American Literature Commons^™

The Problem Of Obviousness, Benjamin Goldberg

Sophia and Philosophia

1. The Problem of Obviousness
There’s no such thing as obviousness.

This isn’t, of course, itself obvious; nor is it clear why it should be a problem. So let me start elsewhere, with the anti-vaccine movement. A friend of mine laid out the ‘obvious’ position: there are facts and rationality on one side, unenlightened ignorance and bigotry on the other. Scientists versus fools, and the fools don’t even know what game is being played.

America Abandoned: German-Jewish Visions Of American Poverty In Serialized Novels By Joseph Roth, Sholem Asch, And Michael Gold, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

In 1930, Hungarian- born Jewish author Arthur Holitscher’s book Wiedersehn mit Amerika: Die Verwandlung der U.S.A. (Reunion with America: The Trans-formation of the U.S.A.) was reviewed by one J. Raphael in the German- Jewish Orthodox weekly newspaper, Der Israelit. This reviewer concluded: “Despite its good reputation, America is a strange country. And Holitscher, whose relationship to Judaism is not explicit, but direct, has determined that to be the case for American Jews as well.” The reviewer’s use of the word “strange” (komisch) offers powerful insight into the complex perceptions of America held by many …

Loving The Unlovable Body In Yamanaka's Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by expicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the …

Delillo's Falling Man And The Trouble With Sympathy In Narratives Of Terrorism, Jessica Mcdonald

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "DeLillo's Falling Man and the Trouble with Sympathy in Narratives of Terrorism" Jessica McDonald discusses the ways Don DeLillo's characterization of a 9/11 terrorist elicits reader sympathy in his 2007 novel Falling Man. McDonald argues that introducing sympathy into narratives of terrorism undermines attempts to understand the contextual issues out of which terrorism arises even if the rhetoric of sympathy may seem to foster a sense of "fellow-feeling" that makes acts of political protest and resistance more accessible to broader publics.

Echo Soundings: Essays On Poetry And Poetics By Jeffery Donaldson, Tonia L. Payne

The Goose

Review of Jeffery Donaldson's Echo Soundings: Essays on Poetry and Poetics.

Using Hamlet And Peter Pan: Family Issues, Ghosts, And Memory In Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park, Michael L. Hardie

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the ways in which Bret Easton Ellis uses Hamlet and Peter Pan as sources in his novel Lunar Park.

Decolonizing The Ya North: Environmental Injustice In Sherri L. Smith’S Orleans, Micah-Jade M. Coleman

Master's Theses

Young Adult (YA) dystopias, in recent years, have imagined a future world fueled by the overuse and misuse of technology, the advancement of science for human gain, as well as societies ruled by governments that govern based on their own self-interests and economic gain. Such novels have opened the door for discussion about how the present-day actions of societies can impact the future of the environment; yet many only focus their attention on societies in the North— regions considered “developed” by the western world. In her YA novel, Orleans (2014), Sherri L. Smith focuses attention on the aftermath of Hurricane …

Pedagogy And Profit: Multiethnic Literature, Gender And Young Adult Publishing, Allison S. Layfield

Open Access Dissertations

This project argues that the adult/young adult division has the effect of maintaining social difference—especially along the lines of race and gender—while simultaneously ignoring the process of maintaining social hierarchies that occurs during the publication, reviewing and educational selection processes. Chapter One brings together the history of YAL as a pedagogical tool with its publishing history in order to show that both forces have redefined the genre in response to changing notions of social responsibility tied to American citizenship. There were five major eras within the history of young adult literature, each of which responded to changing notions of citizenship. …

"Everyone Has Thought About Killing Someone - One Way Or Another": Cannibalism And The Question Of Morality In Bryan Fuller's Hannibal, Kristi Michelle Pierse

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Popular criticism insists that violence in the media perpetuates violence in the real world. This is an especially relevant argument today as we witness on a daily basis the violence that is occurring in the United States through mass shootings, police brutality, and countless other forms of aggressive actions. While studies do show a correlation between violent media and real-world violence, there is no absolute conclusion that proves such. My thesis addresses the moral lessons that can be learned through violence on television, particularly through the creative adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series as reimagined by Bryan Fuller in …

Book Review - Jim Crow, Literature, And The Legacy Of Sutton E. Griggs, Michael K. Law

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Book Review - South Of The Etowah: The View From The Wrong Side Of The River, Diana Hartle

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

Descent: American Individualism, American Blackness And The Trouble With Invention, Simone White

