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Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority

Zora Neale Hurston: Scientist, Folklorist, Storyteller, Mary Catherine Russell Jun 2017

Zora Neale Hurston: Scientist, Folklorist, Storyteller, Mary Catherine Russell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper examines the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston and her contribution to American literature in the 20th Century. While previous critical analysis of Hurston’s work has focused primarily on her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, this paper examines Hurston’s career by taking a holistic approach to the body of her literary works. Hurston’s early career as an anthropologist is shown to provide a foundation for her later interest in folklore. In turn, her connection and participation in the Harlem Renaissance gave Hurston’s writing a nuanced and individualized style as part of the American modernist …


Translating Chopin's Parrot: Local Color Louisiana And The Limits Of Literary Interpretation, 1865-1914, Matthew Paul Smith May 2017

Translating Chopin's Parrot: Local Color Louisiana And The Limits Of Literary Interpretation, 1865-1914, Matthew Paul Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, national periodicals such as Harper's, The Century, and The Atlantic Monthly eagerly solicited and published literature depicting small, often isolated regional communities within the United States – literature collectively referred to as local color. This project examines a tension that exists between two conflicting impulses that drove local color writing – one that sought to participate in an ethnographic project rooted in literary realism, the other that reveled in representing local spaces as sites of ambiguity, uncertainty, illegibility, and impenetrability. "Translating Chopin's Parrot" argues that literary historicists, drawn to the …


A Transnational Novel In Disguise: The Influence Of Brazil In Nella Larsen's Passing, Grant M. Andersen May 2014

A Transnational Novel In Disguise: The Influence Of Brazil In Nella Larsen's Passing, Grant M. Andersen

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.


Ambiguous Recognition: Recursion, Cognitive Blending, And The Problem Of Interpretation In Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Christopher David Kilgore Dec 2010

Ambiguous Recognition: Recursion, Cognitive Blending, And The Problem Of Interpretation In Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Christopher David Kilgore

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses theories of cognitive conceptual integration (as outlined by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner) to propose a model of narrative reading that mediates between narratology and theories of reception. I use this model to demonstrate how new experimental narratives achieve a potent balance between a determinate and open story-form. Where the high postmodernists of the 1970s and 80s created ironic, undecidable story-worlds, the novels considered here allow readers to embrace seemingly opposite propositions without retreating into ironic suspension, trading the postmodernist “neither/nor” for a new “both/and.” This technique demands significant revision of both descriptions of radical experimentation in …