Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Discreet Feminism: Neil Gaiman’S Subversion Of The Patriarchal Society In American Gods, Christopher P. Thompson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Neil Gaiman’s use of a hyper-masculine American culture in American Gods sheds light upon the multiple issues surrounding a misogynistic society in which women are treated as sexual objects and punished for their independence as sexual beings. Gaiman’s efforts at highlighting these issues are discreet and hidden under layers of patriarchal expectations, but through the use of his protagonist, Shadow, Gaiman is able to provide an alternative to the society he represents. While he successfully illustrates this more “ideal” society, his endeavors fall short and are almost imperceptible throughout his novel. Gaiman’s work in American Gods, while lacking in its …

Insomniac Of The Soil: A Collection Of Poetry And Essays, Sarah E. Golibart

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

“Insomniac of the Soil” is a homage to a landscape that has deeply informed Sarah Golibart's life and her artistic voice – the tidewater flatlands of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay peninsula where her family lives and where Golibart has worked on farms since high school. Both her poems and essays are earthy, imagistic, and grounded – quite literally – in the soil as well as in a sensibility of ecological ethics and sustainability. “Insomniac of the Soil” is also a love song to the fervent and fallow cycles of the soil.

The Rough South And New Southern Studies: Crossroads And Constellations, Amanda Freeman

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

“The Rough South and New Southern Studies: Crossroads and Constellations” examines fiction by writers of the Rough South and interrogates the inadequate state of criticism on these working-class authors in New Southern Studies. New Southern Studies seeks to de-marginalize the South and to combat a sense of inferiority or irrelevancy in a multicultural and increasingly globalized world; but in this process, New Southern Studies has actually marginalized the region’s most vibrant form of contemporary fiction—Rough South literature. This marginalization springs partly from class-based prejudice, and partly from a concern that the Rough South is too provincial for New Southern Studies. …

Multiplicity, Marianne Leslie Chan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This manuscript, Multiplicity, is a collection of poems that addresses the varying dimensions within human interactions and the multiple nature of the self. The speakers in these poems confront the “arbitrary constraints” and the categories that define our identities, as well as how these categories are almost always blurred by the complexities of the self and the differences between people. These categories include gender, sexuality, ethnicity, siblinghood, daughterhood, and religion. Two of these poems— “Really, It is All Arbitrary Constraint” and “Other Stories,” which appear in the second section—attempt to dismantle these constraints and/or categories by breaking from traditional poetic …

William Faulkner And Alcoholism : Distilling Facts And Fictions., Quintin Thomas Chipley 1956-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Opinions about alcoholism as a construct, and opinions about William Faulkner’s alcoholism as a fact, have varied. By considering carefully the role alcohol plays in human society, and by looking at these matters of concern through several different lens models, we can explain both why Faulkner was attracted abnormally to alcohol and why others around Faulkner have responded ambivalently to him, to his drinking and to his fiction. Faulkner’s alcoholism was rumored and denied during his life (1897-1962), evaded and contested after his death, and consistently affirmed after 1980. Attention to David Minter and Joseph Blotner, biographers, reveals much about …

Jess's Search For An Understanding Of Truth In Fred Chappell's Kirkman Tetralogy, Alex L. Blumenstock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Fred Chappell’s Kirkman tetralogy, narrator Jess Kirkman synthesizes a multiplicity of perspectives for understanding the nature of truth. Blurring the distinction between art and life, Jess's narrative structure mirrors the imaginative reconstruction of experience; the novels are largely non-chronological emotive interactions with and reflections of his most salient memories and imaginings. Synthesizing an impressive cacophony of voices, Jess's stories both describe and apply the wisdom and tales Jess acquires from and with his family members. Each story informs the prior and the next, and the rhizomatic interaction between language, narrative, and reader explores Jess's numerous identities and understandings as …

Exposing Narrative Ideologies Of Victimhood In Emma Donaghue’S Room And Gillian Flynn’S Gone Girl, Meredith Jeffers

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Stories about abducted women and murdered wives are sadly common on cable and network news programs, from Nancy Grace to Dateline. These at the center of Emma Donaghue’s Room (2010) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). These contemporary novels manipulate the narrative conventions of popular true-crime stories to expose the

In the each chapter, I examine the interesting narrative perspectives of Room and Gone Girl to understand the ways that these novels deconstruct mass media narratives of violence to reveal ideas about gender. In Room, Donaghue dislocates the narration by narrating the novel not from the perspective of …

Shifting Identity/Shifting Discourse: Re‐Naming In Contemporary Literature By Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, And Salman Rushdie, Jennifer Krengel

