Thesiss

May This Be Your Last Sorrow is a novel in stories about the coming of age of two Iranian boys raised in Watertown, Massachusetts. Omid and his mother, Heideh, immigrated to America in 1983, leaving behind Omid's father who Omid thinks is dead. They settle in Watertown, Massachu…

The national popularity of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns and Yasmina Khadra's The Swallows of Kabul suggests an overwhelming Western interest in Afghanistan. Because novels written outside of Afghanistan have become the popular method for Westerners to gain informat…

While the history of the Inquisition and that of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain during the fifteenth century has been portrayed in several different literary and cultural spheres, rarely has it been depicted in contemporary French fiction. Le chemin de l’exil, written by D…

Istanbul is like no city in the world: it is a place of contradiction and complex cultures. In contemporary Turkish literature, one can see a new trend in topoi: these literary concepts are changing in response to a new era in novel history. These topoi are not being changed by …

This study proposes a reading of the writing of history by several Algerian novelists working in the 1980s. It focuses on novels--written in French by Kateb Yacine, Malika Mokeddem, Rachid Mimouni, Tahar Djaout and Assia Djebar, and in Arabic by Wasini al-A'raj--that attempt to …

Our Opposite Gravities seeks to explore an individual's awakening to an awareness of the universe. The first-person speaker is often the observer, watching how themes of nature, identity, history, tradition, and emotion contribute to the reactions that ultimately comprise the hu…

This study examines the juxtaposition of multiple religious and mythological traditions in James Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake . Joyce frequently pairs Biblical narratives with elements from Islam, Egyptology, Celtic paganism, Greek or Norse mythologies, and other religiou…

Camus' philosophical essays, plays, short-stories, and novels present the absurdity of the world, the necessity of consciousness, the ubiquity of death, and the inevitability of personal obligation. Camus' philosophical concerns are particularly captivating in his early principl…

At Home is a work of creative nonfiction in which each chapter is a self-supporting narrative about one period of my experiences in Franklin, North Carolina, before, during, or after the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War. This work illustrates the two-fold front during war-on th…

Twenty-two-year-old Macy Oman narrates the book in retrospect from Cascade, Oregon, where she is visiting her mother. Macy's father moved with her to Portland shortly after the accidental death of her brother, Nick, seven years before the narration begins. Macy's mother stayed b…

My dissertation, The Cairo Letters , is a collection of poems that draws largely on the epistolary tradition. One section describes a series of letters I received from a first love living in Cairo, Egypt. They were long and lonesome and though I have the originals, the poems att…

This study is concerned with the process of the making of a postcolonial poet persona where the poet is addressing multiple audiences and is trying to speak for, and speak to, multiple constituencies through poetry. The poets examined here, Rabindranath Tagore, Derek Walcott, an…

The eminent biologist E.O. Wilson theorizes a unity of knowledge for all fields of study. Claiming that all knowledge springs from a basis in physics and continues to chemistry, biology, social sciences, and into humanities and even religion, Wilson then assumes that all knowled…

The following novel is the third draft of my creative thesis entitled Dancing in the Ashes . It is an exploration of the Detroit rave scene in its dying days, and it mixes real and imagined places and events in order to portray the essence of that time, if not the factuality. Th…

This dissertation examines the contemporary genre of prison literature (adab al-sijn ) in Syria and its connections to avant-garde Arabic literary experimentalism and global human rights discourse. Through readings of various literary works produced in, through, and about the ex…

This dissertation is a study of the works of the late Egyptian novelist Albert Cossery. The goals of the dissertation are four-fold. The first part of the dissertation is a historical study of Egyptian franco-philia. The aim is to show the deep impact of the cultural and linguis…

This dissertation interrogates the ways in which fashion and the black body were reconceptualized and represented by the artists of the New Negro Movement, particularly in relation to consumption, visibility, performance, and sexuality. The search for self-determination, one of …

This dissertation intends to present how Arab-Islamic character views the socio-cultural image of the northern European character in nineteenth-century Arabic prosaic discourse. Its aim is to provide a new theoretical framework for the interaction and relationship between Arab-I…

While Francophone North-African literature and more specifically the work of Assia Djebar have been studied in depth both internationally and nationally (i.e. France) as falling into the definition of Post-colonial studies, my work will focus on the use of music as a technique o…