1,720,963 research outputs found
The making of a more perfect union: reading, writing, and advocating for temperate citizenship in the long Nineteenth Century
No full textThis project recovers, identifies, and analyzes the literary and rhetorical strategies that nineteenth-century social reform authors in the United States used to promote a more perfect union -- or, their shared vision of inclusive, temperate citizenship. Three core practices of temperate citizenship, as examined in this project, are civility, sociality, and parity. Euro-American reformers used these practices to promote an inclusive body politic that affirmed all voices in civil discourse regarding the most contentious national problems of the long nineteenth century: slavery, intemperance, and unequal voting rights. Reform-minded writers engaging these three interconnected issues adapted varying genres and tailored them to address specific questions related to citizenship in action. For each of the social issues referenced above, I analyze a representative textual intervention grounded in the rhetoric of temperate citizenship. Poetry and prose published in one anti-slavery and abolition gift book, The Liberty Bell (1839-1858), modeled and memorialized practices of temperate citizenship, especially civility, for abolitionist readers as a response to the growing unrest caused by slavery. Temperance fiction, such as Our Homes (1881) by Mary Dwinell Chellis, advocated community engagement, caring, and sociality as a cure for overconsumption of alcohol (intemperance) and its resulting social ills. Public speeches by suffrage advocates Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1896) and Henry B. Blackwell (1898) before Congress promised better citizens, happier homes, and a stronger nation once women enjoyed parity in both public and private spheres through the elective franchise. All these authors argued for and modeled, through their literary texts, the ideology and practice of temperate citizenship, a means to transform the United States into more perfect union -- a caring community of independent and interdependent individuals
"Infected Regions": Marriage Metaphors and Illness Plots in Antebellum Cross-Regional Fiction
No full textInfected Regions: Marriage Metaphors and Illness Plots in Antebellum Cross-Regional Fiction extends the timeline for regional fiction to the antebellum era, widening the critical lens enabling the recovery of many once-popular novels. As early as three decades before the start of the Civil War, the writers in this study produced fiction that provides today¿s scholars insight about existing regional, social, and racial anxieties that destabilized national unity. I maintain that during these unstable decades regional tensions between the North and the South prompted a regional subgenre I call ¿cross-regional fiction¿ and a rhetorical trope I call ¿the illness plot.¿ The authors who make up this study all held claim to a multi-regional identity and wrote fiction in which characters crossed into unfamiliar locations seeking to uncover provincial prejudices. Analyzing these texts as examples of Body Politic rhetoric, I demonstrate how these writers metaphorically alluded to existing tensions as a national illness and incorporated sick, allegorical characters to disrupt marriage alliances, ultimately leading to North/South marriage unions. These unions symbolize healing and illustrate that building cultural understanding across the North and the South could heal regional discord and strengthen national unity. In generating definitions for cross-regional fiction and illness plots, I selected novels with both marriage and illness plots involving couples from two contentious regions¿the North and South¿and inspired by three critical eras leading up to the Civil War: The Nullification Crisis of the 1830s, the Financial Crisis of 1837, and the slavery debates of the 1850s. The primary texts for this analysis include William A. Caruthers¿s The Kentuckian in New York (1834), Catharine Sedgwick¿s The Linwoods (1835), Maria McIntosh¿s The Lofty and the Lowly (1853), and Caroline Lee Hentz¿s The Planter¿s Northern Bride (1854). This fiction provided antebellum readers and writers a dialogical space where opposing regions could, theoretically, come together and work out, or rather act out, their differences
Beauty and Romance in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction
No full textThis dissertation describes beauty and romance narratives that recur in contemporary Young Adult fiction for girls and examines the ways these narratives construct girlhood. The romance narrative dictates that girls must find heterosexual romance in order to be happy, while the beauty narrative asserts that girls will only find romance if they meet ideal feminine beauty standards. I first create a genealogy of romance and beauty in American¿ girls¿ fiction in order to demonstrate the origins of these narratives. I then examine how contemporary texts incorporate and resist the beauty and romance narratives. In the first chapter, I compare Stephenie Meyer¿s Twilight (2005) to Meg Cabot¿s The Princess Diaries (2000) to demonstrate how postfeminism and third-wave feminism, respectively, have interpreted the beauty and romance narratives. I argue that the postfeminism of Twilight reinforces conservative ideals and traditional gender norms while the girlie third-wave feminism of The Princess Diaries subtly resists the more restrictive aspects of the romance and beauty narratives. In Chapter Two I use Judith Butler¿s theory of the performative nature of gender to argue that romance and beauty are part of our gender performance, as seen in Rainbow Rowell¿s Eleanor & Park (2013). The title characters are physically, socially, and economically unable to perform beauty and romance as expected, and therefore both prove the constructed nature of that gender performance and offer alternative models of girlhood and boyhood. In Chapter 3 I assert that Suzanne Collins¿ phenomenally popular Hunger Games series criticizes the romance and beauty narratives, in part through its dystopian features, without entirely rejecting romance and beauty. I argue that the protagonist, Katniss, learns to use beauty and romance rhetorically for her political and personal gain. This project ends with a Coda, in which I look to how we may continue to examine the significance of the beauty and romance narratives, such as by analyzing them intersectionally with race, class, and sexuality and by conducting ethnographies to determine the impact these narratives have on real girls
Rhetoricizing the avant-garde: the illegible as argument
