American Literature Commons^™

Gary Snyder's Path, Jason Dockter

Masters Theses

Early in Gary Snyder's life, he lived a rootless existence in pursuance of gaining spiritual satisfaction through a more harmonious relationship with nature. This rootlessness that dominated this period of Snyder's life originated in Snyder's European ancestors lifestyle, which valued exploiting the natural world for a profit. Through exposure to Chinese landscape paintings, Snyder found Buddhism and began to practice it as a means to reconcile his own humanity with the natural world, which his cultural heritage has alienated himself from. Through Buddhism, Snyder realizes the importance of reuniting humanity with the natural world.

Upon gaining this knowledge, Snyder assumes …

"Retracing Our Steps": Storytelling, Time, And Traditional Referentiality In Mama Day And Absalom, Absalom!, Christine Ann Roth

Masters Theses

Gloria Naylor and William Faulkner turn to the history and tradition of oral storytelling in their novels. Mama Day and Absalom, Absalom! especially present the concepts and techniques of the storytelling act. The complexities of the audience-performer dynamic and non-linear time in an oral storytelling event create obstacles for the teller (the writer) and confuse the role of the audience (the readers). Writers create the role of listening audience for the readers, changing the accepted rules of the readers by asking them to become participants. In Mama Day and Absalom, Absalom!, Naylor and Faulkner create connections between audience …

Warren's Audubon: A Vision Revisited, Sylwia W. Zechowska

Masters Theses

This thesis consists of a Polish translation of a volume of Robert Penn Warren's poetry: Audubon: A Vision accompanied by an introductory essay focusing on historical, cultural and psychological aspects of the poems. As a novelist, Robert Penn Warren is well known to the Polish reading public. All his major novels have been translated into Polish and received with great acclaim, which has been confirmed by numerous editions. Warren's popularity among Polish readers may be attributed to the fact that his fiction is permeated with a peculiar sense of melancholy and a profound awareness of tragic national history, features inevitably …

Yoknapatawpha As Camelot: The Influence Of The Arthurian Legends On The Writings Of William Faulkner, Sally Dye

Masters Theses

In my thesis I examine works of William Faulkner which show the influence of the legends of King Arthur. In the introduction to the thesis, I discuss evidence that Faulkner was not only familiar with the characters of the Arthurian legends but was also aware of many of the different versions of these stories.

The main sections of my thesis consist of character studies of various characters from Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha works in light of their similarities to their Arthurian counterparts. The King Arthur section includes the characters of John Sartoris of The Unvanquished and Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom!, …

The Ruins Of Childhood: Jim Thompson, Erskine Caldwell, And William Faulkner Expose Guilt And Consequence, Robert Thomas Newell

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I examine the novels of Jim Thompson, Erskine Caldwell, and William Faulkner and, in turn, depict their exploration of poisoned childhood. This theme is prevalent in many of these authors' works, and I not only illustrate what horrors children are put through in their novels, but I also show that uncaring and unthinking adults are the root cause. The ruining of a child's life is a rippling problem; often times, adulthood is ruined because of a person's childhood.

I explore the devastation that irresponsible adults can have on their impressionable children. Through either neglect or selfish values, …

Benjamin Franklin And His Critics: John Adams, Mark Twain, And David Herbert Lawrence, Marzuki Jamil Baki Bin Haji Mohamed Johar

Masters Theses

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) provided the paradigm for special qualities in each of his multiple careers which have since been regarded as characteristically American. Franklin's Autobiography is the epitome of Franklin's spirit. The first edition of the Autobiography appeared in French in 1971 and the first edition in English, published in 1793, was actually an anonymous retranslation of the French edition. Franklin's grandson, William Temple Franklin prepared Parts One, Two, and Three in 1818. In John Bigelow's 1868 edition, all four parts appear for the first time in English. In the twentieth century, there have been three major editions, each more …

"Maybe I Have Character Too": Reconsidering Bernard Malamud's Seductresses, Jeff Vande Zande

Masters Theses

Over the span of Bernard Malamud's career, a more than subtle difference is evident between the seductress of his first novel and his subsequent novels. Since Malamud has been accused by some critics as depicting one-dimensional women, I analyzed the metamorphosis of the author's seductress characters to determine whether the change lends a better understanding to the relationship between Malamud and his female characters. I used Jung's theory of the mother archetype and his understanding of the Lilith legends to analyze the role of each seductress.

