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Articles 31 - 60 of 144
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Lopsided, Scarred, And Squint-Eyed: Ugly Women In The Work Of Southern Women Writers, Monica C. Miller
Lopsided, Scarred, And Squint-Eyed: Ugly Women In The Work Of Southern Women Writers, Monica C. Miller
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The ubiquity of ugly female characters in the work of southern women calls into question what W. J. Cash termed “gyneolatry,” the worship of the beautiful white woman upon which so much of southern ideology has been based. If the South functions as an internal other for the nation, then examining this fiction’s multiplicity of ugly women illuminates the ways in which women defy not only the norms of southern gender but also those of the larger American culture, in which the southern woman often acts as a representation of the South in general. By considering ugliness as a category …
Queer Emplotment: Lesbian Caretaking In North American Canonical Fiction From 1980 – 2011., Penelope Gay Dane
Queer Emplotment: Lesbian Caretaking In North American Canonical Fiction From 1980 – 2011., Penelope Gay Dane
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation argues that lesbian caretaking in late 20th century and early 21th century North American fiction disrupts normative temporalities while repairing damage protagonists sustain from intra-familial trauma. Aligned with queer studies’ growing interest in representations of time, my project explores this paradox of lesbian representation. How can lesbian characters be both reparative and disruptive? Lesbian characters in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1980); Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992); and Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) are reparative as they clean up the psychological and physical damage caused male violence, sexual abuse, and neglectful mothers. Yet their caregiving disrupts …
Body Language: Pain In Victorian Literature, Laura Jane Faulk
Body Language: Pain In Victorian Literature, Laura Jane Faulk
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
“Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature” argues that Victorian authors use the readable sign system of the body and pain to emphasize their characters’ physical features to the reader. As characters physically manifest emotions or experience violence, their appearances change, and these differences depend on physical descriptions. Marks on the body give it texture and depth, creating a layering that encourages the reader to envision and remember it. Character interactions, particularly when they read others’ somatic signs and experience or cause brutality, further flesh out characters, emphasizing their physical presences in the reader’s mind. The somatic sign system depends upon …
Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality And Sociality In Literary Productions, 1974-1997, Jaime Cantrell
Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality And Sociality In Literary Productions, 1974-1997, Jaime Cantrell
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality and Sociality in Literary Productions, 1974-1997, considers how queer and feminist theories illuminate and complicate the intersections between canonical and obscure, queer and normative, and regional and national narratives in southern literary representations produced during a crucial but understudied period in the historical politicization of sexuality. The advent of New Southern Studies—and its nascent emphasis on sexuality as an organizing principle of social relations—has focused almost exclusively on midcentury texts from the Southern Renascence, largely neglecting post-1970 queer literatures. At the same time, despite these developments in southern studies, most scholarship in women’s and feminist studies continue …
Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie
Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this project, through a closer examination of the controversies over Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), I seek to identify the elements of a defensible postcolonial vision. While postcolonialism is afflicted with many problematic assumptions, the exclusively liberal perspective which these authors seek to reaffirm in its place has its own plethora of defects. Ali, Hosseini and Nafisi merit a closer attention not only for their exposing some of the flawed views underlying postcolonialism but also for their demonstrating why an unqualified reversion to liberalism may …
Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas
Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
“Thrillology: Affective Intensities and the Everyday-Spectacular in American Literature and Culture” presents thrill as a powerful thematic component centered on immediate affective gratification informing character development and narrative. This perspective rethinks theme as always having an affective dimension that accompanies its conceptual articulations, with the former, in many cases, being the more important element. Thrilled psycho-emotional states emerge, in their own right, as legitimizations of individuality and cultural autonomy from the perspective of the passional subject. Engaging with a broad spectrum of literary and cultural sources spanning the last hundred years, this project investigates various ways in which the self-fulfilling …
