Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Printed And Bound: The Publishers' Case Binding And 19th-Century Women's Critique Of Marriage, Carolyn Suneja

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the coevolution of industrial book formats in the 19th century and women’s critique of marriage in fiction, arguing that the highly decorated case binding both reflected and shaped broader cultural anxieties engendered by the accessibility of new literary forms to mass audiences and the impact of that literature on the cultural logics by which women understood their roles and options. Given the reciprocal relationship between the mechanisms of industrial print and women’s writing, the material conditions of book production are important considerations for the literary scholar. The four novels examined in this dissertation—Fanny Fern’s Rose Clark, Harriet …

Hungry For More: American Food Writing And Globalization, Andrew Kleinke

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation, Hungry for More: American Food Writing and Globalization, investigates several food-focused texts including novels, travelogues, culinary memoirs, and TV shows. I take an interdisciplinary approach by incorporating literary theory into the field of food studies to argue that food texts from the United States reveal a growing anxiety towards what, how, and where we eat. As I show, food writing plays a prominent role in shaping many Americans' interactions with the world. More specifically, I argue that globalization has changed, and continues to transform, access and attachments to food. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I examine …

Historical Dissidence: The Temporalities And Radical Possibilities Of American Comics, Jeremy M. Carnes

Theses and Dissertations

Formal criticism of comics has often focused on the importance of sequence and the filling of gutters with causative logics. Practitioner-theorists like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud have focused on “sequentiality” and “closure” to conceive of how readers connect the disparate panels of a given comic. More contemporary scholars of the form have followed Eisner and McCloud, foregrounding the causative logics that create narrative progression in the comics form. Yet, these approaches implicitly rely on dominant, western logics of temporality in the construction of narrative in comics.

This project considers how comics form actually relies on various temporalities and thus …

The Time Is Now: Embodiments Of The Hyper-Present In Contemporary American Literature, Robert Bruss

Theses and Dissertations

For many years, writers have argued the predominant temporality of contemporary experience is an intensified present. David Harvey and Fredric Jameson argued that such an intense emphasis on the present was one of postmodernism’s principle features. Harvey argued that new communication technologies resulted in a "time-space compression” that created the sense that “the present is all there is.” Similarly, Jameson argued that postmodernism reflected the logic of late capitalism, resulting in a society that “has begun to live in a perpetual present” that obliterates one’s awareness of the past or future. Although many consider we have moved beyond postmodernism, our …

The Jeremiad In American Science Fiction Literature, 1890-1970, Matthew Schneider

Theses and Dissertations

Scholarship on the form of sermon known as the American jeremiad—a prophetic warning of national decline and the terms of promised renewal for a select remnant—draws heavily on the work of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch. A wealth of scholarship has critiqued Bercovitch’s formulation of the jeremiad, which he argues is a rhetorical form that holds sway in American culture by forcing political discourse to hold onto an “America” as its frame of reference. But most interlocutors still work with the jeremiad primarily in American studies or in terms of national discourse. Rooted in the legacy of Puritan rhetoric, the …

Commuters, Wanderers, And 'International Mongrels': Resistance And Possibility In Post-Immigrant Literature, Leslie Singel

Theses and Dissertations

The recognizable motifs of the immigrant tale have been upended, as the traditional

narrative has been adapted to capture the multitude of directions, individuals, nations, and paths

of the twenty-first century migrant. In four chapters, I examine selected works from the authors

Colum McCann, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to argue for a new

designation, “post-immigrant literature.” Post-immigrant literature treats critically the themes of

loss, regret, and forced assimilation from perspectives shaped by post-colonial, post-modern and

post-identity politics thinking. Rather than narratives stressing the limitations imposed by

deterministic social forces, post-immigrant texts posit more agency, and anxiety, …

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, And The Creation Of "Authentic Voices" In The Black Women's Literary Tradition, Anna Storm