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Re­‐naming one’s self is an empowering act of self­‐definition; re­‐naming others is an attempt to codify, contain and censure identity. Re­‐naming emerges as a compelling theme in contemporary transnational literature, appearing in three notable texts: Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000), Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2002) and Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton (2012). These texts depict stories of diaspora, the forced migration or dispersal away from a homeland. Communities of diaspora negotiate between two cultures: an originary culture and the culture of the new geographic location. From these negotiations emerge a third, hybridized identity that reimagines the majority culture and challenges structural …

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 …

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

A Tale Of Acadie: Le Grand DéRangement Acadien Et Son Identité LittéRaire, Molly I. Parent

Senior Theses and Projects

In 1755, close to 12,000 Acadians, the descendants of French colonists, were expelled by British forces from their home in present-day Nova Scotia. They were then dispersed throughout the thirteen Atlantic colonies of the British Empire and forced to begin their lives anew in the wake of the trauma that they had suffered. This event has since been coined the “Grand Dérangement,” a title that ultimately suggests the havoc that was caused by the disruption of a culture. The Acadians were a people who had separated themselves from the European powers that fought over their land, a people who found …

"So Much Scope For The Imagination”: Subversive Social Performativity And Spiritual Synthesis In Anne Of Green Gables, Sarah Wallingford

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier

Theses and Dissertations

This project will attempt to provide an outline of some of the most salient constructions of present-day literary fiction, where those constructions might overlap or conflict, and how various contemporary authors and their works might usefully fit within those constructions. This project will argue that fiction-writers following postmodernism are presented with a unique problem of how to write fiction in a way that acknowledges the problems of using language as a primary meaning-making structure without falling down a linguistic rabbit hole where a text ceases to be about anything other than itself. Beginning with David Foster Wallace, this project will …

Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Instead of describing poetry as a set of constraints or history of practices, Muriel Rukeyser calls it "one kind of knowledge." Dark Matter heeds Rukeyser's call, theorizing a poetics of the "scholar's art," in which documentary investigation, autobiographical exploration, and formal innovation are mutual, interwoven concerns. The dissertation pairs American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), reading their hybrid works not through the received categories of American poetry, or through common generic and disciplinary divisions, but using an inductive methodology that takes its lead from the poets. Understanding Howe and Rukeyser's literary experiments as serious interventions in …

The Literary Legacy Of The Federal Writers' Project, Sara Rendene Rutkowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Established by President Roosevelt in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) put thousands of unemployed professionals to work documenting American life during the Depression. Federal writers--many of whom would become famous, including Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West--collected reams of oral histories and folklore, and produced hundreds of guides to cities and states across the country. Yet, despite both the Project's extraordinary volume of writing and its unprecedented support for writers, few critics have examined it from a literary perspective. Instead, the FWP has …

Loosening The Critical Corset: New Approaches To The Short Fiction Of Kate Chopin And Ruth Stuart, Kathryn Erin O'Donoghue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation uses the works and lives of two popular late-nineteenth-century writers, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin, as a heuristic to solve the literary mystery of how "fiction by women" became "women's fiction." While feminist scholars resuscitated Chopin, Stuart remains ignored. The realism and irony of Chopin's novel The Awakening resonate with modern readers, but the sentimental aspects of Stuart's work and Chopin's short fiction remain problematic. The aesthetic movements of realism and naturalism influenced literary taste to the extent that sentimentalism is anathema to contemporary critics. I participate in recent scholarship that explores how sentimentalism has been used …

Public Relations: Diaspora, Media, And The State(S) Of American Literature, Nathan Allen Jung

Dissertations

Like any good public relations campaign, this dissertation aims to offer a persuasive interpretation of certain key facts. The facts, as I see them, are as follows: first, a great number of contemporary novels and poems explore the personal and social consequences of diasporic migration. Second, these texts, along with their print and electronic paratexts, share a pervasive interest in media. And third, these works are rarely read in conversation with one another, despite their mutual concern for migration and media. Owing to this last point in particular, scholarship has failed to fully address the broader media theories developed in …

Protofeminist Women In Bronte’S Jane Eyre And Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Allison Wong

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Gi Jive: Us Soldiers' Writings And Post-World War Ii America, Amanda Lee Stevens

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This work is a comprehensive study of American soldiers‘ writings during World War II as they related to personal and national postwar aims. The paper uses military and domestic publications along with a selection of memoirs and diaries published during and immediately after the war to create an overview of soldiers' ideological and material desires of postwar America.