Toward A Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading The Rural In Seamus Heaney And Paul Muldoon, Stephanie Jean Osburn Krassenstein
Toward A Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading The Rural In Seamus Heaney And Paul Muldoon, Stephanie Jean Osburn Krassenstein
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The goal of this dissertation is three-fold: to mount a comparison of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, arguing that the two poets actually share much in common, particularly in their use of the pastoral mode; to argue that the pastoral mode offers a provocative, even radical platform for postcolonial writing and thinking; and to argue that reading Heaney and Muldoon, and Ireland in general, as postcolonial offers much for critics and scholars. This project looks particularly at Heaney’s use of gender in landscape to argue that Heaney relies on an abject pastoral mode, one which is dominated by excess fertility …
Precarious Positions: Toward A Theory And Analysis Of Rhetorical Vulnerability, David Riche
Precarious Positions: Toward A Theory And Analysis Of Rhetorical Vulnerability, David Riche
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this project, I develop a framework for treating rhetoric as a system for managing vulnerabilities to and through discourse. I contend that, through rhetoric, we are all put into a fundamentally precarious position, an unavoidable state of exposure to material, social, institutional, and rhetorical forces that work to condition us as both agents and audiences. Rhetoric is not simply something we use; it is also something that we respond to, something to which we are continuously exposed, whether we like it or not. There is, in other words, a necessary concern for vulnerability at the heart of rhetorical theory …
Intersections Of Race And Class In 1830s Othello Burlesques, Laura Michelle Keigan
Intersections Of Race And Class In 1830s Othello Burlesques, Laura Michelle Keigan
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In recent years, we have come to better understand how nineteenth-century burlesques critiqued and lampooned the respectable humbuggery of patent theater productions and middle-class culture. Their carnivalesque spectacle and low humor turned topsy-turvy what was falsely revered or pretentious in English society. This study, however, explores the extent to which some burlesques responded conservatively to social and legislative change, which supposedly weakened established hierarchies constituting English culture and society. My chapters examine how two burlesques of Shakespeare’s Othello—Charles M. Westmacott’s Othello, the Moor of Fleet Street (1833) and Maurice M. M. G. Dowling’s Othello Travestie (1834)—contributed to discourse surrounding debate …
Painful Conversions: Reading And Writing Education Reform In Louisiana, Thomas George Sowders
Painful Conversions: Reading And Writing Education Reform In Louisiana, Thomas George Sowders
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In January 2013, the superintendent of a rural Louisiana school system initiated a plan to increase school choice in his district through the implementation of a new virtual magnet school and the conversion of an existing elementary school into a magnet school. Both plans were set into action in April 2013. This study uses performative writing to document the better part of a year spent engaged in this project as a contracted educational consultant. Melding William Blake’s theories of apocalypse and social metonymy with experimental modes of scholarly production as praxis, I theorize education reform as an interactive performance. By …
“Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’S Essayistic Approach To Nothing, Dena Marks
“Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’S Essayistic Approach To Nothing, Dena Marks
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation, “Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’s Essayistic Approach to Nothing, responds to the dominant strand in Beckett criticism that figures the writer as a philosopher of “nothing” whether of Democritean, existentialist, or deconstructionist voids. In contrast, I argue that Beckett’s literary texts approximate philosophy in their essayistic style, characterized by the incorporation of multiple, contradictory sources in a fragmented form. While philosophical analyses are often designed to demonstrate that the literary texts are the equivalent of philosophical discourse, in the first chapter I argue that they actually serve to re-subordinate literature to philosophy since they depend on the pre-existing philosophical …
Translating Arthur : The Historia Regum Brittanniae Of Geoffrey Of Monmouth And Roman De Brut Of Wace, George Gregory Molchan
Translating Arthur : The Historia Regum Brittanniae Of Geoffrey Of Monmouth And Roman De Brut Of Wace, George Gregory Molchan
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation primarily focuses on re-presentations of the foreign others in the twelfth-century chronicles Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Roman de Brut of Wace of the Isle of Jersey. Geoffrey and Wace, I argue, deploy a number of strategies in their narratives regarding the Matter of Britain that mainly though not wholly work to reinforce hegemonic versions of history through dehumanizing and demonizing the others that inhabit their narratives. The strategies that Geoffrey and Wace deploy towards the inhabitants of their narratives, I contend, operate within a framework that both celebrates and defends the Normans’ pretensions to …
