Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford
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 …
The American Dream, The American Lie: An Examination Of Queerness, Disability And American Identity In Miss Lonelyhearts, Vivian Arias
The American Dream, The American Lie: An Examination Of Queerness, Disability And American Identity In Miss Lonelyhearts, Vivian Arias
Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations
This project, informed primarily by queer theory and disability studies, examines the ways in which queerness, disability, and marginality are central to Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and his critique of the American Dream. Nathanael West, Jewish American novelist and screenwriter, is remembered for his work critiquing the American Dream; however, one aspect that has remained understudied is how his novels feature non-normative outsiders, past and present. The primary analysis of this project is focused on the 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts. Other works by West are also referenced. From West’s perspective, the American Dream was the American nightmare for …
‘I Have Had My Vision:’ Visions And The Escape From Expectations In The House Of Mirth And To The Lighthouse, Madison Yardumian
‘I Have Had My Vision:’ Visions And The Escape From Expectations In The House Of Mirth And To The Lighthouse, Madison Yardumian
Scripps Senior Theses
“I have had my vision,” Lily Briscoe declares in the triumphant culminating line of To the Lighthouse, indicating the fulfillment of her artistic vision on a project over ten years in the making. In her success, Lily Briscoe disproves those who have told her “women can’t write, women can’t paint” and actualizes her ability to create, all the while rejecting gendered and heteronormative expectations which prioritize heterosexual marriage over her artistic pursuits (Woolf, TL 86). Strikingly, this language of vision also recurs throughout The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, a text published 22 years after To the Lighthouse, …
‘I Have Had My Vision:’ Visions And The Escape From Expectations In The House Of Mirth And To The Lighthouse, Madison Yardumian
‘I Have Had My Vision:’ Visions And The Escape From Expectations In The House Of Mirth And To The Lighthouse, Madison Yardumian
Scripps Senior Theses
“I have had my vision,” Lily Briscoe declares in the triumphant culminating line of To the Lighthouse, indicating the fulfillment of her artistic vision on a project over ten years in the making. In her success, Lily Briscoe disproves those who have told her “women can’t write, women can’t paint” and actualizes her ability to create, all the while rejecting gendered and heteronormative expectations which prioritize heterosexual marriage over her artistic pursuits (Woolf, TL 86). Strikingly, this language of vision also recurs throughout The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, a text published 22 years after To the Lighthouse, …
On Ways Of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward A Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism, Dennis Wilson Wise
On Ways Of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward A Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism, Dennis Wilson Wise
Journal of Tolkien Research
This article examines major academic approaches used in the study of J.R.R. Tolkien. It argues that certain themes from political philosopher Leo Strauss, by helping us to develop a new theoretical lens, can elucidate several politically salient aspects of Tolkien's work, including thymos and his dialectic between ancient and modern. Four previous (though flawed) Straussian interpretations of Tolkien are highlighted. Finally, by analyzing the tensions that arise when pairing critical theory and its attendant bias against nature with Tolkien and epic fantasy, this article argues for the timeliness of a Straussian lens for studying fantasy and Tolkien alike.
Write It Slant: Queerness And Form In The Argonauts And Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through, Eleanor Linafelt
Write It Slant: Queerness And Form In The Argonauts And Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through, Eleanor Linafelt
Senior Independent Study Theses
This project analyzes two books of contemporary creative nonfiction: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (2015) and Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann (2019). Both writers centrally deal with queerness in their texts as a concept that is ineffable, or unable to be fully explained in words. I explain how to think about queerness as ineffable through the work of queer theorists Judith Butler and José Esteban Muñoz. In their books, Nelson and Fleischmann recognize that language is insufficient or even harmful in maintaining the ineffability of queerness, which poses a significant paradox for their works …
The Embodiment Of Theory In Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Julie A. Ficks
The Embodiment Of Theory In Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Julie A. Ficks
Dissertations and Theses
The purpose of this research is to explore how Maggie Nelson, in her groundbreaking memoir The Argonauts (2015), works to bring critical theory (primarily queer and feminist theory) out of the academy and into the realm of the personal, rendering theory as tangible and embodied in a real-world setting. Through this unique exchange, Nelson radically reinstates norms relating to gender, sexuality, motherhood and relationships.
