Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

"Too Big To Swallow All At Once": Consumption And Posthuman Healing In Ceremony And House Made Of Dawn, Matthew Thomas Craft

Master's Theses

This project examines the roles of animals and animal figures in the Native American novels House Made of Dawn (1968)by N. Scott Momaday and Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko. Both novelists consistently evoke animal imagery within their respective texts often pairing this imagery alongside symbolic and metaphorical depictions of cannibalistic identity violence. Through the use of posthuman and postcolonial methodologies and ideas, I contend that the pairing of these two distinct types of imagery that both Momaday and Silko intentionally align the animal figures with premodern, indigenous belief systems while the cannibalistic violence is more often envisioned as …

Exile And Identity: Chaim Potok's Contribution To Jewish-American Literature, Sarah Anne Hamner

MA in English Theses

Questions of identity and exile are deep in the bones of the Jewish people. In this thesis I will discuss the manifestations of exile and identity in the works of Chaim Potok, a Jewish-American novelist. Potok’s work has long been excluded from the canon of Jewish-American criticism. I suspect this exclusion is due to critical oversight, as Potok’s characters lead more traditional Jewish lives in terms of religious beliefs, backgrounds, and behaviors. In order to prove the critical value of Potok’s work I will note the gaps in Jewish-American criticism where Potok’s work is missing. Then I will concentrate around …

A Woman's Voice And Identity: Narrative Métissage As A Solution To Voicelessness In American Literature, Kali Lauren Oldacre

MA in English Theses

The objective of this thesis was to analyze the progression of a woman’s voice in literature looking particularly at three American women writers spanning the 20th and into the 21st century—Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Danticat. In conjunction, these three novels show a progression through the history of American women’s literature, demonstrating the successes and failures of voice and silence in their works and the ways in which creating an identity through voice is necessary, even if one must create it complexly. Ultimately, the authors establish a voice in their works that lays the foundation for writers who …

Pop, Hip Hop, And Empire, Study Of A New Pedagogical Approach In A Developmental Reading And English Class, Karen Denise Taylor

MA in English Theses

This thesis focuses on the impact of studying students’ identities after using the television show, Empire as a Hip Hop studies based text in a developmental reading and English class. I frame the pedagogical approach to reading and writing by using the television show as a doorway into the varied language practices of the Hip Hop culture as opposed to Standard American English (SAE). This research uses James Paul Gee’s discourse analysis as a method for coding and analysis of the responses of the interviewees to survey questions. The questions were designed to determine from the students’ responses their attitudes …

Critical Exploration Of The Neo-Slave Narrative In Selected Walker And Morrison Novels, Meisha M. Edwards-White

All Student Theses and Dissertations

This study examines Alice Walker’s The Colored Purple and Toni Morrison’s Beloved as Neo-Slave Narratives. These extraordinary authors reveal slave history in their novels. Although these novels deal with neo-slave narratives, they closely identify with history of African American enslavement. Walker and Morrison express through their works the many ways African American women lived in bondage during slavery. Their characters speak volumes to the mis-treatment of African Americans.

Neo-Slave Narratives are contemporary works of fiction. Walker and Morrison have chosen to illustrate the horrors of slavery as it relates to African Americans. The novelists demonstrate the realities of slavery in …

"Follow The Bodies": (Re)Materializing Difference In The Era Of Neoliberal Multiculturalism, Briana Grace Brickley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a transnational literary archive in addition to analyzing shifting U.S. American cultural and political landscapes, and shows how critically attending to the various terms, figures, and valences of corporeality opens generative avenues for addressing the contemporary historical conjuncture, often referred to as the neoliberal capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism, understood here to be a complex, diffuse ideology that manifests in part as a number of broadsweeping economic changes—including widespread deregulation and privatization, the increasing influence of international financial organizations, governmental cuts in social spending, and structural adjustment programs for the formerly colonized nations of the global south—operates in …

