Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Epistemological Insecurity In The Anthropocene, Dustin Purvis
Epistemological Insecurity In The Anthropocene, Dustin Purvis
Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports
This dissertation analyzes how increased mainstream awareness of climate change and other complex environmental phenomena transforms some of the basic tools we use to understand the world, including notions of agency, evidence, and causality. More specifically, this project highlights numerous contemporary literary and cultural narratives that formally and thematically depict impromptu systems of action and comprehension developed by humans confronting the unique forms of information overload that result from damaged and rapidly changing environments. Following critics like Ulrich Beck, Rob Nixon, and Stacy Alaimo, I suggest our current era of ecological instability and destructive environmental practices dictate what I refer …
Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank
Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank
Theses and Dissertations--English
Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …