1,720,958 research outputs found
Underground subjects: public transportation and perception in New York modernist literature
No full textThis dissertation investigates the relationship between public transportation and New York modernist literature. It argues that the experience of riding the subway and elevated train shapes the forms and themes of modernist writing, while textual representations of these spaces of transit in turn shape the modern understanding of urban subjectivity. Exploring the tension between the embodied, habitual ride and the abstract transportation system, New York modernist writers represent the sense of being in thrall to forces of modernity, interrogate the connection between space and psychology, and envision new pathways between the past and the present. I begin with an analysis of the intertwined discourses necessary to a consideration of modernism and public transportation, including visuality and spatial theory, the history of technology, and urban studies. Through readings of American Expressionist plays by Elmer Rice and Osip Dymov, I locate a modernist theatricality in the subway car, one centered on ideas of claustrophobia and fantasy. I then turn to Harlem Renaissance writers Rudolph Fisher and Walter White, whose migration narratives embrace the transitional potential of the mechanized journey North even as they warn against the illusory vision of Harlem seen from the subway steps. Next, I suggest that the affective poetic fusion of Hart Crane's long poem The Bridge finds its equal in the complex network of subway tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn, in which Crane locates a new genealogy of American poetry. I conclude by moving aboveground, considering surrealist artist Joseph Cornell's experimental film Gnir Rednow as it participates in and offers alternatives to postwar New York artists' nostalgia for the soon-to-be-razed Third Avenue El. In each of these versions of modernism, public transportation lies at the intersection of material culture and metaphor. Cutting across genres and movements, I hope to remap the boundaries of early twentieth-century American literature as well as underscore the role of technology in the construction of the urban imaginary.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 208-234)
The Importance of the Ancient Greek Blood Ritual to the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
Get PDFThis thesis contends that in several of Poe’s seminal short stories the author inserted as a common theme the ancient Greek sacrifice gone wrong. Uncovering these symbolic rituals will help us to understand Poe as a writer who was consistently ambivalent about the degree to which he wanted to communicate with his audience. It will additionally allow us to position Poe, in his opposition to pure sentimentalism, as the logical historical predecessor of Herman Melville; to some extent, we will also be able to call him a proto-naturalist
Graphic Shakespeare: Understanding the Contact Zone of Shakespeare Adaptation in Graphic Narrative
No full textThis thesis investigates key features of Shakespearean graphic narratives from works produced by Classical Comics as well as Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic series. These graphic narratives have enjoyed both commercial and critical success, yet there are too few scholarly investigations on how these adaptations function. This thesis will establish the contact zone of Shakespearean graphic narratives by investigating comic rhetoric, adaptation theory, and narratological reappropriation, which will illuminate the complexity of these works and how they can be better understood. The first section outlines the contact zone of Shakespearean graphic narrative by positioning the source texts with comic rhetoric. The second section outlines one prominent theory of adaptation to better understand what occurs when texts are adapted across genres and mediums. The third section outlines narratological reappropriation, relying on close readings of graphic narratives
Monsters, Men and Machines: Gender in Literature and Film, 1942 - 1962
Get PDFIn the construction of the ideologically abject we see the creation of its manifestation: monstrosity. Just as the Kristevian abject, which is neither subject nor object, is my starting point, the Deleuzian --Y´Desiring Machine¡ is my concluding position (Powers of Horror; Anti-Oedipus). I show that, in fictional texts, it is through an ever-reproducing collective of desiring machines that ideology is spread. The scripted language of film creates the allusion of subjectivity, a mise-en-scene which repudiates the stability of the Oedipal triad: mother-child-father. Such refutation of presumed systems eschews normalization; however, due to the very performative nature of film, Hollywood is able to call attention to the manufacture of normalization while simultaneously appropriating the appearance of accepted Oedipal desire. In other words, fiction, by nature, pretends to be reality; because it is through language that subjectivity is negotiated and all possibility of an existential reality is removed from the subject. And because the language of fiction is a scripted appropriation of fantasy, fiction (especially visual fiction) is able to represent fantasmatic desire as real. In the chapters that follow, I will discuss the breakdown between fictive truth and epistemological truth. The appearance of masculinity which conforms to hegemonic expectations (or ´hegemonic masculinity¡) in fiction can be seen as just that -- fiction. Fiction represents the fantastic desires of the culture from which it arises. In the texts that follow, hegemonic masculinity is often performed in a way that betrays itself as a fiction; when cast in the light of satire, parody, and ironic representation, masculinity can be seen as nothing more than a correspondent to Lacan’s feminine masquerade or the façade of phallic femininity
