Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English and American Literatures'
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Hamilton, Amy T. "Peregrinations: Walking the Story, Writing the Path in Euro-American, Native American, and Chicano/Chicana Literatures." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195967.
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This dissertation traces the act of walking as both metaphor and physical journey through the American landscape in American texts. Drawing together texts from different time periods, genres, and cultural contexts, I contend that walking is a central trope in American literature. Textual representations of traversing the land provoke transformation of the self recording the walk and the landscape in the imagination of the walker. The experience of walking across and through the heavily storied American land challenges the walker to reconcile lived experience with prior expectations.While many critics have noted the preponderance of travel stories in American literature, they tend to center their studies on the journeys of Euro-American men and less often Euro-American women, and approach walking solely as metaphor. The symbolic power of a figure walking across the American land has rightfully interested critics looking at travel across the continent; however, this focus tends to obscure the fact that walking, after all, is not only a literary trope - it has real, physical dimensions as well.Walking in the American land is more than the forward movement of civilization, and it is more than the experience of wilderness and wildness. In many ways, walking defines the American ideals of space, place, and freedom. In this context, this dissertation investigates the connections between walking, American literature, and the natural world: What is it about walking that seems to allow American writers to experience the land in a way that horses, cars, trains, and planes prevent? What about the land and the self is revealed at three miles an hour? In the texts I examine, walking provides a connection to the natural world, the sacred, and individual and cultural identity. I trace American responses to nature and cultural identity through the model of walking - the rhythm of footsteps, the pain of blisters and calluses, and the silence of moving through the wilderness on foot.
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Greenfield, Denise. "Violent southern spaces : myth, memory, and the body in literatures of South Africa and the American South." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2013. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/366606/.
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‘Violent Southern Spaces’ examines the narratives, archetypes and metaphors of memory, myth and the body that writers from South Africa and the American South have used to contest histories of racial oppression and segregation. In so doing, it seeks to identify significant transnational interactions and connections between the aesthetic forms, politics and histories of literary texts from South Africa and the United States. By analysing texts and situations that are both analogous and singular, this thesis utilizes Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community as well as Sam Durrant’s Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning to depict how works of literature interrupt Southern and South African forms of community as well as the myths upon which they are founded. Chapter One examines the tension between the narrative and anti-narrative dimensions of trauma in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and considers the conditions under which cultural trauma not only exposes the subject as a singularity, but also serves to create community via a collective identification with a mythic past. In their focus on the interruption of community as well as the disruption of the trauma narrative, these texts help us to better understand how certain myths have come to define the nation or region. Chapter Two considers the manner in which community is enacted through departure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit. Depicted as either a movement towards a more traditional notion of community and communion, or an exposure of the limits of community, there is a certain type of freedom evidenced in such departures—a freedom intimately connected to the being-in-common of community. Finally, in Chapter Three Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf are compared in order to demonstrate how both writers interrogate the excessive accessibility that has come to define the poor white community whilst also writing communities akin to Nancy’s ‘community without unity’. This chapter further examines how both texts depict community as an active, interruptive idea, a continual unworking of totalising and exclusionary myths of collectivity upon which community (and the nation) is formed.
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Pearson, Matthew John. "English and American surrealist writing." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.262394.
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Iida, Eri. "Hedges in Japanese English and American English medical research articles." Thesis, McGill University, 2007. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=99723.
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The present study analysed the use of hedges in English medical research articles written by Japanese and American researchers. The study also examined the relationship between Japanese medical professionals' employment of hedges and their writing process. Sixteen English medical articles: eight written by Japanese and eight by Americans were examined. Four of the Japanese authors discussed their writing process through questionnaires and telephone interviews.The overall ratio of hedges in articles written by the two groups differed only slightly; however, analyses revealed a number of specific differences in the use of hedges between the groups. For example, Japanese researchers used epistemic adverbs and adjectives less frequently than the American researchers. The results were discussed in relation to the problems of nonnative speakers' grammatical competence, cultural differences in rhetorical features, and the amount of experience in the use of medical English.
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Morgan, David Ellis. "Pulp literature a re-evalutation [sic] /." Connect to this title online, 2002. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20040820.122551.
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Sugden, Edward. "American literature and global time, 1812-59." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0c1a68fe-2e17-48bd-851b-00133ca256f0.
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American Literature and Global Time, 1812-59 explores the effects of the early stages of globalization on time consciousness in antebellum American literature and non-fiction. It argues that oceanic trade, extracontinental imperialism, immigration, and Pacific exploration all affected how antebellum Americans configured their national pasts, presents, and futures. The ensuing pluralisation of time that followed disallowed cogent conceptions of national identity. It analyses transnational geographies to examine how they transmit heterogeneous times. The project’s interest is in U.S. national sites that counterintuitively acted as fulcrums for the importations of foreign times and non-U.S. sites that interacted with and modified the homogenous progressive time of nationalism. As such, my project seeks to combine the transnational and temporal turns. It argues that the ethnic, racial, and geographic contestation emphasized by transnational critics found parallels in how antebellum Americans conceived of time. Conversely, it suggests that there were profound links between globalization and the sorts of instabilities in time identified by the critics of the temporal turn. Over its course my project identifies a series of “global times” that came into being in the years between the War of 1812 and the discovery of petroleum in 1859. These fall under three broad headings. First, what I term, entangled times that came about as a result of the movement of ships across borders and different social contexts; secondly, foreign local times that re-set the clock of imperialism and national progress; and, thirdly, a huge mass of reconfigurations in the origins and futures of the still-young United States.
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Tsank, Stephanie A. "Eating the American dream: food, ethnicity, and assimilation in American literary realism, 1893 - 1918." Diss., University of Iowa, 2018. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6514.
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This project examines how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers used food imagery and scenes of consumption to characterize immigrants in works of American literary realism. I argue that William Dean Howells’s construction of realism—supported by the publishing industry’s elitism—reinforced existing cultural and class hierarchies by perpetuating divisions between narrator and subject, native and immigrant. Tacitly responding to the ideologies of Howellsian realism, writers Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Weldon Johnson, and Willa Cather used food scenes to promote cultural pluralism, or alternately, to replicate the hierarchal narrative structures underpinning the genre. At the same time, these writers responded to traditional formulations of the relationship between identity and consumption as enforced by a long-standing hierarchy of the senses, women’s domestic reform movements, and the industrialization and corporatization of the food industry at the century’s turn.
The chapters of this project examine different facets of realism: naturalism, regionalism, the passing narrative, and the turn toward modernism, respectively. Each chapter also explores different aspects of American culinary history, including debates about the sensory body, the rise of domestic science and early home economics, and the mass production of food—all important developments that shaped the way Americans understood the role of food and eating in their lives. By focusing on the parallel ideological imperatives of consumption and narration within American literary realism, this study provides a more comprehensive view of how power was constituted at the century’s turn based on ideas about how individuals should consume the world around them, and furthermore, how one’s approaches to consumption could be a means of obtaining—or forfeiting—claims to national citizenship.
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Rex, Cathy Wyss Hilary E. "Indianness and womanhood textualizing the female American self /." Auburn, Ala, 2008. http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/EtdRoot/2008/SUMMER/English/Dissertation/Rex_Cathy_12.pdf.
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Casero, Eric E. "Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness in American Fiction, 1980-2010." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/38.