In The Natural, the seductress is one-dimensional and plays a destructive role in …

James Welch's Winter In The Blood: Thawing The Fragments Of Misconception In Native American Fiction, Mario A. Leto Ii

Masters Theses

The conventional scholarly view of Native American literature asserts that Native authors often portray their characters as alienated and despairing individuals that are incapable of attaining the means for dispelling those negative feelings. As a result, the characters are presumably destined to forever wander the barren reservation, unable to grasp their fleeting cultural traditions or the modern Euroamerican way of life. James Welch, with his novel Winter in the Blood, challenges that stereotypical scenario by allowing his nameless protagonist to discover a previously unknown link to his traditional Blackfeet heritage. Through the knowledge of his ancestors and the unconscious …

Pynchon, Dionysus And America: In Search Of The Pig That Got Away, Andreas Gerling

Masters Theses

This work seeks to analyze Western thought as a system. As a case study representative of this system, I have chosen the United States of America, as it started as a strange experiment in purely Apollonian thought, which has largely remained a closed system and has become the primary engine of cultural change in the twentieth century. As the tools for my analysis, I have chosen the dialectic represented in the mythical opposites Dionysus and Apollo and the counter cultural reaction by a number of post World War II authors, most notably Thomas Pynchon, to the "American Dream."

America began …

The Concept Of The Local In Williams' Developing Poetics: The Poet's Perception And Representation Of The Poor, Jon Montgomery

Masters Theses

The present study serves as a thematic, critical perspective on William Carlos Williams' poetry on the poor; specifically, I address his representation of the poor in his poetry and his attitude towards them. From 1914-38, his attitude towards the poor goes through three significant stages of change. Roughly, the stage boundaries can be marked by decade: the 1910s, the 1920s and the 1930s.

In the first stage, Williams recognizes his empathetic and aesthetic distance from the poor, since his aesthetics rest primarily on his youthful fascination with Keats. The poet desires to reflect properly the lives of the poor. The …

Robert Frost And Maya Angelou: Poet-As-Rhetor In The Presidential Inauguration: Textual Symbols And The Symbol Of Enactment, Donna M. Witmer

Masters Theses

This criticism uses an organic approach to examine the rhetorical properties of Frost's and Angelou's inaugural poems and their individual enactments respective of the constraints and exigencies in the Presidential inaugurations of Kennedy and Clinton. Apparently responding to the constraints of television's sound bite as well as to exigencies of the traditional inauguration and the need to serve a new generation and a culturally diverse population, the Clinton Administration combined the poetic form, used to heighten an emotional response, with an enactment as a synecdochic symbol, used to assert sociopolitical ideology.

The Multiple Voices Of Frederick Douglass, Gesthemane Vasiliadou

Masters Theses

In this rhetorical analysis of Frederick Douglass' style, I argue that the power of his language comes from the multiplicity of voices arising from his work. I specifically concentrate on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), as well as on some of the speeches he delivered soon after the book was published.

Coming from a different culture, I was intrigued by my reaction to Douglass' writing style. I find him a writer with very strong rhetorical skills which have a tremendous appeal to any reader. My personal response explores the reasons …

A New Reading Of Ruth Suckow, Judith Pierson

Masters Theses

By 1950, after three decades of writing, Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) was a well-respected writer whose work seemed headed for a permanent position in the canon of American literature. Instead, Suckow's fiction steadily became less known through the following decades. The question of why her work came to be ignored and why such a position is unwarranted is addressed in A New Reading of Ruth Suckow. The conclusion is that a regionalist categorization and a related gender bias in the literary canon have adversely affected Suckow's works.

Gender bias is reflected in the critical assumptions which ascribe an inferior position to …

A Woman's Quest For Happiness: O'Neill's "Private Myth", Andrea Ximena CampañA Garcia

Masters Theses

Following the approach used by James Hurt in his book Catiline's Dream to determine Henrik Ibsen's "private myth" which he retold in play after play, I have delineated O'Neill's "private myth" in a narrower way concentrating on his female characters. Examining parallel motifs in the lives of the dominant women in Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra, I have detected this mythic pattern involving the O'Neillian woman: She goes through an early innocent and submissive state guided by an initial vision of happiness which can be regarded as fairly conventional. But when her …

Marianne Moore: Facets Of The Crystal, Mary Virginia Katzeff

Masters Theses

Marianne Mooore's poetry embodies two different types of work. As well as the objective poetry that her contemporaries called modernist or Imagist (labels which she rejected), she also wrote quite personal, subjective poems. Two factors, theme and subject matter, unify her work and give evidence of her distinct poetic voice.

