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Of Language And Thought: American Political Discourse, Normative Reason, And Essentially Contested Concepts, Riley Clare Valentine
Of Language And Thought: American Political Discourse, Normative Reason, And Essentially Contested Concepts, Riley Clare Valentine
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation analyzes progressive liberalism and neoliberalism as forms of normative reason that redefine specific political concepts, which are central to American liberalism – equality, liberty, the role of the State, and the pursuit of happiness. I contend that language is an important expression of normative reason. Language is how political reason and the norms accompanying it are expressed. I move through Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Barack Obama, exploring shifts in language and interpretations of political concepts through progressive liberal and neoliberal forms of normative reason. I argue that a tension emerges between progressive liberalism and neoliberalism, and a …
The Implications Of The American Symphonic Heritage In Contemporary Orchestral Modeling, Mathew Lee Ward
The Implications Of The American Symphonic Heritage In Contemporary Orchestral Modeling, Mathew Lee Ward
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Disparate priorities between composers, performers, audiences, and institutions have created systemic issues in the sustainability and relevance of symphonic music in modern society. The purpose of this study is to explore the history of the symphonic heritage in the United States with the goal of forming solutions to contemporary issues in the sphere of classical symphonic music. With consideration for the breadth of repertoire, the genre of the symphony is the primary focus, with special attention given to under-represented and under-performed composers. The American symphony orchestra, nonexistent during the founding of the country, has become one of the greatest conduits …
Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson
Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I articulate a hermeneutics for reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal text Nature through drawing on the insights of the contemporary philosopher Sebastian Rödl. Particularly, the performative, literary characteristics of Rödl’s quite conceptual work resonate with the poetic strategies that Emerson employs in Nature. In the section on the work of Rödl, I make the performative aspects of his philosophy explicit through a close reading of the way self-consciousness happens in his texts through the language he employs. Rödl refers to his elucidation of self-consciousness as idealism. In the section on Emerson, I show how Emerson’s project …
From Native To Nation: Copway’S American Indian Newspaper And Formation Of American Nationalism, David Shane Wallace
From Native To Nation: Copway’S American Indian Newspaper And Formation Of American Nationalism, David Shane Wallace
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation argues that the publication of Copway’s American Indian (1851) challenges accepted representations of nineteenth-century American Native peoples by countering popular stereotypes. Interrogating a multiplicity of cultural artifacts at the moment of their meeting and investigating the friction created as they rub against one another within the columns of the periodical, I argue that the texts that contribute to the make-up of Copway’s American Indian are juxtaposed in such a way as to force nineteenth-century readers to reconsider the place of the indigenous inhabitants in the American nation. Seemingly disconnected tidbits of information, presented not individually but as components …
Faulkner And The Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, And The Politics Of Art., Theodore B. Atkinson Iii
Faulkner And The Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, And The Politics Of Art., Theodore B. Atkinson Iii
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
William Faulkner's most concentrated and flourishing phase of literary production virtually coincided with the Great Depression, yet the relationship between these two monumental developments in American cultural history has remained for the most part unexplored. Consequently, a more complete understanding of Faulkner can be achieved by redressing this critical oversight. Such an endeavor must involve reconstituting relevant features of historical and cultural context so as to comprehend the forces informing Faulknees literary production. A critical approach rooted in Marxist literary theory is useful in this regard, for it challenges persistent notions of Faulkner as a writer resistant to contextual influences …
Silencing Dreiser: Textual Editing And Theodore Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt"., Annemarie Koning Whaley
Silencing Dreiser: Textual Editing And Theodore Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt"., Annemarie Koning Whaley
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In 1911 Theodore Dreiser published his novel Jennie Gerhardt . Prior to publication, the editors at Harper and Brothers cut around 16,000 words from the text. In 1992 James L. West III, Distinguished Professor of English and Fellow for the Arts and Humanities Studies at Pennsylvania State University, published a restored "Pennsylvania" edition. Scholars are now unsure of which text better represents Dreiser's original artistic vision for the novel. This dissertation closely examines the changes made to the original manuscript and concludes that these changes alter Dreiser's original artistic vision dramatically. Therefore, the 1911 edition is substantially inferior to the …
