1,721,079 research outputs found
Intertextuality and Sociopolitical Engagement in Contemporary Anglophone Women’s Writing
Full text linkMy project examines contemporary Anglophone women’s rewriting to locate an emerging mode of intertextuality that defies existing literary categories. Together, the writers in my project present a new and formally innovative intertextuality that rebels against available terminology and requires new ways of reading. This project centers authors from a variety of historical contexts, including the African diaspora and former British colonies, whose intertextuality is grounded in the interrogation of Western forms and conventions. I argue that the rewritings of Ali Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne deploy intertextuality to recuperate women’s experiences while interrogating the mechanisms responsible for their erasure. In each of the works I study, the source text is appropriated and rewritten through a process of interrogation aimed at the ideologies it engenders. I argue that this intertextuality is deeply committed to sociopolitical activism. My methodology draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism to uncover a culturally situated, embodied mode of intertextuality that brings text, reader, and author into dialogue with each other. I argue that the intertextuality employed by each of these authors requires readers to accommodate ambiguity and instability while engaging in a reading practice aimed at dismantling oppressive structures. My project concludes by extending this analysis into the realm of media-activism by exploring the work of artists Janelle Monáe and Elisa Kreisinger. This final chapter locates a nascent moment of female artists using a dialogic mode of intertextuality to create transformative works of digital activism
Discarding Dreams and Legends: The Short Fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty
Full text linkThis project examines four Southern women writers—Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty—who use the genre of the short story and the setting of the farm or insular living space to critique Southern regional identity. I argue that the social critiques of these southern female short story writers have been overlooked because stereotypes rooted in the fantasy of the idealized southern woman has limited critical perceptions of these authors’ engagements with cultural or political issues, when in reality their short fiction helped to influence the shifting expectations of the mid-twentieth century South. This study provides a new perspective on the women’s voices who had been marginalized because of their region, gender and choice of genre. My research acknowledges the contributions of Roberts, O’Connor, Porter, and Welty to the changing norms of the second quarter of the twentieth century South and works to recover Roberts as important voice of southern change. Their work reveals some of the small moments of transition that helped create change in the South, particularly for its women. In the stories I examine, each author presents a flawed model of society and focuses on the factors that make it flawed. For Roberts, it is the false idolization of the past; for O’Connor, the limitations of the ideals of southern womanhood; for Porter, the social constraints of a provincial society; and for Welty, the available roles for blacks. Some of the stories indicate a path for improvement that allows for a more hopeful future. All of the stories can be read as parallel lessons for the South to discard its constricting Old South ideals
Gonzo Eternal
Full text linkGonzo Eternal enters the recent surge in scholarly attention to the work of Hunter S. Thompson and his practice of Gonzo journalism by examining the growing conflict between the dominant view of Gonzo journalism as Thompson’s unique and proprietary style, and the relatively new trend toward an understanding of Gonzo as a continuum of literary practice that both predates Thompson and continues to adapt and evolve beyond his death in 2005. I contend that this problem is fundamentally one of definition, and that the continued growth of the field depends on a reassessment of Thompson that reframes him from Gonzo metonym to a figure that illuminates an otherwise indistinct continuum of style, methodology, and philosophical approach to writing. It is this conflict of definition to which I address the centerpiece of my dissertation: a comprehensive annotated variorum of Thompson’s seminal Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. The variorum compares differences across three versions of the text: the 1972 Random House book; the original two-part 1971 Rolling Stone publication; and a fair-copy typescript of the first 6,000 words, which is presently the earliest version of any portion of the text known to scholarship. The variorum is presented with some five hundred annotations that draw on academic, private, and nontraditional archives to cross-reference virtually all of the events, quotations, and references that appear in the text. Collectively, the annotations preserves something of the historical moment of the text’s initial publication. Individually, they explicate pieces of the text with unprecedented granularity, in ways that yield new understandings of — and, occasionally, extraordinary revelations about — the historical details, coincidences, and curiosities woven into the text. Most importantly, they offer new insights into Thompson’s methodology and Gonzo practice at a transformative moment in his career: a critical step in addressing questions of