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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, And Cringe, Katherine Anne Schell
Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, And Cringe, Katherine Anne Schell
Theses and Dissertations
Cringe, the negative reflexive reaction we experience when we witness something embarrassing or awkward, has a bad reputation in the queer community. In online and physical queer spaces, there is a pervading belief that “cringe culture” must be antithetical to queerness, that no queer community could possibly achieve liberation until it has eradicated the threat of cringe. This thesis revises that cringe vs. queer positioning by reimagining cringe as its own rhythm of queerness and examining the productive aspects of cringe through engagement with thinkers like Karen Barad and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The thesis, formatted as a response to a …
“Everything Will Be As It Is Now, Just A Little Different”: Affectively Imagining Alternative Worlds In Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Grace Riley
Theses and Dissertations
One of the most crucial concerns of cultural criticism today is the question of how to grapple with what Mark Fisher refers to as the “malaise” of the present; the pervasive belief that capitalism is the only viable option, that there is no alternative ‘other.’ However, there remains a vibrant scholarship committed to resisting such pessimism that theorizes the possibility of alternative, utopian futures that lie athwart the apocalyptic present. This thesis explores the question of how one begins to imagine such alternative futures from within a capitalist order that constantly works to pre-emptively subsume any possibilities of resistance. Art …
Salem Belles, Succubi, And The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft And Gothic Erotic Affect, Sylvia Cutler
Salem Belles, Succubi, And The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft And Gothic Erotic Affect, Sylvia Cutler
Theses and Dissertations
In order to reconcile the absence of sexually deviant witch figures (succubae, demonic women, etc.) within the formation of American national literature in the nineteenth century with the fantastic elements found in European variations on the gothic, my thesis aims to demonstrate transatlantic variants of erotic signifiers attached to witch figures in nineteenth-century gothic fiction and mediums across national traditions. I will begin by tracing the transatlantic and historical impact of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum—an early modern handbook of sorts used widely in witchcraft inquisitions—on Early American witch trials, specifically where its influence deviates from a sexualized …
Remembrances Reconsidered: Site-Specific Affective Retellings, Melanie W. Lozier
Remembrances Reconsidered: Site-Specific Affective Retellings, Melanie W. Lozier
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is an examination of the ways in which strong affective feelings, trauma, and memories are written about by women through diverse narrative forms. Through storytelling, writers engage with the relationship between deep feelings, significant places, and language, such as the frequent employment of words containing the prefix "re."
Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter
Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter
Theses and Dissertations
Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …