American Literature Commons^™

Reading The Culture Wars In The New Academic Novel, 1984-Present, Ian Butcher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The “new academic novel” emerged in the 1980s as what had previously been a cloistered, insular genre began to engage much more directly with the social and political import of universities and the people who work in them. I argue that an important strand of this development centres on a group of novels that through their depiction of recent developments in academia—the threat of political correctness, the so-called theory wars, the growth of contingent labour, and the elevation of a corporate logic above educational concerns—document the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant logic of American higher education and the American …

Nella Larsen: An Untold Story Of Race Through Literature, Bria Stephens Stephens

Honors Theses

This study explores the life of Nella Larsen, investigating how her unusual childhood and early adulthood provided substance for her to make critical and unique views on race relations and racially dichotomized communities. The study shows how the Harlem Renaissance was essential in providing this outlet to Larsen; it was an era where African American art was lauded. The investigation required research into Larsen's childhood and early adult life using several different pieces of biographical works. After detailing impactful events in her early life, the study developed further with critical analyzation of her fictional short stories and novels. Additional research …

Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs

Theses and Dissertations--English

“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of …

American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War.

I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring …

Adapting Skazki: How American Authors Reinvent Russian Fairy Tales, Sarah Krasner

Scripps Senior Theses

Adaptations of works have the potential to bring their subject matter to a new audience. This thesis explores the adaptation of Russian fairy tales into novels by authors Orson Scott Card and Joy Preble by looking at how they present Russian fairy tales, folkloric figures, and fairy tale structure to an American audience.

Gender Revolution Of The Jazz Age: The Source Of Disillusionment In The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald And Ernest Hemingway, Mary Killeen

All Master's Theses

The Lost Generation was forced to develop their own principles regarding gender identity in an environment of ever-shifting cultural norms, which called into question all of their predetermined ideas on femininity, masculinity, and the ways in which members of the opposite sex should interact with one another. Although much of their writing is set amid and seems to embrace the evolving social culture of the early twentieth-century, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway largely criticize the gender revolution of the 1920s and blame evolving gender roles for the collapse of their generation. Nevertheless, I argue that Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s cultural …

Metaphysics Of Mania: Edgar Allan Poe's And Herman Melville's Rebranding Of Madness During The American Asylum Movement, Alexis Renfro

All Master's Theses

The “madman’s” place throughout history has tended to be a mystery on both ontological and epistemological levels. From the perception of the madman as a crazed oracle in the sixteenth century to the perception of the madman as a criminal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth-century madman was even more difficult to define. Because insanity was deemed the inverse of bourgeois normativity and conservative moral standards, those categorized as mad in America during mid-1800s were institutionalized in reformed mental asylums, establishments which sought to homogenize human behavior through moral treatment. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville drew …

Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated …

Book Of Empire: The Political Bible Of U.S. Literary Modernism, Barry Hudek

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Book of Empire” reveals that contrary to what is often suggested by scholars, modernism is not a moment of secularization and declining faith and that the Bible is actually a resource for mounting a radical critique of empire, nation-building, and racial oppression that defies conservative notions supporting those undertakings. For Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston, the Bible is a source of moral authority they use to challenge the imperialist, colonialist, and nativist projects of the twentieth-century U.S. In rebranding the Bible as politically radical, these writers are not denying the authority of the Bible, but are re-appropriating …

An Echo Of Swelling Voices, A Meta-Fictional Novella, Adolfo Danilo Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Horacio P. is an exiled Nicaraguan American poet living and teaching in Austin, Texas since the 1970s. Despite his enormous reputation and highly supportive wife, he feels incapable to write his last, and best, novel. This novel is about the life of Asdreni, an Albanian poet who was also exiled in Romania during the time before World War II, and his quest to find out who sent him a mysterious box containing the unpublished manuscripts of an unknown poet. One day, Horacio himself also receives a mysterious box containing the unpublished manuscripts of an unknown poet. His novel and his …

