American Studies Commons^™

Folklore For A New Generation: Charles Chesnutt's Updated Trickster Figure, Peter Mccollum

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Amidst a surge of plantation fiction writing during the era of American Realism, Charles Chesnutt was arguably one of the most controversial yet prolific authors to address the recent advent of slavery. The Conjure Woman was a publication of seven frame narratives that employed the traditional style of a former slave telling tales of “the old days,” and though Chesnutt's work may have mirrored such authors as Thomas Nelson Page, the tales broke from tradition with surprisingly stark accounts that are clearly based on Chesnutt's own conversations with former slaves. Much like another contemporary, Joel Chandler Harris, Chesnutt looks backward …

Portraiture And Text In African-American Illustrated Biographical Dictionaries, 1876 To 1917, Dennis Williams Ii

Theses and Dissertations

Containing portraiture and biography as well as protest text and affirmative text, African- American Illustrated biographical dictionaries made from 1876 to 1917 present Social Gospel ideology and are examples of Afro-Protestantism. They are similar to the first American illustrated biographical dictionaries of the 1810s in that they formed social identity after national conflict while contesting concepts of social inferiority. The production of these books occurred during the early years of Jim Crow, a period of momentous change to the legal and social fabric of the United States, and because of momentous changes in modern American print industries. While portraits within …

The Discursive Commons: The Establishment, "Outside Agitators," And "Communist Subversives" In Gadsden's Depression-Era Political Environment, John Disque Agricola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses a turbulent and often violent political environment in Gadsden, Alabama during the Great Depression. Using a theoretical construct called the discursive commons my analysis suggests how very particular ideas such as the trope of the outside agitator, and the idea of the communist radical, were used by the establishment to incite violence against United Rubber Workers union organizers who came to Gadsden to enlist members in the 1930s and early 1940s. It is my contention that these discursive formations had affective power over the people who committed acts of violence against their own class interests. This thesis …

The Ghost Of Ravishment That Lingers In The Land: The Beginnings Of Environmentalism In Seraph On The Suwanee And Go Down, Moses, Elisabeth Anne Wagner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner are recognized for their environmental writing. However, few scholars have acknowledged the sophisticated environmentalism present in Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Faulkner's fictional depiction of Lafayette County in Go Down, Moses. This thesis seeks to prove that Hurston and Faulkner were keenly aware of the ecological problems of their hometowns through a close reading of each book alongside the environmental history each book was based on, Eatonville, Florida and Lafayette County, Mississippi respectively. Each author's distinct regional environmental knowledge helped Hurston and Faulkner to see larger national and global problems with using land …

Humanistic Psychology In Selected Plays By Lorraine Hansberry: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Shaimaa M. Saeed

English Language and Literature

Psychoanalysis has long been a breakthrough in the field of literary criticism. This book celebrates the intermarriage between two fields: psychology and literature. It provides a thorough analysis of selected dramatic texts authored by the Afro-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Such analysis is achieved through employing the humanistic psychology theories of the leading humanistic psychologists: Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Rollo May to emphasize that features of humanistic psychology are detected in Hansberry's plays. The interdisciplinary nature of the book calls for psychology and literature readers who have a passion for deduction & induction and a desire to navigate through different …

The Emergence Of The New Woman In Victorian Children's And Family Literature, Geneva Korykowski

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

In the Victorian era, the first wave of feminism surfaced in several influential family novels that modeled the "New Woman" instead of reinstating the "Old Girl." Characters from the novels Little Women, Villette, Jane Eyre, and The Little Lychetts as they modernize the Victorian women in the fin de siecle. Now we see a trend similar to first wave feminism beginning to happen with biology, The Hunger Games and Will Grayson, Will Grayson show examples of how a "New Man" is defined in contemporary society.

