Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives,
2010
University of Texas at El Paso
Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives, Najwa Heather Al-Tabaa
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
My thesis interrogates the postmodern view of popular culture as being banal and questions Theodore Adorno's view of postmodern consumer culture as ultimately anti- human(istic). My re-reading of postmodern popular culture finds that there is potential for meaningful human interaction through popular culture. My re-reading asserts that popular culture is capable of being a vehicle for solidarity. In my analysis I locate a postmodern paradigm shift in which human solidarity becomes a necessary consideration and focus of postmodern narratives and art forms. I term this shift "post-postmodernism" which is marked by a focus on solidarity.1 While the shift to the …
In The Margins: Thresholds Of Text And Identity In U.S.-Mexico Border Literature,
2010
Loyola University Chicago
In The Margins: Thresholds Of Text And Identity In U.S.-Mexico Border Literature, Allison E. Fagan
Dissertations
My project links discussions of U.S.-Mexico border literature's emphasis on marginalized identity with the growing textual studies interest in the marginal, often-invisible processes which aid the production and shape the reception of books. The dissertation not only calls attention to textual instability, or the places where the differing and even opposing intentions of authors, publishers, and editors often become strikingly clear, but also focuses on the political, racial, ethnic, and social instabilities inherent in publishing the work of borderlands writers. It advocates and advances a sustained attentiveness to the conditions under which border literature can and does get produced. Authors …
"The Thought Of What America": Ezra Pound’S Strange Optimism,
2010
University of New Orleans
"The Thought Of What America": Ezra Pound’S Strange Optimism, John Gery
English Faculty Publications
Through a reconsideration of Ezra Pound’s early poem "Cantico del Sole" (1918), an apparently satiric look at American culture in the early twentieth century, this essay argues how the poem, in fact, expresses some of the tenets of Pound’s more radical hopes for American culture, both in his unorthodox critiques of the 1930s in ABC of Reading, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and Guide to Kulchur and, more significantly, in his epic poem, The Cantos. The essay contends that, despite Pound’s controversial economic and political views in his prose (positions which contributed to his arrest for treason in 1945), …
