Below are the abstracts for recent MA thesis, listed chronologically by the most recent.
I plan to analyze the effects of a patriarchal courtship system on female mentalities during the English eighteenth-century. Samuel Richardson's first two novels, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), will be used toward this end based on their epistolary format. The usage of these letters and journals will be pivotal to the evidence based on the characters creating a written nexus of their minds and bodies through their writing. I plan to lay out the ways in which the reader can emotionally feel and understand both Pamela and Clarissa's breakdown in mentality through their linkage of letters to their respective selves and feelings. It is this embodiment that showcases a networking of their minds and bodies for their letter receivers to experience. Letter writing was considered a type of metaphorical sanctuary that the writer could reside in and display their true self and intents for others without being physically present. It is through the mind that they can show their thoughts and it is through the letter envisaging the body that encases this privacy for only the letter receiver to look at. Through these feelings, the reader can see and experience the mental breakdown of both characters, whether it is through their conformity to patriarchy, Pamela, or their disavowal and eventual death from it, Clarissa.
In this thesis, I examine how men in England, particularly after the First World War, became increasingly estranged from society. A sense of disconnection was rooted within the individual as he struggled to maintain his identity during a period of post-industrial development. In an age that valued the system of production and its economics over the individual, men functioned as cogs that kept the societal machine running. This perfunctory behavior forced them to forfeit their individuality and deal with its loss. These are chronic themes within George Orwell’s novels, particularly those written during the interwar period, such as Coming Up for Air (1939) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), which are the focus of this thesis. I also explore how concepts such as nostalgia appeal to an individual who lacks hope in his present state and future condition, since the main protagonists in both novels often recur to such notions to aid in their search for autonomy. Furthermore, once men begin to question the futility and the purpose of their existence, it precipitates them into an existential crisis. As I discuss the existentialist nature of their search, I revert to secondary sources such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. While the concentration of this study will be on the above novels, I also consult a few of Orwell’s other texts, namely Nineteen Eighty-Four, to demonstrate how themes of nostalgia, loss of identity, and feelings of estrangement are effectively used in his narratives and as articulated in this thesis.
Genre fiction can be used to explore literary themes found in marginalized literature such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo or Blood Money, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Each author uses the respective genres of hard-boiled detective fiction, American Western literature, and science fiction to explore the elements of borderland literature and the neo-slave narrative. These elements include hybrid identities, the clash between two cultures, disjunctive localities, and the marginalization of both ethnic groups and women. This thesis will show how each genre’s elements are used to further explore the elements of borderland fiction and the neo-slave narrative and will argue that the conventions of genre and the political concerns of borderland literature and neo-slave narratives are mutually constitutive. This thesis will demonstrate that the conventions of genre, rather than detracting from the important political work of the novels, actually heightens it effectively, highlighting the radical work that genre can do.
We live in an era where the experience of disaster and the conversations surrounding it is prevalent. Whether in the realm of the natural or what is man-made, the concept of disaster and events that qualify as such lead to a broader discussion of past historical events that have continued to plague our society. A discussion of disaster and its defining characteristics allows a broadening of the term and those events that fall under this category. This thesis explores the ways in which slavery and its inhumane, deplorable practices qualify as disaster under the specific terms presented in the concept. After creating a defining framework, I move on to explore the ways in which the writing of disaster within the space of literature occurs as a fictionalization of the instant. Utilizing Maurice Blanchot’s Instant of My Death and Jacques Derrida’s subsequent Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, I use Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, to explore the ways in which individual instants of death move to the collective spaces of the instance through shared experiences of the same event.
In 1963, having been ousted from the International Psychoanalytic Association, the public intellectual Jacques Lacan faced a crucial moment in his career. Set to deliver a yearly seminar on his own concept, the Name(s)-of-the-Father, Lacan reads his institutional expulsion as a defining moment for psychoanalysis itself. Consequently, only a single class is held on the subject, and Lacan vows to never recommence the course. “I will never take up this theme again,” he insists, “seeing there the sign that this seal would not know how to be lifted again for psychoanalysis.” One could say the interruption presents a “lacuna” in Lacan’s work which he is subsequently “laconic” about.
But Lacan’s reports of his dispute with the Association are fraught with contradictions. One moment the incident is a typical power struggle among colleagues; the next, Lacan renders it an infernal drama over Sigmund Freud’s legacy. By reading Lacan’s pronouncements about his fateful seminar and the Names-of-the-Father to the letter, it becomes apparent there is more to the story than meets the eye, with the theatrical “excommunication” perhaps serving as the (absent) center of his discourse and the “Lacanian orientation” as a whole….
