English Language and Literature Commons^™

Imagining Woman Otherwise, Or Nothing: Sexuation As Discourse In Lacanian Thought, Rahna Carusi

Rahna M Carusi

My dissertation looks at the connections between Lacan’s four discourses and the sexuation graph in order to claim that sexuation is discursive and that, as Lacan presents it with the phallus as its quilting point, the sexuation graph is a narrative based on patriarchal hegemony, which is one of many possible narratives. I argue that through the hysteric’s discourse and a removal of the phallus as the Symbolic-Imaginary quilting point, we can begin to formulate new narratives of sexuated subjectivities. The textual objects I use for this project are literary and filmic works where women are the central topic or …

Virginia Woolf's Publishing Archive, John K. Young

John K. Young

Woolf the publisher remains that “drab figure in the gray overalls” for many Woolf scholars, despite an abundance of archival material documenting Woolf’s role as publisher. The most familiar Woolf archives are of course the manuscripts and drafts, many now in print, that have inescapably changed the way we read Woolf’s published texts.

Wordsworth's Habits Of Mind: Knowledge Through Experience (Review), Nancy Easterlin

Nancy Easterlin

No abstract provided.

The Bitter Relicks Of My Flame: The Embodiment Of Venereal Disease And Prostitution In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Melanie Erin Osborn

Melanie E Osborn

Resembling the mercurial, black beauty mark used as an ornamental concealment of syphilitic sores, Jane Austen’s comedy of manners likewise acted as a superficial cosmetic device that concealed the ubiquity of venereal disease and prostitution hidden within. Through her characters, Austen used veiled narrative to highlight the reality of venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century England. This thesis uncovers the hidden narrative in Jane Austen’s novels, as a means of better understanding the impact venereal disease and prostitution had on sexual issues with women and the female body during the eighteenth century. Beginning with an almost comic reference to venereal …

A Biocultural Approach To Literary Theory And Interpretation, Nancy Easterlin

Nancy Easterlin

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation. Easterlin maintains that the practice of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to …

The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

Critics of Sula frequently comment on the pervasive presence of death, the uses of a particular cultural and historical background, the split or doubled protagonist (Sula/Nel), and the attention to chronology in the novel. However, as far as I am aware, no one has presented a reading of Sula that explores the interrelatedness of these elements; yet it is the connections among them that most usefully reveal the novel's overall thematic patterns. Sula can be, and has been, read as, among other things, a fable, a lesbian novel, a black female bildungsroman, a novel of heroic questing, and an historical …

Women And Sisters, Maureen T. Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture, on the iconography of the women's abolitionist movement, is a brilliant example of interdisciplinary thought and study. Crossing the boundaries of history, feminist theory, African American studies, and literary analysis, Yellin illuminates the complex intersections of art and politics in American life. Women and Sisters traces the history of the "Woman and Sister" emblem that the antislavery feminists adopted, examining its permutations in texts both graphic and literary from the 1830s to the 1850s.

Between Catastrophe And Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, And Life Narratives, Cynthia Dobbs, Daphne Lamothe, Theresa Tensuan

Cynthia Dobbs

Flowers Of Rhetoric: The Evolving Use Of The Language Of Flowers In Margaret Fuller’S Dial Sketches And Poetry, Elizabeth Stoddard’S The Morgesons, Edith Wharton’S Summer, Mary Austin’S Santa Lucia And Cactus Thorn, And Susan Glaspell’S The Verge, Corinne Kopcik Rhyner

Corinne Kopcik Rhyner

The language of flowers was a popular phenomenon in the United States in the nineteenth century. This dissertation on American literature looks at several American women authors’ use of the language of flowers in their novels. I examine the use of the language of flowers in Margaret Fuller’s “Magnolia of Lake Pontachartain,” “Yuca Filamentosa,” and poetry such as “To Sarah,” Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons, Edith Wharton’s Summer, Mary Austin’s Santa Lucia: A Common Story and Cactus Thorn, and Susan Glaspell’s The Verge. Through analysis of language of flowers dictionaries, historical studies of the language of flowers, feminist history and theory, …

Literary Annual, Katherine D. Harris

Katherine D. Harris

No abstract provided.

Woolf And Intertextuality, Anne Fernald

Anne E Fernald

No abstract provided.

Surviving The Waterless Flood: Feminism And Ecofeminsim In Margaret Atwood’S The Handmaid’S Tale, Oryx And Crake, And The Year Of The Flood, Karen Stein

Karen F Stein

No abstract provided.

Rachel Carson, Karen Stein

Karen F Stein

Rachel Carson is the twentieth century's most significant environmentalist. Her books about the sea blend science and poetry as they invite readers to share her celebration of the ocean's wonders. Silent Spring, her compelling expose of the damage caused by the widespread aerial spraying of persistent organic pesticides such as DDT, opened our eyes to the interconnectedness of all living beings and the ecological systems we inhabit. Carson's work challenges the belief that science and technology can control the natural world. She calls us to rekindle our sense of wonder at nature's power and beauty, and to tread lightly on …

Reproducing The Line: 1970s Innovative Poetry And Socialist-Feminism In The U.K., Samuel Solomon

Samuel Solomon

This dissertation considers the experimental group of ""Cambridge poets"" in the 1970s and explains how and why their somewhat obscure body of work was a battleground for cultural politics. I focus on the writing of women who bridged Cambridge poetry and socialist-feminist politics even as they worked at the margins of both communities. I argue that this poetry took shape at a unique conjuncture – the history of literary study at Cambridge, the varied British reception of Marxist thought and political action, the rise of Conservatism, and the increasing influence of feminism – that made radical poetics a hotly contested …

Sacrificio, Violencia Y Nación En Lituma En Los Andes De Mario Vargas Llosa, Cesar Valverde

Cesar Valverde

No abstract provided.