Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Trust And Knowing In Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Fictional Genres And Metacognitive Disruptions, Jessica Marie Van Gilder

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation investigates how constructions of trust can be undermined or reinforced by examining trust’s entanglement with our compulsive and subjective desire to know in nineteenth-century American literature. Specifically, I analyze how different fictional genres – satire, historical romance, fantastic, and gothic – respond to our desire to know through the types of trust fictional texts feature and construct with the reader. In doing so, I demonstrate how genres of fiction in nineteenth-century America function as dynamic social contracts that amplify and undermine the reader’s trust in larger sociopolitical systems (e.g., national identity) and the epistemologies that underpin those systems …

A Legacy Of Labor: Maternity Narratives In 1960s And 1970s North American Life Writing, Katelynn Ann Vogelpohl

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Abstract

A Legacy of Labor: Maternity Narratives in 1960s and 1970s North American Life Writing

Katelynn Ann Vogelpohl

The phenomenon of maternity has been repeatedly described as an event that shakes the very foundations of social and physical identity. As the flesh of the pregnant person literally divides to produce new life, one subject becomes enclosed within another, dramatically affecting the pregnant person’s sense of self and causing a confluence of intense, and often conflicting, feelings. In North America, there are two dominant, and seemingly opposing, discourses on pregnancy and childbirth: the institutional medical discourse and the natural childbirth discourse. …

The Names Of All Wild Things: Field Guides And Environmental Thinking, Frank Izaguirre Phd

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The project first traces the earliest origins of natural history writing, surveying how natural history writing from antiquity presented and categorized the living world, and then how the rise of print culture and growing popularity of natural history writing would facilitate the rise of European empires. Values and conventions emerged that would later feed into the field guide, like the pairing of text and illustration to aid identification and the decontextualizing of plants and animals from their environments.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the field guide genre emerged. Some wildly popular books, mostly written by women, emphasized the …

Troubling Waters: Anthropocene Marine Gothic In The 19th-Century Anglo-American Fiction, Phoenix Guqing Wang

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The 19th century witnessed intensifying marine ecological disruptions by colonial, industrial, and imperial activities. Meanwhile, current scholarship acknowledges the significance of the 19th century in tracing the emergence of the “Anthropocene” – a loose shorthand for ecological damages that are planetary in scale. This thesis aims to analyze how gothic imagination of the marine space unravels the linkages between the two temporally intersecting phenomena. Drawing on ocean studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, and gothic studies, I theorize what I call “Anthropocene marine Gothic discourse” to understand how 19th-century Anglo-American writers attend to the marine space to grapple with planetary ecological concerns …

Ethics In Literature: A Case Study Of Hades And Persephone, Mckenzie A. Howard

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The increased ethical scrutiny on art in the modern era places an emphasis on how those art forms are being taught in the classroom. This thesis seeks to answer the question: how do we teach ethics, if we should at all, when we teach literature to a modern audience? This thesis explores this question by looking at how modern adaptations of an ancient text, the “Hymn to Demeter,” change the ethical issues in the original text, to show the relevance of these issues in the source text and the modern adaptations. Through an argument that the ethical concerns are often …

“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati

Theses and Dissertations

Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary …

Dostoyevsky And Wright On Becoming The Underground Man, Zain Alam

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the parallels between Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground, focusing on their shared use of the "Underground Man" archetype to critique philosophical and societal structures. Dostoyevsky's Underground Man embodies the contradictions of Determinism and Rational Egoism in 19th-century Russia, exposing the flaws of these ideologies through satire. In contrast, Wright recontextualizes this character to address racial injustice in mid-20th-century America, using Fred Daniels' descent into a literal underground to highlight systemic oppression. By comparing these works, the thesis demonstrates how both authors utilize the underground as a metaphorical space …

Author And Authorship In Arthur Miller’S Death Of A Salesman: Willy Loman's Attempts To Author A Nostalgic, Fictitious Past Lead To His Downfall, While Linda Loman’S Miller-Authored Warnings Fall On Willy’S Ever-Deaf Ears, Allison Stein-Jackter

Dissertations and Theses

Throughout the 20th century, the American male protagonist’s obsession with and longing for a past that never existed brings about his own downfall. In Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, Willy Loman nostalgically fantasizes about a bygone era, the pre-war days of glory and greatness, but as he attempts to recreate his presumed former prestige in a post-war world, the fantasy unravels, with not only death and destruction in his dream’s widening, illusory wake, but the unraveling also presents itself in the recognition that Willy’s carefully crafted memories are works of fiction. Decades of literary research focus on Willy’s …

The Romanticism Of The Patriarchy Versus Poems By Emily Dickinson, Anamelissa Carrion

Dissertations and Theses

Using poems by Emily Dickinson I will disect the closeting of the poet herself, meaning the hidden identity of the author from within her own work. The poems used here reference a writer hiding in plain sight, comparison to womens equality and how women have over centuries hidden their true identities in order to fit into the mandated social role of "feminine" as defined by men. The cyclical progression of womens rights movements.