In my thesis, I posit Marguerite Duras’s work within a French cultural and theoretical framework, given that her artistic production emerges from the dynamic cultural and socio-political forces at the epicenter of the twentieth century. Her novels, like their author, were caught in-between crucial sociohistorical intersections of war and post-war, modern and post-modern, empire and colony, civilization and inner savagery. Therefore, it is not only vital to identify the progress the author’s writing experienced within the span of these events, but also how the distinctive cultural ideologies and economies, along with its myriad of social ramifications and artistic reverberations influenced and, ultimately, altered Duras’s work over the course of her career. On its way to universal change, the world had lost its symmetry and even when geometry was no longer being symmetrically represented, Duras’s unaligned narratives were able to articulate the individualist chaos and the modern malaise of her geocultural sphere. She demonstrated that even at the center of a visionary maelstrom her fervent personal and artistic inclinations were novel ideas, as her literary contribution extended the psychology of earlier French female fiction, imbuing it with an intensity previously absent, and provided a renewed female perspective to colonial texts and their imperialist desires. Within these modern crosscurrents, where literature and culture coalesce, Duras through her innovative writing style established a singular language that turned inward and explored the aching (in)side of the individual.
Pietro di Donato’s 1939 novel Christ in Concrete is a realistic portrayal of challenges that Italian-Americans faced as members of the working class during the inter-war years. The novel follows the main character Paul (or Paolino) di Alba through the experience of losing his father Geremio in a construction accident and becoming the patriarch of his family. Di Donato’s subsequent novels This Woman and Three Circles of Light elaborate on di Alba’s experiences as a laborer as well as continue conversations about the central character’s developing personal identity and experiences with assimilating that begin in Christ in Concrete. My thesis looks more closely at di Donato’s two later novels. I argue that the dominance of manual labor in the life of Paul di Alba complicates the development of his personal identity and the assimilation process. My analysis of di Donato’s later novels shows it is necessary to read beyond Christ in Concrete to fully understand the ways working as a laborer can impact one’s personal identity. Throughout this thesis, I pay special attention to di Alba’s complicated personal relationships and the ways abandonment manifests throughout his life.
This thesis examines four variations on the literary case study, defined here as factual, embellished, fictionalized, and fictional, which vary in their level of historical detail. The factual case study presented, Robert Hayden’s long poem “Middle Passage,” utilizes found text to present the case of the Amistad rebellion to its readers. The fictionalized case study, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is based on a case of infanticide, though the story has been altered to allow the inclusion of historical details which facilitate a broader look at the horrors of slavery. The embellished case study, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, provides an account of a murder and those involved through a blending of journalism and non-fiction writing. The fictional case study provides the most freedom to the author, as an invented crime can explore anything. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird uses the voice of a young girl to provide readers with a glimpse of the racist aspects of society in the Deep South. The purpose of my thesis is to show that the literary case study, in any form, contributes to history as well as the literary canon. In making this argument, I will discuss the ways in which the four different types of case study are potentially limited by their factual basis, how a case can inspire much more than the facts of a story, and how the literary case study operates when free from factual limitations.
Magical Realism, arguably one of the most important literary forms to develop in the 20th century, is rarely discussed as a film genre, though there are notable film adaptations of magical realist novels. This thesis explores the film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to demonstrate how a magical realist novel may be adapted to a visual form, and still maintain the aesthetic sensibilities—and political implications—of the literary original. Drawing on film adaptation studies, close reading, and film analysis, the thesis argues that film can be an effective magical realist genre, even if the conventions of visual mediums are dramatically different than the narrative conventions of the original. Ultimately, this thesis will prove that despite these differences magical realism still exist in film. However it does exist in a different form. This thesis will look at the novel Midnight’s Children as well as the film version. While the thesis looks at certain passages from the novel, it will examine how these passages were transformed into film magical realism. The thesis will also be looking at how film techniques such as lighting, camera angles, and other techniques are used. In addition to all of this, the thesis shall examine how magical realism has evolved, from paintings to novels to film. It will look at three literary examples of magical realism and then three film examples. By doing this, the thesis shall give the reader a better handle on what magical realism is, how it exists as a literary phenomenon, and how it also exists in the film format.
