Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
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 …
Walker Percy's Return To The Feminine., John Patrick Zmirak Jr
Walker Percy's Return To The Feminine., John Patrick Zmirak Jr
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
What has been lacking in the corpus of interpretation of Walker Percy's work is a synthesis of approaches, a reading of the novels that unites the philosophical, psychological, theological, and linguistic insights that have accrued over three decades of criticism, and applies them to the vexing question of sexuality within his novels. In the present work, Percy's four central, non-satiric novels, The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Lancelot and The Second Coming, are analyzed in the light of the Christian allegorical tradition, which employs sexual categories to explicate the meta-physical order, and to inform sexuality with meaning. In each of Percy's …
"All This World Is Full Of Mystery": The Fiction Of Ellen Douglas., Elizabeth Wilkinson Tardieu
"All This World Is Full Of Mystery": The Fiction Of Ellen Douglas., Elizabeth Wilkinson Tardieu
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation, "'All This World Is Full of Mystery:' The Fiction of Ellen Douglas," provides an introduction to the life of Ellen Douglas (pen name for Josephine Haxton) and a study of the author's major fiction from A Family's Affairs through Can't Quit You, Baby (1962-1988). The first chapter gives an overview of Douglas's life preceding her first novel, A Family's Affairs, with a focus on those people and events contributing to the themes and structure of her writing. The subsequent chapters trace the development of her craft, discussing in chronological order A Family's Affairs, Black Cloud, White Cloud, Where …
Elizabeth Bishop's Poetic Personae: The Dark And The Bright., Joan Louise Fields
Elizabeth Bishop's Poetic Personae: The Dark And The Bright., Joan Louise Fields
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The intrigue of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic texts lies in the design of her sonic elements, vocalized by her dramatic personae as she directs her play of words. She manages a cohesion among her concept or content, the phonemic nature of her chosen words, and the rhythmic phrasing of her lines. Her poetic texts convey an enigmatic, yet natural, tonal quality that is produced by the juxtaposition of opposite strains or "strands" of voice--one shadowed, darker; the other light, brighter. These strands include the voice of a little girl as well as mature male and female speakers. Beneath, yet interwoven with …
Le Temps Dans Les Oeuvres De Jorge Luis Borges, Edouard Glissant Et Saint-John Perse., Valerie Irene Loichot
Le Temps Dans Les Oeuvres De Jorge Luis Borges, Edouard Glissant Et Saint-John Perse., Valerie Irene Loichot
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation compares conceptions of time as they appear in the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Edouard Glissant and Saint-John Perse. It attempts to stage a series of encounters among these writers, encounters or "relatings" in the sense of correlation and narration. The first relation is that expressed by Paul Ricoeur, who states that time becomes human only when it is articulated in narration and narration becomes human only when it describes the features of temporal experience. The second relation, or set of relations, occurs in the plural, interrupted, yet interconnected topos of the Americas. Through an analysis of the …
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 …
Border Crossers And Coyotes: A Reception Study Of Latin American And Latina/O Literatures., Delia Maria Poey
Border Crossers And Coyotes: A Reception Study Of Latin American And Latina/O Literatures., Delia Maria Poey
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Since the 1970s, there has been an ongoing debate within the humanities regarding the canon and curricular reform. Moving beyond questions of advocacy and the dichotomy of center and periphery (without diminishing the necessity of these), Border Crossers and Coyotes: A Reception Study of Latin American and Latina/o Literatures surveys the various ways which marginalized texts enter U.S. academic discourse as well as analyzing the conflicts inherent in these border crossings. The study proposes the position of the coyote, a person who transports undocumented workers across the U.S./Mexico border for profit, as analogous to that of the critic/teacher. Employing a …
James Joyce's "Ulysses" And World War I., Ann Hingle Martin
James Joyce's "Ulysses" And World War I., Ann Hingle Martin
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The final words of Ulysses underline the text's position on the cusp of the pre- and postwar eras. Joyce was emphatic that Molly's "Yes" be immediately followed by those crucial coordinates: centerlineTrieste--Zurich--Paris. centerline 1914-1921. Where does this unsettling epitaph point us? In the direction of history, clearly; we are nudged toward the text's and its nail-paring creator's autobiography. Even the shallowest knowledge of recent history will indicate the centrality of those towns, during those years, to "all those wretched quarrels ... erroneouslv supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag" (526). Even the shallowest knowledge of recent …
Wordsworth's Mother Tongue: Identification, Separation, And Recognition., Robert C. Hale
Wordsworth's Mother Tongue: Identification, Separation, And Recognition., Robert C. Hale
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This psychoanalytic study complicates prevailing notions about William Wordsworth's representations of mothers. Wordsworth does not invariably conflate mothers with Nature or consistently construct women as silent objects of male quest. Rather, he explores a variety of mothers' voices, often associating them with language acquisition and poetic composition. In early work he acknowledges mothers' significance directly and creates more vocal mothers, while in later work and revisions he often conceals mothers' significance and depicts more object-like mothers. In the 1805 version of book two of The Prelude, Wordsworth recalls himself as a "blessed babe" who recognizes his mother as a separate …
"It Is Leviathan": Family, Feminism, And American Drama., Janet Vanderpool Haedicke
"It Is Leviathan": Family, Feminism, And American Drama., Janet Vanderpool Haedicke
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
American drama has ever occupied a stepchild position in scholarship, its denigration rooted in the lure of domestic realism for even the most resistant of our playwrights. Maligned as solipsistic and regressive, this "leviathan" of mainstream American theatre putatively upholds through its content the unity of the mythologized family and through its form the closure of classical realism. Yet the legacy of this leviathan is an epistemological subversion and a transformative impulse. Those very plays which apotheosize American domestic realism ironically undermine its foundation in psychological causality, narrative linearity, transparent language, unmediated consciousness, and unified meaning. Destabilizing that objective reality …
The Amazon Myth In Western Literature., Bruce Robert Magee
The Amazon Myth In Western Literature., Bruce Robert Magee
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation identifies and evaluates the ways in which the Amazon myth has functioned. The Amazon myth functions within broader discourses about the Orient, Africa, and women. It has implications for the ways we define "self" and "other." Because they are often represented as a threat to the border from long ago and/or far away, Amazons can serve both as an excuse for fortifying the center against the margin, and as a way of projecting fantasies into the void. The Amazon myth has incited men to action as they have searched for adventure and Amazons abroad. Intended in part as …