Dislocating Camps: On State Power, Queer Aesthetics & Asian/Americanist Critique, Christopher Alan Eng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that the history of Asian racialization in the United States requires us to grapple with the seemingly counterintuitive entanglement between “the camp” as exceptional space of biopolitical management and “camp” as a performative practice of queer excess. While each practice of camp has been theorized as exemplary of modernity, these considerations have been largely separated into studies of political economy on the one hand, and queer aesthetics on the other. Taken up predominantly in political philosophy and the social sciences, the former centers the death camps in Europe during World War II as epitomizing state violence within …

Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, And The Humanities, Frances H. Tran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation works from and through the field of Asian American studies, drawing on Asian Americanist cultural critique and minority discourse, to investigate the relationship among race, the politics of knowledge, and the epistemic function of the humanities. Proliferating discourses on “post-race” and “colorblindness” characterizing the present moment posit a progressive movement beyond racial division, towards recognizing and incorporating minority difference into the academy. However, even as issues like “diversity” have gained visibility as institutional objectives, I contend that this heightened visibility occludes the structural conditions that allow racialization to persist. In this project, I follow the work of thinkers …

A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …

The Adolescent Grotesque: Transgressing Boundaries Of Female Sexuality In Edwidge Danticat’S Breath, Eyes, Memory And Jamaica Kincaid’S Annie John, Telia Bennett

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Adolescence is a transitory time in human development, characterized by internal and external bodily changes. Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid employ the first-person narrative style in their respective debut novels, Breath, Eyes, Memory and Annie John, to amplify the female adolescent voice and provide unmitigated access to the female adolescent experience. During adolescence, the female body is in sexual flux – steadily losing its amorphousness as puberty runs its course. The adolescent female body peregrinates the biological threshold that distinguishes males from females. In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as “a body in the …

Hereisthefamilymotherfatherdickandjane: An Analysis Of Parenting And The Dick And Jane Readers In Morrison’S The Bluest Eye, Rachel Roseman

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

First-generation college student Rachel Roseman has found the American educational and cultural systems to privilege the white, upper to middle classes. As Toni Morrison demonstrates in The Bluest Eye, those who do not fit this mold often lack educational support and have to learn how to navigate cultural systems on their own. Unlike the character of Pecola, who features in the following essay, Roseman had a strong community and family who supported her decision to attend college and, as a result, achieved success.

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster

Master's Theses

Historically, the issue of representation in postcolonial studies is one of some contention. While scholarship might recognize the necessity for highlighting the plights and struggles attendant to postcolonial societies, the primary literature being studied is most often written by natives of those societies themselves. This gap is especially evident with Indigenous cultures, because there are relatively few Indigenous scholars working in the academy. We are at the point now when we have a multiplicity (but not a plurality) of Indigenous voices writing literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, film, etc.) and academic criticism. However, there is value in non-Natives reading and writing …

"Out Of The Dark Confinement!" Physical Containment In Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Protest Literature, Allison Lane Tharp

Dissertations

Most scholarship on American protest literature tends to focus on the protest literature of specific, politically marginalized groups, such as black protest, women’s protest, or working class protest. My project redefines how we read nineteenth-century American protest literature by investigating the connections between the protest texts of these three marginalized groups. In particular, I argue that mid-nineteenth-century protest authors incorporate images of physical confinement and entrapment within their texts to expose to privileged readers the physical and ideological containment and control marginalized subjects encounter in their daily lives. Drawing from rhetorical theories of argumentation and audience engagement, and incorporating historical …

Immigration And Identity Translation: Characters In Bharati Mukherjee’S Jasmine And Jhumpa Lahiri’S The Namesake As Translators And Translated Beings, Laura Traister

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Bharati Mukherjee’s 1989 novel Jasmine and Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake both feature immigrant protagonists, who experience name changes and identity transformations in the meeting space of Indian and American cultures. Using the theory of cultural translation to view translation as a metaphor for identity transformation, I argue that as these characters alter their identities to conform to cultural expectations, they act as both translators and translated texts. Although they struggle with the resistance of untranslatability via their inability to completely assimilate into American culture, Jasmine and Gogol ultimately gain the ability to bypass the limitations of a foreigner/native …

