Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Animal Representation Of Race In The Princess And The Frog, Tiffany Tyantyan Enoch

Theses and Dissertations

Disney’s 2009 film The Princess and the Frog was created in response to racial criticism. It features the first Black princess as a means of promoting racial equality. This film attempts to positively portray Black characters, who were depicted as violent and lazy in previous animations.

While the film showcases positive themes (e.g., internal beauty and virtuous work) and portrays Black characters in a more positive light than previous films, it still perpetuates the typical racism against people of color. The lack of accurate and equal representation of racial groups in recognizable and famous stories is a persistent issue, and …

Race And Technology In Southern Literature, Civil War To Civil Rights, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers the intersection of technology and race in the literature of the American South from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though narratives about technology in American literature often promise democracy, equality, improvement, and progress, the role of technology in southern literature is more complex and ambivalent. Literature from and about the South from the Civil War to the civil rights era, by Black and white southern authors like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty reveals technology’s ability to uphold and naturalize southern white supremacy, but also to subvert it. Southern literature traces a pattern …

“Power And The Orientations Of Resistance In Twentieth-Century American Literature”, Victoria Eleanor Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

"Power and the Orientations of Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Literature” analyzes the intersections of space, power, and the possibility for alternatives to power structures. I argue that social power circumscribes the spatial possibilities of normative and non-normative subjectivities. In particular, power curtails the ability of marginalized subjects (such as women, queer people, and people of color) to forge alternatives to the current social order. In dialogue with recent scholars of race studies, feminism, and queer theory, this project reveals how dominated subjects employ their quotidian spaces as sites of resistance and survival. The literature I examine in this dissertation identifies …

James Baldwin's Soundscape And Grain Of The Racialized Body, Vallerie M. Matos

Theses and Dissertations

I will investigate the language around, and in direct relation to, the musicality of James Baldwin’s work. The interdependence of music and literature compose the majority, if not all, of his literary corpus. However, at some point both art forms bifurcate and we are confronted by the difficulties of writing about music and sound, and about music in text. I confront Roland Barthes’s disdain for the adjective and his theory of the “Grain of the Voice” in order to argue that attention to Black expressive musical narrative forms make audible and allow readers to witness to the grain of the …

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 …

Tarred And Floral: Femininity, Race, And The Abject In Bayou, Chalice Ritter

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes abjection in the African-American female experience using Bayou, a graphic novel series by Jeremy Love and Patrick Morgan. I examine the relationship between the protagonist, Lee, and her late mother, Tar Baby, to reveal the latter as an abject component of the former’s identity. The project continues a trend of reading abjection into the African-American experience using gothic fiction and focuses on multiple scenes that serve as intersections of violence and femininity. It draws on sociological and psychological studies concerning black womanhood and beauty politics to extend investigation to the Mississippi community Lee and Tar Baby share. …

Heirlooms, Candace Gayle Wiley

Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis is a collection of poems and an essay that explores the concept of defining the self through the influence of personal and cultural heirlooms. It is particularly concerned with the inheritances that children receive, whether they are a pair of stockings or a political atmosphere. This collection consists of five sections, submitted in partial fulfillment of University of South Carolina's Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.

Pierced Through The Ear: Poetic Villainy In Othello, Kathleen Emerald Somers

Theses and Dissertations

The paper examines Othello as metapoetry. Throughout the play, key points of comparison between Iago and Shakespeare's methodologies for employing allegory, symbolism, and mimetic plot and character construction shed light upon Shakespeare's self-reflexive use of poetry as an art of imitation. More specifically, the contrast between Shakespeare and Iago's poetry delineates between dynamic and reductive uses of allegory, emphasizes an Aristotelian model of mimesis that makes reason integral to plot and character formation, and underscores an ethical function to poetry generally. In consequence of the division between Iago and Shakespeare as unethical and ethical poets respectively, critical contention concerning the …

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

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 …