Dissertations / Theses: 'American literature History and criticism Theory'

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Donovan, Kathleen McNerney. "Coming to voice: Native American literature and feminist theory." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186769.

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This dissertation argues that numerous parallels exist between Native American literature, especially that by women, and contemporary feminist literary and cultural theories, as both seek to undermine the hierarchy of voice: who can speak? what can be said? when? how? under what conditions? After the ideas find voice, what action is permitted to women? All of these factors influence what African American cultural theorist bell hooks terms the revolutionary gesture of "coming to voice." These essays explore the ways Native American women have voiced their lives through the oral tradition and through writing. For Native American women of mixed blood, the crucial search for identity and voice must frequently be conducted in the language of the colonizer, English, and in concert with a concern for community and landscape. Among the topics addressed in the study are (1) the negotiation of identity of those who must act in more than one culture; (2) ethnocentrism in ethnographic reports of tribal women's lives; (3) misogyny in a "canonical" Native American text; (4) the ethics of intercultural literary collaboration; (5) commonality in inter-cultural texts; and (6) transformation through rejection of Western privileging of opposition, polarity, and hierarchy.

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Clarke, Joni Adamson. "A place to see: Ecological literary theory and practice." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/187115.

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"A Place to See: Ecological Literary Theory and Practice" approaches "American" literature with an inclusive interdisciplinarity that necessarily complicates traditional notions of both "earliness" and canon. In order to examine how "Nature" has been socially constructed since the seventeenth century to support colonialist objectives, I set American literature into a context which includes ancient Mayan almanacs, the Popol Vuh, early seventeenth and eighteenth century American farmer's almanacs, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography, the 1994 Zapatista National Liberation army uprising in Mexico, and Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Drawing on the feminist, literary and cultural theories of Donna Haraway, Carolyn Merchant, and Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, Annette Kolodny, and Joseph Meeker, I argue that contemporary Native American writers insist that readers question all previous assumptions about "Nature" as uninhabited wilderness and "nature writing" as realistic, non-fiction prose recorded in Waldenesque tranquility. Instead the work of writers such as Silko, Louise Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, and Joy Harjo is a "nature writing" which explores the interconnections among forms and systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression across their different racial, sexual, and ecological manifestations. I posit that literary critics and teachers who wish to work for a more ecologically and socially balanced world should draw on the work of all members of our discourse community in cooperative rather than competitive ways and seek to transform literary theory and practice by bringing it back into dynamic interconnection with the worlds we all live in--inescapably social and material worlds in which issues of race, class, and gender inevitably intersect in complex and multi-faceted ways with issues of natural resource exploitation and conservation.

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Januzzi, Angela. "Making an "American Classic": Faulkner, Ferber, and the Politics of 20th Century Canon Formation." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2007. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/JanuzziA2007.pdf.

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Dowthwaite, James. "Ezra Pound's theory of language." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b7fdc3da-8442-478f-8dbf-4a401cf29e27.

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This thesis examines Ezra Pound's linguistic theory in relation to literary, philosophical and academic treatments of language in the modernist period. Pound is a central figure in the history of twentieth century literature, and his poetic career marks a sustained engagement with questions of how language can register thought, how it can transmit and communicate images, and, ultimately, how language is able to mediate between artists (or, indeed, language speakers as a whole) and the world. I read Pound's statements on language against the disciplinary history of linguistics, assessing the extent to which his positions are representative of his period, or, conversely, the ways in which they form part of an idiosyncratic worldview. My approach is broadly historical. I begin with Pound's educational background, and move chronologically through his career to the concluding passages of his Cantos. I investigate the extent to which Pound's critical writing engages with new departures taking place in linguistics in the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. The scope of my investigation ranges from the legacy of nineteenth century philology to the approaches taken by William Dwight Whitney, Michel Bréal, and Ferdinand de Saussure, to name but a few, in focusing linguistic scholarship on synchronic study of language as function in the early twentieth century, to Franz Boas's and Edward Sapir's studies in the relationship between language and culture between 1910 and 1939. In situating Pound in relation to the history of linguistics as a discipline, I argue that his work asks some of the period's most apposite questions about language and culture, even if his conclusions differ from the dominant academic positions of the time.

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BARKER, STEPHEN FREDERIC. "ARTICULATION, 'ETRANGETE,' AND POWER: ASPECTS OF NIETZSCHE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184183.

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Although Derrida, Deleuze, and others have shown the centrality of Friedrich Nietzsche's work for contemporary philosophy, the breadth of his influence is only just beginning to be understood in literature. Nietzsche saw himself as a philosopher and as a poet, and wrote in all his major works of the importance of understanding the vital interaction of conceptual thinking and its "practical" application by the litterateur. The place of the philosopher/poet, modelled on Nietzsche himself, was to be considered the highest attainable by man. Yet Nietzsche's elevation of poetic thought contains a dynamic paradox, which he himself not only saw but which was for him a--perhaps the --pivotal aspect of his philosophy: since both thinking and writing occur in the same place, language, man must acknowledge that to engage in either is to accept the destruction of his "unity," and to place his attention "out" into language. To articulate, then, is to establish a double focus, an outer one first (in language), and then an inner one posited in that outer medium. The paradox is that this distancing is both necessary to man and disruptive to his sense of himself. Once one perceives this condition as, after Nietzsche, endemic to man, one can begin to see how pervasively the dilemma can be used as a strength, a source of power, by the writer. This study explores applications of Nietzsche's etrangete. Part One considers Nietzsche's writings themselves, selectively, and some precursors on whom he depended for his insights. Part Two applies these ideas to criticism of a number of contemporary writers, showing how the Nietzschean triangulation of articulation, etrangete, and power (Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence," "Overman," and "will to power") informs such diverse writers as Joyce, Faulkner, John Fowles, and Samuel Beckett. Each of the chapters of Part Two explores an aspect of Part One's conclusions relative to a particular writer, showing how he works within the Nietzschean paradigm whether he would repudiate that paradigm (as in the cases of Faulkner and Fowles), or acknowledge it (as with Joyce and Beckett). The dissertation's effort is to demonstrate that Nietzsche's pervasive influence on contemporary literature is systematic, indigenous, and inescapable.