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Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing their characters to live in mental worlds of their own making. While the novel, as a genre, often depicts alienation as a condition deriving from a character’s status as a social outcast, the texts featured in this study treat it as a condition inherent to consciousness, derived from what their creators envision as an inevitable separation of mind from world. Rather than bemoan alienation as a loss of social connectedness, these texts portray it as inherent to mental life.
The chapters of this dissertation explore the particular visions of alienation that emerge in each of these texts. In a chapter on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, I argue that Howie, the novel’s protagonist, views his mind as a machine that operates according to self-sufficient, automatic processes. My analysis of David Markson’s final novels demonstrates that Markson portrays artistic creation as a process through which individual consciousness is isolated from society. David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion treats alienation as a general human condition, as Wallace’s interests in loneliness and solipsism derive, I argue, from his assumptions about the individualized nature of consciousness. Finally, in a chapter on The Truman Show, I argue that the film’s sense of paranoia stems from its protagonist’s sense of being alone in his worldview. I thus present a corpus of works that maintain a close, limited focus on singular fictional minds, shutting out social and physical environments in order to depict the mind as a cloistered, self-enclosed entity. My analysis highlights the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of these narratives render consciousness as an isolating force, stranding fictional characters on mental islands of their own making.
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Roach, William Leonard Brosnahan Irene. "Incorporating American literature into the English as a second language college composition course." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 1988. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p8901469.
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Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1988.Title from title page screen, viewed September 19, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Irene Brosnahan (chair), Ron Fortune, Maurice Sharton, Janet Youga, Ray Lewis White. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-126) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Holmgren, Lindsay. "Knowing children: telepathy in Anglo-American fiction, 1846-1946." Thesis, McGill University, 2014. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=121144.
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"Knowing Children" describes the means by which telepathic devices present the mind of the child in novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers. An intellectual interest in the child and childhood flourished not only during the same period as the formal study of telepathy, but also within the same circles. "Telepathy" can be understood for my purposes as a mode of narrative representation of consciousness and knowledge. Because social, linguistic, and cognitive limitations generally prevent child characters from articulating the contours of their surprisingly complex knowledge, their minds can best be rendered through the use of telepathic literary techniques that enable the child figures themselves to influence the course of their narratives. The theoretical core of the thesis illustrates how telepathic techniques in fiction influence causality, characterization, and reader reception. More broadly, the thesis demonstrates how the telepathic mode challenges the historical assumptions, narrative effects, and readerly responsibilities of so-called omniscient narration, showing how characters' minds are revealed through those of other characters, especially those of children, who would properly be sheltered from the discourses of authority. Thus, the thesis also calls into question the conventional category of childhood itself.« Enfants savants » décrit les méthodes par lesquelles les dispositifs télépathiques présentent l'esprit des enfants dans les romans de Charles Dickens, Henry James, William Faulkner, et Carson McCullers. Un intérêt intellectuel pour l'enfant et l'enfance ont proliféré en tant qu'étude formelle de la télépathie, non seulement lors de la même période, mais aussi à l'intérieur des mêmes milieux. Pour mes fins, la "télépathie" peut être comprise en tant qu'un mode de représentation narrative de la conscience et de la connaissance. Puisque les limitations sociales, linguistiques et cognitives empêchent généralement les personnages d'enfant d'articuler les contours de leur connaissance étonnamment complexe, leurs esprits peuvent le mieux être traduits par le biais de dispositifs télépathiques-dispositifs qui permettent fondamentalement aux personnages d'enfants à influencer eux-mêmes le courant de leurs récits. Le principe théorique de ma thèse souligne la manière dont les techniques télépathiques influence la causalité, la caractérisation et la perception du lecteur. D'une manière générale, la thèse démontre la manière par laquelle le mode télépathique remet en question les suppositions historiques, effets narratifs et responsabilités du lecteur lors d'une narration autrefois omnisciente, montrant comment l'esprit des personnages est relevé à travers d'autres personnages, particulièrement ceux des enfants, qui seraient probablement gardés à l'écart des discours de l'autorité.
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Spiers, Emily. "'Alpha-Mädchen sind wir alle' (we're all Alpha Girls) : subjectivity and agency in contemporary pop-feminist writing in the US, Britain and Germany." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:21fd8597-82a0-40e7-9a21-fdcd3da27641.
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This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.
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Aragona, Jared Lane. "Utopian Canvas: Visionary Aspects of Early English-American Literature, 1497-1705." Diss., Tucson, Arizona : University of Arizona, 2005. http://etd.library.arizona.edu/etd/GetFileServlet?file=file:///data1/pdf/etd/azu%5Fetd%5F1049%5F1%5Fm.pdf&type=application/pdf.
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DeVuono, Adrian. "Before the law: rethinking censorship in late modernist American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=104831.
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This study examines Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch within the contextual framework of censorship. In particular, the three texts are studied as providing unique challenges to the way that obscenity has been determined and governed by the trials that defined the modernist period in America. Therefore, the objective of this study is twofold: to investigate the complex, multidirectional and productive mechanisms of censorship; to recuperate the transgressive potential in the obscenity of Barnes, Miller and Burroughs from the afterlife of the legalized text. Situating these texts in the concept of E.S. Burt's "reading pact" – a sociohistoric contract of rules and regulations that governs the way a text is to be received within a given culture – reveals a intricate relationship between aesthetic form and the interconnected methods through which power and knowledge are secured. Within this interpretive scheme, I explore how obscenity ("the unspeakable") operates as a serious violation of the contract, one that works to widen the field of legitimate discourse ("The speakable"). In the first chapter, the "non case" of Barnes' Nightwood is proposed to be a result of the T.S. Eliot's intervention, reflecting a strategic effort to disguise Barnes' obscenity under the legitimating veil forged by Judge Woolsey's verdict in the 1933 Ulysses trial. The second chapter features an analysis of the epistolary origins of Tropic of Cancer and argues that the letter provides Miller with both a material base to dismantle the constraints of 'the well-made work of art' and a space to write the sexual body back into Woolsey's "l'homme moyen sensuel." Finally, an exploration of the monstrous unspeakability of Naked Lunch illustrates how Burroughs employs the figure of the double agent to deconstruct the allegorical method at the foundation of the legal codes that authorize literature under pre-fabricated moral precepts and bring about the end of censorship.Cette étude examine «Nightwood» par Djuna Barnes, «Tropic of Cancer» par Henry Miller, et «Naked Lunch» par William S. Burroughs dans le cadre contextuel de la censure. En particulier, les trois textes sont étudiées en fournissant des défis uniques pour le moyen que l'obscénité a été déterminée et régie par les essais qui ont défini la période moderniste en Amérique. Par conséquent, l'objectif de cette étude est double: d'enquêter les mécanismes complexes, productifs et multidirectionnelle de la censure; de récupérer le potentiel transgressif de l'obscénité de Barnes, Miller, et Burroughs de la vie après la mort légalisée de texte. Situer ces textes dans le concept « pacte de lecture » de E.S. Burt, un contrat socio-historiques de règles et de règlements qui régissent la façon dont la littérature est reçu dans une culture donnée, révèle la relation embrouillé entre la forme esthétique et les méthodes par lesquelles le pouvoir et la connaissance sont fixé. Dans ce cadre, j'explore la façon dont l'obscénité («non dicible») est une violation grave du contrat, qui élargisse le domaine de ce qui peut être inclus dans le domaine du discours légitime («dicible»). Dans le premier chapitre, le «non case» de «Nightwood» de Barnes est proposé d'être à la suite de l'intervention de TS Eliot qui reflète un essai stratégique pour cacher l'obscénité de Barnes sous le voile de légitimation du juge Woolsey's verdict dans le procès historique 1933 Ulysse. Le deuxième chapitre analyse les origines épistolaire du «Tropic of Cancer» et suggère que la lettre fournit Miller avec un matériau de base pour lutter contre les contraintes du «grand art» et un espace pour écrire le corps sexuelle de «l'homme moyen sensuel» de Woolsey dans la littérature. Enfin, une exploration de la indicible monstrueux de «Naked Lunch» illustre comment Burroughs emploie l'agent-double de déconstruire la méthode allégorique à la base des codes juridiques qui a autorisé le roman et aider à amener la fin du contrôle de la censure.
