American Literature Commons^™

Common Knowledge: The Epistemology Of American Realism, Mark Sussman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, Common Knowledge: The Epistemology of American Realism, focuses on realist fiction (primarily the novel) at the end of the nineteenth century. Its motivating claim is that the central descriptive and thematic imperative of realism--to depict life "as it is" rather than in some idealized form--emerged in response to crises in the status of knowledge that resulted from an attempt by writers and readers to come to a common understanding of the relationship between private experience and an increasingly fragmented social world. While William Dean Howells's definition of realism as a form of writing that displays "fidelity to experience …

Creating Knowledge, Volume 7, 2014

Creating Knowledge

Dear Students, Faculty Colleagues and Friends, It is my great pleasure to introduce the seventh volume of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences’ Creating Knowledge—our undergraduate student scholarship and research journal. First published in 2008, the journal is the outcome of an initiative to enhance and enrich the academic quality of the student experience within the college. Through this publication, the college seeks to encourage students to become actively engaged in creating scholarship and research and gives them a venue for the publication of their essays.

Beginning with the sixth volume of the journal, we instituted a major …

Apparitional Economies: Spectral Imagery In The Antebellum Imaginaton, Holly F. Osborn

Theses and Dissertations--English

Apparitional Economies is invested in both a historical consideration of economic conditions through the antebellum era and an examination of how spectral representations depict the effects of such conditions on local publics and individual persons. From this perspective, the project demonstrates how extensively the period’s literature is entangled in the economic: in financial devastation, in the boundaries of seemingly limitless progress, and in the standards of value that order the worth of commodities and the persons who can trade for them.

I argue that the space of the specter is a force of representation, an invisible site in which the …

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 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.

“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 …

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 …

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 …

The Divided Reception Of The Help, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The reception of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two other novels about race relations by southern white writers: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Like Gone With the Wind, The Help has been a pop culture phenomenon— prominent in bookstores and box offices, and the “darling of book clubs everywhere.” In January 2012 when I asked students in my Women in Modern Literature class what was the best book they had recently read by a woman, most named either The Help or The Hunger …

Terror, Hospitality And The Gift Of Death In Morrison’S Beloved, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

The “us versus them” narrative still pre-dominates the analysis of terrorism in the West, which invariably associates “them” with terrorism. Toni Morrison’s hauntingly memorable novel – Beloved – provides a radically different and historically grounded view of terror and terrorism in the West. The novel not only releases us from the “us versus them” paradigm by demonstrating America’s intimacy with terror, it also enables us to examine terror and terrorism from the perspective of a gendered and ethnic subject who subverts the easy categorization of “us” and “them” or civilized and terrorist. Following Jacques Derrida’s contemplations on death and terror, …

Physicians, Patients, And Poets, Mary Ball Markow

Honors Theses

I examined the works of William Carlos Williams, Peter Pereira, Rafael Campo, Tory Dent, Lucia Perillo, and John Rybicki to gain a better understanding of the field of medicine. I selected these authors based upon their varied experiences with illness, disease, and loss. Their prose and poetry illuminate the nature of medicine and provide insight into human nature as well. The thesis has been edited for the SMBHC Thesis Repository to protect the copyright interests of some authors and publishers. The table of contents has been edited to reflect the changes.

Gravity In A Jar: A Poetic History Of The People, Places, And Events Of Detroit, Morgan Mccomb

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I explore the history of the city of Detroit in order to better understand the factors that have led to Detroit's current state. The research materials I have used are standard history books as well as newspaper articles, journals, and published interviews with former and current Detroit residents. I have incorporated this research into the construction of both a strict research element as well as poetry in order to present varying accounts of the city of Detroit beginning in the early 20th century and continuing into the present-day. I have found that the history of Detroit has …

Magical Me: Self-Insertion Fanfiction As Literary Critique, Melody Strmel

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the traditions of textual interaction that impact the forms of reading engaged in with fanfiction. This thesis continues by exploring how self-insertion fanfiction functions as a medium through which authors express their reading of the text primary through the emotional impact of the text through wish fulfillment, and the interaction of their cultural moment and the text. Furthermore, it argues that self-insertion fanfiction is a mode of literary critique in which the author acknowledges the effect of a mediated world on their perception of self and reality. Through this recognition of a constructed self, the author rejects …

Modern(Izing) Burial In Interwar American Literature, Victoria Marie Bryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims to study literary representations of interwar American deathways as reflections of modernity. The study of burial in United States history tends to focus on mid- to late-nineteenth century movements that distance the dead from the living. This dissertation argues that these practices left Americans ill-equipped to process the influx of death from the conflict areas of World War I, keen to allow the further development of the funeral industry during the interwar period, and anxious about the certain rise in death tolls that would result from World War II. Interwar literature, therefore, exhibits a difficulty in meaning-making …

Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Subversive Storytelling From The Bunchgrass Edge Of The World, Elizabeth P. Tyson

Scripps Senior Theses

Annie Proulx’s three Wyoming short story collections, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is, tell regional stories that push against the myths surrounding the American West. Elements of Naturalism in her work reverse the paradigm of man’s dominance over the frontier. The cyclical nature of time in her stories shows the unfulfilling nature of nostalgia. She uses folk storytelling techniques to take an insider’s perspective and to utilize the subversive nature of dark humor.

Faulkner's Feeble Few: The Mentally Impaired Citizens Of Yoknapatawpha, Matthew Brent Foxen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores Faulkner's use of mental impairments and illnesses, by analyzing closely three of his characters. With chapters focusing on Benjy Compson, Tommy, and Darl Bundren, this work investigates the literal, aesthetic, and figurative purposes that each man serves in his respective novel. It identifies commonalities and differences among these and other mentally impaired or ill characters.