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Murillo, Charles Ray. "The other within the other: Chicana/o literature, composition theory, and the new mestizaje." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2685.

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In this thesis the author explores the notion that American Chicana/o literature serves as an interactive pedagogical site that nurtures a blend of academic and street discourse, proposing the writing of those who exist on the "downside" of the border of non-standard English and academic discourse-basic writers be acknowledged.

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CARTER, STEVEN MICHAEL. "EPISTEMOLOGICAL MODELS SHARED BY AMERICAN PROJECTIVIST POETRY AND QUANTUM PHYSICS." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/187927.

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The American Projectivist verse of Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan contains within its poetics many epistemological assumptions shared by quantum physics. These assumptions exist in three broad categories: perception, process, and wholeness. In physics, the epistemology of perception has been profoundly altered by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation, which creates a symbiotic relationship between the observer and the observed. At least one photon of light is necessary to observe an electron; one photon is sufficient to alter the electron's momentum or position; therefore, a physicist affects an electron's "fate" in the act of observing it. Similarly, in Projectivist poetics, the perceptions of the reader are often enlisted to help "compose" the poem which is offered to him in "pieces," or, as in Robert Duncan's poetry especially, in self-reflexive segments. By "self-reflexive," we further mean that the Projectivist poem often "mirrors itself" as an electron "mirrors itself" as wave or as particle, while it is paradoxically both. A Projectivist poem may pause halfway through and "unravel" itself, i.e., study its own etymology. The reader thus must participate in "putting the poem back together," as the physicist participates in the phenomena he observes. The second epistemological model in physics and poetry stresses becoming, rather than being. Matter at the subatomic level has been defined as energy-in-flux. Similarly, the Projectivist poems of Charles Olson especially often exist as "fields" with no syntactical beginnings or endings. Moreover, the "I" of the Maximus Poems is often seen in a perpetual process of becoming the world of spacetime in the poems, creating a system similar to the being-and-becoming model of particle-and-field in quantum mechanics. Third, wholeness is a premise governing poetry and physics separately and together. Jack Spicer's thematics blend matter and consciousness, as "love and death matter/Matter as wave and particle." Similarly, Robert Duncan's poetics describes a "dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity." In physics, wholeness is seen primarily in an "implicate order" which attempts to overturn the old paradigms of fragmentation and connect matter and consciousness, including language, as interrelated systems of information.

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Bennett, Sarah. "The American contexts of Irish poetry, 1950-present." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669957.

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Mackinnon, Jeremy E. "Speaking the unspeakable : war trauma in six contemporary novels." Title page, contents and abstract only, 2001. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phm15821.pdf.

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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-258) Presents readings of six novels which depict something of the nature of war trauma. Collectively, the novels suggest that the attempt to narrativise war trauma is inherently problematic. Traces the disjunctions between narrative and war trauma which ensure that war trauma remains an elusive and private phenomonen; the gulf between private experience and public discourse haunts each of the novels.

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Trainin, Sarah Jean. "The rise of mass culture theory and its effect on golden age detective fiction." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2002. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2255.

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Louckx, Audrey. "Empowering voices: testimonial literature and social justice in contemporary American culture." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209257.

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Within the last three decades, contemporary North America came to reinvent a socially focused genre of literary personal narratives. These new editorial and writing projects, published in the form of collections of personal narratives, emerged as a tool for the socially voiceless to secure some measure of agency in their contemporary social and cultural situation. Projects such as the Freedom Writers’ Diary or volumes of the Voice of Witness book series fit in the process that is currently labeled social empowerment. Witnesses express a deep urge to share their story in the hope to denounce their experience of an enduring social injustice. The written word, primary a means for self-disclosure, serves to exorcise the suffering associated to this specific predicament. The narrators engage in a powerful self-investigative gesture oriented towards resilience and renewed enfranchisement in regaining control over their life and environment. At the moment of publication, however, these testimonies come to be validated as authentic examples of the injustices they disclose. These examples serve an educational purpose: raising the audience’s awareness and opening deliberative fora for these issues to be discussed and for solutions to be hammered out and eventually implemented.

The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a theoretical model for the subgenre of testimonials of social empowerment. With the concept of empowerment as groundwork, the model develops a textual approach framed in a psychosocial structure. I argue that testimonials may be described as examples of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action. As speech acts aimed at reaching understanding, testimonials capitalize both on the binding and bonding aspects of illocutionary force in the hope to secure with their audience an ongoing dialogue over issues of social justice. The volumes, as unofficial public spheres, mobilize the normative and practical dynamics at work in social movements. These dynamics express as two narrative guiding threads: an aesthetic based on impact, and an ethics based on responsibility. The texts’ aesthetic develops a form of perlocutionary realism instantiating a sense of authenticity and sincerity embodied in the narrators’ voices. The resulting impact is coupled to moral concerns based on a polysemic understanding of social responsibility, on which narrators seek to build their narratives’ ethical potential. A series of case studies allowed to demonstrate that both narrative threads are realized as an appropriation of four paradigmatic forms of rhetorical ethos, each based on a specific realm of the social world: intimacy, justice, spirituality and activism.

Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Vines, Jacob L. "Encounters with the American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, and the Search for the Authentic Plains in the Nineteenth Century." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2511.

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The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Margaret Fuller’s more physical and intimate Transcendentalism unifies this tension in a manner that heralds the rise of the Luminists and the plains-scapes of Worthington Whittredge.

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Skelley, Steven J. "Yeats, Bloom and the dialectics of theory, criticism and poetry." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1992. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13628/.

