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“Fifty Years Of Our Whole Voice”: An Examination Of The History And Culture Leading To The Publication Of Fire!! Devoted To Younger Artists And Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology Of Asian American Writers, Joni Louise Johnson Williams

English Dissertations

According to African American literary theorist Henry Louis Gates, “the slave wrote not primarily to demonstrate humane letters, but to demonstrate his or her own membership in the human community” (128). Two efforts at this demonstration of community membership exist in the publication of the literary journal, Fire!!, written and published by African American artists and writers in 1926 and in the anthology AIIIEEEEE!, compiled and edited by Asian American writers and published in 1974. These compilations, published not quite fifty years apart, are direct responses and reactions to the efforts of the larger society to influence and/or …

Curiosity Seekers, Time Travelers, And Avant-Garde Artists: U.S. American Literary And Artistic Responses To The Occupation Of Haiti (1915-1934), Shelley P. Stevens

English Dissertations

U.S. American literary and creative artists perform the work of developing a discursive response to two critical moments in Haitian history: the Revolution (1791-1804) and the U.S. Marine Occupation (1915 to 1934), inspiring imaginations and imaginary concepts. Revolutionary images of Toussaint Louverture proliferated beyond the boundaries of Haiti illuminating the complicity of colonial powers in maintaining notions of a particularized racial discourse. Frank J. Webb, a free black Philadelphian, engages a scathing critique of Thomas Carlyle’s sage prose “On the Negro Question” (1849) through the fictional depiction of a painted image of Louverture in Webb’s novel The Garies and their …

Sublime Subjects And Ticklish Objects In Early Modern English Utopias, Stephen Mills

English Dissertations

Critical theory has historically situated the beginning of the “modern” era of subjectivity near the end of the seventeenth century. Michel Foucault himself once said in an interview that modernity began with the writings of the late seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza. But an examination of early modern English utopian literature demonstrates that a modern notion of subjectivity can be found in texts that pre-date Spinoza. In this dissertation, I examine four utopian texts—Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Margaret Cavendish’s Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, and Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines—through …

Mixed Classes, Mixed Pedagogies: A Study Of Intercultural Collaborative Learning In A College Developmental Writing Course, Daniel M. Keleher

English Dissertations

College writing classes are often populated by students with varied native and non-native language backgrounds. This phenomenon should impact the ways that teachers develop the curriculum for such courses in order to best enhance their students’ learning. This dissertation explores the impact of culturally themed course content and group and dyadic writing activities on linguistically diverse developmental writing students. The research questions were 1) How do paired and group writing activities impact student perceptions of the usefulness of collaborative learning? and 2) How does enrollment in a culturally-themed writing class emphasizing paired and group learning affect intercultural attitudes? Just as …

Between Tactics Of Hope And Tactics Of Power: Liminality, (Re)Invention, And The Atlanta Overlook, Jeremy Godfrey

English Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the potential empowerment writing has among a homeless community in Atlanta, Georgia. Through the participation in a newly created writing workshop and a street newspaper in that community, the narrative and communication among writing participants demonstrate negotiations of self-identification as public and private writers and the situational influence writing has on their lives.

The study adds to the “public turn” of writing instruction with the intention of helping to bridge the gap between traditional composition pedagogy in academia and such education in outside community. That participatory instruction reinforces the notion that writing and rhetorical performances can …

Masculinity, Desire, And Disarmament In Four Of Shakespeare's Comedies, Jennifer L. Basye

English Dissertations

This dissertation sets out to explore Lacan’s idea of the paradoxical condition of the masculine gender construction. As privileged, favored, powerful, entitled, and hegemonic as it may seem, masculinity does not come without its awareness of what Lacan has most accurately labeled the “threat or even […] the guise of deprivation.” In fact, this construction not only assumes threat and deprivation to its identity but goes so far as to rely upon these potential attacks as necessities in order to perform itself. In other words, the masculine role can only be identified, recognized and/or mean when presented with a threat. …

Modernism From The Margins: Unruly Women And The Politics Of Representation, Lindsay Byron

English Dissertations

Nella Larsen, Anzia Yezierska, and Evelyn Scott were New York neighbors and literary contemporaries in the 1920s, yet they moved in very different social circles. From Larsen, the award-winning psychological novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; to Yezierska, the Jewish immigrant composing in Yiddish-English a boot-straps story of Americanization; to Evelyn Scott, the genteel-born Southern woman penning high modernist tales of scandal, these very different women nonetheless shared a common quality: they were all rule-breakers, pariahs in their hometowns, interlopers wherever they dare tread, who all penned controversial autobiographical works documenting their experiences as cultural outsiders in modern America. Finding no …

Through Her Own Eyes: Environmental Rhetoric In Women's Autobiographical Frontier Writing, Crystal T. Wright

English Dissertations

Through Her Own Eyes: Environmental Rhetoric in Women’s Autobiographical Frontier Writing identifies frontier women, those who traveled overland to the West and those who homesteaded, as historical ecofeminists. The purpose of this study is to analyze frontier women’s environmental rhetoric in their journals and letters, which encouraged readers to become closer to nature and get to know it while encountering new land in the West. Promoting a close relationship with nature, frontier women’s writing also implied conserving and protecting nature for future generations, which demonstrates how they can be retroactively labeled ecofeminists. Frontier women’s environmental rhetoric reveals their alignment with …

An Examination Of Secrecy In Twentieth-Century African American Literature, Tamalyn Peterson

English Dissertations

This dissertation examines the legacy of secrecy, silences, and the unspoken in twentieth century African American literary texts. Using a range of texts representing various eras within the genre of African American literature, this dissertation contends that secrecy is a trope and may be attributed to inherited, maintained traditional practices from West and West Central Africa. Having read a number of African American texts and connecting my personal experiences with these works, I noticed a pattern of withheld discourse throughout.

Most notably, Leslie Lewis’s Telling Narratives posits a reason for this trope by examining earlier narratives, specifically nineteenth-century African American …

Her Syndan Wælcyrian: Illuminating The Form And Function Of The Valkyrie-Figure In The Literature, Mythology, And Social Consciousness Of Anglo-Saxon England, Philip A. Purser

English Dissertations

The image of the warrior-woman, or Valkyrie, occurs, in a number of forms, throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus. Her appearance and function in these writings may be subdivided into three primary registers: the named-appearances of the wælcyrge, unnamed appearances of the wælcyrge in the charms and riddles, and unnamed appearances of the wælcyrge in heroic verse. Since the mid-1800’s scholars have defined the wælcyrge in terms of the valkyrja, or Scandinavian Valkyrie figure, which is reductive and misleading and has caused an eclipse-effect in which the native elements of the wælcyrge have gone underestimated and undervalued. This is due …

Place, Race, And Modernism In The Works Of E.M. Forster And Eudora Welty, Marny H. Borchardt

English Dissertations

This dissertation examines similarities between the works of E. M. Forster (A Room with a View, A Passage to India) and Eudora Welty (“Powerhouse,” Delta Wedding). This study focuses on three areas: the importance of a sense of place for both writers, their nuanced critiques of racism and other intolerances, and their subtle, yet inherently modernist philosophies and methodologies. This dissertation also argues that both writers deserve a prominent place in the modernist literary canon.