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Stinson, Felicia Ann. "Giving setting character : identity and place in American Southern literature." Thesis, Kingston University, 2015. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/35840/.
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In an effort to address and to rectify the overabundance of stereotype in regional literature of the American South, this dissertation seeks to recontextualize the traditional markers and the use of sense of place to determine setting. Instead, the thesis emphasizes and explores how relationships of identity through attitudes of dysfunction and obsession can give place or land agency within a narrative, thus reinvigorating the value and authenticity of the regional narrative beyond common and expected patterns. This is exemplified and analyzed in close readings of contemporary Southern writers who defy the traditional narrative, e.g. Jesmyn Ward, Benh Zeitlin, and Karen Russell, as well as canonical authors whose success can be seen in the appearance of these attitudes and development of identity for place, e.g. William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell. The accompanying novel excerpts serve to highlight even further the execution and power of this literary form for a post-millennium Southern Literature, which can evade its growing presence as a genre literature and regains its position as a figurehead for the significance of regional writing.
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Platt, Mary Hartley. "Epic reduction : receptions of Homer and Virgil in modern American poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9d1045f5-3134-432b-8654-868c3ef9b7de.
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The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.
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Thompson, Clarissa. "Pedagogy and prospective teachers in three college English courses /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/7826.
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Vollaro, Daniel Richard. "Origins and Orthodoxy: Anthologies of American Literature and American History." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2008. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/36.
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This dissertation examines how the new “multicultural phase” anthologies of American literature treat American history. Anthologies of American literature are more historical, more diverse, and more multidisciplinary than ever before, but they have over-extended themselves in both their historical and representational reach. They are not, despite their diversity and historicism, effective vehicles for promoting critical discussions of American history in the classroom. Chapter One outlines a brief history of anthologies of American literature, while also introducing the terminology and methodology used in this study. Chapter Two explores the role of the headnote as a vehicle for American history in anthologies by focusing on headnotes to Abraham Lincoln in multiple anthologies. Chapter Three examines how anthologies frame Native American origin stories for their readers. Chapter Four focuses on the issues raised by anthologizing texts originally composed in Spanish, and Chapter Five argues for a transnational broadening of the “slavery theme” in anthologies to include Barbary captivity narratives and texts that reference Indian slavery.
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Adams, Derek. "Black and White Both Cast Shadows: Unconventional Permutations of Racial Passing in African American and American Literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/241972.
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This dissertation proposes to build upon a critical tradition that explores the formation of racial subjectivity in narratives of passing in African-American and American literature. It adds to recent scholarship on passing narratives which seeks a more comprehensive understanding of the connections between the performance of racial norms and contemporary conceptions of "race" and racial categorization. But rather than focusing entirely on the conventional mulatta/o performs whiteness plot device at work in passing literature, a device that reinforces the desirability of heteronormative whiteness, I am interested in assessing how performances of a variety of racial norms challenges this desirability. Selected literary fiction from Herman Melville, Mary White Ovington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and ZZ Packer provides a rich opportunity for analyzing these unconventional performances. Formulating a theory of "black-passing" that decenters whiteness as the passer's object of desire, this project assesses how the works of these authors broadens the framework of the discourse on racial performance in revelatory ways. Racial passing will get measured in relation to the political consequences engendered by the transgression of racial boundaries, emphasizing how the nature of acts of passing varies according to the way hegemonic society dictates racial enfranchisement. Passing will be situated in the context of various modes of literary representation - realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism - that register subjectivity. The project will also explore in greater detail the changing nature of acts of passing across gendered, spatial, and temporal boundaries.
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McWilliams, Sara E. "Disturbances: Figures of hybridity and the politics of representation /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9411.
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Bell, Monita Kaye Wyss Hilary E. "Getting hair "fixed" Black Power, transvaluation, and hair politics /." Auburn, Ala, 2008. http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/EtdRoot/2008/SPRING/English/Thesis/Bell_Monita_45.pdf.
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Ttoouli, George. "Twentieth century North American serial poetic form & ecological thinking." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/114480/.
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This thesis develops a reflexive methodology to read four North American long form poetic projects: Lorine Niedecker's North Central; Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest; and Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. The methodology, 'ecoseriality,' provides a way of reading serial structures in the 'web of life' (Jason W. More). Ecoseriality emerges through two research threads: ecological thinking (Lorraine Code, Dianne Chisholm), an interdisciplinary approach to ecological methodologies, and seriality, an extension of serial poetic form into an interdisciplinary understanding of serial qualities. The project's ecological thinking comprises a recombinant methodology primarily adapted from Moore's theories and methods for reading capitalism in the web of life, a number of philosophical approaches and concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping. The project's seriality begins with Joseph M. Conte's typology of serial poetic form, Unending Design: the Forms of Postmodern Poetry, reading serial structures across genres and disciplines to refresh understanding of serial poetry and poetics. Ecoseriality develops along three primary, overlapping lines of inquiry: Moore's oikeios, adapted to read competing subjectivities and values brought to bear on relations in the web of life; Jameson's cognitive mapping, adapted into a post-Cartesian strategy for reading the imbrication between matter and meaning; and an examination of how the parts of a series relate to the whole. The project applies these foci to the four case studies, exposing fresh perspectives on the poetry and poetics of each. By reading Howe's 'cannibal cosmology' (Miriam Nichols) through Moore's theories of world-economy and world-ecology, the thesis arrives at an understanding of ecoseriality as an ethical ecological practice within the complex series of relations in the web of life. Ecoseriality thereby emerges as an oikeios for valuing complex relations in the web of life. The analysis concludes with discussion of the cosmological values of the serial poetic projects examined in relation to ecological thinking.
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Puello, Alfonso Sarah L. "Poetics of the urban, poetics of the self : a comparative study of selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4316585d-51c1-4b79-ae46-f5cdaf4c55d5.