The Evolution Of Frank Norris In The American Medievalist Tradition: Norris's Progression From Gothic Juvenilia To Modern Courtly Love In "The Pit"., Holly Ann Hale
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Though most Frank Norris scholars dismiss the author's early gothic works as insignificant elements of the Norris canon, I argue that this frequently ignored juvenilia is essential to understanding Norris's unique development as an American Naturalist. Norris, like other authors of his generation, was caught up in a boyhood enthusiasm for the Middle Ages which was initiated and nurtured by a similar nostalgia for the period among the American elite in the late nineteenth-century. This post-medieval nostalgia for medieval convention came to be known as medievalism and its enthusiasts were called medievalists. Norris's early naturalistic writings, including a number of …
Politics And Philosophy In The Writings Of Robert Penn Warren., Billy Berryhill
Politics And Philosophy In The Writings Of Robert Penn Warren., Billy Berryhill
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Robert Penn Warren is generally regarded as one of America's preeminent men of letters in the twentieth century. In his poetry and novels-as well as his historical essays, literary and social criticism, biographies, and other non-fiction---Warren often addressed political themes. This study of the role of political ideas in Warren's writings begins with his concept of the "philosophical novelist" who consciously incorporates ideas into fiction. An examination of Warren's own essays about his novel All the King's Men provides a useful illustration of the concept and introduces the reader to two key themes that pervade all of his writings: first, …
Autobiography From St. Augustine To David Antin: Examining The Construction Of The Self As Mutually Reflective Of Cultural Developments In Science And Technology, Art, And Literary Theory., Jessica Lynn Faust
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In this study, I look at the mutually reflective changes in society and autobiography in works definitive for their various periods: Augustine's The Confessions from antiquity; Rousseau's The Confessions from the eighteenth century; the autobiographical writings of Gertrude Stein, from the modernist period; and, most importantly here, the focus on the development of David Antin's work as representative of both postmodernism and current culture. Specifically, I consider the construction of the self in respect to art, literary theory, memory research, and science and technology. During the second half of the twentieth century, computers have permeated almost every facet of society. …
The Clarity Of The Modern: Or, The Ambiguities Of Henry James And Wallace Stevens., Gregory Angelo Marks
The Clarity Of The Modern: Or, The Ambiguities Of Henry James And Wallace Stevens., Gregory Angelo Marks
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Clarity, in all its various guises, was before the advent of Romanticism looked upon as an unquestioned focus of attention and irrefutable goal of human endeavor. Conversely, ambiguity was seen negatively: it was in language an obstacle to communication; in ethics, an indecisiveness failing action; and in ontology and aesthetics, a slovenly disorder. With Romanticism, this basic consensus regarding these terms ends. No longer an expression of censure, ambiguity is imagined as a liberatory force. Clarity, if attainable at all, is dismissed as mere rigidity. The works of Americans Henry James and Wallace Stevens embody and enact this tension and …
A Study Of The Influence Of Text In Morten Lauridsen's "Mid-Winter Songs"., Margaret Sue Hulley
A Study Of The Influence Of Text In Morten Lauridsen's "Mid-Winter Songs"., Margaret Sue Hulley
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
A close examination of any composer's work may yield a revealing picture of the importance placed on text by the composer. This paper focuses on the relationship between poetry and music in Morten Lauridsen's Mid-Winter Songs, settings of five poems of English poet Robert Graves. Chapter One's biography of Morten Lauridsen contains the history of Mid-Winter Songs, from its commission to its present form. The biography of Graves emphasizes those elements in his life that are referred to in the poems of Mid-Winter Songs. Chapter Two demonstrates how the texts of Mid-Winter Songs share a common vocabulary of poetic imagery; …
Ambivalent Idylls: Hardy, Glasgow, Faulkner, And The Pastoral., Stephan Randall Toms
Ambivalent Idylls: Hardy, Glasgow, Faulkner, And The Pastoral., Stephan Randall Toms
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Thomas Hardy, Ellen Glasgow, and William Faulkner used the pastoral mode to show the contradictions, inconsistencies, and dangers in some forms of bucolic idyll. The ambivalence of their texts toward the rural world causes many critics to deny or overlook the presence of the pastoral mode in the work of these three novelists. A study of pastoral literature reveals that its characteristics have never been as fixed as many theorists would like to believe. Pastoral redefines, subverts, and reinvents itself as it interacts with different people, cultures, and languages. The theories of Mikhail Bakhtin help us to understand textual ambivalence …
