Estranged Temporality: How Time Tells Stories In Science Fiction,
2024
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Estranged Temporality: How Time Tells Stories In Science Fiction, Phillip H. Howells
Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–
According to Darko Suvin in his influential critical treatise, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, estrangement in Science Fiction (SF) gives authors the ability to build worlds related to but distant from our own using specific metaphors. This dissertation takes up this term and applies it to the fulcrum of time in SF as a method of creating possible futures and imaginative pasts in order to illuminate the realities of the present. The realities of the present are congruent with the material circumstances of the past, and this can be seen in the kinds of SF worlds built by members of …
The Making Of A Survivor: Chopin's Use Of Identity And Rebirth In The Awakening,
2024
Lindenwood University
The Making Of A Survivor: Chopin's Use Of Identity And Rebirth In The Awakening, Amber L. Budd
The Confluence
In recent research of American literature, many scholars have read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and construed the novel’s ambiguous ending as an indication that the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, commits suicide after the ending. Scholars have developed this hypothesis due to contextual evidence, societal expectations at the time Chopin wrote the novel, and Edna’s perceived development of identity over the course of the novel. In this paper, I analyze the popular theories arguing for Edna’s suicide or survival and then examine those articles in conjunction with my own analysis of The Awakening. By doing so, I aim to prove that, …
Picturesque Portraiture: The Composition Of Reality In Hawthorne, Melville, And James,
2024
University of Denver
Picturesque Portraiture: The Composition Of Reality In Hawthorne, Melville, And James, Angela Michael Gattuso Densmore
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Throughout the nineteenth century, American artists were tangled in debates regarding the representation of reality. The Hudson River School of picturesque landscape painters tackled this dilemma with a compromise formula which used the real objects of nature to create ideal scenes. This dissertation applies the same picturesque formula to select examples of literary portraiture, studied under the concept of “picturesque portraiture.” Whereas the Hudson River compromise resulted in an ideal perception of reality, however, the picturesque portraits composed by nineteenth-century authors Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James attempt to invoke a non-idealized “actual” reality of the portrait subject’s person …
Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia,
2024
CUNY Graduate Center
Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia, Jacob Elias Aplaca
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Bad Becomings surveys queer autobiographical works published over the last 30+ years to better understand the animosities and complicities of the queer and the so-called normative. While the limited scholarship on queer autobiographical writing has characterized this corpus of texts based on an edginess, a radicality, and a rejection of the liberal individual that both flies in the face of “traditional autobiography” and indulges queer theory’s persistent idealization of queer culture as radical and antinormative, this dissertation asks that we suspend our desire for so absolute a differentiation. Rather than assume that “queer” automatically makes “autobiography” radical and antinormative, I …
Defying Normativity: Reclaiming A Narrative Of Queer Resistance In Young Adult Literature,
2024
CUNY Graduate Center
Defying Normativity: Reclaiming A Narrative Of Queer Resistance In Young Adult Literature, Christopher Morabito
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
At the heart of this dissertation lies a single question: how Queer is Queer Young Adult Literature? As many scholars have argued, Queerness is, in many ways, a literacy, and literature is one of the greatest sponsors of Queer Literacy. While there is certainly no one comprehensive definition of what it means to be queer, it is also true that the general understanding of queerness has changed quite drastically in the last few decades. What was once used as a term to describe someone who is outside of social conventions has slowly begun to lose its sense of “otherness,” and …
When Critics Are Artists: Ekphrasis In Erotic Art Criticism,
2024
CUNY Graduate Center
When Critics Are Artists: Ekphrasis In Erotic Art Criticism, Joanna A. Ligon
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues for an erotics of art in art criticism in place of hermeneutics. In this thesis, I examine erotics of art, a focus on form and experiencing art instead of exclusively on content, in practice. Drawing on other essays by Sontag, specifically the essay “Godard” in comparison with the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s own filmic criticism in Breathless, criticism according to an erotics of art becomes a new artwork itself. Subsequently, I present a definition of erotic through Anne Carson and Roland Barthes and juxtapose the term with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The comparison ultimately undoes …
