Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Negative Realism: Reading The Novels Of John Williams, William Wells

Masters Theses

This thesis attempts to posit a dynamic theory of literary realism that accounts not only for the commonly understood “historical” realisms of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but for the more fluid realisms that arise in the modern and postmodern eras. Realisms of this sort are still understood to be expressions of particular, sociohistorical eras, but these expressions must be understood to be subject to material change in society. This paper breaks, then, with traditional Marxist conceptions of realism as the direct response to enlightenment thought and early capitalism, and instead argues for traceable eruptions of realism throughout …

The Biopolitical Elements In Yan Lianke's Fiction Worlds, Xiaoyu Gao

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

“Everything Seemed Very Queer”: Divergent Temporalities Of Normative Relations In Mrs. Dalloway, Crystal Brooke Clark

Masters Theses

Queer theory predominantly aligns normative relations to normative experiences of time and connects queer affiliations to queer temporal spaces. Heterosexuality, marriage, sexual reproduction, and the family are hallmarks of normative temporality, as they enact and maintain a progressive, future-oriented, genealogical timeline. However, normative attachments do not always follow queer theory’s narrative of straight time. Closely observing the structure of normative relationships and, in terms of my study specifically, marriage, uncovers assumptions constructing the constitution of normative temporality. I discuss queer theoretical works by Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and others to see how current theories typically oversimplify normative …

Riemannian Reading: Using Manifolds To Calculate And Unfold Narrative, Heather Lamb

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to investigate the space where readers and texts interact. By applying non-Euclidean geometry to the modern subgenre of science fiction known as steampunk, we can see that narratives have no intrinsic geometry. Instead, what we can understand is that readers unflatten inherently flat narratives by applying their own metric of understanding to a narrative. Steampunk acts a primer to considering this mathematical process by explicitly flattening its settings and characters, as well as the historical accounts founding the narrative. Mark Hodder's novel, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, offers two characters that unsuccessfully …

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: 60 Years Of American Dialogue On Sex, Gender, And The Nuclear Family, Amy Brooks

Masters Theses

This thesis is a two-part work. Its components, a written paper and a one-night symposium/film screening event entitled Tennessee Williams: Gender Play in 2015 and Beyond, have been closely coordinated with my dramaturgical research for the February 2015 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The written inquiry is structured around a chronological, selected American production history of Cat; this history, rendered in a series of three case studies, will (1) synthesize preexisting analyses of Cat’s dramaturgical profile, its impact on American theater, and its position in Williams’s oeuvre; …

Hanging The Servant Girl To Hunting The Ripper: The Victorian Birth Of The True Crime Genre, Jonathan G. Brown

Masters Theses

More definitive answers about the creation and form of the modern True Crime genre narrative can be found by exploring, not the creators of True Crime narratives, but by following reader expectations and examining the social situation from which True Crime narratives were able to arise. Theorists in the genre field such as Lloyd Bitzer Carolyn Miller and Amy Devitt have introduced and refined the view of genre as a social action. In this view, genre does not come about as a set of rules imposed upon types of literature to bring order, but as a societally accepted creation constructed …

Female Anti-Heroes In Contemporary Literature, Film, And Television, Sara A. Amato

Masters Theses

The anti-hero character has steadily become more popular in contemporary literature, film, and television. Part of this popularity is due to the character's appeal to the audience. This character type often commits acts that challenge the regulations of society. These acts, however, can become wish fulfillment for some audience members, making the acts of the character a vicarious experience as well as making the character more relatable because of the character's flawed nature.

This study will trace some of the evolution of the female anti-hero by discussing an ancestral character of the female anti-hero—Hester Prynne the protagonist of Nathanial Hawthorne's …

Intersections Of Space, Movement, And Diasporic Subjectivity In Brick Lane, White Teeth, And Maps For Lost Lovers, Md. Alamgir Hossain

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the correlations between characters' encounters with specific locations and their interior development as they adjust to their new environments in the novels Brick Lane (2003), White Teeth (2000), and Maps for Lost Lovers (2004). Monica Ali's Brick Lane focuses on Nazneen's (the protagonist) encounters with different places such as particular streets, pubs, restaurants, cafés, and train stations, which impact her personality to such an extent that, in the process of traversing London's physical terrain, she is transformed from a passive Bangladeshi rural woman into an active, independent agent in London. In With Teeth, Zadie Smith depicts …

