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Articles 1 - 19 of 19
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Readings Of Zwelethu Mthethwa's South African Photographs: Postcolonialsim, Abjection, And Cultural Studies, Dusty K. Ross
Readings Of Zwelethu Mthethwa's South African Photographs: Postcolonialsim, Abjection, And Cultural Studies, Dusty K. Ross
English Theses
South African painter turned photographer, Zwelethu Mthethwa, was born in Durban during Apartheid. In 1980 Mthethwa began taking his photographs in the shanty towns on the outskirts of Cape Town and later took pictures in Mozambique and New Orleans. His work has global significance. Using art and literary theory and criticism, I expand upon the significance of his photographs in the contemporary world. I do “readings” of eight photographs from eight different series of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s work using postcolonial theory, abjection, and cultural studies as theoretical constructs to provide three different angles for interpreting his work.
A True And Lonesome West: The Spaces Of Sam Shepard And Martin Mcdonagh, Sarah A. Dyne
A True And Lonesome West: The Spaces Of Sam Shepard And Martin Mcdonagh, Sarah A. Dyne
English Theses
In this project, I explore how Sam Shepard and Martin McDonagh treat concepts of space (both on stage and within a larger context that expands beyond the theatre), and I seek to identify how underlying anxieties about a mythologized past become manifest in the relationships between characters and landscapes by examining heterotopic and liminal elements in their scripts.
Toward An Ethic Of Failure In Three Novels By Herman Melville, Elinore Faustino
Toward An Ethic Of Failure In Three Novels By Herman Melville, Elinore Faustino
English Theses
Herman Melville’s final novel The Confidence-Man destabilizes conventional Western models of ethical behavior, particularly Kantian notions of moral agency, by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. The Confidence-Man shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in their understanding and justify their moral choices. I use these insights from The Confidence-Man to illuminate Melville’s opposition to the missionaries’ work of civilizing and Christianizing the South Seas islanders in his earlier travelogues. In Typee, his first novel, Melville demonstrates …
Writing Space, Righting Place: Language As A Heterotopic Space In Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, Lelania Ottoboni Watkins
Writing Space, Righting Place: Language As A Heterotopic Space In Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, Lelania Ottoboni Watkins
English Theses
Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa may have had abolitionist motivations when writing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, but the function of the text is much different and self-serving. Specifically, in looking closely at the wording of the text, with its language of we versus they, in group versus out group, ours versus theirs, Equiano clearly feels he at no time belongs fully to any specific group or place; rather, he only partially belongs anywhere, and thus, creates this work of autobiography and appropriation of fiction and oral …
Revealing And Concealing Hitler's Visual Discourse: Considering "Forbidden" Images With Rhetorics Of Display, Matthew G. Donald
Revealing And Concealing Hitler's Visual Discourse: Considering "Forbidden" Images With Rhetorics Of Display, Matthew G. Donald
English Theses
Typically, when considering Adolf Hitler, we see him in one of two ways: A parodied figure or a monolithic figure of power. I argue that instead of only viewing images of Hitler he wanted us to see, we should expand our view and overall consideration of images he did not want his audiences to bear witness. By examining a collection of photographs that Hitler censored from his audiences, I question what remains hidden about Hitler’s image when we are constantly shown widely circulated images of Hitler. To satisfy this inquiry, I utilize rhetorics of display to argue that when we …
Carnival, Convents, And The Cult Of St. Rocque: Cultural Subterfuge In The Work Of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sibongile B. Lynch
Carnival, Convents, And The Cult Of St. Rocque: Cultural Subterfuge In The Work Of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sibongile B. Lynch
English Theses
In the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson the city and culture of 19th century New Orleans figures prominently, and is a major character affecting the lives of her protagonists. While race, class, and gender are among the focuses of many scholars the eccentricity and cultural history of the most exotic American city, and its impact on Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is unmistakable. This essay will discuss how the diverse cultural environment of New Orleans in the 19th century allowed Alice Dunbar Nelson to create narratives which allowed her short stories to speak to the shifting identities of women and the social …
It's Different For Girls: Coming Of Age In Two Victorian Novels, Jamila Mctizic
It's Different For Girls: Coming Of Age In Two Victorian Novels, Jamila Mctizic
English Theses
This thesis examines the feminine coming-of-age stories in The Mill on the Floss and Hard Times and seeks to redefine coming-of-age for Victorian girls as a movement into personal agency. The traditional bildungsroman has been defined in a way that largely excludes the experiences and stories of girls born during the early nineteenth century. Because these girls lacked the options and choices of their male counterparts, it becomes important to redefine what coming-of-age means when there are limited opportunities for personal growth. The middle-class Victorian woman led a largely prescribed existence and her well-being and security was often directly and …
Evolution Of Ethics In The Island Of Doctor Moreau And Heart Of Darkness, Christine D. Anlicker
Evolution Of Ethics In The Island Of Doctor Moreau And Heart Of Darkness, Christine D. Anlicker
English Theses
This thesis analyzes H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness within the context of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. I explore how Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley used evolution by natural selection to develop differing explanations of the origins of ethics and how this impacted the place each scientist gave morality in civilization. By exploring how Huxley and Darwin understood morality to derive from the phenomena of sympathy and restrain, I illustrate how Wells’s and Conrad’s novellas interrogate these discourses of altruism.
