American Literature Commons^™

Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores four contemporary novels set in the American South and analyzes the understandings of American pasts, perceptions of current social and political crises, and projections of possible future paths they contain. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones tell stories of disasters the natures of which reflect prominent anxieties concerning the twenty-first century position of the United States as a global power. The total destruction leaving behind an unrecognizable nation that McCarthy imagines in his post-apocalyptic novel suggests the viewpoint that the degree to which the U.S. is indicted in the use of unethical practices …

Matrices Of Disorder: Class, Race, And The Policing Of Normative Southern Femininity In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, And Requiem For A Nun, Claire B. Mischker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I apply Judith Butler's late twentieth century theory of gender performance, outlined in her book Gender Trouble , to three major novels from William Faulkner's early career, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary, and to one novel from his later period, Requiem for a Nun. This project examines the main female characters of these novels: Caddy Compson, Addie and Dewey Dell Bundren, Temple Drake, and Nancy Mannigoe, respectively, to reveal how race and class are indelible to the performance of gender in the literature of the early twentieth century South. The focus …

The Song We Sing: Negotiating Black Nationalism And Queerness In James Baldwin's Late Novels, Elliot N. Long

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite his exclusion from the Black Arts Movement, James Baldwin includes in his later novels many elements of Black Nationalism, including a focus on black communities, black music, Pan-Africanism, and elements of separatism. In his inclusion of queer sexuality, Baldwin pushes against the typical bounds of Black Arts writings, expanding the limits of the genre. Contrary to the philosophy of Black Nationalism, which depends upon solid definitions of blackness, heterosexuality, and masculinity, is Baldwin's tearing down of identity categories through queering sexuality, gender, and race. This thesis examines James Baldwin's late novels, which remain undervalued and under-read, in terms of …

Gay Faulkner: Uncovering A Homosexual Presence In Yoknapatawpha And Beyond, Phillip Andrew Gordon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a biographical study of William Faulkner (1897-1962) as his life coincided with a particular moment in LGBT history when the words homosexual and queer were undergoing profound changes and when our contemporary understanding of gay identity was becoming a widespread and recognizable epistemology. The connections forged in this study--based on archival research from Joseph Blotner's extensive biographical notes--reveal a version of Faulkner distinctly not anxious about homosexuality and, in fact, often quite comfortable with gay men and living in gay environments (New Orleans, New York). From these connections, I reassess Faulkner's pre-marriage writings (1918-1929) for their prolific …

Talking Back To History: Leanne Howe, Linda Hogan, And Louis Owens's Rewriting Of The Southeastern Native Past Through Fiction, Kimberlee Kaitlyn Hodges

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For years, non-Native anthropologists and historians have endeavored to unravel the inner-workings of Native American culture through close examinations of archeological evidence, Euro-American historical record, and oral histories. Consequently, in an attempt to reclaim and re-appropriate these pasts are the stories written by Native American authors and novelists such as LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Louis Owens (Choctaw), and Linda Hogan (Chickasaw). Through their writings, one is able to more fully understand the history of Southeastern Native American tribes as they are given insight into what was and is most valued by Native American people to this day such as kinship, spirituality, …

The Unthinkable Botanical Gardens: Poems, Travis Oliver Green Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Unthinkable Botanical Gardens is a book of poems in five sections. The first, third, and fifth sections present a speaker navigating a wondrous and often hostile world. The second and fourth sections are long poems: "Zodiac B," a sequence inspired by obsolete or forgotten constellations, and "Elbow Island," which tells the story of the beluga whales exhibited in Barnum's American Museum.

Mouth, Dorothy Lynn Knight

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Poems written between August 2010 and April 2013.

"A Shade Too Unreserved": Destabilizing Sexuality And Gender Constructs Of The New Negro Identity In Harlem Renaissance Literature, Renee E. Chase

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Much of the Harlem Renaissance artistic movement was directly intertwined with the New Negro social movement of the time. Race leaders spoke to and influenced artistic trends, while artists often engaged with the New Negro race issues and social debates through their works. Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston used their own fictional works to explore the New Negro construct being promoted. In examining the constructed nature of this New Negro identity, these artists strove to destabilize the social "norms" upon which the identity was based. As they thematically and stylistically explored such social constructs through their fiction, …

“To Make Myself For A Person”: The Bildungsroman In Modern Jewish-American Literature, Kari Lynn Keeling

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky share many similarities: they both feature young Jewish protagonists who immigrate to America in search of the better life they believe America can provide. Though their novels have similar trajectories, each author answers the still relevant question of how immigrants might successfully assimilate into American culture in contrasting lights. Cahan's protagonist, in a superficial sense, achieves the "American dream," while Yezierska's Sara achieves a more modest success. However, Sara ultimately navigates the trials of cultural assimilation and identity formation more successfully. Levinsky gains monetary wealth by adapting to …

Another World Entire: The Posthumanism Of Cormac Mccarthy, Margaret Henson Pless

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cormac McCarthy's novels are thought experiments in what it might mean to write posthuman works of fiction. In a close reading of three of his novels, Child of God, The Crossing, and The Road , this project reveals how McCarthy's stories paradoxically unravel the dangerous human desire to make of our world a story. His characters, Lester Ballard, Billy Parham, and the boy, become posthuman as they live increasingly outside of narrative. Their existences extend beyond the page, in a radical intimacy with the world, evident in the haunting and elusive presences, and absences, of wolves, hawks, trout, and even …

The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine, Joshua Sean Lundy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the thematic role of families and the familial in the literature of the Southern Renaissance. Whereas a number of scholars have come at this matter from a strictly cultural perspective, this analysis utilizes an economic framework. Following the example set by Karl Marx, Freidrich Engels, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, I attempt to formulate an understanding of the southern family not as an independent and singular social organism, but, rather, as a mechanism for the distribution of capital, firmly embedded within modern capitalism's expansive network of production, consumption, and exchange. My argument …

From Country To Country Club: The Landscapes Of Walker Percy, Joyce Garrett Butterworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Walker Percy emerged on the literary scene in 1961, the American landscape had begun to transform in new and dramatic ways. As more and more Americans moved from city centers to suburban developments, Percy found that, in more ways than one, the center would not hold. This American cultural transformation was well underway when Percy wrote The Moviegoer, perhaps the first novel from the American South to have as its subject matter a suburban dilemma. Challenging, as Percy does, traditional notions of southern place and community, this thesis seeks to discover in Percy's body of work whether the rise …

Two Trains Running: Capture And Escape In The Racialized Train Cars Of The Jim Crow South, 1893-1930, Raleigh Mixon Robinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The role of the railroad in the modern American experience—and its role in making that experience modern—cannot be overstated. This thesis proposes to tell one of many possible railroad stories. By focusing on the historical and cultural relevance of a series of bodies in transit, I examine the implementation of railroad segregation law and the response by African-American performers. The thesis begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the Homer Plessy test case and continues across three decades, meeting along the way novelists Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson and musicians W. C. Handy, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, …

The Queen Of The Household: Mothers, Other Mothers, And Female Genealogy On The Plantation In Postslavery Women's Fiction, Correna Catlett Merricks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In many ways, the plantation defined the U.S. South because it was the primary site of production, and therefore income, for prominent southerners. In addition to being a site of production, the plantation created a complex series of connected relationships that was imagined by the plantocracy to be a large family unit. It functioned according to a specific hierarchical model that was primarily based on a patriarchal understanding of genealogy. Yet Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" and "La Belle Zoraïde," Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, …

One Time, One Place? Richard Wright And Eudora Welty's Shared Visual Politics In The Depression Era, Mallory Blasingame

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis questions the absence of critical comparative studies of Mississippi-born authors Richard Wright and Eudora Welty. It argues that, though the authors' writing has traditionally been understood as residing on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they share a political vision of the rural South and urban North in the Depression era that is established in their documentary works—Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and Welty's One Time, One Place (1971)—and extends into such fictional works as Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home" (1936) and Native Son (1941) and Welty's "Moon Lake" (1949) and "Flowers for Marjorie" (1941). In chapter …

