Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Neil Gaiman's Elevated Fairy Tale: Childhood Trauma Through The Lens Of Postmodernism, Faith Adams

Student Works

In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman explores the influence of trauma on identity formation. In the sinister world of his liminal fantasy, Gaiman’s nameless narrator strives to assemble a comforting sense of identity in the midst of traumatic chaos. Viewed through a postmodern lens, Gaiman’s use of hypertextuality and non-linear storytelling undermines idealized views of objective truth and reality, ultimately suggesting that nothing in life can be reduced to a binary.

“Around We Go”: The Apocalypse As Revolution And Revelation In David Mitchell’S Cloud Atlas, Emma G. Schilling

Student Publications

The tradition of global disasters in literature is long-standing and David Mitchell contributes to that discussion. For him, the possibility of political, social, and environmental collapse is imminent based on patterns he traced throughout human history. One common thread Mitchell weaves throughout his works is the presence and the relevance of the apocalyptic. In his best known work, Cloud Atlas, Mitchell explores the cyclical trends of humanity across time and space, including the recurrence of predacity, cruelty, and systematic oppression. Rather than being overwhelmed by a nihilistic reality, Mitchell centers Cloud Atlas around recurring figures of revolution, resisting and …

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

A New Way Of Speaking: Jonathan Safran Foer’S Everything Is Illuminated And Effective Forms Of Holocaust Literature, Elizabeth A. Bentley

Honors College Research

This paper examines the use of broken English, magic realism, and nonlinearity in the novel Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, arguing that such nontraditional narrative techniques are appropriate for depicting the Holocaust, which cannot be represented by conventional narrative form. This paper also examines the ethicality of creating a fictional work about the Holocaust: I argue that Foer distinguishes well between that which is meant to be taken literally and that which is meant to be understood symbolically, and that he in no way compromises the essential core of truth of what occurred during the Nazi genocide.

Real Or Not Real: Fragmentation, Fabrication, And Composite Identity In The Hunger Games And The Mass Effect Trilogy, Tessanna Curtis

Masters Theses

As one glance at box office ratings from the past decade can attest to, twenty-first century Western society seems particularly fixated on coming-of-age stories. These stories reflect the quintessential search for identity, as explained by developmental psychologist Erik Erikson. As Erikson argues throughout his works, the fundamental task of the individual on his journey to becoming a healthy, mature adult is the formation of a personal identity and sense of self that is both unified and whole. What seems particularly ironic, however, is that these coming-of-age stories are released into a culture that is largely dismissive of Erikson’s theory of …

We Are Standing In The Nick Of Time: Translative Relevance In Anne Carson's "Antigonick", Michelle Alonso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated …

I Am With You: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Fans, And The Harmful Effects Of Californication, Alexander Macphail-Fausey

English Seminar Capstone Research Papers

This is my capstone paper from English Seminar and my English degree. The paper is an analysis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Californication and its relation to the fan base of the band. It explores the influences on the creation of the album within a postmodern context, using the theories of Katherine Hayles, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. Through these theories, the paper explores the postmodern impact on the Cult of Celebrity and the American Dream and how those affected the lives of Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante from the Peppers. Finally, the paper shows how the album …

The World In Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress", Tiffany L. Fajardo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject …

White Male Nostalgia In Don Delillo's Underworld, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Hippie Caulfield: The Catcher In The Rye's Influence On 1960s American Counterculture, Richard Neffinger

Masters Theses

This study covers the influence of The Catcher in the Rye on the 1960s youth counterculture in America. Drawing heavily from postmodern and new historicist theory, The Catcher in the Rye has developed a unique connection with the American public, most notably youth culture. This study examines why youth are so attracted to the character of Holden Caulfield and what implications their connection has meant and will mean for future generations of young Americans.