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This thesis explores the poetic representation of Buenos Aires and Paris in selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda respectively. Its primary aim is to analyse the relational phenomenon between the construction of these poets' personal maps of the city and the concomitant formation of the poetic self. The principal point of departure is Jacques Réda's Ferveur de Borges (1987), a collection of essays and poems published individually between 1957 and 1986, where the author expresses his admiration for Borges, shows his broad and critical knowledge of Borges's works and establishes the similarities between their poetics of the urban and poetics of the self. Another important aim of this thesis is therefore to ascertain the extent of Borges's influential role in Réda's poetics, but also how reading Borges through Réda enhances our understanding of Borges's urban poetry. This comparison reveals that Borges and Réda gravitate towards places within the city, but mostly its periphery, characterised by their unpretentious, soulful and heterotopic qualities — places where the poets feel a sense of belonging. Their objective is to restore, through the prism of their minds and their physical investment in space, the provincial spirit of Buenos Aires and Paris, hidden behind the dynamism of the modern metropolises they have become. As a consequence of this communion between self and place they explore the possibility of being on the brink of a revelatory experience that speaks to the enigma of life. The wider scope of the thesis addresses the historical and cultural relationship between Buenos Aires and Paris, Borges's and Réda's redefinition of the centre/periphery dichotomy, the evening as a temporal locale and the distinction between poetic destiny and aesthetic experience.
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Keith, Ravon D. "Constructing the Concept of Masculinity in black American men." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2011. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/234.
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Historically, and in literature, the concept of black masculinity is often viewed from a Euro-American perspective. This perspective makes the stages of progression to manhood problematic for black males. Since slavery, African American men have been hampered in their progress toward manhood based on the oppressors’ expedient notion that black males are incapable of self-actualization, a concept that was utilized to ensure that black males were always “boys” and, thus, more manageable. Recently, revisionist history, along with black authored literature, has resulted in a different perspective of black masculinity and black manhood. This thesis illustrates that Earnest Gaines’s A Gathering ofOld Men and Daniel Black’s They Tell Me ofA Home offer a new paradigm for black masculinity and manhood through the perspective of their black male characters. In Gaines and Black’s novels, black males redefine their own concepts of manhood by engaging in self-innovation through spirituality and by resisting racial oppression.
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Walker, Aretha A. "A study of the rhetoric of American advertising discourse." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2007. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/1366.
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This study, exploring the nature of American advertising discourse, is guided by two overriding questions. First, "What is the nature of rhetoric in American advertising discourse?" and "How is the rhetoric of American advertising different from literature?" To answer these questions, the study examines the extended post-modern meaning of discourse and advertising, exploring both terms from the perspectives of humanists, sociologists, advertisers and communication experts. The study further discusses the nature of popular culture, of which advertising is a subgroup, and then explores the view of its critics who see it as dystopic—creating the opposite of a Utopia. These critics primarily fall into three camps: those who stridently denounce it without applying any sort of analysis or explanation of why it is bad, the best example being Hilton Kramer. Another in this camp, Dwight McDonald, tries to analyze popular culture albeit from a biased perspective, as his terminology and language quickly demonstrate. Others who more successfully explore the negative aspects of popular culture are the famous culture 1 critics, Allan Bloom and Christopher Lasch, who advocate keeping popular literature out of the classroom because it takes away precious time from the classics. Proponents of popular culture are less concerned, however, with whether or not the items being studied are "good" or bad" but rather whether or not they are worth being studied. They give an overwhelming answer, "Yes, they should be." These scholars, often politically motivated, use the theory of cultural materialism through which to examine cultural artifacts. Moreover, the study examines rhetorical devices of advertising discourse. Using glossy magazine advertisements, four tropes that are frequently used in advertisements are explored—imagery, rhythm, symbolism, and hyperbole, demonstrating how the visual images of women, as well as images that project power and wealth, are utilized in the discourse of American advertising, both positively and negatively. Finally, the study brings poetry and advertising together for comparative purposes by examining elements of syntax and graphics, and the ideology of love as seen in the two. The overall significance of this study is that it sheds light on the relationship between the discourses of two genres of cultural production that many people frequently assume not to be related.
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Quinn, Caroline. "Dueling Dualities: The Power of Architecture in American Gothic Literature." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/897.
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This article seeks to establish the importance of gothic convention and architecture’s role in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Southworth’s The Hidden Hand. By examining these stories’ dualities this article analyzes Poe and Southworth’s projects behind setting up dual spaces. Specific to Poe, this article follows architecture’s effect on mental health. Specific to Southworth, this article investigates her criticism of binaries and convention and how she uses architecture to shape her analysis.
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DiCuirci, Lindsay Erin Marks. "History's Imprint: The Colonial Book and the Writing of American History, 1790-1855." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1280362004.
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Armstrong, Catherine. "Representations of North American 'place' and 'potential' in English travel literature, 1607-1660." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2004. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2628/.
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This thesis analyses the representations of North America in English travel narratives between the years 1607-1660. Texts in both print and manuscript format are examined to discover how authors described the geography, climate, landscape, flora and fauna of America, as well as the settlements established there by the English. The thesis is mostly concerned with literature concerning Virginia and New England, although the settlements of Newfoundland, Maine and Maryland are also briefly mentioned. The first chapter describes the methodology of the thesis and locates its place alongside the existing literature. A chapter explaining the pre-history of English involvement in North America in the reign of Elizabeth I follows. Chapter Three describes the connection between printing and adventuring on which the thesis is predicted, explaining how the authors’ intentions and experiences affected their portrayal of the New World. The ways in which authors understood the geography and climate of America are explored in Chapter Four, including the influence of European thinking and the writers’ experiences in America itself. The landscape, including rivers, mountains and forests are examined next in chapter five, with a special focus on the Englishmen’s subduing of the landscape and their reactions to its potential. Chapters Six and Seven deal with the flora and fauna of the New World, tracing how the settlers’ initial high hopes of using the diversity of wildlife they encountered gave way to the realisation that familiar crops and animals imported from Europe would prove more useful than those found locally, with a few notable exceptions, such as tobacco. Chapters Eight and Nine analyse the changing representations of the English settlements themselves, by comparing the English experiences in Virginia and those of New England. Again, initial hopes give way to an acceptance of a less idealistic vision for the plantations. Chapter Ten brings the focus of the thesis back to England, asking how printed information about the New World was transmitted around the country by various practitioners of the printing trade, and who was able to digest this information. The representation of America, not only in travel narratives, but also in other forms of literature such as ballads, poetry and plays, are reviewed more broadly in chapter eleven, and an attempt is made to define the responses of individual and collective readers to the news from the New World that they gathered. In its conclusion, the thesis explores the influence of this literature on the new scientific thinking and on England’s relationship with her colonies.
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Singleton, Keir Elizabeth. "Personal experiences and adversities: the existential struggles of women in American women's literature." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2011. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/229.
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This is a study of women’s struggles in a system of patriarchy as portrayed in the works of Willa Cather, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. The selected works include: My Antonia, The Color Purple, and Sula. Most commonly, in a patriarchal society, masculinity is usually defined by aggression and dominance, whereas femininity is portrayed as symbolic of passivity and submission. The need for women to be submissive in a male-dominated society caused many of the women characters to begin to suffer from lack of individuality and self-expression. The idea that women often evolve into different personalities because of their life experiences and struggles is at the center of the works selected for this study. In these particular works, the writers demonstrate that in spite of ethnicities and family backgrounds, many women living under the system of patriarchy become strong and outspoken because of their personal experiences and life challenges, while some of them become casualties of their struggles but learn from the experiences in order to become agents of social change.
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Rezek, Joseph Paul. "Tales from elsewhere fiction at a proximate distance in the anglophone Atlantic /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1925765691&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Young, Jennifer Maria. "Paradidomi : magical realism and the American South." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2009. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/169817/.
