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Articles 1 - 30 of 53
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Before Realism : The Great American Novel And The Forms Of Nationhood, 1851-1882, Naoto Kojima
Before Realism : The Great American Novel And The Forms Of Nationhood, 1851-1882, Naoto Kojima
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation uses the concept of the Great American Novel as a strategic framework for understanding the cultural ascendance of realism. Much more than a naïve expression of literary chauvinism, the rise of the idea of the Great American Novel marks a transformative moment in the decades before realism becomes institutionalized as a “new school” in the 1880s. Examining how Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, and Henry James anticipate or respond to the call for the national novel which mediates among regions, Before Realism demonstrates that American literary realism emerged out of its engagement and negotiation with the Great …
Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann
Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The dissertation studies the pre-history of trauma in US American fiction, examining how experiences of large-scale adversity are represented before the concept of psychological trauma emerges in the late nineteenth century. Distinctly modern forms of violence—diffuse, systemic, lacking direction and intent—bring forth less individual and personal experiences of grief and suffering than those imagined by twentieth-century trauma theory. Studying forms of feeling and of genre that make trauma legible historicizes the way a Western idea of modern subjectivity, as white, self-possessed, agential, and split, has shaped out understanding of how a person processes crisis. The dissertation visits three spaces that …
Defining African American Authorship, April Quattlebaum
Defining African American Authorship, April Quattlebaum
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
James Weldon Johnson and Melvin B. Tolson are pivotal figures of the early 20th century. They represent a fundamental question that has been and is indeed still in the minds of African American authors: What is a Black author? African American authorship necessarily involves the challenge of forging a literary identity in the face of a society structurally and temperamentally predisposed to marginalize and dismiss them. In their creative and scholarly works, Johnson and Tolson methodically dissect Black authorship, looking both to the past and to their present situation as they strive to imagine a future for African American literary …
Twentieth-Century Feminine Visionary Poetics : Vulnerable Visions Of Survival And Healing:, Lucyna Prostko
Twentieth-Century Feminine Visionary Poetics : Vulnerable Visions Of Survival And Healing:, Lucyna Prostko
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
H.D. and Denise Levertov, two visionary poets of the twentieth century, represent both female poets’ awakening of political and historical consciousness and their engagement with the poetics of vulnerability and survival. H.D. and Levertov offer lyrical visions that dismantle the binaries of real and unreal, earthly and transcendent, and individual and communal. The subject of this project is visionary imagination and its various reverberations, limitations, and potentialities. What is at stake in feminine visionary twentieth-century poetics is the creation of imaginative worlds, the space of possibility, and the shaping of a lyrical form that encompasses the voices of survival, vulnerability, …
Meeting Places : The Entanglements Of Poetry And Science In The Modern American Imagination, James H. Searle
Meeting Places : The Entanglements Of Poetry And Science In The Modern American Imagination, James H. Searle
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
“Meeting Places: The Entanglements of Poetry and Science in the Modern American Imagination” explores how Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser responded to the rise of modern science and industrial technology by reflecting on the similarities and differences between the poetic and scientific imaginations. Across four chapters, I show how the growth of the natural and social sciences from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century spurred these writers to rethink the social and cultural functions of literature in a democratic society. Unlike many of their peers, these figures refused to treat science either as a …
Dickinson At Thirty, Philip Pardi
Dickinson At Thirty, Philip Pardi
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
When we say there are “no Mozarts in literature,” we point to an enticing fact: writers become. Pick any text you love or revere, and there was a moment earlier in the author’s life when it could not have been written. The writers we remember develop over time; they change and are changed. Their careers divide, if not always easily, into a before (often thought of as a kind of apprenticeship) and an after (a work or body of work that has a significant claim on our attention). Personal relationships, lived experiences, social and political contexts, readers real and imagined, …
The Legacy Of Uncle Tom : The Transformation Of Black Masculinity And Racial Politics, Lauren R. Weeks
The Legacy Of Uncle Tom : The Transformation Of Black Masculinity And Racial Politics, Lauren R. Weeks
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The main aim of this thesis is to reveal the immense effect that literature can have on society spanning generations. It explores the restriction of black men’s political possibilities due to their perceived relationship with the character Uncle Tom, which not only causes harm to black activist projects by inciting disunity, but also becomes a source of inner turmoil for black men who struggle to be identified in society. This project offers to call these harmful standards that black men are judged by, due to the creation of Uncle Tom, as the binary of black masculinity. By analyzing how this …
Idealist And Materialist Approaches To Abolition In Uncle Tom's Cabin And The Daughter Of Adoption, Jillian Shea
Idealist And Materialist Approaches To Abolition In Uncle Tom's Cabin And The Daughter Of Adoption, Jillian Shea
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Sentimentalism was a popular aesthetic, moral, political, and literary movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and England, and both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) use sentimentalism in their attempts to advocate for the abolition of slavery. Scholars such as Lauren Berlant critique sentimentalism, specifically Stowe’s use of sentimentalism, for its potential to make structural problems appear as if they can be assuaged by personal change, and I situate this understanding of sentimentalism within an idealist framework, or a framework that primarily emphasizes subjectivity’s role in …
Proletarian Modernism : Aesthetic Intervention In Naturalist Epistemology In Steinbeck, Wright And Mccullers, Kenji Kihara
Proletarian Modernism : Aesthetic Intervention In Naturalist Epistemology In Steinbeck, Wright And Mccullers, Kenji Kihara
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation explores three proletarian novels published at the end of the Depression era—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—in light of how their aesthetics complicates the inherited epistemology of literary naturalism in response to the changing political climates in the age of the Popular Front. Calling these texts “proletarian modernism,” I investigate how their aesthetics mediate the relations among Marxist ideas, political solidarity and the American value of individualism in an age when it became gradually difficult to fundamentally criticize capitalism and liberalism.
