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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian
Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian
Theses and Dissertations
An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …
Material Witnesses: Deconstructing Networks Of Credibility And Objectivity In Medical Narratives From Mary Toft To The Contraceptive Pill, Krista Elizabeth Roberts
Material Witnesses: Deconstructing Networks Of Credibility And Objectivity In Medical Narratives From Mary Toft To The Contraceptive Pill, Krista Elizabeth Roberts
Theses and Dissertations
In this dissertation, I argue that to better understand the tangled, embedded human and nonhuman subjects and how their testimonies function in western medical history, we need to first understand their erasure. By using relationality as a reading method, I break apart who and with whom individuals make medical decisions by considering what constitutes evidence. In the Mary Toft case, expert witnessing informs the ways in which a reader trusts what the narrator claims. The medicolegal conventions of courtroom testimony shape the ways in which medical men wrote their pamphlets. These men shore up their credibility through descriptions of nonhuman …
Voice, Choice, And ( Material ) Agency: The Sexualized Feminine Body In Young Adult Literature, Tharini Viswanath
Voice, Choice, And ( Material ) Agency: The Sexualized Feminine Body In Young Adult Literature, Tharini Viswanath
Theses and Dissertations
My study unites two disparate strands of feminist theory: the linguistic, which emphasizes the relationship between language and power, and the material, which argues that the human body has its own agency. I raise three main points. First, I contend that the sexualized feminine body is the site of neither the linguistic nor the material independent of one another, but both the linguistic and the material existing in a state of fluidity and interdependency, which combine to grant the young female character agency. Second, I contend that feminist novels should not only have strong female characters, but that they should …
Body Composition: Reading, Writing, And Resisting Weight Loss Autobiography As Biopolitical Pedagogy, Katherine Ann Browne
Body Composition: Reading, Writing, And Resisting Weight Loss Autobiography As Biopolitical Pedagogy, Katherine Ann Browne
Theses and Dissertations
In this dissertation, I argue that autobiographical narratives of body size function as lifestyle guides based on an interpretation of obesity as an undesirable bodily condition. These narratives are anchored by the “weight loss success story” narrative trope, which represents the result of extreme weight loss processes synthesized as “Before and After.” This dissertation serves the dual purpose of historicizing weight loss autobiography in the United States from the late 19th century to present, and arguing that these texts have been taken up as instructional guides for living, or biopedagogical tools. After outlining my methodology in the first chapter, the …
Split Wounds: Diverging Formations Of Trauma In The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders V, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, And The Rat Laughed, And Once Were Warriors, Emily R. Johnston
Theses and Dissertations
Split Wounds interrogates naturalized, normalized trauma wisdom—particularly the individualization and pathologization of sexualized trauma. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discursive formation, explicated in The Archaeology of Knowledge as a set of conditions that enables history, this dissertation elucidates differing discursive formations of trauma in contemporary medical documents, literary texts, and films. The introductory chapter explicates how founding texts in the field of trauma theory construct trauma as a preverbal, psychological experience that can only be represented through fragmented, non-linear, anti-narrative textual strategies. Chapter two exposes such Euro-American modernist ideology in the American Psychiatric Association’s clinical definition of posttraumatic stress disorder …
Limitation, Subversion, And Agency: Gendered Spaces In The Works Of Margaret Mahy, Cynthia Voigt, And Dia Na Wynne Jones, Elizabeth Ann Pearce
Limitation, Subversion, And Agency: Gendered Spaces In The Works Of Margaret Mahy, Cynthia Voigt, And Dia Na Wynne Jones, Elizabeth Ann Pearce
Theses and Dissertations
In this dissertation, I argue that adolescent literature featuring female protagonists often illustrates complicated relationships between gender and space. My contention is that because of their gender, these protagonists are uniquely constrained to the home, which creates a literary pattern that has serious ideological implications. While I argue that the dominant discourse of these novels implies that girls should adhere to specific cultural norms, some of these works, however, provide room for subversion and agency, including new ways of looking at patriarchal constructions. To demonstrate these issues at work, I use the novels of three female authors from three different …
Tammy Rae Carland's Queer Riot Grrrl Zine"I ( Heart ) Amy Carter": A World Of Public Intimacy, Annah-Marie Rostowsky
Tammy Rae Carland's Queer Riot Grrrl Zine"I ( Heart ) Amy Carter": A World Of Public Intimacy, Annah-Marie Rostowsky
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes Tammy Rae Carland's queer Riot Grrrl zine I (heart) Amy Carter as a counterpublic sphere engendered by acts of public intimacy that make visible the intersectional complexities of gender, sexuality, class, and race that insidious traumas continually work to conceal. It looks to Ann Cvetkovich's inquiries into the positive aspects of public cultures in the book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2006) as well as Mimi Thi Nguyen's investigation of the Riot Grrrl race crisis in the article "Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival" (2012) as frameworks to critique Carland's visual and textual …
Framing Eve: Contemporary Retellings Of Biblical Women For Young People, Elizabeth Gillhouse
Framing Eve: Contemporary Retellings Of Biblical Women For Young People, Elizabeth Gillhouse
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the ideological implications of re-visioning Bible stories for young readers in order to negotiate changing cultural attitudes regarding gender. I begin by exploring three theories of retelling traditional narratives including John Stephens and Robyn McCallum's discussion of "reversion," Adrienne Rich's concept of "re-vision," and the Jewish tradition of biblical Midrash. Stephens and McCallum's term "reversion" emphasizes the inevitable cultural influence that occurs during the process of retelling an existing narrative. Rich's discussion of "re-vision" advocates an active attempt on the part of feminists to re-see traditional narratives that have historically been used to oppress women. The Jewish …
An Uncommon Splice: Seeking Mutations In The Life-Writing And Short Fiction Of Mary Butts And Djuna Barnes, Susan George
An Uncommon Splice: Seeking Mutations In The Life-Writing And Short Fiction Of Mary Butts And Djuna Barnes, Susan George
Theses and Dissertations
Immersed in a web of short stories, poetry, and supporting biographical and life-writing sources, I investigate the narrative significance beneath and beyond two British and American modernist women authors. I evaluate sisterly connectedness between their literary production, publishing histories and life writings present in a specific cultural-temporal moment and genre: the short story. By looking on these unique, forgotten fictions through a new materialist lens, I argue for their short fiction's greater inclusion in the canon of women's modernism. Chapter I tests correlations between two authors undergoing the same stresses, alienations, joys and desires by taking up tenants of material …