American Literary Environmentalism, 1637-1872., David Mazel
American Literary Environmentalism, 1637-1872., David Mazel
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The American environment is a mythic narrative that has served to mystify the social and economic relationships linking people and place. This study examines the early writing of the environment, from the 1637 Pequot War to the creation of the first national parks in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 1 draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Edward Said to theorize "literary environmentalism" as a knowledge-power formation that functions as a domestic Orientalism. Chapter 2 theorizes the narratological and psychosociological bases of environmental constructions generally before analyzing two colonial texts whose literary environmentalism is paradigmatic: John Underhill's Newes from …
Delights Of The Night And Pleasures Of The Void: Vampirism And Entropy In Nineteenth-Century Literature., Michael James Dennison
Delights Of The Night And Pleasures Of The Void: Vampirism And Entropy In Nineteenth-Century Literature., Michael James Dennison
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation explores the figure of the vampire in the nineteenth century as a metaphor of disorder, especially as interpreted through the root metaphor of the second law of thermodynamics, also known as entropy. The theoretical approach used in the reading of several vampire texts is an entropy theory of literature, a mostly aesthetic approach of relevance to a comparatist study on vampirism and entropy. Chapter One considers the female vampire in one of her earliest nineteenth-century incarnations, the seductive Clarimonde of Theophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse. Chapter Two is a study of the vampire women in Edgar Allan Poe's …
Encoding Imperialism: Homelessness In American Naturalism, 1890-1918., Janet M. Whyde
Encoding Imperialism: Homelessness In American Naturalism, 1890-1918., Janet M. Whyde
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Homelessness occurs with uncommon regularity in the works of American naturalists, and in each case, the result of a character's homelessness results in a crisis of social identity and self definition. This pattern recurs in the works of the canonically identified naturalists, such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, as well as other writers who have only been tangentially associated with naturalism--Edith Wharton and Paul Laurence Dunbar, for example. In this study, I analyze the relationship between homelessness as it is represented in the novels and the political debate over the United States's imperialist aspirations at the turn …
"Rag-Tag And Bob-Ends Of Old Stories": Biblical Intertextuality In Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, And O'Connor., Timothy Paul Caron
"Rag-Tag And Bob-Ends Of Old Stories": Biblical Intertextuality In Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, And O'Connor., Timothy Paul Caron
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Liqht in August, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Uncle Tom's Children, and Wise Blood all borrow from the South's religious traditions. Recognizing the authority given to the Book, Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, and O'Connor invoke and re-read its central stories, characters, and tropes in order to voice their individual contributions to the South's intra-cultural conversation on race. In various ways, each work claims the necessity of the South to revitalize its practice of biblical interpretation. All of these texts comment upon the South's racial struggles over exactly how the Bible was to be interpreted: is it a book to aid in …
Comedy Of Redemption In Three Southern Writers., Carolyn Patricia Gardner
Comedy Of Redemption In Three Southern Writers., Carolyn Patricia Gardner
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The present study discusses a theological motif in the works of three Southern writers, Faulkner, Percy, and Toole, with The Unvanquished, The Moviegoer, and A Confederacy of Dunces being the works chosen for examination. The particular nature of religion in a Southern novel is established early. The Southern novelist is concerned not with sin in the abstract but with the existential angst resulting from it and with the hope of redemption. Also, in the Southern novel, there is humor undergirding even the study of existential angst. God's comedy is the focus of this study of the movement toward redemption in …
Wise Economies: Storytelling, Narrative Authority, And Brevity In The American Short Story, 1819-1980., Kirk Lee Curnutt
Wise Economies: Storytelling, Narrative Authority, And Brevity In The American Short Story, 1819-1980., Kirk Lee Curnutt
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study proposes a new way of measuring brevity in the American short story. Since Edgar Allan Poe's definition of the tale, literary criticism has looked to various structural features within the text to define the elements that distinguish the short story from other prose genres like the novel. I argue that brevity is an essential feature of storytelling and suggest that its perception is molded and shaped by several historical factors. The phrase "wise economy" offers two ways of thinking about the conciseness of the form: it evokes a history of rhetorical economy central to the formation of a …