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The thesis is comprised of a novel and a critical reflection. The novel component, entitled The Mathers’ Land, draws on traditions of magical realism, storytelling, memory and metafiction. The framing narrative of the novel follows Luanne Richardson, a librarian who has moved South with her new boyfriend, Kenneth Miers. As soon as they arrive in Peebles, North Carolina, Kenneth disappears. Luanne only knows that he last visited a particular house that belongs to the Mathers, the richest family in Peebles. Luanne forces an encounter with the head of the family, Walter Mathers. Despite her initially confrontational contact, Walter Mathers offers Luanne a job to construct a history of his family through interviews and records. He hopes the history will provide an answer to why his only son Eric has not produced an heir. Luanne’s research draws her into a claustrophobic society where no one seems to notice the frequent deaths of the wives of the Mathers family or their odd attachment to roses and a dogwood tree, as elements of magical realism occur in the frame story. The interviews Luanne conducts appear on the pages of the novel as fully developed stories, which draw on themes of tradition, loss and family attachment. These themes are explored through perceptions of memory and storytelling. The critical reflection component considers both what methods and writings made it to the thesis as well as what methods and writings did not. It explores the modes of construction, from the use of Oulipian and metafictional techniques to the use of magical realism. The major influences from specific writers are addressed in terms of structure, magical realism and Southerness, specifically Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Mischa Berlinksi, Sharyn McCrumb, Randall Kenan, Steven Sherrill, and particularly Doris Betts. The reflection concludes by addressing what it means to be an expatriate ‘Southern’ writer.
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Wilkes, Nicole. "Standing in the Center of the World: The Ethical Intentionality of Autoethnography." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2009. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1874.
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Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ipseity and alterity has permeated Western thought for more than forty years. In the social sciences and the humanities, the recognition of the Other and focus on difference, alterity, has influenced the way we ethically approach peoples and arts from different cultures. Because focus on the ego, ipseity, limits our ethical obligations, focusing on the Other does, according to Levinas, bring us closer to an ethical life. Furthermore, the self maintains responsibility for the Other and must work within Levinas's ethical system to become truly responsible. Therefore, the interaction between self and Other is Levinas's principal concern as we move toward the New Humanism. The traditional Western autobiography has been centered in the self, the ego, which may prevent the ethical interaction on the part of the writer because the writer often portrays himself or herself as exemplary or unique rather than as an individual within a culture who is responsible for others. Nevertheless, life writing has expanded as writers strive to represent themselves and their cultures responsibly. One form that has emerged is the literary autoethnography, a memoir that considers ancestry, culture, history, and spiritual inheritance amidst personal reflection. In particular, Native American conceptions of the self within story have inspired conventions of literary autoethnography. This project explores the way Native American worldviews have influenced the autoethnography by looking at four Native American authors: Janet Campbell Hale, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Carter Revard. Through research, family stories, interviews, and returns to ancestral spaces, autoethnographers can bring themselves and their readers closer to cultural consciousness. By investigating standards in autoethnographic works, this project will illustrate the ethical intentionality of autoethnography.
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Westover, Paul Aaron. "Traveling to meet the dead 1750-1860 a study of literary tourism and necromanticism /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3297950.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 30, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-03, Section: A, page: 0990. Adviser: Mary Favret.
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Gunn, Meagan. "Women's Circles Broken| The Disruption of Sisterhood in Three Nineteenth-Century Works." Thesis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10264176.
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Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women are three works which focus on communities of women. Since women had such limited opportunities available to them in the nineteenth century, marriage was the most viable option for survival. An interesting connection found, though, among the literature written by women at the time is the way in which women thrive together in communities with each other—up until the men enter the scene. Once the men, or more commonly, one man who is also the future husband, disrupt these women-centered communities, the close bond among women is severed. These three authors envisioned a better option than marriage—a supportive sisterhood—safe, loving, and uninterrupted. How and why did women thrive together in these three fictional nineteenth-century communities? How did they communicate? In what spaces did these communities exist? In what ways did men disrupt these communities, and was it possible for women to regain a similar level of closeness with each other after the disruption of men (i.e. marriage)? This thesis looks at the various viewpoints and treatments each author brought to women’s communities, their importance, formation, and men’s intrusions upon them.
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Levitsky, Zhana. "The Rocket and the Whale: A Critical Study of Pynchon’s Use of Melville." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:24078356.
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Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow are two American novels that intersect stylistically and thematically. This thesis argues that Pynchon’s novel mirrors and reinvents Melville’s novel. Gravity’s Rainbow is not simply engaging with Moby-Dick, but actively reprising it for the late 20th century through the power of Pynchon’s imagination. Pynchon responds to and reimagines Melville’s book by mirroring major themes and frameworks from Melville, by adopting some of his central images, and by mirroring his profuse use of technical language to express coded spiritual beliefs and deepening character analysis. The sublime white whale is reinvented as the Schwarzgerät, a German V2 rocket loaded with the mysterious polymer Imipolex G; this profound object stands symbolically at the center of the novel much as the whale, Moby Dick, does in Melville’s opus. The monstrous “grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air” (Melville 7) is re-forged as the “white finality” looming “up in the zero sky” (Pynchon 85, 87).
Beyond the functions of the novels’ sublime central images, both novels are here recognized as relying on coded technical, specialist language to express metaphysical beliefs. Throughout each novel, the technical language codes the ineffable and the transcendent, allowing for an entry point to understand the functions of symbolic material. Gravity’s Rainbow echoes Moby Dick’s stylistic structure, which is vast and loose. Very few novels are identified from the world’s literary canon as “encyclopedic,” and the two here discussed are the only examples from American literature, according to Edward Mendelson’s “Encyclopedic Narrative” hypothesis, which is supported by literary critic Andrzej Kopcewicz. It is the similarities in the unconventional, encyclopedic literary style of Moby-Dick and Gravity’s Rainbow that offers one of the strongest arguments for their resonant kinship. I use the work of Lawrence Buell to deepen and critically engage the material; I also engage with the critical work of several other prominent scholars. The metaphors from science extend to the color theory at work in the main symbols present, which are white or suffused with light, such as the whale, rocket, doubloon and light bulb. This thesis argues that light and whiteness as characteristics of the symbolic objects represent evil, malignity or another dark force. I show that the color theory that ties the books together has its main genesis, for both Melville and Pynchon, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors.
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MacDiarmid, Laurie J. 1964. "T. S. Eliot's civilized savage: Religious eroticism and poetics." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282374.
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Current studies of T. S. Eliot explore his social poetic, his religion, his sexuality, and his place in the history of modernism and contemporary poetics. "T. S. Eliot's Civilized Savage" links these interests, beginning with Eliot's controversial masculinity. Eliot constructs an impotent poet who engages in celibate heterosexual relationships; he uses comparative religious studies (such as Frazer's Golden Bough and Harrison's Themis) to transform these relationships into a social imperative. "The Death of Saint Narcissus," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Hysteria" compare Eliot's poet to Frazer's self-sacrificing god, pitting him against a voracious mother goddess who demands the poet's self-sacrifice. Eliot's lady poses as an alibi for his own hysteria and as a spiritual catalyst; the poet is reborn in the Father. By Ash Wednesday, Eliot rewrites heterosexuality using Christian iconography. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" exposes Eliot's ambivalent relationship to masculinity and maternity: though Eliot describes a purely scientific poetic reproduction, the essay bears traces of his maternal fascinations, though these images are sterilized by the rhetoric of Immaculate Conception. By 1927, Eliot converts to the Church of England, abandons Vivienne, rekindles a chaste romance with Emily Hale, develops his poetry of confession, and refashions the Lady. Now she acts as the perfect vessel for God's Word, and her "torn and most whole" body eliminates the threat of sexual intercourse. Subsumed in her, Eliot's poet becomes God's womb. Eliot's contemporary fall from grace seems to stem from repeated exposures of his erotic and religious masquerades. Christopher Ricks's publication of Eliot's notebooks foregrounds Eliot's racist, sexist and classicist ideology and Michael Hastings's Tom and Viv suggests that Eliot blamed his hysteria on Vivienne while profiting from the marriage. Eliot's mysticism appears to be an impotent attempt to escape domestic horrors, but a re-examination of this diagnosis may reveal our own construction of sexuality, poetics, politics and spirituality. As we recoil from Eliot's corrosive "conservatism" perhaps we safeguard our own.
