In a comparative analysis of Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire" (1962) and Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves" (2000), common aesthetic values and principles of content assist in establishing them as manifestations of ergodic literature. The term ergodic, derived from the Greek terms for "work" and "path" was defined in Espen J. Aarseth's literature theory book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Using Aarseth's theories about non-conventional novels, the unique similarities in specific postmodern novels creates a new classification and genre for novels that employ unique aesthetics and visual elements to recreate the act of reading into an experience that cannot be imitated by new age media.

International adoption is always changing, influenced by global politics and social norms. This thesis looks specifically at Russian and Eastern European adoption and reasons why parents choose these countries from which to adopt. I then interviewed eight people who had either adopted or been adopted from this region to examine the idea of "culture-keeping" and what factors influence a parent's decision to encourage culture-keeping or not.

From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective interdisciplinary response to widening social disparities and species collapses caused by climate change in the new epoch recently being termed "the anthropocene." In response, I analyze canonical texts, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in juxtaposition with Neill Blomkamp's South African science fiction thriller District 9 and contemporary US American novels such as Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses and Richard Power's Generosity and The Echo Maker, to show how writers, filmmakers, and academics have been calling attention to dramatic climate events that consequently challenge the public to rethink the relationships among human beings to other species, and to ecological systems of low predictability, high variability, and frequent extremes. Rather than focusing solely on the "human," I examine how the relationships and livelihoods of multi-species communities shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. As a whole, this dissertation seeks to make abstract, often intangible global patterns and concepts accessible by providing models for what I call "readings in the anthropocene" or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts and film that offer insights into changing human behavior and suggesting alternative management practices of local and global commons as well as opportunities to imagine how to live in and beyond the anthropocene.

This project examines the intersections between sexual/cultural cross-dressing and un/documented immigration from the point of view of folklore and immigration studies using Sui Sin Far's short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Tropic of Orange. Using the lenses of folklore theory and cross-dressing highlights aspects of immigration (and its intersection with gender and race) that are otherwise missed; it is necessary to examine the evolving ways in which fictionalized cross-dressers re-craft and occupy the spaces from which they are barred in order to address and redress questions of immigration today. Incorporating anthropology, history, folkloristics, and gender studies, this project shows that historical forms of cross-dressing and immigration lead to the development of unstable identities and pressures to "re-dress" and return to one's original space. More recent studies about gender, however, reveal a historical change in how cross-dressers negotiate their identities and the space(s) they inhabit. Therefore, it is crucial to inspect cross-dressing and immigration as both historical and contemporary phenomena. While Mrs. Spring Fragrance (published in 1912) represents more conventional ideas of cross-dressing and immigration, Tropic of Orange (published in 1997) offers alternative ways to navigate borders, immigration, and identity by using these concepts more playfully and self-consciously. Although sexual/cultural cross-dressing and un/documented immigration are not the same in every case, there are enough similarities between the two to warrant investigating whether some of the solutions reached by modern cross-dressers and gender-ambiguous people might not also help un/documented immigrants to re-negotiate their status, identities, and spaces in the midst of an unstable and at times hostile environment. In fact, an examination of such intersections can address and redress immigration by changing the perceptions of how, and the contexts in which, people view immigration and borders. Thus, this project contends that it is the combination of folkloristics, gender and immigration studies, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and Tropic of Orange together that precipitates such a reading.

This dissertation examines U. S. American intergenerational witnesses to the Holocaust, particularly how addressees turned addressors maintain an ethical obligation to First Generation witnesses while creating an affective relation to this history for new generations. In response to revisionism and the incommunicability of the Holocaust, a focus on (accurate) First Generation testimony emerged that marginalizes that of intergenerational witnesses. The risk of such a position is that it paralyzes language, locking the addressee into a movement always into the past. Using examples of intergenerational witnesses (moving from close to more distant relationships), this project argues that there is a possibility for ethical intergenerational response. There are two major discussion arcs that the work follows: self-reflexivity and the use of the Banality of Evil as a theme. Self-reflexivity in intergenerational witnessing calls attention to the role of the author as transgenerational witness, an act that does not seek to appropriate the importance or position of the Holocaust survivor because it calls attention to a subjective site in relation to the survivor and the communities of memory created within the text. The other major discussion arc moves from traditional depictions of the Banality of Evil to ones that challenge the audience to consider the way evil is conceptualized after the Holocaust and its implications in contemporary life. In these ways, intergenerational witnesses move from addressee to addressors, continuing to stress the importance of this history through the imperative to pass Holocaust testimony onward into the future.

During the mid-1930s in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway befriended Cuban artist Antonio Gattorno (1904-1980) during Hemingway's most active period of Gulf Stream fishing trips. Their relationship soon transcended ocean sojourns, and the two exchanged letters, eight of which reside in the Hemingway Collection at the J.F.K. Library in Boston. Written between 1935 and 1937, the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence showcases the relationship that came to fruition between the American writer and Cuban artist in the 1930s. It also presents a lens through which to examine the cultural contact that occurred between Americans and Cubans during a decade of great political, social, and economic exchange between the two nations. In addition, the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence elucidates each country's tendency to romanticize the other before the Cuban Revolution and provides a template with which to examine current U.S.-Cuban relationships today. This thesis endeavors to first discuss the Hemingway-Gattorno relationship via a close examination of the correspondence that occurred between them. It then attests that the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence exemplifies the transatlantic glamorization that characterized pre-revolutionary U.S.-Cuban relations. The thesis explores the replay of this act of romanticizing in real time, arguing that despite governmental injunctions since 1961, Americans and Cubans alike have continued to ingeniously find ways to communicate with one another in much the same way Hemingway and Gattorno did in the 1930s. One mechanism for doing so is remembering Ernest Hemingway's life in Cuba and the home he owned there, Finca Vigía, a performance of memory that often occurs through the conduits of either the Hemingway Archives in Boston or the Finca Vigía Museum in Cuba. American and Cuban longing for the cultural contact enjoyed by Hemingway and Gattorno is expressed and performed through a glorification of Hemingway and the Finca Vigía, despite the severance of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1961. In addition, for Cubans in particular, Hemingway and the Finca Vigía present an opportunity to imagine the much more unified pre-revolutionary Cuba. Although certainly Hemingway and his home represent different realities for Cubans and Americans, in all, the thesis will show that citizens from both countries continue to find ways to create and imagine themselves in pre-revolutionary contexts like those embodied by Hemingway and Gattorno in the 1930s.