How Queer Came To Be: Deconstructing White Queerness In Melville's "Bartleby," Ginsberg's Howl, And Morrison's A Mercy, Sara Elizabeth Parnell Wilcox
How Queer Came To Be: Deconstructing White Queerness In Melville's "Bartleby," Ginsberg's Howl, And Morrison's A Mercy, Sara Elizabeth Parnell Wilcox
Graduate Theses
In American LGBTQ+ communities, questions continually arise about what it means to live in a post-gay marriage world. Is there still a need for a division between LGBTQ+ and heteronormative spaces, such as nightclubs or parades? What purpose does the ideological signification of a queer identity serve if, ostensibly, queer communities are now equal with their heteronormative counterparts? Rather than accepting the homonormative, post-gay marriage premise that underlies frequent, current representations of “queerness” in terms of white, male, gay bodies, I plan to explore the convergence of aesthetics and politics as a method of freeing queer theory from some of …
Disarming “Nature” As A Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining Of Futurity And Environmental Ethics Through Memoir, Sam Lauer
Master’s Theses
In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the …
Incomplete Utopianism: Homosexuality In The Dispossessed, Beck O. Adelante
Incomplete Utopianism: Homosexuality In The Dispossessed, Beck O. Adelante
Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship
This paper draws on research about queer theory and history to analyze, through a literary utopian lens, Ursula K. Le Guin’s treatment of homosexuality in her novel The Dispossessed. The novel itself is said to be “an ambiguous utopia,” a description that holds up in an analysis of the other various parts of the novel. When it comes to sexuality, however, Le Guin’s discussion and writing on the topic is notably lacking. It is paid lip service through a brief showing of neutral attitude on the “anarchist” planet in the novel, but never given further analysis or a more …
The Child To Come: Life After The Human Catastrophe By Rebekah Sheldon, Nathan Tebokkel
The Child To Come: Life After The Human Catastrophe By Rebekah Sheldon, Nathan Tebokkel
The Goose
Review of Rebekah Sheldon's The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe.
"Unsex Me Here": A Queer Reading Of Faith In O'Connor, Shelby Spears
"Unsex Me Here": A Queer Reading Of Faith In O'Connor, Shelby Spears
English Class Publications
In this essay, the author examines the O'Connor stories "The Life You Save may be Your Own," "The Comports of Home," and "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" from a queer perspective using psycho-biographical evidence.
Against The Pursuit Of 'Life's Delirium': Modern Queer Readings Of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" And Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall", Nina Posner
Scripps Senior Theses
This essay explores modern queer readings of The Awakening and Ruth Hall, with an emphasis on feeling, time, femininity, and maternity.
“Between That Earth And That Sky”: The Idealized Horizon Of Willa Cather’S My Ántonia, Miriam A. Gonzales
“Between That Earth And That Sky”: The Idealized Horizon Of Willa Cather’S My Ántonia, Miriam A. Gonzales
Anthós
Since its 1918 publication, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia has been lauded for Cather’s masterful description of the Nebraska prairie landscape; since the mid-1980s, this text has also been the subject of countless queer theoretical analyses, many of which focus on what their authors perceive as an obstructed romantic connection between the novel’s two main characters, Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda. While these two subjects may not initially seem correlative, a more recent—and unrelated—critical essay illuminates a new way of examining Cather’s attention to setting. When we view My Ántonia in conjunction with José Esteban Muñoz’s “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics …
The Man In The Text: Desire, Masculinity, And The Development Of Poe's Detective Fiction, Peter J. Goodwin
The Man In The Text: Desire, Masculinity, And The Development Of Poe's Detective Fiction, Peter J. Goodwin
Peter J Goodwin
This article finds the kernel of Poe's detective fiction in his investigations into the construction of "gentlemanliness" that he began at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. As precursors to Poe's tales of ratiocination, "The Man That Was Used Up" and "The Man of the Crowd" train the reader not to expect a satisfying conclusion to the mystery surrounding masculinity that the author has woven. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the homoerotic desire to apprehend an integral masculine subject ends in frustration bordering on the absurd. In thus undermining the American ideal of masculinity as unified, integral, impenetrable, and fraternal, Poe …