Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- American Literature (6)
- African American Literature (4)
- Race (4)
- Film (3)
- Linguistics (3)
-
- Sexuality (3)
- Abortion (2)
- American literature (2)
- Antebellum Literature (2)
- Appalachia (2)
- Appalachian Studies (2)
- Authenticity (2)
- Capitalism (2)
- Class (2)
- Discourse analysis (2)
- Ecocriticism (2)
- Ecology (2)
- Environmentalism (2)
- Feminism (2)
- Gender Studies (2)
- Kentucky (2)
- Literature (2)
- Media (2)
- Modernism (2)
- Music (2)
- Narrative (2)
- Post-Apocalyptic (2)
- Queer (2)
- Rowlandson (2)
- 9/11 (1)
- Publication Year
Articles 1 - 30 of 60
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Aesthetics Of Environmental Risk In Paolo Bacigalupi’S The Windup Girl And The Water Knife, David Schwartz
The Aesthetics Of Environmental Risk In Paolo Bacigalupi’S The Windup Girl And The Water Knife, David Schwartz
Theses and Dissertations--English
Any work of environmentally oriented fiction that seeks to represent the wide-reaching effects of climate change is faced with the problem of scale. These texts must render visible change which is at once ubiquitous and microscopic, along with the cascade of side-effects generated in the wake of rising temperature, rising sea levels, and winnowing biodiversity. In short order, these texts must fully imagine what it means to live within the modern global risk society. Borrowing this sociological model from the late Ulrich Beck, I analyze the literary work of Paolo Bacigalupi, one of the foremost authors in the growing genre …
Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall
Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall
Theses and Dissertations--English
Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …
Part-Time Normals: Embodied Trans Geographies Of Homonationalism, Ivy Faye Monroe
Part-Time Normals: Embodied Trans Geographies Of Homonationalism, Ivy Faye Monroe
Theses and Dissertations--Geography
Self-understanding of one’s gender identity both emerges from, and rearticulates into, the ways one experiences and mediates their personal and social relationships with the geographic worlds they inhabit. Trans geographical literature has, to date, created compelling work on the social geographies of trans people in highly-gendered spaces. This thesis extends the existing literature to research how gender is both experienced and performed in the mundane structures of everyday life. Building from theories of cruel optimism and homonationalism, this research examines how the discursive and spatial epistemologies of gender identity inform attachments to structures of normativity. Through archival research of transvestite …
The Reflective Age: Nostalgia At The End Of History, Zachary Griffith
The Reflective Age: Nostalgia At The End Of History, Zachary Griffith
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project investigates the ways in which nostalgic American media of the last decade reflects the sociopolitical conditions of the end of history. It begins with the assertion that the end of history represents a confounded, contradictory moment in which large-scale political change is relatively scarce, and belief in a progressive future has largely been abandoned, while cultural change has also accelerated at a pace never before seen––spurred on, in particular, by the constant return of dead styles and dormant IP. In other words, it seems as if nothing is changing and everything is changing simultaneously. The recent boom in …
Twenty-First Century Adaptations Of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature, Kathryn J. Mcclain
Twenty-First Century Adaptations Of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature, Kathryn J. Mcclain
Theses and Dissertations--English
Twenty-First Century Adaptations of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature examines the resurgence of didactic political literature in the United States during the 21st century, specifically adaptations of early 20th century American leftist protest works by authors such as Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Richard Wright. While the most political aspects of these writers’ fiction are often either criticized as too politically overt – such as Sinclair’s The Jungle and Wright’s Native Son – or forgotten in favor of an author’s perceived literary merit – London’s The Iron Heel in comparison to his other works like Call of the Wild …
(Dis)Possessed Black Youth: How America's Architecture Challenges Coming Of Age In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century African American Women's Literature, Margaret Frymire Kelly
(Dis)Possessed Black Youth: How America's Architecture Challenges Coming Of Age In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century African American Women's Literature, Margaret Frymire Kelly
Theses and Dissertations--English