The content and form of Moore's work developed from her personal life and interests. In her childhood, loss of a beloved grandfather and changes of household, as well as a lifelong attachment to her mother, affected the poet deeply, as evidenced by her consistent theme of protection. Exotic animals populate …

Americans Define Themselves In The New World, Judith Richards

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to show how the different groups who settled in the English American colonies which later became the United States described themselves during the colonial period. The focal work is Letters from an American Farmer by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. In his chapter "What is an American?" Crevecoeur goes into detail in his descriptions of settlers living in the American colonies just before the Revolutionary War.

Crevecoeur's descriptions are compared with those of earlier writers who wrote at the time of settlement. These writers are selected to be representative of their colony or region. …

The Perpetual Journey: Jonathan Edwards' "Personal Narrative" And Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Pamela A. Masden

Masters Theses

Scholarly readers seem to have avoided a comparison of the writings of Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-90). Although they were born three years apart, they are rarely represented in anthologies as having been contemporaries, primarily because Edwards was a Puritan preacher and Franklin was an "Enlightenment" politician and inventor. However, when we disregard these critical constraints and assumptions, we find that as writers and thinkers, they have a great deal in common.

In my thesis, I have examined the autobiographies of these contemporary works: Edwards' "Personal Narrative" (c. 1739-42) and Franklin's Autobiography (1771-88). The theoretical approaches of Jane …

Killer Trees And Homicidal Grass: The Anthropomorphic Landscape In The American Prose Narrative Of The Vietnam War, Timothy F. Poremba

Masters Theses

Reading the landscape of Vietnam (the climate, the jungle, the topography) as an anthropomorphic character in the American prose narrative of the war provides a unique insight into the inner landscapes of the men who fought there and now write about it. William V. Spanos writes that the urge to name--to anthropomorphize--is man's method for dealing with the existential nothingness of being. Zohreh T. Sullivan, in discussing the landscape of Joseph Conrad, perceives landscape as a projection of the author's own psychic turmoil. Furthermore, Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space recognizes the imaginative value that man places on space, …

The Zen Of Stevens, Rebecca Dickens

Masters Theses

Using comparative studies as background, I develop a Zen model for reading Stevens, arguing that his poetry works in the manner of Zen anecdotes and that it can be understood better by understanding Zen. Three critical studies of Wallace Stevens and Zen assert the Zen-like qualities of Stevens' poetry. Stevens has affinities with Zen writers in three areas: use of language, explorations into the nature of thought, and the structure of anecdotes and poems.

I develop a terminology in order to construct my model, giving attention to the definitions and interrelations of terms such as logical thought, figurative thought, paradox, …

Selective Methods Of Teaching Secondary English: The Scarlet Letter: A Study And Application Of The Collaborative And Mastery Learning Methods, Janine M. Kardas

Masters Theses

This study is about the relationship of content in teaching to the process in teaching for the purpose of helping students to become better readers of literature. This study investigates two selected teaching strategies supported by research to be effective, and applies them to the teaching of a canonical piece of literature, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This study employs literary theory in the development of the objectives and applies both cooperative learning and mastery learning methods to the teaching of this novel. Two sets of lesson plans are developed from the objectives and subsequently analyzed for their effectiveness …

Preservation Of The Family Unit In Adolescent Novels, Mary M. Hutchings

Masters Theses

This thesis discusses the development of the family story from the late nineteenth century to the present, beginning with What Katy Did as an example of the earlier moral story from which this genre grows. It then focuses on Little Women as the beginning of the modern family story and uses Jo from Little Women as the starting point to discuss the development of the female adolescent protagonist in these stories. And lastly, comparing Little Women to modern family life stories which began to appear about 1940, the thesis discusses changes in didacticism which have occurred since the late nineteenth …

Pilar And Brett: Female Heroes In Hemingway, Jean Kover Chandler

Masters Theses

The significant works on the hero have always assumed that the hero is male. However, feminist writers, such as Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, have recently shown many women who are, in fact, heroic in both American and British literature. The main problem is that both cultures have often been unable to recognize female heroism, primarily because of their long-conditioned patriarchal perspectives.

