Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"The Whole Foundations Of The Solid Globe Were Suddenly Rent Asunder": Space Place And Homelessness In Poe's "The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym" And Melville's "Benito Cereno", Francis H. Hill

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My project examines the phenomenon of the hazy spaces on the periphery of the antebellum imagination that, while existing geographically at the very fringes of daily American life, are nonetheless active in the conceptualization, production, and representation of an idiosyncratic American sense of space: an anxiety of spatial fragmentation, formlessness, and modulation. In particular I am interested in Poe's “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and Melville's “Benito Cereno,” both of which deal with American transoceanic travel to the proximity of Antarctica and its surrounding seas. These gothicized nautical fictions demonstrate an important dialectic playing out in these extreme spaces: …

Zora Neale Hurston And The Narrative Aesthetics Of Dance Performance, Jennifer M. Sittig

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Zora Neale Hurston’s literature involves dance and performance. What makes this a viable topic of inquiry is her texts often exhibit the performative, whether portraying culture or using dance and associated folk rituals to create complex meaning. Hurston’s use of black vernacular and storytelling evokes lyrical expression in "Their Eyes Were Watching God." African and Caribbean Diasporas in Hurston’s literature reflects primitive dance performances and folklore. This novel requires lyrical analysis. The storytelling feature of performance arts and reclamations of the body are present in Hurston’s text. In recent academic settings, the body has come to occupy a crucial place …

Women Creators: Artistry And Sacrifice In The Novels Of Virginia Woolf, Issel M. Guigou

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines different facets of feminine artistry in Virginia Woolf's novels with the purpose of defining her conception of women artists and the role sacrifice plays in it. The project follows characters in "Mrs. Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," and "Between the Acts" as they attempt to create art despite society's restrictions; it studies the suffering these women experience under regimented institutions and arbitrary gender roles.

From Woolf’s earlier texts to her last, she embraces the uncertainty of identity, even as she portrays the artist’s sacrifice in the early-to-mid twentieth century, specifically as the creative female identity fights to adapt …

What We’Ve Got Here Is A Failure To Communicate: A Postmodern Analysis Of Representations Of Higher Education In Cinema, Carlos E. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of this study was to explore representations of higher education in film. In order to achieve that objective this study consisted of a narrative analysis of the themes that emerged in films regarding higher education. This study focused on films from the 1950s to the present. The narratives that emerged from the analysis of the films were compared and contrasted to the scholarly literature regarding higher education. The analysis of the films also included juxtaposing the film narratives to the work of postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault in order to inform the claims made by the …

The Central American Question: Nicaraguan Cultural Production And Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, Oscar A. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the cultural production and political history of Nicaragua from the 1960s to the early 1990s and interprets Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman alongside Central America’s literary boom period, the nation-building project of the revolutionary letrados, and race relations between Nicaragua’s Pacific region and its two autonomous sectors of the Atlantic coast. It is argued that Central American ways of seeing are colored by the interplay between a revolutionary past, the myth of the pure Indio or mestizo, and the erasure of national identity in the US contact zone. Rather than recuperating a Central American identity, it …

The Landscape Parks Of Jane Austen: Gender And Voice, Lauren N. Rey

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the function of specific garden features in Jane Austen’s novels, particularly in the seminal texts Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. Male power, politics and land ownership dominated eighteenth-century society. Despite this, Austen’s woman protagonists utilize the tree avenues feature of landscape parks, voicing a need to redefine moral responsibility associated with land ownership. This thesis draws on the literary theories of gender studies and ecocriticism to examine garden spaces in Austen’s texts, though the primary focus of the investigation relies on exploring the primary texts themselves with a historical approach. In addition to this secondary critical …

Children's Literature, Ideology, And Cultural Identity Before And After The Cuban Revolution, Zeila M. Frade

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mediante de un acercamiento cronológico, esta disertación analiza la función de la ideología como herramienta poderosa para construir la nación y moldear al futuro ciudadano en la narrativa infantil cubana pre y pos-revolucionaria. Aunque una tradición y un proceso de formación de identidad nacional anteceden la literatura infantil publicada antes del triunfo de la Revolución, en los períodos posteriores existe una estrecha relación entre el contexto social de los textos y su función ideológica. Partiendo de “La Edad de Oro” (1889) de José Martí, este estudio se enfoca en los cambios socio-culturales que influyen en el desarrollo de una narrativa …