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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Posthuman Nurturing In American Literary Futurities, Andrew Ryan Tolle
Posthuman Nurturing In American Literary Futurities, Andrew Ryan Tolle
English Dissertations
This dissertation applies posthuman theories to the concept of nurture in American literatures of 1880-1920 and 1980-2020 to explore how writers construct and imagine futurities that increasingly critique the liberal Cartesian human. While relationships between “subjects” and “objects” in Cartesian dualism can render the act of nurturing both problematic and violent, posthuman nurture decenters the nurturer, shifting focus onto the nurtured. This allows us to view nurture as an inherently mutual act that includes agencies beyond humans, including animals, plants, and other non-zoe. American literatures of 1880-1920, which often speculated futures taking place in 1980-2020, exhibit nascent strains of the …
Disabling Sex Education: Science, Narrative, And The Female Body In Feminist Medical Fiction, 1874-1916, Stephanie P. Tavera
Disabling Sex Education: Science, Narrative, And The Female Body In Feminist Medical Fiction, 1874-1916, Stephanie P. Tavera
English Dissertations
This dissertation offers a feminist disability theory approach to women’s medical fiction during the Comstock Law Era. I argue that, in responding to Comstockian censorship, women authors of medical fiction resisted sexed and gendered narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sex education discourses, but in so doing, they recast the female body within disability rhetoric. Using feminist body theorists such as Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Emily Martin, and Elizabeth Grosz, I frame each work of feminist medical fiction within a specific historical nexus before discussing how the authors–Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Charlotte Perkins …
Ecocritical Theology Neo-Pastoral Themes In American Fiction From 1960 To The Present, Joan Anderson Ashford
Ecocritical Theology Neo-Pastoral Themes In American Fiction From 1960 To The Present, Joan Anderson Ashford
English Dissertations
Ecocritical theology relates to American fiction as it connects nature and spirituality. In my development of the term “neo-pastoral” I begin with Virgil’s Eclogues to serve as examples for spiritual and nature related themes. Virgil’s characters in “The Dispossessed” represent people’s alienation from the land. Meliboeus must leave his homeland because the Roman government has reassigned it to their war veterans. As he leaves Meliboeus wonders why fate has rendered this judgment on him and yet has granted his friend Tityrus a reprieve. Typically, pastoral literature represents people’s longing to leave the city and return to the spiritual respite of …
"Nam-Shub Versus The Big Other: Revising The Language That Binds Us In Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, And Chuck Palahniuk", Jason Michael Embry
"Nam-Shub Versus The Big Other: Revising The Language That Binds Us In Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, And Chuck Palahniuk", Jason Michael Embry
English Dissertations
Within the science fiction genre, utopian as well as dystopian experiments have found equal representation. This balanced treatment of two diametrically opposed social constructs results from a focus on the future for which this particular genre is well known. Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, more aptly characterized as speculative fiction because of its use of magic against scientific social subjugation, each tackle dystopian qualities of contemporary society by analyzing the power that language possesses in the formation of the self and propagation of ideology. The utopian goals of these …