Blame : Marriage, Folklore, And The Victorian Novel, Corrie Kiesel
Blame : Marriage, Folklore, And The Victorian Novel, Corrie Kiesel
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Blame: Marriage, Folklore, and the Victorian Novel contends that the intersection of folk and legal discourses of responsibility and culpability shapes the way the Victorian novel imagines blame. Recent studies have drawn attention to the importance of official legal discourses such as trial testimony and standards of evidence to the development of narrative form during the nineteenth century. However, by attending to folk modes for establishing blameworthiness in Victorian novels, I show that folk and legal standards of culpability are mutually constitutive. The legal system is designed to identify the culpable in a fixed process – codified in slow-changing statutes …
Erotic Transgressions: Pornographic Uses Of The Victorian, Laura Helen Marks
Erotic Transgressions: Pornographic Uses Of The Victorian, Laura Helen Marks
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation argues that while pornographic film asserts itself as the rebellious cousin to the literary and cinematic canon, it nonetheless relies on a particular Victorianness, transgressing and drawing on its perceived repressions and perversions for pornography’s own ostensible subversiveness. Through an analysis of pornographic adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, this project shows that the rupture and rearticulation of social and corporeal propriety constitutes pornography’s persistent appeal. These predominantly American pornographic texts, spanning 1974—2012, appropriate canonical British …
The Laws Of Verse : The Poetry Of Alice Meynell And Its Literary Contexts, 1875-1923, Jared Hromadka
The Laws Of Verse : The Poetry Of Alice Meynell And Its Literary Contexts, 1875-1923, Jared Hromadka
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Like other poets who came to prominence in the nineteenth century but continued to publish well into the twentieth, Alice Meynell’s work has come gradually to be occluded by the work of her younger contemporaries, among them T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The available scholarship records this process of occlusion in the form of an almost complete absence of serious discourse on Meynell’s work following her death in 1922 until the beginnings of a modest revival of interest in her writing beginning in the 1980s. This study aims to address that gap by giving a more complete account of …
"Vulgarized" : Victorian Women's Fiction In Minor Theatres, Doris Ann Frye
"Vulgarized" : Victorian Women's Fiction In Minor Theatres, Doris Ann Frye
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The theatre of the Victorian era is often ignored in literary studies or denigrated when it is discussed. This project, however, seeks to provide a framework within which we can explore the power of Victorian theatre as it responded to and shaped ideas in London between 1848 and 1882. Looking specifically at how these theatres adapted material already situated within the ideological context of the period, I argue that the adaptations of three major Victorian novels highlight the ways in which minor theatres engaged with the genres often considered high art and used that material to create new meanings for …
Minding The Gap : A Rhetorical History Of The Achievement Gap, Laura Elizabeth Jones
Minding The Gap : A Rhetorical History Of The Achievement Gap, Laura Elizabeth Jones
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Minding the Gap: A Rhetorical History of the Achievement Gap arose as an inquiry into the rhetorical congestion around the phrase achievement gap in public discourse. Having been used in support of multiple, often competing, education agendas, the phrase seems versatile almost to the point of emptiness, and yet it seemingly retains its persuasive power. Examining the history of the phrase, I reveal that the notion of the achievement gap is rooted in the logic of segregation and the rhetoric of disability, and serves to construct students in ways that paradoxically undermine efforts to expand access to educational opportunity. Although …
Friends Of Bill F. : Alcohol, Recovery, And Social Progress In Southern Fiction, Conor Adam Picken
Friends Of Bill F. : Alcohol, Recovery, And Social Progress In Southern Fiction, Conor Adam Picken
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In “Friends of Bill F.: Alcohol, Recovery, and Social Progress in Southern Fiction,” I argue that many southern writers use the trope of drunkenness to investigate the South’s often hesitant stance toward social change. The overwhelming presence of hard drinking in southern fiction is so ubiquitous that it becomes nearly invisible, and what distinguishes twentieth century southern literary representations of alcohol from their antecedents is how overconsumption reflects a dis-ease in both the individual drinker and the region as a whole. Emerging from the concept of diseased drinking is the idea of recovery, and by foregrounding recovery language alongside depictions …
In Spite Of Yourself : The Asignifying Force Of Humor And Laughter, Kevin Michael Casper
In Spite Of Yourself : The Asignifying Force Of Humor And Laughter, Kevin Michael Casper