Time Ripens On The Counter: A Literary History Of The Americas,
2024
CUNY Graduate Center
Time Ripens On The Counter: A Literary History Of The Americas, Judah Rubin
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The tumultuous years of the 1970s and 1980s are generally seen as marking the ends of the New Left in the United States and the Americas at large. With shifts afoot in US policy that would see the drawdown and close of the Vietnam War, increased subversion and infiltration of Left-wing movements, these decades are often remembered as a holding pattern and, later, nadir in progressive, not to mention revolutionary, gains. The same was true, if not amplified, across the Americas where, tens of thousands were murdered, imprisoned and disappeared across the Southern Cone and into the Andes, and where …
The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic,
2024
CUNY Graduate Center
The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was …
Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art,
2024
CUNY Graduate Center
Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art, Caitlin Cacciatore
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that occupies the underdeveloped niche of freely available teaching and learning materials about the interdisciplinary poetic medium of ekphrasis. Ekphrastic poetry is a form dating back to Book XVIII of the Iliad, experiencing a revitalization in the latter half of the 18th century, when demand for written descriptions of paintings was in high demand, and again taking on a new, modern meaning in the early 19th century, with poems like John Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ekphrasis is …
Literary Lepidopterology: Nabokov And The Book That Was A Butterfly,
2024
Portland State University
Literary Lepidopterology: Nabokov And The Book That Was A Butterfly, Dave Patterson
Anthós
In this paper I examine Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, arguing that contrary to many interpretations, the book does not assert a moral lesson, and is instead a work of art for art’s sake. I examine its formal structures to demonstrate this claim. First I look at a Doppelgänger motif between the characters of Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty. Since this motif is independent of Humbert’s character arc, it is narratively insignificant and becomes merely one of many themes related to doubles, twins, and mirror images. I also explain how Nabokov was a lifelong scientist studying butterflies and moths, and saw …
“I Don’T Want To Be Human”: The Neurodivergent Reader Response To Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries Series,
2024
Grand Valley State University
“I Don’T Want To Be Human”: The Neurodivergent Reader Response To Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries Series, Rachel S. Anderson
Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture
This article explores how readers have responded to the Martha Wells series The Murderbot Diaries by identifying the titular character as neurodivergent and the recent ways in which the author has responded to questions about the character—and herself—as potentially autistic. While initially resisting this reader-supplied diagnosis, Wells has more recently acknowledged a neurodivergent identity. By examining Murderbot’s sense of self and relationship with the humans around it, this article will explore our current society’s relationship with human/machine intelligences and how we define such concepts as “neurotypical” and “human.” Specifically, this article will examine how the concept of a “governor module” …
Marvelous Ordinariness: Re-Engaging With Realism’S Social Function,
2024
Dartmouth College
Marvelous Ordinariness: Re-Engaging With Realism’S Social Function, Miranda Ochoa Natera
Comparative Literature M.A. Essays
Against Romanticism, European literary realism of the 19th century aimed to provide an objective representation of reality through mimesis that could capture the truth in an objective way. Yet, its positivist approach severely narrowed down the complexity of truth, reality, and the mundane by wrongfully drawing the universal from the particular. A new way of engaging with realist literature from any time period, called Marvelous Ordinariness, rearranges this triad in ways that expand our understanding of our own and other realities portrayed. Using Alejo Carpentier’s description of “lo real maravilloso,” Marvelous Ordinariness unfolds in three layers that resemble Carl Jung’s …
Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies,
2024
City University of New York (CUNY)
Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica
Open Educational Resources
An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.
