English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Sanctuary Of Acceptance: Love And Identity Through The Letters And Poetry Of John Keats, Amanda Caridad Estevez Ms.

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I propose to explain how it is that the life and work of John Keats assists us in answering the question of how we create ourselves through the presence of others. I aim to do this through an analysis of the work that his relationship with Fanny Brawne inspired. In doing so, I hope to prove that romantic love creates a sort of metaphysical sanctuary for us to inhabit as we shift through the various incarnations of our identity throughout our lives. By synthesizing the theories of phenomenology and transgression, I hope to demonstrate how Keats’ rapid …

Identity Formation And The Stranger In William Shakespeare's Othello And The Merchant Of Venice, Rodney Castillo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to probe the question of the stranger as engaged by William Shakespeare in the plays Othello and The Merchant of Venice. It will introduce predominant views held during Tudor England towards foreigners and other marginalized groups, to ascertain the forces that influenced Shakespeare’s works, and to provide a historical frame of reference. Further, the thesis will engage with issues of identity formation through postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity and hospitality as expressed by critical theorists Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, and Jacques Derrida. While racism and anti-Semitism are the most common readings of these …

The Dancing Policeman And Other Stories, Satyaki Kanjilal

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Dancing Policeman and Other Stories, a collection of short stories set in India and the United States, looks at ordinary people facing challenges in societies undergoing economic and social change.

Some have historical settings. In “Faithful Naren,” a young man learns the complex political realities of British rule in early 20^th century Natihati, West Bengal, while in the same town in the 1960s, a teenager deals with injustice in “Sabotage.”

Others take place in a present where past practices persist. "Shit Gibbon" centers on a store clerk driven to gambling rather than sacrifice his son's future. In “Road …

Reimagining African Authenticity Through Adichie's Imitation Motif, Ivette Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie …

Border Crossings And Transnational Movements In Sandra Cisneros’ Spatial Narratives Offer Alternatives To Dominant Discourse, Raquel D. Vallecillo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My study aims to reveal how ideologies, the way we perceive our world, what we believe, and our value judgments inextricably linked to a dominant discourse, have real and material consequences. In addition to explicating how these ideologies stem from a Western philosophical tradition, this thesis examines this thought-system alongside selections from Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Caramelo or Puro Cuento. My project reveals how Cisneros’ spatial narratives challenge ideologies concerning the border separating the United States and Mexico, which proves significant as the project of decolonization and understanding of identity formation is fundamentally tied to these geographical …

Stephen Dedalus' Search For Identity In Catholic Ireland, Cristina L. Cuevas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of my research was to explore the interplay between religion and art in James Joyce’s novel, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. My aim was to trace the development of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus by analyzing how Catholicsim is an institution that forms him, yet must reject to realize his artistic potential. I researched Joyce’s background to gain an understanding of the exilic experience on the literature. Through the exilic lens, I realized that Catholicism was the predominant influence on Stephen’s need to embark on a self-imposed exile at the end of the novel. …

Counter-Monumentalism In The Search For American Identity In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter & The Marble Faun, Carmen Mise

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the crisis of identity the United States was experiencing in the nineteenth-century through two of the major literary works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun. Hawthorne, who lived through this crucial and important developmental period, was concerned as to what this identity would be, how the United States would shape and define itself, and what its future would be if this identity was malformed. In addition, this study will look at counter-monuments as argued by James E. Young in his essay “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today” to expand on these …

The World In Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress", Tiffany L. Fajardo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject …