Browsing by Subject "American Literature"
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Item Ambivalent Devotion: Religious Imagination in Contemporary Southern Women's Fiction(2011-02-22) Peters, Sarah L.Analyzing novels by Sheri Reynolds, Lee Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Sue Monk Kidd, I argue that these authors challenge religious structures by dramatizing the struggle between love and resentment that brings many women to the point of crisis but also inspires imaginative and generative processes of appropriation and revision, emphasizing not destination but process. Employing first-person narration in coming-of-age stories, Smith, Reynolds, and Kingsolver highlight the various narratives that govern the experiences of children born into religious cultures, including narratives of sexual development, gender identity, and religious conversion, to portray the difficulty of articulating female experience within the limited lexicon of Christian fundamentalism. As they mature into adulthood, the girl characters in these novels break from tradition to develop new consciousness by altering and adapting religious language, understood as open and malleable rather than authoritative and fixed. Smith, Kidd, and Naylor incorporate the Virgin Mary and divine maternal figures from non-Christian traditions to restore the mother-daughter relationship that is eclipsed by the Father and Son in Christian tradition. Identifying the female body as a site of spiritual knowledge, these authors present a metaphorical return to the womb that empowers their characters to embrace divine maternal love that transgresses the masculine symbolic order, displacing (but not necessarily destroying) the authority of God the Father and His human representatives. Reynolds and Walker portray physical pain, central to the Christian image of crucifixion, as destroying the ability of women to speak, denying them subjectivity. Through transgressive sexual relationships infused with religious significance, these authors disrupt the Christian moral paradigm by presenting bodily pleasure as an alternative to the Christian valorization of sacrifice. The replacement of pain with pleasure inspires imaginative work that makes private spirituality shareable through artistic creation. The novels I study present themes that also concern Christian and non-Christian feminist theologians: the development of feminine images of the divine, emphasis on immanence over transcendence, the apprehension of the divine in nature, and the necessity of challenging the reification of religious images and dualisms that undermine female subjectivity. I show the reciprocal relationship between fiction and theology, as theologians treat women's literature as sacred texts and fiction writers give life to abstract religious concepts through narrative.Item Cosmopolitan America: Affect, Attention, and the Nation in Post-Cold War Literature(2014-04-18) Yost, Brian ArmstrongMy dissertation makes two key interventions in the fields of cosmopolitanism and contemporary American literature. First, I define cosmopolitanism as a way of organizing sociality in terms of affect, through how individuals pay attention to the world. Interactions with people and texts evoke affects and socialization trains individuals how to respond to them through the formation of feelings for particular forms of community. Rather than a set of actually existing conditions or some common identity, cosmopolitanism, as a potential outcome for ongoing processes of socialization, is one means of politicizing affect within political institutions like the nation, which remain grounded in material conditions and particular identities. Cosmopolitanism is not some state of affairs that our actions or intentions bring into being; it remains abstract and outside the present in the form of appeals to a nostalgic past or utopian future. For example, nationalist literature deploys the idea of cosmopolitanism as a reality or possibility to reconsolidate the political effects of affect around the nation-state. Second, I argue that recent literature about America reconceptualizes the nation?s cultural and political value through appeals to cosmopolitanism as if it were a set of conditions or common identity that readers can use to construct a positive self-identity. This rhetorical move justifies a simultaneous vision of expanding cultural, political, and economic influence that accompanies American texts? visions of America as the center of cosmopolitan humanitarian or ethical interventions. Literary appeals to America as the center of cosmopolitan solidarity manage the formation of the nation within global space by encouraging readers to feel positively for their global presence. The dissertation presents detailed readings of texts concerned with the identity of America rather than those emerging from it as the object of its inquiry to show how global literature situates the affective experience of America within a cosmopolitan sociability stratified across a number of solidarities including race, class, gender, and nationality. Analyzing texts by David Foster Wallace, Hari Kunzru, Joe Sacco, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Dave Eggers, I elaborate on critical and philosophical deployments of cosmopolitanism as justifications