The Flight From Despair: A Translation And Critical Exploration Of Hagiwara Sakutarō'S Zetsubō No Tōsō, Samik N. Sikand

Masters Theses

The text that I have translated below, and for which the paper that precedes it is a critical introduction, is Hagiwara Sakutarō's Zetsubō no Tōsō, a collection of 204 aphorisms which I have translated as The Flight from Despair. My introduction concentrates on Sakutarō's use of the aphoristic form in order to show how he both follows and subverts the genre's conventions. First, I concentrate on the author's goal to tackle the "everyday" matters of life through his text rather than intellectual abstractions. I also bring attention to the concision of Sakutarō's style and the protean nature of …

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 …

Samwise Gamgee: Beauty, Truth, And Heroism In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Christine Loraine Chichester

Masters Theses

The Lord of the Rings is a well-established part of fantasy's literary canon because of J.R.R. Tolkien's creative imaginary setting and his use of legendary characters. However, this story, and in particular, its use of the archetypal hero's journey deals not only in the Beauty of myth, but also in the universal Truth of Story. Tolkien combines aspects of well-established archetypes with unchanging Truth in order to create a fitting and ultimately Good depiction of heroism. This thesis seeks to examine how Samwise Gamgee, an unexpected hero, experiences or does not experience the stages of Joseph Campbell's Adventure of the …

Translating Françoize Boucher’S Le Livre Qui T’Explique Enfin Tout Sur Les Parents For Us Audiences: Playing With Words And Images, Evgeniya Bugaeva

Masters Theses

The focus of this thesis is my translation of Le livre qui t'explique enfin tout sur les parents by Françoize Boucher from French into English. Chapter one begins with a brief history and definition of children’s literature, as well as children’s literature in translation. I discuss the subgenre of informational picturebooks—its objectives, characteristics, and current trends. What follows is a short biographic and bibliographic sketch of Françoize Boucher. Then, I discuss the content, format, style, and illustrations of Le livre qui t'explique as well as examine the work’s audience, aims, and values. Finally, I discuss my English translation of the …

Literatura En Las Coordenadas Del Cambio: Premio Casa De Las Americas Literatura Para Niños Y Jovenes (1975-2012), Gloria-Maria Cuesta-Gonzalez

Masters Theses

The cultural dimension of the Cuban Revolution (1959) has an unquestionable reference: Casa de las Américas, international symbol of Cuba in the field of the arts. Of its multiple artistic expression, we have put our focus in the literary prizes with which this institution recognizes children’s literary creation, and our working hypothesis is that Casa de las Américas has played an essential role in the development and consolidation, in the Latin American context, of a genre that even today in day is considered minor. The goal of our study is therefore to investigate and analyze the reasons offered for that …

Constructing Abe No Seimei: Integrating Genre And Disparate Narratives In Yumemakura Baku's Onmyōji, Devin T. Recchio

Masters Theses

The Onmyōji series has had an incredible impact on Japanese fiction. It has created an entire genre of material called onmyōjimono and sold 5 million copies counting only the novel series. Despite this, it has been woefully understudied by both Japanese and English speaking scholars. The Japanese scholars that do acknowledge it use it as a springboard to launch a survey of Abe no Seimei in written and performed media throughout history, and the English speaking scholars have limited their analyses to the form that oni take in the narrative. My research has revealed that Yumemakura Baku utilizes a complex …

Detective Fiction Reinvention And Didacticism In G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, Clifford Stumme

Masters Theses

In the Father Brown stories, G. K. Chesterton reengineers the classic detective story so that it can be a vehicle for didactic messages. Through a rethinking of mysteries, a repurposing of secondary characters, and a subversion of Holmsean-type detectives, Chesterton is able to insert philosophic ideas into his stories while still entertaining readers. Differing from earlier detective stories, the Father Brown mysteries showcase an acceptance of the spiritual and a natural empathy for all characters whether criminal or no. In my research, I show how, through these stories, Chesterton posits messages that are new to the mystery genre and how …

Between The Man And Beast: Reactions To Evolutionary Science In Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls Of The King And T. H. White's The Once And Future King, Mary Feldman

