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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

For The Future: An Examination Of Conspiracy And Terror In The Works Of Don Delillo, Ashleigh Whelan May 2011

For The Future: An Examination Of Conspiracy And Terror In The Works Of Don Delillo, Ashleigh Whelan

English Theses

This thesis is divided into two chapters, the first being an examination of conspiracy and paranoia in Libra, while the second focuses on the relationship between art and terror in Mao II, “In the Ruins of the Future,” Falling Man, and Point Omega. The study traces how DeLillo’s works have evolved over the years, focusing on the creation of counternarratives. Readers are given a glimpse of American culture and shown the power of narrative, ultimately shedding light on the future of our collective consciousness.


Taking Eudora Welty's Text Out Of The Closet: Delta Wedding's George Fairchild And The Queering Of Saint George, James R. Wallace Jul 2009

Taking Eudora Welty's Text Out Of The Closet: Delta Wedding's George Fairchild And The Queering Of Saint George, James R. Wallace

English Theses

Eudora Welty’s characterization of George Fairchild (Delta Wedding) queers the heroic masculine ideal, St George, whose legendary exploits have been popularized in narrative literature, Catholic iconography, and children’s fairy tale. Lauded by the Fairchild women for his “difference,” George’s sexuality offers him an identity apart from the suffocating Fairchild family myth. George Fairchild’s queer sexuality and homoeroticism augments our critical understanding of Delta Wedding, the character, as well as other characters. The author’s subtly politicized construction of the novel’s ostensible hero subverts literary tradition, the gender binary, and patriarchal myth.


By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Angela Marie Hall-Godsey Nov 2008

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Angela Marie Hall-Godsey

English Dissertations

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction explores the intentional methods of self-castration that lead to authorial empowerment. The project relies on the following self-castration formula: the author’s recognition of herself as a being defined by lack. This lack refers to the inability to signify within the phallocentric system of language. In addition to this initial recognition, the female author realizes writing for public consumption emulates the process of castration but, nevertheless, initiates the writing process as a way to resituate the origin of castration—placing it in her own hand. The female writer also recognizes …


The Butler And The Minstrel: Profession, Performance And Identity, Agnel Barron Sep 2008

The Butler And The Minstrel: Profession, Performance And Identity, Agnel Barron

Graduate English Association New Voices Conference 2008

Both of the novels, The Remains of the Day and Dancing in the Dark, focus on the lives of their anachronistic main characters whose obsession with their professions dominates their lives to the point where it corrodes their identity and selfhood. Both novels position their protagonists in a time of transition and show their struggle to come to terms with the new realities which they face. Set in the decades of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, in a manor in the English countryside, Remains, written by Kazuo Ishiguro, depicts the protagonist‟s, Stevens, attempt to come to terms with profound changes …


Medias Res, Temporal Double-Consciousness And Resistance In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Roslyn Nicole Smith Nov 2007

Medias Res, Temporal Double-Consciousness And Resistance In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Roslyn Nicole Smith

English Theses

Dana, the Black female protagonist in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred (1979), finds herself literally and figuratively in medias res as she sporadically travels between her present day life in 1976 and her ancestral plantation of 1815 – two time periods that represent two converse concepts of her identity as a Black woman. As a result, her time travel experiences cause her to revise her racial and gendered identity from a historically fragmented Black woman, who defines herself solely on her contemporary experiences, to a Black woman who defines herself based on her present life and her personal and ancestral history …


Remapping And Renaming Ireland: A Postcolonial Look At The Problem Of Language And Identity In Brian Friel's Translations., Maria Laura Barberan Reinares Sep 2007

Remapping And Renaming Ireland: A Postcolonial Look At The Problem Of Language And Identity In Brian Friel's Translations., Maria Laura Barberan Reinares

Graduate English Association New Voices Conference 2007

Brian Friel‘s acclaimed Translations, suggestively written in English, captures the moment in the history of Ireland when the British, in a clear sign of imperial dominance, initiated the remapping and renaming of the Irish territory, generating a linguistic uncertainty that eventually led to the capitulation of the Gaelic language and placed the colonizing tongue – English -- on central stage. The fact that this contemporary Irish playwright in 1980 wrote Translations in English and not in Gaelic speaks for itself. But Friel‘s choice of English as the vehicle for his play is far from trivial, and to assume that this …


An Erratic Performance: Constructing Racial Identity And James Baldwin, Natasha N. Walker May 2007

An Erratic Performance: Constructing Racial Identity And James Baldwin, Natasha N. Walker

English Theses

This thesis analyzes James Baldwin's essays as a method for understanding racial identity and authenticity. By using Vetta Sanders-Thompson's racial identification parameters, I suggest that Baldwin's struggle with his identity as a black American is crucial to deposing the idea of a monolithic black experience, which opens up new ways of analyzing African American literature.