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This thesis begins by showing how a strong and subtle challenge to poetry and theories of poetry has been recently argued by writers like Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller—critics whose ironic linguistic "disfigurations" of lyrical voice have thrown poem and poet into an anti-mimetic free fall, an abyss of bewilderment or undecidability. To its credit, de Manian deconstruction strongly misreads various mimetic approaches to William Butler Yeats, as its corrosive irony empties out theories of imitation. Chapter two explains how New Criticism, biographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical criticism, all treat Yeats's poetry as a reflection or imitation of some prior being, text, or doctrine; and chapter three how, most recently and energetically, various new historicisms treat his poems as ideological artifacts determined by the world or history, but as artifacts that must seek to change the world in order to have value. Harold Bloom's theory meets such challenges. It enacts deconstruction's misreading of poem and poet without reducing them to a linguistic abyss; and it re-envisions mimetic approaches by reading poems in terms of genealogical influence, without moralizing. Chapter four investigates Bloom's vision of strong poetry as a "supermimesis" or in terms of gnostic figures of "negative transcendence." Bloom's work, however, also needs Yeatsian creative correction. As the fifth and sixth chapters show, it needs, like Yeats's poetry, to hold itself more open to the chaos of history. Invoking instruction from the very poetry that has so influenced Bloom's theory of influence, yet from which Bloom has turned away, this thesis re-interprets Yeats's poems and Yeats criticism generally. Using Yeats's openness to history to revise Bloom and his pragmatic theory of misreading to re-interpret Yeats, the thesis attempts to advance dialectically both Yeats criticism and Bloomian theory.

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Suzuki-Martinez, Sharon S. 1963. "Tribal Selves: Subversive Identity in Asian American and Native American Literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/565575.

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Stryz, Jan A. "Memorial pictures: Visual representation in the American Romance." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185575.

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The American Romance is characterized by its use of memorial images which contribute in developing the form and content of its individual literary works. Readings of works by four authors who fall within the American Romance tradition--Hawthorne, James, Faulkner, and Toni Morrison--reveal a poetics of memory that operates in terms of tensions between word and image, with memory achieving apparent embodiment through the image, while the simple presence thus generated is revealed to be both contaminated and opposed by cultural codes. Through portraits, photographs, and other less concrete representations of the human countenance, characters seek to take personal possession of both themselves and others and thereby gain a form of self-possession which places them in a certain relationship to the culture. In creating verbal constructions of images, the authors also pursue a goal mirroring that of their characters. Individual chapters specifically address the way in which the written work of art's identity is reflected in the characteristics of the visual art forms it represents; the power of the memorialized image of woman; and the imaginary strategies by which the cultural authority of one written text can be defused by the written Romance that appropriates it. Works discussed are: The House of the Seven Gables, The Wings of the Dove, The Sound and the Fury, and Song of Solomon and Beloved.

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Rockhill, Paul Hunter. "The Reception Theory of Hans Robert Jauss: Theory and Application." PDXScholar, 1996. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/5153.

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Hans Robert Jauss is a professor of literary criticism and romance philology at the University of Constance in Germany. Jauss co-founded the University of Constance and the Constance group of literary studies. Hans Robert Jauss's version of reception theory was introduced in the late 1960s, a period of social, political, and intellectual instability in West Germany. Jauss's reception theory focused on the reader rather than the author or text. The original reception of a text was compared to a later reception, revealing different literary receptions and their evolution. Jauss's Rezeptionsgeschichte (history of reception) illustrated the evolution of the reception of texts and the evolving paradigms of literary criticism that they were a part of. However, Jauss's essays proved to be more of a provocation for change in literary criticism than the foundation for the next literary paradigm. The empirical studies discussed in this thesis reveal the.idealism of Jauss's theory by testing main ideas and concepts. The results show the inapplicability of Jauss's theory for practical purposes. The intent of this study is to illustrate the origins, development and impact of Jauss's version of reception theory. The interrelationship between the social environment, the institutional reforms at the University of Constance, and the methodology of reception theory are also discussed. The new social values in West Germany advocated individualism and questioned status quo institutions and their authority. This facilitated the establishment of the University of Constance, which served as the prototype for the democratization of German universities and the introduction of Jauss's reception theory. With the democratization of the university, old autonomous faculties were broken down into interdisciplinary subject areas. The Old Philology and New Philology department were made into the sciences of language and literature and ultimately introduced as the all-encompassing literaturwissenschaft. Five professors from the Slavic, English, German, Classics and Romance language departments gave up direction of these large departments to work together under the Constance reforms in an effort to form a new concept of literary studies. The result was the socalled theories of "reception" and "effect" which they continue to research.

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Stigter, Shelley, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "Double-voice and double-consciousness in Native American literature." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Sciencec, 2005, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/288.

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This thesis follows the interaction of "double-voicing" and "double-consciousness" in Native American literary history. It begins with surviving records from the time of colonial contact and ends with works by Leslie Marmon Silko and Thomas King, two contemporary authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance. "Double-voicing" is a common feature found in many works preserved by early anthropologists from various Native American oral traditions. However, after colonial contact this feature largely disappears from literary works written by Native American authors, when it is replaced by the societal condition "double-consciousness." With the revitalization of cultural knowledge in the mid-twentieth-century, Native authors also revitalize their rhetorical techniques in their writing and the "double-voice" feature reemerges coupled with a bicultural awareness that is carried over from "double-consciousness."
vi, 98 leaves ; 29 cm.

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Wolfe, Andrea P. "Black mothers and the nation : claiming space and crafting signification for the black maternal body in American women's narratives of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation, 1852-2001." CardinalScholar 1.0, 2010. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1560845.

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“Black Mothers and the Nation” tracks the ways that texts produced by United States women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries position the black maternal body as subversive to the white patriarchal power structure for which it labored and that has acted in many ways to abject it from the national body. This study points to the ways in which the black mother’s subversive potential has been repeatedly, violently, and surreptitiously circumscribed in some quarters even as it succeeds in others. Several important thematic threads run throughout the chapters of this study, sometimes appearing in clear relationship to the texts discussed and sometimes underwriting their analysis in less obvious ways: the functioning of the black maternal body to both support the construction of and undermine white womanhood in slavery and in the years beyond; the reclamation of the maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; the resistance of black mother figures to oppressive discourses surrounding their bodies and reproduction; and, finally, the figurative and literal location of the black mother in a national body politic that has simultaneously used and abjected it over the course of centuries. Using these lenses, this study focuses on a grouping of women’s literature that depicts slavery and its legacy for black women and their bodies. The narratives discussed in this study explore the intersections of the issues outlined above in order to get at meaningful expressions of black maternal identity. By their very nature as representations of historical record and regional and national realities, these texts speak to the problematic placement of black maternal bodies within the nation, beginning in the antebellum era and continuing through the present; in other words, these slavery, Reconstruction, and segregation narratives connect personal and physical experiences of maternity to the national body.
The subordination of embodied power : sentimental representations of the black maternal body in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl -- Recuperating the body : the black mother's reclamation of embodied presence and her reintegration into the black community in Pauline Hopkins's Contending forces and Toni Morrison's Beloved -- The narrative power of the black maternal body : resisting and exceeding visual economies of discipline in Margaret Walker's Jubilee and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose -- Mapping black motherhood onto the nation : the black maternal body and the body politic in Lillian Smith's Strange fruit and Alice Randall's The wind done gone -- Michelle Obama in context.
Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only
Department of English

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Turner, Robert Charles Grey. "Counterfeit culture : truth and authenticity in the American prose epic since 1960." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709455.

