1,720,968 research outputs found
The Red Menace in the Cellar: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Enduring Power of the Old Left to Subvert Young Minds
No full textArt holds an unparalleled power to encapsulate and carry political aspirations forward in time. Perhaps no art form does this as effectively as music. This essay explores how one particular work created at the height of the Red Scare—Pete Seeger\u27s 1953 album, Folksongs and Ballads: A Pete Seeger Concert—preserved and then transmitted the Popular Front ideology of the Communist Party of the United States to the author in 1990. Through a mix of personal reflection and critical analysis, this essay examines the album\u27s meaning at the time it was created, when the author encountered it in 1990, and within the context of our current political moment and beyond.</p
Towards Democratic Education: Working-Class Learning in Tillie Olsen and Raymond Williams
No full textTillie Olsen\u27s Yonnondio and Raymond Williams\u27 "Culture is Ordinary" explore the untapped potential of working-class people and the beauties of even the most difficult lives. Though they were written two decades apart, "Culture is Ordinary" builds upon Yonnondio\u27s glimpses into a healthy and productive democratic educational process that could emerge from the positive aspects of working-class experiences. Both works investigate the difficult conditions which the children of laborers face in schools that ignore their needs and present them with irrelevant and useless material that reflects only a static and elitist form of culture. Williams defines culture in a dynamic and more inclusive way, insisting that every individual shapes the culture of his or her society and that culture is not merely a reservoir of elite traditions. Rather, culture is both historical and made every day in every mind and the cultures of elites and working people exist alongside one another
Haunted by Violence: Ambivalent Pastoral Visions in American Modernist Poetry
No full textThis dissertation argues that 20th-century American poets share the presumption that intersecting histories of economic exploitation, racial inequality, and sexual domination had scarred the rural landscapes they loved. For decades, leading critics have tended to view the pastoral as an escapist, politically conservative genre pursued mainly by elites. In contrast, my project offers a fundamental revision of our understanding of the pastoral\u27s ideology—showing it to be more radical, anti-idealizing, and darker than previously imagined. I bring together Robert Frost, who is perhaps the quintessential modernist pastoral poet, and two of the most innovative poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Jean Toomer and Helene Johnson, to demonstrate how writers from varied positions in the American social order all struggled to understand a relation to the natural world that had been permeated by violence and loss. Although these poets participate in pastoral celebrations of nature, their enactments give voice to shocking legacies of violence and their attendant negative emotions—such as fear, anxiety, anger, and grief. The result is a poignant tension in their representations of the natural world. In chapter one, I argue that Frost tried to manage a sense of responsibility to working-class people early in his career through nostalgic idealization and, later, through an increasingly angry realism by the years of the Great Depression. In the chapter on Johnson, I consider how the poet\u27s eerily beautiful adaptations of the pastoral mode register the traumatic effects of racial violence and sexual exploitation even as they affirm the sensuous pleasures of the natural world. In chapter three, I argue that Toomer\u27s celebration of a beloved southern landscape is shadowed by the problem of alienation produced by the rapid industrialization of agricultural labor and the much longer history of enslavement. As they mourned histories of violence, these poets and other practitioners of modernist pastoral—including William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Claude McKay, and Ron Rash—offered hard-won visions of a less-alienated connection to the natural world and rural labor on which every society depends
Psychological symptoms as expressions of "rebellious" thoughts in Charlotte Perkins Gilman\u27s "The yellow wallpaper"
No full text
Not Entirely Secular, Not Entirely Sacred: Women, Modernism, and Religion
