Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'North American writers'

Asian American literature has continued to evolve since the emergence of first generation Asian American writers in 1975. Authors have continued to interact not only with Asian American content, but also with different forms to express that content – one of these forms is genre writing. Genre writing allows Asian American writers to interact with genre conventions, using them to inform Asian American tropes and vice versa. This thesis focuses on the genre of science fiction, specifically in the subgenre of time travel. Using three literary case studies – Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History,” Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” – this thesis seeks to explore the ways in which different Asian American writers have interacted with the genre, using it to retell Asian American narratives in new ways. “The Man Who Ended History” explores the use of time travel in restoring lost or silenced historical narratives, and the implications of that usage; How to Live Safely is a clever rewriting of the immigrant narrative, which embeds the story within the conventions of a science fictional universe; “Story of Your Life” presents a reimagining of alterity, and investigates how we might interact with the alien in a globalized world. Ultimately, all three stories, though quite different, express Asian American concerns in new and interesting ways; they may point to ways that Asian American writers can continue to write and rewrite Asian American narratives, branching out into new genres and affecting those genres in turn.

This dissertation is an investigation into the representation of mourning and melancholia in the work of Elizabeth Smart, Evelyn Lau, Siri Hustvedt, Sarah Sheard and Kathryn Harrison. The thesis addresses women's historic exclusion from the discourse of melancholia from a feminist perspective. It will consider the political and theoretical implications of women's absence from this discursive field by focusing on the cultural legacy of their devalorised status. Freud's essay, 'Mourning and Melancholia', first published in 1917, is cited as an important conceptual model exercising considerable influence over subsequent theoreticians working within this area. My thesis builds on Freud's attempt to establish a clear-cut binary division between the twinned states of mourning and melancholia. The thesis reveals how Freud's construction of melancholia as a pathological condition, shadowing the normative state of mourning, has been linked with psychoanalytic constructions of femininity by leading feminist theorists such as Irigaray, Silverman and Kristeva. The first chapter provides an overview of melancholia as a gendered discourse privileging male practitioners; the subsequent chapters provide symptomatic readings of five novels written by five contemporary North American women. The psychoanalytic interpretation of these readings, ranging from blocked or postponed mourning to the ideological loss of a father through incest, illustrate the close epistemological relationship between the construction of femininity and melancholia within Western historical and philosophical traditions. This thesis is not concerned with merely re-interpreting Western cultural prejudices related to the discourse of melancholia from a late twentieth century postfeminist perspective. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how contemporary women writers are engaged in a revisionary approach to the representation of loss within their work, by insistently inscribing their active, desiring bodies on the discourses of heterosexual femininity and melancholia. By refusing to disappear from the margins of the melancholic text, I show how the resisting melancholic daughter produces a counter-discourse that destroys the conventional dynamics of the family romance within Western literary traditions. The 'writing cure' replaces the 'talking cure' in this context. By removing the patriarchal figurehead from the text, and the psychoanalytic confessional discourse surrounding it, women writers challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature.

In Australia, we have not yet composed a literature of place in which the Australian geographies sing, so in this dissertation, the author goes travelling with some North American writers in their native landscapes, exploring the practice of landscape witness, of ecological imagination. They carry on there,looking for the ways in which the wild music of the land be discerned and expressed in words. He talks with them about the business of writing the life of places. He takes heed of the natural histories in which their works have arisen, looking for correlations between those physical terrains - the actual earth, the solid ground of their work - and the terrain of these writers' prose, wondering how the prose (and sometimes the poetry) may be said to be an expression of the place. This work, in a sense, is a natural history of six nature writers; it is an ecological imagining of their lives and works and places. Writing the Wild is a journey through the light, the wind, the rock, the water, sometimes the fire that makes the land that houses the writers who compose these lyrics of place. Most of what it learns about those writers, it learns from the places themselves. This dissertation takes landscapes seriously. It reads the works of these writers as though the landscapes of which and in which they write might be worthy of regard in understanding the terrain of their texts. It lets places show light on works of words composed within them.
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