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Malkin, Rachel M. E. "Ordinary pursuits : experience, community, and the aesthetic in American writing since modernism." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708519.

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Kopec, Andrew. "Economic Crisis and American Literature, 1819-1857." The Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1365760287.

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Su, Suocai. "Inventing transnational Chinese American identities in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the white moon faces, and Shawn Hsu Wong's American knees." Virtual Press, 2004. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1301632.

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My dissertation investigates how Chinese American writers invent transnational Chinese American identities in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, I focus on Amy Tan's The JoyLuck Club (1989), Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996), and Shawn Hsu Wong's American Knees(1995). 1 argue that Tan, Lim, and Wong challenge the conventional ideas of a singular, pure, and fixed identity but instead create Chinese American identities in the post-1965 era as multiple, hybrid, and constantly changing to accommodate to an open, diverse, and multicultural America. Specifically, in Tan's work, by describing both the conflicts and connections between the Chinese mothers and their American horn daughters, she represents a group of Chinese American women who transcend their cultural, generational, and linguistic differences to achieve an identity that connects the West with the East. In Lim's work, by portraying the domestic and international movements of herself as an immigrant, she reveals the long and painful process of negotiating multiple cultures and identities that enables her to change from a Chinese Malaysian to a new Asian American woman. In Wong's work, by focusing on how the fourth- and fifthgeneration of Chinese and/or Asian American men and women negotiate racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, Wong meditates on what the term Asian American means in the new age. Together the three works reflect the range, diversity, and invention of contemporary Chinese American identities by Chinese American writers in the new era.
Department of English

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Mathews, Peter David 1975. "Strategies of realism : realist fiction and postmodern theory." Monash University, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8656.

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MacLeod, Alexander. "Between a rock and a soft place : postmodern-regionalism in Canadian and American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19527.

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This study calls for a re-evaluation of contemporary regionalist literary theory. It argues that traditional models of the discourse have been too heavily influenced by nineteenth century realist aesthetics and political ideologies. Because most scholars continue to interpret regionalist texts according to a resolutely empirical reading of geography, literary regionalism has fallen out of touch with the new kinds of "unrealistic," generic landscapes that now dominate North American culture in the postindustrial era. Drawing heavily on recent work by postmodern geographers such as Edward Soja, David Harvey, Michael Dear and Derek Gregory, this project updates regionalist theory by "re-placing" the artificially stabilized reading of geography that dominated the nineteenth century with a more self-consciously spatialized reading of what Soja calls our contemporary "real-and-imagined" places. By grafting together traditional regionalism and postmodern spatial theory we improve on both contributing discourses. In a "postmodern-regionalist" literary criticism, traditional regionalism sheds its reputation for theoretical naivete, while the elusive abstractions of postmodern theory gain a real-world referent, and a specific geographical index. When we "read postmodernism regionally" - - when we aggressively interrogate where this kind of fiction comes from and the places it represents - - we realize that the canons of postmodern fiction in Canada and the United States have been influenced by two very different spatial epistemologies. Rather than being "determined" by their real geographies, Canadian and American postmodernism have been more directly influenced by two different readings of geography. Works by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo demonstrate that American postmodernism often interprets social space according to what Henri Lefebvre calls the idealistic "the illusion of transparency," while texts by Canadian postmodernists such as Robert Kroetsch, Wayne Johnston and Guy Vanderhaeghe tend to fall under Lefebvre's more materialistic "illusion of opacity." The ambiguous figure of Douglas Coupland - - a Canadian writer most critics treat as an American - - puts the spatial conventions of postmodernism in both countries in sharp relief. In an American postmodernism, dominated by generic suburban settings, regions will almost always be seen as imaginary projections, while in a Canadian postmodernism, dominated by the Prairies, regions will almost always retain some sense of their material reality.

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Staton, Maria S. "Christianity in American Indian plays, 1760s-1850s." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1364944.

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The main purpose of this study is to prove that the view on the American Indians, as it is presented in the plays, is determined by two dissimilar sets of values: those related to Christianity and those associated with democracy. The Christian ideals of mercy and benevolence are counterbalanced by the democratic values of freedom and patriotism in such a way that secular ideals in many cases supersede the religious ones. To achieve the purpose of the dissertation, I sifted the plays for a list of notions related to Christianity and, using textual evidence, demonstrated that these notions were not confined to particular pieces but systematically appeared in a significant number of plays. This method allowed me to make a claim that the motif of Christianity was one of the leading ones, yet it was systematically set against another major recurrent subject—the values of democracy. I also established the types of clerical characters in the plays and discovered their common characteristic—the ultimate bankruptcy of their ideals. This finding supported the main conclusion of this study: in the plays under discussion, Christianity was presented as no longer the only valid system of beliefs and was strongly contested by the outlook of democracy.I discovered that the motif of Christianity in the American Indian plays reveals itself in three ways: in the superiority of Christian civilization over Indian lifestyle, in the characterization of Indians within the framework of Christian morality, and in the importance of Christian clergy in the plays. None of these three topics, however, gets an unequivocal interpretation. First, the notion of Christian corruption is distinctly manifest. Second, the Indian heroes and heroines demonstrate important civic virtues: desire for freedom and willingness to sacrifice themselves for their land. Third, since the representation of the clerics varies from saintliness to villainy, the only thing they have in common is the impracticability and incredulity of the ideas they preach. More fundamental truths, it is suggested, should be sought outside of Christianity, and the newly found values should be not so much of a "Christian" as of "democratic" quality.
Department of English

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Elston, Suzanne Poteet. "Garrison Keillor and American Literary Traditions." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500338/.

