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Another Person's Skin: Imagining Race In The Works Of Crane, Dunbar, Cather And Stevens, Lisa M. Durose

Dissertations

This study is interested in the motivations behind certain authors' attempts to, in the words of Willa Cather, "enter into another person's skin"~in the desires compelling writers to cross, transgress, or perhaps transcend those barriers that have historically divided people in the world: barriers of color, class, and gender. In particular it seeks to examine the works of four early twentieth century writers who undertake what these days is considered risky: transracial and transethnic crossings. By relying on biographical, cultural, and historical sources, I explore the strategies American writers Stephen Crane (1871-1900), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872- 1906), Willa Cather (1873-1947), …

The Song Of Lies: A Collection Of Poems, James Scannell Mccormick

Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a book-length manuscript of poems. What holds up, what holds together, the collection is, fundamentally, a narrow examination of the interrelationship between the poetic speakers' physical and psychological landscapes, that is, how various psychological states (love, grief, fear) shape a speaker's perceptions of, and reactions to, the world. This psychological anatomizing and taxonomizing takes place in four stages, arranged as parts in the manuscript.

The first part, with its emphasis on the contrast between the "objective" (real or external) and the "subjective" (perceived or internal) worlds, establishes the speakers' essential inability to reconcile what they see …