No full textThis dissertation defines a tradition of American and British female modernists whose desire for full emancipation in the early twentieth century compelled them to engage dialectically with their own religious inheritances. Unlike many later twentieth-century feminist thinkers who have advocated a surgical response to gendered religious oppression - one that finds a solution in eliminating religion altogether from women\u27s lives - novelists May Sinclair and Zora Neale Hurston and poets H.D. and Anne Spencer are representative of the surprising number of female modernists who insisted that simply walking away was inadequate. These authors believed that, in order to be free, women must critique and then revise the patriarchal Christian traditions that had so powerfully shaped their emotional, material, and imaginative lives. In Sinclair\u27s Mary Olivier, for example, a woman\u27s creative, intellectual, and sexual development is threatened by a doctrine of self-renunciation rooted in an austere Victorian Anglicanism that extols a model of self-denying womanhood, while in Hurston\u27s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a similar threat is produced by a religiously infused response to the violence of slavery that equates self-relinquishment with self-protection. But for all these writers, the ultimate act of empowerment was spiritual reclamation through revision. Each sought to transform religious discourse into an idiom for women\u27s liberation: Spencer\u27s female prophets, for instance, provide a model of African American female authority that appropriates sacred language as a means of resisting male domination, while the resurrection poetics in H.D.\u27s long poem Trilogy links women\u27s divinity to their fully realized capacities for love, desire, and creativity. By uniting women from such varied backgrounds, my dissertation seeks to reveal the full extent to which female modernists saw religion as an urgent site for gender-conscious contestation. My feminist, postsecular approach thus allows me to offer an alternative account of the cultural conditions for modernism\u27s emergence - one that challenges the familiar vision of literary modernism as unequivocally secular literature produced by a uniformly secular Western modernity. I argue that, on the contrary, the most famous literary movement of the early twentieth century emerged largely from women\u27s efforts to respond, not to the loss of religion in modernity, but rather to its complex persistence and its ongoing impact on women\u27s lives. Moreover, the problem of how religion affects women\u27s creative, intellectual, and libidinal development remains urgent today as religious fundamentalisms exert increasing influence nationally and internationally. The authors I study encourage us neither to demonize nor sentimentalize the role of religion in women\u27s lives by modeling a mode of engagement that refuses to accept religious oppression, yet honors women\u27s liberatory appropriations of their own religious inheritances
Emancipated Intimacy: Kate Chopin\u27s Eco-Feminism
No full textBy utilizing ecofeminist theory, including the work of Greta Gaard, Donna Haraway, and Stacy Alaimo, to examine the writing of nineteenth century American writer Kate Chopin, I argue that she should be understood as an early material feminist writer who was interested in both women\u27s emancipation and cultivating respect for the natural world. In her personal writing and fiction, Chopin envisions the natural world as varied, gender minimizing, often queer, and possessing of agency, and casts it as a liberating domain of possibility for her female characters. Unlike male writers of the same period who conceived of the earth as feminine, sexual, and maternal, Chopin portrays nature as genderless, erotic, and full of agency and diversity. Immersed in a genderless environment, the female characters are stripped of their own gender as they undergo intense affective sensations that trigger critiques of patriarchal institutions like marriage and the convent in a process of "emancipated intimacy." I argue that her writing develops a personal ecofeminist ethics, and that by recognizing the agency possessed by nature, a critical ecofeminist point of departure, Chopin, and by extension her protagonists, are able to invoke agency within themselves. I ultimately suggest that by revisiting Chopin\u27s life and personal writing, we may not only reaffirm her importance as an early feminist writer, but we may claim her as one of the earliest examples of an ecofeminist writer
The Beasts of Capital, the Ghosts of Labor: Environmental Justice in Tillie Olsen\u27s Yonnondio
No full textTillie Olsen\u27s Depression-era novel Yonnondio is considered an influential part of many working-class and feminist literary traditions in the US. Yet, the strong environmental dimension of the novel\u27s working-class and feminist consciousness has received little scholarly attention. I am interested in exploring this neglected ecocritical aspect by analyzing Olsen\u27s use of three closely connected tropes in the novel: the idiom of the proletarian grotesque, the creation of ecological sprectres, and the use of a Brechtian narrator that makes significant textual intrusions. While most critics read these forms and symbols only as proletarian tropes, I contend that they serve, simultaneously, as the tropes of environmental justice writing in the novel. My reading of Yonnondio is, at one level, an attempt to imagine a place for it in the evolving canon of environmental justice writing. I am also, at the same time, interested in analyzing aesthetic and formal devices in the novel as a way to think about their potential to respond to the daunting representational challenges presented to fiction writers by the contemporary environmental crisis
- …