Children Of A Lesser Education: Contemporary American Drama And Multiculturalism., Walter Holton Placzek
Children Of A Lesser Education: Contemporary American Drama And Multiculturalism., Walter Holton Placzek
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study explores issues of multiculturalism in contemporary American plays that deal with education. The project begins by identifying the value which the American social order places upon education. It next analyzes the shifting and multiple definitions and connotations of "culture" and "multiculturalism," probing the possible implications of multicultural education for American society. Seven contemporary American plays (all of which place a primary focus upon the educational system and/or process) are examined: Uncommon Women and Others, the one-act and full-length versions of Open Admissions, Children of a Lesser God, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, Another Antigone, and …
Voices From Home: Familial Bonds In The Works Of Horton Foote (1916- )., Marion Dean Castleberry
Voices From Home: Familial Bonds In The Works Of Horton Foote (1916- )., Marion Dean Castleberry
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
For more than half a century Horton Foote has been regarded as one of America's foremost dramatists. Born and reared in Wharton, Texas, he wrote his first play Wharton Dance in 1939, at the age of twenty-three, and gained his first Broadway production, Only The Heart, in 1944. His success as a playwright led to television, for which he wrote some of his finest dramas, and finally to a distinguished career in film. Foote has received numerous awards for his plays and screenplays, including Academy Awards for To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983) and an Academy Award …
Romanticism Reconsidered: The Implications Of Organicism In Educational Reform., Anne Burford Griffin
Romanticism Reconsidered: The Implications Of Organicism In Educational Reform., Anne Burford Griffin
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The purpose of this study was to reconsider what has historically been called "Romantic" in American education. What I discovered was the ubiquity of organicism--an organicism which, when applied to education, promises to heal divisions with connection and integration. A reading of Romanticism as organicism is a traditional interpretation which fails to acknowledge the revisionist work of critics like de Man, Hartman, Bloom, and McFarland, who regard the Romantic recognition of language and self-consciousness as providing alienation, not unity. However, education continues to regard the Romantics as organicists and to provide organic remedies, such as the organic reforms proposed in …
Mimesis And Poiesis In The Novel: William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" And The Mythopoeic Turn In The American Imagination., Paul Richard Connell
Mimesis And Poiesis In The Novel: William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" And The Mythopoeic Turn In The American Imagination., Paul Richard Connell
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In the course of its development as a genre, the novel shifted in the mid-twentieth century from a mimetic model grounded in imitation and colored with pessimism, to a poietic one based on discovery and novelty and foregrounded in hope. Precipitated by a crisis in representation after Joyce, the novel found in its own history, through the recuperation of older literary forms, new possibilities of representation, and shifted away from assumptions based on fact and history, to one grounded in miracle and myth. This shift was anticipated by the theories of the German Romantics Schlegel and Novalis and is adumbrated …
Codependency Issues In Selected Contemporary American Plays., Jill Stapleton Bergeron
Codependency Issues In Selected Contemporary American Plays., Jill Stapleton Bergeron
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Codependency is defined in this study as a disease characterized by individual adult inability to function in everyday life, in particular regards to personal relationships with others, in a healthy and self-loving manner. The study points to the works of several prominent theorists and practitioners in this field, such as John Bradshaw, Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse, Anne Wilson Schaef, and John and Linda Friel, as authoritative resource material on the subject. Being progressive in nature, codependency eventually leads to a host of severe personality and physical disorders, and usually to some form of suicide. The study points to abusive treatment in childhood--either …
Modernity And War In The Poetry Of T. S. Eliot., Patricia Anne Gabilondo
Modernity And War In The Poetry Of T. S. Eliot., Patricia Anne Gabilondo
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Although most readers of T. S. Eliot have agreed that the European experience of world war and the resultant political and cultural dislocations provided an important context and source of imagery for much of his work, what has not been recognized is Eliot's use of figures of war to represent the intimate yet antagonistic relations between the poet's writing of modernity and the text that is history. Beginning with a tropological analysis of Eliot's "A Note on War Poetry," relative to both the genre of war poetry and aesthetic modernity, this study examines the figural interpenetration of war and literary …
