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Immigration, Ethnicity, And Citizenship: The Words And Faces Of The Chinese Of North America, Pengyi Huang
Immigration, Ethnicity, And Citizenship: The Words And Faces Of The Chinese Of North America, Pengyi Huang
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I have analyzed the migrant experience of Chinese immigrants in North America through their representation in literature and photography. Each of its three chapters focuses on three major ethnic issues affecting the lives and identity of Chinese immigrants and their offspring in North America: the first concerns the ways in which occupation, home, and family affect the destinies of Chinese immigrants; the second deals with the role of language in the lives of Chinese immigrants and the career of Chinese migrant writers; the third addresses stereotypes about Chinese immigrants and their offspring and the redefinition of their …
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 …
Southern Bellas: The Construction Of Mestiza Identity In Southern Narratives, Wendy Aimee Braun
Southern Bellas: The Construction Of Mestiza Identity In Southern Narratives, Wendy Aimee Braun
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This project analyzes representations and self-representations of Mestizas living in areas of the Deep South that lack a significant Latino presence. Incorporating a range of media, I take a comparative approach to Southern cultural narratives and propose a re-reading of these works through an examination of identity formation and cultural negotiation. By centering the Southern Mestiza, this dissertation advances concepts of intersectionality to address the role of region, as well as race and gender, in the representation and experiences of women often overlooked in Southern and U.S. Latino studies. The Introductory chapter summarizes the theoretical framework for the study, including …
Attitudes Des Éducateurs Envers Le Français Et Le Créole: Le Cas D'Haïti, Lesly Jean-François
Attitudes Des Éducateurs Envers Le Français Et Le Créole: Le Cas D'Haïti, Lesly Jean-François
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Language attitudes represent a serious challenge for Haitian education policy makers. This research is the first attempt to study the attitudes of elementary school educators toward the linguistic situation in Haiti. A survey of 154 teachers addressed their attitudes toward language use, preference and choice, and their stereotypes toward other Haitian native speakers. Three instruments (quantitative questionnaire, Match-Guise-Technique, and qualitative questionnaire) were utilized and two Statistical Methods (descriptive and inference), along with Chi-Square were used in order to observe the significance of differences in independent variables. Since Haitian teachers who participated in this study were assumed bilingual, the questionnaire first …
Perceptions Of Stereotypes In Hispanic Children's Literature, Nancy Gomez
Perceptions Of Stereotypes In Hispanic Children's Literature, Nancy Gomez
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This study attempted to determine the accurateness of the representation of the Hispanic culture in children’s books. I interviewed ten people: five non-Hispanic and five Hispanic, and I found that the Hispanic people do not seem to pay as much attention to physical features as non-Hispanic people do. However, they were concerned about the portrayal of the Hispanic culture in traditional ways: the traditional roles of women, the traditional dress, the architecture of the houses and the portrayal of the Hispanic people living in rural areas and being extremely poor. It appears that from the timeline covered by the books, …
Reticent Romans: Silence And Writing In La Vie De Saint Alexis, Le Conte Du Graal, And Le Roman De Silence, Evan J. Bibbee
Reticent Romans: Silence And Writing In La Vie De Saint Alexis, Le Conte Du Graal, And Le Roman De Silence, Evan J. Bibbee
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Apart from discourse and yet somehow part of it, silence is a powerfully ambiguous linguistic phenomenon that blurs the lines between presence and absence. Eluding the material aspects of oral and written language, it is only perceptible as the gaps or spaces between words. Nonetheless, it plays a role in all linguistic productions: although silence itself cannot be directly communicated, it can influence communication. In a literary text, silence may takes on many different guises, including rhythmic hesitations, rhetorical omissions, and poetic oppositions that mimic the audible gaps of spoken language. The visual, aural, and fictional interaction of all these …
Translating Exile In Panait Istrati's "Mes Departs", Samuel Beckett's "Fin De Partie" And Selected Poems By Paul Celan., Ina Alice Pfitzner
Translating Exile In Panait Istrati's "Mes Departs", Samuel Beckett's "Fin De Partie" And Selected Poems By Paul Celan., Ina Alice Pfitzner
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Translation and exile are two phenomena that marked life in the twentieth century, especially in Europe, and have therefore left their traces in French literature as well. Translation from one language to another is a heightened form of the translation process inherent in any writing. Exile in a foreign country, linguistic exile, is an aggravated form of the exile every human being experiences at some point. Parting from Lucian Blaga's concept of "mioritic space," which is based on the Romanian myth of Mioritza, as well as Walter Benjamin's essay "Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers" [The Task of the Translator], this study …