This dissertation advances studies of Black childhood, particularly Black girlhood, by examining how African American women writers depict the troubled journey to adulthood in stories of segregation, immigration, and incarceration. I argue that authors of four representative literary works emphasize architectural structures as well as ancestral hauntings among which Black children grow up. Without examining the material structures, we cannot understand the strategies these haunted Black youth deploy to reach adulthood. Examining the architectural structures that the protagonists of Maud Martha (1953), Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Zami (1982), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) grow up in and around, I demonstrate …
A Fat Imposter: The Embodied Intersection Between Race, Body Type And Fatness In Margaret Cho’S Comedy, Julia Cox
Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics
Margaret Cho is a comedic goddess who, in her mockery, serves flaming hot social commentary about race, body image, and fatness. Within this thesis, I used critical discourse analysis to understand how Margaret Cho embodies Asianness, whiteness, and the body types and images prescribed respectively. While working on data analysis, I came across a common media trope of fat women: the use of indexically Southern (United States), Appalachian, and Working class indexicals in speech and lexical items. I connected the ideologies surrounding Southern and Appalachian language to the inequalities that fat women face. This voicing had not previously been written …
Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel
Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel
Theses and Dissertations--English
Race Youth in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture argues for the centrality of black youth, both real and literary, to the trajectories of African American literature and its repudiation of white supremacy. Drawing on research into the rise of the adolescent and teenager as distinct social categories, I argue that age-based subjectivity should inform how we read race-based subjectivity. My first chapter explores how early twentieth-century black periodicals push back against white supremacist theories of human development in an explicit appeal to what I call “race youth,” the children and adolescents who would take up the mantle of racial uplift. …
"To Claim That Greatness For Themselves”: A History Of The Kentucky Horse Park, Emily Elizabeth Libecap
"To Claim That Greatness For Themselves”: A History Of The Kentucky Horse Park, Emily Elizabeth Libecap
Theses and Dissertations--History
The Kentucky Horse Park describes itself as the world’s only equine theme park. However, the park is not entirely without historical precedent; instead, world’s fairs, amusement parks, and theme parks all form a century-long pedigree chart through which the park can trace its ancestors. The Kentucky Horse Park’s links to these predecessors deepen our understanding of how the park is a reflection of the world around it and the motivations for how and why it was built. From its inception in the late 1960s, to when it opened in 1978, through the present day, the Kentucky Horse Park was and …
Wilderness Of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Captivity Narratives, And Genre Transformation In Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Hannah Gautsch
Wilderness Of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Captivity Narratives, And Genre Transformation In Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Hannah Gautsch
Theses and Dissertations--English
As a modiste well-versed in the social expectations of the domestic world, Elizabeth Keckley crafted an autobiography that would appeal to this wide variety of audiences. Throughout the 1850s, women across the nation negotiated the terms of True Womanhood and identified activism as a space where women could engage with national concerns. At the same time, literary production in the US was increasing exponentially, creating room for literature to be used as a means of social change. Contemporary scholars have devoted much attention to the ways Keckley’s Behind the Scenes combines elements of multiple genres to assure its long-term survival …
Songs For High Voice: An Annotated Guide To African Romances, Op. 17 By Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Makeda Danielle Hampton
Songs For High Voice: An Annotated Guide To African Romances, Op. 17 By Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Makeda Danielle Hampton
Theses and Dissertations--Music
African Romances, Op. 17, composed in 1897 by African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), is a collection of seven songs for high voice that is uniquely both African and American. The lyrics of this song cycle were first published in the book Majors and Minors, a collection of poems published in 1895 by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906).
