Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …

Exploring The Margins Of Kotha Culture : Reconstructing A Courtesan’S Life In Neelum Saran Gour’S Requiem In Raga Janki, Chhandita Das, Priyanka Tripathi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Exploring the Margins of Kotha Culture: Reconstructing a Courtesan’s life in Neelum Saran Gour’s Requiem in Raga Janki,” Chhandita Das and Priyanka Tripathi discuss the invisible challenges in life of a famous courtesan Janki Bai Ilahabadi through close analysis of Neelum Saran Gour’s 2018 novel, Requiem in Raga Janki. In this novel, Janki belongs to the infamous kotha but she never fails to seek her subjectivity. This marginal place of Janaki’s belonging will be discussed by appropriating and the theoretical framework of Indian feminist Lata Singh’s (2007) for whom courtesans have been represented as “‘other’ …

Exploring The Rhetorical Power Of Speculative Fiction Through Jewelle Gomez’S The Gilda Stories And Octavia Butler’S Fledgling, Monique Dixon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

There are apparent similarities between Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. However, this thesis will demonstrate that they share more than similar subject matter and yet differ in substantial ways. Utilizing Black feminist theory and alternative rhetoric this thesis examines how Gomez and Butler harness the potential of speculative fiction to critique the world around them and imagine an alternative world for those who are intersectionally marginalized.

“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish grew up in Israel as an internal refugee living under Israeli military rule, legally classified as a “present-absentee alien.” This article focuses on his 1995 volume of poetry, Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?), to study the manner in which Darwish’s cultivation of the musical and aural aspects of poetry serves as a means of poetically attending to the effects of dispossession and displacement. Through a discussion of the poems in the collection’s fourth section, Ghurfa l’il kalām maʿ al-nafs (A Room to Talk to Oneself …

No Man's Land: Critical Disability And Exile In Modernist Literature, Danny Fernandez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis works to synthesize literary theory into an examination of socio- cultural and political factors of post-World War I Europe, as they appear in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, that led to nationalist movements in the 1930s and the current day. These concepts are divided into three sections with the first being an introduction to the formation of signifiers among the modernist writers. The second involves a differentiation of disability from gender in the expatriate community. The third an investigation of disability among the veteran expatriates. The modernist novel, whilst assisting in the creation …

Discarnation: Expounding On Marshall Mcluhan's Critique Of Modern Subjectivity, Amanda Sevilla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project presents Marshall McLuhan’s work as an explication of discarnate subjectivity in mediated environments, with special focus on the consequences of technological environments in society. The first and second chapters focus on McLuhan’s ground, sensibilities, and practice to shed light on his intricate discussions of social perceptions emerging in modern times—i.e., communal awareness propels perceptual and cultural shifts. The third chapter attends to people’s perceptual compass, or their ability to interpret the world around them. Chapter four considers some of the phenomenological aspects of McLuhan’s probes. The ideas show disconnects between time and space that contribute to discarnation in …

Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs in The Reluctant Fundamentalist” Valerie Kennedy analyzes the interrelation of individual subjectivity and global capitalism and the conflict between two belief systems in Mohsin Hamid’s novel. These are, first, a neoliberal system that sees individuals as rationally self-interested, mobile, economic units, and, second, a system based on a humanist definition of individuals as defined by nation, family, and tradition. Changez, the novel’s protagonist, initially endorses the first, but later rejects it for the second, due to his growing awareness of the impact on Pakistan of American geopolitics after 9/11. The essay also examines …

Subjectivity And Methodology In The Arch'i'Ve, Elizabeth J. Vincelette

English Faculty Publications

This article explores methodologies from the fields of library archival science, human geography, composition and rhetoric, and established editorial practices in English studies. By elaborating on the role of a researcher’s subjectivity in archival creation, this work expands the conversation regarding methodology and archives, especially how archives present us with new ways of seeing and making narratives during the editorial decision-making involved in their creation. Writing about my own experience, I privilege the researcher’s point of view with a narrative about my construction of a digital archive. With archival research, we should promote the revelation of methods and methodology to …

Subjectivity And Methodology In The Arch‘I’Ve, Elizabeth J. Vincelette

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This article explores methodologies from the fields of library archival science, human geography, composition and rhetoric, and established editorial practices in English studies. By elaborating on the role of a researcher’s subjectivity in archival creation, this work expands the conversation regarding methodology and archives, especially how archives present us with new ways of seeing and making narratives during the editorial decision-making involved in their creation. Writing about my own experience, I privilege the researcher’s point of view with a narrative about my construction of a digital archive. With archival research, we should promote the revelation of methods and methodology to …

"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on the discovery of subjectivity through the recovery of lost paradise in Milton’s late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This theme revolves around the tension between the affective and the empirical, which also configure the spheres of the sacred and the profane. I explore how the irresistibly emancipatory impulse of recovering lost paradise compels Miltonic subjects to seek ways to return to their originary state or the divine ensemble. During this process, the subject is engaged with his own incapacity or privation while reaching into the sphere of unknown potentiality. In …