Kate Chopin's Contribution To Realism And Naturalism: Reconsiderations Of W. D. Howells, Maupassant, And Flaubert., Jean Ann Witherow
Kate Chopin's Contribution To Realism And Naturalism: Reconsiderations Of W. D. Howells, Maupassant, And Flaubert., Jean Ann Witherow
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
No one has previously undertaken a detailed examination of Kate Chopin's documented intertextuality with writers such as W. D. Howells, Hamlin Garland, Maupassant, and Flaubert. My purpose is to examine Chopin's works in the context of writers with whom she interacts and so to reveal her impact on the development of literary realism and naturalism. My study reveals that, though her mature writing eliminates sentimentalism, she never abandons romance elements residual from her youth. Her typically subjective narrator removes narrative authority, intensifies our involvement with characters, and validates the marginalized voice. Darwin and the philosophers temper her Catholicism, yet she …
Slain In The Spirit: A Vodun Aesthetic In Selected Works Of Simone Schwarz -Bart, Zora Neale Hurston, And Paule Marshall., Maria Thecla Smith
Slain In The Spirit: A Vodun Aesthetic In Selected Works Of Simone Schwarz -Bart, Zora Neale Hurston, And Paule Marshall., Maria Thecla Smith
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study, focusing on select novels by women writers of the African diaspora, discovers a surprising commonality among works with obvious geographical, cultural and linguistic differences---an affirmation of the philosophical essence of the Vodun religion as an antidote to Western spiritual and cultural moribundity. Each of the novels---Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle, and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow---alludes to the Vodun pantheon, ancestor veneration and/or rituals in order to valorize the holistic Vodun worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness of all living things and the fluidity of boundaries between …
Hearsay, Testimony And Conference: Citationality In The Works Of Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot And Jacques Derrida., Mary Carla Criner
Hearsay, Testimony And Conference: Citationality In The Works Of Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot And Jacques Derrida., Mary Carla Criner
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation involves an examination of the effects and implications of three modes of citationality: hearsay, testimony and conference. As a term coined by Jacques Derrida, citationality involves the problematization of questions related to borders and limits and to the attempt to re-present the originary event thought to lie beyond the performance of citational acts of bearing witness. In chapter one I situate my project theoretically through an examination of the principles of deconstruction. In particular, Jacques Derrida's work on the metaphysical concepts of presence and speech, in terms of repeatability or iterability, bears heavily on my study. As a …
A Matter Of Life And Death: Jose Maria Arguedas, Mario Vargas Llosa, And The Postmodern Condition., Lynn Marie Walford
A Matter Of Life And Death: Jose Maria Arguedas, Mario Vargas Llosa, And The Postmodern Condition., Lynn Marie Walford
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Despite all that has been written in recent years on the subject of literary postmodernism, theorists and critics have yet to arrive at a consensus about the meaning of the term. In the context of Latin America, the theoretical disagreement is given an added dimension by an ongoing debate over whether the notion of postmodernism, in any of its manifestations, is relevant to contemporary Latin American letters. This study maintains that at least some of the issues raised in the debate over postmodernism are not only relevant, but crucial to an understanding of the many complex worlds of Latin America …
Francis Hayman: An Artist Reading British Literature In The 1740s., Stephen Alan Raynie
Francis Hayman: An Artist Reading British Literature In The 1740s., Stephen Alan Raynie
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The on-going comparison of the sister arts (poetry and painting) in the eighteenth century recommends a reassessment of Francis Hayman's role as an artist reading and interpreting literary texts. A founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768, Francis Hayman began his artistic career as a scene painter at the Goodman's Fields and Drury Lane theaters. Although Hayman was one of the most prolific book illustrators in mid eighteenth century Britain, relatively little critical attention has been devoted to his work. Moreover, his circle of friends included such Old Slaughter's and St. Martin's Lane Academy regulars as Henry Fielding, William …
Memory, Time And Identity In The Novels Of William Faulkner And Marcel Proust., John Stephen Larose
Memory, Time And Identity In The Novels Of William Faulkner And Marcel Proust., John Stephen Larose
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation is a comparative study of first person narrative in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), and selected novels of William Faulkner, primarily those in which the character of Quentin Compson appears: The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This comparison is based upon the assumption that the attempts to represent the patterns of thought, memory, or consciousness in these novels is symptomatic of many twentieth-century novels, which dramatize an anxiety about the possibility of a solid ground for knowledge of the world or of the self. The language of these novels …