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Descent is metacritical, ranging across disciplines to take up – as flash points or instances – failed attempts to revolutionize knowledge, considering these as descents, or movements into the deep, that remain stiff or un-poetic in their attitudes toward the American truisms “individualism,” “blackness” and “invention.” Beginning with William Carlos Williams’ formulation of descent (as a practice necessary for establishing national literary identity) in In the American Grain, the project resolves around the question, How can the critic make peace with her desire to dominate the object of critique by proposing its perpetual sameness in relation to the critic? …

Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter And The Bunker Hill Monument, John Hay

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Both Into And Out Of The Cage: New Media, Transgression, And The Remaking Of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999, Casey Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, …

Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, And The Humanities, Frances H. Tran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation works from and through the field of Asian American studies, drawing on Asian Americanist cultural critique and minority discourse, to investigate the relationship among race, the politics of knowledge, and the epistemic function of the humanities. Proliferating discourses on “post-race” and “colorblindness” characterizing the present moment posit a progressive movement beyond racial division, towards recognizing and incorporating minority difference into the academy. However, even as issues like “diversity” have gained visibility as institutional objectives, I contend that this heightened visibility occludes the structural conditions that allow racialization to persist. In this project, I follow the work of thinkers …

A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …

"Both Nourished At My Grandmother's Breast": Eating, Feeding, And The Subverted Female Ideal In Jacobs' Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Catherine Ventura

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This essay analyzes the relationship between Harriet Jacobs’ representations of womanhood in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and the domestic ideal which promoted a woman’s role as nurturer and nourisher. The main female characters in the text, particularly Mrs. Flint, Aunt Martha, and Linda Brent, highlight the distorted nature of womanhood in the context of slavery and point to the subversion and perversion of the nineteenth-century ideals associated with True Womanhood. Each element of the ideal—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity—is, at first glance, seemingly upheld by these women, but a closer analysis of their actions, circumstances, and …

Natural Elements Representing The Cycle Of Life And Death Through Whitman’S “Song Of Myself” And “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’D”, Priya Patel

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” he writes that we have “no genius in America” and that we need to find a poet who can be America’s Shakespeare. He continues to say that “America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination…” Not long after Emerson published “The Poet,” Walt Whitman emerged becoming “The Poet” that Emerson was seeking to find. Whitman soon became the “one who would sing of the new country in a new voice.”

In 1855, Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass and shed light to the wonderful landscapes that America …

The Lightbringer: A Novel, Brett L. Butler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Lightbringer is about a collision of two worlds: the world of a contemporary South Florida town and the magical world of Zariel, bringing with it the universal threat of the Terra. Childhood friends, Breck and Tom, are thrown into the middle of an ancient conflict between the Terra—a collection of alien races that have been transformed by darkness—and the forces of good. After an encounter with a magical pool of golden water, the boys must learn to use their new abilities to protect against the growing Terranox army. In the midst of their struggle, however, a mysterious companion—the Lightbringer, …

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster

Master's Theses

Historically, the issue of representation in postcolonial studies is one of some contention. While scholarship might recognize the necessity for highlighting the plights and struggles attendant to postcolonial societies, the primary literature being studied is most often written by natives of those societies themselves. This gap is especially evident with Indigenous cultures, because there are relatively few Indigenous scholars working in the academy. We are at the point now when we have a multiplicity (but not a plurality) of Indigenous voices writing literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, film, etc.) and academic criticism. However, there is value in non-Natives reading and writing …

"Out Of The Dark Confinement!" Physical Containment In Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Protest Literature, Allison Lane Tharp

Dissertations

Most scholarship on American protest literature tends to focus on the protest literature of specific, politically marginalized groups, such as black protest, women’s protest, or working class protest. My project redefines how we read nineteenth-century American protest literature by investigating the connections between the protest texts of these three marginalized groups. In particular, I argue that mid-nineteenth-century protest authors incorporate images of physical confinement and entrapment within their texts to expose to privileged readers the physical and ideological containment and control marginalized subjects encounter in their daily lives. Drawing from rhetorical theories of argumentation and audience engagement, and incorporating historical …

William Faulkner's Southern Landscape, Rachel V. Ford

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

The American South is a region full of rich and complicated history, undergoing slavery, war, poverty, ecological devastation, and racial violence. One of the most famous and distinctly southern writers of the twentieth century is William Faulkner, whose works challenge the idealistic Lost Cause mentality of white supremacy and highlight major issues within southern society. Faulkner’s writings are set in Mississippi, grounded with a distinct sense of place. The southern landscape provides more than simply a backdrop to the stories, but plays an active role in plot and character development. This thesis examines three of Faulkner’s novels, discussing their historical …