With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential,
2024
Whittier College
With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner
Whittier Scholars Program
My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …
Generational Awareness Of Folk Figures In The American Midwest,
2024
University of South Dakota
Generational Awareness Of Folk Figures In The American Midwest, Addison L. Jensen
Honors Thesis
The popular folklore of a region can clearly reflect how its citizens understand themselves and their nation. The goal of this study was to determine the number of individuals who can be considered “well-versed” in traditional folklore and to speculate on the possible reasons for the differences in recognition that arise. Five figures (Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Annie Oakley, and Rip Van Winkle) were selected to serve as a representative sample of folk characters that have been historically significant to the country. An online survey of 279 Midwesterners and interviews with various age groups in South Dakota, found …
Dredging The Wetlands, Tilling The Field: Ecotonal Poetics Of The Anthropocene,
2024
University of Mississippi
Dredging The Wetlands, Tilling The Field: Ecotonal Poetics Of The Anthropocene, Stacey Balkun
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation interrogates the use of poetic fragmentation as a tool of ecological representation and coins the term “ecotonal poetics.” Ecotonal poesis, this dissertation explains, is the stretching of lyric across the field of the page, using space, sound, language, and parataxis in its attempt to not only represent but create ecotonal ecologies through text, sound, and visual cues. This dissertation puts forth four case studies of contemporary American women poets turning the space of the page into an ecotone where text, white space, author, reader, body, and environment meet. The poets studied here rely heavily on textual experimentation, suggesting …
Final Master's Portfolio,
2024
Bowling Green State University
Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman
Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects
This portfolio uses Marxist and feminist film theory to analyze various forms of visual media. It analyzes Mark Mylod's film The Menu (2022), Julie Taymor's film Across the Universe (2007), the historic V-J Day Kiss photograph, and popular TikTok videos. This portfolio focuses on the impact of capitalism in the political and economic sphere. It also analyzes images of women throughout history and critiques how these images have been used to formulate the American body politic.
Catfish Dinner & Other Malicious Morsels,
2024
Stephen F. Austin State University
Catfish Dinner & Other Malicious Morsels, Bonnie Klein
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Catfish Dinner & Other Malicious Morsels is a collection of short stories utilizing the combined elements of Fantasy, Southern, and Gothic Literature. The collection demonstrates the feasibility of combining the three different literary genres, each with its own strong identity and literary history, in a work that appeals to readers reaching the age of young adulthood. Named for the titular story, the collection features seven short stories of varying lengths depicting the cultural influence of food, community morals, storytelling, and nature in East Texas communities. Each story is told through third-person point of view of a different character. The stories …
Reparative Justice As Literary Methodology: Confronting Criminality In Contemporary American Fiction,
2024
Montclair State University
Reparative Justice As Literary Methodology: Confronting Criminality In Contemporary American Fiction, Diane Paulson
Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects
This thesis presents an approach to literary analysis centered on dismantling one’s conscious or unconscious biases by engaging in reparative justice practices with fictional characters. It stems from the belief that America’s criminal justice system is a white patriarchal system that serves to support and uplift systems of white power. I argue that we must advocate for its abolition with a wide lens. Doing so requires a recognition of one’s biases and a radical shift in empathy to those who have directly and indirectly survived and continue to survive oppression by the criminal justice system. I argue conducting reparative readings …
“No One To Show Us The Way:” Assessing The Contemporary Relevance Of The Gay Male Bildungsroman,
2024
Chapman University
“No One To Show Us The Way:” Assessing The Contemporary Relevance Of The Gay Male Bildungsroman, Matthew Lemas
English (MA) Theses
The gay male bildungsroman can trace its origins to E.M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice (1971) and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982), among other examples. While nested under the umbrella category of the queer bildungsroman (and, more broadly, the bildungsroman), the gay male iteration particularly explores integrational challenges related to the extant tensions between hegemonic masculinity and the male protagonist’s sexuality and gender identity. The subgenre—often conflated with the “coming out novel”—has faced a range of criticism in its roughly half-century existence. Scholars have accused it of banality, often relying on a limited range of well-trodden tropes; lacking diversity, …
