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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
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Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie
Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this project, through a closer examination of the controversies over Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), I seek to identify the elements of a defensible postcolonial vision. While postcolonialism is afflicted with many problematic assumptions, the exclusively liberal perspective which these authors seek to reaffirm in its place has its own plethora of defects. Ali, Hosseini and Nafisi merit a closer attention not only for their exposing some of the flawed views underlying postcolonialism but also for their demonstrating why an unqualified reversion to liberalism may …
Lopsided, Scarred, And Squint-Eyed: Ugly Women In The Work Of Southern Women Writers, Monica C. Miller
Lopsided, Scarred, And Squint-Eyed: Ugly Women In The Work Of Southern Women Writers, Monica C. Miller
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The ubiquity of ugly female characters in the work of southern women calls into question what W. J. Cash termed “gyneolatry,” the worship of the beautiful white woman upon which so much of southern ideology has been based. If the South functions as an internal other for the nation, then examining this fiction’s multiplicity of ugly women illuminates the ways in which women defy not only the norms of southern gender but also those of the larger American culture, in which the southern woman often acts as a representation of the South in general. By considering ugliness as a category …
The Imagined After: Re-Positioning Social Memory Through Twentieth-Century Post-Apocalyptic Literature And Film, Amanda Ashleigh Wicks
The Imagined After: Re-Positioning Social Memory Through Twentieth-Century Post-Apocalyptic Literature And Film, Amanda Ashleigh Wicks
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Maurice Halbwachs first proposed a collective approach to memory in the early twentieth century, but the vast majority of subsequent scholarship investigates memory’s social properties from a theoretical point of view. This project instead proposes that memory functions as a social phenomenon in significant and real ways, primarily understood through the social relations that arise within social frameworks, which provide a structure against which people’s memories come together to form important memory-narratives that configure individual and social consciousness. Once people transform memory from individual thought-image into socially structured language, memory takes on social properties. Memory relies upon social frameworks to …
Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas
Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
“Thrillology: Affective Intensities and the Everyday-Spectacular in American Literature and Culture” presents thrill as a powerful thematic component centered on immediate affective gratification informing character development and narrative. This perspective rethinks theme as always having an affective dimension that accompanies its conceptual articulations, with the former, in many cases, being the more important element. Thrilled psycho-emotional states emerge, in their own right, as legitimizations of individuality and cultural autonomy from the perspective of the passional subject. Engaging with a broad spectrum of literary and cultural sources spanning the last hundred years, this project investigates various ways in which the self-fulfilling …
The Visual Novel: Fictional Space And Print After 1900, Michael James Griffin Ii
The Visual Novel: Fictional Space And Print After 1900, Michael James Griffin Ii
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation, The Visual Novel: Fictional Space and Print After 1900, examines how and why the novel has assimilated visual mediums—film, art, and the digital—into the genre as a means of adapting to the proliferation of mass media and technology. This project connects a history of the novel (genre) with a history of the book (the genre’s physical form), thereby theorizing and narrating a history of the visual novel. I demonstrate that through fictional space, a critical term used by narratologists and textual studies scholars, visual writing emerges as a hybridized mode of creative composition where we can see most …
Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality And Sociality In Literary Productions, 1974-1997, Jaime Cantrell
Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality And Sociality In Literary Productions, 1974-1997, Jaime Cantrell
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality and Sociality in Literary Productions, 1974-1997, considers how queer and feminist theories illuminate and complicate the intersections between canonical and obscure, queer and normative, and regional and national narratives in southern literary representations produced during a crucial but understudied period in the historical politicization of sexuality. The advent of New Southern Studies—and its nascent emphasis on sexuality as an organizing principle of social relations—has focused almost exclusively on midcentury texts from the Southern Renascence, largely neglecting post-1970 queer literatures. At the same time, despite these developments in southern studies, most scholarship in women’s and feminist studies continue …
Toward A Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading The Rural In Seamus Heaney And Paul Muldoon, Stephanie Jean Osburn Krassenstein
Toward A Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading The Rural In Seamus Heaney And Paul Muldoon, Stephanie Jean Osburn Krassenstein