O presente trabalho busca explorar como a dimensão do traumático incide na literatura contemporânea, mais especificamente, na literatura de um escritor nova-iorquino, Paul Auster. Supomos que as modalidades de subjetivação de determinado período histórico podem ser investigadas a partir de objetos estéticos culturais particulares, ou, pelo menos, que determinadas obras podem servir como uma espécie de testemunho e de historiografia dos sofrimentos de uma época. Esboçamos possíveis ressonâncias entre o plano geral da cultura e da história e o das qualidades específicas e expressivas de uma obra determinada, o que abre espaço para um diálogo entre esses domínios. Com isso, contudo, não se espera privilegiar o que é externo à obra em detrimento dela, e muito menos explicar a literatura pelo recurso a teorias e sistemas de compreensão prévios. Ao contrário, partimos de uma leitura próxima e imanente às obras para realizar ensaios a partir de três livros de Paul Auster: A invenção da solidão, O livro das ilusões e Noite do oráculo. Tais leituras seguiram uma espécie de ética da hospitalidade enquanto ética da leitura. Seguindo de perto as obras, e instalando-se nelas como num regime de habitação, fomos abrindo pontos de contato e comunicação entre as obras, bem como com outras dimensões da história, principalmente no que concerne a aspectos traumáticos e catastróficos. Os ensaios aventam a hipótese de que os livros de Paul Auster escolhidos demonstram, em seu aspecto mais formal, aspectos importantes do que veio a ser conhecido, na psicanálise, como compulsão à repetição. Além disso, a transmissão de aspectos indigestos e traumáticos transgeracionais, por via de criptas psíquicas, pode ser observada na própria autobiografia de Paul Auster, notadamente, A Invenção da solidão. As vicissitudes e destinos do trauma em sua dimensão transgeracional e individual são articuladas com o plano da cultura e com outros pensadores. Propomos, também, uma modalidade de leitura reparadora, em contraposição a uma leitura paranoica, para responder à complexidade e às ambiguidades das obras selecionadas
The present thesis aims to explore how the dimension of the traumatic concurs in contemporary literature, particularly in the one by New Yorker writer Paul Auster. It is supposed that the forms of subjectivity in a certain historical period can be searched into on the basis of particular cultural aesthetic objects. Or, at least, certain pieces of work can render as some sort of witness, as well as historiography of suffering in a particular era. It has been possible to outline some resonances between the general cultural and historical level ground and the one of expressive and specific qualities in a certain work, which opens space for a dialog between these domains. Nevertheless it is not expected neither to grant a privilege to what is external to the piece of work to its detriment, nor to explain literature from the theories and systems of previous comprehension. To the contrary, a close and immanent reading has been made, in order to make an assay, out of three of Paul Austers books: The invention of solitude, The book of illusions and Oracle Night. Such reading has followed some kind of hospitality ethics whereas reading ethics. Accompanying closely these works, and settling down on them as in a habitation regime, points of communication were opened between them, as well as with other dimensions of history, mainly to what concerns traumatic and catastrophic aspects. The assays suggest the hypothesis that these chosen Austers books demonstrate, in their formal aspect, important features of what has become known in Psychoanalysis as compulsion of repeating. Furthermore, the transmission of transgenerational indigestive and traumatic aspects, through psychic crypts, can be observed in Austers autobiography The invention of solitude. The vicissitudes and destinies of trauma on its transgenerational and individual dimensions are articulated with the cultural level ground and with other authors. It is also proposed a modality of repairing reading, in opposition to a paranoid reading, to respond to the complexity and ambiguity of the selected works

Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.