Robert Frost’S Ulteriority: Saying One Thing In Terms Of Another – The Inexpressible, Nicolette S. Stackhouse

Honors Theses

Robert Frost’s poetry, which is famously rich in double meaning—saying one thing but meaning something else—is also concerned with pragmatism. Pragmatism implies that there is no one fundamental universal truth. I contend that Robert Frost’s poetry says that duplicity of meaning, or ulteriority, is something to be embraced. Frost wants the uncertainty of meaning to be understood by the reader as vital to life and the mind’s processes. The simple fact that so many readers search for the hidden meanings in his poetry justly proves this point. As a pragmatist, Frost was aware that the process of getting to a …

Keats And America: Attitudes And Appropriations, Jessica Hall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While John Keats never traveled to America and only wrote a handful of admittedly hostile lines about it in his poetry, American writers and readers have consistently regarded Keats as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the past two centuries. His critical reputation in America has been stable since the 1840s, enduring throughout changing tastes and movements, and his biography and work have been utilized in manifold appropriations by American poets and writers. I examine Keats’s attitude toward the United States—which was in conflict with the general feeling regarding the country by his fellow Romantic poets—and briefly …

New Appalachians Of The Twenty-First Century: Reinventing Metanarratives And Master-Images Of Southern Appalachian Literature, Kelsey Alannah Solomon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Appalachian studies tradition ascertains that Appalachian people politically, socially, and academically represent a heterogeneous minority group of our own. In post-capitalistic America, however, the Appalachian region serves as a hotspot for media misrepresentation and tourism that perpetuate through works of fiction, nonfiction, and scholarship both negative and positive stereotypes in the overall American consciousness. Twenty-first-century Appalachian authors, I contend, are reinventing Appalachia from its postmodern rubble through fictionalized reconceptualizations of our region’s history, shifts in our collective consciousness from anthropocentric to ecocentric, and subversions of the heteronormative discourse of our internal colony through explorations of the psychosexual. The contemporary …

Beyond "Main Street": Small Towns In Post-"Revolt" American Literature, Rachael Price

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Beyond Main Street” examines the impact and legacy of the literary movement that Carl Van Doren, in an infamous 1920 article from The Nation, referred to as the “revolt from the village.” This movement, which is widely acknowledged to encompass such writers as Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, pushed back against the primacy of the heretofore-dominant pastoral tradition when it came to depictions of rural America. These authors sought to create a more accurate portrayal of the small town, one that, while not completely eschewing the pastoral, also exposed the more seedy side of village life. Critics …

The Stories Of Junot Díaz: Genre And Narrative In Drown And This Is How You Lose Her, Luis Fernando Marin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Junot Díaz creates and constructs his literary alter-ego and narrator, Yunior de las Casas, and examines the Social and cultural aspects, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, that condition or influence Yunior’s construction. I argue that Díaz uses the short story as a subversive genre and modernist narrative techniques, such as shifts in space-time and focalization, to reflect Yunior’s diasporic, fragmented subjectivity. My analysis includes narratological and generic readings of Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, with a brief look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, paying particular attention to Yunior as …

Divining The Southwest: Liminality, Pragmatism, And Regionalism In "Death Comes For The Archbishop", Alex C. Blomstedt

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work aims to explore the themes of pragmatism and liminality, particularly as they pertain to spirituality, in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. By taking an interdisciplinary critical approach to the novel, I will synthesize its spiritual affect into a sensibility called “pragmatic liminality.” Finally, I will connect this sensibility to other works in the Southwestern literary canon and elucidate the foundational importance that pragmatic liminality has to the Southwestern “sense of place” and its role in the larger narratives of regionalism in American literature.

“In The End We All Come To Be Cured Of Our Sentiments”: Violence And Cultural Anxiety In Cormac Mccarthy’S Border Trilogy, Stephen Michael Turner

Student Theses and Dissertations

Each of Cormac McCarthy’s works contain unflinching violence and gore. A majority of McCarthy critics agree that the presence of violence within his work remain disconnected from each novel's plot and theme. This examination of Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" illustrates the political and historical relationship between the United States and Mexico, as represented through various characters within the trilogy, and also explores the role that cultural anxiety plays as a primary motivator for violence. The loss of a certain way of life is a major concept found within McCarthy’s work, and the “Border Trilogy” serves as a meditation on this …