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Reading Bodies: Disability And American Literary History, 1789-1889, Amanda Stuckey
Reading Bodies: Disability And American Literary History, 1789-1889, Amanda Stuckey
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation brings the field of critical disability studies to bear on organizational paradigms of nineteenth-century American literature. “Reading Bodies” intervenes in these fields with the claim that the book in a variety of formats, publications, and circulations acts as a disciplinary tool that seeks to arrange physical and mental characteristics and capacities into the category of disability. This project moves beyond examining representations of disability to demonstrate that the same social, cultural, and political forces that generated literary movements and outpourings – such as nationalism, displacement of Native peoples, slavery, and state-sanctioned violence – also generated material conditions of …
Race And Culture In The Early-Twentieth-Century United States And Colonial Hawaii, Leah Kuragano
Race And Culture In The Early-Twentieth-Century United States And Colonial Hawaii, Leah Kuragano
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The following essays are two explorations of the role of culture in colonial Hawai‘i and in the American metropole in racializing and dominating Native Hawaiians in terms of a larger history of race-based oppression and romanticization in the US. The first essay draws from Werner Sollors’ Ethnic Modernism, in which he argues that the aesthetic movement of modernism, which has been historically white-washed by scholars, had strong ties to the influx of immigrants and the growing popularity of jazz music and other forms of African American cultural expression in the early twentieth century. The second essay, written for “Politics of …
Material Literacy: Alphabets, Bodies, And Consumer Culture, Wendy Korwin-Pawlowski
Material Literacy: Alphabets, Bodies, And Consumer Culture, Wendy Korwin-Pawlowski
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation posits that a new form of material literacy emerged in the United States between 1890 and 1925, in tandem with the modern advertising profession. A nation recalibrating the way it valued economic and cultural mass consumption demanded, among other things, new signage – new ways to announce, and through those announcements, to produce its commitment to consumer society. What I call material literacy emerged as a set of interpretive skills wielded by both the creators and audiences of advertising material, whose paths crossed via representations of goods. These historically situated ways of reading and writing not only invited …
Folk Into Art: John Fahey, Modernism And The American Folk Revival, Lisa Carpenter
Folk Into Art: John Fahey, Modernism And The American Folk Revival, Lisa Carpenter
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
John Fahey’s music holds a distinct place in the mid-century folk revival--distinct because he is difficult to fit in with traditional narratives of the revival. John Fahey created a unique musical style through incorporation of traditional American music with classical music forms. His musical “quotations” and renditions of American blues, folk, ragtime, Protestant hymns, and parlor songs did not merely revive traditional music, but gave it new form and newfound respect in order to further artistic exploration. Fahey was a musical modernist, infusing tradition with the new. Fahey’s work can be situated in the context of modernist/folk connections that began …
Escaping Through The Past, Haunted By The Future: Confronting America Through Child Of God And The Underground Railroad, Zarah Victoria Quinn
Escaping Through The Past, Haunted By The Future: Confronting America Through Child Of God And The Underground Railroad, Zarah Victoria Quinn
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
My Master’s Thesis is comprised of two essays that review two contemporary American texts. Through genres of the gothic and historical fiction, these texts confront America’s violence of the past and present. The first essay, “Desiring and Dispossessing: Whiteness in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God,” investigates the novel’s reliance on a gothic genre as an affective strategy to confront whiteness’ specter of self-destruction. The second essay, “Escaping Through The Underground Railroad,” reconsiders the movement of escape and theorizes the action as a miraculous but forever-incomplete movement toward alternative ways of being--a theorization that could be useful for the present day. …
The Sacred Ginmill Closes: Heavy Drinking, White Masculinity And The Hard-Boiled Detective In American Culture, David Camak Pratt
The Sacred Ginmill Closes: Heavy Drinking, White Masculinity And The Hard-Boiled Detective In American Culture, David Camak Pratt
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Through close readings of fiction, film, and television, “The Sacred Ginmill Closes” provides a cultural history of the heavy-drinking hard-boiled detective in his twentieth-century cultural prime. Emergent in the Prohibition era, hard-boiled fiction comprised a cultural response to both the real and imagined effects of national prohibition. In portraying the Prohibition era’s corrupt and violent public sphere, early hard-boiled fiction by authors like Dashiell Hammett contrasted heavy drinking masculine authority figures, often private detectives, with transgressively greedy and excessively thirsty women whose participation in the public sphere and in masculine behaviors like heavy drinking represented both the cause and ongoing …
Black Capes, White Spies: An Exploration Of Visual Black Identity, Evolving Heroism And 'Passing' In Marvel's Black Panther Comics And Mat Johnson's Graphic Novel, Incogengro, Ravynn K. Stringfield
Black Capes, White Spies: An Exploration Of Visual Black Identity, Evolving Heroism And 'Passing' In Marvel's Black Panther Comics And Mat Johnson's Graphic Novel, Incogengro, Ravynn K. Stringfield
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis is a portfolio which contains two essays. The first essay, “Reclaiming Wakanda,” is a character biography of the Black Panther comic character from his inception in 1966 until 2016. The work historicizes and politicizes a character written as apolotical by his creators while also placing him firmly within a legacy of Black Power, Civil Rights and other Black freedom movements of the second half of the 20th century. The second essay, “Incogengro: The Creation and Destruction of Black Identity in the ‘Safety’ of Harlem” considers how images and representations race and racial violence are constructed in graphic novel …
"I Figured You Were Probably Watching Us": Ex Machina And The Performativity Of Lateral Surveillance, Kayla Danielle Meyers
"I Figured You Were Probably Watching Us": Ex Machina And The Performativity Of Lateral Surveillance, Kayla Danielle Meyers
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Surveillance plays a central role in the film Ex Machina (2015). Though surveillance is usually conceived as a unilateral force exerted by one agent onto another, the film imagines a more fluid system where characters perform roles of surveillant and subject of surveillance simultaneously. to provide commentary on surveillance culture, the film connects the A.I. film genre to the office film and fraternity film, which privilege male kinship. In bringing these three genres together, the film highlights gender hierarchies and constructions of masculinity where surveillance is a tool for exacting hetero-patriarchal power. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I …