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Although Garrison Keillor is perhaps best known as the creator and host of Minnesota Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion (1974-1987), the focus of this study is his literary career. Keillor's literary accomplishments include a successful career as a writer for The New Yorker and two best-selling books about the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, entitled Lake Wobegon Days (1985) and Leaving Home (1987). His literary style incorporates elements from several traditions in American literature--the precise, sophisticated "New Yorker style" practiced by writers such as E. B. White and James Thurber; the oral tradition prominent in the works of Mark Twain and the nineteenth-century literary comedians; and the satiric realism associated with the small-town literature of writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.

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Shishkin, Timur. "Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction." PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.

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The focus of the present research work is the contemporary American short stories that bring up issues of compulsory norm and the conflict between marginalized characters and their environment. This research was based on those short stories that seemed to represent the idea of being "different" in the most complex and multilayered way, and its goal was to unfold new aspects of the conflict between "normal" and "abnormal"/"different". Variations of norm as well as diversity within the marginalized raise a number of questions about the reasons for their inability to coexist peacefully. The close reading and the analysis of the selected stories show that all the conflicts in them, in one way or another, repeat similar patterns and lead to the same root of the problem of misunderstanding, which is fear. To be more precise, all the cases of hate towards "different" characters can be explained by the hater's explicit or implicit fear of death in its various forms: inability to procreate one's own kind, cultural or personal self-identity loss, actual life threat in the form of a reminder of possible physical harm and death. Most often it would be the case where shame and fear of death overlap in a very complex way. In general, the cases of characters' otherness fall into three major groups. The nature of the alienation for each of these groups is described and analyzed in three separate chapters. Prejudice and stereotypes are playing a great role in formation of fears and insecurities which need to be dismantled in order to make peaceful coexistence possible. This work concludes with pointing out the crucial role of taking an approach of representation of various perspectives and diversification of voices in creative writing, academia and media in the context of multicultural society.

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Reyes, Karen Stoner. "Finding a new voice : the Oregon writing community between the world wars." PDXScholar, 1986. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/3602.

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The period of 1919 to 1939 was a significant one for the development of the literature of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. The literary work produced in the region prior to the first world war was greatly influenced by the "Genteel tradition" of the late nineteenth century. By 1939, however, the literature of Oregon and the region had emerged from the outdated literary standards of the pre-war period and had found a new, realistic, natural voice, strongly regional in nature and rooted in the modern American tradition.

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Munoz, Cabrera Patricia. "Journeying: narratives of female empowerment in Gayl Jones's and Toni Morrison's ficton." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210259.

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This dissertation discusses Gayl Jones’s and Toni Morrison’s characterisation of black women’s journeying towards empowered subjectivity and agency.

Through comparative analysis of eight fictional works, I explore the writers’ idea of female freedom and emancipation, the structures of power affecting the transition from oppressed towards liberated subject positions, and the literary techniques through which the authors facilitate these seminal trajectories.

My research addresses a corpus comprised of three novels and one book-long poem by Gayl Jones, as well as four novels by Toni Morrison. These two writers emerge in the US literary scene during the 1970s, one of the decades of the second black women’s renaissance (1970s, 1980s). This period witnessed unprecedented developments in US black literature and feminist theorising. In the domain of African American letters, it witnessed the emergence of a host of black women writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison. This period also marks a turning point in the reconfiguration of African American literature, as several unknown or misplaced literary works by pioneering black women writers were discovered, shifting the chronology of African American literature.

Moreover, the second black women's renaissance marks a paradigmatic development in black feminist theorising on womanhood and subjectivity. Many black feminist scholars and activists challenged what they perceived to be the homogenising female subject conceptualised by US white middle-class feminism and the androcentricity of the subject proclaimed by the Black Aesthetic Movement. They claimed that, in focusing solely on gender and patriarchal oppression, white feminism had overlooked the salience of the race/class nexus, while focus by the Black Aesthetic Movement on racism had overlooked the salience of gender and heterosexual discrimination.

In this dissertation, I discuss the works of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison in the context of seminal debates on the nature of the female subject and the racial and gender politics affecting the construction of empowered subjectivities in black women's fiction.

Through the metaphor of journeying towards female empowerment, I show how Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison engage in imaginative returns to the past in an attempt to relocate black women as literary subjects of primary importance. I also show how, in the works selected for discussion, a complex idea of modern female subjectivities emerges from the writers' re-examination of the oppressive material and psychological circumstances under which pioneering black women lived, the common practice of sexual exploitation with which they had to contend, and the struggle to assert the dignity of their womanhood beyond the parameters of the white-defined “ideological discourse of true womanhood” (Carby, 1987: 25).

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Zheng, Baoxuan, and 鄭寶璇. "The theme of alienation in modern Chinese and Anglo-American fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1985. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31206803.

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Go, King-fan, and 吳景勛. "Burdens of the past: a study of Chinese-American writings." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B37642832.

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Dobozy, Tamas. "Towards a definition of dirty realism." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ56533.pdf.

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Proietti, Salvatore. "The cyborg, cyberspace, and North American science fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0021/NQ44558.pdf.

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Kocela, Christopher. "Fetishism as historical practice in postmodern American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38213.

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This study contends that postmodern American fiction dramatizes an important shift of philosophical perspective on the fetish in keeping with recent theories of fetishism as a cultural practice. This shift is defined by the refusal to accept the traditional Western condemnation of the fetishist as primitive or perverse, and by the effort to affirm more productive uses for fetishism as a theoretical concept spanning the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxian social theory, and anthropology. Analyzing the depiction of fetishistic practices in selected contemporary American novels, the dissertation utilizes fetish theory in order to clarify the unique textual and historiographic features of postmodernist fiction. It also emphasizes the way in which conventional ideas about history and teleology are necessarily challenged by an affirmative orientation toward the fetish. Part One of the dissertation, comprising the first two chapters, traces the lineage of Western thinking about fetishism from Hegel, Marx, and Freud to Derrida, Baudrillard, and Jameson, among others. Recognizing that traditional theories attribute the symbolic power of the fetish to its mystification of historical origins, Part One posits that poststructuralist and postmodernist contributions to the subject enable, but do not develop, an alternative concept of fetishism as a practice with constructive historical potential. Part Two of the study seeks to develop this historical potential with reference to prominent descriptive models of postmodernist fiction, and through close readings of five contemporary American authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Don DeLillo. The four chapters of Part Two each examine the fictional representation of fetishism within a different theoretical framework, focusing on, respectively: temporality and objectivity in postmodern fiction theory; the interrelation between psychoanalytic theory and female fetishism in novels by Pynchon and Acker

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Brauer, Kristen D. "The religious roots of postmodernism in American culture : an analysis of the postmodern theory of Bernard Iddings Bell and its continued relevance to contemporary postmodern theory and literary criticism." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/6264/.