(An) Unsettled Commons: Narrative And Trauma After 9/11, Chinmayi Kattemalavadi

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines fictional responses to the events of September 11, 2001. It argues for the importance of one kind of fictional response, one which focuses on representing the feeling of "unsettledness" that can be one effect of trauma, with the aim of making that unsettledness itself a locus of a shared common experience. I posit that in articulating the events of 9/11 in the context of, in relation to, and as one in a series of traumas, violences, and histories, these narratives make the unsettlements shareable. Focusing on four works of fiction that were published after 9/11 – Joseph …

Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the poetry of Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman, two poets of the critically neglected second-generation New York school. I argue that Brainard and Waldman help define the emerging discourse of postmodern poetry through their attention to cold war culture of the 1970s, countercultural ideologies, and poetic form. Both Brainard and Waldman enact a poetics of vulnerability in their work, situating themselves as wholly unique from their late-modernist predecessors. In doing so, they help engender a poetics concerned not only with the intellectual stakes but with the cultural environment they are forced to navigate. Chapter 1 explores Brainard's …

Reader's Guide: A Foray Into Violence, Trauma And Masculinity In In Our Time, Sara-Rose Beatriz Bockian

CMC Senior Theses

Modernism has been called “a reaction to the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War and a search for a new mode of art that would rescue civilization from its state of crisis after the war” (Lewis, 109) Hemingway attempts this rescue by re-thinking aspects of the novel that were taken for granted in earlier periods, just as the conventions of modern life were taken for granted pre-WWI. Furthermore, his work tries to rectify the dissonance between a pre and post-war self through the exploration of social conventions relating to violence, trauma and masculinity.

Everybody's Story: Gertrude Stein's Career As A Nexus Connecting Writers And Painters In Bohemian Paris, Elizabeth F. Milam

Honors Theses

My thesis examines how the combination of Gertrude Stein's career, Paris, and the time period before, during, and after The Great War conflated to create the Lost Generation and affected the work of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. Five different sections focus on: the background of Stein and how her understanding of expression came into existence, Paris and the unique environment it provided for experimentation at the beginning of the twentieth century (and how that compared to the environment found in America), Modernism existing in Paris prior to World War One, the mass culture of militarization in World War One …

All Things Loved And Unlovable: Discovering Southern Identity In Black Migration Novels, Michael Holman

Honors Theses

This thesis traces the development of the ways that the South figures in the imaginations of black writers by examining Southern identity in three novels centered around migratory protagonists. The thesis examines the ways in which folk identity, urban landscapes, remigration, and gender shape the migration experience in each novel. The novels discussed here are Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Quicksand posits the South as a place of unique danger, especially for black women, Invisible Man characterizes it as a place defined by oppressive memory that may be utilized as a resource …

[Review Of The Book Brown Girl Dreaming, By J. Woodson], Kaavonia Hinton

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Jacqueline Woodson is an award-winning children's literature author, who, early in her career, was touted by renowned children's literature sholar Rudine Sims Bishop as one of the most promising children's literature authors of her generation. Lauded for her ability to write honestly about social issues, marginalized youth, and popular culture, Woodson, to date, has written over twenty-five texts for youth, spanning several genres- from novels and picture books to books-in-verse and short stories. She is, as predicted, a major voice in children's literature. In Brown Girl Dreaming, a book written for youth, Woodson explores how she learned to develop …

Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, Judith Lakämper

Wayne State University Dissertations

In “Affective Dissonance: (Post)feminism and Popular Cultural Expressions of Motherhood,” I argue that motherhood in the so-called post-feminist age is structured by a conflicted relationship between affective expectations raised by public discourses of motherhood and the material, embodied experience of maternity, inflected by race, class, age, and sexuality. While recent feminist scholarship has engaged questions of (bodily) materiality, and popular medial discourses increasingly critique unrealistic ideals of motherhood, my dissertation considers these approaches together. Juxtaposing representations of motherhood from various sources – memoirs, digital media, art photography, and television – I demonstrate how the postfeminist rhetoric of female empowerment and …