Male Development In Young Adult Novels: Mapping The Intersections Between Masculinity, Fatal Illness, Male Queerness, And Brotherhood, Ruth Nelson

Departmental Honors Projects

Since 2000, Young Adult (YA) literature has grown exponentially. The subgenres of cancer novels (teen “sick-lit”) and LGBTQ fiction, in particular, have experienced a recent surge in popularity. The novels in these subgenres that feature young men as the affected characters (diagnosed with cancer and/or identifying as gay or queer) are particularly interesting because of the threats that these experiences pose to heteronormative masculinity. Because this fiction is directed at an impressionable audience in the process of forming their identities, the novels’ representations of gender could have a strong influence over readers’ gender identity development. Researchers have begun exploring the …

Bluegrass, Bildung, And Blueprints: The Little Shepherd Of Kingdom Come As An Appalachian Bildungsroman, Leona Shoemaker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come takes as its backdrop the American Civil War, as the author, John Fox, Jr., champions Kentucky's social development during the Progressive Era. Although often criticized for capitalizing on his propagation of regional stereotypes, I argue that the structure of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come is much more problematic than that. Recognizing the Bildungsroman as a vehicle for cultural and social critique in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century writing, this project offers an in-depth literary analysis of John Fox, Jr.'s novel, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, in which I contend the story itself is, …

Completeless Show, Kathleen Raymond-Judy

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating In Post-9/11 American War Literature, David Andrew Buchanan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A rhetorical approach to the fiction of war offers an appropriate vehicle by which one may encounter and interrogate such literature and the cultural metanarratives that exist therein. My project is a critical analysis—one that relies heavily upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method and his concepts of scapegoating, the comic corrective, and hierarchical psychosis—of three war novels published in 2012 (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, FOBBIT by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain). This analysis assumes a rhetorical screen in order to subvert and redirect the grand narratives the United States perpetuates in art …

Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank

Theses and Dissertations--English

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …

"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …

El Paso Odyessy, Tafari Amin Nugent

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El Paso Odyssey not only attempts to give an accurate reflection of everyday American life within a particular timeframe but, also attempts to give characters the ability to speak for themselves. The audience must judge and interpret the authenticity and accuracy of the language throughout the text and if the veracity of the dialogue rings true, the narrative story has succeeded on some level.

Voices In Crisis: An Exploration Of Masculine Identity In Modernist Narratives, Amy Cannistraro

Scripps Senior Theses

The period following World War I can be characterized in literature by the trauma and changes that promoted crises of masculinity. These crises, however, are not discussed between the men that suffer similar feelings of insecurity and anxiety; not approached as a tension in need of resolution. Exploring the narrative voices of Nick, Jake, Darl and Anse in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and As I Lay Dying, this thesis addresses the ways in which this unspoken phenomenon is essential to the modernist male narrative. I propose that, despite the widespread nature of this phenomenon, …

Mental Illness In Early American Fiction: Charles Brockden Brown And The Sentimental Novelists, Katie E. Walk

Masters Theses

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of the United States of America as a new nation. This development brought with it new ideologies and social and political change; included in these changes was the way that sexual conduct outside of marriage was dealt with. Because the emerging legal system became less concerned with matters of morality, some people became frightened that sexual promiscuity would become rampant. The sentimental novel or seduction tale became a means of attempting to control sexual behavior when the law was not able to step in.

The way that madness, a term …

The Germ Theory Of Dystopias: Fears Of Human Nature In 1984 And Brave New World, Clea D. Harris

Scripps Senior Theses

This project is an exploration of 20^th century dystopian literature through the lens of germ theory. This scientific principle, which emerged in the late 19^th century, asserts that microorganisms pervade the world; these invisible and omnipresent germs cause specific diseases which are often life threatening. Additionally, germ theory states that vaccines and antiseptics can prevent some of these afflictions and that antibiotics can treat others. This concept of a pervasive, invisible, infection-causing other is not just a biological principle, though; in this paper, I argue that one can interpret it as an ideological framework for understanding human existence …

Recontextualizing Pudd'nhead: Minstrelsy, Race, And The Performance Of Progress, Collin A. Skeen

Theses and Dissertations--English

This thesis examines how Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson does much more than simply bridge the recurring racial and cultural behaviors of the antebellum South with the reality of late-19^th century America; instead, I argue that Twain’s novella acts as a performative text, participating in a dialogue with a number of cultural forces—literature, theatre, politics, and commercialism—as a way of commenting on popular conceptualizations of late-nineteenth century social progress. Using the critical perspective of Performance Studies, it is clear that Twain’s novel is demonstrating how nineteenth century America used certain sets of symbols and signs to perform race, ultimately critiquing the …