Crossing Boundaries, Drawing Anew : Exploring The Treatment Of American Indian Land With A Penobscot Lens Through The Life And Traditions Of The Red Man By Joseph Nicolar, Andrea Guerrero
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The relationship between the Wabanaki and the land informs their creation myths, their cultural expertise, and individual and communal identity. The connection is so integral to their identity that when privatization of property usurps their connections to the land, an entire
Misfitology : Misfit Narratives In Ideology, Kennedy Lyn Coyne
Misfitology : Misfit Narratives In Ideology, Kennedy Lyn Coyne
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This hybrid thesis, part critical and part fiction, examines experimental and nontraditional texts that showcase how misfits allow viewers and readers to glimpse ideological structures—particularly interpellation. It argues that the misfit is essential to the visibility of the ideological process because the misfit shows the disconnect between the inverted and the real world. The inverted world seems like the real world but it is masked by ideology. This thesis examines how a pair of films – David Lynch’s films Blue Velvet and Mullholland Drive – and a pair of novels – Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls, and Chris Kraus’ I Love …
Dis/Inheritance : Love, Grief, And Genealogy In Faulkner, Daisuke Kiriyama
Dis/Inheritance : Love, Grief, And Genealogy In Faulkner, Daisuke Kiriyama
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation is devoted to the close examination of two novels of William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. I find in them the repression and return of prohibited emotions and a consistent pattern of “the race between the pursuing white man and the fleeing black man.” I explore how these are related to the Faulknerian conception of time and the establishment and disruption of the conventional Southern notions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The white man’s pursuit, performed in various forms, ultimately aims to prove his mastery and masculinity, racial superiority, or everything that whiteness means to …
Before Nature's Nation : Ecological Thought And Early American Poetry, Joshua Bartlett
Before Nature's Nation : Ecological Thought And Early American Poetry, Joshua Bartlett
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This project examines early American encounters with the natural world through the context of contemporary ecocriticism. In readings of Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Michael Wigglesworth, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, and Mohegan minister Samson Occom, it demonstrates how poetic attentions to nature transformed collective antagonism toward the “howling wilderness” into personal feelings of affection and wonder. Likewise, it develops an understanding of the “ecological” that is both methodology, a way of thinking about specific things, such as trees or stones, and epistemology, a kind of thinking that emphasizes relational perception. It then situates these experiences amidst both canonical Americanist scholarship …
The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom
The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The Enlightenment has been thought of as the Age of Reason: the birth of the individual, the rise of print culture, the beginning of the middle class, and an exponential growth in the sciences. The Enlightenment shaped the world into the form that it is today, but it also marks the start of colonization and the slave trade. The following thesis seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Enlightenment to both colonization and the slave trade; that without it neither of these practices would have had the reach that they achieved over time. Using the works of Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques …
Attitudes Toward Mental Illness And Mental Health In The Literature Classroom, Melissa B. Guadron
Attitudes Toward Mental Illness And Mental Health In The Literature Classroom, Melissa B. Guadron
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The purpose of this study was to observe undergraduate students’ attitudes toward mental illness and mental health in the literature classroom. This was an observational, inductive study of Jeffrey Berman’s literature course, featuring books written by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This setting was chosen because of Berman’s unique pedagogy, which encourages self-disclosure and psychoanalytic readings. Three questionnaires and three introspective reader response diaries were collected from fifteen participants; text analyses were performed on diaries. Research inquiries questioned a participant’s interactions with the books: How did participants respond to the portrayals of characters with mental illness or mental health …
Threads Of Truth : Aesthetics Of A Sacrificed Self In The Nineteenth-Century American Romance Of Susanna Rowson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James And Kate Chopin, Anne S. Jung
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Abstract
Ten Klicks South Of Whiskey : A Play In Three Acts, Ryan Jeffrey Smithson
Ten Klicks South Of Whiskey : A Play In Three Acts, Ryan Jeffrey Smithson
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Ten Klicks South of Whiskey is a stage performance in three acts, consisting mostly of monologues from soldiers of various backgrounds. It follows the trials of 4th platoon, Delta Troop, 463rd Cavalry Squadron, a fictional unit that achieves a near-mythic reputation of heroism and invulnerability in Iraq. As the monologues begin to reveal, however, not every tale about the 463rd can be substantiated. The audience is first challenged to search for truth and then to understand that truth is not the ultimate--or even the desired--goal of war stories.
