Browsing by Subject "Novels"

“South as Method: From the ‘Southern Question’ to the ‘Southern Thoughts’” examines the emergence of narrative and rhetoric patterns within the context of the unclear and unstable meaning of race and nation-building discourses in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Argentina. My methodology combines a close reading of late nineteenth-century novels and short stories published in these countries with an analysis of the ways that the global editorial market and local sociological essays influenced the creation of local ‘social types’ in these texts. Bridging intersectional literary analysis with post- and decolonial theories, this study analyzes writers’ definitions of their novels rather than what critics or theorists have called ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ novels. It is an invitation to look inside the writers’ peculiar ways of producing novels in this style while prioritizing national concerns. The literary corpus analyzed spans from essays—Luigi Capuana’s L’isola del sole, Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere, Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente, José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada’s Radiografia de la pampa, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie—to novels and short stories—Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La tribuna, Mercedes Cabello’s Blanca Sol, Eugenio Cambaceres’s En la sangre, Clorinda Matto’s Herencia, Luigi Pirandello’s “L’altro figlio,” Benito Pérez Galdós’s Lo prohibido and Tormento, Giovanni Verga’s “Rosso Malpelo” and “L’amante di Gramigna.” In my analysis of these nineteenth-century texts, the concept of ‘social type’ is highlighted as a key framework and a descriptive tool that responds to the growing need for orientation within the unsteady national borders. In this sense, I analyze the osmotic relationship between social science and literature, which culminates in the responses articulated by Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, and José Carlos Mariátegui, in the 1930s, through their original articulation of the south as a method rather than an object of study.

This project examines dance scenes in nineteenth-century French novels written by women to consider how grace—beauty in motion—defines women as social, moral, and artistic actors. Creating a constellation of dance scenes, I develop a concept called graceful inclinations, meaning experiences that move observers to contemplate space, time, or bodies differently. I use this concept to study representations of women’s sexuality and subjectivity in dances scenes written by Sophie Cottin, Germaine de Staël, Barbara von Krüdener, Claire de Duras, George Sand, and Marie d’Agoult. Because previous studies of dance in nineteenth-century French literature focus predominately on texts by canonical male authors, scholarship on literary descriptions of dance is limited to a masculine perspective. Moreover, studies of the philosophical and esthetic meanings of grace rarely cite primary sources written by women, although, since the eighteenth century, grace has been closely associated with Western understandings of femininity.This project focuses on four genres of dance: contradances, the waltz, presentational dances (the shawl dance, quadrille, and bolero), and the tarantella. Whereas descriptions of contradances propose ideal social relations or contest the idealization of disembodied femininity, waltz scenes create dystopian depictions of upper-class debauchery and masculine authority. Characters performing presentational dances become archetypal representations of their gender or race. The tarantella in Staël’s novel Corinne, ou l’Italie presents the ultimate dancer who is graceful and sensual. Analyzing representations of exoticism throughout this corpus, I use Srinivas Aravamudan’s theory of Enlightenment Orientalism to consider how exoticized bodies became a testing ground for thinking about female sexuality. I draw upon the theories of Adriana Cavarero, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Genviève Fraisse, and Judith Lynne Hanna to study the sexual politics of dance scenes. In my study of the aesthetic and philosophical concept of grace, dance emerges as an art capable of moving its viewers but not yet capable of instigating social change. Creating both utopian or dystopian moments, dance scenes offer insight into the different worlds that writers wished to create or to avoid.