Browsing by Subject "American"
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Item An American mythology: William Carlos Williams and the poetics of modernism(Texas Tech University, 2005-08) Jasmin, James B.; Conrad, Bryce D.; Samson, John; Wenthe, WilliamThe modernist period (1920 to 1960) in America was a time of diverse and complex cultural upheaval. Modern poets both at home and abroad attempted to track and record the events of the time, but the modernist approach to both history and poetics was different in America than in England and Europe. William Carlos Williams, and, to some extent, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, defined what was “American” in their verse. To do so, a distancing from traditional notions of history, literature and other disciplines became one of the central themes of their work. This dissertation is a study of the American modernists and their approach to a new system of national letters. For this work’s purpose, “myth” is defined as the practices, beliefs, customs, philosophy and ideology of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the approach of the poet as the “writer of culture,” I examine how Williams and the other modernist poets redefined American culture through the reification of values, ideals and social practices. While I take the position that culture is responsible for the “break” from European tradition, I argue that the poet is responsible for mapping, defining and cataloguing the development and evolution of this break. The “myth” of America is thus separate from its constructed history; it is a more authentic portrait of American culture.Item Latino/a Racial Self Identification: Taking a Closer Look with Integration Measures(2012-10-19) Sanchez, Marisa EstelaThis study uses logistic regression to analyze how strength of American identity influences Latino/a racial self identification with traditional and integration measures such as discrimination and skin color. These integration measures are not considered in Latino/a racial identity research using Census data that focuses on traditional measures such as socioeconomic status and education. The primary hypothesis of the analysis is that those Latino/as who report seeing themselves strongly as American are more likely to choose "white" than "some other race" as their racial identity. The secondary hypothesis states that those Latino/as with darker skin tones and higher reports of discrimination will also be more likely to choose "some other race" than those Latino/as with lighter skin tones and no reports of discrimination. This is due to the concept that in America historically, only those considered white were allowed to be citizens of the United States and therefore American. Additionally, the concept of being American is still closely linked as someone with European decent and European features holding white values regardless of citizenship statues.Item Manufacturing ruin(2013-05) Fassi, Anthony Joseph, III; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-"Manufacturing Ruin" argues that the most important moments in the history of the concept and consciousness of "American ruin" accompany volatile episodes of progress and decline in American manufacturing. This dissertation attends to the construction of "American ruin" in response to the rise of manufacturing in the early to mid-nineteenth century and the decline of industrial capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Americans have manufactured picturesque ruins and spectacular episodes of ruination both to conceal and reveal and to "contain" and "harness" destructive forces inherent to capitalism. In some cases, ruins have been represented in ways that conceal processes of ruination inherent to their own destruction. In other instances, episodes of destruction demonstrate that in attending to particular processes of ruination, Americans have intentionally ignored others.Item Re-reading the American renaissance in New England and in Mexico City(2010-05) Anderson, Jill, 1979-; Barrish, Phillip; Carton, Evan; Dominguéz-Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Joysmith, Claire; Murphy, GretchenRe-Reading the American Renaissance in New England and in Mexico City is a bi-national literary history of the confluence of concerns unevenly shared by new world liberal intellectuals in New England and in Mexico City. This dissertation seeks to fill a gap in our understanding of the complex history that informs the multi-faceted public and private spheres of the United States and Mexico in the twenty-first century. I introduce translations of nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals from the interior of Mexico who were preoccupied with many of the same ideas and problems characteristic of US American literary nationalism: the nation in moral crisis, the post-/neo-colonial onus of originality in the new world, the hypocrisies of race-based romantic nationalism, and the inherent contradictions of economic and political liberalisms. These inter-textual juxtapositions shift the analysis of US American liberal nationalism from a nation-based narrative of success or failure to the study of the complex, unequally distributed failures of liberalism across the region. Each chapter offers a new contextualization of the US American renaissance that demonstrates the period to be a complex palimpsest of provincial prejudices, liberal nationalisms, and cosmopolitan strategies. In Chapter Two I read the trans-american jeremiads of Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, and Henry David Thoreau and Carlos María de Bustamante, Mariano Otero, and Luís de la Rosa in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Chapter Three focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Ignacio Ramírez's incommensurate preoccupations with the origins of language and their inter-related post/neo-colonial bids for national recognition on a Eurocentric geopolitical stage. The travel accounts of William Cullen Bryant’s trip to Mexico City in 1872 and Guillermo Prieto’s overnight stay in Bryant’s Long Island home in 1877 set the scene in Chapter Four to explore the bi-national tensions inherent in their oddly inter-related romantic nationalisms. Furthermore, the insights of this bi-national literary history invite us to recognize the contours of our own geopolitical positions, and in recognizing them, to re-orient nationalist epistemologies and literary histories as deeply conversant with contemporaneous traditions otherwise considered peripheral and/or foreign.Item Seriality in Contemporary American Memoir: 1957-2007(2010-10-12) McDaniel-Carder, Nicole EveIn this dissertation, I examine