Literacies Of The Disaster Zone: New Media Genres And Participatory Rhetorics After The 2010 Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill, R. J. Lambert

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

On April 20, 2010, explosions at the British Petroleum (BP) Macondo Project in the Gulf of Mexico initiated what would become the world's largest accidental release of oil into the ocean. This ecological disaster, a unique combination of natural and human causes, is one of many significant traumas over approximately the last two decades that various stakeholders have documented, participated in, and responded to largely through the expanding and increasingly ubiquitous media of the internet, computers, cell phones, and other networked communicative technologies, which both enable and constrain the variety of responses to traumatic events.

This Dissertation improves our understanding …

A Mexican American's Passage: An Autoethnographic Exploration Of Identity And Self-Empowerment, Corina Lerma

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Thesis presents a critical autoethnography that explores how an understanding of political and cultural events have contributed to my conflicted sense of identity. The purpose of the study was to identify genealogical and historical patterns that manifest in the traumas that have influenced and problematized the construction of my reality and to discover if personal traumas and conflicted senses of identity as a Mexican American in the United States finds any source in the social and political events that took place during the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s. The autoethnography was conducted both through research of Mexican American history, …

What’S Creative About Creative Writing? Critical Pedagogy And Transversal Creativity, Erick Piller

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

As creative writing studies emerges as a field, scholars should interrogate the meanings and possibilities of creativity in the educational contexts of creative writing. This article draws from the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to propose the concept of transversal creativity, which emphasizes agency and self-invention through a realized meshing of discourses and identities—ways of speaking, writing, thinking, and being that cut across and run between established discourses and subject positions. Conceived in this light, creativity can bring critical pedagogy into the creative writing course.

Reading English Literature And Korean Scholars' Search For "Authentic Subjectivity", Jonggab Kim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reading English Literature and Korean Scholars' Search for 'Authentic Subjectivity'" Jonggab Kim discusses the ambivalence of Korean scholars toward the reading and analysis of English-language literature because of its perceived threat to Korean national identity and a route to internationalization. Kim's study is an attempt to evaluate a dual strategy of reading, one that involves both sympathy and antipathy. Kim postulates that what Korean scholars need is not a national practice of reading, but the type of reading that takes into account Korea's historical situation with the knowledge of the field or period of the text. Based …

Is First, They Killed My Father A Cambodian Testimonio?, John Maddox

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Is First, They Killed My Father a Cambodian testimonio" John T. Maddox discusses aspects of the testimonial. Dialoguing with leading Latin Americanists, Maddox argues that Cambodian writer Loung Ung's First, They Killed My Father (2000) challenges this uniqueness and opens studies on the testimonio to new possibilities for intellectual reflection and political activism. In Maddox's view, the continued use of the term testimonio would serve as a reference to this long-standing tradition of writing and thinking about political violence in Latin America. After a discussion of the debate of the definition and function of testimonio and …

Era[C]Ing Diversity: A Critical Rhetorical Approach To Race And The New Citizen, Theresa Donovan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Era[c]ing Diversity is guided by a broad question of inquiry regarding the formation and reformation of subjectivity through the filling out of "blank" forms such as the application for naturalization. This dissertation examines how the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service uses and distributes race, and how subjects participate in the social reproduction of the dominant ideology to create a society where individuals think: I am White; He/she is Black, or Asian, or Native American etc. Era[c]ing Diversity examines how the N-400 constructs the new citizen and the ways that permanent legal residents of Mexican origin disrupt or reify this construct. …

Silent Subjects: Silence In Theories Of Subjectivity, Nikki Ann Agee

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Postmodern theories describe human subjectivity as fragmented. (Faigley 12). Unlike Enlightenment thinkers, who theorized the Cartesian subject as an autonomous, stable, rational self with "privileged insight into its own processes" (111), postmodern theorists "decisively [reject] the primacy of consciousness and instead [have] consciousness originating in language, arguing that the subject is an effect rather than a cause of discourse" (Faigley 9).

The idea that language constructs who subjects are, how they are, and who they may and may not become is very powerful, for it suggests subjects cannot consciously know themselves apart from language. Self-knowledge results from social, institutional, and …

Anti-Ethnography?, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

"Many of the ongoing difficulties teachers face revolve around the 'translation' of disciplinary knowledge—especially critical theory—into pedagogical praxis. It often seems that our teaching lags behind our theoretical knowledge by about two decades, and sometimes we wonder if it will ever catch up. This sense of disjunction has been compounded by the difficulty of teaching postmodern understandings of subjectivity, truth, and epistemology in an increasingly commodified teaching context, where consumers expect to purchase a clear, identifiable, and literally usable product, and where 'knowledge' often means easily digestible and repeatable content rather than analytic skills, critical understandings, or complex world views. …