Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Affect"

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    The Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Vurun Kahpeye [Strike the Slut] and its Cinematic Afterlife
    (University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Germen, Baran; Gopal, Sangita
    Proposing melodrama as an aesthetics of victimhood, my dissertation examines the intermedial itineraries of notable feminist Halide Edib’s Vurun Kahpeye [Strike the Slut]. Originally serialized in 1923 and published as a novella in 1926 in Ottoman Turkish, Vurun Kahpeye was translated into modern day Turkish in 1946. The melodramatic story was then adapted for screen three times in 1949, 1964, and 1973, respectively, by Ömer Lütfi Akad, Orhan Aksoy and Halit Refiğ. With the circulation of these films on TV, the title Vurun Kahpeye has since the 90s morphed into an idiom designating the unjust treatment of the innocent. The persistent repetition of Vurun Kahpeye across media, I suggest, signifies melodrama’s aesthetic durability due to its affective excess: its efficacy in making a disaffected public experience its own victimhood. Thus, my dissertation provides an archeology of melodrama as a political technology through a reading of each of Vurun Kahpeye’s media iteration as embedded in its socio-historical context. In this account, the affective medium of cinema emerges as the main site for the formation of a secular mass public by linking secularism to structures of feeling rooted in victimization, suffering, and injury. And yet, the affective excess of melodrama, I demonstrate, renders Vurun Kahpeye’s normative project unstable and uncontainable with each iteration. At different moments in time, Vurun Kahpeye is a queer text exposing the heteropatriarchal nature of secular nationalism; lays the infrastructural, spectatorial, and aesthetic foundation of the classical cinema of Turkey; and serves as the project of a social realist, counter-populist, and anti- Western theory of cinema. Therefore, this dissertation traces the conflicting projections, aspirations, and feelings central to Turkish republican modernity that congeal and clash in, through, and around Vurun Kahpeye.
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    Thinking through the Affective Skin: Affect-Based Literacy and Literary Orientations
    (University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Habib, Mushira; Wood, Mary
    My dissertation, “Thinking through the Affective Skin: Affective Literacy and Literary Orientations,” proposes affective ways of orientating our thoughts and skins to literacy practices, literary analysis, media consumption, and subjectivity formation. It contributes to the affective paradigmatic shift in critical theory by proposing its incorporation into education and the mechanics of knowledge production to acknowledge and accommodate multiple, alternative modes of producing and sharing knowledge, demonstrating comprehension, and projecting intelligence. I suggest that an affective orientation can shift affect’s analysis as an object of study to affect as study and analysis. The analogy of the skin envelops the mind-body duality to refer to affectivity as an open layer over and beyond corporeality or embodiment. Thinking through the affective skin, as an encompassing model, thus allows multiple affective regimes to be points of entry to thought and all thought to become points of reference for affectivity. It is an inter-disciplinary and multilingual project in its conception through an engagement with various genres of writing, literature, and media. In this project, I attempt an organic integration of critical theory, affect theory, composition theory, gender theory, postcolonial theory, media theory, cultural studies and writing studies. It is a multicultural project that situates my work in Comparative Literature within larger frameworks of literacy, intersectionality and affect. Thinking through the affective skin as an orientation brings to the forefront marginalized histories and forms of knowing and theorizing processes and purposes. It offers a multiplicity of groundbreaking models for pedagogical innovations and affective accommodations. It provides attention to previously ignored or under-researched details, nuances, and analyses of affective engagements. It can rationalize affectivities misunderstood, or not understood, prior to the affective orientation. In three chapters, I experiment with and exemplify different ways of engaging with affective writing. These chapters are thematically divided into three varied modes of literacy and literary engagements, while affectively connected via my affective orientation. It is a demonstration of thinking through my affective skin.