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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Notes Toward A Personal Afrofuturism, Jalen T. Adams
Notes Toward A Personal Afrofuturism, Jalen T. Adams
Theses and Dissertations
This paper is penned by a young adult who is generally confused about a lot of things regarding life, but has one singular focus that is perhaps larger than life—trying to find the bridge between a future already lived, and a past yet to happen. These are his findings so far.
Breaking Bridges: A Latina's Role In Familismo And Higher Education, Desiree Trejo
Breaking Bridges: A Latina's Role In Familismo And Higher Education, Desiree Trejo
Theses and Dissertations
This research and collective experiences have been recorded to bring together an autoethnography that demonstrates my personal experiences of being the eldest daughter in a Latino family and how these experiences situate within a social context. The primary purpose of this autoethnography is to provide insight on Latino culture expectations placed upon first born daughters. My own experiences connect to my research covering Latino culture and gender expectations to further understand social meanings and understandings of this culture. This autoethnography presents qualitive research that allows me to self-reflect and apply these findings to my personal experiences within my family to …
I Am An Author: Performing Authorship In Literary Culture, Justin R. Greene
I Am An Author: Performing Authorship In Literary Culture, Justin R. Greene
Theses and Dissertations
Authorship is not merely an act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard; it is a social identity performance that includes the use of multiple media. Authors must be hyper- visible to cut through the dearth of information, entertainment options, and personae vying for attention in our supersaturated media environment. As they enter the literary world, writers consciously create characters and narratives around themselves, and through the consistent and believable enactment of these features, authors are born. In this dissertation, I analyze the performance of authorship in U.S. literary culture through an interdisciplinary framework. My work pulls from …
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Theses and Dissertations
This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …
“There Is No God And We Are His Prophets”: The Visionary Potential Of Memory And Nostalgia In Cormac Mccarthy's No Country For Old Men And The Road, Marie Reine Pugh
“There Is No God And We Are His Prophets”: The Visionary Potential Of Memory And Nostalgia In Cormac Mccarthy's No Country For Old Men And The Road, Marie Reine Pugh
Theses and Dissertations
Memory and nostalgia work in complex, paradoxical ways in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and The Road, both haunting the main protagonists, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and the father, as well as bringing them to crucial realizations. These men give up the traditional hero role for the more meaningful and generative image of “carrying the fire,” which unites these two novels. Carrying the fire represents a memorial and nostalgic longing for home and family. Bell and the father attain this vision because of their obsession with the past, and because of their struggle with memory and nostalgia. Memory, …
Blues Trope As A Cultural Intersection In Alice Walker's The Temple Of My Familiar And Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, Julia Leuthardt
Blues Trope As A Cultural Intersection In Alice Walker's The Temple Of My Familiar And Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, Julia Leuthardt
Theses and Dissertations
Though bound historically through hundreds of years, the African-Native American relation has not received much attention by scholars of literature; hence, the emphasis of this thesis is to investigate the literary portrayal of the interethnic relation between African Americans and Native Americans through the blues trope. The blues trope provides an intriguing literary platform for the psychological and physical struggles in finding an identity within such a diverse multiethnic society like the United States. For African American writer Alice Walker and Native American author Sherman Alexie the blues trope is a successful literary device in expressing long lost and rediscovered …
Negotiating Identity: Culturally Situated Epideictic In The Victorian Travel Narratives Of Isabella Bird, Katherine Reilly Robinson
Negotiating Identity: Culturally Situated Epideictic In The Victorian Travel Narratives Of Isabella Bird, Katherine Reilly Robinson
Theses and Dissertations
Epideictic rhetoric, one of the classical modes of persuasion described by Aristotle, has faced some criticism concerning its value in the realm of rhetoric. Though attitudes have been shifting over the last several decades, there is still a tendency to undervalue epideictic, falling back on the Aristotelian system of ceremonial oratory. However, its “praise and blame” style of persuasion employs of the type of rhetor / audience identification described by Kenneth Burke. Epideictic rhetoric is a major component of virtually any communication, as the speaker or writer seeks to create a bond with that audience so as to persuade them …
Taking Mormons Seriously: Ethics Of Representing Latter-Day Saints In American Fiction, Terrol Roark Williams
Taking Mormons Seriously: Ethics Of Representing Latter-Day Saints In American Fiction, Terrol Roark Williams
Theses and Dissertations
My paper examines the ethics of representing Mormons in serious American fiction, viewed through two primary texts, Bayard Taylor's nineteenth-century dramatic poem The Prophet and Maureen Whipple's epic novel The Giant Joshua. I also briefly examine Walter Kirn's short stories “Planetarium” and “Whole Other Bodies.” Using Werner Sollors' and Matthew Frye Jacobson's writings on ethnicity as foundational, I argue in that Mormonism constitutes an ethnicity, which designation accentuates the ethical demands of those who represent the group. I also use W.J.T. Mitchell's theories of representation as the basis of my arguments of the ethics of representing ethnicity. As ethical theorists, …
Versions Of America: Reading American Literature For Identity And Difference, Raj G. Chetty
Versions Of America: Reading American Literature For Identity And Difference, Raj G. Chetty
Theses and Dissertations
My paper examines how American authors of the South Asian Diaspora (Indian-American or South Asian American) can be read 1) as simply American and 2) without regard to ethnicity. I develop this argument using American authors Jhumpa Lahiri, a first generation American of Bengali-Indian descent, and Bharati Mukherjee, an American of Bengali-Indian origin. I borrow from Deepika Bahri's materialist aesthetics in postcolonialism (in turn borrowed from members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) and include theoretical insights from Rey Chow, Graham Huggan, and R. Radhakrishnan regarding multiculturalism, identity politics, and diaspora studies. Huggan and Radhakrishnan's insights are especially useful …
Bridging The Gap: Why Many High School Writers Are Not Successful In College Composition Classes, Amy Stutzman Park
Bridging The Gap: Why Many High School Writers Are Not Successful In College Composition Classes, Amy Stutzman Park
Theses and Dissertations
It may be useful to identify this so-called gap that seems to plague first-year college writers before attempting to discover why it exists. In order to identify the gap, I want to define these writers who are leaving high school and finding difficulty in college composition classes. Patricia Bizzell defines basic writers as "those who are least well prepared for college" (Bizzell "What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College?" 294). I'd like to broaden her definition of basic writers and use the term "inexperienced writers" as the field now defines them. In order to fully understand why most college …
A Voice From The Fire: The Authority Of Experience, Colleen C. Bernhard
A Voice From The Fire: The Authority Of Experience, Colleen C. Bernhard
Theses and Dissertations
Over all, this thesis was written to be a "ramble" of its own around and through three issues that are central to the writing of the personal essay-voice, authority, and experience-and central to the emergence of this author's own sense of "self."
Drawing upon years of voluminous journals, this collection of six personal essays demonstrates what the scholarly introduction proposes: that the personal essay is both a valid genre and a magnificent bridge from informal life-writing to genuine literary accomplishment. Drawing on Phillip Lopate's differentiation of "memoiristic" essays from the more classic autobiographical form, this collection includes three of each …