American Literature Commons^™

A Convergence Of Surrealism And Realism: Why Spirituality, Folklore, And The Supernatural Saturate The Work Of Toni Morrison, Kevon K. Harvey

Dissertations and Theses

This paper will analyze how Toni Morrison blends surrealistic elements into the recognized realism of her text by crafting various paradoxes within her work. Using three of Morrison’s books: Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, I will examine how each book ties a specific surrealistic component, as well as an equally relevant realistic element that will aid in the construct of a figurative bridge between the cultural past and present for African Americans. Moreover, I will discuss how the use of the surreal in Morrison’s work represents a dive into African traditions. Formed as a direct result of slavery, …

Writing Indigenous Identity In Herman Melville And Joseph Conrad's Polynesian And Malay Archipelago Novels, Catherine L. Black

Dissertations and Theses

The thesis of this paper is that cross-cultural writing can be done with the right methods of communication, such as engaging narrator and education—or simply sensitive, imaginative writing. Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad’s five books set in the Polynesian and Malay Archipelagos—Typee and Omoo and the Malay Trilogy (Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue)— are used as master models of how to write indigenous characters with rich characterization in pivotal roles, even circa 1846 and 1896. The unique perspective and technique by which they did this is explored, a technique and perspective not …

Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …

I Am An Author: Performing Authorship In Literary Culture, Justin R. Greene

Theses and Dissertations

Authorship is not merely an act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard; it is a social identity performance that includes the use of multiple media. Authors must be hyper- visible to cut through the dearth of information, entertainment options, and personae vying for attention in our supersaturated media environment. As they enter the literary world, writers consciously create characters and narratives around themselves, and through the consistent and believable enactment of these features, authors are born. In this dissertation, I analyze the performance of authorship in U.S. literary culture through an interdisciplinary framework. My work pulls from …

Introducing The Hero Of Stasis: An Examination Of Heroism In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest And The Pale King, Gregory Robert Peterson

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Ecospatial Orientation And American Literature, Lowell Wyse

Dissertations

Place is complex, and it undergirds and influences our fictional and nonfictional narratives in ways we often fail to recognize. In this dissertation, Lowell Wyse argues for a more holistic understanding of place's role in literature while asking what it means to read environmentally€”spatially, ecologically, and historically. Drawing from ecocriticism, which emphasizes the biological world, and geocriticism, which privileges the spatial, Wyse proposes a hybrid "ecospatial" criticism, with a particular emphasis on the role of maps in reading for place. With individual chapters on the nonfiction of William Least Heat-Moon, John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley fiction, Richard Wright's Native Son, and …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

The Classical Versus The Grotesque Body In Edith Wharton's Fiction, Joshua T. Temples

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In her landmark works The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton responds to earlier depictions of the classical, pure Victorian and Edwardian woman. Wharton's "inconvenient" women overturn popular stereotypes. Subsequently, they are barred from their social groups, but they are independent, unlike the complicit and obedient women of the classical body, most of whom ascribe to the trope of the "Angel in the House." The grotesque seeks to undercut the unrealistic expectations enforced by the classical through its embodiment of progression and humanity, and Wharton is drawn to …

The Significance Of The Game Of Pool In Ernest Hemingway’S “Soldier’S Home”, Molly J. Donehoo

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In his 1929 A Farewell to Arms, American Author Ernest Hemingway provides the thesis for all of American Modernism when he writes, “the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places” (216). If the world breaks everyone Hemingway’s focus becomes not in the breaking but in the solutions for becoming strong at the broken places. Throughout his canon Hemingway presents the healing rituals and therapeutic patterns that govern sports and game as a solution to becoming strong at the broken places. While critics have closely analyzed and scrutinized some of his most recognized short-stories, stories …

Toward A Theory Of Work: Personal Responsibility, Self-Regulation, And Identity In The Age Of America’S Work Crisis, Katrina Newsom

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

TOWARD A THEORY OF WORK: PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, SELF-REGULATION, AND IDENTITY IN THE AGE OF AMERICA’S WORK CRISIS

by

KATRINA NEWSOM

May 2018

Advisor: Dr. Sarika Chandra

Major: English

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Toward a Theory of Work: Personal Responsibility, Self-Regulation, and Identity in the Age of America’s Work Crisis examines how American culture grapples with work in the Postfordist era of production, particularly in the areas of ethnic, working-class, cultural, and literary studies. Specific to these areas are ideas of (personal) responsibility that take shape in concepts of self-regulation invented to function as both a direct and indirect redress …