the practice of what I term serial memoir in the second-half of the twentieth century in American literature, arguing that serial memoir represents an emerging and significant trend in life writing as it illustrates a transition in how a particular generation of writers understands lived experience and its textual representation. During the second-half of the twentieth century, and in tandem with the rapid technological advancements of postmodern and postindustrial culture, I look at the serial authorship and publication of multiple self-reflexive texts and propose that serial memoir presents a challenge to the historically privileged techniques of linear storytelling, narrative closure, and the possibility for autonomous subjectivity in American life writing. As generic boundaries become increasingly fluid, postmodern memoirists are able to be both more innovative and overt about how they have constructed the self at particular moments in time. Following the trend of examining life writing through contemporary theories about culture, narrative, and techniques of self-representation, I engage the serial memoirs of Mary McCarthy, Maya Angelou, Art Spiegelman, and Augusten Burroughs as I suggest that these authors iterate the self as serialized, recursive, genealogically constructed, and material. Finally, the fact that these are well-known memoirists underscores the degree to which serial memoir has become mainstream in American autobiographical writing. Serial memoir emphasizes such issues as temporality and memory, repetition and recursivity, and witnessing and testimony, and as such, my objective in this project is to theorize the practice of serial memoir, a form that has been largely neglected in critical work, as I underscore its significance in relation to twentieth-century American culture. I contend that seriality in contemporary American memoir is a burgeoning and powerful form of self-expression, and that a close examination of how authors are presenting and re-presenting themselves as they challenge conventional life writing narrative structures will influence not only the way we read and understand contemporary memoir, but will impact our approaches to self-reflexive narrative structures and provide us with new ways to understand ourselves, and our lives, in relation to the serial culture in which we live.Item ¡Sí se come! : creating a unique Mexican American food identity(2012-08) Juárez, Marisa Celia; Stross, Brian; Moran Gonzalez, JohnYou are what you eat. The essence of being is our identity, so what we choose to eat has a large impact on who we are. By defining identity and applying these definitions in relation to food we can discover how we identify through the foods we eat, creating a food identity. For Mexican Americans, it is la comida que sí se come! I have classified the following as our most basic forms of identity: mental versus the physical or biological, and individual versus group. Within the group identity stem the facets of race, ethnicity, nationality, language and culture that all make up a Mexican American identity. By thoroughly exploring the four basic classifications of identity we are able to apply the methods of identity creation towards our interactions with food, from our first learned experiences as children, to later cooking for our own children, which all lead to the creation of our food identities. Once food identity is understood it can be applied specifically to the Mexican American experience, therefore exploring how the food choices that Mexican Americans make contribute towards a unique food identity. Just like the Mexican American self identity, Mexican American food identity is neither “Mexican” nor “American,” and yet it can be both. Like self identity, this food identity consists of a long historical background, embracing dual nationalities and combining life experiences with culture. It is also heavily influenced by family- familia- more so than a generic food identity.Item William Jenkins, business elites, and the evolution of the Mexican state : 1910-1960(2008-12) Paxman, Andrew, 1967-; Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio, 1962-; Brown, Jonathan C. (Jonathan Charles), 1942-This is a biographical case study of Mexican industrialization, focusing on expatriate U.S. businessman William O. Jenkins (1878-1963). I trace Jenkins' career in textiles, land speculation, sugar, banking, and film, using it as a forum for themes that flesh out the economic and political history of modern Mexico. Chief among these themes are Mexico's substantial but socially unequal capitalistic development; interdependent relationships between business elites and the state; the role of the regions in Mexican development; and a tradition of viewing U.S. industrialists as enemies of national progress. I use Jenkins to illustrate the ability of Mexico's business elite to negotiate the hazards of the 1910-1920 Revolution and the property expropriations that followed. Industrialists, many of them immigrants, helped to forge rapid economic development between 1933 and 1981. However, their behavior was often characterized by monopolistic and rent-seeking practices, to the qualitative detriment of industries including film and textiles. I demonstrate how the success of industrialists owed much to their relations with politicians, and how the persistence of authoritarian regimes at regional and national levels owed much to industrialists' support. For Jenkins, this symbiosis involved loans to state governors, campaign contributions, and support for the federal government by channeling cheap entertainment to urban populations. Such links help explain why fifty years of development saw little electoral democracy or progressive distribution of wealth. I "de-center" Mexico's economic and political narrative by focusing on the state of Puebla, showing how alliances between industrialists and authorities often begin in provincial arenas and how they can impact national economic and political trends. I also address the underdevelopment of Puebla City, long Mexico's second metropolis, which after 1900 fell significantly behind Guadalajara and Monterrey. Finally, I trace how Jenkins functioned rhetorically as the epitome of the grasping U.S. capitalist. His controversial image afforded leftist politicians, business rivals, and labor leaders with an inflammatory object of protest. Such "gringophobia" in turn contributed to a polarization within Mexican society that proliferated after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. I complement this theme with intermittent commentary on rarely-remarked similarities between business practice in Mexico and the United States.