Rotten Bananas, Hip Hop Heads, And The American Individual: Teaching Eddie Huang’S Memoir Fresh Off The Boat And Its Tropes Of Literacy, Wilson C. Chen

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay focuses on Fresh Off the Boat as an eminently teachable coming-of-age story, provides critical contexts and directions for teaching this ideologically suggestive text, and sets forth the interpretive argument that the structures and themes of the memoir are fundamentally shaped by the literacy narrative at its core. As such, the text enters into conversation with other literacy narratives that have become so foundational in the teaching of multiethnic literature in the U.S. Moreover, Huang’s tropes of literacy draw from enduring, mythified Americanist discourses that are suggestive of a masculine individualism that, while not unique, is recognizable, instructive, and …

"It's Oil And Water": Race, Gender, Power, And Trauma In Vu Tran's Dragonfish, Quan-Manh Ha, Chase Greenfield

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes in-depth the interplay between race, gender, power, and trauma in Vu Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish. We argue that Dragonfish focuses on the relationships, desires, and conflicts among its three protagonists—Robert, Suzy, and Sonny—to highlight how their postwar interactions complicate race, gender, trauma, and remembrance. The three protagonists engage in an intense socio-political struggle for dominance and control, which is riddled with irony, heart-wrenching pain, and misleading appearances. They experience hardship and loss, but they rely on each other for recovery from past and present trauma, and to advance their own varying personal priorities and agendas: …

"Goo-Prone And Generally Pathetic": Empathy And Irony In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Benjamin L. Peyton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Critical considerations of David Foster Wallace’s work have tended, on the whole, to use the framework that the author himself established in his essay “E Unibus Pluram” and in his interview with Larry McCaffery. Following his own lead, the critical consensus is that Wallace succeeds in overcoming the limits of postmodern irony. If we examine the formal trappings of his writing, however, we find that the critical assertion that Wallace manages to transcend the paralytic irony of his postmodern predecessors is made in the face of his frequent employment of postmodern techniques and devices. Thus, there arises a contradiction between …

The American Pastoral Tradition And The Stories Of Breece D'J Pancake, Christopher Blackburn

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In the late twentieth century, Breece Pancake carried on the American pastoral tradition by both featuring and modifying characteristics of early American pastoral literature. Breece Pancake does not directly imitate his predecessors, but instead brings the spirit of the nearly 200-year-old tradition in which he participates to a twentieth-century audience. Part of the enduring relevance of the literature in the American pastoral tradition, including The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, is that at the heart of these stories is a theme that has defined and continues to shape the American experience: the struggle with living in liminal spaces.

Photographic Representations Of The South: Eudora Welty And Doris Ulmann, Molly Maher

Honors Theses

Eudora Welty and Doris Ulmann both photographed African Americans living in the South during the 1930s. Ulmann photographed the unique Gullah community in South Carolina, documenting their agricultural work, religious traditions, and lifestyle. Welty photographed the African American community within her home state of Mississippi. Despite a parallel interest in subject matter, Welty stated that she did not like Ulmann's photography. This thesis examines the differences between Welty and Ulmann's techniques and their relationships to the South, their subjects, and literary texts in order to identify why Welty explicitly expressed a dislike for Ulmann's photographs.

