Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford

Masters Theses

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

Negative Realism: Reading The Novels Of John Williams, William Wells

Masters Theses

This thesis attempts to posit a dynamic theory of literary realism that accounts not only for the commonly understood “historical” realisms of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but for the more fluid realisms that arise in the modern and postmodern eras. Realisms of this sort are still understood to be expressions of particular, sociohistorical eras, but these expressions must be understood to be subject to material change in society. This paper breaks, then, with traditional Marxist conceptions of realism as the direct response to enlightenment thought and early capitalism, and instead argues for traceable eruptions of realism throughout …

Front Matter - Jaepl Volume 27, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Front Matter

Not That Bad: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape culture, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape …

Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Lucas R. Nossaman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the …

The Fragility Of White Masculinity: An Exploration Of The White, Heterosexual Male Fantasy Of Gender In Horror, Allison D. Clark

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Zora Neale Hurston: Scientist, Folklorist, Storyteller, Mary Catherine Russell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper examines the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston and her contribution to American literature in the 20th Century. While previous critical analysis of Hurston’s work has focused primarily on her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, this paper examines Hurston’s career by taking a holistic approach to the body of her literary works. Hurston’s early career as an anthropologist is shown to provide a foundation for her later interest in folklore. In turn, her connection and participation in the Harlem Renaissance gave Hurston’s writing a nuanced and individualized style as part of the American modernist …

Translating Chopin's Parrot: Local Color Louisiana And The Limits Of Literary Interpretation, 1865-1914, Matthew Paul Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, national periodicals such as Harper's, The Century, and The Atlantic Monthly eagerly solicited and published literature depicting small, often isolated regional communities within the United States – literature collectively referred to as local color. This project examines a tension that exists between two conflicting impulses that drove local color writing – one that sought to participate in an ethnographic project rooted in literary realism, the other that reveled in representing local spaces as sites of ambiguity, uncertainty, illegibility, and impenetrability. "Translating Chopin's Parrot" argues that literary historicists, drawn to the …

Queer Affect In T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry, Michael Houle

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Toward Justice: Reflections On A Lesson Before Dying, Robin A. Bedenbaugh, Ralph Hutchison, Connor Hess, André Canty, Kaya Grace Porter, Erin Adams, Ginna Mashburn, Jennifer M. Jabson, David B. Byrd

Newfound Press eBooks

In 2016, the citizens of Knoxville, Tennessee, joined in a community reading program called the Big Read. Knoxvillians read Ernest Gaines's book A Lesson Before Dying, and community groups hosted a series of lectures, book discussions, film screenings, and dramatic performances that immersed the community in a five-week conversation on racism.

This book of essays is the University of Tennessee Libraries' contribution to Knoxville's Big Read. The Libraries put out a community-wide call for written responses to A Lesson Before Dying and was richly rewarded with the thoughtful and heartfelt commentaries gathered here.

Nothing Stranger, Helen Mary Stead

Doctoral Dissertations

“Nothing Stranger” is a collection of dystopian short stories concerned with themes of motherhood and violence submitted for consideration as a creative dissertation at the University of Tennessee.

Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski

Doctoral Dissertations

“Moral Margins: Slavery and Capitalism in American Northern Literature, 1837-1900,” focuses on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and literature, building on recent historical scholarship on the myriad ways slavery impacted the growth of American capitalism. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than in the nineteenth century, when slavery experienced its highest levels of economic and political influence. Scholars of capitalism and American slavery have tended to focus on the South, the obvious locus of slavery, but little attention is paid to the North, where this relationship is more veiled. I argue that Northern literature shows the ethical complexities of slavery-based …

Gothic Naturalism And American Women Writers, Stephanie Ann Metz

Doctoral Dissertations

Traditionally, naturalism and the Gothic have been seen as genres that have little to do with one another. However, Frank Norris, one of the practitioners and theoreticians of canonical naturalism, argued that the roots of naturalism lie not in realism (as is often argued) but in romanticism. This project seeks to explore Norris’s claim by positing a new genre—Gothic naturalism. Gothic naturalism is a hybrid genre that combines the Gothic’s haunting nature and representations of the abject, grotesque, and uncanny with canonical naturalism’s interrogation of making choices and the forces of chance, determinism, and heredity. Although naturalism is traditionally seen …