This paper discusses how women will change their character and fundamental self development creating "closeted selves" or hidden selves they share to the world while hiding their …

Stratifying The Social: The Race/Class Dialectic And The Fetishization Of Race In Our Neoliberal Contemporary, Steven D. Delmagori

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation utilizes the lens of Social Reproduction Theory to examine the consequences of viewing race and racism and other systems of oppression like Patriarchy as separate or additive autonomous ontologies. Intersectionality Theory posits oppressions as independent systems that “add” or “intersect” onto oppressed subjects in particular circumstances. On the other hand, responding to Intersectionality Theory, Social Reproduction Theory understands systems of oppression as mutually constitutive social relations. Social Reproduction Theory therefore allows for a more thorough understanding of the relationship between racism and other systems of oppression and their own relationship to capitalism. Rather than theorizing these social relations …

Let Your Head Hang Down: A Narrative Examination Of Cultic & Conspiratorial Romance, Kyle Macy

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

A response to recent cultural trends of radicalization, extremism, and violence in American society, this dissertation, a novel rendered in ephemeral fragments of oral histories, interrogates the romanticist postures that compel a community of musical artists, the so-called “Folk Revival Revival,” toward infamy and tragedy. Where more traditional sociological approaches to cultic formations stress the importance of centralized charismatic authority, and more traditional psychological approaches rely upon a conspiratorial Cold War ethos of cognitive bias and coercive control (i.e. “brainwashing”), this project meets such assumptions with incredulity, asserting instead that cultic and conspiratorial entrancement awakens first from within, and may …

The Heart Is Never In Question (Collected Poems), Michael Issac Bethel

Writing Beyond the Prison Living Archive

Poetry on Identity/Self-determination

Wise Blood Through The Lens Of Reader Response Theory, Hannah Rose Horton Stewart

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel, Wise Blood, is a frequently misunderstood classic. While O’Connor is very rarely associated with reader response theory, its framework offers a way to more fully appreciate O’Connor as an author and Wise Blood as a novel while addressing aspects of critics’ confusion. The objective of this study is to consider a previously under-researched area of O’Connor scholarship while offering greater clarity to Wise Blood. By considering O’Connor’s personal nonfiction writing and the text of her first novel through the lens of reader response scholars such as Wolfgang Iser, this study offers a call towards viewing …

Little Miss Sure Shot: Essays On A Young Woman Journalist's Search For Fulfillment, Mallory Schmitz

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Countering Dominant Narratives In Community: The Many Voices In Spoken Word Poetry, Natalie Raquel Acuña

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In this project I research the counternarratives within spoken word poetry by authors of color (i.e., Rafeef Ziadah, José Olivarez, and Denise Frohman) and how they resist the dominant narratives that are broadcast towards a larger audience. I analyze categories of counterstory through the following paired themes: immigration/citizenship, and joy/trauma. I delve into the heavy importance of community within my project in the realm of spoken word poetry. A lot of poetry is going against dominant narratives, community within this discourse gives a sense of belonging and relatability to the experience of the spoken word performers.

Anxieties About The Future: Ecocriticism And Dystopian Landscapes In The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch And Selected Fiction By Philip K. Dick, Nickolas Michael Sykora

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In a literary analysis of selected fiction by Philip K Dick through an ecocritical framework, the focus of this study reveals the consequences of ecological destruction on futuristic societies reflecting the Anthropocene. Drawing correlations between various texts by the author, the separation of nature from humanity demonstrates how dystopian landscapes influence the identity of the characters in these settings and how dystopia serves as a prism which distorts or reflects what it means to be human. With this, ontology and artificial intelligence are analyzed as a notable facet of his literature which addresses the progress of innovation in society and …

Disney Adult Or Disney Cult?: Observing The Effects And Perceptions Of Transmedia Storytelling Onto Fandom, Sara Spradley

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Transmedia storytelling is the vehicle for narratives to become immersive to their audience through different modalities. The Walt Disney Company employs this form of storytelling by placing any one of its films in the context of attractions and live-action performances, or vice-versa, creating a convergent culture that will follow these products through every medium. This project views transmedia storytelling used by the Walt Disney Company as the reasoning for the Disney Adults' fandom interest in interacting with Disney products. Through the use of discourse analysis, and digital ethnography I will observe this relationship between the use of transmedia storytelling, fandom …

Book Review: Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections From Thirty Years, Andy Oler

Publications

The Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections from Thirty Years, edited by Timothy Fay. Iowa City: University of Iowa press, 2023. xi, 249 pp. Illustrations. $27.50 paperback.

Foreign Expert: A Memoir Manuscript, Jenny L. Rowe

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This is a full memoir manuscript that I wrote for my MFA thesis, which is tentatively titled Foreign Expert. In this manuscript, we follow myself as narrator as I struggle to adapt to life in Beijing (prior to the pandemic) while also recovering from a recent divorce. The man I’d been married to for five years back in Iowa had become violently mentally ill, and though I’d been fortunate enough to remove myself from him, I quickly learned that being a foreign expert in China—my residential visa title—required more work than basic survival. By the end of my two years …

Andrew Tate, Matt Walsh, And The Discursive Production And Policing Of Gender, Alan J. Bandyk, Alan J. Bandyk

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis utilizes the works of Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said in a discourse analysis of influencers and writers in the right wing "manosphere." The figures analyzed herein are Andrew Tate and Matt Walsh. Their rhetoric aims to create a discursive woman who embodies traditional notions of gender and sex that de Beauvoir critiqued in 1949. The constant adherence and reference to a mythical past exhibits ways of thinking that coincide perfectly with Jameson's own theoretical work with the term and its inherent false nostalgia. Tate's and Walsh's efforts also fall into discursive attempts at …