Browsing by Subject "Contemporary Literature"
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Item The Media Spectacle of Terrorism and Response-Able Literature(2010-01-16) Cockley, DavidA movement in literature has evolved out of the aftermath of 9/11 to confront the spectacle of terrorism perpetuated by the corporate news media and find a way to respond to terrorism in a more ethical manner. In this dissertation, I examine the influence of the media on literary production in the post-9/11 environment and how writers push back against the foreclosure of the media spectacle of terrorism. I examine a particular practice, infotainment, which crosses over from television news into literature that focuses on terrorism, and I lay out the theoretical framework for understanding literary responses to this practice. Since 9/11, the corporate media has been fixated with terrorism, and the vast amount of literature produced since the tragedy that focuses on terrorism demonstrates terrorism?s influence on literary production. I expose a theoretical basis for how literature intervenes in the spectacle of terrorism, offering a challenge to media foreclosure through an ethical engagement. Then, I examine texts in both the American and global contexts to determine how they intervene in the foreclosure and form more ethical responses. Writers like Don DeLillo and Moshin Hamid confront the unified definition of terrorism the corporate media presents by opening the subject to unanswered questions and in-depth examinations from all angles that enable responses rather than close off diverse perspectives. Literary writers strive to respond to the singular nature of each event, while positing an understanding of the plight of victims and perpetrators alike. The texts I examine each engage the foreclosure of the media spectacle of terrorism, creating a critical discourse by opening gaps, imposing ethical hesitation, reinstituting singularity, and responding to terrorism in an ethical manner. Don DeLillo posits an exemplary challenge to writers issued by terrorism in an often quoted line from Mao II: ?What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought.? DeLillo, along with other contemporary writers, takes up this challenge in order to ethically respond to the spectacle of terrorism.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.