"It's Oil And Water": Race, Gender, Power, And Trauma In Vu Tran's Dragonfish, 2017 University of Montana - Missoula
"It's Oil And Water": Race, Gender, Power, And Trauma In Vu Tran's Dragonfish, Quan-Manh Ha, Chase Greenfield
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
ABSTRACT: This article analyzes in-depth the interplay between race, gender, power, and trauma in Vu Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish. We argue that Dragonfish focuses on the relationships, desires, and conflicts among its three protagonists—Robert, Suzy, and Sonny—to highlight how their postwar interactions complicate race, gender, trauma, and remembrance. The three protagonists engage in an intense socio-political struggle for dominance and control, which is riddled with irony, heart-wrenching pain, and misleading appearances. They experience hardship and loss, but they rely on each other for recovery from past and present trauma, and to advance their own varying personal priorities and agendas: …
Volume 8 Cover, 2017 San Jose State University
Volume 8 Cover, Joanne Lamb
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
No abstract provided.
“Report All Obscene Mail To Your Postmaster” Reading, Institutions, And The American Public, Post-Revolution And 1965, 2017 Bard College
“Report All Obscene Mail To Your Postmaster” Reading, Institutions, And The American Public, Post-Revolution And 1965, Connor Christopher Boehme
Senior Projects Spring 2017
This project attempts to understand how Americans are able to imagine themselves as a political public in two revolutionary moments: just after the American Revolution, and in 1965, at the heart of the Civil Rights era. The public, which the Constitution labels “We, the people,” is explored first in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which postulates the institutional conditions necessary for its readership, the first generation of Americans, to form a political public. The project then studies the “We,” of the Constitution’s preamble and considers how readers can interpret who is signified by that “We.” 1965 saw a cultural revolution in America …
Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, 2017 University of Mississippi. Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College
Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, Bria Stephens Stephens
Honors Theses
This study explores the life of Nella Larsen, investigating how her unusual childhood and early adulthood provided substance for her to make critical and unique views on race relations and racially dichotomized communities. The study shows how the Harlem Renaissance was essential in providing this outlet to Larsen; it was an era where African American art was lauded. The investigation required research into Larsen's childhood and early adult life using several different pieces of biographical works. After detailing impactful events in her early life, the study developed further with critical analyzation of her fictional short stories and novels. Additional research …
Everybody's Story: Gertrude Stein's Career As A Nexus Connecting Writers And Painters In Bohemian Paris, 2017 University of Mississippi. Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College
Everybody's Story: Gertrude Stein's Career As A Nexus Connecting Writers And Painters In Bohemian Paris, Elizabeth F. Milam
Honors Theses
My thesis examines how the combination of Gertrude Stein's career, Paris, and the time period before, during, and after The Great War conflated to create the Lost Generation and affected the work of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. Five different sections focus on: the background of Stein and how her understanding of expression came into existence, Paris and the unique environment it provided for experimentation at the beginning of the twentieth century (and how that compared to the environment found in America), Modernism existing in Paris prior to World War One, the mass culture of militarization in World War One …
Photographic Representations Of The South: Eudora Welty And Doris Ulmann, 2017 University of Mississippi. Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College
Photographic Representations Of The South: Eudora Welty And Doris Ulmann, Molly Maher
Honors Theses
Eudora Welty and Doris Ulmann both photographed African Americans living in the South during the 1930s. Ulmann photographed the unique Gullah community in South Carolina, documenting their agricultural work, religious traditions, and lifestyle. Welty photographed the African American community within her home state of Mississippi. Despite a parallel interest in subject matter, Welty stated that she did not like Ulmann's photography. This thesis examines the differences between Welty and Ulmann's techniques and their relationships to the South, their subjects, and literary texts in order to identify why Welty explicitly expressed a dislike for Ulmann's photographs.
Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, 2017 Virginia Commonwealth University
Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes
Theses and Dissertations
Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how …
One Or Two Things I Know About Us: Narrative Strategies For Autoethnography, Self-Representation And Healing In Four Memoirs By Poor-White Women From The U.S. South, 2017 University of Mississippi
One Or Two Things I Know About Us: Narrative Strategies For Autoethnography, Self-Representation And Healing In Four Memoirs By Poor-White Women From The U.S. South, Joseph Aaron Farmer
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines autobiographical writings by formerly poor white Southern women, who are rarely considered as a group and are more typically studied with “rough South” male writers, which would suggest that few women have contributed their own gendered experience to discussions of class, race, and sexuality vis-à-vis Southern poverty. Correcting this assumption, I examine formative statements by women from poor white backgrounds, including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, Dorothy Allison’s Trash, and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. Each of these writers engage in narrative strategies that do not defend …
Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, 2017 University of Mississippi
Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, Barry Hudek
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
“Book of Empire” reveals that contrary to what is often suggested by scholars, modernism is not a moment of secularization and declining faith and that the Bible is actually a resource for mounting a radical critique of empire, nation-building, and racial oppression that defies conservative notions supporting those undertakings. For Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston, the Bible is a source of moral authority they use to challenge the imperialist, colonialist, and nativist projects of the twentieth-century U.S. In rebranding the Bible as politically radical, these writers are not denying the authority of the Bible, but are re-appropriating …
The End Of Postmodernism, 2017 Boise State University
The End Of Postmodernism, Ralph Clare
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
Appearing at the start of the millennium, Percival Everett's Erasure (2001) features Monk Ellison, a writer who is questioning his one-time embrace of postmodern aesthetics and who raises the ire of "innovative" writer and fellow member of the Nouveau Roman Society after delivering a conference paper, F/V, part parody of and part homage to Roland Barthes's S/Z. Becoming belligerent, the writer proclaims to Ellison that postmodernists did not "have time to finish what we set out to accomplish" because any art which "opposes or rejects established systems of creation ... has to remain unfinished." His unsuccessful attempt to …
"It's [Not] Only Lines On Paper, Folks!": The Curious Literary Identity Of The Graphic Novel, 2017 Bard College
"It's [Not] Only Lines On Paper, Folks!": The Curious Literary Identity Of The Graphic Novel, Oona Blood Cullen
Senior Projects Spring 2017
Art Spiegelman's “Maus,” Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' “Watchmen,” and Frank Miller's “The Dark Knight Returns,” created waves in both the literary and comics communities upon their subsequent release in the year 1986. My project seeks to unpack the ways in which the “1986 Big Three” forge identities for themselves both within and without the designations of literature and comics, and ultimately to define the unique literary identity of each work. I examine the ways in which each of these works makes use of the history and traditions of the medium from which they emerge, including use of recognizable tropes …
Adventures With Animals Big And Small, 2017 Boise State University
Adventures With Animals Big And Small, Emily Allen, Marcus Blandford, Shannon Brennan, Brennen Keen, Amanda Timm, Tara Penry, Sarah Obendorf
English Literature Student Projects and Publications
The purpose of this project is to produce a short collection of out-of-print children’s stories that would be suitable for first grade level readers. Stories selected for the collection fit the theme of being seasonally themed and include animals as main protagonists. Under the guidance of Dr. Tara Penry, the class searched children’s magazines from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to find stories that would be relevant and interesting to today’s elementary schoolers.