This thesis argues that consumerism and the mass media wield an unparalleled influence over contemporary North American society, and that these forces constitute the primary means through which identity is constituted. The historical and theoretical developments that have led to the foregrounding of these forces are outlined in the introduction - developments, it is argued, that are intrinsically connected to the social upheava1 that characterized America in the late 1960's and early 1970's, while their presence in and effects on the fiction of four contemporary North American writers - Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland - are examined in the main body of the thesis. Chapter I focuses on Pynchon whose novels, it is argued, are the product of a uniquely post-1960's America, which mourns the sacrifice of traditional ideals to the corporate mindset which has been prevalent since ths 1980's Pynchon's dominant metaphor for the direction in which he believes American society to be moving is the thermodynamic concept of entropy, which stipulates that all prqress is towards death. His novels abound with characters who disintegrate due to the information overload fostered by their media-based world. However, he retains his faith that a return to historical values and traditions will stem and even reverse the entropic tide DeLillo, a close contemporary of Pynchon's, draws on a different aspect of the legacy of the 1960's, for his writing is overshadowed by the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy and the years of turbulence that ensued. His novels are ultimately more pessimistic because his characters do not succeed in escaping from the repressive narratives of consumerism and the mass media in order to reassert their own personalities. One reason for this failure, it is argued, is that DeLillo's characters represent a metaphorical dramatization of the dichotomy between the modernist desire for structure and the postmodernist embrace of fluidity and uncertainty. The fictional characters of the younger authors, Ellis and Coupland, inhabit this postmodern world where all experience has been rendered depthless and traditional ontological and epistemological certainties have been collapsed Ellis' characters fluctuate between the extremes of apathy and violence as they search for a way of preventing their psyches from disintegrating amidst the surrounding chaos. Neither one of these options brings - any relief. Coupland is more optimistic about the ability of his characters to survive and even prosper in the contemporary world. He arms them with the linguistic and technological skills necessary to adapt to the rapid social and technological changes. Most importantly of all, he draws on the sense of objectivity fostered by his own background as a Canadian in order to provide them with an alternative and a sense of escape from the media-saturated environment of the American West Coast. What is perhaps most remarkable about these four authors as a group is that in spite of their obvious insight into the nature of the contemporary postmodern world, they are unwilling - or perhaps even unable - to fully relinquish their hold on a number of traditional metanarratives, most notably the ideal of the stable, supportive family unit. This implies a degree of uncertainty and perhaps even of fear on their parts about fully committing to the fluidity of contemporary culture.

This thesis explores the representation of motherhood as ideology, identity, and experience in contemporary women’s writings, offering comparative studies of Persian texts alongside English-language narratives from marginalized backgrounds such as African American, Caribbean, Chinese American, and queer mothering. It investigates theoretical approaches to motherhood and identity such as those of Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, questions the exclusion of women from other literary theories such as that of Michel Foucault, and engages with contemporary critical views on motherhood and the materials published recently in mothering studies.

In Australia, we have not yet composed a literature of place in which the Australian geographies sing, so in this dissertation, the author goes travelling with some North American writers in their native landscapes, exploring the practice of landscape witness, of ecological imagination. They carry on there,looking for the ways in which the wild music of the land be discerned and expressed in words. He talks with them about the business of writing the life of places. He takes heed of the natural histories in which their works have arisen, looking for correlations between those physical terrains - the actual earth, the solid ground of their work - and the terrain of these writers' prose, wondering how the prose (and sometimes the poetry) may be said to be an expression of the place. This work, in a sense, is a natural history of six nature writers; it is an ecological imagining of their lives and works and places. Writing the Wild is a journey through the light, the wind, the rock, the water, sometimes the fire that makes the land that houses the writers who compose these lyrics of place. Most of what it learns about those writers, it learns from the places themselves. This dissertation takes landscapes seriously. It reads the works of these writers as though the landscapes of which and in which they write might be worthy of regard in understanding the terrain of their texts. It lets places show light on works of words composed within them.

