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

Diversifying Woolf’S Room: Private Spaces And Creativity In The Works Of Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, And Alice Walker, Ebtesam M. Alawfi Dec 2021

Diversifying Woolf’S Room: Private Spaces And Creativity In The Works Of Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, And Alice Walker, Ebtesam M. Alawfi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a divergence between Woolf’s vision of private physical spaces necessary for creating art and that of some feminists of color such as Alice Walker, Ortiz Cofer, and Gloria Anzaldua. Both Woolf and these contemporary scholars agree on the importance of physical spaces for female artists. However, they disagree on the nature of these spaces. Woolf’s private physical space is a room with a lock on the door whereas these writers’ room is the kitchen table, the bus, or the welfare line. Walker and like-minded writers challenge the narrowness of Woolf’s room because her locked room is a luxury …


Spirit Don't Ever Die: Apocalypse And Denial In An Infinite Universe, Nathan Riggs Aug 2019

Spirit Don't Ever Die: Apocalypse And Denial In An Infinite Universe, Nathan Riggs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh catalogs contemporary fiction’s failure to adequately engage with catastrophic climate change. In this thesis, I argue the engagement problem has a century-old analogue in fiction’s approach to entropy. Entropy was among the first secular apocalyptic modes in mainstream discourse, and this investigation of authors’ approaches to its portrayal provides a model for understanding fiction’s denial or acceptance of apocalypse. I first examine William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land, a far-future tale set in a post-solar Earth. I contend that Hodgson’s centering of the human experience prevents him from portraying a true end …


Maternal Criticism: Reading Two Middle Eastern Women Writers As Nonviolent Peace Activism, Charlyn Marie Ingwerson May 2019

Maternal Criticism: Reading Two Middle Eastern Women Writers As Nonviolent Peace Activism, Charlyn Marie Ingwerson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation advocates for reading the literatures of two Middle Eastern women writers through a Maternal Critical lens that recognizes the demands of universal vulnerability in characters who resist violence, and responds in Maternal communities of Readers that connect readers to characters, readers to writers, and readers to other readers, carrying the struggle for equity forward. My unfolding argument, centered on Maternal Critical activity in the novels of Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh and Israeli writer Ronit Matalon, demonstrates how literature by these Middle Eastern women is part of a narrative context of women’s peacemaking and resistance to violence, a part …


The Persistence Of The Past Into The Future: Indigenous Futurism And Future Slave Narratives As Transformative Resistance In Nnedi Okorafor's The Book Of Phoenix, Ellen Eubanks Dec 2018

The Persistence Of The Past Into The Future: Indigenous Futurism And Future Slave Narratives As Transformative Resistance In Nnedi Okorafor's The Book Of Phoenix, Ellen Eubanks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, a number of authors have written science fiction works that express the concerns and experiences of marginalized people groups, including those in postcolonial societies, Indigenous/First Nations peoples, and other racial minorities. These works provide counter narratives to that of much canonical science fiction, which developed from narrative forms that often explicitly and implicitly supported colonial ideologies, and still often includes these ideologies today. This thesis analyzes the way The Book of Phoenix (2015) by the NigerianAmerican speculative fiction author Nnedi Okorafor uses a combination of the forms of Indigenous futurism and what Isiah Lavender terms meta-slavery narratives …


Wayward Women, Macho Men: Linguistic Construction Of Gender Binaries In Yxta Maya Murray's Locas And Denise Chavez's Loving Pedro Infante, Stephanie Tangman May 2017

Wayward Women, Macho Men: Linguistic Construction Of Gender Binaries In Yxta Maya Murray's Locas And Denise Chavez's Loving Pedro Infante, Stephanie Tangman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Language labels and defines in order to enhance meaning and communication, but through these labels and definitions speakers are also conditioned to associate certain connotations with words and, therefore, their referents. While often harmless, linguistic conditioning can at times create unsavory associations with these referents. One of these instances occurs in gendered labels and conceptions of male and female bodies and purpose. Both Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas and Denise Chavez’s Loving Pedro Infante can be read through a lens that applies linguistic conditioning with gender theory in order to examine the reinterpretation of female archetypes in the Chicana imagination. It …


The Influence Of Literacy On The Lives Of Twentieth Century Southern Female Minority Figures, Laura Leighann Dicks Aug 2014

The Influence Of Literacy On The Lives Of Twentieth Century Southern Female Minority Figures, Laura Leighann Dicks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The American South has long been a region associated with myth and fantasy; in popular culture especially, the region is consistently tied to skewed notions of the antebellum South that include images of large plantation homes, women in hoop skirts, and magnolia trees that manifest in television and film representations such as Gone With the Wind (1939). Juxtaposed with these idealized, mythic images is the hillbilly trope, reinforced by radio shows such as Lum and Abner, and films such as Scatterbrain (1940). Out of this idea comes the southern illiteracy stereotype, which suggests that southerners are collectively unconcerned with education …


Paradigms Of Style: A Study Of Zulfikar Ghose's Novels, Abu Ul Wafa Mansoor Ahmed Abbasi May 2012

Paradigms Of Style: A Study Of Zulfikar Ghose's Novels, Abu Ul Wafa Mansoor Ahmed Abbasi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study deals with Zulfikar Ghose's--an expatriate English language writer of Pakistani origin living in the USA--novels. In this study, I focus on, among other things, the writer's negotiation with style and socio-politically provocative subject matter. I study Ghose's novels in a "good old fashioned way" in which I analyze his work by exploring his achievement as an artist, both in terms of style and socio-political subject matter. The focus is, precisely, to highlight the writer's correspondence between language and reality.