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This thesis is an examination and reassessment of an early work on postmodernism written by the once prominent American critic, Bernard Iddings Bell, in 1926. Bell's work, Postmodernism, and other essays, provides us with one of the earliest documented uses of the term "postmodernism" in the English language. It also anticipates many of the pronouncements of later critics regarding the development of postmodernism in politics, philosophy, and literary criticism. Despite these facts however, or perhaps because of them, contemporary critics have continued to ignore Bell's work, charging that his thesis is "anti-modern" rather than "postmodern", and otherwise irrelevant to current debates on postmodernism. This thesis will challenge that interpretation. Here it will be argued that the decision to exclude Bell's work from current debates on postmodernism is based upon Bell's religious predilections. In addition to constituting a radical break with the knowledge systems of the past, Bell argues that postmodernism will also be accompanied by a large scale religious revival. This argument runs counter to the dominant critical consensus regarding the relationship between postmodernism and religion adopted by critics from Arnold J. Toynbee in the 1950s, to Fredric Jameson in the 1990s. The first part of the thesis is dedicated to analysis of the philosophical influences and historical background to Bell's essay with the aim of comparing and contrasting Bell's ideas with those found in more recent works on postmodernism. The second part examines the possible impact of Bell's thesis on the interpretation of contemporary American literature and literary theory. Rather than focusing on a "poetics of parody", or the theoretical implications of "irony and humour", as previous critics have done, we will focus here on how contemporary writers like John Updike, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison, have chosen to incorporate the themes of postmodern criticism with a critique of that criticism, especially where this touches on the subject of religion. We conclude that Bell's insistence that postmodernism will be defined by a renewed interest in religion and mystical theology still has merit in the realm of contemporary cultural debates. Postmodern criticism that attempts to exclude religion from this arena does so on the basis of a modern interpretation of religious evolution and secularization, and therefore runs the risk of reiterating an older modernist critique.

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Jenkins, Jennifer Lei. "Failed mothers and fallen houses: Gothic domesticity in nineteenth-century American fiction." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186122.

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This study examines the relation between gender and genre in four novels that chart the development of American domestic life from the Colonial to the Gilded Age. In these novels, the presence in the house of women--mothers, daughters, sisters, servants, slaves--often threatens the fathers' dynastic ambitions and subverts the formal intentions of the narrative. These women represent familiar but strange forces of the uncanny which lurk beneath the apparently placid surface of domestic narrative. In "house" novels by Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, and James, interactions of the uncanny feminine with dynastic concerns threaten not only the novel's social message of destiny and dynasty, but the traditional form of the novel itself. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne constructs a narrative in which patrician fathers and domestic daughters struggle for control of the House and its story. Slavery disrupts domestic life in Uncle Tom's Cabin, inverting and thereby perverting traditional notions of home and family and producing monstrous mothers and failed households. Alcott details the abuses and dangers of reified gender roles in family life, while depicting a young woman's attempt to reconstruct domesticity as a female community in Work. Finally, James displaces domestic concerns entirely from The Other House, portraying instead the violent nature of feminine desire unrestrained by tradition, community, or family. Story and telling work at cross-purposes in these novels, creating a tension between Romantic structures and realistic narrative strategies. These authors depart from the tropes of their times, using gothic devices to reveal monstrous mothers, uncanny children, and failed or fallen houses within the apparently conservative domestic novel. Such gothic devices transcend literary historians' distinctions of romance and sentimental fiction as respectively male and female stories and reveal the fundamentally subversive nature of domestic fiction. For these writers, the uncanny presence of the feminine produces a counternarrative of gender, class, and race, redefines the cultural boundaries of home and family, and exposes the fictive nature of social constructions of gender and domesticity.

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Morrison, Shannon M. "The Rhetoric of Educational Reform in American Public Education: A criticism of corporate reform attitudes." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1448353920.

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Ferretter, Luke. "Towards a Christian literary theory." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15232.

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Most contemporary literary theories are either explicitly or implicitly atheistic. This thesis describes a literary theory whose principles are derived from or consistent with Christian theology. It argues against modern objections to such a theory that this is a rationally and ethically legitimate mode of contemporary literary theory. The first half of the thesis constitutes an analysis of deconstruction, of Marxism and of psychoanalysis. These are three of the most influential discourses in modern literary theory, each of which constitutes a significant argument against the existence of God, as this has traditionally been understood in Christian theology. In a chapter devoted to each theory, I examine its relation to Christian theology, and argue that it does not constitute a conclusive argument against the truth-content of such theology. I go on to assess which of its principles can be used in modem Christian literary theory, and which cannot. The second half of the thesis constitutes an analysis of a Christian tradition of thought that pertains to literary theory. In the fourth chapter, I examine the concepts of language and of art expressed or implied in the Bible, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and assess which of these concepts could be used in Christian literary theory today. In the fifth chapter, I examine certain twentieth-century Christian philosophers and literary critics, and assess how their thought could be used in contemporary Christian literary theory. In the final chapter, I synthesize the conclusions to these arguments into the outline of a literary theory that both derives from Christian theology and takes account of the objections to such theology posed by contemporary literary theory.

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Totten, Gary. "The eyewitness in American specular narrative : empiricism, representation, and the gaze." Virtual Press, 1998. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1117105.

