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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis situates Zora Neale Hurston and the folk communities in her oeuvre within the context of modernity’s dependencies on fossil fuels. Such a disciplinary context provides an energy footing for our understandings of African American migrations in the twentieth century—which radically transformed the nation on multiple levels—and it illuminates the communal values that undergird Black approaches to petromodern forms of mobility. Furthermore, by engaging the Black spaces of the South, my argument begins filling a gap in the energy humanities. Few scholars in this field engage deeply those populations and regions that disproportionately experience the underbelly of petromodernity and …
Activist Modernisms: Human Rights And Anti-Totalitarianism In Mid-Twentieth Century Literature, Mary Ellen Gray
Activist Modernisms: Human Rights And Anti-Totalitarianism In Mid-Twentieth Century Literature, Mary Ellen Gray
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The period after World War II saw the emergence of a new discourse of human rights, with the signing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the postwar period and throughout the twentieth century, human rights would often be vieas a set of self-evident, monolithic, and timeless values that had merely reached their full realization after the horrors of the war. This study examines a body of literature from the 1930s and 40s, the wartime moment just before the foundation of the twentieth century universal rights ideology, to explore the process by which theories of human rights are …
How The Soul Slips In: Virginia Woolf's (Un)Natural History Of Dogs, Allison Castle Combs
How The Soul Slips In: Virginia Woolf's (Un)Natural History Of Dogs, Allison Castle Combs
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Dogs have a crucial place in articulating ideas about class and sexuality in Woolf and her milieu. Her works move from considering dogs as representative instruments of class and gender in Mrs. Dalloway, to thinking more complexly about the dog/human boundary in Orlando. Human-to-animal ontologies are an evaluation of human biopolitical affiliations, where human social categories and function are embedded and reflected in canine behavior. The “anthropological machine” and the fabulated nature of the human world is exposed in contact zones associated with problems of sexuality, class, and gender, as these internal and external distinctions are able to evade human …
Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier
Material Melancholy: Stranded Objects In Modern Southern Women's Writing, James Travis Rozier
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation traces the origins and uses of a specifically southern obsession with the past. Examining how southern women writers represent the compulsion to remember, I demonstrate how, in their narratives, efforts to retain intimate relationships with an idealized past obstruct characters' ability to live in the present. Their fiction aligns neatly with the dynamic described in psychoanalysis as 'melancholia’—not least because, in each case, these relationships with the past are typically ambivalent or even destructive, and the melancholic subjects must 'work through' their damaging attachments. Typical psychoanalytic approaches, however, have neglected how such troubled remembering might be influenced by …
Uneven Ground: Figurations Of The Rural Modern In The U.S. South, 1890-1945, Benjamin S. Child
Uneven Ground: Figurations Of The Rural Modern In The U.S. South, 1890-1945, Benjamin S. Child
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
New modernist studies has opened wide the discussion about what modernism means, when it begins, and, compellingly for the purposes of this project, where it occurs. Exploring intersections between modernization, modernism, labor, and segregation in the agricultural South, this dissertation demonstrates how the effects of nascent industrialization, emergent technologies, and "modern" thought are animated by figures and spaces associated with--or performing--versions of rurality. The project is divided into three major sections. In the first, I suggest that the contradictions of African American life in the post-Reconstruction world are parsed in the period's literature through the presence of a veiled georgic …
My Higher Self: Elizabeth Bishop And The Endurance Of Emerson, Joshua Andrew Mayo
My Higher Self: Elizabeth Bishop And The Endurance Of Emerson, Joshua Andrew Mayo
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
While there exists some scholarship affirming the aesthetic and intellectual connections between transcendentalism and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, there is to date no substantial study of what role Ralph Waldo Emerson singularly played in the inheritance of that tradition. This essay seeks to validate Emerson as Bishop's literary parentage, an influence that, though not immediately identifiable, greatly shaped her creative process. In so doing, it addresses the critical mistakes which have prevented a thorough discussion of Emerson's relevance and, moreover, negatively dominated the imagination of Bishop scholarship. As an exploration of the writers' shared iconography, their mutual metaphors, the …
Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson
Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The role of the railroad in the modern American experience—and its role in making that experience modern—cannot be overstated. This thesis proposes to tell one of many possible railroad stories. By focusing on the historical and cultural relevance of a series of bodies in transit, I examine the implementation of railroad segregation law and the response by African-American performers. The thesis begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the Homer Plessy test case and continues across three decades, meeting along the way novelists Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson and musicians W. C. Handy, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, …