A Transnational Postmodernism : North Africa As A Locus For Postmodern Fiction, Steven Weber
A Transnational Postmodernism : North Africa As A Locus For Postmodern Fiction, Steven Weber
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Examining a 25-year period of literature about post-WWII North Africa by Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Kateb Yacine, and Pierre Guyotat, A Transnational Postmodernism describes the creation of a particular kind of postmodern literature that has been shaped by the concerns of its colonial/postcolonial context. Such a shaping introduces postmodernity as a problem. This problem—astutely identified by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire—is that, at the moment of decolonization, as we move from modern to postmodern regimes of power and control, the typical elements of postmodernity (hybridity, et al) are no longer as necessarily liberatory as they once were against …
Altered States : Challenges To Narratives Of State Unity In 19th Century American Fiction, Aaron Minar Wittman
Altered States : Challenges To Narratives Of State Unity In 19th Century American Fiction, Aaron Minar Wittman
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation critiques the treatment of State spaces in four 19th Century American novels--Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1793), James Fenimore Cooper's Wyandotte; or, the Hutted Knoll (1843), John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), and Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales (1856)--to expose underlying resistances to the limiting historical narratives that fuel and justify the imperialistic expansion of State. Through a close examination of the narrative construction and interpretation of geographic features, topographical layouts, and other environmental elements, I detail how these texts engage issues of State expansion and appropriation, establishing prominent correlations between territorial capture, …
Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo
Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also …
Self-Effacement Of The "Author" To Circulate Texts : Strategies To Construct Authorship In Antebellum America, Rumi Takahashi
Self-Effacement Of The "Author" To Circulate Texts : Strategies To Construct Authorship In Antebellum America, Rumi Takahashi
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
From the post-Revolutionary days, American print materials and political institutions were interrelated with each other for the purpose of building a new nation. The democratic institutions composed of the president and a sovereign people marked the country's difference from European monarchy, while the book trade served as a means that would disseminate a moral image of an ideal citizen to endorse the national identity. Yet, as drastic changes of industry in the 1820s enabled more people to participate in the economic system, the sovereignty of people turned out to be potentially subversive power of the mob, which required the literary …
Reading After The End Of The World, Christina Thyssen
Reading After The End Of The World, Christina Thyssen
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Reading after the End of the World is an investigation into challenges to our critical registers brought on by the increasingly visible effects of climate change and the era of the anthropocene. Its concerns are with how these realities can be seen as transformative of our notions of "reading" and with a literature that seems to anticipate such a moment of disarticulation. The project is organized around close readings of novels by Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman and it traces in these texts what I refer to as a "positive nihilism," which serves as a …
Queer Bodies And Queer Materials In Post-Wwii American Texts, William Joseph Whalen
Queer Bodies And Queer Materials In Post-Wwii American Texts, William Joseph Whalen
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Although the primary subject of this dissertation is contemporary American literature and popular culture--individual chapters are devoted to careful studies of Octavia Butler's short story "Bloodchild," Cormack McCarthy's gothic novel Child of God, Chuck Palahniuk's epistolary novel Pygmy, and the track "It's Good" by hip-hop artist Lil Wayne featuring Drake and Jadakiss--I develop a reading of these contemporary texts that places them within much older and richer intellectual, spiritual, psychological, and even biological traditions. My primary focus is the human body, both literal and figurative, as the site of dynamic exchanges, movements, blockages, and productive potentialities. I argue that at …
Fordism & Modernist Forms : The Transformation Of Work And Style, William Jeffrey Casto
Fordism & Modernist Forms : The Transformation Of Work And Style, William Jeffrey Casto
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Fordism and Modernist Forms argues that Fordism is an American manifestation of a global tendency towards concentration and rationalization that we know as "monopoly capitalism." Fordism, as part of the historical transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, reshapes and reorganizes the structures of modern life - accentuating repetitive habits and efficient behavior, replacing craftsmanship with deskilled labor, and integrating consumer culture into identity formation. These socio-economic transformations obfuscate the actually existing structures that produce their uneven societies and the monotonies of modern, everyday "life" and, therefore, create an artistic crisis of representation as the individual increasingly relies on the prisms …
