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Lessoning Fiction: Modernist Crisis And The Pedagogy Of Form, Matthew Cheney

Doctoral Dissertations

Writers committed to Modernist ideas of artistic autonomy may find that commitment challenged during times of socio-political crisis. This dissertation explores three writers who developed a similar literary strategy at such times: they pushed fictionality toward and beyond its limits, but ultimately preserved that fictionality, revealing new value in fiction after challenging it. Virginia Woolf, Samuel R. Delany, and J. M. Coetzee shaped their writings at these moments to provide readers with an experience that I argue is congruent with the goals of critical pedagogy as espoused by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and others. Such a reading experience avoids an …

1960s Travel Fiction And Englishness During The Postimperial Turn, Matthew J. Hurwitz

Doctoral Dissertations

British travel writing has for centuries helped to construct English identity in relation to its others. The traditional function of travel narratives to define Englishness, however, faced a fundamental crisis of meaning when the British Empire starting falling apart after WWII. This crisis emerged as an explicit literary subject in several key 1960s novels: John Fowles's The Magus (1965), V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967), and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In these three novels, Fowles, Naipaul and Rhys critique British imperialism by engaging and reinventing the travel narrative form. Although many British writers publishing during the 60s …

"The Alien Within": Residual Catholicism And The Emerging National Identity Of Post-Reformation England, Melissa K. Siik (Femino)

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the current critical discourse in Early Modern English Studies on the conceptions and literary representations of national and racial identity in 16th- and 17th-century England. Central to this discourse is an examination of how the English defined themselves in relation to those they deemed as "others": the foreign and marginalized members of society. My study is unique because I look at individual figures of "otherness"---the Irishman, the Turk, and the Jew---in light of their common characteristic: their shared significance as coded figures of Catholicism. Ultimately, my dissertation unifies disparate conversations about race, religion, and politics in …

Raping The Raced Body: Trauma In Asian North American Women's Literature, Amy Lillian Manning

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the representation of racial and sexual traumas in short fiction and novels by Asian American women writing post-WWII to the present. The central focus of this project is on Asian American literary representations of the lingering effects of physical, racial, and sexual traumas to Asian American women, specifically the nuances of narrating traumatic experiences. Each chapter explores various literary representations of post-traumatic psychological states of unrest, instability, and incoherence. Most importantly, this study examines the frequently simultaneous narrations of sexual trauma and racial awareness, of how personal narratives of trauma against the physical body become entangled with …

Competing Visions: Women Writers And Male Illustrators In The Golden Age Of Illustration, Jason Richard Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

In "Competing Visions," I examine the works of women writers and male illustrators during what has been termed the "Golden Age of Illustration" (1880--1920). Due to advances in printing technology and the proliferation of mass-market magazines just before the turn-of-the-last century, novels and short stories were often published with images by illustrators like Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth, who subsequently gained enormous popularity and developed wide followings. At the same time, women writers enjoyed an unprecedented period of widespread exposure and political influence. Looking closely at the intersection of images and texts from early twentieth century periodical publications reveals …

Corpses Revealed: The Staging Of The Theatrical Corpse In Early Modern Drama, N M. Imbracsio

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the theatrical depiction of corpses as both stage-objects for theoretical speculation and as performance phenomena of the early modern English stage. Investigating popular drama on the London stage from 1587 -- 1683, I demonstrate that the performance of the dead body by the living actor (what I term the "theatrical corpse") is informed by early modern secular and religious polemics over the materiality of the body, the efficacy of performative behavior, and emerging theories of theatrical presence.

Previously, literary scholars have approached the performance of death on the stage using the insights of psychoanalysis or medical science, …

Excavating The Landscapes Of American Literature: Archaeology, Antiquarianism, And The Landscape In American Women's Writing, 1820--1890, Christina Healey

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the ways that women writers made use of the discourses of antiquarianism and archaeology between the years 1820 and 1890. Focusing especially upon the writings of Sarah Josepha Hale, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, the project examines depictions of artifacts, ruins, relics, and other antiquities in literary landscapes. Each of these women presents a unique way of knowing the world that is manifested in the ways their texts join different ways of understanding the landscape, its occupants, the artifacts it contains, its strata and geological history, and its aesthetic value. …

Absent Meaning: Fascination, Narrative, And Trauma In The Holocaust Imaginary, Christopher Scott Massey

Doctoral Dissertations

Examining post-1970 representations of the Holocaust and Nazism along with critical responses to these representations, the dissertation demonstrates how a use of the term "fascination" has shaped contemporary understandings of how the Holocaust should and should not be represented and remembered. My argument is that despite its pervasive and influential usage in the discourse of Holocaust representation, no critical attention has been given to what the term means. In as much as the term's usage draws the historical and ethical boundaries across which representations of the Holocaust cannot pass, this dearth of critical attention given to the term means that …

