English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Ache Of Modernism: Death, Affect, And Intersubjectivity In Twentieth-Century American Literature, Alex Gergely

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation suggests that we can locate, describe, and experience death as an aesthetic mood called the ache of modernism. The ache is an atmosphere found in twentieth-century literature that goes beyond simply “positive” or “negative” feeling and encourages audiences to come to an affective and existential relationship with their mortality. As an intersubjective mood deriving from an attunement on death, it illuminates the historical and philosophical moment of many twentieth-century authors while clarifying their texts’ continued resonance today. This project therefore draws on the thought of major philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, …

In The Flesh, Isabella Mason

Theses and Dissertations--English

IN THE FLESH is a nonfiction collection by Bell McEntire Mason, in which she illustrates a life dominated by the corporeal, embodied, and incarnate experience of physicality. Consisting primarily of personal essay, lyric essay, and flash nonfiction, the collection follows a journey of bodily understanding and acceptance that braids itself with the author’s life experiences, ranging from battles with mental health and physical illness to tender and painful relationships with family to looming acknowledgement of a body’s temporary status.

Other Eyes: The Dilemma Of Authorship And Autobiography In Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, And Cristina García, Kevin J.B. O'Connor

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation analyzes authorship in contemporary American literature, harnessing the writings—prose and poetry—of Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, and Cristina García to challenge traditional classification and periodization schema. Hewing to the notion of authorship as a dilemma—a simultaneity of forces pressing upon the author, demanding a response—each chapter unravels critical moments of authorial expression that continually inscribe the importance of praxis and futurity. Comprehending authorship as a relational dilemma to be brooked, and indeed, overcome in a panoply of gestures, frees it theoretically from the perils of prior models by drawing attention to authorship’s agential and multi-modal aspects. Melding archival research …

Shakespeare’S Martyrs And The Poetics Of Transformation, Robert Keim

Theses and Dissertations--English

At the beginning of William Shakespeare’s career as a playwright, England’s most widely read book, after the Bible, was Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days, commonly known as John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Foxe’s martyrological literature, along with the inherently theatrical nature of martyrdom itself, helped the lives and deaths of Reformation martyrs to assume a prominent place in England’s literary consciousness. Shakespeare was not immune to their influential presence, and though overt representations of martyrdom were too controversial for the popular stage, he did enrich his plays by endowing certain characters—through imagery, allusive diction, …

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, And The Question Of The “True” Ariel: Complicating Binaries In Plath’S Literary Legacy, Jacob C. Quinn

Theses and Dissertations--English

This thesis aims to complicate common binaries that have defined critical responses to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel since its first publication in 1965, and which emerged as the result of her husband Ted Hughes’ alterations to her original selection and arrangement of poems. Hughes’ editing emphasizes a narrative which ends in bleak fatality, whereas Plath’s original narrative concludes on a note of bittersweet hope. I read Hughes’ choice of ending as highly influential on Plath’s reception and legacy. The tone of her immediate reception, largely shaped by Al Alvarez, characterized Plath as an “extremist” poet whose work should be read through …

We Need To Care About Care: (Un)Caring Relations In Victorian Fiction, Roslyn Fleming

Theses and Dissertations--English

The professionalization and institutionalization of care in the Victorian era ushered in a growing societal concern about the pitfalls of care being “systematized and depersonalized” and treating people as burdens, problems to be solved. Given the increasing attention paid to people’s welfare and well-being during this period, the cultural shift from intimate community care to professional and institutional care, and the growing stigmatization of disabled bodyminds, the fiction produced amidst these cultural changes makes a compelling site for a study of care. Critical scholarship attending to Victorian novels’ representations of care, however, has largely concentrated on specific categorizations of care …

Benjy's Personhood In The Sound And The Fury, Addison D. Tighe

Theses and Dissertations--English

This thesis will take a look at the way Benjy Compson’s character in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury can be used to form an anti-eugenic argument. By taking a close look at the historical context of America’s twentieth century eugenic movement, the ways in which the novel presents an argument of personhood for those with disabilities come forth despite the eugenic pressures of the time. By taking the time to closely read Benjy’s section within the novel, a mix of disability studies and feminist disability studies, and understanding the complexity of character and stream of conscious writing, …