Masters Theses

The development and popular acceptance of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, of which Charles Darwin was perhaps the leading voice, produced perhaps the greatest cultural cataclysm of the Modern age. It held theological and philosophical implications beyond the scientific realm, profoundly impacting the humanities as well as science. The Arthurian legend, a story that has been told and retold for centuries before and after Darwin, offers us a unique opportunity to examine how a preexisting story was radically altered in the light of evolution. Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King and T. H. White's The Once and Future …

No Greater Love: Recognition, Transformation, And Friendship In The Harry Potter Series, Stephen Parish

Masters Theses

Nobody today doubts the momentous influence the Harry Potter series has had on a generation of readers. Many scholars and critics assume Harry's place amongst other great works of children's literature, and indeed the series has brought about a revival in children's literature scholarship. Despite this popularity, many critics question the series' aesthetics, its attention to moral demeanor. Therefore, what element exists in Harry Potter that could enforce its aesthetic quality? Based on a rhetorical reading of the texts, my thesis upholds the aesthetic nature of the books through an analysis of the trio's friendship and and its impact on …

Life Inside The Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, And Storytelling In The Age Of Entertainment, John Hawkins

Masters Theses

This project explores George Saunders's In Persuasion Nation and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as interventionary literature. The thesis asserts that the two works confront the problems of isolation and dehumanization created by entertainment-based consumerism; they do so by depicting satirically exaggerated consumer societies and placing well-developed, sympathetic characters in those settings. The thesis includes a consideration of Jameson and deBord's theories of spectacle and Wallace's stated concerns with postmodern irony as an ineffective form of critique.

Spice Sisters: Religion, Freedom And Escape Of Women In African American And Indian Literatures, Lovely Koshy

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on women in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Rabindranath Tagore's three short stories. Hansberry writes during a period in America when racism, segregation, and black migration to the North weighed heavy upon the psyche of black women. Tagore writes during a time when British control, sati system, caste system, and dharma leave Indian women voiceless. Both express their disagreement with entrenched norms and institutions that have been in place for hundreds of years, a task that initially may seem to be an impossible undertaking, and unlikely to bring about expected change. This work reveals …

Paradox Of The Abject: Postcolonial Subjectivity In Jamaica Kincaid’S The Autobiography Of My Mother And Cristina García’S Dreaming In Cuban, Allison Nicole Harris

Masters Theses

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines abjection as the seductive and destructive remainder of the process of entering the symbolic space of the father and leaving the pre-symbolic space of the mother, resulting in a desire to return to the jouissance of the pre-symbolic space. In this project, I read Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother as an attempt to link Xuela’s psychic abjection with the postcolonial identity. Xuela exists on the boundaries of the colonial dichotomy, embracing the space of the abject because she is haunted by her dead mother. She cannot return to her mother, …

Style As A "[M]Anner Of Seeing": The Poetics Of Gustave Flaubert, Nicole Lyn Brownfield

Masters Theses

Although Madame Bovary is considered a classic of modern realism, Gustave Flaubert would disagree with his classification as a realist, as he hardly remained loyal to a single literary genre or period. Rather, he longed to create a work of literature that would stand alone as an object of art, and to make this dream a reality he employed the techniques that he believed generated artful and expressive prose. As an author and artist, he was influenced greatly by other art forms, such as music and the visual arts, and like other authors of his time, he sought to discover …

Image And Identity: Effects Of The Gaze In Colette's The Vagabond And Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Janet A. Puzey

Masters Theses

Image and Identity: Effects of the Gaze in Colette's The Vagabond and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight explains the development of identity, within private and public spaces, of the novels' female protagonists, Renee Nere and Sasha Jensen. Understanding the history of Paris, used as setting in both novels as well as serving as home for both authors, and its historical relationship to the gaze is important.

Using John Berger's and Charles Baudelaire's observations of female presence and the gaze, the thesis analyzes the ways in which Renee and Sasha struggle to form their identities, not only while braving the critical …

Motherlands Of The Mind: A Study Of The Women Characters Of Attia Hosain's Sunlight On A Broken Column And Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Umme Sadat Nazmun Nahar Al-Wazedi

Masters Theses

In my thesis I examine the portrayal of women characters by two post-colonial Indian writers, Attia Hosain and Salman Rushdie, respectively in Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Midnight's Children (1980). I show how Hosain's and Rushdie's ideas of identity, nation and nationality influence their depiction of these women characters.

