Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier Jan 2015

Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the origins and uses of a specifically southern obsession with the past. Examining how southern women writers represent the compulsion to remember, I demonstrate how, in their narratives, efforts to retain intimate relationships with an idealized past obstruct characters' ability to live in the present. Their fiction aligns neatly with the dynamic described in psychoanalysis as 'melancholia’—not least because, in each case, these relationships with the past are typically ambivalent or even destructive, and the melancholic subjects must 'work through' their damaging attachments. Typical psychoanalytic approaches, however, have neglected how such troubled remembering might be influenced by …


The South According To Quentin Tarantino, Michael Henley Jan 2015

The South According To Quentin Tarantino, Michael Henley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of the South and southerners in his films Pulp Fiction (1994), Death Proof (2007), and Django Unchained (2012). In order to do so, it explores and explains Tarantino’s mixture of genres, influences, and filmmaking styles in which he places the South and its inhabitants into current trends in southern studies which aim to examine the South as a place that is defined by cultural reproductions, lacking authenticity, and cultural distinctiveness. Like Godard before him, Tarantino’s movies are commentaries on film history itself. In short, Tarantino’s films actively reimagine the South and southerners …


Speaking In Wild Tongues: The Borderlands Of Eudora Welty And Alice Walker, Sara Gabler Thomas Jan 2015

Speaking In Wild Tongues: The Borderlands Of Eudora Welty And Alice Walker, Sara Gabler Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa describes her experience undergoing a dental procedure as a battle between her wild tongue and the dentist. Beginning with a discussion of Anzaldúa’s concept of the wild tongue, this project asks how writers across the US South depict unruly tongues and infelicitous speech. Methodologically, this thesis inverts the comreading model in literary studies of reading Third World writers through First World theorists. Instead, beginning with Anzaldúa, I propose to reverse this process and assert a new reading methodology of reading First World writers through Third World theorists. The trope of the wild tongue will mobilize …


Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock Jan 2015

Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human "nature," newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the "organic angel," a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation's budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at …


Being Nice Is Lethal: Disciplining And Subverting Southern Femininity In Contemporary Southern Popular Culture, Kaitlyn Vogt Jan 2015

Being Nice Is Lethal: Disciplining And Subverting Southern Femininity In Contemporary Southern Popular Culture, Kaitlyn Vogt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the performance of southern femininity in contemporary southern popular culture, specifically prescriptive literature and reality television. Both texts provide valuable insight into how southern femininity is disciplined and subverted by individual women and the public. Humorous prescriptive literature in the first chapter provides the data necessary to delineate key markers of “ideal” southern femininity and how primarily elite white women perform it. The second chapter focuses on the show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and how June Shannon opened up a liminal space for thinking about alternative southern femininities before ultimately closing it with her scandal …


Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran Jan 2015

Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thin Bodies, is a fictional thriller revolving around a retrospective, female voice. It is a short novel-length view into the insular community of the sorority, specifically in the U.S. Deep South. The town and university are both fictional, as are the characters, sororities, and events, but they are based in realistic institutions of socialization and community. Sarah Beth, our protagonist and narrator, considers her coming-of-age through her recruitment, initiation, ensuing leadership, and eventual fall from grace in her sorority, Theta Kappa. The group of women that this novel intends to characterize struggle with identity and how they are perceived against …


I Have Been Somewhere: Place In The South Carolina Poems Of Nikky Finney And Kwame Dawes, Purvis L. Cornish Jan 2015

I Have Been Somewhere: Place In The South Carolina Poems Of Nikky Finney And Kwame Dawes, Purvis L. Cornish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis focuses on the role of “place” in the poems of two black South Carolinian poets, Nikky Finney and Kwame Dawes. Borrowing from cultural and humanistic geographers’ myriad understandings of place, as well as philosophers’, I examine the ways in which Finney’s Rice and Dawes’s Wisteria function as meditations on and transmutations of the South Carolina low country in both its physical and non-physical dimensions, ultimately shedding light on historically silenced and marginalized emplaced realities. I also examine how Finney and Dawes employ different strategies of emplacement and their influence on the poems’ structure and meaning. In the …


“The Hard Work Is Done In The Looking”: Analyzing Representations Of And Responses To Appalachia In Popular Culture, Elizabeth Rose Barnes Trollinger Jan 2015

“The Hard Work Is Done In The Looking”: Analyzing Representations Of And Responses To Appalachia In Popular Culture, Elizabeth Rose Barnes Trollinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For many Americans, the concept of Appalachia as a singular place has been created through images in popular culture, often stereotypical. This thesis presents an evolution of Appalachian representations—or, more appropriately, a chronology of images in stasis, as they seem to have remained fairly unchanged over time. Responses to those images, however, have changed greatly. Most importantly, responses from within Appalachia have transformed, with regional people gaining power over the types of images of the region in popular culture. There is, however, a paradoxical dualism in the responses from within the region, as some Appalachians grow weary of being stereotyped …