Literacy, Literature, and Pedagogy in Two Nineteenth-Century Alabama Normal Schools
Get PDFSix of Alabama’s eleven state universities began as normal schools during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Florence State Normal School and Tuskegee Normal and Industrial School created empowerment for individual students and teachers, many from families who had no previous access to education. However, these normal schools also reinforced gender, racial, and class hierarchies. This dissertation argues for research into late nineteenth-century Alabama normal schools and provides possible theoretical approaches from archival methods, literacy studies, feminist historiography, and cultural studies. Archival evidence includes examples of student writing, school catalogs, student publications, and advertising for teacher-training institutes and reveals articulations between national, regional, and state structures of culture and power arising from literacy education. The dissertation includes an analysis of a class prophecy written by a young woman from the Class of 1890 at Florence, a study of the rhetoric of normal school pedagogy and the figure of the pedagogue, and a reading of texts listed as subjects of study and pleasure in the unpublished Minutes of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club. While it is not possible to draw direct analogies to relate to contemporary literacy issues and challenges, understanding the emergence and disappearance of the normal schools provides insight into the ideological uses of the literacies claimed by schooling
Beyond Alterity: Narrative Ethics in Faulkner and Agee
Get PDFThis thesis uses the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to examine the narrative structures of two literary works: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Both texts feature dense interaction with the notion of the “poor Southern white”; this is of particular interest to me because of the American literary canon's habitual ontological categorization of this figure as lazy and shiftless; even the term “poor white” linguistically traps these people as 1. poor and 2. white. My aim is to explore the ways in which these texts' narrative ethics free the characters ethically damaged by the “poor white” cognitive category and allow them to transcend caricature into humanity
Reconfiguring Cultural Literacy: Multi-Authored Cultural Literacy Narratives in a Post-Hirsch Age
Get PDFMy dissertation argues that Hirsch’s definition of cultural literacy must be updated so that it focuses on the behaviors, practices, beliefs, and ideals of individuals (any individual) and how each of these areas connects to the socially constructed nature of literacy. I employ the solo performed documentary drama of Anna Deavere Smith, comments from the blogosphere, and Victor Turner’s theory of social drama to examine the role of narrative and reflection during incidents of social conflict in America and the impact narrative and reflection have on the development of cultural literacy. My analysis considers the manner in which cultural literacy can be measured and developed through the reflexive activity of reading and writing about cultural events (large-scale events such as 9/11 and more localized/personal events such as a minority student engaging a dominant ideology for the first time). Following the research on social and community literacy (Street, Flower, Gee, Delpit, Lu), I am interested in the way that cultural differences are approached, understood, and negotiated on a daily basis and how narrative can be employed to analyze cultural literacy through individual and group interactions during times of social conflict. My analysis suggests that both cultural literacy and illiteracy are made apparent during these conflicts and that the use of narrative reflection presents an opportunity for the development of cultural empathy, which can lead to cultural literacy. This conclusion presents us with the pedagogical opportunity to implement course objectives that place students in situations of social or cultural conflict through their interaction with narrative (both those written by them as well as those written by others)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Toward a More Perfect Engine: Natural Science and Optimism in the American Renaissance
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the discourse regarding the perfectibility of American society among four figures associated with the American Renaissance: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson in English Traits, Nature, and many of his other works suggests that America, because of both its racial and cultural constitution, will reach the endpoint of human knowledge. To a large degree, Emerson bases his beliefs upon the biological concepts of race during his time. His protégé Thoreau, however, consistently argues against the belief in human progress espoused by his mentor. Thoreau’s works from three different genres are explored: journalism, lectures, and non-fiction. Margaret Fuller, in both her journalism and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, argues that by granting equal rights to woman American society will become a utopia. Fuller believes, based on her own experiences with the esoteric practice of mesmerism and her understanding of the theories of the Christian mystic Immanuel Swedenborg, that women have a superior access to divine revelation and, consequently, altruism. Hence, when women are given their due freedom, the world will fulfill the expectations of her Christian millennialism. Nathaniel Hawthorne, on the other hand, is suspicious of the practice of mesmerism and the ability of technology to correct the flaws of human society. Ultimately, this dissertation explores the particular scientific and philosophical influences that fueled Emerson’s and Fuller’s optimism as well as the impetus for Thoreau’s and Hawthorne’s guarded cynicism
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