This thesis closely examines Henry James’ years as a full-time dramatist. In 1889, with finances tightening due to poor book sales, James sought the financial successes of commercial playwriting by tapping into France’s nineteenth century idea of the well-made play. He also resolved to fundamentally change the British theater and save it from being, as he discusses in his literary criticism, a crude and unrefined hodgepodge that lacked discipline. From 1890 to 1895, James wrote a dramatized adaptation of The American (1890), as well as Tenants (1890), The Album (1891), The Reprobate (1891), The Disengaged (1892), and Guy Domville (1893), all plays he felt followed the well-made play ideology. Examining well-made play dramatic theory, the authors who made the well-made play great, and James’ plays show how he failed to follow the French style he lauded. Critical analysis also shows why the plays led to poor sales at the ticket office and, in several instances, a failure to find a manager willing to produce them. A close inspection of James’ letters and notebooks reveal a man who was overconfident of his dramatic abilities and, when criticized by accomplished playwrights like George Bernard Shaw, defended a method of craft whose roots were antithesis to the fundamentals of the well-made play. This failure to dramatize, coupled with Henrik Ibsen and Shaw’s sweeping changes to theater, pushed the well-made play, and James’ hope of any financial success, out of reach. The sobering effect of failure, however, would positively influence James’ later works.
This study proposes a new way to examine the supernatural being in Ann Radcliffe’sThe Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest. Critics have argued that the supernatural being is used in these novels to remind the heroines to think rationally; however, I argue that his purpose is more complex than that of a figment who instills reason. Rather, his role is to make the females realize their sexual vulnerability within the imprisoning, Gothic house. He is able to show the women they are in sexual danger by creating sexually explicit situations with the heroine that occur in her bedroom. While he never has sex with her, his ability to eroticize her, through his gaze, allows her to realize the impropriety of the real life men who attempt to dominate her within the house.
The supernatural’s ability to instill the idea of sexual vulnerability in the heroine turns him into a father-like figure by positioning him as a type of guardian. By giving this ghostly being the attributes of a guardian, Radcliffe creates what I call the superpaternal. The superpaternal is the ultimate father, as shown by his ability to be a greater sexual threat than the physical men of the house, and by his position as an image of the heroine’s biological father. As a father figure, the superpaternal’s actions bear incestuous implications and his presence within the house is the reason why Radcliffe’s heroines never experience sexual maturation during the novel; rather, they marry their beloveds at the end of the novel due to the unnatural sexual feelings the superpaternal causes the heroines to have. Radcliffe purposely chooses to exclude the consummation of Adeline’s and Emily’s marriages from the novels because she is protecting her female characters from further visual objectification by the reader and the supernatural being.
Throughout the history of the Caribbean there has been a hegemonic divide between colonized and colonizer. The colonizer exerts power over its subjects by controlling history, often through literature. Colonized subjects were not taught their own histories; they did not have their own literature to represent them. Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in Trinidad while the country was still under British rule and, with his writing, gave a voice to the descendants of indentured servants and slaves alike; a voice that, at the time of his writing, was represented far too infrequently. Selvon captures the worlds that he lived in – both the colony and metropole – with documentary-like accuracy; as such, place becomes a measuring tool that I believe can be used to further the study of the post-colonial relationship between colonized and colonizer.
By looking at Selvon’s work through the ideas of cultural critic Raymond Williams, specifically his The Country and the City, parallels and comparisons can be drawn between the country and the city that uncover many facts about modern culture. All of Selvon’s works take place either primarily in Trinidad or primarily in London. I am interested in the way that Selvon operated when writing about Trinidad and London: specifically, when writing stories set mainly in Trinidad how does Selvon represent his home country and how does he signify London? Conversely, when writing about characters living in London, how does Selvon represent the metropole and how does he signify the Caribbean? A disconnect exists between these two places in Selvon’s life. I believe that Selvon recognized the cultural rift between these places and wrote to close the gap.
In many slave narratives and fictional representations of slavery, white mistresses are often misrepresented or completely forgotten. They are frequently portrayed as vindictive, malicious, and jealous or authors and scholars fail to include them. It is incredibly rare when slave narratives include the white mistresses let alone portray them in a positive light and include their achievements in the abolition movement. Many white mistresses supported and fought for abolition because they shared a similar desire for equality with slaves. They recognized and witnessed many of the injustices slaves faced on a daily basis and decided to take action. Many mistresses that supported abolition used their essential resources to help slaves achieve freedom. These vital resources include the power associated with their skin color, money, shelter, transportation, and food.
