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Long In The Tooth: The Commodification Of Teeth, Land, And Character; Resistance To British Oral Culture In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, And The Americas 1770-1900, Emma B. Mincks

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation is about teeth- rather, how they are portrayed in British colonial discourses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and their development as a commodified material object associated with purity, lands, and visceral emotionality. What do teeth specifically, and orality more generally, mean to eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers in relation to the logics of white possession? How did objectified subjects react to and respond to the affective tension created by this objectification? Teeth are represented in relation to feminine purity throughout British writing from at least the 1600’s. However, between 1770-1900, teeth gain additional cultural meanings, most …

Transformation And Embodiment: Posthumanism In Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales And Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl, Samantha Ludlow

All Master's Theses

This thesis seeks to analyze Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, with a particular emphasis on how one’s age, gender, and racial identity each affect the reception an individual has towards their animality and connections with nonhuman animals. By using posthumanism as a framework, I argue that though it is initially difficult for Darrieussecq’s narrator to accept her changing body during her adulthood (where she already has a strong sense of identity), her transformation and choice to life as a sow by the end of the novel illustrates a rejection of her society’s anthropocentrism. Further, …

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women’s clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how …

Seeking The Feminine Divine: Mormon Women's Religious Authority, Power, And Presence In Rachel Hunt Steenblik's Mother's Milk, Kaitlin Hoelzer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Literary theorists like Hélène Cixous and other French feminists have written about l’écriture feminine, a deconstructive force which allows female writers more freedom from male-dominated areas. Because Christianity has been historically male-dominated, Christian women have long used this idea to great effect, using their writing as a space in which they are free to assert power and authority. Mormonism, which arose in the 1830s during the Second Great Awakening, has grown to reinforce a patriarchal model for both family and church leadership, making Cixous’ separate space of writing necessary for Mormon women of the twenty-first century. The Mormon poet …

"Monsters In Suburbia": Women's Bodies, Monstrosity, And Motherhood In The Mere Wife, Claire M. Bonvillain

Honors Theses

This thesis explores themes of monstrosity in Maria Dahvana Headley's novel The Mere Wife in connection with issues of women's bodies and feminism. It analyzes prominent female characters in the novel and the relationships of their bodies to patriarchal authority, showing how and why bodies are deemed monstrous. It discusses the role that motherhood plays in patriarchal society, as well as explores alternatives that the novel offers to this system.

“That Confusion Of Who Is Who, Flesh And Flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, And The Body In Postwar And Contemporary American Literature, Jennifer Renee Blevins

Theses and Dissertations

In “That confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, and the Body in Postwar and Contemporary American Literature, I investigate how the body limits, disrupts, ruptures, or recuperates the mother/daughter relationship in postwar and contemporary texts by twentieth-century US women writers. These narratives portray the construction of female subjectivity when the feminine self seems insufficiently distinct from the mother (or daughter). In four chapters arranged chronologically by decade, I examine texts by Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat. On the one hand, mothers in these texts …

Voice, Choice, And ( Material ) Agency: The Sexualized Feminine Body In Young Adult Literature, Tharini Viswanath

Theses and Dissertations

My study unites two disparate strands of feminist theory: the linguistic, which emphasizes the relationship between language and power, and the material, which argues that the human body has its own agency. I raise three main points. First, I contend that the sexualized feminine body is the site of neither the linguistic nor the material independent of one another, but both the linguistic and the material existing in a state of fluidity and interdependency, which combine to grant the young female character agency. Second, I contend that feminist novels should not only have strong female characters, but that they should …

Letter Blocks, Lukas Graham Hemmer

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A collection of prose and poetry exploring language as a material object.

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …

Identity, Spectacle, And Embodiment In Social Protest, Craig Alan Crowder

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation examines the way rhetorical performances of identity function within a social movement. Examining the University of Kentucky chapter of a campus activist organization, United Students Against Sweatshops, I argue that embodied performances of identity often leverage spectacle in disruptive ways and work not only to solidify activists’ identities as part of a social movement but ultimately help to create solidarity within the movement, thereby working toward movement objectives. Historically under-examined in social movement literature in the rhetoric and composition tradition, identity performance examples are taken from an oral history project and archival materials to show how identity is …

The Embodiment Of Theory In Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Julie A. Ficks

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore how Maggie Nelson, in her groundbreaking memoir The Argonauts (2015), works to bring critical theory (primarily queer and feminist theory) out of the academy and into the realm of the personal, rendering theory as tangible and embodied in a real-world setting. Through this unique exchange, Nelson radically reinstates norms relating to gender, sexuality, motherhood and relationships.

Re-Embodying Our Discipline, Chelsea Dryer

Theses

This Master's Thesis uses personal narrative and scholarly works to examine the benefits of embodiment in literary studies. Special attention is given to how lived experience can provide legitimate sources of academic evidence when examining texts and that texts can be used to integrate, examine, and reframe lived experiences.

Embodying The West: A Literary And Cultural History Of Environment, Body, And Belief, Julie E. Williams

English Language and Literature ETDs

My dissertation challenges the dominant narrative identity about Western embodiment and opens the field of Western literary studies as it explores what the West looks like to women writers for whom it is not a space of regeneration through violence. I argue that women’s writing reconceptualizes Western literature, creating a counter-narrative about American identity by shaping a space for and a discourse about the embodied experiences that have been marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Through examining discourses of health and embodiment in women’s writing about the American West from the 1880s to the present day, my study brings together a diverse …

Intelligent Bodies And Embodied Minds: Reading Religious Performance In Middle English Writing From Syon Abbey, Nicholas Love, William Langland, And John Gower, Paul Holchak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues for a new reading of the relationship that texts have to performance, bodies have to agency, and that social construction has to literary criticism as these matters relate to the study of religious practice in late medieval England. The project first asks what it meant to participate in religious practice in two, early fifteenth-century Middle English prose texts, The Myroure of Oure Ladye and The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. The former work is a gloss of the Divine Service performed by the Brigittine sisters at Syon Abbey, and the latter consists of …

A Tourist Performance: Redefining The Tourist Attraction, Brandy Lee Kinkade

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to examine the intersection of tourism and memoirs in the United States specifically how specific travel memoirs function as tourist attractions. This investigation employs performer-centered analysis as a method of inquiry in order to gain insight on tourist experience as well as concepts of travel, imagination and embodiment. The paper also employs MacCannell’s Semiotics of Attraction as a framework to illustrate the presence of the following categories: tourist, sight, and marker. The presence and the relationships established between these categories establish Into Thin Air and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-eight Days on the John Muir Trail …

The Early Modern Space: (Cartographic) Literature And The Author In Place, Michael C. Myers

HIM 1990-2015

In geography, maps are a tool of placement which locate both the cartographer and the territory made cartographic. In order to place objects in space, the cartographer inserts his own judgment into the scheme of his design. During the Early Modern period, maps were no longer suspicious icons as they were in the Middle Ages and not yet products of science, but subjects of discourse and works of art. The image of a cartographer’s territory depended on his vision—both the nature and placement of his gaze—and the product reflected that author’s judgment. This is not a study of maps as …

The Sabatoge Of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" : Hitchcock Reads Conrad, Robert Benton Preslar

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This paper traces the ways in which Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent and Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage each comment on their respective mediums. Taking the object which is left behind in the wake of Stevie's death as its starting point, the triangular piece of cloth, this thesis examines the ways in which the figure of the delta alerts the reader to a commentary on language and text that echoes throughout the novel. As that triangular piece of cloth becomes a film tin bearing the title "Bartholomew the Strangler," this paper then traces the resonances that film and the …

Artificial Intelligence And The Technological Sublime: How Virtual Characters Influence The Landscape Of Modern Sublimity, Kyle Craft-Jenkins

Theses and Dissertations--English

The principle objective of this thesis is to expand the term “technological sublime” to include technologies of artificial intelligence. In defining new realms of the technological sublime, we must not only consider the ecological integration of technology within natural surroundings, but also appreciate modern technological objects that instigate sublime experiences. This work examines science fictional portrayals of interactions with sentient artificial intelligence in I, Robot, 2001: A Space Odyssey and other major works of science fiction. In each of these works, characters who encounter technologies possessing artificial intelligence share sublime experiences. This thesis considers various levels of embodiment associated with …

Graphomania: Composing Subjects In Late-Victorian Gothic Fiction And Technology, Gregory D. Brophy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the varied phenomena of “automatic writing” in Victorian Gothic fiction, reading the genre’s fascination with the irrepressible signifying practices of the body in light of the medical, criminological and scientific discourses that underwrite the “scriptural economy” of the late nineteenth century with their own arsenal of automatic writing machines. I have titled the project "Graphomania," and I consider the term a keyword of late-Victorian culture—one that names a distinctly Victorian pathology of compulsive writing, but that alludes also to the widespread epistemic hope that writing could render objectively the internal and subjective experiences of individuals.

In a …