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Halberg, Lauren. ""The Footprint of the Monster": California and the American Nightmare." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/472.
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Los Angeles is often depicted as a utopia—a glamorous, untroubled society on a geographical paradise. This image of perfection was crafted in conjunction with the city itself, with the metropolitan development in the 1930s. Los Angeles has been advertised as paradise and, in the 1930s, as a city unaffected by the Great Depression (Fine,“Nathanael”). The construction of the California Dream has an even more extensive historical grounding than the metropolis, though. It reaches back to the migration to California during the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. A classic novel of the Old West, which this thesis draws upon as a representation of early western literary themes, is Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague. Themes found in this early western are central to literature of 1930s Los Angeles, such as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1933) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941). These enduring themes include unattainable treasure, false promises, and maddening desire in pursuit of the American Dream.
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Livesay, Sarah Lindsay. "Literature as memorial: challenging histories and reckoning with absences through contemporary American literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2016. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6982.
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What are the intersections between literary and memorial studies? This study interrogates that question by combining critical readings of contemporary American literature (1969-present) with national memorials. My method of reading moves between physical memorials that provide canonical representations of American historical events and textual memorials that provide literary counter-readings of the same events. These texts challenge traditional memorial-making by reframing the discourses for the ways memorials function in American culture.
The study of memorial traverses several disciplines and fields of scholarship. Within the broad field of memorial studies, this dissertation examines the concerns of physical monuments and memorials, memory and counter-memory, trauma and terror, place and community, and absence and haunting. Situating both literary and physical memorials within these interconnected frameworks offers an interdisciplinary and multidirectional understanding of what memorials can be, what they mean, and what they do in the contemporary era.
A useful way to understand how literature can be framed as memorial is through recognizing its overlap with Pierre Nora’s concept of “lieux de mémoire,” or sites of memory. Nora defines lieux de mémoire as sites where memory eternally lingers. These lieux “are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness” (12). Commemorative texts fall into this categorization because of their existence as purely symbolic objects that nevertheless address the many interests of history and memory. Literature utilizes imaginative and emotive modes to reframe the ways in which sites of memory can work in American culture. In this way, they become “the ultimate [embodiment] of a memorial consciousness.”
The literature analyzed in this dissertation enriches memorial studies by adopting forms of counternarrative as radical frameworks for thinking and rethinking American memorialization. Literature’s theoretical production of memorial contrasts with most national memorials’ physicality. Thus, it is worth considering how literary abstraction allows for different ways of responding to history and trauma. The literary memorial’s dialogic facilities allow it to be subversive without seeking legitimacy from the national organizations that typically approve of the nation’s large built memorials. Therefore, literature does not perform merely as memorial but also as countermemorial. The countermemorial challenges authoritative structures by questioning patriotic tropes, resisting nationalistic expression, and reconstructing historical understanding. In doing so, it posits lyric and fiction as valid methods of truth-telling and memorial-making.
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Savoie, Tracy Ann. "Cosmopolitanism and Twentieth-Century American Modernism: Writing Intercultural Relationships through the Trope of Interracial Romance." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1217981585.
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Warfield, Angela Marie. "Utopia unlimited: reassessing American literary utopias." Diss., University of Iowa, 2009. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/271.
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This project argues that American literary utopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Dean Howells' Altrurian Romances (1907) to Aldous Huxley's Island and Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed (1974), offer a unique narrative site to approach the ethical and political concerns of postmodernity. Literary utopias are conventionally read as either dogmatic and totalitarian schemes or impractical and fanciful dreams; they are interpreted as representations of an archetypal ideology. I contend that these conventional interpretations overlay and belie an essentially post-ideological irony and ambivalence inherent in the neologism "utopia"--the "good place" (eu-topos) that is simultaneously "no place" (ou-topos). Utopian narratives remain unfinished projects whose political and ethical potential resides in the suspension of utopia's realization, a notion discussed in Jacques Derrida's exploration of the irony and ultimate ethical significance of an idea that cannot be fully presented or realized (différance), a space that cannot be traversed (a-poria), and of a community-to-come engendered by these notions. Accordingly, my readings of American literary utopias disclose narrative characteristics, from temporal instability to radical shifts in points of view, to show that the value of utopian literature lies in its exploration of alternative possibilities without prescribing finite and present solutions.
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Kong, Io Chun. "Chay Yew's Whitelands Trilogy : the queer hyphen in Asian(-)American identity." Thesis, University of Macau, 2009. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2456328.
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O'Neil, Justine Eileen. "?Reciprocity is everything?: The Female Journey to Elective Bonding in African-American Literature." NCSU, 2006. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04222006-172341/.
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This thesis identifies the severe impact of compulsory heterosexuality in the African-American community. In particular, I explore the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality is tied to the legacy of slavery and how it damages Black female subjectivity as well as Black love relationships. I focus on three novels by African-American women ? Gayl Jones?s Corregidora (1975), Opal Palmer Adisa?s It Begins with Tears (1997) and Pearl Cleage?s What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997) ? to illustrate the struggle that Black women face when subjected to sexual and emotional restrictions. I submit that the opposition to compulsory heterosexuality is elective bonding, in which women demand agency in all relationships. Chapter one discusses the authors? portrayals of how compulsory heterosexuality causes a repression of female desire, particularly when women structure their sexual lives around male satisfaction and reproduction. Chapter two focuses on the power of compulsory heterosexuality to obstruct female bonding from women?s lives, mainly by promoting female competition for the male gaze. Finally, chapter three outlines the steps necessary to escape the limitations of compulsory heterosexuality and to enter into elective bonding. My research suggests that effective elective bonding depends largely on building female community. Elective bonding ultimately prepares women to be active agents in all relationships, particularly those with men, in which they denounce compulsory heterosexuality and demand reciprocity. In this project, I posit that female bonding is the medium through which women can escape the sexual and emotional limitations of compulsory heterosexuality.
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Holliday, Marta Alaina. "The body as spectacle: beauty and biraciality in American literature and film, 1852-2002." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2520.
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This project discusses the aesthetic representations of biracial (i.e. African American and Anglo-American) femininity that have persistently occurred in fiction, non-fiction, magazine and film from the antebellum era through the turn of the twenty-first century. It spans the first novel published by an African American (Clotel by William Wells Brown, 1852) through the Oscar-winning movie Monster's Ball (2001), for which the biracial Halle Berry became the first self-identified African American to win the Best Actress award. Various chapters scrutinize biracial characters that appear in nineteenth and twentieth century novels and memoirs, while others contemplate landmark but often controversial films from later generations. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of the memoirs of several emerging contemporary writers and public figures who accept and who ultimately embrace all of what they are (e.g. Sadie and Bessie Delany, Having Our Say, 1993, Bliss Broyard, One Drop, 2007, Danzy Senna, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, 2009).
