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Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
The Transcorporeal South: Bodies And Ecologies In Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, Tiffany Morgan Messick
The Transcorporeal South: Bodies And Ecologies In Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, Tiffany Morgan Messick
Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations
This dissertation proposes that transcorporeality offers an alternative to Cartesian dualistic modes of embodiment in Walker Percy’s, The Moviegoer, Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright’s, Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Opposing the division between mind and body as theorized by René Descartes, transcorporeality advances the body’s porosity, maintaining that the individual is enmeshed within the material world and that this entanglement consubstantiates consciousness. Examining the works of Descartes, focusing especially on the ways that Cartesian ideas have been applied in Southern culture, I contend that a Cartesian definition of subjectivity, …
Colonialism And Globalism In Two Contemporary Southern Appalachian Novels - Serena (2008) By Ron Rash, And Flight Behavior (2012) By Barbara Kingsolver, Jasmyn Herrell
Undergraduate Honors Theses
In this essay, I investigate how the historic and current economic structures operating in Appalachia from the 1920s to the 2010s are represented in two contemporary Southern Appalachian novels – Serena (2008) by Ron Rash and Flight Behavior (2012) by Barbara Kingsolver. Through the lens of postcolonial theory, I show how Serena represents Appalachia as functioning under the colonial model outlined by Robert Blauner and Helen Mathews Lewis in 1978. Then, still under the theory of postcolonialism, I explore how Kingsolver’s work depicts regional identity in response to a post-colonial environment and the ever-expanding global economy.
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Theses and Dissertations--English
Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …
"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.
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 …
Seen, Not Heard: William Faulkner’S Narrative Style In The Creation Of African American Characters, Dixon Speaker
Seen, Not Heard: William Faulkner’S Narrative Style In The Creation Of African American Characters, Dixon Speaker
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.
Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn
Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers' works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its …
Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray
Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores four contemporary novels set in the American South and analyzes the understandings of American pasts, perceptions of current social and political crises, and projections of possible future paths they contain. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones tell stories of disasters the natures of which reflect prominent anxieties concerning the twenty-first century position of the United States as a global power. The total destruction leaving behind an unrecognizable nation that McCarthy imagines in his post-apocalyptic novel suggests the viewpoint that the degree to which the U.S. is indicted in the use of unethical practices …
Southern Noir: Appropriations And Alterations Of A Twentieth-Century Form, Bob Hodges
Southern Noir: Appropriations And Alterations Of A Twentieth-Century Form, Bob Hodges
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Southern noir conjoins the two seemingly antithetical words in a telling fashion. The word noir conjures images of cheap films about detectives, criminals, and luckless men scurrying across a city at night with expressionistic shadows and light play, a foreboding sense of doom, and deadly seductive femmes fatales nipping at their heels. The understanding of noir as a symptom of urban modernity inextricably linked to cities and cinema stands in stark contrast to the traditional understanding of the south as rural, retrograde, and a repository for all the antiquated, “coercive forms of human society” in labor and social practices (Greeson …
A Call To Climb, A Call For Consumption: The Role Of Place In Tim Gautreaux’S The Clearing, Heidi Martin
A Call To Climb, A Call For Consumption: The Role Of Place In Tim Gautreaux’S The Clearing, Heidi Martin
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.