Present Futures: Possibilities For Selfhood At A Community Mental Health Center In Detroit, Michigan, Talia Gordon

Wayne State University Theses

Since the 1990s, recovery-oriented approaches to mental illness have become the dominant paradigm in contemporary U.S. non-clinical institutional settings. Central to the recovery paradigm is a discourse of self-determination that separates psychiatric pathology from personhood and expects those diagnosed to enact and manage themselves as autonomous subjects - as empowered, responsible, independent, and transformable. For many individuals, however, everyday experiences of illness are at odds with expectations for recovery, defined as a "process of change" through which the self is continuously worked upon and improved (SAMHSA 2011). One particularly popular non-clinical recovery modality is the Clubhouse model of psychosocial rehabilitation …

“It Made The Ladies Into Ghosts”: The Male Hero's Journey And The Destruction Of The Feminine In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! And Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Catherine Ruth Schetina

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis is a consideration of the intertextual relationship between William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. It considers the objectification and destruction of women and female-coded men in the service of the male protagonist's journey to selfhood, with particular focus on the construction of race, gender, and class performances.

Technical And Structural Experimentation In Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius And Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Samantha Branin

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis discusses the experimental writing techniques of two contemporary American authors, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, in their works A Heartbreaking Work o f Staggering Genius and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, respectively. These authors’ narrative experiments are examined and contextualized through the lens of trauma theory, a practice of literary analysis that relies upon studies of the effects of trauma, most specifically the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Branin posits that Eggers’ and Foer’s experimental narrative choices—e.g. shifts in form and narrator, the use of circuitous and non-chronological narratives, typographical experiments, and the use of images instead …

Self-Effacement Of The "Author" To Circulate Texts : Strategies To Construct Authorship In Antebellum America, Rumi Takahashi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

From the post-Revolutionary days, American print materials and political institutions were interrelated with each other for the purpose of building a new nation. The democratic institutions composed of the president and a sovereign people marked the country's difference from European monarchy, while the book trade served as a means that would disseminate a moral image of an ideal citizen to endorse the national identity. Yet, as drastic changes of industry in the 1820s enabled more people to participate in the economic system, the sovereignty of people turned out to be potentially subversive power of the mob, which required the literary …

Queer Bodies And Queer Materials In Post-Wwii American Texts, William Joseph Whalen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Although the primary subject of this dissertation is contemporary American literature and popular culture--individual chapters are devoted to careful studies of Octavia Butler's short story "Bloodchild," Cormack McCarthy's gothic novel Child of God, Chuck Palahniuk's epistolary novel Pygmy, and the track "It's Good" by hip-hop artist Lil Wayne featuring Drake and Jadakiss--I develop a reading of these contemporary texts that places them within much older and richer intellectual, spiritual, psychological, and even biological traditions. My primary focus is the human body, both literal and figurative, as the site of dynamic exchanges, movements, blockages, and productive potentialities. I argue that at …

A Study Of The Native American Captivity Narrative, Meghan Daniele Madden

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis examines the genre of Native American captivity narratives and their evolution from their first appearance in the seventeenth century to their waning popularity in the nineteenth century. The thesis starts with the Puritan narrative as a device for spiritual elevation and pronouncement. As Calvinism begins to diminish and the American Revolution approaches, captivity narratives take a turn from anti-Jesuit propaganda to anti-Indian propaganda. Narratives were used not only to warn colonists and Americans of the savagery of Indians, but also to strengthen the separation between the English and Indian inhabitants of America. The anxiety of degenerating into savages …

Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also …

Reading After The End Of The World, Christina Thyssen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Reading after the End of the World is an investigation into challenges to our critical registers brought on by the increasingly visible effects of climate change and the era of the anthropocene. Its concerns are with how these realities can be seen as transformative of our notions of "reading" and with a literature that seems to anticipate such a moment of disarticulation. The project is organized around close readings of novels by Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman and it traces in these texts what I refer to as a "positive nihilism," which serves as a …

Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Historicization Of Antebellum Landscapes And Character In "A New-England Tale" And "Hope Leslie", Lisa D. Grant

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis investigates Catharine Maria Sedgwick's situating of New England religion, political issues, and social class structures in A New-England Tale (1822) and Hope Leslie or Early Times in Massachusetts (1827). A New-England Tale models the convergence of morality, religion, education and politics in nineteenth-century America in order to awaken a sense of national pride, and in doing so places a priority on political independence and education. Hope Leslie models morality and traces the correlation of religion and politics as they served to promote Puritan civic responsibility in seventeenth-century New England, and in doing so places a priority on moral …

Platonic Conception : Post War Experience In "The Great Gatsby" And "Farewell To Arms", Frederick D. Floss

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

"Platonic Conception" explores the relationship that authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had with World War I through their respective novels "The Great Gatsby" and "A Farewell to Arms." The thesis's author examines how the cultural impact of the war can be felt in five facets of both novels: the formative influences of the writers, their experiences with the War itself, their use of setting, their treatment of female characters, and how they render the War's influence in a post-war world. Comparing the ways these two books treat the war leads Floss to argue that cultural impact of the …

Fordism & Modernist Forms : The Transformation Of Work And Style, William Jeffrey Casto

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Fordism and Modernist Forms argues that Fordism is an American manifestation of a global tendency towards concentration and rationalization that we know as "monopoly capitalism." Fordism, as part of the historical transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, reshapes and reorganizes the structures of modern life - accentuating repetitive habits and efficient behavior, replacing craftsmanship with deskilled labor, and integrating consumer culture into identity formation. These socio-economic transformations obfuscate the actually existing structures that produce their uneven societies and the monotonies of modern, everyday "life" and, therefore, create an artistic crisis of representation as the individual increasingly relies on the prisms …

The Blackness Of Black (W)Holes, Eric M. Anderson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Blackness of Black (W)holes analyzes Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's Sanctuary, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as against establishing the illusion of a coherent, recognizable self through relational identities and subservience to denotative language and categories of identity. These novel’s feature characters packing knives, I claim, because they advocate for what I term stylistic self–extrication: a rupture with prevailing forms of identity and cliché ways of speaking through rhythmic, sonorous, experimental language use. Characters who succeed at the task, I argue, are associated with a blackness in excess of racial markings, because they become unclassifiable as a result. In …

Mississippi Motoring: Mom And Pops And Entrepreneurs, Erin Elizabeth Scott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the 21st century, motorists driving "off the beaten path" and not on the interstate now have the treat of gaining insight into a local area's foodways when they stop to eat. From tamales to the local fried experiment, gas stations have evolved to provide one stop shopping for the day tripper or sustenance and social interaction within a locale. The state of Mississippi has somewhat escaped the national burger or sandwich chain connected to the service station and instead has a "mom and pop" kitchen serving up often informal and local flavors. How do these establishments make a go …

The Life And Songwriting Of Vic Chesnutt, John Hermann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of the life and music of Vic Chesnutt, and it accompanies a documentary film. Both components feature interview excerpts from over 30 hours of film footage with Chesnutt, as interspersed with archival documents of his life, along with dozens of interviews with his family, friends, peers, music writers, and bandmates. Chesnutt's story can only be properly told through the lens of southern culture. He was not just a charter member of an international group, but a southern songwriter whose rural Georgia upbringing was paramount to his work. He has often been compared in music journals …

Cold War Pulp: Gender And Fiction In The Age Of Liberation, James Lewis Hood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The early decades of the twentieth century saw incredible changes in both literacy and general publishing. Once literature had been the domain of the elite, but now it was the daily pleasure of compeople. The changes in American culture in the middle of the century, combined with this revolution in publishing and literacy, combined to produce texts frequently referred to as pulp-fiction, works easily and cheaply produced for a mass-market. This market actively catered to diverse interests, perhaps most significantly the sexually alienated. Works of gay and feminist pulp fiction served to show alienated gay men and women, as well …

Uneven Ground: Figurations Of The Rural Modern In The U.S. South, 1890-1945, Benjamin S. Child

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

New modernist studies has opened wide the discussion about what modernism means, when it begins, and, compellingly for the purposes of this project, where it occurs. Exploring intersections between modernization, modernism, labor, and segregation in the agricultural South, this dissertation demonstrates how the effects of nascent industrialization, emergent technologies, and "modern" thought are animated by figures and spaces associated with--or performing--versions of rurality. The project is divided into three major sections. In the first, I suggest that the contradictions of African American life in the post-Reconstruction world are parsed in the period's literature through the presence of a veiled georgic …

Genealogical Interpretation: Applications Of Genealogy At Historic Sites, Foresta Hanson

Theses

Historical sites protect and preserve sites of national importance and shared memories of its citizens (Lenz, 2011; Mackintosh, 2000). These sites document liberty, colonial history, slavery, wars, prominent figures, and more through museums, villages, homes, cemeteries, and battlefields (Utah Education Network, 2012). Interpreters tell the stories of the people who lived and died at the historic site connecting visitors to the resource. Genealogy answers the universal need people have to know who they are and where they come from (Bishop, 2008; Brough, 1995). Interpreters bring the ancestors to life and help the visitor understand what life was like in previous …

Big T-Shirts And Running Shorts: A Female Uniform And Southern Womanhood On The Ole Miss Campus, Abigail Abide

Honors Theses

This thesis attempts to understand why white female sorority members wear oversized t-shirts as a uniform to their classes and how this outfit affects the construction of white southern womanhood on the Ole Miss campus. In this exploration, I have interview male and female, black and white, undergraduates. I also used an online survey that I separated by sex. I have found that oversized t-shirts are related to ideas of social status, sexuality, class, constructions of ideas about the female body, and southern identity with in the Greek community. These ideas intensely affect the daily lives of Ole Miss students …

In Another Day: The Historical And Cultural Relevance Of Gone With The Wind, Cody Rentz

Honors Theses

Although it was a massive success in its time and won a Pulitzer Prize, critics today tend to discard Gone with the Wind as a piece of low-quality, racist, historically inaccurate literature. However, the novel, through no intent of its author, parallels the Great Depression in many ways, a fact that likely contributed to its popularity. As such, the novel can be a useful tool in studying the culture of the 1930s. To study the cultural connections, I began by reading the novel, watching the film, and speculating as to the connections to Depression-era culture. I then researched the author, …

Relocating The Cowboy: American Privilege In "All The Pretty Horses", Maia Y. Rodriguez

Global Tides

American novelist Cormac McCarthy published the first installment of his Border Trilogy, a novel entitled All The Pretty Horses, only a decade before the turn of the 21st century. Within a few months, essays by Alan Cheuse and Vereen M. Bell would set the tone for scholarship on McCarthy's work for the decade to follow. However, in 2012 Jordan Savage revolutionized the conversation on the concept of "border" within the Border Trilogy, identifying it as an ideological myth. This paper will further Savage’s analysis using Jacques Derrida’s Deconstructionist theory in order to analyze the binaries created by the border …

The Power Of Multiplying: Reproductive Control In American Culture, 1850-1930, Virginia B. Engholm

Theses and Dissertations--English

Prior to the advent of modern birth control beginning in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of pregnancy, post-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adult years. The average birth rate per woman in 1800 was just over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to just under than three and a half. The question that this dissertation explores is what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge in the wake of this demographic shift. What’s at stake in a woman’s decision to reproduce, for herself, her family, her nation? How do women, and society, control birth?

In …

Knowing And Being Known: Sexual Delinquency, Stardom, And Adolescent Girlhood In Midcentury American Film, Michael Todd Hendricks

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of …

Looking To The Future, Selling The Past: Churchill Weavers Marketing Strategies In The 1950s, Cassandra White-Fredette

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

This thesis explores the Churchill Weavers stereocards housed at the Kentucky Historical Society and Berea College based on visual analysis. By examining the stereocards as advertisements and comparing them to a series of short films created by the company, I will discuss how the Churchill Weavers created a brand that emphasized both an image of traditional American rural production and modern urban consumption. I will further discuss how the marketing strategies used by the Churchill Weavers exemplify a larger trend in American advertising in the years following World War Two.

The China Dream And The American Dream, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Since Xi Jinping invoked “The China Dream” as a key concept in November 2012, this phrase has come to dominate discussions of China’s future. This paper will examine the China dream phenomenon first by placing it in the context of debates that have been raging in Chinese civil society over the past few years. It will analyze the works of 20 prominent “China dreamers” in terms of debates over the proper relationship between (1) politics and economics, (2) equality and hierarchy, (3) civilization and civility, and (4) nationalism and statism. The other main context for the China dream concept is …