While the "tragedy" of the "tragic" mulatta's existence more obviously connotes the heroine's inner torment over her inability to racially "belong," this project focuses on interpreting "tragedy" in the literal, visceral sense, via the heroine's untimely and often brutal death, and any abuses that she may suffer. Existent research on the tragic mulatta has minimally addressed the role of appearance and visceral suffering in the heroine's life; the causes and consequences of the heroine's actual, visceral demise are less studied than the metaphorical or psychological implications of "tragedy."
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Gainyard, Nicole Michelle. "Trouble in paradise: rupture of the pastoral plantation myth in American literature, 1832-1921." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4630.
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In "Trouble in Paradise: Rupture of the Pastoral Plantation Myth in American Literature, 1832-1921," I argue that nineteenth-century African American and white writers use the plantation space in their texts as a barometer of American politics and life. Beginning with a case study of John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832 revised 1851), "Trouble in Paradise" argues that the plantation is fraught with contradiction, conflict, and decay, but it also accommodates other views that are not visible from the big house windows. Therefore, I use Plantation Geography, a spatially-driven model, to reveal the sociopolitical costs of slavery through a comparative analysis of what Patricia Yeager calls "themed spaces." In this framework, the big house acts as a hub that may regulate the widening places--forest, coffeehouse, tavern--which were nonetheless imagined to radiate from it. Feeling the normative pull of the big house, these far-flung places decenter the master's home as the plantation's symbol of power and stability, and locates alternative pathways and their accompanying activities as primary locales of antebellum life. Therefore, while Kennedy intended to preserve the whimsical charm of country life in the Old Dominion, he more publicly remapped the plantation space as national attitudes shifted. By focusing on a variety of plantation spaces--cabins, kitchens, sheds, and stables--and the routes between them, "Trouble in Paradise" challenges the limits of African American democratic participation suggesting that their activities transform and exceed plantation boundaries. Writers throughout this period take a cue from Kennedy's novel by revising the plantation space in vastly different ways.
Chapter One, "A House Divided: The Abolitionist Deployment of the Plantation Landscape, 1850-1862," looks at how Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave (1853) utilize the plantation as a means of abolitionist protest. Specifically, this chapter discusses the ways in which Uncle Tom and Madison Washington expose, challenge and transform their positions through their activities in a myriad of spaces including alternative sites beyond the plantation. Therefore, distant places in both novels have a proclivity to either promise or peril; while the cotton gin-house shed, tavern, Quaker home, and ship are potential sites where a slave's minority status could be reaffirmed, their distance from the plantation proper decreases the big house's power and pull. However, as much as these spaces present real opportunities for change, their transitory nature constantly challenged the assurance of a former slave's subjectivity. As promising as these spaces are, the real challenge was to renegotiate the United States as a nation that would eventually support the incorporation of African Americans into its body politic as American citizens.
Chapter Two, "Paradise Lost: The State of the Myth during the Civil War and Reconstruction," explores two distinct literary visions of the South as their protagonists' struggle to reconcile themselves to the demise of their plantations during and after the Civil War. Joseph Addison Turner's The Old Plantation: A Poem (1862) reveals a perspective of the plantation through the son of a slaveholder, who tinges southern nostalgia with melancholy, pathos, loss, and decay. However, the poem reveals the limits of his vision because the plantation cannot be replicated and maintained on a national scale. Although Turner's Reconstruction writings reveal an angry and bitter southerner who criminalizes African American movement and pathways, his works also reveal the hope of a new South as a Phoenix, primed to rise from the plantation ashes. Harper's novella counters Turner's lament by chronicling the journey of a man and woman who discover their African-American ancestry. This revelation holds the big house and the White House accountable to the slave cabins of the South and suggests that a radical restructuring of spaces is vital to the South's rebirth. This in effect reveals the conflict between the crippling power of the pastoral plantation in the hearts and minds of white southerners and the courageous endeavors of the emerging African American community as they all participated in the reorganization of the South.
Chapter Three, "The `Good Ole Days': Reconciliationist Literature and its Discontents" argues that Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880) and Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Woman (1899) utilize the pastoral plantation in sharp contrast to their antebellum counterparts. While the harmonious spaces of the plantation and Uncle Remus's cabin serve as a framework for the predatory world of the animals in the folktales, these spaces also foster amnesia about the brutality of black bondage and the Civil War by focusing on the good ole days of slavery. Episodes of hostility, violence, toil, and sacrifice by blacks are encrypted exclusively as a series of folktales told by Uncle Remus to the little white boy within the confines of his old slave cabin. However, Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman presents a vision of the plantation as a site of business created to extract wealth from slave labor and the land. Published in The Atlantic Monthly as early as 1887, these stories reveal local and national connections to the plantation through John and Annie's relocation to North Carolina from northern Ohio. At the heart of these tales are Julius's unpleasant memories of an Old South rife with thievery, conjuring, and murder as he seeks to renegotiate his claim to the McAdoo plantation with John and Annie. Both writers reveal a complicated recollection of the pastoral plantation that the earlier Kennedy could not imagine.
Concluding with Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods (1902), "Trouble in Paradise" continues to explore the pastoral myth's inconsistencies, appeal and contradictions incepted by John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn. In the opening scene of Dunbar's novel, a slave cottage much like the one in Kennedy's novel is resurrected and misery once again intrudes upon Eden. In a dark rebuttal, Dunbar challenges Harris's positive conclusion and suggests that everyone eventually bears the costs of the plantation, including whites. Furthermore, while several scholars argue that Dunbar's ending does not offer social or political alternatives to the plantation model, The Sport of the Gods revisits a space--the urban milieu--as a site where African Americans continue the process of creating a new identity away from the plantation proper. In doing so, this project presents a comprehensive paradigm that enlarges the plantation's boundaries and a narrow definition of "the South."
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Scruggs, Shelby. "American Journey Toward Female Equality with and Through Adrienne Rich's Works." TopSCHOLAR®, 1999. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/756.
Full textAbstract:
What initially triggered my writing a thesis on the feminist movement in America was the question, "Will women ever truly achieve equality?" Further, will all humanity ever achieve equality? I found through the movement toward equality for women that any movement toward equality progresses toward equality for all because if one group only wants to be equal with others, then they want others to have equality as well. This thesis surveys the feminist movement in America from the 1950's to the 1990's through the realm of the works of Adrienne Rich, American female poet. Rich's progression as a political feminist poet becomes a microcosm of the overall female journey toward equality. This piece also explores endeavors made by others that parallel Rich's venture. Through this survey of the American movement toward an equalitarian society from the 50's to the present, one finds that women and other oppressed Americans have come far in having equal standing in society, but what Rich and others find is that equality still does not truly exist in all public nor private domains, yet especially in private realms. The need for further change, in addition to laws and status, is the inherited cultural thought that women and minorities are somehow inferior to the Caucasian male. This pervading idea is a part of our history books, and until it becomes just that—history—then the movement to eradicate its presence, even in our subconscious minds, has to continue. We are all of the human race, and we are all born equally and freely into this world; thus, we all deserve to live freely and be treated equally. When freedom is truly felt and lived by all, then the pace toward equality will finally cross the finish line.