Disciplining The Body: Societal Controls Of Gender, Race And Sexuality, Michelle Renae Bright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Poetry And The Multiple Drafts Model: The Functional Similarity Of Cole Swensen's Verse And Human Consciousness, Connor Ryan Kreimeyer Fisher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project compares the operational methods of three of Cole Swensen's books of poetry (Such Rich Hour, Try, and Goest) with ways in which the human mind and consciousness function. I use Daniel Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness, as described in Consciousness Explained, alongside concepts presented in several other philosophical works (from both analytic and continental traditions), to demonstrate that significant similarities exist between the operations of poetry and consciousness in general, and that these operational similarities are especially noticeable in Swensen's work. This thesis examines several operational modes that are present within the …

The Gay Of The Land: Queer Ecology And The Literature Of The 1960s, Jill Elizabeth Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue not only that queer ecology is a legitimate and important next step for ecocritics and queer theorists but also that its literary application does a great amount of good in exploring and dismantling the natural/unnatural binary and exposing the ecological impact of the choices humans make everyday. I take as my method a combination of queer and environmental theory and literary criticism, as well as the foundational queer ecocritical works and include important historical and political perspectives influencing the emergence of the environmental and gay and lesbian movements. Through this dissertation, I legitimize more recent …

Ourself Behind Ourself, Concealed: The Thematic Importance Of Doubling In Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century American Gothic Literature, Katharine Mclaren Todd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Without question, Gothic literature provides an impressively suitable venue for the expression of societal anxieties and frustrations, especially those concerning power, patriarchy, and the socially sanctioned roles of women (i.e. to be obediently passive wives and nurturing mothers) and men (i.e. to be representatives of strength, rationality, morality, and order). While it might seem as though supernatural entities or outside forces are often to be feared in Gothic literature, the most sinister force is usually that of the protagonist's unsettled mind. The shadowy haunted houses and often isolated, gloomy, and claustrophobic spaces in which terrorized protagonists are trapped frequently mirror …

Playing The Game: Violence And The Revolt Against Normative Masculinity In John Updike's Rabbit Run, Norman Mailer's An American Dream, And Phil Andros's $Tud, Ann Marie Schott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine two high-brow examples of Cold War literature by white male authors, Norman Mailer's An American Dream (1965) and John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), and examine them through the lens of the lesser-known gay pulp $tud (1966) by Phil Andros. Although $tud's gay hustler protagonist Phil seems to be a progressive, even transgressive example of an alternate masculinity, he is actually heavily invested in the binary strictures of normative masculinity and therefore works to uphold or reinforce normativity. $tud, therefore, is not about deviance from a masculine norm but rather a meditation on the ways that American …

Reforming Tastes: Taste As A Print Aesthetic In American Cookery Writing, Sarah Wurgler Walden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many eighteenth-century philosophers such as Kant and Hume worked to develop discourses of taste as a means of standardizing cultural behaviors. Using physical taste as a metaphor for aesthetic perception and judgment, these writers could both define and abstract group boundaries. As American writers worked to distinguish their nation from their British forebears, many recognized the utility of taste-based discourse and worked to develop cultural tastes around shared principles of egalitarianism and democracy. Cookbooks and domestic writing soon engaged these discourses, as it was the task of women to cultivate a virtuous citizenry, and—through domestic print culture—to demonstrate the deleterious …

Southern Noir: Appropriations And Alterations Of A Twentieth-Century Form, Bob Hodges

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Southern noir conjoins the two seemingly antithetical words in a telling fashion. The word noir conjures images of cheap films about detectives, criminals, and luckless men scurrying across a city at night with expressionistic shadows and light play, a foreboding sense of doom, and deadly seductive femmes fatales nipping at their heels. The understanding of noir as a symptom of urban modernity inextricably linked to cities and cinema stands in stark contrast to the traditional understanding of the south as rural, retrograde, and a repository for all the antiquated, “coercive forms of human society” in labor and social practices (Greeson …

With Malice Towards None: Six Stories And A Novella, Burke Nixon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A fiction collection consisting of six short stories folloby a novella. The pieces attempt to be comic, but also--with debatable success--to be more than just comic. As the title suggests, one of the collection's thematic concerns is mercy and its absence. Most of the pieces are set in Texas; characters in the collection include a female student in an absurdly incompetent public high school, a parking cop, the best friend of a stand-up comedian, an Abilene man whose life goal is to be struck by lightning, and an unselfconscious grandfather character, who bookends the beginning and end of the collection. …