Arresting Beauty, Framing Evidence: An Inquiry Into Photography And The Teaching Of Writing, Kuhio Walters

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the uses and conceptualizations of photography in college Composition. Composition has long been conflicted over the relation between form and content---and since the 1970s, between aesthetics and politics. Today, this disciplinary tension manifests in how the visual is brought into pedagogy: either it is approached aesthetically, as something to beautify a text, or politically, as a source of cultural critique. The field's uses of photography have been positioned within this aesthetics/politics binary, but to understand the medium as only one or the other is to miss its full practical and theoretical potential.

Theoretically, photography is powerful and …

Material Culture And Domestic Texts: Textiles In The Texts Of Warner, Adams, Wilson, Sadlier, Stoddard, And Phelps, Laura Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

In "Material Culture and Domestic Texts: Textiles in the Texts of Warner, Adams, Wilson, Sadlier, Stoddard, and Phelps," I draw from recently revised notions of the discourse of domesticity to argue that the imagery of textile production, consumption, and containment enables authors to configure experimental domestic forms. Mid-nineteenth-century authors used textiles---including their inherent "textility" and feminine associations---to play out new domestic configurations in response to exigencies of economy, race, intemperance, competitive desire, and labor. Their literature demystifies textiles' ability to invest social hierarchies of race, class, gender, and religion; it also enacts material changes of women's domestic spaces and roles …

Dirty Whites And Dark Secrets: Sex And Race In "Peyton Place", Sally Hirsh-Dickinson

Doctoral Dissertations

"Dirty Whites and Dark Secrets: Sex and Race in Peyton Place " suggests that Grace Metalious's 1956 potboiler Peyton Place contains a critique of race which may have been just as unsettling to a mid-century readership as the novel's famed critique of sexuality. Peyton Place is most often said to be "about" sex. In this study, I argue that it is also "about" race, and that it is the racing of the sex that may have provoked the scandalized outcry against the novel. My work posits that Peyton Place's controversial reputation resulted from Metalious's racialized representations of sexuality and the …

The Comradeship Of The "Happy Few": Henry James, Edith Wharton, And The Pederastic Tradition, Sharon Kehl Califano

Doctoral Dissertations

The recent scholarly reevaluation of Henry James in terms of queer theory has created a need to reexamine James' influence on Edith Wharton and her works. In this dissertation, I explore how James introduced Wharton to a circle of friends (the "Happy Few"), a group of queer men-of-letters who provided the author with both a literal and figurative space for discovering an interiorized, masculine queer self. Specifically addressing the years between 1905 and 1910, I show in this study how Wharton's initiation into queer culture and her introduction to the pederastic tradition, as reimagined through Walt Whitman's paradigmatic "comradeship," gave …

Rumor, Gender, And Authority In English Renaissance Drama, Keith M. Botelho

Doctoral Dissertations

The dramatic works of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson register a certain type of male character who is capable of discerning listening, an action that becomes an agent of specific masculine authority and identity. However, rumor's inherent ambiguity and indeterminacy poses the greatest threat to discerning listening. The paradox that emerges is that while the drama posits men as superior authors of information, it is men---and not women---who are responsible for the circulation of unauthorized information and rumor on the stage. Early modern literary and cultural discourses repeatedly pointed to the dangers of loose tongues and transgressive speech, …

Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up The Pen In The Colonial Period, Drew Lopenzina

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation looks at the ways that Native Americans appropriated alphabetic literacy for their own purposes in the colonial period. Studies of Native writing tend to begin with the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom whose A Sermon Preached by Samson Occom (1772) is the first known publication by a Native author on the North American continent. This work, however, locates Occom near the end of a series of earlier Native contacts with the written word, the fragments of which are scattered throughout the archive of the colonizer. While scholars have become largely familiarized with the representational modes in American literature that …

Choran Community: The Aesthetics Of Encounter In Literary And Photographic Modernism, Emily M. Hinnov

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines novels, photographs, and phototexts by British and American artists published between the world wars in order to argue that these works re-envision community through a narrative aesthetic, which I term the choran moment, that communicates the possibility of genuinely empathetic understanding between self and other. My study of literary and photographic modernism is based upon these modern artists' awareness of an ever-present, organic community allied in common knowledge of the interconnection among humanity offered through convergence with and respect for difference. These choran moments of correlation are key to the aesthetics and therefore the politics of modernist …

"Invidiam Viam Aut Faciam": "I Will Find A Way Or Make One" The Poetic Practice Of Political Counsel In The Courts Of Elizabeth I And James I, Andrea L. Harkness