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In this dissertation, I investigate American specular narrative which displays a significant level of visual empiricism and examine the implications of the eyewitness perspective such narrative assumes. Based on the epistemological assumption that "to see is to know," specular narrative imagines an empirical access (via visual processes of the gaze) to a knowable reality, and uses the figure of the eyewitness (by way of narration, focalization, and narrative technique) to render a supposedly transparent relation between narrative and reality. This study draws upon theories of narrative, realism, subjectivity, and the gaze to explore this narrative eyewitness, tracking how the impulse to construct an authentic American identity, which materializes during American colonization, influences early American discourse and recurs as a specular realism in later American narrative. I examine how the illusion of the eyewitness sustains Realist ideology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narrative (William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes, Henry James' The Spoils ofPoynton, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth); how new spatial and temporal paradigms created by automotive technology affect the eyewitness (and a particular vision of America) in the American road book, specifically Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday, and how the specular fetishism of the nonfiction novel, particularly Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, problematizes narrative objectivity and sutures the reader into the narrative as eyewitness
Department of English

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England, Peter S. (Peter Shands). "American Literary Pragmatism : Lighting Out for the Territory." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278511/.

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Allen, Edward Joseph Frank. "Lyric technologies : the sound media of American modernist poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708318.

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Sloboda, Nicholas Neil. "Crossing boundaries : self identity and social expression in "emergent" American literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=37711.

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Currently, in the fields of multi-ethnic literary and cultural studies in American, many critics and theoreticians concentrate on exposing forces of social and economic oppression against ethnic minorities and practices of cultural hegemony by the dominant culture. In the process, they often read characters in multi-ethnic American literatures as agents of resistance and counter-discourse. While it is valuable to recognize the subversive potential in these writings, it is equally important to expose their distinct, individual attributes. Accordingly, this dissertation explores the neglected double nature and "bi-cultural" presence of the subject in a branch of contemporary American literature that I designate as "emergent." Through its "re-accentuation" (Bakhtin) of sign systems, writers of emergent fiction strive not to simply reintonate already established cultural paradigms from either recent or ancient homelands but, instead, to engage an active and ongoing cultural exchange in the context of America as (new) homeland. Presenting the individual and social subject as hybrid, emergent writers examine its dynamic involvement in both private and public spheres. My close readings of this literature focus on the representation of self-other interrelationships.
I introduce and situate my analysis with a theoretical overview of the subject in cross-cultural or "liminal" zones (Bhabha). I also consider the significance of "dialogism" (Bakhtin) in the multi-ethnic, often female, subject's experience of "estrangement" (Felski). My choice of both established and lesser-known of new writers, born (or raised) in the United States but of diverse ethnic backgrounds, includes Cristina Garcia (Hispanic), Louise Erdrich (Native), Julia Shigekuni (Japanese), Sandra Cisneros (Chicana), Askold Melnyczuk (Ukrainian), Charlotte Sherman (African), and Amy Tan (Chinese). Situating the individual and social subject at various crossroads---both physical and psychological---emergent writers examine the changing nature of self identity and social expression. Through their "border pedagogy" (Giroux), they traverse axiologic discourses and socio-cultural boundaries and attend to ensuing dialectical tensions between inner and outer worlds, and among peoples, cultures, and social hierarchies.

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Kisawadkorn, Kriengsak. "American Grotesque from Nineteenth Century to Modernism: the Latter's Acceptance of the Exceptional." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278030/.

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This dissertation explores a history of the grotesque and its meaning in art and literature along with those of its related term, the arabesque, since their co-existence, specifically in literature, is later treated by a well-known nineteenth-century American writer in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Theories or views of the grotesque (used in literature), both in Europe and America, belong to twelve theorists of different eras, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present period, especially Modernism (approximately from 1910 to 1945)--Rabelais, Hegel, Scott, Wright, Hugo, Symonds, Ruskin, Santayana, Kayser, Bakhtin, (William Van) O'Connor, and Spiegel. My study examines the grotesque in American literature, as treated by both nineteenth-century writers--Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and, significantly, by modernist writers--Anderson, West, and Steinbeck in Northern (or non-Southern) literature; Faulkner, McCullers, and (Flannery) O'Connor in Southern literature. I survey several novels and short stories of these American writers for their grotesqueries in characterization and episodes. The grotesque, as treated by these earlier American writers is often despised, feared, or mistrusted by other characters, but is the opposite in modernist fiction.

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Wright, Charlotte M. "Plain and Ugly Janes: the Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278032/.

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Women characters in American literature of the nineteenth century form an overwhelmingly lovely group, but a search through some of the overlooked works reveals a thin but discernible thread of plain, even homely, heroines. Most of these fall into the stereotypical "old maid" category, and, like their real-life counterparts, these "undesirable" women are considered failures, even if they have money or satisfying careers, because they do not have boyfriends, husbands, or children. During the twentieth century, the old maid figure develops into someone not just homely, but downright ugly; in addition, the number of these characters increases, especially in the latter half of the century. In many works written since the 1960s, the woman's ugliness is such an intrinsic part of the story that it could not take place if she were beautiful. In subtle ways, these "ugly woman" stories begin to question the overwhelming value placed on beauty, to question the narrow definition of beauty in American society as a whole, and to suggest that the price for such a "blessing" might indeed be too high. Rather than settling for being a mere "heroine"—which still carries feminine connotations of passive behavior and second-class status—the ugly woman's increase in power over her own life and the lives of others, allows her to achieve a status more in keeping with the more "masculine" and active role of hero.

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Blake, Greyory. "Good Game." VCU Scholars Compass, 2018. https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/5377.

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This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic developments must be framed within the post-Internet sphere.

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Burrows, Sonja S. 1973. "Beyond the comfort zone: Monolingual ideologies, bilingual U.S. Latino texts." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10866.

