Research

William Faulkner’s chaotic Yoknapatawpha was translated into Spanish and distributed throughout Latin America for the first time in 1932. Faulkner’s short stories and novels reached the hands of aspiring writers, amongst them Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Colombia, Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru and Carlos Fuentes in Mexico. My senior thesis focuses on the role of William Faulkner’s work in the formative years of the writers of the Latin American Boom. I begin by thinking about theories of influence and the power dynamics involved in cross-cultural literary inheritance. I then consider the ways in which the translators of Faulkner modify his sentences and what elements of these translations, if any, are present in the early work of the Boom. With a focus on the early work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his first encounters with Faulkner, this project hopes to better understand the place of William Faulkner in the Latin American Boom. 

Fire and Flour is the result of over 30 hours of oral histories conducted with my family in Martinique. I was awarded the Schiff Fellowship in order to pursue research for my creative writing thesis, and used the money to fly to Martinique to conduct my interviews in person. A creative “novella”, Fire and Flour compiles and remembers a history of deep personal importance.

During World War II, France’s rapid and unexpected defeat was followed by the German occupation of the northern half of the country. The Occupation (1940-44) was marked not only by the daily stress of living alongside the German enemy, but also by a civil war within the French population. Existing critical works on Irène Némirovsky, a Russian-Jewish author writing in France during the Occupation, focus on fitting Némirovsky’s wartime writing into a certain political and ideological framework; however, these attempts to label Némirovsky’s political stance are far too reductive. In my thesis, I have taken the opposite approach, seeking to bring to light the complexity of Némirovsky’s ambivalent representation of Germans, as well as of French elites and women. Rather than producing unequivocal propaganda works, Némirovsky portrays these external and internal enemies to French national solidarity in order to consider timeless ethical questions regarding individual responsibility and collective identity.