Truman Capote, autor, roteirista e dramaturgo Americano, foi um dos principais escritores americanos de ficção do período pós-guerra, conhecido por receber ampla notoriedade pelo seu romance best-seller In Cold Blood, de 1965, por um estilo de escrita que misturava literatura e jornalismo. No entanto, o trabalho de Capote se estende além do romance antes mencionado. O autor, que se tornaria famoso por sua personalidade também, revelou grande talento como escritor desde muito jovem, trabalhando com temas muito relacionados à sua vida pessoal. Durante minhas leituras de seus trabalhos, eu pude perceber que o narrador que Capote criava trazia o leitor muito mais próximo à história. O propósito da minha dissertação é fazer uma análise do narrador de Capote para poder discutir suas técnicas específicas. Para tal, escolhi trabalhar com a teoria da narratologia, que não apenas é o estudo da narrativa e da estrutura de um texto, mas também sobre como ele afeta nossas percepções como leitores. Através de uma análise de aspectos como focalização e discurso do narrador, minha intenção foi traçar uma relação entre o narrador de Capote com seu autor implícito para poder entender como isso afeta nossa experiência de leitura e seu relacionamento com o leitor. Para essa análise, eu escolhi o primeiro romance publicado de Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), porque acredito que conta uma história que pareceu surgir de emoções altamente reprimidas do autor sobre sua infância e crescimento. Além disso, tentarei identificar onde elementos biográficos podem ter inspirado alguns dos eventos presentes na história, na tentativa de estabelecer uma conexão com os eventos de sua vida real e o quanto elas interferiam em sua ficção. teoria que em destaque nesse trabalho são os trabalhos da autora Mieke Bal (2009) e de Herman & Vervaeck (2005), para poder trazer os termos que ajudam a continuar com a discussão. Ao fim desta análise, espero mostrar o que há por baixo de um narrador cuidadosamente construído, e que o leitor seja capaz de perceber Truman Capote por mais do que sua famosa personalidade, mas também como um escritor cuidadoso e focado que era apaixonado por sua arte.
American novelist, screenwriter and playwright Truman Capote was one of the leading American authors of fiction of the post-war period, known for receiving wide notoriety for his 1965 best seller In Cold Blood, for a style of writing that mixed literature and journalism. However, Capote’s works extend beyond the aforementioned novel. The author, who would eventually become famous for his personality as well, revealed great talent as a writer since a very young age, working with themes closely related to his personal life. During my readings of his works, I was able to perceive that the narrator Capote creates brings the reader much closer to the story. The purpose of this thesis is to carry out an analysis of Capote’s narrator in order to discuss his particular techniques. In order to do that, I chose to work with the theory of narratology, which is not only the study of narrative and the narrative structure of a text, but also of how it affects our perceptions as readers. Through an analysis of aspects such as focalization and the narrator’s discourse, my intention was to trace a relation between the narrator with Capote’s implied author in order to understand how this affects the reading experience and the relationship with the reader. For this analysis, I chose Capote’s first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), because I believe that it tells a story that seem to come from the highly suppressed emotions of the author about his childhood and growing up. I will also attempt to identify where biographical elements might have inspired some of the events that appear in the story, attempting to establish connection to the events of his real life and how much it interfered in his fiction. As to the theory that underlines this work, I chose the works of Mieke Bal (2009) and Herman & Vervaeck (2005), in order to bring light to terms that help further the discussion. By the end of this analysis, I hope to show what lies beneath a carefully constructed narrator, and that the reader will be able to perceive Truman Capote for more than his famous personality, but also as a careful and focused writer that was passionate about his craft.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2003.
Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

This dissertation investigates the works of two Black female writers: Flora Nwapa(African and Nigerian) and Zora Neale Hurston (African American). Although theycome from different geographical regions, both writers use the same rchetypal patterns to create strong female protagonists. By characterizing protagonists in their novels from an African religious cultural perspective, both authors dismantle the stereotypical images of how black women are typically portrayed in fiction. Using Jung's theory of the collective unconscious and archetypal criticism the study finds that both authors create black female protagonists who are wise, resilient, decisive, courageous, independent, and risk-taking; the women who, through their self-discovery journeys, are neither defined by nor in oppositional relationships with the males in their lives. The study compares how the qualities of two archetypal goddesses, Uhamiri of the Igbo cosmology and Oya of the Yoruba cosmology, are personified through the personalities of the two female protagonists in Nwapa's Efuru and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, respectively. Using strong mythical females as templates, this research explores the ways in which the authors have defined their female characters, thus providing an alternative strategy for defining and analyzing black female characters in fiction. The study asserts that literary interpretation of Africana women should include the cultural realities associated with the African religious framework in order to capture the full essence of their humanity. In addition, African feminist thought, unlike Western feminist theory, provides a more realistic model of discourse on Africana women's selfidentity. Examining Africana women from these perspectives, as opposed to analyzing them based on European standards, is an effective method of discrediting stereotypical images that continue to plague the portrayal of black women in fiction. When black women in fiction are explored from this vantage point, the literary work sends a message of cultural authenticity and preservation that elevates Africana women, expanding their functions and positions in society beyond traditional roles.