In the section analyzing Sunlight on a Broken Column, I argue that there is a spatial veil separating the feudal world of "Ashiana" from the outside world with its political disturbances, the life of a woman as an individual from the life of a woman as a part …

Women's Heart Of Sorrow: Versions Of The Truyen Kieu In The Works Of Duong Thu Huong And Le Ly Hayslip, Vi Tran

Masters Theses

Nguyen Du's Truyen Kieu or Tale of Kieu has arguably provided a life model for Vietnamese females. The poem's influence extends in important ways to contemporary Vietnamese writers as well, including those as politically and artistically diverse as Duong Thu Huong and Le Ly Hayslip. In Novel Without a Name, Paradise of the Blind and Memories of a Pure Spring, Duong Thu Huong transforms the terms of Nguyen Du's poem to those of Vietnam during its revolutionary period and today. As an overseas Vietnamese who had earlier experienced prostitution and the moral chaos of war, Le Ly Hayslip's …

The Voices From The Sanctuary: The Female Narrators Of J M Coetzee's In The Heart Of The Country And Doris Lessing's Memoirs Of A Survivor, James L. Forman

Masters Theses

In both In the Heart of the Country (1977) by J. M. Coetzee and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris Lessing, a female narrator fabricates a sanctuary—mental rather than physical—that enables each woman to challenge, deflect, or adapt to a conflict and that shelters her from a hostile, patriarchal society. For Coetzee's narrator (Magda) in In the Heart of the Country, writing, rewriting, and editing provide the necessary devices to establish her asylum in her quest for identity. For Lessing's narrator (the survivor) in The Memoirs of a Survivor, escaping behind the wall allows her to …

Garbage Picking With Salman Rushdie, Tara Hubschmitt

Masters Theses

Salman Rushdie's voice is one of the most powerful in postmodern and post-colonial literature. He stands as a primary spokesman for the displaced personality of those caught between the conflicting influences of traditional cultures and the contemporary west. In Midnight's Children (1980), The Satanic Verses (1989), and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Rushdie appears to reveal himself as a proponent of a garbage aesthetic. The garbage metaphor, as explained by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in Unthinking Eurocentricism (1994), develops from Brazilian filmmakers of the 1960s and is generally used to highlight the omnipresent influence of western culture upon …

"The World Adrift In Emptiness": Crossing The Abyss Of Transition In Four Tragedies By Wole Soyinka, Michael H. Lake

Masters Theses

1986 Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, Nigerian dramatist, poet, essayist and novelist, names the Yoruba god, Ogun, as his tragic muse for ritual theatre in "The Fourth Stage," his early artistic manifesto. In this essay Soyinka maintains that in contrast to Dionysus, Nietzsche's hero in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Ogun balances within himself elements that could be described as Dionysian, Apollonian, and Promethean. Archetypally, Ogun thus constitutes a destructive-creative unity which overcomes the dyad of good-versus-evil of Europe's Christian civilization.

For this reason, Soyinka upholds Ogun not only as a natural patron of tragedy …

Growing Old And Growing Wise? Parenting And Maturation In Henry James' Selected Tales And Novels, Judit Magyar

Masters Theses

My thesis examines young people portrayed in Henry James' selected novels and tales, exploring the theme of the maturing process, with special emphasis on the influence of the adult world on the psychological development of the young. To this end, I focus on the following works: Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, “A London Life,” “The Pupil,” What Maisie Knew, “The Tum of the Screw” and The Awkward Age. James, through the experience of his young characters, explores not only the depths of moral corruption in society, but also the necessary steps to be taken …

"Time Is One": The Temporal Aspect Of The Hopi Language And Its Experimental Application In Postmodernist Novels, Peter Buru

Masters Theses

My thesis examines the relationship between the temporal aspects of the language of the Hopi Indians, based on Benjamin Lee Whorf’s linguistic analyses, and postmodernist narrative theory. Within postmodernism itself, the study focuses on the narratives' handling of time and space, as illustrated by the following novels: Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson; Time's Arrow by Martin Amis; Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; and Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko.

The study investigates how these postmodernist novels experiment with the application of a timeless temporal scheme. This scheme originates from what I refer to as Benjamin Lee Whorf’s …