for the management of communication, human rights, and aesthetic production alongside literary analogs that situate critical struggles to realize cosmopolitanism within America.Item Deserting Gender: A Feminist Rhetorical Approach to Vietnam War Novels(2012-07-16) Womack, Anne-MarieFemale characters and references to femininity throughout American war literature disrupt discursive and biological divisions of the masculine and feminine. In examining gender and war literature over the twentieth century, I propose an alternative genealogy of American war literature in which narratives since the end of the nineteenth century initiate two related patterns of gender representation that Vietnam War literature dramatically expands: they critique aggression, camaraderie, and heroism, rejecting these traditional sites of masculinity through desertion narratives, and they harness sentimentality, domesticity, motherhood, and penetration, embracing these traditional sites of femininity in ways that disrupt gender norms. By examining these sites of cross-gender identification through psychoanalytic, rhetorical, and feminist methods, I argue that narratives by Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O'Brien, Stephen Wright, and Larry Heinemann reveal the power of contemporary redefinitions of gender by absorbing feminist discourse into the performance of masculinity.Item Picking up Where Thoreau Left Off: John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, an Unlikely Partnership Bringing Thoreau's Vision to Life(Texas A&M International University, 2015-01-06) Maldonado, Annette; Broncano, Manuel; Thompson, Jerry D.; Niemeyer, Paul; Dean, John EmoryIn American history, views of nature have changed over time to fit the needs of the society interacting with the wilderness. The literature of each period reflects the shift in attitudes towards wilderness as it progresses from fear of evil lurking in nature to a need to dominate and exploit it for its useful resources. Over the course of time, the need to conquer and exploit nature was rivaled by an urge to protect it. Ideas of wilderness protection were scarce early in the country’s history, but they were not unheard of; however, by the time of Transcendentalism a definite and more visible interest in protecting American wilderness began to take shape. This interest is best seen in the literature of the Transcendentalists. Ideas for wilderness protection existed from the midcentury, but it was not until the environmental reform movements of the turn of the century that Transcendentalist thought, particularly that of Henry David Thoreau, began to be widely appreciated and realized. This was no easy task, but through the work of many environmentalists the efforts culminated in the eventual creation of the National Park Service. John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, two pioneers of the environmental movement, were two of these individuals, and their partnership is worth special attention for the unlikely pairing and the influence Henry David Thoreau had on both men.Item Rethinking Things in Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton(2012-07-16) Nozaki, NaoyukiThe main objectives of this thesis are to examine the relations between people and things in American novelist Henry James's 1897 novel The Spoils of Poynton, and thus to deepen our understanding of James's engagement with material culture. Critics have tended to frame James's works in general in terms of his detachment from economic and material reality; and criticisms on the novel in particular have seen it as exemplifying the alleged detachment, interpreting the things accumulated by a female collector at Poynton, as something illusory and unsubstantial, such as a form of commodity fetishism, a Freudian fetish, or a Lacanian signifier. Contrary to the conventional view, however, this thesis argues that James, in this novel about a struggle between a mother and her son over a house and its furnishings, represents and explores physical and affective relationships between the characters and things. James, focusing on the characters' sense experience, attempts to criticize the phallocentric power of his own culture that not only excludes women from the legal right of possession but also undervalues female domestic work in spite of its support for the culture. Drawing our attention to the senses that have traditionally been thought "lower" and "feminine," and thus refusing the taxonomization and hierarchization of the senses, James expands the category of aesthetic experience. This thesis argues that in the novel, by adopting as his primary mode of writing immediate sense experience prior to philosophical abstraction, James makes clear the latent implication between cultural repudiation of the feminine and the material, on the one hand, and the political and institutionalized exclusion of women by patriarchal property law, on the other. Criticism that ignores the material urgency and presence in the novel will further replicate that patriarchal power structure.Item The Paradox of Domesticity: Resistance to the Myth of Home in Contemporary American Literature and Film(2012-07-16) Cox, Kimberly O'DellThis dissertation focuses on novels and films produced in the second half of the twentieth century that critique traditional