A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, 2017 University of Mississippi
A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, William Mackenzie
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This PH.D dissertation aims to develop a 3-D numerical model of dam-break flows on movable beds. Three tasks are defined to accomplish the goal of this study. The first task is developing a 3-D hydrodynamic model to simulate dam-break flow on fixed beds with simple geometry and test the water surface tracking technique. This model solves the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations using a finite-difference method on rectilinear, staggered grids. The volume-of-fluid (VOF) technique with SOLA-VOF advection scheme is used to capture the free surface motion. The developed model is tested using several experimental dam-break flows and the VOF technique is …
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, 2017 University of Mississippi
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the poetry of Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman, two poets of the critically neglected second-generation New York school. I argue that Brainard and Waldman help define the emerging discourse of postmodern poetry through their attention to cold war culture of the 1970s, countercultural ideologies, and poetic form. Both Brainard and Waldman enact a poetics of vulnerability in their work, situating themselves as wholly unique from their late-modernist predecessors. In doing so, they help engender a poetics concerned not only with the intellectual stakes but with the cultural environment they are forced to navigate. Chapter 1 explores Brainard's …
Reader's Guide: A Foray Into Violence, Trauma And Masculinity In In Our Time, 2017 Claremont McKenna College
Reader's Guide: A Foray Into Violence, Trauma And Masculinity In In Our Time, Sara-Rose Beatriz Bockian
CMC Senior Theses
Modernism has been called “a reaction to the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War and a search for a new mode of art that would rescue civilization from its state of crisis after the war” (Lewis, 109) Hemingway attempts this rescue by re-thinking aspects of the novel that were taken for granted in earlier periods, just as the conventions of modern life were taken for granted pre-WWI. Furthermore, his work tries to rectify the dissonance between a pre and post-war self through the exploration of social conventions relating to violence, trauma and masculinity.
Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, 2017 Scripps College
Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated …
Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, 2017 Wayne State University
Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, Judith Lakämper
Wayne State University Dissertations
In “Affective Dissonance: (Post)feminism and Popular Cultural Expressions of Motherhood,” I argue that motherhood in the so-called post-feminist age is structured by a conflicted relationship between affective expectations raised by public discourses of motherhood and the material, embodied experience of maternity, inflected by race, class, age, and sexuality. While recent feminist scholarship has engaged questions of (bodily) materiality, and popular medial discourses increasingly critique unrealistic ideals of motherhood, my dissertation considers these approaches together. Juxtaposing representations of motherhood from various sources – memoirs, digital media, art photography, and television – I demonstrate how the postfeminist rhetoric of female empowerment and …
(An) Unsettled Commons: Narrative And Trauma After 9/11, 2017 Wayne State University
(An) Unsettled Commons: Narrative And Trauma After 9/11, Chinmayi Kattemalavadi
Wayne State University Dissertations
This dissertation examines fictional responses to the events of September 11, 2001. It argues for the importance of one kind of fictional response, one which focuses on representing the feeling of "unsettledness" that can be one effect of trauma, with the aim of making that unsettledness itself a locus of a shared common experience. I posit that in articulating the events of 9/11 in the context of, in relation to, and as one in a series of traumas, violences, and histories, these narratives make the unsettlements shareable. Focusing on four works of fiction that were published after 9/11 – Joseph …
Weird Propaganda: Texts Of The Black Power And Women’S Liberation Movements, 2017 Wayne State University
Weird Propaganda: Texts Of The Black Power And Women’S Liberation Movements, Marie Buck
Wayne State University Dissertations
“Weird Propaganda: Texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements” examines texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements: the early Black Arts Movement anthology For Malcolm; the now-canonical texts Our Bodies, Ourselves; The Black Woman; and Sisterhood Is Powerful; a number of pamphlets and other small press works; and the Black Panthers’ newspaper. This project argues that writers and activists used senses of the uncanny, along with elements of science fiction and fantasy, to negotiate the day-to-day uncertainties of political organizing and, more broadly, political hope. The texts examined here convey particular political views in an explict …
An Echo Of Swelling Voices, A Meta-Fictional Novella, 2017 University of Texas at El Paso
An Echo Of Swelling Voices, A Meta-Fictional Novella, Adolfo Danilo Lopez
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
Horacio P. is an exiled Nicaraguan American poet living and teaching in Austin, Texas since the 1970s. Despite his enormous reputation and highly supportive wife, he feels incapable to write his last, and best, novel. This novel is about the life of Asdreni, an Albanian poet who was also exiled in Romania during the time before World War II, and his quest to find out who sent him a mysterious box containing the unpublished manuscripts of an unknown poet. One day, Horacio himself also receives a mysterious box containing the unpublished manuscripts of an unknown poet. His novel and his …