An analysis of resources supports that academic discourse in Black vocal music has been underrepresented due to the absence of centralized information, such as published scores, recorded materials, catalogs, and guides for study and performance. While in depth research focusing on the art …
Freakish Taxonomies: How The American Freak Show And Its Literature Redefine The Archive, Megan E. Pillow
Freakish Taxonomies: How The American Freak Show And Its Literature Redefine The Archive, Megan E. Pillow
Theses and Dissertations--English
The American freak show, which dominated the entertainment landscape from 1840 to 1940, is considered by some disability studies scholars to be off limits for critical engagement. In Freakish Taxonomies: How the American Freak Show and its Literature Redefine the Archive, I argue that by casting the freak show solely as an exploitative institution, we overlook its capacity to serve as a model for reinterpreting the relationship between literary studies and the archive. By recognizing the freak show not just as an exploitative institution but also as a dynamic archive of marginalized lives—one that utilizes an imperfect, often deceptive …
The Mothman And Other Strange Tales: Shaping Queer Appalachia Through Folkloric Discourse In Online Social Media Communities, Brenton Watts
The Mothman And Other Strange Tales: Shaping Queer Appalachia Through Folkloric Discourse In Online Social Media Communities, Brenton Watts
Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics
Little work has been conducted on the intersections of queer and Appalachian identities, in part because these two identities are viewed as incompatible (Mann 2016). This study uses a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach to examine the Instagram posts of the Queer Appalachia Project, which represent a substantial body of discourse created by and for queer Appalachians. Of specific interest to this analysis are those posts which employ folkloric figures, such as West Virginia’s Mothman, to do identity work that is queer, Appalachian, and queer-Appalachian. Often, this act is accomplished through juxtaposition with Appalachian imagery and the reclamation of homophobic …
Envisioning Catholicism: Popular Practice Of A Traditional Faith In The Post-Wwii Us, Christy A. Bohl
Envisioning Catholicism: Popular Practice Of A Traditional Faith In The Post-Wwii Us, Christy A. Bohl
Theses and Dissertations--History
Marian apparitions in the United States have occurred in ever-increasing numbers since World War Two, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. These apparitions occupy a unique space in religious life, as they provide opportunities for Catholics to practice their faith outside of the Church hierarchy while still maintaining their status as faithful Catholics, often placing women in prominent positions. Although apparitions are an important part of faith for thousands of American Catholics, most Americans and Catholics are unaware of how widespread this movement is. This dissertation takes a comparative approach to examine a selection of apparition events, illuminating the pilgrimage …
Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.
Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.
Theses and Dissertations--English
This dissertation argues that early American writers often constructed queer ecologies in order to naturalize Anglo-American civilization and justify its expansion into Native American territories. Since there is so little textual evidence on the subject, the major challenge to studying sexuality in early America is approaching sexuality studies creatively—to broaden both our understanding of what counts as sexual discourse and our frameworks for analyzing it. My dissertation addresses this challenge through what many ecocritical scholars of sexuality call queer ecology. In their groundbreaking anthology on the topic, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson remind us that, historically and in the present, …
Consuming Appalachia: An Archaeology Of Company Coal Towns, Zada Komara
Consuming Appalachia: An Archaeology Of Company Coal Towns, Zada Komara
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
Material culture is an understudied aspect of social life in Appalachian Studies, the multi- disciplinary investigation of social life in the Appalachian region. Historically, material culture in the region has been largely studied for its semiotic properties, decoded as a tangible symbol of “a region apart,” lagging behind the rest of America in terms of moral, mental, economic, and social development. Critical material studies from archaeology and other disciplines paint a different picture, however, and construct a region as American as any other. This study utilizes discourse analysis of material rhetoric about Appalachia and archaeological and oral historical data from …
Finding The Singing Spruce: Craft Labor, Global Forests, And Musical Instrument Makers In Appalachia, Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth
Finding The Singing Spruce: Craft Labor, Global Forests, And Musical Instrument Makers In Appalachia, Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
Musical instrument makers in the state of West Virginia in the United States pursue “singing,” lively instruments that capture ideals of musical tone and “re-enchant” their work and lives through relationships with craft materials and the forest landscape. Suitable tonewoods that grow in the region, such as red spruce (Picea rubens), intersect with makers’ desires to craft instruments in the style of famed makers such as the C.F. Martin Company and the Gibson Company as well as provide instruments imbued with a sense of place. While the demand for and symbolic import of instruments made with local wood …
All That You Say Is Beautiful: Stories, Omaria Sanchez Pratt
All That You Say Is Beautiful: Stories, Omaria Sanchez Pratt
Theses and Dissertations--English
From the city of High Point to New York City, this collection portrays a certain black experience. Through a sociological lens, the stories in All That You Say is Beautiful study intersections of class, race, family, and sexuality by bending forms, expectations, and seeks to understand what it means to be human when your experience is not that of mainstream American culture.
