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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere
The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …
Contradictory Shakespeare: An Investigation Of Female Protagonists In Othello, Measure For Measure, And Pericles, Mingyue Xu
Student Theses and Dissertations
Unlike the stereotyped image of women in the Elizabethan era, in which women should submit to men’s control, Desdemona in Othello, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Marina in Pericles present their powerful and brave characteristics when facing male dominance. More specifically, all three young women — Desdemona, Isabella and Marina — negotiate sexual and marital arrangements with their language intelligently, despite the fact that they sometimes lack self-determining power in the plays. That is to say, Shakespeare gives women rhetorical power while in certain circumstances, men cannot be persuaded. Such contradiction within how Shakespeare depicts his female …
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 …
Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon
Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon
English (MA) Theses
Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …
Decentering The Dictator: ‘In The Time Of The Butterflies’ And The Mirabal Sisters’ Outspoken Challenge, Elise Coombs
Decentering The Dictator: ‘In The Time Of The Butterflies’ And The Mirabal Sisters’ Outspoken Challenge, Elise Coombs
English
Julia Alvarez’s portrayal of the Mirabal sisters from In the Time of the Butterflies centers the novel around the sisters’ speech and humanity. This decenters the dictator, a figure who was often central to Latin American dictator novels. The first chapter will provide background on the dictator’s characteristics to demonstrate how the Mirabal sisters’ speech draws attention away from his power. The four times the sisters encounter the dictator Rafael Trujillo in the novel, their speech decenters him because Alvarez emphasizes their experience. In the second chapter, I examine the gaps between each encounter, focusing on Minerva’s speech development towards …
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 …
From Terrorism To Feminism: Live-Action Superhero Films As Reflections Of American Social Problems Post 9/11, Lindsey Poe
From Terrorism To Feminism: Live-Action Superhero Films As Reflections Of American Social Problems Post 9/11, Lindsey Poe
English MA Theses
Superheroes have always been used as tools of escapism. From their insurgence into popular culture in the 1930s, to their animation in television programs, and appearance in films in the late 1970s until now, superheroes have allowed audiences an avenue through which they could imagine an alternate, utopian reality. Through the analyses of modern superhero films, audiences are able to connect how the genre reflects larger social and political fears in the wake of such unexpected realities: fear of annihilation after the 9/11 attacks and existing in a potentially unsafe America following the election of Donald Trump. The superhero film …
Children's Literature As A Catalyst For Social Change, Lyndsey Reynolds
Children's Literature As A Catalyst For Social Change, Lyndsey Reynolds
Senior Theses
This thesis is the amalgamation of a creative writing project and an exploration of the ways that children’s literature influences and draws from social justice causes. It started after reading Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and realizing that children’s books are not as simple as I remember them being. This book inspired me to consider the power of children’s literature to push young readers to be aware of and thoughtfully engaged with political, social and cultural conversations. The first phase of my thesis was exploring the relationship between social justice and children’s books by reading scholarly materials. In these …
Alchemical Feminism : The Power And Authority Of Women In Shakespeare's Pericles, Kathryn Corah
Alchemical Feminism : The Power And Authority Of Women In Shakespeare's Pericles, Kathryn Corah
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
William Shakespeare and George Wilkin’s romance play, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, is an example of a Renaissance narrative that includes alchemical subtext. There have been many academic articles and dissertations written on this subject; I seek to build upon these previous arguments to expand upon their premises to argue that this alchemical diction and iconography of alchemical emblems allows for Marina and Thaisa to promote the power latent in feminine-coded virtue as it resists against patriarchal violence and reforms a masculinist patriarchal system. The lens I utilized to analyze the text in my exploration of this topic, which I named …
Uncertain Inheritance: The Motherless Heiress In Big House Novels, Anna Bedsole
Uncertain Inheritance: The Motherless Heiress In Big House Novels, Anna Bedsole
Theses and Dissertations--English
Thus, Uncertain Inheritance traces the heiress in Anglo-Irish Big House novels situated at key times of change for the Irish Ascendancy. The Gothic triad of orphaned heiress, dead mother, and sinister uncle does not belong exclusively to the realm of Irish Gothic authors, but rather this triad is used for different discursive purposes than in its English counterparts. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), Sommerville and Ross’s An Irish Cousin (1903), and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) use the Gothic trope of absent mothers both to address anxieties about and to question the Irish “half” of the Ascendancy Anglo-Irish …
The Chivalrous And Feminist King: How The Arthurian Legends Chronicled The Formation Of Two Gender Identities, Gary Andrew Pickle
The Chivalrous And Feminist King: How The Arthurian Legends Chronicled The Formation Of Two Gender Identities, Gary Andrew Pickle
Online Theses and Dissertations
Literature is often a product of its time, though some works can be said to be more indicative of the time period they came from than others. This thesis inspects Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, not only as products of their time but also as works that illuminate the formation of gender identity within their respective time periods. Malory’s unique experience as an acting knight throughout the fifteenth century influenced his version of the existing legends of Arthur and his court injecting then-current chivalric ideals into the text. Bradley worked to write …