Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reimagining African Authenticity Through Adichie's Imitation Motif, Ivette Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie …

Progressive Saxonism: The Construction Of Anglo-Saxonism In Jack London's The Valley Of The Moon And Frank Norris's Mcteague, Matthew John Soderblom

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of my thesis seeks to uncover the constructed nature of the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity within two works of fiction. My thesis utilizes London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913) and Norris’s McTeague (1899) because they were published in a similar era. Both authors lived and wrote in the Bay Area during the Progressive Era of American politics. Therefore, there is political, stylistic, and regional proximity. Although Anglo-Saxonism has always been present in the United States, the construction of race was changing in the 1900s. The Valley of the Moon and McTeague both contain intriguing (and antiquated) notions of whiteness …

Reimagining Movements: Towards A Queer Ecology And Trans/Black Feminism, Gabriel Benavente

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples.

In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but …

Depictions Of Fear In Lev Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches And Stephen Crane's The Red Badge Of Courage, Ralph Willard Schusler Jr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to examine and compare two iconoclastic works dealing with war as experienced by combatants. So much of modern war fiction takes this perspective that one is hard pressed to imagine a time when such was not the case; the watershed was marked in the above named works by the aforementioned writers, which, and who, were first in putting readers inside the heads of common soldiers facing mortal danger. These pioneering authors opened the door to modernist writing about boundary situations involving existential threat, as well as the psychological reactions they evoke – especially fear. …