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on African American women’s literature from the 1890s through 1948, covering the New Negro movement and sentimental domestic novel, the folk writings of the early twentieth century, and white-life fiction. The study investigates writers and texts that at various points in the creation of a black women’s literary tradition have been labeled “inauthentic” or have otherwise received comparably little attention by scholars of the tradition. In particular, I examine the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Zora Neale Hurston, placing them in conversation with one another and within the broader context of black women’s writing at the turn …

The Meadow: A Novel, Scott Albert Winkler

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

THE MEADOW: A NOVEL

by

Scott A. Winkler

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015

Under the Supervision of Professor George Clark

The Meadow considers the question of how all Americans, both civilians and military personnel alike, are affected by the United States’ military actions. Set during the Vietnam era, The Meadow tells the story of Walt Neumann, who is torn between his dream of going to college and his father’s insistence that his sons serve their nation as he did in World War II. Circumstance unexpectedly enables Walt to pursue his dream, but he also comes to realize the source …

All Play And No Work: The Protestant Work Ethic And The Comic Plays Of The Federal Theatre Project, Paul Gagliardi

Theses and Dissertations

Given the massive unemployment of the era, the subject of work dominated the politics and culture of the Great Depression. In particular, most government programs of the New Deal sought to provide jobs or reinforce long-standing American views of working. These aims were reflected by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which was charged with providing jobs to unemployed theatre workers and uplifting the spirits of audiences. But the FTP also strove to challenge its audiences by staging overtly political theatre. In this context, many comic plays -which have long been ignored by scholars of the FTP - actually challenged work …

The Secret Hills, David Bowen

Theses and Dissertations

The Secret Hills is a literary thriller. Kelly Murdoch is crestfallen when her sister Mara fails to attend her documentary premiere. Kelly visits Mara's apartment and finds evidence that no one has been there for weeks. A random shooting occurs across town at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Seven people die.

The zoo shooter, Ibrahim Rohani, had participated in one of Mara's PTSD studies. Kelly tracks down Rohani's friend Nick Miner, a fellow veteran who also participated in Mara's study. With Nick, Kelly drives to Colorado to confront Lorenzo Hills, an independently wealthy rancher who funded Mara's PTSD research. Despite (or …

"Tales" Of Text And Culture: Tropes Of Imperialism, Women's Roles, Technologies Of Representation, And Collaborative Meaning-Making In Rita Golden Gelman's Tales Of A Female Nomad, Female Nomad And Friends, And Personal Website, Michelle Lynne Van Wert Kosalka

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines contemporary travel writing specifically created for a popular reading culture, Rita Golden Gelman's Tales of a Female Nomad, Female Nomad and Friends, and personal website. The project is concerned with how culture is continuously represented and shaped through the dialogic interaction between writer and reader, and the subsequent liminal spaces which emerge in moments of meaning-making. Chapter 1 is a close reading of how Gelman's works reinforce and, in some cases, resist, tropes of imperialism. Chapter 2 examines patriarchal gender roles in Gelman's works and the ways in which recent advances in feminist psychiatry and psychology can …

The Post-Apocalyptic Turn: A Study Of Contemporary Apocalyptic And Post-Apocalyptic Narrative, Hyong-Jun Moon

Theses and Dissertations

Few periods have witnessed so strong a cultural fixation on apocalyptic calamity as the present. From fictions and comic books to Hollywood films, television shows, and video games, the end of the world is ubiquitous in the form of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives. Imagining world-changing catastrophes, contemporary apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives force us to face urgent socio-political questions such as danger of globalization, effect of neoliberal capitalist hegemony, ecological disasters, fragility of human civilization, and so on. J. G. Ballard's final fictions, though they do not directly deal with apocalyptic events but evoke apocalyptic mood, portray the bleak landscape of …