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Wanambisi, Monica Nalyaka. "Eight major exemplars of the twentieth-century american novel, 1900-1959." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1987. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/1069.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation is a study of twentieth-century American novels which can be used in a course by Kenyan and other East African students and teachers. The selected novels can be studied as models for exemplification of the most significant developments and trends in longer American narrative fiction in the period covered by the study. Because of time limits and for purposes of presenting quality fictional works to be covered in one semester, eight novels were analyzed in this study. These are: Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser, The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway, intruder in the Dust (1948) by William Faulkner, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger, Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison, Go Tell It On The Moutain (1953) by James Baldwin and Brown Girl. Brownstones (1959) by Paule Marshall.
Each of the selected novels represents a component of significance in American literature during the era designated. Sister Carrie's strengths lie in its reflection of American life as affected by industrialization and consequent urbanization. The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises vividly present significant themes of the First World 1 War's 111 effects on some Americans and others. Intruder in the Dust examines tensions created by racial discrimination in the Southern United States. The Catcher in the Rye treats the theme of adolescence eloquently. Go Tell It on the Mountain vividly presents Baldwin's view of the damange that racial prejudice inflicts on both blacks and whites. Invisible Man is a powerful presentation of the black experience in the United States. Brown Girl, Brownstones vividly treats a range of subjects such as the crisis of adolescence, religion, poverty and the importance of tradition for the black American, to name but a few. In addition to other reasons, all were chosen because they are artistically significant literary works, some, for example, having won for their authors Pultizer prizes or other major literary awards. Of course each novel was chosen for various other reasons which are elaborated in the study, but the above-named are most important.
In addition to those fundamental themes, which provide the focuses in analyzing each of the novels, the dissertation assembles specific types of information that teachers would find essential to furnish their students by way of introduction to and as the basis for study of the novels. Some of this material is for teacher-development, providing instructors kind of information that would give shape to their teaching of the course. The study also provides an organizational framework within which the course would be designed.
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Scott, Brenda Foster. "John Steinbeck's concept of the individualistic survival of the American dream." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1985. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/2386.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this thesis is to examine three rather diverse novels of John Steinbeck which are linked by unifying themes. The novels on which the study focuses are Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The novels chosen not only represent the most significant works of the author, but also contain comparative elements and recurrent ideas. Considered a "novelist of the people," Steinbeck tends to focus on the common man who, in a continuous conflict with those external forces which tend to dehumanize a society or those internal forces which tend to make him subhuman, pursues a desirable and useful life, only to find that the pursuit is in vain. In the discussion of the unifying themes, the study will focus on Steinbeck's common people—the paisanos of Tortilla Flat, George Milton and Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men, and the Joad family and other migrants in The Grapes of Wrath. The development of these novels is based on Steinbeck’s use of contradictions between the life-styles and personalities of the characters in his novels. The study will also consider those literary techniques and philosophies from which the author develops his ideas.
Chapter One examines the internal and external struggles of the paisanos of Tortilla Flat. It considers the paisanos’ lack of conventional morality and the reader's acceptance of that which is good in them as a result of the crude chivalry of these characters. The study also con siders the internal struggle of the central character, Danny. It considers his desire for individuality, his ap parent loyalty to his comrades and the conflicts innate in those situations which ultimately lead to his demise. The analysis shows that the dream or the desire to function on the same level as that of the bourgeois society described in the novel becomes destroyed as a result of the following: (1) the basic, conflicting character traits of the paisanos and of the bourgeoisie of the Monterey Valley, (2) the misguided acts of chivalry performed by the paisanos within the brotherhood, (3) the desire for personal freedom in conflict with the person's commitment to the brotherhood, and (4) the lack of a purpose to sustain the bond that had been created by Danny and the paisanos around him.
Chapter Two examines the external forces which dominate the lives of George Milton and Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men. It considers Lennie as a fated victim of those elements which tend to dehumanize a society as well as George, who has become entrapped by those same dehumanizing elements. The analysis shows that the dream or the desire to achieve a mode of stability in the lives of George and Lennie also becomes destroyed due to several factors: (1) the handicap of Lennie, which gives him a propensity for unintentionally violent acts, (2) the unwillingness of the given society described in the novel to accept or tolerate Lennie1s condition, (3) conflicts with others within the given society who too possess a type of handicap which makes them objectionable in their own society, and (4) the final destruction of George's companion Lennie, which in turn destroys the hope and the dream.
Chapter Three examines both the internal struggles of the ordinary man's attempt to pursue a meaningful life and the external forces which not only prevent him from doing so, but also cause human degradation in The Grapes of Wrath. It considers the symbolic elements of numerous episodes and those philosophies which are manifested in the actions of the Joads and other migrants. The analysis shows how the dream or the desire to regain a viable existence within the American social structure becomes virtually annihilated as a result of the following: (1) natural disasters, as well as the economic exploitation that results in the forcible transferral of the land farmed by the Joad family and many other migrants to the banks and other lending institutions, (2) dissolution of the family unit as a result of death and desertion, (3) a loss of morale and a loss of morality as defined by the society of the novel, and (4) the use of unethical yet pragmatic means to survive the ultimate degradation placed upon them.
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Williams, Katlyn E. "American magic: authorship and politics in the new American literary genre fiction." Diss., University of Iowa, 2018. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6664.
Full textAbstract:
This project examines how a subset of contemporary American literary cross-genre authors use popular forms within their fiction to comment on, interact with, and critique the possibilities of formula fiction and modern fan communities. I argue that the historic feminization of the popular (set against the stoicism of realism), combined with the startlingly masculine histories of popular genres like science fiction and fantasy, has resulted in distinct differences in the style and aims of male and female authors utilizing hybrid forms. The writers comprising the focus of this study, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, and Kelly Link, create a range of competing modes of genre mixing that clarify the lingering effects of popular genre’s marginalization by the literary elite and the academy.
The chapters of this project move through these modes by examining, respectively, toxic nerd fantasies and fandoms, the impact of fan fiction and its universalizing impulse, the rise of “speculative fiction,” and the role of domestic fabulism in reimagining the limited frameworks of realism and celebrating the possibilities of mass tropes and forms. Each of these chapters interrogates the author’s impact on the developing field of the new American literary genre fiction, linking their public personas as fans and scholars of genre to the attitudes and ideologies advanced by their fiction. These projects, anti-imperialist or feminist in nature, make self-conscious arguments about the value of the popular genres with which they interact. By focusing on the links between the author’s persona, public reception, and cultural fandoms, and the impact of these elements on contemporary cross-genre fiction, I attempt to revitalize genre theory in a manner that challenges its historically hierarchal configurations, particularly for women authors and consumers of the popular.
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Mediratta, Sangeeta. "Bazaars, cannibals, and sepoys : sensationalism and empire in nineteenth century Britain and the United States /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3175284.
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Schneider, Star. "The Un-American American: Edgar Allan Poe and the Problem of National Genre." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/902.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis seeks to account for Edgar Allan Poe's reception as an "American" author. Historically, it took time for Poe to become recognized as an American author rather than as an author who happened to also be American. This thesis argues that one major reason for this problem is that the American influences of his work are largely coded, but that Poe nevertheless was writing for an American audience and that his work did develop in response to national influences.