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In Spite of Yourself: The Asignifying Force of Humor and Laughter calls upon the interruptive moments of uncontrollable laughter to challenge rhetoric’s historical treatment of humor and laughter. Anyone who has ever suffered a fit of hysterical laughter at precisely the wrong moment, or has begun to laugh spontaneously at an inappropriate joke before stopping short, can attest to laughter’s uniquely uncontrollable force. Beyond all reason and control, laughter interrupts us and reminds us of the limits of the human subject. Because laughter does not signify meaning in the traditional communicative sense, it exerts an asignifying force irreducible to the …
Country Of Illusion: Imagined Geographies And Transnational Connections In F. Scott Fitzgerald's America, Charles Mitchell Frye Iii
Country Of Illusion: Imagined Geographies And Transnational Connections In F. Scott Fitzgerald's America, Charles Mitchell Frye Iii
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The two decades between World Wars I and II were a remarkably isolationist, xenophobic period in the history of American politics and culture. In the era’s literature, however, some US authors repurposed regional writing as a medium for rethinking conservative nationalism and for imagining their country’s place in the emerging global community. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose career successes and failures mirrored the parabolic national pattern of Boom and Bust, was one such author. Though his works have seldom been interpreted through a regionalist lens, Fitzgerald lived in and wrote about every major American section, often planting tropes of transregional and …
Adaptation As Anarchist: A Complexity Method For Ideology-Critique Of American Crime Narratives, Kristopher Mecholsky
Adaptation As Anarchist: A Complexity Method For Ideology-Critique Of American Crime Narratives, Kristopher Mecholsky
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Particularly through their relation to ideology, crime narrative adaptations expose the conflict between individuals and communities on one side and the State on the other. Adaptations take the already defamiliarizing effect of narrative and continue to defamiliarize, creating a narrative cubist effect through various audiences and discursive orderings of events. Hence, they question the ideological prefiguring that lies at the foundation of narrative understanding. Insofar as ideologies are simplified ways to legitimate actions and project images of identity, the fact that a society’s narratives necessarily inherit ideology from the State obscures that society and State’s inevitable deviations from their self-images. …
Queer Utopian Geographies And Cold War Poetry, Brigitte Natalie Mccray
Queer Utopian Geographies And Cold War Poetry, Brigitte Natalie Mccray
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Queer Utopian Geographies and Cold War Poetry intervenes in the general narrative about Cold War culture, made even more famous by such recent popular shows like Mad Men and Pan Am, that describes the era as a repressed society in desperate need of liberation. While indeed Cold War America was a time of paranoia and loyalty oaths, even before the Stonewall Riots of 1969 gay men and lesbians found subtle ways to resist popular media and government discourse that perpetuated the myth that the homosexual was the anti-citizen. A number of gay men and lesbians traveled extensively to escape this …
Wedding Belles And Enslaved Brides: Louisiana Plantation Weddings In Fact, Fiction And Folklore, Cherry Lynne Levin
Wedding Belles And Enslaved Brides: Louisiana Plantation Weddings In Fact, Fiction And Folklore, Cherry Lynne Levin
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Wedding Belles and Enslaved Brides: Louisiana Plantation Weddings in Fact, Fiction and Folklore Dissertation directed by Professor John Wharton Lowe, Robert Penn Warren Professor of English Pages in dissertation, 380, Words in Abstract, 234 Abstract Along with rites of passage marking birth and death, wedding rituals played an important role in ordering social life on antebellum Louisiana plantations, not only for elite white families but also for the enslaved. Louisiana women's autobiographical accounts of plantation weddings yield considerable insights on the importance of weddings for Louisiana plantation women before, and especially during, the Civil War. Moreover, information contained within the …
Contingent Constellations: Frederick Douglass And The Fact Freedom, Tomohiro Hori
Contingent Constellations: Frederick Douglass And The Fact Freedom, Tomohiro Hori
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Reading the celebrated Narrative (1845) of Frederick Douglass (1817-95) as well as his second autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) alongside the theories of freedom including Immanuel Kant’s and G. W. F. Hegel’s among others, this dissertation examines the process through which the young American slave Douglass discovers the idea of freedom and turns it into the primary object of his pursuit to the point that he stakes his life in his famed battle with the overseer Edward Covey. The experience of hearing other slaves’ voices—such as Aunt Hester’s cries and slave songs—opens his eyes to the darkest reality …
Birth Matters: Discourses Of Childbirth In Contemporary American Culture, Jennifer Ellis West
Birth Matters: Discourses Of Childbirth In Contemporary American Culture, Jennifer Ellis West
