Framed! Encountering otherness in frame narratives

"Framed!" investigates the intersections between frame narratives and encounters with ethnic and racial Otherness. Taking as its point of departure The Arabian Nights, it examines case studies in 19th and 20 th century German, Jewish-American and African American literatures. It posits a theory at the junction of narratology and ethnic studies. Through a comparative analysis of six representative novellas, poems and novels by William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hans Grimm, Gerhart Hauptmann, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud---this dissertation contends that ethnic framing and narrative framing connect into a causal relationship. Otherness is a product of narrative conditioning, rather than an a priori, ontologically determined category. If narrative is the locus of Othering, it is also the location of reclaiming discursive power. The structural properties of frame narratives are a representation of the effort of "carrying over", outside the frame -- which narrative not only shares with, but also accomplishes through metaphor.;Following an "Introduction" that offers a theory of narrative representation as a blend of ethnic studies and narratology and argues that literature is fundamentally defined by the concept of talking back, the body chapters consist of dose readings. The two chapters within Part I examines Grimm and Hauptmann's representations of discursive structures that perpetuate a gendered and raced colonialism, and of rhetorical riddles that grant Black African subjects the discursive power to reclaim Selfhood. The two chapters in Part II examine works by Brown and Harper in which the figure of the enslaved ethnic Other renders their stories into a lesson in interpretive practices in a relationship to focal intertexts, the Bible and the Law. The two chapters in Part III pursue tenuousness of the embedded narrative and the instrumentality of the Black character for the textual problematization of the discursive control over experience. The Conclusion examines the literary selections as corresponding to different hermeneutic paradigms of intertextuality. As literature about the "Other" becomes literature about literature---metalanguage---the dissertation concludes in the argument that the leap from Otherness to Selfhood is possible due to the power inherent in language of carrying over in metaphor.