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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz
Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz
Doctoral Dissertations
This project considers how socioeconomic impoverishment and society's failure to recognize working class women as valued subjects impinge upon a mother's ability to afford recognition to her daughter's selfhood. Situated within the larger North American literary tradition of fiction animated by flight in search of freedom, the texts here explored constitutes a subgenre that I term the “working class escape narrative.” Combining close readings of fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Sigrid Nunez with sociological research and psychoanalytic theory, I explore a relationship between mother and daughter characterized not by mirroring and bonding but rather the absence of intimacy …
Wanting It Told: Narrative Desire In Cather And Faulkner, Monroe Street
Wanting It Told: Narrative Desire In Cather And Faulkner, Monroe Street
Graduate College Dissertations and Theses
This thesis explores the role played by narrative desire within two modernist experimentations with novel form: Willa Cather's 1918 novel My Antonia and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In it, I argue that Cather and Faulkner utilize framing narratives in order to present the main plot of each novel as a product of multiple narrators' desire for a story to emerge. In My Antonia, it is the expressed wish of Jim Burden's nameless writer friend that compels him to finish writing his account of Antonia, which constitutes the main plot of the novel. Meanwhile, in Absalom, Absalom! it is …