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this project, I use a rhetorical-cultural approach to examine the multiple and often-contradictory messages circulating in contemporary American culture about the event of childbirth. Though many feminist scholars have shown how professional obstetrics’ view of physiological birth shapes medical practice and women’s experiences in hospitals, few have asked what the American public is learning about birth outside of the hospital, or why that knowledge might matter. In order to fill that gap, I trace a dominant narrative that positions institutionalized biomedical knowledge and technology as the exclusive producers of health and safety for birthing women and their babies in …
Constructing Hindu Religioscapes: Guruism And Identity In South Asian Diasporic Fiction, Sukanya Gupta
Constructing Hindu Religioscapes: Guruism And Identity In South Asian Diasporic Fiction, Sukanya Gupta
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This project draws attention to the modern phenomenon of Guruism. I demonstrate that gurus in South Asian fiction are no longer adopting Guruism for the purposes of religion alone. In the novels I analyze, gurus use religion as a tool to resist dominant power structures, to strengthen/protect themselves in communities that stereotype, to access social/financial mobility and to obtain political power. The actions of these religious leaders have both positive and negative effects, as gurus ultimately desire authority to determine how South Asian communities conceive Hinduism, the function of Hindu religious institutions, and the role that Hinduism must play in …
From Native To Nation: Copway’S American Indian Newspaper And Formation Of American Nationalism, David Shane Wallace
From Native To Nation: Copway’S American Indian Newspaper And Formation Of American Nationalism, David Shane Wallace
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation argues that the publication of Copway’s American Indian (1851) challenges accepted representations of nineteenth-century American Native peoples by countering popular stereotypes. Interrogating a multiplicity of cultural artifacts at the moment of their meeting and investigating the friction created as they rub against one another within the columns of the periodical, I argue that the texts that contribute to the make-up of Copway’s American Indian are juxtaposed in such a way as to force nineteenth-century readers to reconsider the place of the indigenous inhabitants in the American nation. Seemingly disconnected tidbits of information, presented not individually but as components …
Framing Empire: Victorian Literature, Hollywood International, And Postcolonial Film Adaptation, Jerod Ra'del Hollyfield
Framing Empire: Victorian Literature, Hollywood International, And Postcolonial Film Adaptation, Jerod Ra'del Hollyfield
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines how adaptations of Victorian literature made in Hollywood by postcolonial filmmakers contend with the legacy of British imperialism and Hollywood’s role as a multinational corporate entity. Highlighting the increased number of postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood, the project demonstrates how film adaptation has become a strategy for, in the words of Salman Rushdie, “writing back” to imperial powers. Placing such adaptations of Victorian literature within the tradition of postcolonial rewritings of classic British texts, I bridge fidelity criticism, the auteur theory, and contrapuntal readings of source texts with studies of political economy in order to …
Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, And The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Blair Bonds
Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, And The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Blair Bonds
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
“Transatlantic Baggage: Expatriate Paris, Modernism, and the Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway” argues that Hemingway’s expatriation and apprenticeship in modernist Paris from 1921-1925 provided an important impetus for his explorations in gender alterity. The project focuses on a critical-biographical rethinking of Hemingway’s literary development, integrating previous Hemingway biography and gender studies scholarship with new revelations from the manuscript of the forthcoming first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. An updated study of the author’s literary formation is long overdue; Charles Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1954), for example, has served for …
An African American Discourse Community In Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, Kristi Richard Melancon
An African American Discourse Community In Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, Kristi Richard Melancon
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, an archival study of the first black-owned daily newspaper in the United States, I argue that the newspaper rhetorically constructed a literate African American discourse community worthy of citizenship and equal political rights within the public sphere of Reconstruction United States. Although contemporaneous media in the South depicted blacks as both unable to read and write and as culturally illiterate, I demonstrate how articles across the lifespan of the Tribune represented, as well as encouraged and enabled, multiple literacies within the African American community. I ultimately …