Through The Looking Glass: Another Reading Of Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Rebecca H. Bonacchi
Through The Looking Glass: Another Reading Of Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Rebecca H. Bonacchi
English Theses
This project examines Cather’s experimentation with conflicting voices of narrative authority in the presentation of four central female characters in The Professor’s House, using St. Peter and an entity termed the implied narrator as lenses through which we view other characters. The project is broken down into four chapters, each dealing one addressing the central issues involving that specific female character.
The Trauma Of Chattel Slavery: A Womanist Perspective Women On Georgia In Early American Times, Dionne Blasingame
The Trauma Of Chattel Slavery: A Womanist Perspective Women On Georgia In Early American Times, Dionne Blasingame
English Theses
This thesis explores the psycho-socio-cultural dynamics that surrounded black womanhood in antebellumGeorgia. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how slave narratives, testimonies, and interviews depicted the plight of enslaved black women through a womanist lens and second, to discover what political and socio-cultural constructions enabled the severe slave institution that was endemic toGeorgia. Womanist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and trauma theory are addressed in this study to focus on antebellum or pre-Civil WarGeorgia.
Gothic Romance And Poe's Authorial Intent In "The Fall Of The House Of Usher", Robert F. Hiatt
Gothic Romance And Poe's Authorial Intent In "The Fall Of The House Of Usher", Robert F. Hiatt
English Theses
In my thesis I will discuss Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in relation to the expectations that scholars have of the gothic genre. I will break this project into four chapters, along with an introduction: (Ch.1) a critical review of scholarship on Poe’s “Usher” that will demonstrate the difficulty in coming to a critical consensus on the tale, (Ch.2) a discussion of Brown’s outline of Gothic conventions, (Ch.3) a look at Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” juxtaposed with Aristotle’s Poetics to illumine aspects of Poe’s approach to writing and how it has been informed, and …
In Their Words: Women's Holocaust Memoirs, Shana Latimer
In Their Words: Women's Holocaust Memoirs, Shana Latimer
English Theses
Sara Tuvel Bernstein’s The Seamstress and Rena Kornreich Gelissen’s Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, both Holocaust memoirs, offer insight into the rise of violent anti-Semitism prior to World War II and the authors’ experiences in concentration camps. The purpose of this project is to better understand the unique trauma women experienced during the Holocaust and the impact of that trauma on their literary responses.
Slothrop's Sublime: Perversion And Paranoia In Gravity's Rainbow, Christopher Simony
Slothrop's Sublime: Perversion And Paranoia In Gravity's Rainbow, Christopher Simony
English Theses
This paper examines how the protagonist of Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, seeks subjective fixity in the historical and postmodern sublime. Using an approach that draws upon the theories of Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, the essay argues that while Slothrop indulges his own paranoia and commits acts of increasing perversion to assert self, these attempts actually blur the lines of identity instead of presenting an autonomous being.