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xii, 206 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This project examines reader reception of U.S. Latino-authored narratives that engage in varying degrees of textual code switching and bicultural belonging. The analysis builds on the argument that these narratives, as part of a larger body of minor literatures, play a role in revolutionizing traditional Anglo-American discourses of knowledge by marginalizing the monolingual and monocultural reader historically positioned as the prototype of cultural literacy in the United States. This project further proposes that marginalization is achieved by a textual appropriation and structural weakening of the dominant language and culture via the creation of a narrative space that privileges code switching to articulate bicultural identities. U.S. Latino texts that alternate between English and Spanish mirror the misunderstandings and failures of intelligibility in the multicultural situations they depict, thereby requiring the monolingual and monocultural reader to experience this unintelligibility first-hand. In order to tackle broader questions about how these literary texts and their reception reflect what is at stake politically, nationally, and culturally for Latinos in the United States today, this interdisciplinary project draws upon a diversity of perspectives originating from linguistics, literary analysis, sociology, and history to identify how literary texts mirror bicultural identity for Latinos. As a part of this analysis, the project examines the history of Spanish language use in the United States, Latino immigration history, the standard language ideology privileging English monolingualism, the persistence of bilingualism, oral and written code switching, the publishing industry, and analyses of reader responses to bilingual texts based on survey data. In situating these histories within discussions about the bilingual, bicultural nature and reception of the U.S. Latino narrative, this project shows how the linguistic makeup and the subsequent receptivity of these texts minor the bicultural identity and changing social positioning of the Latino population in the United States.
Committee in charge: Robert Davis, Chairperson, Romance Languages; Analisa Taylor, Member, Romance Languages; Monique Balbuena, Member, Honors College; Holly Cashman, Member, Not from U of O; David Vazquez, Outside Member, English

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Hise, Patricia Jean Fielder. "Carson McCullers Beyond Southern Boundaries: Diagnosing "An American Malady"." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc935671/.

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The loneliness theme of Carson McCullers' fiction falls into three divisions or levels. And because of her focus on the individual, her general theme of loneliness as it results from human isolation is universal. She develops her "broad principal theme" through an examination of human characteristics common to all human beings. In expressing her concept of isolation as a human condition, however, she presents loneliness as she believes it exists in her own culture, and, for this reason, her works present a loneliness that results from American cultural attitudes and is tempered by a Southern sense of nostalgia. After first establishing an understanding of McCullers' basic theme through an analysis of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, this study analyzes the nature of the Southern tradition and its influence on the criticism of her fiction with particular focus on the problems of determining to what degree her Southern settings inhibit the interpretation of her works beyond a regional perspective. A comparison of thematic elements, events, and characterization in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to nonfiction critical discussions of American culture in The Image by Daniel Boorstin and The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater shows that the social context and the theme of isolation in the novel reflect a condition of life that is American, not distinctively Southern. The final portion of this study continues the analysis of McCullers' basic theme in Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands, comparing elements of these later works to The Image and The Pursuit of Loneliness in order to demonstrate the particularly American loneliness of her characters and the value of her works to the tradition of American novel.

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Robinson, Heather Lindsey. "Ours is the Kingdom of Heaven: Racial Construction of Early American Christian Identities." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc849673/.

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This project interrogates how religious performance, either authentic or contrived, aids in the quest for freedom for oppressed peoples; how the rhetoric of the Enlightenment era pervades literatures delivered or written by Native Americans and African Americans; and how religious modes, such as evoking scripture, performing sacrifices, or relying upon providence, assist oppressed populations in their roles as early American authors and speakers. Even though the African American and Native American populations of early America before the eighteenth century were denied access to rights and freedom, they learned to manipulate these imposed constraints--renouncing the expectation that they should be subordinate and silent--to assert their independent bodies, voices, and spiritual identities through the use of literary expression. These performative strategies, such as self-fashioning, commanding language, destabilizing republican rhetoric, or revising narrative forms, become the tools used to present three significant strands of identity: the individual person, the racialized person, and the spiritual person. As each author resists the imposed restrictions of early American ideology and the resulting expectation of inferior behavior, he/she displays abilities within literature (oral and written forms) denied him/her by the political systems of the early republican and early national eras. Specifically, they each represent themselves in three ways: first, as a unique individual with differentiated abilities, exceptionalities, and personality; second, as a person with distinct value, regardless of skin color, cultural difference, or gender; and third, as a sanctified and redeemed Christian, guaranteed agency and inheritance through the family of God. Furthermore, the use of religion and spirituality allows these authors the opportunity to function as active agents who were adapting specific verbal and physical methods of self-fashioning through particular literary strategies. Doing so demonstrates that they were not the unrefined and unfeeling individuals that early American political and social restrictions had made them--that instead they were intellectually and morally capable of making both physical and spiritual contributions to society while reciprocally deserving to possess the liberties and freedoms denied them.

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Young, Erin S. "Corporate heroines and utopian individualism: A study of the romance novel in global capitalism." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11460.

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x, 195 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This dissertation explores two subgenres of popular romance fiction that emerge in the 1990s: "corporate" and "paranormal" romance. While the formulaic conventions of popular romance have typically centralized the gendered tension between hero and heroine, this project reveals that "corporate" and "paranormal" romances negotiate a new primary conflict, the tension between work and home in the era of global capitalism. Transformations in political economy also occur at the level of personal and emotional life, which constitute the central problem that contemporary romances attempt to resolve. Drawing from sociological studies of globalization and intimacy, feminist criticism, and queer theory, I argue that these subgenres mark the transition from what David Harvey calls Fordist capitalism to flexible or global capitalism as the primary social condition negotiated in the popular romance. My analysis demonstrates that corporate and paranormal romance novels reflect changing ideals about intimacy in a globalized world that is increasingly influenced, socially and culturally, by the values and philosophies that dominate the marketplace. Each of these subgenres offers a distinct formal resolution to the cultural and social effects of a flexible capitalist economy. The "corporate" romances of Jayne Ann Krentz, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Lowell, and Katherine Stone feature heroines who constantly navigate the dual and intersecting arenas of work and home in an effort to locate a balance that leads to success and happiness in both realms. In contrast, the "paranormal" romances of Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Kelley Armstrong, and Carrie Vaughn dissolve the tension between home and work, or the private and the public, by affirming the heroine's open and endless pursuit of pleasure, adventure, and self-fulfillment. Such new forms of romantic fantasy at once reveal the tension in globalization and the domination of corporate and masculinist values that the novels hope to overcome.
Committee in charge: David Leiwei Li, Chair; Mary Elene Wood; Cynthia H. Tolentino; Jiannbin L. Shiao

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Cheuk, Ka Chi. "Protest literature : aesthetics and race politics in Toni Morrison's historiographic trilogy." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2013. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1515.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'American literature History and criticism Theory'

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