Although many authors fail to include the stories of female abolitionists in their novels, Sue Monk Kidd and Sherley Anne Williams use their neo-slave narratives, TheInvention of Wings and Dessa Rose, to tell the extraordinary tales of three white female abolitionists. Kidd and Williams depict slavery through the often nonexistent white female perspective. Both The Invention of Wings and Dessa Rose challenge the common stereotypes of white women in slavery as well as show the essential resources mistresses used to help slaves achieve freedom, and how white mistresses served as witnesses for the slaves. By examining neo-slave narratives such as these, scholars and authors will hopefully be encouraged to continue researching and fighting for the mistresses of slavery.
Death today is hidden from our everyday lives so it cannot intermingle with the general public. So when a family member dies, their body becomes an object in need of disposal; no longer can they be recognized as the familiar person they once were. To witness death is to force individuals to confront the truths of human existence, and for most of us seeing such a sight would fill us with an emotion of disgust. Yet during the nineteenth century, the burden of care towards the sick or dying was shared by a community of family, neighbors, and friends; the death of each person was a public occurrence. Death happened at home and, instead of being met with repulsion, was greeted as an event.
In this study, I explore the Victorian family's shared emotional and psychological support of the deathbed scene, particularly in the literary treatment of the dying and dead body, while also comparing it to our modern attitudes of death. Both the sickroom and the deathbed were important spaces in Victorian life and literature as abjection of the body is forced away in favor of a literary escapism in which the young, dead woman in the text not only stays beautiful, but is also "frozen" in time to preserve her purity and innocence against mortal aging and sin. This study will prove how both time periods distort the realities of death, but with reasonably different methods.
Of the many extant critical analyses of rap poetry, there have been relatively few that focus strictly on form and medium. Given the world-wide dissemination of hip-hop culture and the unique rhetorical devices practiced in rap, this project aims to realize a better formal understanding of rap aesthetics as a postmodern art movement which, in turn, can offer some elucidation of postmodern thought and culture. Specifically, I draw some conclusions about the idea of writing after print culture. I turn to Marjorie Perloff for a broad definition of postmodern poetics which my readings will build from. Perloff underscores post-structural formations of linguistic structure and technological mediation as two of the main currents in poetics since the middle to late 20th century. I use the critical concepts of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Walter Benjamin to execute studies which investigate these elements of postmodern aesthetics in the form of rap, and as the subject of my readings I have chosen the oeuvre of Ghostface Killah, The RZA, and Nas. These analyses focus on the intersection between technology, writing and the body as well as the paradoxical relationship between alienation and representation in postmodern poetry.
Storytelling traditions from all corners of the globe are active experiences that involve both teller and listener. We tell stories to keep history alive, to impart lessons, to awake cathartic emotions, and to be simply entertained. Storytelling, therefore, is an act of self-preservation. Not only do we keep our ancestors in our memory, but as we see with the famous tale of Shahrazad (or Scheherazade), we also tell stories to save ourselves and those we love within our families and community. The characters in modern twentieth and twenty-first century children’s literature further this tradition of salvation through storytelling by using stories to save their own lives or those of others, or even that of the reader.
The texts examined are The Capture by Kathryn Lasky, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin, Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, and Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher. By showing young readers how valuable the storytelling experience is, we keep it alive and reaffirm that this it is vital to our spiritual and physical survival. Through Shahrazad’s ongoing tradition, we can find salvation through storytelling.
I examine the notion of queer faith as it is illustrated in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and, in doing so, highlight the lack of criticism that addresses issues of faith and sexual identity within queer theory. I compensate for this critical oversight by proposing that the intersection of faith and sexuality provides an essential source for the emergence of characters' personal identities. In addition, I utilize the work of some queer theologians to facilitate my own reading of the biblical allusions present within the primary texts. I argue that the influence of heteronormativity, especially as it is expressed in traditional faith communities, creates distinct challenges for characters who attempt to re-create an understanding of the Divine through the lens of their sexuality. Although the primary texts arrive at different conclusions about faith and sexual identity, both explore the liminal space where these ideas converge and depict a complex yet synergistic relationship.
Women during the Victorian Era did not have many rights. They were viewed as only supposed to be housewives and mothers to their children. The women during this era were only viewed as people that should only concern themselves with keeping a successful household. However, during this time women were forced into working positions outside of the household.