Who Cycles Into Our Valley, Benjamin M. Solomon
Who Cycles Into Our Valley, Benjamin M. Solomon
English Theses
The twelve stories in this collection chart a course between the United States and India. Some are set wholly in one country, while others form a bridge between the two. Uniting them is a shared attention to memory, isolation, and loss. In their own idiosyncratic ways, each of the characters in these small fictions is struggling for human connection in a hostile and lonely world.
The Lactating Body On Display: Collective Rhetoric And Resistant Discourse In Breastfeeding Activism, Amy M. Saxon
The Lactating Body On Display: Collective Rhetoric And Resistant Discourse In Breastfeeding Activism, Amy M. Saxon
English Theses
This thesis analyzes public “nurse-ins” and breastfeeding activism of the past decade, examining public breastfeeding demonstrations as an example of collective rhetoric in which the individual is empowered in its relation to the masses. The author discusses the potential of collective rhetoric to reintroduce feminist activism at a time dominated by postfeminist discourse. Staged nurse-ins force the public to confront realities of the maternal body; however, the self-proclaimed “lactivists” seldom discuss the inseparable sexuality of the breast and the underlying narrative of “natural” and “good” motherhood. Addressing Foucauldian discursive formations, the author acknowledges that even though the resistant discourse cannot …
The Pursuit Of Happiness: The State Of The American Dream In Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, Sabrina A. Abid
The Pursuit Of Happiness: The State Of The American Dream In Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, Sabrina A. Abid
English Theses
In an interview conducted by Matthew C. Roudané, Arthur Miller elaborates on the extent the myth of the American Dream infuses our literature: “The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out—the screen of the perfectibility of man. Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story” (374). Suzan-Lori Parks is no exception to this rule. In her Pulitzer-Prize winning Topdog/Underdog, Parks reveals the illusory nature of the American Dream on a private, deeply personal level by focusing her drama …
Dismantling The Spatiality Of Heaven In The Prayer Poems Of Emily Dickinson, Scott A. Pett
Dismantling The Spatiality Of Heaven In The Prayer Poems Of Emily Dickinson, Scott A. Pett
English Theses
I identify three significant components of Heaven’s spatiality that determine the boundaries of and conditions for “legitimate” spiritual experience, all of which are embodied in what Dickinson calls “the apparatus” of prayer (Fr 632). First, the locations of Heaven and Earth are determinable, absolute, and inflexible, thus marking the distance that separates human from God as static and constant; second, in order to engage God, the supplicant must turn towards Heaven (and away from Earth); and third, specific spatial and emotional protocol are established by assigning God socially constructed roles such as King or Father. Dickinson dismantles the spatiality of …
Dressing Their Best: Independent Fashion Bloggers And The Complexities Of Ethos, Melody C. Heffner
Dressing Their Best: Independent Fashion Bloggers And The Complexities Of Ethos, Melody C. Heffner
English Theses
Fashion is a site of cultural production where issues of gender, identity and consumerism meet. While the rhetoric of the fashion industry often remains focused on innovation at the expense of women's lived experiences, independent fashion bloggers provide a necessary cultural critique of its practices. However, as the fashion industry pays more attention to bloggers in order to engage their growing readership, bloggers’ oppositional role has become more complicated. To explore the current context of these women’s writing in relation to a powerful economic industry, I analyze the role that ethos plays as a rhetorical concept and analyze how it …
Phenomenology Of Space And Time In Rudyard Kipling's Kim: Understanding Identity In The Chronotope, Daniel S. Parker
Phenomenology Of Space And Time In Rudyard Kipling's Kim: Understanding Identity In The Chronotope, Daniel S. Parker
English Theses
This thesis intends to investigate the ways in which the changing perceptions of landscape during the nineteenth century play out in Kipling’s treatment of Kim’s phenomenological and epistemological questions of identity by examining the indelible influence of space— geopolitical, narrative, and imaginative—on Kim’s identity. By interrogating the extent to which maps encode certain ideological assumptions, I will assess the problematic issues of Kim’s multi-faceted identity through an exploration of both geographical and narrative landscapes and the various chronotopes—Bakhtin’s term for coexisting frameworks of time and space—that ultimately provide a new reading of identity-formation in Kim.