Haitian Votes Matter: Haitian Immigrants In Florida In Local Politics And Government, Bobb Rousseau

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

This qualitative study investigated perceived barriers to the incorporation of Haitian immigrants in Florida into local politics and government. The theoretical framework for this study was Marschall and Mikulska's theory of minority political incorporation to better understand the political ambition of Haitian immigrants to emerge as candidates and voters toward achieving electoral success and a substantive representation. The research question addressed the lived experiences and perceptions of Haitian immigrants related to barriers to their political mobilization at district, state, and federal levels. A phenomenological study design was used with open-ended interviews of 10 Haitian Americans who lived in Florida for …

The Library In The Mountains And The Writing On The Wall : Fragmented Memories And Cultural Amnesia In Ursula K. Le Guin, Erin Michelle Roll

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Memory, especially its loss, plays a prominent role in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929). The Telling (2000) and Voices (2006), two of Le Guin’s most recent works, go into great detail on what happens when a memory is lost or destroyed, usually under duress. The former, the last book in Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, deals with a goal to preserve books and learning from a regime that has made it a misguided goal to eradicate all elements of past culture in an effort to modernize the country. In the latter, part of Le Guin’s Annals of …

Breaking Chains Of Oppression: Popular Culture And The Plundering Of Blackness, Corina Sacajawea Ambrose

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis focuses on the ways in which white supremacy created mass incarceration, specifically mass incarceration of black individuals, and how this continues to perpetuate a racial caste system in the United States. First, I examine contemporary novelist Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad to provide a historical background of white supremacy and slavery. Then, I argue that pop culture is one area in which artists are focused on the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and ending mass incarceration. Finally, I focus on JAY-Z‘s music video “The Story of O.J.“ and Beyoncé‘s visual album Lemonade and her 2018 Coachella performance to …

Stray Threads: Factory Women In Fiction From The Freehold Farm To The Rented Room, 1840-1875, Meghan Wadle

English Theses and Dissertations

As industrialism unmoored agrarian-based American values surrounding independence, individualism, and the gender roles attached to labor, it demanded imaginative solutions for these potentially broken ideologies in antebellum fiction. This project, in two parts, explores how factory women stood at the center of the industrializing U.S.’s cultural identity crisis. In Part One authors from Herman Melville to Harriet Jacobs imagine women laboring in the industrial marketplace as a form of deviant dependency. Here, sexualized depictions of female laborers symptomatize national anxieties about how economic change might transform political freedom by simultaneously modifying traditional forms of patriarchal control. In Part Two, Lucy …

Red Pens, White Paper: Wider Implications Of Coulthard’S Call To Sovereignty, Brian Burkhart, David J. Carlson, Billy J. Stratton, Theodore C. Van Alst, Carol Edelman Warrior

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

Transcript of a roundtable conversation focused on Glen Coulthard's book Red Skins, White Masks.

The Postmodern Novel In Saudi Arabia And America, Mohammed Lafi Alshammari

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the early twenty-first century, Saudi Arabia is a global economic power that stands as an equal among the other members of the most powerful economic organizations, including as the Group of Twenty and The World Trade Organization. As a result of this economic status and of Saudi Arabia never having been colonized, recent Saudi novels (especially those published after 2001) can usefully be read postmodern, rather than as postcolonial—the usual paradigm in readings of contemporary Arab novels. To establish a reference point, a comparative approach that engages Saudi and American postmodern novels is applied in this dissertation through the …

Only The Earth Remains: Exploring The Machine In Selected Lyric Poetry Of Robinson Jeffers, Mark Hutton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America, Leo Marx “evaluates the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience” (Marx 4). While Marx explores ways that pastoralism has been impacted by factors such as industrialism, it is the purpose of this project to explore Marx’s assertion regarding the presence of the figurative and literal machine within the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

Jeffers’ poetry is generally located within the landscapes of California. His lyric poetry has a distinct connection to the land and is driven by inhumanism, which works to shift …

Pigs, Pastures, Pepper Pickers, Pitchforks: Carl Sandburg’S Rootabaga Stories And The Tall Tale, Michael Heyman

Faculty Works

Past studies of American nonsense literature have tended to lump it together with the British, for many good reasons. This article, however, distinguishes American nonsense from the British by way of its folk origins and cultural context. One of the least-recognized writers of nonsense is Carl Sandburg, who is famous for his iconic American poetry, but his Rootabaga Stories (1922–30) are some of the best and most distinctive representatives of the genre. Sandburg’s nonsense short stories are lyrical and strange, but their value lies also in their distinctive American origins. They are distinguished in having particularly American themes, cultural tendencies, …