George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando

English Faculty Research

George Saunders peoples his stories with the losers of American history—the dispossessed, the oppressed, or merely those whom history’s winners have walked all over on their paths to glory, fame, or terrific wealth. Among other forms of marginalization, Saunders’s subject is above all the American working class. In the last twenty or more years, however, for reasons that include the fall of the Soviet Union, the impact of poststructuralist theory, conceptualizations of identity that more and more take race and gender into consideration alongside class, and the general cultural turn in class analysis, it has become increasingly difficult to write …

Out Of The Kitchen And Into Actuality: Postmodern Literary Women As Free Agents, Nicole Foti

Honors Theses

This paper will discuss the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism in 1960s literature. Specifically, the paper will discuss the deconstruction of the subject and the introduction of subsequent “pluralities.” Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road are discussed as texts in unique areas of transition in which the female protagonists embody this sense of plurality and use it to become women freer from patriarchal constraints.

Postmodernism Meets The Mopey Prince: Comparing The Ideologies Of Hamlet And Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, Sarah Weitekamp

2011 Spring Semester

It is often said that Hamlet’s tragic flaw was indecisiveness. Centuries of scholars and high school students have imperiously pointed at Hamlet, prescribing an oh-so-obvious solution to our dithering hero’s problems: just do something! Yet in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard takes the opposite tack, introducing us to characters who are even more actionless and aimless than our troubled Danish prince. Stoppard’s main characters are an obvious homage to Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot: purely Postmodern men—clueless, directionless, and passionless. By juxtaposing Beckett-like uncertainty with the Bard’s iconic characters and setting, …

Exploring The New Front Of The Culture War: 1984, Oryx And Crake, And Cultural Hegemony, Terry Ryan Hall

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Dystopic fiction is defined by its depiction of oppressive societies with power structures that seek to exercise control on its citizens. Orwell’s classic 1984 depicts a society that is a reaction to World War II and totalitarian regimes. This society depicts elements of cultural hegemony that are altered during the move to postmodernism. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake evolved to reflect the political climate that grew out of the Cold War’s end, while retaining the cautionary messages regarding the state’s ability to control. Oryx and Crake can be seen as completely reversing the concern from centralized power to decentralized power (represented …

Postmodern And Poststructuralist Approaches To Virginia Woolf, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

“In or about December 1985, Virginia Woolf criticism changed” (Caughie 1991, 1). Thus begins my book, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991), which demonstrates how postmodern and poststructuralist theories can change, and have changed, the way we read Woolf—that is, the kinds of questions that motivate our readings, the objectives that guide our analyses, and the contexts in which we place her works. 1985 was the year Toril Moi published Sexual/Textual Politics and first articulated the opposition between French feminist theory and Anglo-American feminist criticism, establishing “feminist postmodernism” as a new methodology that disrupted the cultural consensus among feminist critics …

Connecting White Noise To Critical Whiteness Studies, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Connecting White Noise To Critical Whiteness Studies, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

"On And On" Until "All Out": Seeking Silence Within The Postmodern Paradigm Of Samuel Beckett, Rachel Ganong

English Seminar Capstone Research Papers

In his biography of Samuel Beckett's life, James Knowlson writes that Beckett failed miserably as a teacher; had Beckett not failed, he would have spent his life as a scholar, teaching and writing brilliant essays like his award winning Proust study. The sizable amount of literature on Beckett's creative writing, however, seems to indicate that Beckett's pedagogic failure metamorphosed into a dazzling success for the humanity, which so frequently themes his work, through literature. Yet, some groups, proponents of Christianity in particular, might have preferred for Beckett's influence to have trickled through the one or two schools in which he …

Breaking And Entering: An Italian American's Literary Odyssey, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

In this personalized account, Gardaphe presents audiences with his own-first person story of the meaning of ethnic identity in America. Gardaphe relates his story of how his own adventures, on the streets of Chicago and in the libraries and school, shaped his views on becoming an intellectual and fashioned his career as a writer and professor of Italian American culture.

Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature In Quest & Question Of Itself, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism argues not that Virginia Woolf is a postmodernist but that postmodern assumptions about art can account for her narrative innovations and feminist politics better than conventional modernist and feminist approaches to her works. In rethinking many of the prominent aesthetic and critical positions of her day, Woolf anticipated many postmodernist tenets. This book helps us to understand how and why she came to hold such views, and how we might change our reading of Woolf and narrative literature in turn.

Pamela Caughie brings together pragmatism and postmodern theory to move critical inquiry, particularly feminist criticism and …