Cultus: Eco-Phenomenology In The Work Of John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, And Jack London, Carter D. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--English

In the face of increasingly dire environmental crises, proposed solutions have gravitated toward imperatives for faster, cleaner, and more efficient technologies and resources. While practical solutions are necessary, they are entirely insufficient to deal with an underlying issue driving environmental degradation: unbridled instrumental reason. In this dissertation, I suggest a theoretical posture, cultus, which attempts to balance the necessity of instrumental action with the guiding counterweight of receptivity. Furthermore, I argue that such personal receptivity is uniquely fostered in aesthetic experiences, attuning the individual to the non-identical and renewing a relationship of care.

I examine the life and work of …

The Disappearance Of Shannon White, Kathryn J. Limberg

Theses and Dissertations--English

The Disappearance of Shannon White is a Mystery-Thriller novel. The aim of the piece is to explore thematic components including perseverance, socio-economic inequities, the stigmas and medical malpractice of the American mental health system in the late twentieth century, and, ultimately, to entertain. My earliest love in the literary world was science fiction and fantasy. Writers like Robert Jordan, and more recently, Simone St. James, create worlds that test the bounds of reality in a way that I find liberating, and I seek to implement this in my own work. Such authors have taught me that fiction offers freedom to …

No Hope?: Queer Negativity, Afropessimism, And The Limits Of Futurity, Colton Barton

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since their inceptions, black and queer studies have sought to articulate the positions of “black” and “queer” within American social life—often converging on the goal of liberation. This thesis examines the intersection of two “negative” theoretical frameworks—Afropessimism and anti-social queer theory (or “queer negativity”)—to interrogate both the limits and generative potential of radical negativity. Though emerging from distinct intellectual traditions, these frameworks conceptualize blackness and queerness as constitutive negations—gaps within the dominant social order that render those so marked inassimilable to normative notions of humanity. While the convergences of these theories can be illuminating, their shared pessimism risks obscuring alternative …

Preserving Nature: Mapping Patriarchal And Imperial Control In Victorian Fiction, Hannah Schultz

Theses and Dissertations--English

In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a group of fallen women see “themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other” (65). As relational, boundary-dissolving, ecological subjects, these women are empowered above society’s judgment, made “sublime as the moon and stars” (65). By analyzing such representations of ecological relationality in Victorian fiction, my dissertation reveals new forms of agency for women and racialized others. While many ecofeminists have historically disavowed the nature-gender link as reinforcing the shared oppression of nature and marginalized groups, I depart from this standpoint, as …

Fatal Futures: Slow Violence, Utopia, And The Postnatural Human In Contemporary American Literature, Shelby Roberts

Theses and Dissertations--English

Fatal Futures: Slow Violence, Utopia, and the Postnatural Human in Contemporary American Literature investigates the ways in which ideas of futurity are articulated in narratives that conceptualize both the end of the world and post-calamity society through the lens of a pessimistic, queer approach to understanding the future. The purpose of this project is to not only build previous research in the configurations of the body in queer, gothic, and speculative American writing as a whole, but to enter into a developing conversation surrounding Appalachian literature through the idea of kinship (the broadening of relationships both chemical and postnatural) as …

Feeling And Experience In American Women's Writing From The First World War, Anika Jensen

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation analyzes the political capacity of feeling in American women’s autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writing from and about their work during the First World War. Women produced emotionally complex accounts that resist easy categorization, and I argue that attending to feeling clarifies not only their emotional experiences with war work but their social and political projects. This dissertation closely examines portrayals and rhetorics of feeling, considering the intersections of gender, class, race, and labor in impacting how feelings are depicted, negotiated, and conveyed. While British women were more compelled to perform and convey feeling according to a rigid class system, …

Writing For The Journal: A Guide For Community-Based Organizations, Randy Wykoff, Rachel E. Dixon

Journal of Appalachian Health

The Journal of Appalachian Health welcomes submissions from a variety of stakeholders interested in and contributing to improvement of health across the Appalachian Region. This editorial provides basic guidelines for those working in community settings who may with to make JAH (or any other journal) their publication home.