No full textCapitalizing on a renewal of interest in the rapprochement between literary and rhetorical study, this dissertation examines the avant-garde's illegible (or mysterious") nature as a form of argumentation that calls into question prevailing systems of linguistic, political, and social control. It is my primary contention that reading vanguard texts through the lens of rhetorical theory enables us to fully account for the connection between radical changes in poetic language and radical changes in social relations. In my first chapter, I pair poet Erica Hunt with Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca to argue that poetic opposition is founded upon innovative language practices that unite members of a community and then persuade them to resist the totalizing pronouncements of a culture's dominant discourse. Chapter Two explores the connections between Lyn Hejinian and philosopher Susanne Langer.^This chapter suggests that, by embracing non-discursive form, Hejinian's My Life argues for a more ethical relationship among poets, texts, and readers that remains perpetually open to the full range of human perception made possible via aesthetic experience. In Chapter Three, I argue that Jackson Mac Low's "5 biblical poems" utilize chance and erasure as strategies for securing unending dialogue within an interpretive community. Similar to Kenneth Burke's pure persuasion, Mac Low challenges the privilege of the speaking subject and opens the space necessary for new understandings of rhetorical ethos. The dissertation's closing chapter draws upon each of these theorists to present a comprehensive rhetoricized reading of John Ashbery's Girls on the Run. I demonstrate how Girls argues for new conceptions of gender and community rooted in the belief that closure and certainty are inimical to the long-term health of the aesthetic and the social realms.^In dedicating each chapter to a specific poet and theorist, this dissertation illustrates the extent to which the illegible becomes readable when viewed as a rhetorically motivated act. These pairings demonstrate that the New Rhetoric of the twentieth century offers both a method for reading the avant-garde's famed difficulty and a vehicle for opening lines of cross-disciplinary communication between the field of rhetoric and the field of literature"--Abstract
Chapter 11. “Suspend the Sigh, dear Sir”: Politics of voice and address in two elegies by Phillis Wheatley Peters
No full textThis chapter illumines the politics of voice in Boston poet Phillis Wheatley’s neoclassical elegies in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) and from among her uncollected works. As the first African-born woman to publish a poetry collection in English, Wheatley’s oeuvre has long been of interest to scholars of Early American and eighteenth-century British literary history, and her fiercely eloquent yet politic protests against the injustices of chattel slavery are key texts in the African-American canon. Although the rhetoric and politics of Wheatley’s elegies have been compellingly analysed by scholars including Gregory Rigby, Isani Mukhtar Ali and, more recently, Andrea Haslanger and Antonio T. Bly, scholarship on Wheatley has yet to connect these insights to the gender-ambiguous rhetoric of lament that allowed eighteenth-century English-speaking Protestant women to use neoclassical elegy as a vehicle for political debate. This chapter argues that, as deployed by Wheatley, neoclassical elegiac rhetoric produces a critical deconstruction of eighteenth-century feminine lyric voice as paradoxically disenfranchised yet authoritative and, thus, complicit with Atlantic world social hierarchies and inequalities. Focusing on two linked elegies from the early 1770s, the chapter shows how, adopting a gender-ambiguous elegiac voice derived from classical and neoclassical sources, Wheatley both ventriloquizes and re-codes a set of “antique” metrical patterns, rhetorical figures and religio-literary allusions. In this strategy, which I elucidate via the theorization of voice by twentieth-century poet and critic bell hooks, the authority long sought by eighteenth-century female elegists is ironized by being voiced by a woman who, as chattelized, is doubly disenfranchised. Christian death, as occasion, provides the context and alibi for this subversion
Elaine Goodale Eastman, Modernist Author? Re-visiting a Border-crossing Woman Writer's Place in Literary History
No full textElaine Goodale Eastman is not a name generally associated with transnational literary modernism. Yet, a review of her extensive oeuvre demonstrates that her writings interacted in diverse complex ways with that cultural movement. She wrote in a range of genres, including lyric poetry, journalism, didactic children's books and what she herself termed "potboilers" aimed primarily at supporting her family's finances. As an editor and co-author with her husband Charles, she contributed to the development of Native American literatures in an intense period of U.S. suppression of indigenous culture--a process in which she played conflicting roles. Through autobiographical texts published late in her life, we see that Eastman continued to have aspirations consistent with a number of modernism's familiar tenets, even as she also struggled to reconcile the intersectional elements in her gendered personal history with both the successes and the limitations of her multi-faceted publishing career. On associe rarement le nom d’Elaine Goodale Eastman au modernisme littéraire transnational. Prise dans son ensemble, toutefois, son oeuvre prolifique peut se lire comme une réponse complexe et variée au mouvement moderniste. Eastman a expérimenté avec divers genres, comme la poésie lyrique, le journalisme ou la littérature enfantine ¿ visée didactique, en sus de produire ce qu’elle considérait comme des « oeuvres alimentaires » destinées ¿ subvenir aux besoins de sa famille. Son travail de rédactrice et sa collaboration avec son époux Charles Eastman ont contribué ¿ l’essor de la littérature amérindienne ¿ une période marquée par la volonté des États-Unis de supprimer la culture indigène, processus auquel l’écrivaine s’est opposée de manière parfois ambivalente. Les écrits autobiographiques publiés tard dans sa carrière montrent que les aspirations d’Eastman ne sont pas sans lien avec celles du modernisme, alors même que l’écrivaine s’efforce de concilier les éléments intersectionnels de son parcours personnel avec les succès et les revers d’une carrière littéraire protéiforme
Introduction: Concise Collection on Teaching the Works of Phillis Wheatley Peters
No full textThis short essay introduces a two-part Concise Collections special issue on teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters. It discusses how the life and works of the poet can be taught in various educational settings
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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