Women that were forced into working situations outside of their households were viewed negatively by society. Many women needed to have an income to support their families because the men in the household were not making enough money to survive. When the women entered the work places they were not made to feel welcome and were often harassed. These women workers therefore were not welcome in the work place (outside of the household) or in society.
The texts Helen Fleetwood, Goblin Market, North and South, Shirley and Sybil all have women in different working roles during this era. All of these texts strive to show that working women of all classes and working roles are viewed and treated poorly by Victorian society as a whole. However, the society is not giving the women any other option to advance or fix the situation that they are in. These texts show the unsafe conditions these working women were faced with and the treatments of them from society as a whole.
Within this thesis, I examine the historical background as well as the philosophical beliefs that inspired the “weird fiction” of author Howard Phillips Lovecraft. In particular, I focus on how his life experiences led to the formation of his own literary philosophy, that of “Cosmic Indifferentism.” Seemingly based in part on the theories of Post-Enlightenment thinkers, the Gothic Sublime, and Lovecraft’s own simultaneous fascination with and fear of the scientific progress of mankind, Cosmic Indifferentism posits that the universe is monstrously indifferent to the plight of the human race. As a result, humanity is considered under a Lovecraftian lens to bevastly insignificant when compared to the grand scheme of the cosmos. In the decades since his death, Lovecraft’s philosophy has been heavily misconstrued. Specifically, through an examination of several films which purport to be direct adaptations of the author’s short stories and novellas, I argue that such films either misinterpret or simply ignore the key tenets of Cosmic Indifferentism which in turn serve as the foundation for Lovecraft’s “Mythos.”Conversely, I also posit that a number of films, while not direct adaptations of any Lovecraft story, nevertheless successfully adhere to the author’s focus on cosmic horror and humanity’s insignificance.
The focus of my thesis project is to investigate how three modernist women writers, Virginia Woolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), navigate gender and subjectivity through ghostly figures and the uncanny nature of language. I argue that ghosts within Woolf’s Orlando, Brooks’s The Womanhood, and H.D.’s Trilogy, haunt a normative gendered binary. Through poststructural analyses, I will illuminate the ways that reading the discursive conventions of a text engages modernist feminisms. As these writers switch between the figure of a person and that of a ghost, they are constantly engaging in the spaces of the unknown. The illusory selfhoods of their ghostly figures become situated between the sign and the trace and between the person and the phantom to reveal the social construction of identity and gender. By resurrecting ghosts of the past, these writers focus on feminist consciousness that promotes transformation and engages the multiplicities of contemporary feminism.
Don DeLillo’s Falling Man addresses cultural changes within the age of postmodern indifference and global terror, as the reaction to the image of a falling body becomes controversial following the events of 9/11. After being initially removed by the media, Richard Drew’s provocative photo titled “The Falling Man” captures a body falling against the backdrop of the World Trade Center, and is recovered and reexamined in DeLillo’s novel. Several types of bodily disturbances are illuminated in Falling Man as the fictional bodies of both American citizens and foreign terrorists become susceptible to strange mutations and disarticulations. DeLillo uses the bodily form as a reference point to expose and analyze the hidden atrocities of American exceptionalism—a system that accepts and allows actual human bodies to become the waste by-product of these global exchanges. Image and reality have become blurred in the era of postmodernity, and the outrage over Drew’s intriguing photo immediately after 9/11 should raise suspicion as to this image’s cultural significance. By encompassing a strange mix of bodily concerns such as viral infections, detached faces, and the unique phenomenon of organic shrapnel, DeLillo unearths the suffering body from its hiding place and brings to the forefront again in Falling Man.
In my thesis, I analyze the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop by emphasizing the gap between referential and sonic elements of language. While Stevens, Moore, and Bishop strive to attain precise meaning in their poetry, they also interrogate this possibility. Stevens believes that language has a metaphorical basis, so any attempt to articulate the literal essence of a thing is problematic. In “The Man on the Dump,” the speaker tries to pare down language to its essence but can only do so through metaphors. Moore presents a static scene in “The Steeple-Jack,” but, as she incorporates simultaneously differing perspectives and subjectivities, she obscures the scene’s fixity and shows the dynamism of language. Bishop ostensibly presents real childhood memories in “Manners” and “First Death in Nova Scotia,” but, as she does so, she figures her own life as literary. Each of these poets infuse their individuality into their poetry, but also sink into the generality of the lyric “I,” which must be both individually specific and communally general. Because of these contradictory elements of language, Stevens, Moore, and Bishop show how fixed, precise meaning is hardly possible.
