American Literature Commons^™

Reconstructing Queer Outsiders: Intersecting Identities Of Contemporary Gay Ethnic American Poets, Anthony Salazar

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores poetry and memoirs written by recent poets who identify as gay, ethnic, and American. As a result of the complex process of both integrating their intersecting identities and confronting various forms of oppression, the work of gay ethnic American poets has become necessarily more layered than that of their white heteronormative counterparts. They have also transformed a genre traditionally defined by the limited and limiting category “gay” into a multivalent “queer” medium that embraces a futurity of vast and unapologetically ambiguous possibilities. Their very act of emphasizing ethnicity and sexuality in relation to other intersecting identities ultimately …

Ghosts, Hauntings, Kinship, And Contamination: Key Tropes For Narrating Extinction In Jeff Vandermeer's Hummingbird Salamander And James Bradley's Ghost Species, Christopher Hardesty Nicholson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the narrative portrayals of issues pertaining to anthropogenic extinction in two contemporary speculative fiction novels: Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021) and James Bradley’s Ghost Species (2020). This focus leads to consideration of narrative genre, tropes, and affective resonance. The first half of this thesis centers the genres of tragedy and elegy, their tropes of ghosts and hauntings, and the affective processes of grief and horror. Within these narrative frameworks extinction is experienced as a claustrophobic site of horror in Hummingbird Salamander, and as a time-warping inspiration of grief in Ghost Species. However, in each novel …

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Toward An Archaeology Of Manuscripts, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The title of Rachael Scarborough King’s edited collection of essays, After Print, refers at once to Peter Stallybrass’s insight that printing is a provocation of manuscript, as well as to what the study of manuscripts looks like when we move away from stadial and supersessionist print culture paradigms of authorship and publication and instead embrace archival methods and interpretive approaches that center on concepts of media interrelation in early modern manuscript cultures, such as Margaret Ezell’s concept of social authorship.The essays in King’s collection, including an epilogue by Ezell herself, bear the fruits of such intermedial and transmedial approaches, bringing …

See You In The Funny Pages: Forms And Aesthetics Of Newspaper Comic Strips In Bill Watterson's Calvin And Hobbes, Jack Mallard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project looks at how Bill Watterson’s aesthetics and his employment of the comics apparatus, as well as his advocacy for learning the history of the formal development (and decline) of the newspaper comic strip, influence Calvin and Hobbes’ approach to art, family, education, and other cultural topics. By adapting Thierry Groensteen’s theory of spatio-topia, a term describing comics’ ability to provoke meaning from how graphic, verbal, and structural elements inhabit space and relate to one another within space, I demonstrate how Bill Watterson’s quality as a comics artist comes as much from his ability to activate spatio-topic potentials …

Charles Gibson And Indian Territory's Periodical Press, Tereza M. Szeghi

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

I argue that Charles Gibson (Creek writer and journalist) offers an important but woefully understudied voice of resistance to the changes imposed upon the tribes of Indian Territory around the turn of the 20th century (such as forced allotment of tribal lands, dissolution of tribal governments, and Oklahoma statehood). In his regular column, “Rifle Shots,” Gibson offered a dynamic space in which to process and comment upon these changes. More specifically, while Gibson was quite outspoken in his critiques of the ways in which U.S. policies threatened Creeks’ sovereignty, culture, and well-being, his column also frequently contained reworkings of traditional …

From The Corner Of One's Soul: The Methods Of Negotiating Tension In Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West, Julian Pena

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a practical and meaningful reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, one that is rooted in the claim that both Judge Holden and the Kid reflect two different methods for negotiating a tension impinged upon them by their external circumstances. Using a theoretical framework that is inspired by the social psychological Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, this thesis provides an extensive analysis of the novel’s fictional universe, Judge Holden, and the Kid. Such an analysis elucidates the violent nature of Blood Meridian’s universe and further reveals the character of Judge Holden …

Diversifying Woolf’S Room: Private Spaces And Creativity In The Works Of Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, And Alice Walker, Ebtesam M. Alawfi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a divergence between Woolf’s vision of private physical spaces necessary for creating art and that of some feminists of color such as Alice Walker, Ortiz Cofer, and Gloria Anzaldua. Both Woolf and these contemporary scholars agree on the importance of physical spaces for female artists. However, they disagree on the nature of these spaces. Woolf’s private physical space is a room with a lock on the door whereas these writers’ room is the kitchen table, the bus, or the welfare line. Walker and like-minded writers challenge the narrowness of Woolf’s room because her locked room is a luxury …

Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The dissertation studies the pre-history of trauma in US American fiction, examining how experiences of large-scale adversity are represented before the concept of psychological trauma emerges in the late nineteenth century. Distinctly modern forms of violence—diffuse, systemic, lacking direction and intent—bring forth less individual and personal experiences of grief and suffering than those imagined by twentieth-century trauma theory. Studying forms of feeling and of genre that make trauma legible historicizes the way a Western idea of modern subjectivity, as white, self-possessed, agential, and split, has shaped out understanding of how a person processes crisis. The dissertation visits three spaces that …

Defining African American Authorship, April Quattlebaum

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

James Weldon Johnson and Melvin B. Tolson are pivotal figures of the early 20th century. They represent a fundamental question that has been and is indeed still in the minds of African American authors: What is a Black author? African American authorship necessarily involves the challenge of forging a literary identity in the face of a society structurally and temperamentally predisposed to marginalize and dismiss them. In their creative and scholarly works, Johnson and Tolson methodically dissect Black authorship, looking both to the past and to their present situation as they strive to imagine a future for African American literary …

The Christian Right In Translation: Christian Conservative Discourse In Contemporary American Literature, Elizabeth Richardson Duke

English Theses and Dissertations

Religion in contemporary American politics and religion in contemporary American Literature: are they independent phenomena? Literary scholars have largely assumed so. Scholars have attended to nontraditional, liberal religion in postwar American literature, while overlooking how this literature represents and critiques the rise of the Christian Right. Since white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians allied with the Republican party in the late 1970s, Christian conservatives have transformed American politics. As the GOP’s most influential interest group, the Christian Right has set the terms for many of the last four decades’ most contentious and consequential debates. Historians, political scientists, and contemporary American writers …

Unsettling South Dakota Literature: Countering Lionized Representations Of A Frontier Fantasy Space, Lindsay R. Stephens

Dissertations and Theses

In this dissertation, I challenge the pervasive notion of South Dakota as a settler fantasy space by considering several of its twentieth and twenty-first century literary offerings through the lens of Settler Colonial Studies. Settler colonial ideology has long dominated historical, sociopolitical, and literary narratives in South Dakota, affecting state policy, Lakota and Dakota sovereignty, public school curricula, the state’s economy, and even state and local responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Notions of Manifest Destiny and a Wild West frontier continue to evolve, shift, and resolidify in South Dakota, playing a key role in the perpetuation of institutionalized disenfranchisement and …

Why So Negative? Street Literature And Its Negative Effects On The African American Psyche, Lilly Lamia Simone

Theses (2016-Present)

Urban literature, more widely known as street lit is a genre of literature that glorifies and exaggerates drugs, violence, and sex in the lives of its African American characters. Through Street lit readers are introduced to the black man as a figure of power through illegal activity in his community, and black women as either overly aggressive or figures in need of protection. These novels choose loyalty over family, drugs, and athleticism over education, and money and power over morality. These novels and their glorifications cause African American people to see dream lives in goals that are not only unattainable …

Mija, Iris Brito-Stevens

The Tuxedo Archives

No abstract provided.

The Confederate Stories Of America: The Short-Story Cycle And The Representation Of The American South, Ikuko Takeda

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the ways in which the short-story cycle has provided a unique generic framework for representing and investigating the complex interplay of contending forces that constitute what we think of as the American South. Often confused with a collection of disparate short stories or a novel, the short-story cycle is a collection of short stories in which each story is independent, but simultaneously interrelated to one another. Although the South has produced a number of short-story cycles or linked story collections, scholars have not paid much attention to the connection between the genre/form and the region. I consider, …

Settler Kitsch The Legacies Of Puritanism In America, Jonathan Beecher Field

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Legacy Book In America, 1664–1792, Roxanne Harde, Lindsay Yakimyshyn

Zea E-Books Collection

Legacy books in colonial America were instruments for the transmission of cultural values between generations: the dying mother (usually) instructing and advising children on the path to salvation and heavenly reunions. They were a popular and influential form of women’s discourse that distilled the ideologies of the religious establishment into practical and emotional lessons for lay persons, especially the young.

This collection draws together legacy texts written by colonial American women and girls: five mother’s legacy books and two legacies by children, organized here chronologically. These legacies were writ­ten in anticipation of dying, making awareness of death central to the …

Emily Dickinson In The 21st Century, Corbelli Lorena

Honors Program Contracts

No abstract provided.

What If Forgiveness Were Unthinkable?, James K.A. Smith

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Review of Paul Kahn's memoir Testimony.