Southern Gothic Fiction And New Naturalism: Toward A Reading Of New Naturalism, Jeremy Kevin Locke

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersections of American naturalism and the Southern Gothic by seeking to demonstrate how William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West revise key elements of fin-de-siècle naturalist fiction in a manner that enables them to create a new naturalism that they use to shed light upon the tendency of the sociocultural narratives that give meaning to the traditional conception of the Southern community to entrap characters within predetermined identities. Of particular interest are these texts’ revisions of the figures of the naturalist …

Home/Economics: Enterprise, Property, And Money In Women’S Domestic Fiction, 1860-1930, Julia Poindexter Mcleod

Doctoral Dissertations

“Home/Economics: Enterprise, Property, and Money in Women’s Domestic Fiction, 1860-1930” connects American women’s literature to the ideological tensions that affected women’s participation in the development of industrial capitalism in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Working against separate spheres ideologies that largely restricted women’s activities to domestic duties as wives and mothers and discouraged them from working in the public marketplace, American women authors engaged with the contemporary economic theories of John Stuart Mill and Thorstein Veblen and promoted New Woman principles to forge new avenues of fulfilling and productive work for women.

In chapters focusing on entrepreneurial work that …

Kenneth Koch's Postmodern Comedy Revisited, John Campbell Nichols

Masters Theses

This thesis describes and analyzes the postmodern comedy of New York School poet, Kenneth Koch and discusses the changes this comedy underwent throughout his lengthy career. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter I explains the aesthetic of the New York School of poets as contrasted to the dominant New Critical compositional aesthetic embodied by poets such as Robert Lowell in the mid-century United States. Chapter II develops Koch’s comedy as expressing an emergent postmodernism. Chapter III discusses the various aspects of Koch’s comedy, sampling poems from across his career. Chapter IV traces the development and maturity of Koch’s …

The Blindness Of An Invisible Man: An Exploration Of Ellison’S Female Characters, Madison Elkins

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Questions have long been raised about the female characters in Invisible Man who often appear to be objectified or stereotyped. Especially in light of Ellison’s professed opinions against the dangers of stereotyping as minority oppression, the depiction of his female characters seems to be fundamentally hypocritical. It is the dominant critical opinion among feminist scholars that Ellison’s treatment of female characters is not only hopelessly misogynistic, but, more importantly, undermines the telos of the novel and enervates its social claims. While it is a valid exercise to analyze Ellison’s female characters in this way, this opinion fails in two critical …

Infinite Islands: The Seatrees, Colin Christian Alan Mort

Doctoral Dissertations

Infinite Islands: The Seatrees investigates on the subject of infinity as it relates to storytelling and the novel. The critical introduction lays out the relation between reality, fantasy, the imagination and the history of the novel as a source of inspiration for the fictional portion of the dissertation. It considers the similarities between canonical literary novels and fantasy genre novels. Through this consideration, aspects of reality and fantasy in the novel are considered in both theoretical and primary texts. In the fictional portion, an unnamed narrator is retelling the story of his life from beginning to end. Although he works …

The Contemporary Encyclopedic Novel, Matthew Warren Raese

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation will define the contemporary American encyclopedic novel and the significant role that irony plays in shaping meaning. The dissertation constructs a model of the encyclopedic novel based upon the history of the encyclopedia – from Denis Diderot's Enlightenment influenced Encyclopédie – and Northrop Frye's conception of the encyclopedic form. It claims (1) that the contemporary encyclopedic novel continues in the cycle of modal progression toward mythic integration that Frye proposes in Anatomy of Criticism; and (2) that the encyclopedic novel utilizes different forms of irony to challenge authoritative discourse and elevate marginal discourse.

