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Comparative Literature

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

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Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Maneuvering Past Meaning: Queering Language Through Trans-Poetics, Brooke Ingram Jan 2019

Maneuvering Past Meaning: Queering Language Through Trans-Poetics, Brooke Ingram

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Queer studies today has seen a rise in analysis of the trans subject. While previous research has focused on the queer body and on the term queer, my interest in trans studies is in the form and function of language. That focus on the structures of language is what underlies this thesis. My claim is that queering language is visible in the authors I cover in the form of what I call trans-poetics. I focus on keri edwards’ succubus in my pocket and Moss Angel’s Sea-Witch Volume 1. In edwards, I locate a displaced “I” and thus a displaced subjectivity …


Some-Ness In No-When: Queer Temporalities In The Horror Genre, Melody Hope Cooper Jan 2018

Some-Ness In No-When: Queer Temporalities In The Horror Genre, Melody Hope Cooper

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In my research, I question why heteronormative society is afraid of the elements of horror films that are inherently queer. My focus is on temporal understandings of horror through the concepts of queer time, as theorized by Jack Halberstam and the theory of the abject, as presented by Julia Kristeva. I examine the relationship between queer time and heteronormative time. The abject serves as the return of time without identity or defined by binaries. Queer time is the time that will destroy heteronormative time’s conception of itself. This then relates to the horror that is created by the queering of …


Scandalous Deception In The Castle: An Examination Of The Gender Performance Through The Bedtrick Trope In Arthurian Literature, Abby Louise Daniel Jan 2014

Scandalous Deception In The Castle: An Examination Of The Gender Performance Through The Bedtrick Trope In Arthurian Literature, Abby Louise Daniel

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The bedtrick – mistaken identity in a sexual encounter – is a comic motif employed by medieval, renaissance and modern storytellers. While modern readers tend to recognize this motif as (at best) a disturbing sexual escapade and (at worst) rape, the scholarship on mistaken identity in medieval literature still generally glosses over the bedtrick as a moment of comedy. My thesis examines the literary trope of the bedtrick through the critical lens of Judith Butler’s performativity theory, and the motives behind this form of deception and the modern implications. Furthermore, the bedtrick trope is explored in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur …


Women With Short Hair, Amanda Layne Stephens Jan 2010

Women With Short Hair, Amanda Layne Stephens

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Women with Short Hair is a short-fiction collection that centers on the lives of four women who live in West Virginia. Each story depicts a female character during a different developmental stage: childhood in ―In Casino Daycare,‖ young adulthood in ―Felis domestica,‖ adulthood in ―Date Night at the Beach,‖ and middle-age in ―Women with Short Hair.‖ Short-fiction collections that influenced Women with Short Hair include Flannery O‘Connor‘s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, James Joyce‘s Dubliners, and Ernest Hemingway‘s In Our Time. Symbolism, repetition, the objective correlative, and free indirect discourse constitute reoccurring literary devices while reappearing themes include …


Chasing Demons: Female Villains And Narrative Strategy In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Heather Sowards Jan 2003

Chasing Demons: Female Villains And Narrative Strategy In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Heather Sowards

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis explores Victorian sensation fiction and key authors who rely on essentialism, employing the classifications of either angel or demon to their literary female figures. Using Nina Auerbach's theories on these above categorizations and Helene Cixous's linguistic binaries, I examine the ways in which the narrators of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, and Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science force this taxonomy onto the female villains who dominate the novels' themes. By looking closely at the narrative strategies, I conclude that these female characters themselves are proposing a very different sense of self or …