Through the use of biographical materials, and three selected works from Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte, parallels were found between their lives, character design, and the plot of their works. The lack of a mother figure in the lives of the Bronte sisters caused their upbringing to differ from that of other children, and as a result influenced their perspective of the world. Motherless female characters were found in each of the three novels by the Bronte sisters and in each instance commonalities were shared with the author of the work, to a degree that indicates that the lives that the sisters led, was the inspiration for the stories they created. After investigating whether or not the novels created by the Bronte sisters were influenced by the lack of a mother figure, the conclusion reached, is that this absence had an immense influence throughout their lives, and based on more than one account, helped shape the design of each of their respective works.

White depictions of Aborigines in literature have generally been culturally biased. In this study I explore four depictions of Indigenous Australians by white Australian writers. Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) depicts a half-caste Aborigine's attempt to enter white society in a racially-antipathetic world that precipitates his ruin. Children's author Colin Thiele develops friendships between white and Aboriginal children in frightening and dangerous landscapes in both Storm Boy (1963) and Fire in the Stone (1973). Nobel laureate Patrick White sets A Fringe of Leaves (1976) in a world in which Ellen Roxburgh's quest for freedom comes only through her captivity by the Aborigines. I use whiteness and masculinity studies as theoretical frameworks in my analysis of these depictions. As invisibility and ordinariness are endemic to white and masculine actions, interrogating these ideological constructions aids in facilitating a better awareness of the racialized stereotypes that exist in Indigenous representations.

Through examining the common themes in the writings of five anarchist women writers, I argue their writings are representative of ideological regionalism, or the convergence of factors that give rise to a political ideology that is then expounded through the literary production of a particular time and place. I analyze the economic, sexual, and “religious” politics across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, connecting arguments about class, individualism, feminism, and anarchism to a foundation of Midwestern cultural ideology. Ultimately, I argue that economic, political, and historical conditions promulgated an exceptionalist American anarchism rooted in settler anti-statism.

This thesis probes the ways in which land-based and bodily violence inform contemporary North American Indigenous poetry. Since the “Oka Crisis” of 1990, English-speaking North American Indigenous writers have produced a substantial body of poetry that has significant implications in forwarding national sovereignty struggles. Gender violence enabled settler colonial land appropriation; resource exploitation also harmed Indigenous bodies. This project considers the ways in which Indigenous authors with diverse geographic, cultural and embodied experiences employ common strategies toward using poetry as an emancipatory tool. A poem is both whole, and a fragment of a larger body of work; engaging with the works of individual poets, and multi-authored anthologies allows for varied readings of the same poems and their engagements with the project’s key themes of homeland and embodiment. This paper is informed by the reading of many Indigenous theorists and poets, and aligns with an Indigenous-feminist critique that suggests that nationalist sovereignty struggles are meaningless as long as bodily violence against Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people is still prevalent. As such, contemporary struggles for reclaiming Indigenous lands must also be struggles toward a sovereign erotic, sovereignty over one’s sexuality and gender identity.
Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-12 03:07:52.957

Works of literature written by Native Americans have long been treated by readers and critics as expressions of cultural identity: transparent representations of communal world-views, traditional belief-systems, or sets of cultural practices. Often, such ethnographic readings come at the expense of understanding how these texts express the political concerns of their authors. My dissertation pushes back against such readings, showing how Ojibwe writers attempt to use literature as a means of shaping public opinion in the pursuit of pragmatic political goals. Reconsidering Ojibwe writing in this way, I examine how Ojibwe authors use their work to engage in dialog with non-Native readers and writers in the U.S.--an interaction they insist be understood as transnational. By comparing literary representations of the Ojibwe produced by both U.S. writers and the Ojibwe themselves, I show how poems, novels, and dramatic works have been the site at which the possibility of Ojibwe nationhood has been imagined and contested for nearly two centuries. In so doing, I suggest that Ojibwe literature is not a stable and homogenous category, but an expedient response to U.S. settler-colonialism defined by a shared set of political commitments. In so doing, I complicate prior theorizations of indigenous literary nationalism as a project primarily oriented toward cultural separatism, replacing them with a more nuanced model of continual, if agonistic, engagement on the imperfectly leveling field of literary representation.