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Full-Text Articles in Reading and Language

The Blackness Of Black (W)Holes, Eric M. Anderson Jan 2014

The Blackness Of Black (W)Holes, Eric M. Anderson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Blackness of Black (W)holes analyzes Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's Sanctuary, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as against establishing the illusion of a coherent, recognizable self through relational identities and subservience to denotative language and categories of identity. These novel’s feature characters packing knives, I claim, because they advocate for what I term stylistic self–extrication: a rupture with prevailing forms of identity and cliché ways of speaking through rhythmic, sonorous, experimental language use. Characters who succeed at the task, I argue, are associated with a blackness in excess of racial markings, because they become unclassifiable as a result. In …


Trans-Relational Poetics And Outsider American Modernist And Postmodernist Poetry, Anna Elena Eyre Jan 2013

Trans-Relational Poetics And Outsider American Modernist And Postmodernist Poetry, Anna Elena Eyre

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is concerned with how language mediates the relationship between self and other, and in particular, mythopoetic language. The political potential of myth has long been condemned, so much so that the word "myth" is now synonymous with "false." I argue that this is a result of what I term as heroic mythopoesis wherein the relationship between self and other is predicated on a violent separation that reinforces conceptions of identity. In contrast, in what I term as trans-relational mythopoesis this relationship is contingent on an embodied exposure between self and other that reciprocally translates and transforms conceptions of …