Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Troubling The Water: Dismantling The Ideology Of Separate Spheres, Lisa Weddell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines nineteenth century U.S. women’s maritime writings to re-evaluate and more accurately represent the roles women played in society. I contend that the nineteenth century ship is a microcosm of the United States and women’s sea experiences and maritime writings reveal their lived experiences and the visible roles they played in their relationships and in public politics. Women’s maritime writings, I argue, challenge ideologies of “True Womanhood” that define women as submissive and passive. Instead, these texts demonstrate how women equally contributed to establishing national identity in the United States by defining appropriate gender performance for men and …

Expanding The Definition Of Liminality: Speculative Fiction As An Exploration Of New Boundaries, Dianna C. Lacy

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Speculative fiction allows an expanded view of literature and so allows scholars to explore new boundaries in the way words and ideas work. In the titular character of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, the reader sees an expansion of self through liminality while A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick explores its collapse. In order to portray each of these the character examined must move though one seems to move upward and the other downward. This idea of movement is only part of what expands the idea of liminality past the traditional idea of a doorway to create …

How To Get A Job In Book Publishing, Grecia Medina

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

There are many different doorways into the world of book publishing and it can be challenging, but there are choices that can make it easier. Aspiring publishers often have a hard time breaking into this world because they have no guide. This thesis will be a guide to traversing the different avenues into the world of publishing. Prospective publishers, editors, and writers will be provided with a landscape of what it’s like to work in book publishing. It will also cover the two different ways that people become publishers, an overview of the basic requirements that publishing houses look for …

Review Of Joyce Carol Oates's Pursuit, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

A review of Joyce Carol Oates's Pursuit considering the elements of suspense, learned gendered behavior, and narrative strategy.

Narratives Of Incarcerated Women, Kaceylee Klein

Honors Scholar Theses

Our criminal-justice system mandates the silencing and disappearing of 2.3 million people, a consequence of its historical context as an inherently violent institution, carrying on traditions of slavery, oppression, and extortion. While any voice that makes it out of a prison cell is resisting the effort to silence, smother, and make compliant the voices of those labeled criminal, the form of publication of that voice allows more or less agency to the author depending on its conventions and structures. There is a spectrum from more controlled or mediated forms of publications to more author-directed ones and they vary over the …

The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …

Treading The Winepress; Or, A Mountain Of Misfortune, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, Jean Macdonald

Undiscovered Americas

“Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.”

So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in 1885–1886 instead of serialized in The Boston Advocate, would have been the second novel published by a black woman in the United States. Instead, Allen has been mostly forgotten by literary history. Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of editors Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean …

The Gendering Of Death Personifications In Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol From Baudelaire To Barnes, Amanda Mcnally

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The time of modernity, defined here as 1850-1940, contributed to massive changes in the representation of the feminine in literature. Societal paradigm shifts due to industrialism, advances in science, psychology, and a newfound push for gender equality brought transformation to the Western World. As a result of this, male frustrations revived the ancient trope of the femme fatale, but the modern woman—already hungry for agency, tired of maligned representation in heinous portrayals of skeletons, sirens, and beasts—saw a symbol begging for redemption rather than the intended insult. Women of the nineteenth century infused texture to a two-dimensional accusation that argued …

The Power Of Modern Othello, Akasha Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Proper, Politic, And Fetishized Object: Representations Of Body In The Fiction Of Edgar Allan Poe, Courtney Glass

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis involves a close-reading of how Edgar Allan Poe writes the body and how bodies operate as discursive spaces to explore identity, sexuality, gender, and society and are constructed and deconstructed. Consideration is given to how Poe challenges, destabilizes, and problematizes notions of the body exacerbated by abnormal bodies absenting themselves via death, decay, or prosthetics and the meaning that is gathered around either their conjunction or disjunction.

The introduction gives an overview of relevant Poe criticism and a rationale for this project. Chapter II explores how Poe’s treatment of the body-proper and identity in “How to Write a …

Ambassador Between Two Nations: Shakespeare In American Ideology, Nicholas Jaroma

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

The purpose of this thesis was to examine William Shakespeare’s role in American ideology. Utilizing the theoretical approaches of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, adaptation and appropriation theories, and Critical Race Theory, I argue that Shakespeare is an integral part of American history and culture by how his works factor into American ideologies, particularly within ideologies focusing on race and colonialism. Specific plays and Shakespeare’s texts are analyzed, and I also follow the literary history of Americans in response to these plays. My first chapter looks at the Revolutionary and early republic eras, with particular focus on John Adams, his son …

Photographic (Over) Exposures In The Nuclear Age In Joyce Carol Oates’S You Must Remember This, Sonia Weiner