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Theses and Dissertations--English
Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …
Where We Belong: Spatial Imagining In American Women’S Life Narratives, 1859-1912, Gokce Tekeli
Where We Belong: Spatial Imagining In American Women’S Life Narratives, 1859-1912, Gokce Tekeli
Theses and Dissertations--English
Where We Belong: Spatial Imagining in American Women’s Life Narratives, 1859-1912, studies three marginalized and disadvantaged American women’s self-life narratives during a transitional period in American history. In this dissertation, I am taking an interdisciplinary approach. Where We Belong borrows from social geography, new materialism, and autobiography studies in order to complicate critical discussions of women’s space and place in nineteenth-century women’s self-life narratives. Each chapter of Where We Belong presents a case study with the goal to provide a broader understanding of women’s strategies of belonging due to and despite their spatial exclusions. The overarching emphasis in each …
A Repurposed Narrative: Mary Rowlandson’S Narrative And Pre-Revolutionary Sentiment, Steven F. Thomas
A Repurposed Narrative: Mary Rowlandson’S Narrative And Pre-Revolutionary Sentiment, Steven F. Thomas
Theses and Dissertations--English
Leading into the American Revolution, Puritan captivity narratives gained a resurgent popularity as nationalized sentiment burned towards political upheaval. Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative (1682) was reprinted six times between 1770-1776, signifying an incredible interest in Puritan stories that seemed to antithetically inspire a progressive and radical revolution against England. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God or A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson enhanced an already fervent revolutionary sentiment, transforming a seemingly straightforward captivity narrative into a totem meant to represent the oppressive struggle between England and her most coveted colony.
Such a literary revival taps …
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …
Gender, Politics, Market Segmentation, And Taste: Adult Contemporary Radio At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Saesha Senger
Gender, Politics, Market Segmentation, And Taste: Adult Contemporary Radio At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Saesha Senger
Theses and Dissertations--Music
This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the …
But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr
But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr
Theses and Dissertations--English
“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a …
Collaborative Organizational Structures Among Artist Member And Other Related Organizations, Kelsey Shackelford
Collaborative Organizational Structures Among Artist Member And Other Related Organizations, Kelsey Shackelford
Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development
Kentucky has a rich cultural and artistic tapestry that is part of the economic future of the state. An important consideration of this future is the artist-member organizations that serve Kentucky creatives and how they work together collaboratively, both internally and externally. The objective of this study was to see how ten different organizations viewed themselves and interacted with their communities in the way in which they are structure, or lack a definite structure as is the case with several different groups. Through web analysis and a series of interviews with organizations that provide benefits to Kentucky artists, we learn …
“Well, Don’T Walk Around Naked... Unless You’Re A Girl”: Gender, Sexuality, And Risk In Jamtronica Festival Subcultural Scenes, Kaitlyne A. Motl
“Well, Don’T Walk Around Naked... Unless You’Re A Girl”: Gender, Sexuality, And Risk In Jamtronica Festival Subcultural Scenes, Kaitlyne A. Motl
Theses and Dissertations--Sociology
The purpose of this study was to explore emerging issues surrounding gendered fear, threat, and violence perpetration at music festivals – particularly events that feature a synthesis of jam band and electronic dance music acts – a genre termed jamtronica by its fans. Though gendered violence perpetration and prevention have been widely studied within other party-oriented settings (i.e., sexual violence perpetration on college campuses), very little research exists to address how wider disparities of gender and sexuality permeate a community whose members frequently claim the scene’s immunity from external inequalities.
In this three-year multi-sited ethnography, I incorporate participant observations, group …
Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky
Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky
Theses and Dissertations--English
Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …
Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton
Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton
Theses and Dissertations--English
Conceptions of masculinity on film shifted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from representations of male heroism as invulnerable, powerful, and safe to representations of male heroism as resilient, vengeful, and vulnerable. At the same time, the antagonists of these films shifted towards representations as shadowy, unknowable, and disembodied. These changing representations, I argue, are windows into the anxieties Americans faced in the aftermath of the attacks. The continuing presentation of power as linked to violence, however, illustrates the ways in which conceptions of masculinity have stayed the same.
Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins
Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins
Theses and Dissertations--English
In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to …
From Blues To The Ny Dolls: The Rolling Stones And Performance Of Authenticity, Mariia Spirina
From Blues To The Ny Dolls: The Rolling Stones And Performance Of Authenticity, Mariia Spirina
Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies
Rock’n’roll has specific aesthetic — a set of invisible rules that each young rock musician accepts as a given. If one examines the history of rock’n’roll starting from 1950s, one will notice that there was a clear division in rock that separates the rock’n’roll of 1950s from rock of the second half of the 1960s and beyond—the rock that we know today. This thesis investigates how the visual aesthetic of rock’n’roll evolved from its origins in the 1950s blues tradition, how it was formed in the second half of the 1960s, and how it was modified in the first half …