Platonic Conception : Post War Experience In "The Great Gatsby" And "Farewell To Arms", Frederick D. Floss
Platonic Conception : Post War Experience In "The Great Gatsby" And "Farewell To Arms", Frederick D. Floss
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
"Platonic Conception" explores the relationship that authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had with World War I through their respective novels "The Great Gatsby" and "A Farewell to Arms." The thesis's author examines how the cultural impact of the war can be felt in five facets of both novels: the formative influences of the writers, their experiences with the War itself, their use of setting, their treatment of female characters, and how they render the War's influence in a post-war world. Comparing the ways these two books treat the war leads Floss to argue that cultural impact of the …
Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Historicization Of Antebellum Landscapes And Character In "A New-England Tale" And "Hope Leslie", Lisa D. Grant
Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Historicization Of Antebellum Landscapes And Character In "A New-England Tale" And "Hope Leslie", Lisa D. Grant
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis investigates Catharine Maria Sedgwick's situating of New England religion, political issues, and social class structures in A New-England Tale (1822) and Hope Leslie or Early Times in Massachusetts (1827). A New-England Tale models the convergence of morality, religion, education and politics in nineteenth-century America in order to awaken a sense of national pride, and in doing so places a priority on political independence and education. Hope Leslie models morality and traces the correlation of religion and politics as they served to promote Puritan civic responsibility in seventeenth-century New England, and in doing so places a priority on moral …
A Study Of The Native American Captivity Narrative, Meghan Daniele Madden
A Study Of The Native American Captivity Narrative, Meghan Daniele Madden
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis examines the genre of Native American captivity narratives and their evolution from their first appearance in the seventeenth century to their waning popularity in the nineteenth century. The thesis starts with the Puritan narrative as a device for spiritual elevation and pronouncement. As Calvinism begins to diminish and the American Revolution approaches, captivity narratives take a turn from anti-Jesuit propaganda to anti-Indian propaganda. Narratives were used not only to warn colonists and Americans of the savagery of Indians, but also to strengthen the separation between the English and Indian inhabitants of America. The anxiety of degenerating into savages …
Literary Know-How : Restructuring Creative Writing And Literary Studies, Jonas Casey-Williams
Literary Know-How : Restructuring Creative Writing And Literary Studies, Jonas Casey-Williams
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The emerging field of creative writing studies has provided new conceptions of creative writing's role within the English discipline. These conceptions focus on the relation of creative writing to composition studies, and there remains a need to reconsider creative writing's relation to literary studies.
Trans-Relational Poetics And Outsider American Modernist And Postmodernist Poetry, Anna Elena Eyre
Trans-Relational Poetics And Outsider American Modernist And Postmodernist Poetry, Anna Elena Eyre
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation is concerned with how language mediates the relationship between self and other, and in particular, mythopoetic language. The political potential of myth has long been condemned, so much so that the word "myth" is now synonymous with "false." I argue that this is a result of what I term as heroic mythopoesis wherein the relationship between self and other is predicated on a violent separation that reinforces conceptions of identity. In contrast, in what I term as trans-relational mythopoesis this relationship is contingent on an embodied exposure between self and other that reciprocally translates and transforms conceptions of …
The Subject As Subjective : Benjamin Franklin's Biographers, Alex Starr-Baier
The Subject As Subjective : Benjamin Franklin's Biographers, Alex Starr-Baier
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This Thesis is a case study in biographical subjectivity. We are taught in primary school to trust biographies, as they are meant to objective. However, the truth is each biographer brings with them their own bias, and thus leaves with their own perception of their subject. I chose to focus on Benjamin Franklin because a good example of this phenomenon. Franklin's fascinating and full life brings with it a treasure trove of biographical speculation. Each Biographer, in constructing their own version of Franklin, manipulates the facts of Franklin's life. I traced Franklin's biographical legacy through time, from the 1800's to …