definition. Gonzo Eternal relies on on the work of William Stephenson, Matthew Winston, Kevin T. McEneaney, Robert Alexander & Christine Isager, Tim Denevi, Peter Richardson, and others whose work collectively ushers in a new era in the study of Thompson and Gonzo journalism. My intervention seeks to lay further stable groundwork for future study that enriches both the understanding of Thompson’s praxis as well as better define elements of a form that actively resists dissection and classification. I conclude Gonzo Eternal with an appraisal, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, of Thompson as a minor literature, which construes Thompson as the principle which illuminates a thread of literary practice both historical and ongoing, and rejects the notion that scholarly interrogation of the Thompson/Gonzo monad somehow abrogates Thompson’s importance to the study of Gonzo. Finally, I conclude Gonzo Eternal with a reflection on the unique pedagogical challenges of teaching Gonzo in the writing classroom. As the burgeoning field continues to mature, Gonzo Eternal resists the collapse into oversimplification represented by the Thompson/Gonzo metonym, and situates itself to offer valuable new insights into both Thompson’s work and the future of Gonzo journalism
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The City As a Trap: 20th and 21st Century American Literature and the American Myth of Mobility
Full text linkThis dissertation reads twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. multicultural literatures, women’s literature, and science-fiction film and literature to identify a tradition of literary representation of long-standing patterns of economic entrapment in American cities.” I argue that the capitalist ideologies of opportunity and spatial, economic, and social mobility associated with American cities have been largely false promises, and that literature provides an avenue to investigate the ideological matrices and cultural narratives that American capitalism uses to situate bodies where it needs them, primarily in urban centers. I claim that this entrapment remains more or less a constant in American cities despite the fact that both capitalism and the space of the city have radically changed since the late 1930s. I further claim that the persistence of this entrapment across different instantiations of both the American city and American capitalism speak to its normalization, acceptance, and the fact of its continuing legacy. As the ideological narratives are culturally projected as ones of the promise and freedom of mobility in cities, and as the historical conditions of entrapment have proven so resilient, literature and film have constituted important tools for exposing just how these capitalist ideologies generate consent for hegemonic capitalism. The dissertation seeks to understand how a large percentage of urban populations are interpellated by the very capitalist machinery which fixes them in space and class while simultaneously denying them the benefits of American capitalism
Genre and Loss: The Impossibility of Restoration in 20th Century Detective Fiction
Full text linkMy project situates loss, rather than restoration, as the identifying trait of the detective fiction genre. I contend that instead of providing a problem-solution model that gives readers closure and reinforces simplified understandings of good and evil, detective fiction refuses to build comforting narratives that rehabilitate a corrupted world. Detective fiction, with its continual attempts to provide an unobtainable solution, ruminates on the impossibility of restoration.Genre and Loss: The Impossibility of Restoration in 20th Century Detective Fiction divides into four chapters, each addressing a perceived subdivision of the detective fiction genre in order to illuminate the unifying connections between them. In each chapter, I pair transatlantic texts in order to highlight the genre’s cohesive, continuing orientation, across nations and time periods, around different enactments of loss. Using Chandler’s The High Window and Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon, I begin by contradicting an oft-replicated division drawn between the supposed comfort and security of the British cosies and the corrupt world of the American hard-boileds. Next, I argue that the protagonists of Fleming’s Casino Royale and Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me experience internal loss that prevents them from operating as authoritative producers of solutions. La Bern’s Goodbye Picadilly, Farewell Leicester Square and Highsmith’s The Glass Cell parallel the detective’s loss of individual authority with the inability of the protagonists to prevent the attenuation of control over their own self-identity. Then, I analyze McIlvanney’s Laidlaw and Block’s The Sins of the Fathers to contend that the detectives use their vocation to acknowledge loss as an unavoidable element of life, and to embrace it by prioritizing a continual interrogation of certainty over false closure achieved through criminal convictions. Finally, I conclude the project with a brief exploration of Auster’s City of Glass and Miéville’s The City and The City. These more recent texts highlight the necessity of engaging in ongoing interpretation rather than the possibility of locating a stable answer. Even as the genre of detective fiction develops further, its trajectory continues to trace, and retrace, the steps around the same central theme, the inability to find closure, or an endpoint of restoration
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