This research interrogates hospitality dynamics, centralizing the following query: where and how does violence arise between guest and host? Rooted in theory from Jacques Derrida and Richard Kearney, which identifies the host as a uniquely vulnerable subject in this dynamic, my exploration intervenes with an analysis of the intimacy inherently involved in guest-host dynamics. I employ an analytical lens of affect, specifically centralizing queer and feminist negative affect, when analyzing Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest, Emma Cline’s The Guest, and Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest. Feminist negative studies the affect resulting from violent patriarchal systems and structures. Similarly, queer negative affect regards the affect of existing in opposition to dominant power structures, often relating to dynamics of specifically queer sexuality. Through a textual analysis under these lenses, I argue that the interpersonal juxtaposition necessitated by hospitality dynamics yields an intimacy uniquely primed for the replication of oppressive external power structures. I argue that the true violence of hospitality dynamics stems because of and through the intimate interplay of guest and host, upending existing theory about the ultimate vulnerability of hosts in hospitality dynamics.

This project explores the poetry of Italian and Russian Futurism, two early 20th century artistic movements united by a shared aesthetic obsession with the “future,” political change, and modernity. In this project, I argue that, despite this mutual appreciation, Italian and Russian Futurist schools of literature had dramatically different aesthetic theories of what the future should “look like” and how it should come about, and that these theories chiefly diverged across the schools' conceptions of speed, violence, collectivism, and the body, expressed within their verse. I further posit that this divergence found within their poetic production, importantly, is indicative of reciprocally generative aesthetic relationships between the schools of Italian and Russian Futurism, and the differing political ideologies the two schools were affiliated with (Fascism and Communism, respectively), as well as their political aims (that is, perpetual war and revolution). This analysis was accomplished by contrasting political theoretical texts (e.g from Marx, Lenin, Schmitt, etc.) with a range of poems from both Futurist schools (e.g. from Marinetti, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, etc.), shedding light on the productivity of aesthetic imagery for political groups/ideologies, as well as the inverse—the influence of political logic on the valuation of particular aesthetic ideals, offering a unique contribution to rapidly intensifying discourses across the humanities and social sciences on the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

This project explores the differing aesthetic representations of women and femininity in the poetry of two Symbolist French poets, Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry. In this project, I argue that Valéry and Baudelaire both place heavy emphasis on aesthetic discussions of women across their work, but that Baudelaire introduces the grotesque into his conception of feminine beauty in his work, whereas Valéry’s conception of feminine beauty solely necessitates purity. I posit that this difference can be attributed to Baudelaire’s depiction of women as real, unpolished human figures (forcing him to contend with the whole reality of female existence), whereas Valéry depicts women as abstract, unreal ideas, instead allowing him to partake in the poetic privileges of a fantasy of purity undesecrated by the real world. This analysis was accomplished by contrasting a range of Baudelaire’s and Valéry’s short poems, comparing the differing levels of physicality, vitality, agency, individuality, and consciousness they afford their female figures—characteristics which are necessary to substantiate a “real woman”—with Baudelaire being substantially more generous in his provisions of these characteristics than Valéry, explaining their differing aesthetic philosophies. This research feeds into existing, accelerating discourses on feminist aesthetics, demonstrating that standards of beauty for women are not morally or politically neutral, and are dependent on the level of humanity and autonomy denied to women and their depictions in art.

This thesis examines the tortured artist trope to explore how pain restructures language and identity. I argue that fugue provides a dual framework for understanding the trope’s relevance in literature. Drawing on disability studies and trauma theory, it positions pain as a force that disrupts linguistic coherence and reorganizes narrative form. Engaging in debates on pain’s ineffability (Scarry), its epistemological productivity (Price; Patsavas), and its recursive nature (Caruth), the project develops fugue as a psychological condition and compositional structure that models the fragmentation of a protagonist under pressure. Fugue operates in two key ways across the thesis’ primary texts, Sylvia Plath’s novel, "The Bell Jar," and Damien Chazelle’s film, "Whiplash." First, it describes the protagonists’ ambition and suffering, where psychological and physical strain produces disruptions in memory and self-perception. Second, fugue functions as a principle that organizes narrative itself, as the texts’ linear progressions turn to recursive, contrapuntal, and unordered sequencing. Moments of pain become generative breaks from which multiple versions of the self – and of the story – emerge, diverge, and reinterweave. The thesis argues that language does not simply fail under the weight of pain but can be reconstituted into fugue-like structure that expand the possibilities of narrative form, revealing new ways of articulating trauma, ambition, and the instability of the self.

This project traces a transhistorical relationship between clothing, femininity, and power across three cultural archives: medieval Italy, early colonial Mexico, and the contemporary United States. This project argues that dress functions not merely as adornment, but as a social language through which women, particularly migrant women, construct, negotiate, and resist identity. Beginning with The Decameron, the study examines how female characters mobilize clothing as a strategy for movement, disguise, and survival, establishing an early framework in which feminine visibility is both constrained and strategically manipulated through dress. The project then turns to the Florentine Codex, a colonial-era text that documents Indigenous Mesoamerican life. Through its textual and visual “othering”, the Codex reveals how clothing becomes a tool of colonial governance, marking bodies as legible within emerging racial hierarchies. Bridging these histories, the project situates the modern quinceañera as a living ritual that inherits and transforms gendered dress. Operating as both a symbol of tradition and a site of negotiation, Latina girls must navigate expectations of femininity, family, and cultural belonging. The dress even extends beyond ritual into public and political life, functioning as an assertion of visibility and resistance against racialized surveillance and cultural erasure. Thus this project demonstrates that clothing is never neutral -- it is an interface that produces, regulates, and contests femininity.

This project examines the relationship between Itō Shizuo’s Summer Blooms and Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, focusing on a 1939 letter in which Itō reflects on Rilke’s “precision of vision” and the necessity of passing through a poetic “negative” or moment of halting stillness. Rather than treating this encounter as a matter of one-sided influence, the project asks: how do global lyric forms register this moment of arrested perception, and what are its consequences for poetic subjectivity? To address this question, I adopt translation as a critical method. Drawing on my full English translation of Summer Blooms, I analyze how Itō’s use of syntactic spacing, pronoun omission, and rhythmic segmentation produces a materialized stillness within the poetic line. In translation, these features encounter resistance: English syntax demands explicit subjects and cannot reproduce the visual spacing of Japanese, forcing decisions that expose the cost of precision itself. Through close readings of selected poems, I argue that translation does not simply transmit Itō’s poetics but reenacts the very tension he identifies in Rilke. This study proposes that both Itō and Rilke locate lyric truth at the point where perception falters and language arrests. By framing translation as an analytic practice, the project offers a new comparative approach to modernist poetics across linguistic and cultural boundaries.