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, You Must Remember This, examines themes of memory, time, and nostalgia through verbal descriptions of iconic and fictional photographs (such as Rocky Marciano, Holocaust Victims, Atomic Mushroom Clouds, Rita Hayworth). An analysis of the photographic imagery in the novel reveals discrepancies between surface appearances and embedded social and cultural ideological contexts within the work. Photographs are shown to undermine the overt conformity and conservatism of postwar America by exposing its underlying uncertainties and tensions. These tensions are explored through the perspective of a rebellious adolescent female, whose struggles highlight Oates’s critique of power, violence, and postwar …

Deconstructing Turok: The Kiowa Dinosaur Hunter In Comics And Film (1954-2014), Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Articles & Research

The Dell and Gold Key Comics series Turok: Son of Stone (1954 ­ 1982) were groundbreaking in their introduction of a Native American protagonist who starred in his own adventure series instead of serving as the marginalized sidekick of a white male adventurer.

“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair

Doctoral Dissertations

Cultural and literary theorists have been increasingly advocating for a posthuman ethic that challenges oppressive binaries of all kinds. In turn, the field of queer ecology, which investigates discourses of sex and nature for implicit heterosexism and androcentrism, has come to the fore. This dissertation, rooted firmly in this newer branch of ecocriticism, focuses on various inter-species environments imagined by early twentieth-century queer women writers. Each of their works, in different ways, challenges the naturalization of social hierarchies based on gender, sexuality, race, class, and species being reinforced in the burgeoning fields of sexology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Their novels …

Pyramids In America: Rewriting The “Egypt Of The West” In Rick Riordan’S The Kane Chronicles Series, Heather K. Cyr

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In this paper, I examine the use of well-known American landmarks in Rick Riordan’s The Kane Chronicles (2010-2012), a set of Children’s Fantasy novels that place Ancient Egyptian mythology in the modern world. With reference to the author’s more famous Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (2005-2009), this essay focuses on specific American landscapes in the first novel of the Egyptian mythology-inspired series, The Red Pyramid, arguing that Riordan’s use of Ancient Egyptian-inspired structures reflects the overall ethos of the text. On one level, Riordan’s use of modern American landmarks signals that new stories using old myths have just …

To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this project, I am arguing for a particularly American visual poetics that dwells in the state of suspension implied by attention, quivering between wonder and contemplation, immobility and unfixity as it seeks to reveal, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his 1945 The Phenomenology of Perception, the world which is “always ‘already there’ before reflection begins — as an inalienable presence.”^[1] Grounded in visual theory, the project pairs poets and artists, searching not for similitude, but rather examining resemblance, difference, and most important, relation. Susan Howe, one of my guides for this project, writes that, “immense perspectives …

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …

Nystagmic Poetics In Lorine Niedecker’S Postwar Poetry, Edward Ferrari

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In this article I explore the work of Lorine Niedecker, a poet not conventionally associated with disability studies, in order to flesh out an account of the function of visual disability in midcentury poetics and praxis. To do this I read Niedecker’s formative sequence “For Paul,” the late long poem “Wintergreen Ridge,” and other poems, through deformative practices in the belief that such an engagement shows how Niedecker’s hybrid objectivist praxis can be integrated with critical models of disability studies. Such an integration is then bodied forth in what I’m calling a “nystagmic poetics.” In such a poetics, the physical …

Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry's Jurisdiction And The Transformation Of Equal Rights, Talia Shalev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Across various academic fields and from a range of political orientations, scholars note that a pervasive rights discourse shapes the imaginable horizons of identity, politics, and social life in the United States. Many critiques of rights since the 1970s highlight a particular conundrum of this rights culture: existing rights law and ubiquitous rights invocations fail to guarantee equal conditions for thriving across racialized and gendered axes of identity. Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry’s Jurisdiction and the Transformation of Equal Rights emphasizes and complicates elements of these critiques by reading poetry of the 1970s and 1980s in relation to shifting rights …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

The Meaning In The Music: Music And The Prose Of Chopin, Joyce, Baldwin And Egan, Colin Perry

Senior Theses

Kate Chopin, James Joyce, James Baldwin, and Jennifer Egan are collectively gifted in the art of prose, yet each author also experiments with music in their literary works. An analysis of Chopin's The Awakening, Joyce's "The Dead," Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," and Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad reveals a trend of authors utilizing music to enrich their texts and convey major themes.

