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Literature in English, North America Commons™

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Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

2023

Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America

Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford Aug 2023

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 …

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The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim Jun 2023

The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

While drawing on mythology and a literary history that associated women with death as well as creativity, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath experimented with binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, composition/decomposition, and death/(re)birth. They gained inspiration from the same source, the dead muse, but how do they transform traditions that derive from classical and medieval literary precedent, perhaps in ways that are inherently critical of patriarchal modes of gender dynamics? Why is Poe fixated on a feminine dead muse while Plath is inspired by what she calls her “father-sea-god muse”? How do both authors represent the female body, and how …

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Encoding/Decoding Identity: Communication In Carson Mccullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Sarrah Wolfe Jun 2023

Encoding/Decoding Identity: Communication In Carson Mccullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Sarrah Wolfe

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

N/A

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Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard May 2023

Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard

English (MA) Theses

Fantastical narratives such as fairy tales and magical realist literature utilizes fantastic and intangible spaces to unpack that which is often beyond the limitations imposed on our understanding by reality: the stunting experience of individual and generational traumas. This study aims to contribute to the current literary discourse’s understandings of fantastic literature and its subgenres as a tool for healing from trauma through the application of ontological notions of Selfhood and Otherness supplied by 20th century philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, and the notion of Orientalism by postcolonial scholar, Edward Said. The dialogue generated by these schools of thought provide a space …

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Disrupted Ambitions And Unmasked Identities: An Analysis Of Doubleness In Sylvia Plath’S The Bell Jar And Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man In Cold War America, Laura Anderson Apr 2023

Disrupted Ambitions And Unmasked Identities: An Analysis Of Doubleness In Sylvia Plath’S The Bell Jar And Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man In Cold War America, Laura Anderson

English Language and Literature ETDs

This thesis conducts a literary analysis on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) with a primary investigation on the protagonists and their convergence of identity in Cold War America. One of the critical discourses evaluated throughout the project’s literary analysis includes the protagonists’ complications of doubleness. This essay argues that since these two texts sit between W.E.B DuBois’s “Double Consciousness” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1988 theory on intersectionality, these protagonists are forced to contend with an identity crossroads. Secondary to the context of this analysis is the use of “post-war” and “Cold War,”; neither are …

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The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin Apr 2023

The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin

Munn Scholars Awards

Aria Da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1919 play, has thus far been largely ignored in literary criticism. This essay, through a historical survey of Millay’s previous critical reception followed by a close reading of Aria Da Capo, attempts to explain and then bridge this gap in academic scholarship. A postmodernist reading of the play will then illustrate why Millay’s work still confounds scholars today and how Aria Da Capo specifically continues to be relevant more than 100 years after it was first produced.

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Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti Feb 2023

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself …

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Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig Jan 2023

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

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Multilingual Experimental Literature And Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Erín Moure And Kathy Acker, Melissa Tanti Jan 2023

Multilingual Experimental Literature And Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Erín Moure And Kathy Acker, Melissa Tanti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The impulse toward multilingual writing has arisen as a prominent trend in contemporary women’s writing. Criticism and notions of the literary have to respond to, among other things, the fact that "we live in a world where a significant portion of the population is at least partially bi or multilingual" (Camboni 34). To be responsive to the "increasing multilingualism of writers necessitates new strategies for reading the polyvocality of texts" (Eagleton and Friedman 3). This paper considers the ways multilingual writing creates, “small scale modes of listening” (Maguire xix) that tune the reader to languages, identities, and cultures under erasure. …

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