Libraries And Changing Humanities Fields, Peter Hesseldenz

2024 R&I Day

A description of a project which explores how Humanities fields are changing as they grapple with diversity and inclusion issues, focusing particularly on curricula and teaching methods. The project also seeks to understand how well libraries are working with and supporting these changes with particular emphasis on the role of Academic Liaisons.

The Aesthetics Of Environmental Risk In Paolo Bacigalupi’S The Windup Girl And The Water Knife, David Schwartz

Theses and Dissertations--English

Any work of environmentally oriented fiction that seeks to represent the wide-reaching effects of climate change is faced with the problem of scale. These texts must render visible change which is at once ubiquitous and microscopic, along with the cascade of side-effects generated in the wake of rising temperature, rising sea levels, and winnowing biodiversity. In short order, these texts must fully imagine what it means to live within the modern global risk society. Borrowing this sociological model from the late Ulrich Beck, I analyze the literary work of Paolo Bacigalupi, one of the foremost authors in the growing genre …

Spaces Of Citizenship: Negotiating Belonging Through Cold War Literature And Culture, Daria Goncharova

Theses and Dissertations--English

At the height of Cold War containment culture, when fears of Communism and nuclear warfare overlapped with anxieties about homosexuality, gender inversion, miscegenation, and juvenile delinquency, formal citizenship—narrowly defined as one’s legal status—did not provide all American citizens with a sense of belonging, equal access to civil liberties, and a reasonable degree of safety. Instead, spatialized identity, rather than civic responsibilities and legal rights, came to define the boundaries of proper citizenship. In this context, highly exclusionary suburbs, which sprang up outside major metropolitan areas in the late 1940s-1950s, emerged as a cornerstone of the cultural narratives defining American citizenship. …

The Dark Sides Of Giving: Representations Of Philanthropy And Gifts In Eighteenth-Century Literature, C.1750-1820, Jillian Winter

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation explores representations of the gift in popular women’s novels of the long eighteenth century. Gift transactions in women’s fiction from this period reveal larger cultural reflections about the limitations placed on women who try to give and to help others. The primary works discussed in this project include Frances Burney’s Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Sarah Fielding’s The History of Ophelia (1760), and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Frequently, the novels considered in this dissertation showcase the complicated conditions, oftentimes troubling …

Trust And Knowing In Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Fictional Genres And Metacognitive Disruptions, Jessica Marie Van Gilder

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation investigates how constructions of trust can be undermined or reinforced by examining trust’s entanglement with our compulsive and subjective desire to know in nineteenth-century American literature. Specifically, I analyze how different fictional genres – satire, historical romance, fantastic, and gothic – respond to our desire to know through the types of trust fictional texts feature and construct with the reader. In doing so, I demonstrate how genres of fiction in nineteenth-century America function as dynamic social contracts that amplify and undermine the reader’s trust in larger sociopolitical systems (e.g., national identity) and the epistemologies that underpin those systems …

Writing White Women: White (Supremacist) Feminism In American Literature And Culture, Post Suffrage To Post Hillary (1920–2020s), Jannell C. Mcconnell Parsons

Theses and Dissertations--English

Recent critical texts by Jessie Daniels, Mikki Kendall, and more frame the histories of mainstream white feminism in ways that highlight its ongoing complicity with white supremacy and its maintenance of racist structures and systems. In conversation with these current scholarly as well as mainstream cultural conversations about white feminism that have been happening with more frequency since 2016, this project turns to post-suffrage narratives of white womanhood to historicize the modern narratives we tell about feminism’s history. Each chapter of this project considers a 1920s or 1930s literary narrative alongside current literary and cultural narratives as I explore the …

"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Love, broadly defined, needs space to grow. For love to materialize and sustain itself (in both literature and society), it must find hospitable geosocial, institutional, and psychic terrain. This is especially true for queer intimacies beyond heteronormative relationality, for the prospect of love’s radical––or reactionary––possibilities is contingent upon the more general sociality in which it develops. Yet love is often a worldmaking and, sometimes, historic mechanism unto itself. Love and its concomitant sexualities must therefore be understood within and without normative structures of hegemony; the workings of (neo)colonialism and capitalism––as well as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism––dictate to love, and …

