…

This thesis focuses on a body of cultural productions and, more specifically, on some texts that have emerged on the French and francophone literary scene in the early eighties. There are about thirty novels, a few testimonies and some movies, which all share the characteristic …

While the social sciences have interrogated religious conversions as intensely social, historically situated phenomena, literary studies has not focused the same scrutiny on these textually rendered events and the forces that shape them. This dissertation explores religious conv…

In the field of literary production, women's autobiographical writing has been one of the most powerful means of artistic expression. Life-writing is a genre of ambiguity and paradox intertwined with some of the most fundamental questions of literary studies. Within the domain o…

This project examines the question of memory and cross-cultural identities in the context of diasporic cultures, focusing in particular on the works of two Algerian women: Fadhma Amrouche and her daughter Taos Amrouche. Both occupy a unique position in Maghrebian literature. Pre…

Thomas Edward Lawrence is a figure that still stirs the imagination more than 60 years after his death. What is his appeal? Some critics have stated that Lawrence's character held something for everyone. This would seem to be the case, but whether this is due to Lawrence himself…