We Eat This Gold, Christopher Drew

Theses and Dissertations

We Eat This Gold is a novel set in a small coal mining community in southwestern Indiana. Centered around a son's return to his father's house after a failed music career in Nashville, the novel explores the subtle social structures of rural America, the slow decline of modern coal communities, and the often oversimplified beliefs, worries, and biases found in small towns. It also seeks to provide a realistic portrayal of the inner workings and broader culture of an active underground coal mine, as well as explore the ramifications, both economic and psychological, of serious workplace injuries sustained in such …

Traducción Y Subversión: Traduciendo La Voz Femenina. Una Nueva Interpretación De La Poesía Traducida De Adrienne Rich, Leticia De La Paz De Dios

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis intends to prove how close politics and poetics are in Adrienne Rich's works, to the point that they often become indistinguishable. When this overlap occurs, while the author makes the intentions of her work and her language explicit within her works, essays or public speeches/declarations in English (as she defends her creation of a language for women), some of the translations of her work into Spanish find problematic to follow the intentions present in the English. This thesis explores the reasons for that and concludes that, due to some characteristics of Spanish morphology, such as genderization, the translation …

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book, Melissa Anne Morrow

Theses and Dissertations

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book is a hybrid-genre collection of poems (including lyric, narrative, graphic, prose, and combinations of these four forms) uttered in the voices of fictitious personas based on the participants pictured in, the historical circumstances surrounding, and one inscribed artifact of a postcard depicting the lynching of Allen Brooks in Dallas, Texas on March 3, 1910. The theoretical scaffold for the manuscript is "triangulation," a method used by qualitative researchers to validate their studies by exploring research issues from multiple perspectives. Triangulation is also a mapmaking method used to verify the position of waypoints by measuring them against …

Nostalgic Frontiers: Violence Across The Midwest In Popular Film, Adam R. Ochonicky

Theses and Dissertations

In "Nostalgic Frontiers: Violence Across the Midwest in Popular Film," I analyze the temporality and politics of nostalgia while providing a critical history of Midwestern representations in popular culture from the turn of the twentieth century through the first decade of the new millennium. A general line of inquiry informs this project: how do narratives set in the Midwest imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity, and what are the repercussions of such regional imagery circulating in American culture? Throughout this project, I identify shifting cultural perceptions of the Midwest at particular historical moments. In relation to these regional considerations, I …

Carry The Fire: Intersections Of Apocalypse, Primitivism, And Masculinity In American Literature, 1945-2000, Dylan Barth

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines American apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic texts from 1945-2000 in order to consider the varying ways that masculinity has been constructed in relation to the imagined primitive. The first chapter provides an overview of studies in apocalypse, primitivism, and masculinity to lay the foundation for the in-depth, critical analyses that follow. The second chapter provides an operational definition of American post-apocalyptic fiction as well as a survey of American post-apocalyptic fiction that includes George Stewart's Earth Abides, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, and David …

The Non-National Subject: Ambivalent "Americans" In Contemporary Narratives By Women Writers In The Us, Dalia Gomaa

Theses and Dissertations

This study argues that the notion of Americanness is constructed nationally within the U.S. geographic space, as well as transnationally outside that space. The transnational perception of the U.S. nation-space and Americanness makes possible ambivalent positionings which I call non-national and through its lens I examine migrant narratives by Arab-American, Chicana, Indian-American, Pakistani-American, and Cuban-American women writers. I explain in my study that the non-national subject does not merely occupy a liminal space between home-country and host-country but rather reconfigures the implications of the "foreign" and the "domestic"; "home" and "abroad" within that interstitial space. I also argue that the …

Foxfire: The Selected Poems Of Yosa Buson, A Translation, Allan Persinger

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is a creative translation from Japanese into English of the poetry of Yosa Buson, an 18th century (1716 - 1783) poet. Buson is considered to be one of the most important of the Edo Era poets and is still influential in modern Japanese literature. By taking account of Japanese culture, identity and aesthetics the dissertation project bridges the gap between American and Japanese poetics, while at the same time revealing the complexity of thought in Buson's poetry and bringing the target audience closer to the text of a powerful and moving writer.

Currently, the only two books offering …