Doctoral Dissertations

In this study I argue that at least four poets: three aristocrats from the Sidney family---Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Mary Wroth---with a history of service to Tudor monarchs, and one non-aristocratic writer, Aemilia Lanyer, who claimed to be a poetical descendant of a Sidney, responded to the efforts of Elizabeth I and James I to restrict the power of the aristocracy by claiming a right to offer counsel to their monarch. Though no one of them could claim a position from which to offer direct counsel, they each exploited the Petrarchan discourse of love to assert an …

Performing Texts; Playing With Jazz Aesthetics, Richard (Rick) Walters

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite all the critical attention jazz has received in recent years from scholars in other fields---literature, history, political science, cultural studies---very little headway has been made in understanding what jazz aesthetics are and how they might inform other forms of cultural and artistic expression. Part of the difficulty lies in the time-bound, performative nature of the artform and the fact that it is primarily a non-discursive means of expression; that is to say, jazz does not translate well.

This dissertation attempts to evoke and inhabit jazz aesthetics rather than trying to define, categorize or delineate them. Alternating between close reading, …

Excavating The Remains Of Empire: War And Postimperial Trauma In The Twentieth-Century Novel, Elizabeth J. Andersen

Doctoral Dissertations

In "Excavating the Remains of Empire: War and Postimperial Trauma in the Twentieth-Century Novel," I investigate the implications of the residual presence of empire in the contemporary novel set in England, by questioning that if it is generally accepted that in the age of imperialism novels co-produced empire, what do they now, in this historical moment of the late twentieth-century, produce in its stead? Do shame and nostalgia for empire and the trauma of empire's dissolution coexist in the postimperial, postwar novel? I use war as the key point of entry into the empire and novel connection, and claim that …

A Gender And Development (Gad) Implementation Evaluation: Testimonios Reveal The Successes, Challenges, And Unpredicted Results For Women's Equality And Community Sustainability, Melinda Salazar

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a case study of a Gender and Development implementation evaluation in several rural, Baha'i communities in Andean Bolivian. "Traditional Media as Change Agent," funded by UNIFEM (UN International Fund for Women) and implemented by BIC (Baha'i International Community), was an innovative, non-economic approach to change gender attitudes and behaviors by including men in a consultative process using traditional media. This study responded to criticism that GAD ignored the environment, was lodged squarely in Western economic development thought and Western feminist values, and lacked the voices of the women and men for whom development aims to benefit.

This study …

Gothic Economies: Global Capitalism And The Boundaries Of Identity, Robert Adrian Herschbach

Doctoral Dissertations

Since Dickens and Mary Shelley, the Gothic has provided a rubric for literary conceptualizations of modernity. Dickens' depictions of industrial London characterize it as a labyrinth of temptations and horrors, haunted by monstrosity and by personal and social demons; the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the disfigured byproduct of science and technology. Bram Stoker's Dracula, perhaps the most effective "global" narrative to come out of the British fin de siecle, grafted elements of a pre-Enlightenment atavism onto the turn-of-the-century liberal metropolis. In our own era, the literature of the postmodern technopolis---the fiction of William Gibson, for example---has continued to …

The Composition Of Anonymity: Toward A Theory, History, And Pedagogy, Timothy Thomas Dansdill

Doctoral Dissertations

In keeping with its recognized function of non-identity through the suppression of proper name recognition, anonymity is not recognized as "essential" to nominalist consciousness or to intersubjective action through language. The founding philosophical discourses of identity, authority, and community reveal an "anonymous function"---a transgressive discourse of impersonation, authenticity, and immunity---which this dissertation traces in phenomenology, discourse theory, poetics, rhetoric, and composition.

The first two chapters draw from phenomenology (Schutz and Natanson), and discourse theory (Foucault), to propose a theory of anonymity as integral to any understanding of personal identity across the entire performative range of self/other orientations. Chapter three draws …

Embodied Narratives: Ways Of Reading Student Literacy Histories, Stephanie Diane Paterson

Doctoral Dissertations

When asked about their former experiences and attitudes towards reading and writing first-year students often begin with statements like, " I don't know how to write," or "I'm not a big reader," or "I'm not creative." Behind these facile and familiar sentences is a world of experience we know very little about and are hard-pressed to explain.