Rights Of Passage: A Cross -Cultural Study Of Maroon Novels By Black Women., Randi Gray Kristensen
Rights Of Passage: A Cross -Cultural Study Of Maroon Novels By Black Women., Randi Gray Kristensen
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study investigates the use and implications of the trope of marronage, the African-American practice of self-emancipation to forge alternative New World communities, in selected novels by Black women writers of North America and the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. It draws on theories of liminality to posit a theory of liberatory practice that deconstructs hegemonic narratives, both personal and historical. Postmodern approaches are deferred in favor of locating these texts and their concerns as deriving from the epistemological consequences of modernity. Cross-cultural Black women's texts were chosen to illuminate the recognition of shared subjugations across national and linguistic borders, as …
Ernest Renan And The Question Of Race., Jane Victoria Dagon
Ernest Renan And The Question Of Race., Jane Victoria Dagon
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Racism in France can be traced back to the 1560's when the nobles claimed to be of a separate race in order to obtain special rights and privileges. Soon after in the seventeenth century, scientists started to classify humans according to physical features. With the increase in travel, the slave trade, the fear of the unknown and the fear of contamination, these factors along with physiognomy and phrenology encouraged "biological racism." During the second half of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan (1823--1892) denounces biological racism and the existence of the so-called "pure races." He is also the first dramatist to …
The Search For Senefiance: Contraires Allegories In The "Roman De La Rose", Camilla Rachal Pugh
The Search For Senefiance: Contraires Allegories In The "Roman De La Rose", Camilla Rachal Pugh
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
It is the thesis of this dissertation that there exists in the Roman de la Rose a system of contraires allegories which move in a direction opposed to the traditional readings of three facets of the text. They are (1) Amant's assault upon the statue/sanctuary, (2) his relationship with Bel Accueil, and (3) the advice which Genius gives to Amour's barons. In addition, when taken cumulatively, the readings advanced argue for the identification of the Roman de la Rose with the Evangile eternel of Joachim de Fiore. These readings depend upon the reader's recognition of Faus Semblant as a contraire …
The Women On/Of The Porch: Performative Space In African-American Women's Fiction., Lajuan Evette Simpson
The Women On/Of The Porch: Performative Space In African-American Women's Fiction., Lajuan Evette Simpson
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Mediating Structures in African-American literature are essential in the formation of identity in the lives of the characters. Contemporary theory has moved into a deeper layer of hermeneutics beyond self/other dichotomies to look at the space between binary opposites. Therefore, modern theorists look at sites of play, of exchange, and of transformation. The porch is such a space. A mediating structure is a space that allows the various characters to develop and define themselves. Because of African-Americans, lack of freedom, it was important for them to find a space in which they were able to move and express their ideas, …
The "Power...To Alter And Amend": Textual Production And Editorial Actions In Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa"., Steven Robert Price
The "Power...To Alter And Amend": Textual Production And Editorial Actions In Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa"., Steven Robert Price
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This dissertation is a study of texts, focusing on how texts are constructed (through both words as well as physical attributes) and how they are edited after their initial composition. The scope of this dissertation is limited to Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and his rare 1750 third edition of Clarissa and to the characters in Clarissa and their familiar letters. I argue that the altering of a text is a negotiation of power between the editor and the author, and that editors advance their personal agendas by undermining the intentions of the author. In Chapter 1, I explain the relevancy of …
"To Play With Fixities And Definites": Byron's Fanciful Real World Games In "Don Juan"., Nancy Clark Victory
"To Play With Fixities And Definites": Byron's Fanciful Real World Games In "Don Juan"., Nancy Clark Victory
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In his "epic" retelling of the Don Juan tale, Byron playfully transforms his conventional sources into a poem which explores, among other subjects, Byron's poetics. Of the many love relationships in Don Juan, Juan and Haidee's represents not only ideal love, but also a startlingly Romantic expression of poetic activity. The lovers' transformation of the elements of their heretofore hostile world into a natural playworld is accomplished by a fourth variety of Romantic imagination, a Byronic Fancy which surpasses the mechanical nature of Coleridge's "Fancy." Operating in a manner strikingly similar to Coleridge's "secondary Imagination," Byron's poetic faculty also "dissolves, …
