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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
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At Home In The Free-Market World: The Neoliberal Cosmopolitan Man In Salman Rushdie's Fury, Mary J. Nitsch
At Home In The Free-Market World: The Neoliberal Cosmopolitan Man In Salman Rushdie's Fury, Mary J. Nitsch
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
This article offers an exploration of the concept of cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie's novel, Fury. Through both Rushdie's and his protagonist's cosmopolitanism, the ambivalence of the position is revealed in particular through the latter's (un)easy access to global commodities and problematic exploitation of women. The economic and gender exploitations oddly converge in Solanka's latest creative project, the success of which glosses over the problematics of class and gender privilege. Ultimately, the protagonist’s cosmopolitanism truly impedes any critique cosmopolitanism might afford: he is readily swept up in the rising tide of the 90s financial boom and the frequently misogynist sexuality …
Distinctly American: Performing Humanity In African American Literature From Proto To Post New Negro Renaissance, Julie A. Naviaux
Distinctly American: Performing Humanity In African American Literature From Proto To Post New Negro Renaissance, Julie A. Naviaux
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project demonstrates how African American literature from the 1910s through the 1940s uses performance in order to stage debates within African American identity and American culture. Drawing on recent literary scholarship, performance studies, and early critical writing on African American art and performance, the project examines scenes of public performance in order to show how these literary scenes create space to investigate social and cultural constructions. The project investigates the ways performances within the texts also critique performances of race, gender, and class. Within these performance scenes, the literary texts also critique the audiences’ reactions to the artistic product …
Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey
Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey
Theses and Dissertations--English
Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …
Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven
Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct …
Northside, Jesse L. Houk
Northside, Jesse L. Houk
Theses and Dissertations--English
The Northside of Lexington, Kentucky is an area with its own culture, community and art. While living in this community I was able to learn, grow and develop alongside this newly renovated area. The people and their lives intersect in such a way that creates a tension at times. However, many social awareness advocates vie for the success of this neighborhood for many years to come. The objective of studying such an area as the Northside in Lexington is to focus on the similarites rather than the differences in culture, community and artistic endeavor. With a collection of essays and …
Patriarchal Trauma In Appalachian Literature, Michelle Justus
Patriarchal Trauma In Appalachian Literature, Michelle Justus
Theses and Dissertations--English
Patriarchal Trauma in Appalachian Literature examines the effects of subjugation on women as it is represented in three novels set in Appalachia. I define patriarchal trauma as an act causing mental anguish to a woman and perpetrated against her because she is a woman. I use the term to encompass violent, catastrophic harms but more particularly to pinpoint the traumatic effects of the quotidian, systemic deprivation of women’s autonomy. Reconsidering classic texts such as James Still’s River of Earth and Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage as narratives of women’s trauma establishes a lineage on the subject, …
Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero
Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero
Theses and Dissertations--English
Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing …
Life Matter: Women Subjects And Women's Objects In Innovative American Poetry, Jenna L. Goldsmith
Life Matter: Women Subjects And Women's Objects In Innovative American Poetry, Jenna L. Goldsmith
Theses and Dissertations--English
Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, and Juliana Spahr employ innovative poetic practices attuned to nature and environment in order to understand their personal lives and depict these understandings for readers. My dissertation investigates how these poets enact an inclusive posture toward environment that many innovative and experimental women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries possess, but are rarely recognized for. To this end, my dissertation provides counterarguments to characterizations of innovative or experimental poetic practices as reclusive, language-centric, opaque, and/or disconnected from the material world. I offer readings of poems, prose pieces, film, and art, to illustrate how materially innovative …
A Culture Of Rape: In Twentieth Century American Literature And Beyond, Lisa M. Schroot
A Culture Of Rape: In Twentieth Century American Literature And Beyond, Lisa M. Schroot
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project examines rape culture in American literature and society, exploring factors of rape culture through the narratives of literary protagonists and current women alike. Each chapter is grounded in a work of literature, which serves as a lens through which to analyze a factor of rape culture, and is then broadened in scope to incorporate recent court cases that have had significant sociocultural impacts. The introduction includes a critical review of rape in feminist theory, from Susan Brownmiller to Ann J. Cahill. The first chapter treats the rape of Dolores Haze and victim blaming in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita …
The Contest Of Marriage: Domestic Authority In The Victorian Novel, Morgan Richardson
The Contest Of Marriage: Domestic Authority In The Victorian Novel, Morgan Richardson
Theses and Dissertations--English
In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate …
Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar
Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar
Theses and Dissertations--English
While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …
The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin
The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin
Theses and Dissertations--English
While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a …
Strong, Independent, And In Love: Fighting Female Fantasies In Popular Culture, Allison P. Palumbo
Strong, Independent, And In Love: Fighting Female Fantasies In Popular Culture, Allison P. Palumbo
Theses and Dissertations--English
During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics like Janice Radway began to reconsider so-called women’s genres, like romance novels and soap operas and melodramas, in order to address the forms of subversion and expressions of agency they provided female audiences. However, in spite of greater willingness to consider the progressive potential in romance narratives, there has been little such consideration given to stories of romance for the fighting female character—defined as a protagonist who uses violence, via her body or weapons, to save herself and others. The fighting female has received a good deal of attention from critics like …