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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Mothering And Surrogacy In Twentieth-Century American Literature: Promise Or Betrayal, Kimberly C. Weaver
Mothering And Surrogacy In Twentieth-Century American Literature: Promise Or Betrayal, Kimberly C. Weaver
English Dissertations
Twentieth-century American literature is filled with new images of motherhood. Long gone is the idealism of motherhood that flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in life and in writing. Long gone are the mother help books and guides on training mothers. The twentieth-century fiction writer ushers in new examples of motherhood described in novels that critique the bad mother and turn a critical eye towards the role of women and motherhood. This study examines the trauma surrounding twentieth-century motherhood and surrogacy; in particular, how abandonment, rape, incest, and negation often results in surrogacy; and how selected authors create characters …
Can The Wound Be Taken At Its Word?: Performed Trauma In Don Delillo's The Body Artist And Falling Man, Brett Thomas Griffin
Can The Wound Be Taken At Its Word?: Performed Trauma In Don Delillo's The Body Artist And Falling Man, Brett Thomas Griffin
English Theses
Two of Don DeLillo’s recently published novels, The Body Artist (2001) and Falling Man (2007), feature performance artists performing trauma. Through the bodies of these performers, DeLillo restates the central concern of trauma studies: if trauma is that which denies mediation, how may we speak about traumatic experience? DeLillo’s stagings of traumatic (re)iterations illustrate how the missed originary moment of trauma precludes directly referential content in traumatic representation. But I propose that performed trauma – the knowledge of forgetting addressed to another – recapitulates the structure of traumatic experience itself, thereby revealing trauma to be wholly constituted in repetition, and …
Illuminating The Queer Subtext: The Unmentioned Affairs In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Nora Neill
Illuminating The Queer Subtext: The Unmentioned Affairs In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Nora Neill
English Theses
Willa Cather contests the contemporary notion that identification links to a natural or original order. For example, that man equals masculine and femininity comes from an essential connection to woman. Cather deconstructs normativity through her use of character relationships in order to redefine successful interpersonal alliances. Thus, Alexandra, the protagonist of O Pioneers! builds a home and friendships that exemplify alternatives to stasis. My readings of O Pioneers! display the places in the novel where Cather subtly contests the ideology of naturalization. I make lesbian erotic and queer social interactions visible through a discourse on Cather’s symbolism. I favor queer …
Perpetrators & Possibilities: Holocaust Diaries, Resistance, And The Crisis Of Imagination, Eryk Emil Tahvonen
Perpetrators & Possibilities: Holocaust Diaries, Resistance, And The Crisis Of Imagination, Eryk Emil Tahvonen
History Theses
This thesis examines the way genocide leaves marks in the writings of targeted people. It posits not only that these marks exist, but also that they indicate a type of psychological resistance. By focusing on the ways Holocaust diarists depicted Nazi perpetrators, and by concentrating on the ways language was used to distance the victim from the perpetrator, it is possible to see how Jewish diarists were engaged in alternate and subtle, but nevertheless important, forms of resistance to genocide. The thesis suggest this resistance on the part of victims is similar in many ways to well-known distancing mechanisms employed …