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 …
Rousseau And The Lyric Natural: The Self As Representation., Pamela Diane Gay
Rousseau And The Lyric Natural: The Self As Representation., Pamela Diane Gay
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's work for the lyric stage comprises several opera libretti (Les Muses galantes and La Decouverte du nouveau monde), an intermede ( Le Devin du village), a scene lyrique ( Pygmalion) and an unfinished opera (Daphnis et Chloce ). These works use as a motif the figure of nature while continually defining and redefining, in a sort of spiral development, the self. Nature represents for Rousseau and others of his century a paradigm allowing for small segments of history to be presented as an evenly construed narrative. For Rousseau, the construction of a narrative in Le Second Discours marks …
The Counsel Group: Rhetorical And Political Contexts Of Court Counsel In "The Canterbury Tales"., Marc S. Guidry
The Counsel Group: Rhetorical And Political Contexts Of Court Counsel In "The Canterbury Tales"., Marc S. Guidry
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
The Counsel Group: Rhetorical and Political Contexts of Court Counsel in The Canterbury Tales argues that counsel-taking is one of the most important themes in Chaucer's masterwork. Court counsel--which includes giving the ruler or lord political advice, making laws and treaties, and passing judicial sentence--was a major form of medieval discourse that recurs throughout Ricardian poetry. Indeed, the modern principle of consultative government has its roots in the medieval discourse of counsel and consent. As a diplomat in the service of Richard II, member of parliament, and acquaintance of several leading members of the king's council, Chaucer was well positioned …
Representing Shakespeare's "Brave New World": Latin American Appropriations Of "The Tempest"., Ximena Gallardo
Representing Shakespeare's "Brave New World": Latin American Appropriations Of "The Tempest"., Ximena Gallardo
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Representing Shakespeare's "Brave New World" is a descriptive analysis of Latin American appropriations of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. The first part explores the written appropriations by Jose Enrique Rodo, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aime Cesaire and George Lamming. The second part analyzes four major dramatic appropriations of The Tempest: a 1989 production by the Chilean company El Conventillo, a 1994 adaptation by the Chilean company La Bordada, a 1991 version by the Venezuelan company Rajatabla and a 1992 production by the Mexican company Por Amor Al Arte. Representing Shakespeare's "Brave New World" also explores the connection between these …
Linguistics And Poetry: Phonological Performance Analysis As Key To Interpretation In Donne's Lyrics., Sara Witsell Anderson
Linguistics And Poetry: Phonological Performance Analysis As Key To Interpretation In Donne's Lyrics., Sara Witsell Anderson
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
This study blends linguistic science and literary criticism by using phonological theory and methodology to uncover interpretive clues in the form of structurally-based guidance to the manner of performance of certain lines of selected poems. Its underlying assumption is that with regard to interpretation, the oral dimension of metrical lyric poetry is at least as important as the written dimension, since such commonly accepted features as meter, rhyme, and alliteration depend on oral performance of the poetry involved, at least in the form of the reader's sounding it imaginarily to the mind's ear. It follows that intonationally precise renditions of …
Southern Families And Their Daughters: The Self And The System In Selected Texts By Grau, Gilchrist, Welty, Spencer, And Douglas., Jo K. Galle
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
In this interdisciplinary study, I apply the materials of family systems theory to the study of five twentieth-century literary texts, each written by a Southern white woman. Arranged in the order they will appear in this study, the five texts are The Keepers of the House (1964) by Shirley Ann Grau; Net of Jewels (1992) by Ellen Gilchrist; The Golden Apples (1949) by Eudora Welty; The Voice at the Back Door (1956) by Elizabeth Spencer; and Can't Quit You, Baby (1988) by Ellen Douglas. In the analysis of these books--all examples of domestic and social realism--I analyze and measure the …
The Myth Of Narcissus And The Narcissistic Structure., Joachim Conrad Hermann Vogeler
The Myth Of Narcissus And The Narcissistic Structure., Joachim Conrad Hermann Vogeler
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses
Since Freud's article "On Narcissism," behavioral psychologists have predominantly viewed this phenomenon as a personality disorder. This dissertation, in contrast, provides a psychoanalytic, i.e., Lacanian reading of the myth of Narcissus as it is recorded in classical literature, and brings about an understanding of the myth's underlying structure. The four fundamental exigencies of the myth's structure include the incest prohibition which symbolically castrates the human subject, the incestuous desire as a result of this prohibition, the displacement of this desire for another imaginary object, and the obsessive quest of that image as the symptom. This structure--defined as narcissistic structure and …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …