American Literature Commons^™

Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan

English Faculty Scholarship

Poetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period's activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because …

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

"A Stranger In America": Queer Diasporic Writers And The American Politics Of Exclusion, Caitlin Stanfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the academic concept of queer diasporic studies is relatively new, the epistemic future of this interdisciplinary, intersectional, and inclusive field is already imperiled. Throughout recent years, bills seeking to expunge critical race and queer theory from not only the public education sector, but from the legally-defined “general public” as well, have been proposed by legislators throughout the United States. To combat this assault upon marginalized educators, scholars, and authors, one must first understand what is at stake; the rich site of contemporary, queer diasporic poetry provides one such example. By situating these poems within their complex cultural, political, and …

Before They Could Be Saved: Aids Voices Before Protease Inhibitors, Julian J. Willis

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to explore writing during the start of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. States. This time period encompasses the early 1980s to mid-1990s before Protease Inhibitors were FDA approved which was the medical breakthrough drug that helped turn an HIV diagnosis from a death sentence to a chronic condition. This thesis will be an examination of three themes: “Gay White Cis Male Experience of HIV/AIDS”,” Marginalized Identity Experience of HIV/AIDS” and an exploration of two plays written during the height of the AIDS epidemic that were later turned into HBO productions: The Normal Heart …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. Further Toward Minor Literatures operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. Minor literature is self-theorizing, perhaps even authotheoretical, in its expressing and fulfilling the mobile orientations of its minoritarian communities. This study …

Color And Descriptors To See A Deeper Meaning In "Passing", Dani Szafran

Anthós

A small glimpse into the novel “Passing” by Nella Larsen. A fictional story of Irene Redfield, a black woman living in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and her unraveling life brought on by a chance meeting of an old friend. This is a look at the latent lesbian feelings as shown by the use of descriptive words to paint a picture of a desire that was forbidden during those times.

Scenes Of Subversion: How Monstrous Subjectivities Affect Futurity In Gothic Horror, Salvatore S. Dibono

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen begins his conclusory section of his influential essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” stating, “Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return” (52). Yet, Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive makes a statement which complicates the idea of the monster being “our child” when discussing that the normative (conservative) movement will “recurrently frame their political struggle…as a ‘fight for our children—for our daughters and our …

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, this thesis outlines how to ethically and effectively teach literature that deals with trauma. My personal teaching philosophy as well as the current pedagogy surrounding trauma literature preface a detailed syllabus, lesson plans, assessments, and activities that would be useful in teaching a course centered around literature that deals with trauma. This thesis highlights the merits of teaching trauma fiction in the literature classroom.

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation argues that early American writers often constructed queer ecologies in order to naturalize Anglo-American civilization and justify its expansion into Native American territories. Since there is so little textual evidence on the subject, the major challenge to studying sexuality in early America is approaching sexuality studies creatively—to broaden both our understanding of what counts as sexual discourse and our frameworks for analyzing it. My dissertation addresses this challenge through what many ecocritical scholars of sexuality call queer ecology. In their groundbreaking anthology on the topic, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson remind us that, historically and in the present, …

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …

'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the "taming" that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value.

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

Posthuman And Alien Breeding: The Implications Of Cybersex In Octavia Butler’S Dawn 2019., Elizabeth Rutkowski

Master's Theses

Speculative science fiction affords new ways for authors to represent social problems of the modern day in an apocalyptic manner. Authors such as Octavia Butler use science fiction to analyze social injustices revolving around race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout her novel Dawn, Butler uses the posthuman to represent minority groups in the late twentieth century. The posthuman represents those who have moved from humanity towards a new opportunity that is mixed with the potential for struggle. 1 As demonstrated through Butler’s work posthumanism blurs the lines between binaries such as male / female, straight / gay, and consensual / nonconsensual …

Performing Desire In Times Square: Sailors, Hustlers And Masculinity, Kel R. Karpinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From WWII to the early 1970s, New York City as a port town created a liminal space extending from the piers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard all the way to Times Square in Midtown Manhattan. In Times Square, through interactions on the street, in bars and in hotel rooms, desire and masculinity become a performance between and for men. The queerness of these performances lies in the fact that they fall outside of the norms of society both as same-sex encounters and because sex work is viewed as “deviant.” Further, these interactions eschew traditional labels and limits of desire and …

Bound To Rise, Morgan P. H. Bielawski

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Bound to Rise is a collection of short stories about people who discover themselves in the “fine drizzly rain” (or smirr, in Scottish lingo) of everyday life. They orient themselves and find some way forward, or they realize they have to. Thematically, it addresses a carnival (the carnivalesque), a demolition derby, multiple fires, photography, drinking, music, an eating disorder, and a birthday cake. It includes one original children’s story written in Russian and translated into English by the author.

"Bachelor Buttons": Feminist And Womanist Essays And Poems, Billy E. Clem Jr.

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this critical and creative dissertation, I sketch a brief study of selected multicultural hybrid texts in contemporary US Anglophone literary studies; discuss their implications for reading, writing, and teaching; and present my own hybrid text.

Second-wave feminist and womanist theories and practices opened literary and cultural studies to new and exciting ideas and methods for reading, teaching, and writing both canonical and non-canonical Anglophone texts. One genre emerging anew by these theories, practices, and practitioners is the literary hybrid text, a multi-genre form composed of a variety of prose genres, poetry, drama, and/or visual imagery. Hybrid texts ask readers …

Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots For The Diaspora: Ghosts In The Family Tree. Ann Arbor: U Of Michigan P, 2016., Annie De Saussure

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the family tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 325 pp.

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

The Way We Dream Now: History, Theory, And Lgbtq Memoir In America, Megan Paslawski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines American memoirs written after 2000 by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors with an eye to how the recent institutionalization of queer theory and the open production of LGBTQ histories affect these writers’ conceptions of their lives, aspirations, and cultures. I argue that these memoirs, sometimes consciously, find themselves struggling with what are also competing ideas within queer theory about the queerness of futurity even as they turn to the past of queer/trans literature and history to bolster their senses of possible identities and communities. This often has the effect of positioning contemporary LGBTQ writers as …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.

Disarming “Nature” As A Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining Of Futurity And Environmental Ethics Through Memoir, Sam Lauer

Master’s Theses

In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the …

Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Sinister Wisdom Issue 3, published the year 1977 holds an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, titled, “It is the lesbian in us...”; The cover of the same issue has art by photographer Tee Corinne. Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. This non-fiction creative essay written by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz reflects on the first year of Sinister Wisdom's publication as a celebration of 40 years through this special edition anniversary print for which only 1000 have been printed. The essay remarks on the shift in lesbian identity and community and the potential impact of the Sinister Wisdom journal …