Financial Frictions: Money And Materiality In American Literary Naturalism, 1890-1925, Patricia Luedecke

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation argues that American literary naturalists employ money—particularly the tension between its materiality and immateriality—as a metaphor for hidden ontological instability in the following nineteenth-century cultural cornerstones: financial speculation, criminal justice, race law, and social-Darwinian individualism. My first chapter investigates the tension between material accounting and Gothic ethereality in Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912). This chapter argues that, since the Gothic genre involves a compulsive need to account for the incredible and incorporeal, The Financier’s irresolvable tensions between gambling and speculation, home and market, are Gothically inflected. I conclude that, just as speculation haunts the ontological coherence of …

Cormac Mccarthy’S Border Trilogy And The Modern American Identity Crisis, Michael G. Cox

Masters Theses

The narrative trope of the American western is a long-standing literary convention rooted in a convoluted history of conquest, exploration, settlement, and exploitation. At the heart of the western genre is the idyllic vision of self-reliance. From its inception, the United States developed westward, pushing the limits of self-governance into the farthest reaches of empty terrain. As a result, the frontier has long been a symbol of personal liberty, a place where travelers and homesteaders have the freedom to achieve private independence in its purest form. Hollywood has done much to nurture this nostalgic image of prairie life. Iconic silver …

Gender In Apocalyptic California: The Ecological Frontier, Marykate Eileen Messimer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is the consequence of ideologies that promote human reproduction and resource consumption by sacrificing human justice, nonhuman species, and the land. Both biology and queer ecologies resist this notion of human separation and supremacy by showing that no body is a singular, impermeable entity, that all beings are biologically and inexorably connected. My dissertation demonstrates that fiction writers use this knowledge to locate a utopian vision that can counteract the dystopian impotence of living within climate change. This argument is founded on novels written by women and set in California, a state that uniquely inhabits a utopian and …

A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From Frank Kermode to Norman Cohn to John Hall, scholars agree that apocalypse historically has represented times of radical change to social and political systems as older orders are wiped away and replaced by a realignment of respective norms. This paradigm is predicated upon an understanding of apocalypse that emphasizes the rebuilding of communities after catastrophe has occurred. However, in the last half-century, narratives that emphasize the destruction of human civilization without this restorative component have begun to overshadow the more historically popular post-apocalyptic models that were particularly abundant during the early days of the Cold War. In light of …

Increasing Faculty-Librarian Collaboration Through Critical Librarianship, Adrienne Gosselin, Mandi Goodsett

Michael Schwartz Library Publications

Through the lens of critical librarianship, librarians are becoming increasingly involved in social justice, civic engagement, and human rights issues. This paper examines the collaboration between a subject librarian and a faculty member in an assignment that engaged in Public Sphere Pedagogy (PSP), a teaching strategy with the goal of increasing students’ sense of civic agency and personal and social responsibility by connecting their classwork to public arenas; and project-based learning, wherein students develop a question to research and create projects that reflect their knowledge, which they share with a select audience.

Revitalization Of Female History: An Analysis Of Adrienne Rich's Diving Into The Wreck And The Dream Of A Common Language, Kate Soules

Augsburg Honors Review

Of the many important female American poets of the twentieth century, Adrienne Rich is one of the most significant. In her many journals and essays, Rich exposes an ongoing journey of self-discovery, a journey also revealed in her poetry. Her books of poetry Diving into the Wreck and The Dream of a Common Language in particular display a progression of thought about womanhood. This progression begins with a desire for androgyny achieved through a revival of the feminine portion of history in Diving into the Wreck. To achieve androgyny would mean an achievement of balance between male and female, which …

Black Men Who Betray Their Race: 20th Century Literary Representations Of The Black Male Race Traitor, Gregory Coleman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Black Men Who Betray Their Race, gathers a literary archive in order to identify and introduce the “race traitor” as a heretofore unrecognized yet important trope within 20^th century African-American Literature. In addition to coping with the burden of racism, African Americans have had to put considerable energy toward negotiating the possibility of being perceived as race traitors by others within the African American community. This study tracks the possibilities and perils of black group identity in literary representations of black men, neither privileging opposition to the white world, nor celebrating black unity beyond it. Focusing …

Ms – 244: Papers Of George S. Patton Jr., Jujuan K. Johnson

All Finding Aids

This collection is contained in two series, the first being George S. Patton Jr.’s letters to his Aunt “Nannie” and his mother from both VMI and West Point (1903-1908). The second being George S. Patton Jr.’s book “My Father as I remembered him.”, which contains a biography of his father, George S. Patton, and a brief biography of other family members, including himself up to 1927.

In Patton’s book “My Father as I remembered him,” he gives brief descriptions and stories about his family, starting with the first “Patton” and ending with himself in 1927. The first “Patton” was Robert …

Kentuckiana, And A Dash Of Cambodia: A Collection Of Short Stories, Brodie Lee Gress

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The following is a collection of five short stories set in regions familiar to me: “Dewberry Park,” “YouLead,” and “The Color Violet” in Indiana; “Mens Rea” in Kentucky; and “Tory Ride” in Cambodia. Gay identity plays a role in many of these stories, and other themes explored include family, region, socioeconomics, gender, mentality, and change. These stories are concerned with people on the brink, failing and surviving all the same. Some of them are intended to weigh, and some to satirize. I hope they all nick their readers.