notions of home in contemporary America to expand on the large body of work on American domesticity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These texts demonstrate the damaging power and overwhelming force of conventional domesticity, complicating traditional notions of home by speaking from positions of marginality. In each text, key figures react to limited ideologies of domesticity that seek to maintain sameness, silence, and servitude by enacting embodied resistance to domestic entrapment. The areas of convergence between the figure of the conventional, middle-class home, and the material and psychic reality of home disavow the expectations of the middle-class home ideal and offer real resistance to narrow, and often damaging, visions of home. These spaces allow for new conceptions of home and suggest that it may be possible to conceive of home as something other than fixed in place, governed by family and community, or created by prolific consumption of goods. In this way, this dissertation intervenes in the established binary of home/stability in opposition to mobility/freedom, which maintains the limits of appropriate ways of establishing and enacting domesticity along gender and class lines. By considering portraits of domesticity that are often left out of discussions of home in the United States my research intersects with a broad range of theoretical fields and discourses about mobility, historical and popular culture representations of the tramp, the body and surveillance, the home as spatial construct, and housekeeping as both oppressive and subversive. Drawing on historical and theoretical examinations of women within the home space, coupled with literary criticism and close-readings, I seek to determine the nature of confining domesticity and examine the varied ways that different groups of people respond to their entrapment. At stake in this dissertation is a deeper understanding of the ways that literary and filmic representations of home at the end of the twentieth century suggest a conflict between the ways that home and houses, are popularly represented and the fact that home remains a contested and dangerous space.Item Writing Woman?s Empire: Imperialism and the Construction of American Femininity in Antebellum Literary Discourse(2014-12-16) Lee, Seung HeeThis dissertation examines the interplay between the language of empire and femininity in antebellum literary culture by focusing on texts that offer gendered meanings of America as a new empire in their depiction and imagination of the types of femininity the novelty of the land would give rise to. Where Amy Kaplan?s ?Manifest Domesticity? posits that the imperial subjectivity of white women took shape in and through the language of domesticity during the time of Manifest Destiny, I start by showing that the imperial construction of white femininity began earlier in the Revolutionary period by revisiting the tenet of Republican Motherhood. In the first chapter, I discuss how the colonial context shapes the question of the divided American female subject in Wieland, the very first text by the first professional American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown. Wieland portrays America as the place where the enlightened white female subject transforms itself through the contact with savage otherness both from within and without. The new type of female subjectivity that Brown depicts as arising from the nation that continuously expands its borders and expels the original inhabitants is the divided subject whose inner psychological terrain resembles and mirrors the exterior terrain?a subject that uncannily anticipates Gloria Anzald?a?s borderland subject. Using Anzald?a?s theory, I trace how Brown disrupts the equation of whiteness with rationality to question white ownership of the land. If C.B. Brown treats white femininity as the site of colonial confusion and anxiety, Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller cast it as the major imperial source for the nation by rewriting the national history as the story of woman?s empire and fusing utopian hope for a better world for women with the nation?s imperial aspirations. Chapter two discusses Hobomok where Child opposes masculine forms of colonial venture to offer feminine forms of colonization as more humane and effective ways of building an empire by feminizing sentimentality. Chapter three traces the development of Fuller?s imperialism from Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 to Woman in the Nineteenth Century. I revise the previous understanding that the two texts represent Fuller?s growing criticism of the American empire by showing that Fuller does not so much disapprove of her nation?s imperial progress as attempt to elevate it through the moral source of white women. Chapter four examines the intersection between emancipation and empire that underwrites the plot of the first Afro-American novel, Clotel. William Wells Brown criticizes the notion of America as a woman?s empire, but he still reproduces the discourse of white women?s moral power and its attendant imperial claims to enlist their support. Rather than giving white women?s moral duty a nationalist cast, however, Clotel puts it in the transatlantic context of the emancipationist politics of the British Empire.