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Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America

Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand Sep 2021

Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages with literary trauma theory and rape studies by investigating how scholars through the 1990s theorized the relationship among trauma, narration, and silence, and how the #MeToo movement causes us to rethink these views. Attending to the specific silence generated in the wake of sexual violation reveals how power structures influence the act of telling, challenging the idea that trauma is untellable. I argue that literary trauma theory needs to push beyond its foundation in biomedical models of trauma—in which the (in)ability to recall or articulate traumatic events is rooted in neurology—to examine the ways traumatic narratives are …


Unthinkable Conditions: Affect And Environment In Romanticism And Speculative Fiction, Amelia Z. Greene Sep 2021

Unthinkable Conditions: Affect And Environment In Romanticism And Speculative Fiction, Amelia Z. Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unthinkable Conditions bridges two literary periods and two theoretical modes in order to illustrate important parallels between historical periods and the writers who attempted to approach the changing environmental conditions of their respective eras. Each chapter names and theorizes a unique form of feeling which then serves as a framework for eco-affective analysis, drawing from existing studies in the environmental humanities and in studies of affect in order to construct a hybrid theoretical model which more fully accounts for the work of the writer treated in each chapter. The central claim of this dissertation is that vital affective innovations accompany …


"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider Sep 2021

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …


Very Two, Very One: Reading As Friendship, Amelia Marini Jun 2021

Very Two, Very One: Reading As Friendship, Amelia Marini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Very Two, Very One: Reading as Friendship” embarks upon what the American philosopher John Dewey might describe as an act of “cultivated naïveté” by asking the reader to imagine that one of the study of literature’s highest goods is the feeling of friendship that it can inspire between the studious reader and the multivalent text. This dissertation proposes that our readerly interactions with texts have many of the same interpersonal complexities and satisfactions of lived friendship, and the chapters that follow will offer a vocabulary for describing those complex interactions in ways that allow us to speak, write, and think …


Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing Jun 2021

Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) and Mary Norbert Korte (b. 1934) are two poets whose contributions to postwar American poetry are vitally important, and yet their status on the margins of mainstream literary culture has left their work largely unstudied. Di Prima, the granddaughter of Italian Anarchist Domenico Mallozzi (with whom she shared a close relationship) grew up in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn and bore witness to the cultural schizophrenia of WWII as a child. Korte was raised in an affluent Bay Area family, and encountered hardships (including the death of her father when she was 12) that affected her …