A Reading Of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" And "A Curtain Of Green": The Influence Of Parable On Flannery O'Connor And Eudora Welty., Allison Carol Chestnut
A Reading Of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" And "A Curtain Of Green": The Influence Of Parable On Flannery O'Connor And Eudora Welty., Allison Carol Chestnut
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor and A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty are short story cycles harmonized by their marked imitation of the style and structure of parable. O'Connor added stories after initially sending the collection to the publisher and then rearranged them accordingly; her work represents a completed cycle. Welty's collection, published in an order different from their individual publications and their original placement in an early typescript, is an arranged cycle. Moreover, parabolic style and structure unify each cycle. A parable typically is a brief story told in the past tense, usually …
The Federal Writers' Project's Mirror To America: The Florida Reflection., Pamela G. Bordelon
The Federal Writers' Project's Mirror To America: The Florida Reflection., Pamela G. Bordelon
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In the 1930s, the federal writers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) plowed fertile new ground in American cultural scholarship. The writers were for the most part not professionals but white collar workers who had been dramatically rescued from unemployment by this government relief project. Like other New Deal relief agencies, the Writers' Project had been created more to make work than to do work. But by the end of the program, it had charted a nation and documented American life more comprehensively than any earlier effort had done. In Florida the federal writers produced a state guide, pioneered African-American …
Faulkner, Truth, And The Artist's Directive: A Reading Of "A Fable"., Bobby Lynn Matthews
Faulkner, Truth, And The Artist's Directive: A Reading Of "A Fable"., Bobby Lynn Matthews
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The old general in A Fable embodies the resolution of questions about the relation of art and life that Faulkner evoked in his invention of Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury and pursued in a series of subsequent characterizations. This artist-figure motif discloses Faulkner's implication of the relation in the modern crisis of faith. Faulkner images in narrative fiction what Nietzsche asserts in discourse, namely, the need for a reversal of the Platonic valuation of eternal "truth" (ideality) over art. The characterization of Quentin shows the potentially terrible consequences of man's propensity for mythopoeic invention, as Quentin's unconscious …
Existentialism And New England: The Poetry And Criticism Of Hayden Carruth., Anthony Jerome Robbins
Existentialism And New England: The Poetry And Criticism Of Hayden Carruth., Anthony Jerome Robbins
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Hayden Carruth (b. 1921) has reached an advanced stage in his distinguished career as a poet, critic, and editor without having received the critical attention which he deserves and which has been accorded many of his less able contemporaries. He is a thorough-going existentialist, a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee, and an anarchist. The study uses these characteristics to explore the importance of his poetry and the nature of his complex relations with his chosen traditions. The first three chapters describe and analyze Carruth's development book by book from 1959 to 1983. The fourth chapter, "Carruth's Existential Revisions of Walden," considers Carruth's response …
With The Flavor Of The South: The Influence Of The Southern Tradition On The Writings Of Shirley Ann Grau., Judy Ann Tarver
With The Flavor Of The South: The Influence Of The Southern Tradition On The Writings Of Shirley Ann Grau., Judy Ann Tarver
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Since before the time of the so-called Southern Renaissance of the 1920's, critics have been debating the existence and the value of a literature of the South. Although they agree on little else, most would concur that such a literature would share certain characteristics: a belief in the importance of community and the past; a tendency to prefer myth, or a perception of reality, to reality itself; a religious sensibility, especially a pervading sense of sin and guilt; an emphasis on place; and the use of elements of the Gothic. For thirty-five years Shirley Ann Grau has been writing fiction …
New Female Playwrights In The American Theatre, 1973-1983: A Critical Analysis Of Thought In Selected Plays., Joyce Williams O'Rourke
New Female Playwrights In The American Theatre, 1973-1983: A Critical Analysis Of Thought In Selected Plays., Joyce Williams O'Rourke
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Historically, the female playwright has been plagued by a lack of visibility. Long hindered by a limited number of women writers as role models, by the few receptive stages on which to mount their works, and by a public accustomed to a male dominated stage practice, female playwrights nevertheless in the last two decades have produced an extraordinary body of work, signifying a new thrust in the American theatre. Ten playwrights have been selected as representatives of this movement: Tina Howe, Rosalyn Drexler, Rose Goldemberg, Mary Gallagher, Adele Shank, Lavonne Mueller, Wendy Wasserstein, Ntozake Shange, Beth Henley and Marsha Norman. …