Anthology Of A Mess, Yusuf Akman

Theses and Dissertations--English

Anthology of a Mess is a collection of poems by Yusuf Akman, written at the University of Kentucky. Poems in this thesis deal examine the journey of a poet in three chapters. The first chapter examines myth-making, ekphrasis, and language. While the second one is a genre-defying work in which the modes of mockumentary, lyric essay, and fairy tale co-exist. Last but not least, the final chapter contains autobiographical poems, starting in Turkey and continuing in Kentucky. These poems explore eco-homo eroticism, roadkill, religion, and what it is like to be a queer Turk in Kentucky/the South. Throughout these sections, …

Vapr, Henry Knollenberg

Theses and Dissertations--English

vapr is a collection of short stories loosely interconnected via an anthropoid of smoke self-titled the Antimmanuel. vapr is an acronym for VOID & AUGURY & PRESENCE & RESIDUE; there is nothing else, and it is all ephemeral. The Antimmanuel is the guide; it is there with us even when god is not – within capitalism, within religion, within mental health crises, etc. Although very much not a work of Realism, this collection of eight stories grasps for, at the very least, its own author’s understanding of the real – what it feels like to live in middle America in …

Together Now, Alfonso Zapata

Theses and Dissertations--English

Together Now is a collection of poems by Alfonso Zapata, with work written between 2021 and 2023 at the University of Kentucky. This thesis contains poems which examine the close relationship between families, art, and the histories each contain. These poems use these subjects in order to illustrate the emotional and physical impact communities have upon those who live in them; art can evolve a person, shape them in beautiful ways, and give us the ability to process tragedy together; on the other end of the spectrum, societal neglect, environmental crisis, and food insecurity can rip these communities apart potentially …

Kill On The Left Foot, Daniel Collins

Theses and Dissertations--English

This collection of essays and short stories represents experiences during and related to my military service as a Tactical Air Control Partyman in the United States Air Force. Recurrent themes in this collection involve patriotism, fatherhood, masculinity, trauma, and recovery. The work itself represents the study and practice of the elements of fiction and foundational concepts related to creative nonfiction.

Emerging Hues: Essays From The Teneral Stage, Lucy Jayes

Theses and Dissertations--English

This collection of essays features work created and revised over two years in the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. They reflect a period of intense evolution in the author’s life and delve into topics of modern-day motherhood and cycles of intimate partner violence.

The Reflexitve Fritz Lang: Meta-Cinematic And Genre Critiques In His American Films, Justin J. Roberts

Theses and Dissertations--English

Director Fritz Lang is best remembered and most celebrated for the films he made in Germany, including Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), between 1919 and 1933. But he spent over half of his career working in Hollywood. This dissertation is a reconsideration of his American films, focused on how Lang used various Hollywood genres to question and critique the way Hollywood films and genres functioned, as well as trends within those genres. This dissertation is a roughly chronological reading of twelve of Lang’s American films, sorted by genre. We can see how his thinking about the function of film and …

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …

Stick With Me: Essays, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

A small-town Appalachian deviant confronts the frequent, recurrent grief of the opioid crisis and its mortal, psychological, and communal consequences. This collection endeavors to explore substance use, addiction, geopolitical exploitation of Kentucky, central Appalachia, and surrounding areas, while also celebrating the lives of individual loved ones lost to deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism. Here, the common narrative of depravity surrounding addiction is challenged through the rendering of full characters capable of love, trust, friendship, humor, mental health management, and personal growth. Time and place factor fundamentally into the stories told here—whether based in central Kentucky or central Appalachia, …

From Jane Austen To Meghan Markle: The Persistence Of British Imperialism In White Popular Feminism, Kathryn M. Kohls

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation traces the persistent threads and values of white womanhood from the nineteenth-century British Empire to modern American popular culture. The figure of the white woman was significant to upholding colonialism and empire in the literary mass media and culture of the nineteenth century, and I argue that this figure continues to be used in popular media and online content today to surreptitiously uphold white supremacy and obscure race and gender inequalities. This dissertation will explore the overlaps between nostalgia, historical revisionism, white womanhood, white supremacy, and white feminism in modern American popular culture. The connections between, and the …