Men go on heroic quests; women either help or hinder them along their paths. Thus, women have been considered as supporting characters only, and they are called heroines. But some authors have created female heroes who are not …

Zora Neale Hurston’S Search For Identity In Moses, Man Of The Mountain, Joan E. Sebastian

Masters Theses

Zora Neale Hurston, Afro-American writer of the 1920s and 1930s, has gained critical recognition for her novels and studies about the Afro-American masses. Hurston, also an anthropologist and folklorist, worked directly with southern Afro-Americans through her research in both of these fields. Her folklore collecting journeys enabled her to see and to capture the cultural traditions and oral heritage of Afro-Americans. It was her search into the cultural traditions, moreover, that led her to find her own identity. Hurston, therefore, depicted her protagonists as searching for an identity in most of her novels, with this quest especially apparent in Moses, …

Jean Toomer's Cane: A Work In The American Grotesque Genre, Kathryn M. Olsen

Masters Theses

In my thesis I will discuss the fact that Jean Toomer’s Cane is a grotesque work, one which in several ways resembles Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. While Jean Toomer never specifically alludes to any of the characters in Cane as grotesques, they consistently exhibit three of the strongest, most characteristic elements of the grotesque: physical and/or psychic deformities, alienation from the reader/viewer, and, most importantly, unrelenting conflict from two opposing elements. In fact, the figures in Cane show even more development of grotesque themes than the characters in Winesburg, Ohio, a collection known for its portrayals of modern …

An Application Of Mikhail Bakhtin’S Theory Of The Grotesque To The Fiction Of Flannery O’Connor, Holly Roberts

Masters Theses

The grotesque in Flannery O'Connor's fiction has always been a central concern of her readers and critics, because it is such a prominent aspect of her work and is usually connected with the equally pervasive characteristics of violence, destruction, and death. Many of her critics see the grotesquerie of her characters and landscapes as indicative of humanity's fallen existence--that it serves only to reveal what is wrong with the human condition. Such views echo the premises of Wolfgang Kayser's theory of the grotesque presented in his well-known book, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, but as I point out, …

Dream In The Fiction Of Nathanael West, James M. Caldwell

Masters Theses

Since the publication of his first novel in 1931, Nathanael West has presented significant problems for critics in their attempts to arrive at conclusions about his work and to classify him among twentieth century novelists. Various critical approaches have helped to clarify some of the ambiguities in West's four novels, but the bibliographic, source, and psychological studies have often often neglected specifics of the texts in favor of finding West a niche in relation to his twentieth century contemporaries.

Most criticism of West's fiction discusses dreams to some extent. His fictions are considered dreamworlds, and each novel's ordering dream is …

"Failed Love" In The Drama Of Edward Albee, Steven Leonard Long

Masters Theses

The plays of Edward Albee are frequently examinations of characters who are unable to love or to be loved. A central and recurring conflict which runs through many of Albee's plays is the conflict which stems from the lack of success which the characters often experience as they strive to find love. The uncertainty and ambiguity which surround the abstraction called "love" leave the characters with feelings of unhappiness, frustration, fear, self-hatred, and despondency. Though the individuals in Albee's plays are aware that love is the ingredient which is missing from their lives, none knows how to go about alleviating …

Mark Twain's Confidence Men, Sharon K. Scruton

Masters Theses

In Mark Twain's literature the confidence man has special talents, but he is also subject to human failings. Through the characters of Huck Finn and Hank Morgan (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) Twain exposes the traps into which a con artist, as a creative talent, can fall. Twain knows these traps, both from experience and from fears of what the future holds. Hank Morgan becomes an extension of Huckleberry Finn. He is a figure who, as he progresses, leaves the best talent of a con artist behind--the talent of instinct. The natural abilities of insight and …

The Law And Mark Twain, Jeff Andrew Weigel

Masters Theses

Varying concepts of law are an essential part in many of Mark Twain's works. Twain's position as an observer and critic of society is often reflected by the way he represents law and justice in his stories. His dislike of injustice and cruelty caused him to focus on these "legal" problems as a way of revealing and attacking various injustices in society. My thesis examines Twain's perception of law as he exposes it in Roughing It, Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The general objective of my …

E. Taylor's Use Of Canticles, Clella J. Camp

Masters Theses

In Sermon IV of the Christographia Edward Taylor makes the following statement.

Man, the last in the creation, is the glory of all elementary nature. The image of God in man, the last draught of God upon him, is the glory of Man. Come to artifical instinces, and here it holds; All things of less considerations are first touched on, but that which is last entered on is of the greatest concern…And so it is in the things of God!

Because those things that are constantly fixed in “the last place” are the most complete and the most valued of …