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The goal of this dissertation is three-fold: to mount a comparison of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, arguing that the two poets actually share much in common, particularly in their use of the pastoral mode; to argue that the pastoral mode offers a provocative, even radical platform for postcolonial writing and thinking; and to argue that reading Heaney and Muldoon, and Ireland in general, as postcolonial offers much for critics and scholars. This project looks particularly at Heaney’s use of gender in landscape to argue that Heaney relies on an abject pastoral mode, one which is dominated by excess fertility …
Precarious Positions: Toward A Theory And Analysis Of Rhetorical Vulnerability, David Riche
Precarious Positions: Toward A Theory And Analysis Of Rhetorical Vulnerability, David Riche
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this project, I develop a framework for treating rhetoric as a system for managing vulnerabilities to and through discourse. I contend that, through rhetoric, we are all put into a fundamentally precarious position, an unavoidable state of exposure to material, social, institutional, and rhetorical forces that work to condition us as both agents and audiences. Rhetoric is not simply something we use; it is also something that we respond to, something to which we are continuously exposed, whether we like it or not. There is, in other words, a necessary concern for vulnerability at the heart of rhetorical theory …
Intersections Of Race And Class In 1830s Othello Burlesques, Laura Michelle Keigan
Intersections Of Race And Class In 1830s Othello Burlesques, Laura Michelle Keigan
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In recent years, we have come to better understand how nineteenth-century burlesques critiqued and lampooned the respectable humbuggery of patent theater productions and middle-class culture. Their carnivalesque spectacle and low humor turned topsy-turvy what was falsely revered or pretentious in English society. This study, however, explores the extent to which some burlesques responded conservatively to social and legislative change, which supposedly weakened established hierarchies constituting English culture and society. My chapters examine how two burlesques of Shakespeare’s Othello—Charles M. Westmacott’s Othello, the Moor of Fleet Street (1833) and Maurice M. M. G. Dowling’s Othello Travestie (1834)—contributed to discourse surrounding debate …
Queer Emplotment: Lesbian Caretaking In North American Canonical Fiction From 1980 – 2011., Penelope Gay Dane
Queer Emplotment: Lesbian Caretaking In North American Canonical Fiction From 1980 – 2011., Penelope Gay Dane
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation argues that lesbian caretaking in late 20th century and early 21th century North American fiction disrupts normative temporalities while repairing damage protagonists sustain from intra-familial trauma. Aligned with queer studies’ growing interest in representations of time, my project explores this paradox of lesbian representation. How can lesbian characters be both reparative and disruptive? Lesbian characters in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1980); Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992); and Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) are reparative as they clean up the psychological and physical damage caused male violence, sexual abuse, and neglectful mothers. Yet their caregiving disrupts …
Painful Conversions: Reading And Writing Education Reform In Louisiana, Thomas George Sowders
Painful Conversions: Reading And Writing Education Reform In Louisiana, Thomas George Sowders
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In January 2013, the superintendent of a rural Louisiana school system initiated a plan to increase school choice in his district through the implementation of a new virtual magnet school and the conversion of an existing elementary school into a magnet school. Both plans were set into action in April 2013. This study uses performative writing to document the better part of a year spent engaged in this project as a contracted educational consultant. Melding William Blake’s theories of apocalypse and social metonymy with experimental modes of scholarly production as praxis, I theorize education reform as an interactive performance. By …
“Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’S Essayistic Approach To Nothing, Dena Marks
“Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’S Essayistic Approach To Nothing, Dena Marks
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation, “Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’s Essayistic Approach to Nothing, responds to the dominant strand in Beckett criticism that figures the writer as a philosopher of “nothing” whether of Democritean, existentialist, or deconstructionist voids. In contrast, I argue that Beckett’s literary texts approximate philosophy in their essayistic style, characterized by the incorporation of multiple, contradictory sources in a fragmented form. While philosophical analyses are often designed to demonstrate that the literary texts are the equivalent of philosophical discourse, in the first chapter I argue that they actually serve to re-subordinate literature to philosophy since they depend on the pre-existing philosophical …
Body Language: Pain In Victorian Literature, Laura Jane Faulk
Body Language: Pain In Victorian Literature, Laura Jane Faulk
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
“Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature” argues that Victorian authors use the readable sign system of the body and pain to emphasize their characters’ physical features to the reader. As characters physically manifest emotions or experience violence, their appearances change, and these differences depend on physical descriptions. Marks on the body give it texture and depth, creating a layering that encourages the reader to envision and remember it. Character interactions, particularly when they read others’ somatic signs and experience or cause brutality, further flesh out characters, emphasizing their physical presences in the reader’s mind. The somatic sign system depends upon …