The first chapter defines …

The "Vast And Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, And Levinas, Tyler Joseph Efird

Doctoral Dissertations

In an 1896 essay, Frank Norris wrote that the reading world should abandon those “teacup tragedies” to which it had grown accustomed and embrace a new literature that would depict a “vast and terrible drama.” Realism, Norris claimed, could not be used to achieve an earnest portrait of the conditions that mark individual lives under capitalism. Instead, the world needed a romantic wrestling with the forces of existential inscrutability. Also, the perceived need for literature to depict a clear ethical system needed revising from the perspective of American literary naturalism, a school long denigrated for apparent moral vacuity. Through excruciating …

Rejecting Shadow For Substance: Marriageable Love Within The Novels Of Louisa May Alcott, Megan Gentry

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

A Transnational Novel In Disguise: The Influence Of Brazil In Nella Larsen's Passing, Grant M. Andersen

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction And Global Capitalism, Katharine Aileen Burnett

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism” connects the development of literature of the U.S. South to the ideological tensions inherent in the southern plantation economy before the Civil War. Southern literary form during this time reflects an economy that was sustained by international capitalism but which imagined itself as a version of provincial feudalism. The antebellum southern economy was defined by slavery and individual plantations, which created a culture that was isolated, rural, and oppressive. However, with global trade through cotton plantations as the driving force behind regional profit, the southern economy was also shaped by a …

Tell Me A Story: Metaphysics And The Literary Criticism Of Robert Penn Warren And Wendell Berry, Jason Frederick Hardy

Masters Theses

Robert Penn Warren and Wendell Berry share more than a home state. Both have produced prodigious and varied literary oeuvres that include accomplished fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and both have written extensively on literature’s indispensable function within a healthy culture. This latter shared vision is not unanimously held in academic literary scholarship. In fact, many contemporary critics, who often see literature as a mere material participant in potentially oppressive power structures, oppose the idea that literature serves a valid and definable social function, or at least regard it with skepticism. For this reason, Warren’s and Berry’s views of literature’s proper …

Flannery O'Connor And The Mystery Of Justice, Matthew Holland Bryant Cheney

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study will be to begin to answer the question, “What is ‘justice’ in the work of Flannery O’Connor?” by approaching three stories—“The Comforts of Home,” “The Partridge Festival,” and finally “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Each of these stories applies pressure to both individual and social conceptions of justice while fixating primarily on individuals’ just or unjust convictions and principles, usually in tension with those of their family or community. Flannery O’Connor’s work, while it seriously questions the possibility of “perfect” justice among a fallen humanity, exemplifies the paradoxes that arise from the contingency of our …

Beat Consumption: The Challenge To Consumerism In Beat Literature, Amien Essif

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Critics of the Beat generation, from their contemporaries to the present day, often contend that the Beats’ opposition to consumer culture was superficial. Writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs failed, according to these critics, to present a coherent and principled response to consumerism. This paper, however, argues that while in many ways the Beats continued to participate in consumer culture, they developed a distinct form of consumption—Beat consumption—which attempted to regain sovereignty for the Beat consumer. Through an analysis of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and On the Road as well as several of Ginsberg’s seminal works, …

Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins

Doctoral Dissertations

In the lyric tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets and James Wright’s odes to the Midwest, the poems in Collateral interrogate the complexities of faith and doubt in middle-class America and present a witness compelled to translate suburbia’s landscapes and evangelical banalities into a testimony of hard truths. These poems explore the emotional exhaustion that accompanies language’s broken connection to ideal meaning and how both are unable to fully correspond to our lives. The manuscript is also an exploration of my own corresponding lyric struggle to reconcile what is and what should be, the personal and the political …

Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman

Doctoral Dissertations

Gothic Modernism: Revising and Representing the Narratives of History and Romance analyzes the surprising frequency of the tones, tropes, language, and conventions of the classic Gothic that oppose the realist impulses of Modernism. In a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about The Great Gatsby, he explains that he “selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’” (Letters 551). This “stuff” constitutes the “subtler means” that Virginia Woolf wrote about when she observed that the conventions of the classic Gothic no longer evoked fear: “The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters …

“Can The Circle Be Unbroken” : An Ensemble Of Memory And Performance In Selected Novels Of Lee Smith, Jessica Frances Hoover

Masters Theses

This project combines performance studies and memory studies to the analysis of three of Lee Smith’s southern Appalachian novels in order to open the texts to broader understandings of Smith’s use of oral performance forms, such as ballads, music, and storytelling, in her characters’ transmissions of tradition. The approach draws on performance work by Joseph Roach and collective memory theory by Maurice Halbwachs to create a lens through which to add to existing Smith scholarship centering on feminist readings and women’s authorship. This blended approach allows room to analyze the oral performance forms so central to Smith’s work and their …