Utopia In Progress In Di Prima's Revolutionary Letters, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Utopia in Progress in di Prima's Revolutionary Letters" Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo describes Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters (1971) within the context of social transformation and spatiality studies. In the context of the socio-political revolt and utopian revival of the 1970s, di Prima's utopia is grounded in reality and in progress; and it needs people's help and strength to be attained. In the first section of the article Pinedo analyzes a group of letters which serve as "tips" or a "how-to" guide to prepare for a revolution and in the second part she considers letters in which glimpses …

Authorship In Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy And Bowles's Translation Of Moroccan Storytellers, Benjamin J. Heal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Authorship in Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy and Bowles's Translation of Moroccan Storytellers" Benjamin J. Heal discusses Paul Bowles's and William S. Burroughs's varying interrogation of the constructed nature of authorship. In his study Heal focuses on the publication history of Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night (1981), which was written with considerable collaborative influence and Bowles's translation of illiterate Moroccan storytellers, where his influence over the production and editing of the texts is blurred as are the roles of author and translator. Through an examination of Bowles's and Burroughs's authorship strategies in parallel with an explication of …

Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions in The Yage Letters" Melanie Keomany discusses the contents of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg's The Yage Letters which could be dismissed as openly bigoted and racist. Keomany posits that the text reveals valuable connections between the colonial expansion of the eighteenth century and 1950s USA and Latin America. By re-shaping Burroughs's lived experiences in the Amazon into a text where the narrator William Lee mimics sardonically and parodically the colonial scientific explorer, The Yage Letters provides valuable insight into the complex postcolonial context of the mid-twentieth century.

The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Impact of Burroughs's Naked Lunch on Chester's The Exquisite Corpse" Jaap van der Bent posits that although Alfred Chester was critical of most Beat writing, in Tangier in the early 1960s he associated not only with Paul Bowles, but also with William S. Burroughs. Van der Bent argues that The Exquisite Corpse, the experimental novel Chester wrote in Tangier, shows the influence of the city's geography and especially the content and form of Burroughs's Naked Lunch.

Ginsberg's Translations Of Apollinaire And Genet In The Development Of His Poetics Of "Open Secrecy", Véronique Lane

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Ginsberg's Translations of Apollinaire and Genet in the Development of his Poetics of 'Open Secrecy'" Véronique Lane analyzes the extent to which the journals, letters and poems of Allen Ginsberg are marked by constant reference to literary models that give just as much weight to French as to American writers. Focusing on his long involvement with Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Genet's works, Lane argues that Ginsberg meticulously constructed the genealogy of his poetry through a threefold strategy of literary quotation, translation and encryption. Uncovering this strategy through analysis of "Howl," "At Apollinaire's Grave," and "Death to Van …

Literary Creolization In Layachi's A Life Full Of Holes, Maarten Van Gageldonk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Creolization in Layachi's A Life Full of Holes" Maarten van Gageldonk discusses the publication of Larbi Layachi's 1964 book by Grove Press based on a transcription and translation by Paul Bowles. Both Bowles and the editors at Grove Press made numerous alterations to the content and form of Layachi's tales in order to make them more accessible for readers. In the process, Layachi's book became a "cultural creole" (Hannerz). Drawing on archival materials from the Grove Press Records housed at Syracuse University, van Gageldonk examines how in its published form A Life Full of Holes …

The Beat "Pad", Heike Mlakar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Beat 'Pad'" Heike Mlakar analyzes the importance of Joan Vollmer's and Hettie Jones's Manhattan apartments as centers for the upcoming avant-garde movement of the time in order to understand the meaning of "home" in postwar bohemianism in general and specifically for female Beats. In sensationalized late 1950s films and in print media, the Beats were associated with low-rent Beat "pads" in poor urban areas, in which wild all-night parties were held—sites of drug use, destitution, and sexual promiscuity. Both Vollmer and Jones contributed greatly to the formation of the Beat Generation by providing the perfect setting …

Burroughs's Folios As An Archival Machine For Artistic Creation, Tomasz D. Stompor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Burroughs's Folios as an Archival Machine for Artistic Creation" Tomasz D. Stompor discusses the significance of archival material as a scholarly resource for the analysis of William S. Burroughs's cut-up experiments. Stompor retraces the history of the author's filing system as both a referential repository and a device for documentation and investigates its function as an eperimental machine for the production of cut-up texts and layouts