I Preferred, Much Preferred, My Version: Exploring The Female Voice And Feminine Identity Within Memoirs Of The 20th And 21st Centuries, Alexandra Fradelizio

Senior Theses

Memoirs have long been a valuable way in which individuals share and reflect on their past experiences. The genre of memoir writing especially had a tremendous impact on a range of American female writers. This thesis explores memoirs written by women throughout the 20^th century. With the shift in women’s roles during the 1900s and early 2000s, the memoirs examined emphasize the importance of feminine identity. The analysis provided within this thesis centers on each memoirist’s unique path in determining her sense of self. Moreover, the memoirists each use the process of writing to relay the value of personal …

Birth Family Search, Trauma, And Mel-Han-Cholia In Korean Adoptee Memoirs, Katelyn J. Hemmeke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Birth Family Search, Trauma, and Mel-han-cholia in Korean Adoptee Memoirs” analyzes the connections between adoption trauma and birth family search by examining three Korean-American adoptee memoirs: The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea, both by Jane Jeong Trenka; and Ghost of Sangju by Soojung Jo. I draw links between their work and studies on trauma by critical scholars Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Margaret Homans, and Jennifer Cho. According to Caruth, the pathology of a traumatic experience lies in the victim’s inability to fully experience the traumatic event as it happens; only …

Jazz Epidemics And Deep Set Diseases: The De-Pathologization Of The Black Body In The Work Of Three Harlem Renaissance Writers, Shane C. Hunter

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation argues that the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, a response to Victorian-era medical and scientific racism, and that the three writers on which it centers, Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Wallace Thurman (1902-1934), and Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), participated in subverting these racist discourses. I focus on elements of their creative work that de-pathologize the black body. Specifically, I consider how these writers undermine Victorian-era medical racism that had, by the 1920s, come to inform American racial politics. Hughes’s, Thurman’s, and Nugent’s work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s is at least partly concerned with undermining medically racist ideology …

Perceptions Of Southern Culture And Writing Program Effectiveness At A Community College: A Phenomenology, Mary Fetters

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this hermeneutical phenomenological study was to develop a deeper understanding of the perceptions of students, faculty, administration, and visiting Southern authors of the effectiveness of Chattanooga State Community College’s Writers@Work program for encouraging composition student writing and learning about Southern culture. Southern culture is defined as phenomena which shape the regional experience and resonate through the lives of individuals native to the US South. Participants in the study that was conducted in Chattanooga, Tennessee consisted of two current English administrators, four current English professors, eight composition students who participated in the Writers@Work program, and two visiting Southern …

An Anthropological Exploration Of Latino Immigrant Identity In Contemporary Migration Literature, Laura Hoppe

Honors Capstone Projects

Immigration remains one of the hottest topics of debate in the United States. As a country constructed by immigrants and home to over one million newly admitted immigrants each year, the immigration phenomenon has contributed extensively to the multiculturalism seen in the United States today. While many immigrant groups have historically lived in marginalization, the 21st century has proven especially difficult for Latino immigrants--those from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. As the current largest immigrant group, Latinos have received a lot of backlash and discrimination in the U.S. Many of these immigrants, whether they immigrate to the U.S. temporarily or …

Black Dreams: Sight And Sound In African American Life Stories, Karintha Lowe

English Honors Projects

This project examines the work of Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Langston Hughes, in conjunction with the work of literary and psychoanalytic theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, and Laura Mulvey. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s conception of the “American Dream” as emphasizing a linear, progressive understanding of time and space, I argue that Douglass, Hurston, Petry, and Hughes all reshape this narrative of upward mobility to include the experiences of marginalized communities. By analyzing how each author used multiple genres, including autobiography, parody, song, and poetry, to form a single narrative, I contend that these life stories …