William Faulkner's Hebrew Bible: Empire And The Myths Of Origins, Scott T. Chancellor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I propose that William Faulkner's literary imagination is charged by a Jewish sensibility rooted in reverence for the Bible as a text that is as vital and relevant in his time as in any since its composition. The Hebrew Bible's narrative method of compiling, redacting, doubling, and retelling, and its attention to curses, genealogies, covenants, and nation-building, reverberate in Faulkner's time as resoundingly as in any preceding it. There are myriad links in Faulkner's work between the Hebrew Bible, Southern Christianity, and American colonialism that merit our attention within ongoing discussions of Faulkner, empire, and nation-building, the Bible and colonialism, …

(Un)Natural Bodies, Endangered Species, And Embodied Others In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake, Marcy Galbreath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The developing knowledge of life sciences is at the crux of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as she examines human promise gone awry in a near-future dystopia. This thesis examines aspects of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminism in the novel's scientific, cultural, and environmental projections. Through the trope of extinction, Atwood's text foregrounds the effects of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to the natural world, and engenders an analysis of human identity through its biological and cultural aspects. Extinction thus serves as a metaphor for both human development and human excesses, redefining the idea of human within the context of …

On The Road From Melville To Postmodernism: The Case For Kerouac's Canonization., Jeffrey Warren King

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the publication of On the Road in 1957, Jack Kerouac became a cultural phenomenon. Crowned the "King" of the Beat Generation, Kerouac embodied the restlessness of Cold War-era America. What no one realized at the time, however, was that the movement that he supposedly led went against Kerouac's own beliefs. Rather than rebellion, Kerouac wanted to write in a way that no one had written before. Heavily influenced by, among others, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Herman Melville, and, especially, James Joyce, Kerouac used the influence of his predecessors to formulate his own style of writing-spontaneous prose. The …

Elizabeth Bishop And Her Women:Countering Loss, Love, And Language Through Bishop's Homosocial Continuum, Donna Rogers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Elizabeth Bishop's seemingly understated and yet nuanced poetry with a specific focus on loss, love, and language through domesticity to create a poetic home. In this sense, home offers security for a displaced orphan and lesbian, moving from filial to amorous love, as well as the literary home for a poet who struggled for critical recognition. Further, juxtaposing the familiar with the strange, Bishop situates her speaker in a construction of artificial and natural boundaries that break down across her topography and represent loss through the multiple female figures that permeate her poems to convey the uncertainty …

The Internal Odyssey Of Identity: James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain, And History., Brent Nelson Lamons

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates how James Baldwin thought about history and treats his first novel as an important document in extricating his construct of the past. A close reading of the work reveals that it is an examination rather than a symptom of two powerful forces that dominate Baldwin's psychology, his father and his history.

James Baldwin felt the individual interpretation of one's experience is just as important as the experience itself. The novel is an informative exposition of how people interpret their experience and how that interpretation affects their psychology. Through Go Tell It on the Mountain Baldwin recreates the …

Henry James, Virginia Woolf, And Frank Lloyd Wright: Interiority, Consciousness, Time, And Space In The Modernist Novel And The Home, Carol Michaelsen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the Modernist period, generally defined between the years 1890 and 1945, artists were attempting to break away from previous forms and styles. For example, writers like Henry James and Virginia Woolf sought to change the novel by exploring the consciousness of characters, while playing with the ideas of time and space to create the present moment. The thesis explores the modernist techniques used by James and Woolf, but also connects the work of the writers with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Using Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form, my work explores the similarities between Wright's designs of private …

Silence, Absence, And Mystery In Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, And Power, Kathryn Erickson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, and Power, Linda Hogan uses the devices of silence, absence, and mystery to articulate the oppression and marginalization of Native Americans. Specifically, because of the environmental crises that produce conflict in each novel, the project benefits from ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology. Also, because of various interpretations that open up when silence is examined, theories of deconstruction strengthen the thesis. Ultimately, Hogan's characters move from silence as a form of tyranny to silence as a form of reconnection with tribal ways. As the characters discover pathways to native traditions, they also discover spiritual connections with the …