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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Sound Minds: Women’S Novels, Vibrational Experience, And The Listening Imagination In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Elizabeth Weybright
Sound Minds: Women’S Novels, Vibrational Experience, And The Listening Imagination In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Elizabeth Weybright
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Sound Minds: Women’s Novels, Vibrational Experience, and the Listening Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain traces nineteenth-century evolutions of the concept of auditory subjecthood and brings narrative representations of audition and utterance in novels written by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot to bear on sound studies, acoustic research, and adjacent philosophies of musical aesthetics. Between Ernst Chladni’s groundbreaking publications on acoustic science in 1787 and 1802 and Hermann von Helmholtz’s enormously influential study of sound waves and musical theory, On the Sensations of Tone: As a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1862), continental Europe and Britain saw proliferating …
Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand
Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation engages with literary trauma theory and rape studies by investigating how scholars through the 1990s theorized the relationship among trauma, narration, and silence, and how the #MeToo movement causes us to rethink these views. Attending to the specific silence generated in the wake of sexual violation reveals how power structures influence the act of telling, challenging the idea that trauma is untellable. I argue that literary trauma theory needs to push beyond its foundation in biomedical models of trauma—in which the (in)ability to recall or articulate traumatic events is rooted in neurology—to examine the ways traumatic narratives are …
The Position Of A Woman: A Poetics Of Grace Paley’S Political Storytelling, Jamie Zabinsky
The Position Of A Woman: A Poetics Of Grace Paley’S Political Storytelling, Jamie Zabinsky
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
While literary critics have long shown modest interest in writer-activist Grace Paley’s short fiction, no scholarship has yet focused on her extensive record of nonfiction writing. This thesis concentrates on Just As I Thought, an anthology of Paley’s essays, articles and speeches organized by Paley herself in lieu of any memoir or autobiography. Hannah Arendt’s theorizations of time, thought and standpoint serve as frameworks to establish the essay collection, arranged according to Paley’s political life along a timeline of feminist history, as a political storytelling project. Political storytelling, in the Arendtian sense and in context of this thesis, aims …
The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest
The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American …
Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen
Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …
Genres Of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, And Community, 1970-1983, Meredith A. Benjamin
Genres Of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, And Community, 1970-1983, Meredith A. Benjamin
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The desire to record lives and the conviction that such recordings would serve an important purpose for other women were the motivations behind much of the autobiographical writing in U.S. feminist writing of the 1970s and 80s. In Genres of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, and Community, 1970-1983, I argue that feminist writers in this period used autobiographical writing to create a sense of community among their readers: a new feminist public. Realizing the inadequacy of a sense of identification, these writers encouraged their audiences, in the words of Audre Lorde, to transform silence into language and action. While scholars …