Students are situated on a precarious fault line within the academy and their narratives function like maps of this treacherous terrain. Their stories do not simply reflect personal, private crises but cultural phenomena---including taken-for-granted issues surrounding the "necessity" of discipline and an almost …

Semitic Discourse: English Identity And The Nineteenth -Century British Novel, Heidi Nan Kaufman

Doctoral Dissertations

The following study examines the manner in which nineteenth-century British novels use a Semitic discourse to imagine and construct Christian English people as racially pure. One result of the growing presence of assimilated Jewish people living in England in the nineteenth century was the fear that they might pass undetected and pollute the "purity" of English blood. In response to this phenomenon, the narratives in this study illuminate not only cultural anxiety about the historical lineage that links Judaism and Christianity, but the threat this link posed to the very idea of English Christian racial purity. My claim, that English …

Faith Positions: Re -Reading Gender, Race, And Christianity In Nineteenth -Century American Women's Writing, Mary L. Doyle

Doctoral Dissertations

Faith Positions is a study of the ways in which various modes of nineteenth-century religious belief are intertwined with the strained threads of an "American" national narrative. Specifically, I focus on the texts of four nineteenth-century American women---Jarena Lee, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Frances Harper---to consider the ways in which religious belief, and the narratives shaped by belief, respond to experiences defined by gender and race.

As Jenny Franchot and Carolyn Haynes (among others) have noted, contemporary American literary scholarship tends to evade concerns of religion and belief. "About those who 'had it' [religious belief] in the …

Reading For *Class: Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, And Sylvia Townsend Warner, Laurie Ann Quinn

Doctoral Dissertations

Reading for Class is a feminist materialist study of three twentieth-century British writers: Virginia Woolf (1882--1941), Rebecca West (1892--1983), and Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893--1978). In triangulation, Woolf, West, and Warner provide the specific grounding for the project's more general exploration of the intersections between class issues and literature. The Introduction forges the eclectic critical method defined as reading for class, and articulates the historical-political purposes of the method and of the study itself. In Chapter One, analyses of two of Woolf's lesser-known texts, the "Introductory Letter" to the collection Life as We Have Known It (1931) and Nurse Lugton's Golden …

Shelley And The Nature Of Nonviolence, William James Stroup

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a study of the English Romantic poet and essayist Percy Bysshe Shelley's conception of the role and function of humans in the natural world, and of his influence on later reformers. Shelley's long poems Queen Mab, Laon and Cythna, and Prometheus Unbound are discussed as a trilogy where his themes of political nonviolence and protoecological awareness became integrated; also discussed at length are Mont Blanc, The Mask of Anarchy, and The Triumph of Life. The legacy of Shelley's poetry and ideas is discussed through two key figures who met in the 1880s: the now obscure Shelleyan and animal …

Motherwork, Artwork: The Mother/Artist In Fiction By Parton, Phelps, Chopin, Woolf, Drabble, And Walker, Nancy Hoyt Lecourt

Doctoral Dissertations

This study asks the question, What happens to a practicing (fictional) mother who also tries to be a practicing artist? How do literary texts represent such people? How do they represent the relationship between material and artistic work? The primary works studied are Sarah Parton's Ruth Hall, (1855), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story of Avis (1877), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), and Margaret Drabble's The Millstone (1965). The conclusion focuses on Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use."

Mother-artists finds themselves on the "wrong" side of the nature/culture binary, where ideologies about "true womanhood" and …

Class In Seventeenth-Century British Drama By Women, Erika Mae Olbricht

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that seventeenth-century drama by women should be analyzed as a public discursive practice rather than as privatized "closet drama." This study focuses on class in order to delineate the texts' participation in public modes of representation and offers post-marxist readings as an alternative to the gynocritical/biographical model that dominates criticism on literature by women of the early modern period.

Chapter one of this dissertation problematizes separate spheres ideology, lest texts by women become separated from the economic sites that inform them. I consider the ideological importance of generic conventions, arguing that conventions of tragedy and comedy are …

Domestic Visions And Shifting Identities: The Urban Novel And The Rise Of A Consumer Culture In America, 1852-1925, Nancy Helen Von Rosk

Doctoral Dissertations

Domestic Visions reexamines the tradition of the urban novel in America by reading the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edith Wharton, Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska within the historical and cultural contexts of an evolving urban consumer culture. Bringing together not only a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts, but also an analysis of America's shifting domestic ideals over the last half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study traces the impact of a new spectacular urban public culture on both the private realm and those who are …

Language's "Bliss Of Unfolding" In And Through History, Autobiography And Myth: The Poetry Of Rita Dove, Carol Keyes

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the first five books of poetry published by the American poet Rita Dove: The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986; awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987), Grace Notes (1989), and Mother Love (1995). It situates her work within the whole field of American poetic discourse. Dove's relationship to myriad strands of American ars poetica traditions arises out of patterns of amplification and negotiation worked out in Dove's poetry in relation to a wide range of such traditions. Thus, the study's methodology proceeds from the poet T. S. Eliot's dictum that …