Browsing by Subject "Contemporary literature"
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Item Narrative privacy : keeping secrets in contemporary Native American, Mexican American, and Asian American metafictions(2015-05) Eils, Colleen Gleeson; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Perez, Domino R.; Minich, Julie A.; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole M.; Barrish, Phillip J.This dissertation considers twenty-first century metafictional novels and short stories by Native American, Mexican American, and Asian American authors who use literary form to theorize the politics of ethnic privacy. These authors use metafictional strategies to situate the well-meaning desires of academic and popular readers for ethnic literary representation within historical contexts in which increased visibility for ethnic people often compromised rather than improved their status. Using a formal maneuver I term “narrative privacy,” the writers in this project explicitly withhold stories from readers to maintain control over the most intimate parts of their lives and as an assertion of the social and political dangers that often accompany the mass dissemination of ethnic representations in the post-9/11 age. The dissertation’s three chapters each focus on a specific context of compulsory visibility—ethnographic, capitalistic, and archival—that authors use narrative privacy to resist. The dissertation opens with a reading of David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles (2006), Sherman Alexie’s “Dear John Wayne” (2000), Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines (2003), and Nam Le’s “The Boat” (2008) as rejecting ethnographic imperatives in ethnic literature. By constructing private spaces for their characters within the narrative, Treuer, Alexie, González and Le destabilize persistent understandings of ethnic peoples as available subjects of study for the curious. Chapter two considers how Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) and Le’s “Love and Honor” (2008) position writers’ and readers’ literary gazes as privileged acts of dominance and surveillance that mimic oppressive U.S. political and economic processes that target people of color. Monique Truong understands literary and historical inclusion of marginalized subjectivities as potentially confining rather than validating in The Book of Salt (2003), the focus of the third chapter. Truong argues that well-meaning academic practices of historical and literary recovery reinscribe the authority of written records that have long diminished and excluded marginalized subjectivities. In conclusion, I argue that these narrative strategies indicates a vibrant formal and political shift in contemporary ethnic U.S. fiction that attends to some of the most urgent questions of privacy and surveillance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century U.S.Item Narrative salvage(2016-05) Shapland, Jennifer Ann; Houser, Heather; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Bennett, Chad; Lewis, RandolphNarrative Salvage brings together contemporary writing and film of what I call wastescapes: places made expendable—wasted—under late capitalism. In hybrid works of the 2000s by Bonnie Jo Campbell, Agnes Varda, Natasha Trethewey, Brenda Longfellow, Rebecca Solnit, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Eileen Myles, I analyze tactile and emotional representations of everyday life in the wastescape. Each of the four chapters examines a particular wastescape featured by these writers and filmmakers: the postindustrial junkyard, the oil-slicked Gulf Coast, the nuclear waste strewn Nevada desert, and the melting Arctic tundra. Within these spaces, I track practices of repurposing that occur in the inhabitants’ everyday lives and analyze the potential for writing and film to reclaim and transform place through representation. I argue that waste is a crucial site of trans-corporeal experience, which in Stacy Alaimo's words constitutes a "literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature." The trans-corporeal wastescape affects ecosystems, human communities, and material objects; however, the representation of waste has not been a primary focus in environmental criticism. Narrative Salvage addresses this gap by approaching waste interdisciplinarily, drawing on the critical tools of environmental studies, sociology, and material culture studies. Practices of repurposing in the works I study dismantle the ideologies that create wastescapes by calling into question the production of value and rejection of waste that undergird capitalist and patriarchal enterprise. In the deviant ethics of the wastescape, the telos of progress loses its hold, making way for makeshift epistemologies and queer temporalities of continuous making do and regeneration. These experimental contemporary works' alinear, fragmented, and polyvocal forms embrace the vital ongoingness of decay and contamination. In Narrative Salvage, adamantly personal literatures and films of the wastescape urge audiences to rethink waste by seeing it anew, by defamiliarizing it, and in so doing help to rethink the human's relationship to—immersion within—place and environment.Item Narrow nationalisms and third generation Nigerian fiction(2016-05) Coffey, Meredith Armstrong; Harlow, Barbara, 1948-; Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-; Bady, Aaron; Falola, Toyin; Shingavi, SnehalThe last decade or so, many literary critics hold, has witnessed a substantial shift in African fiction: nationalist commitments, integral to older African writers' work, have faded from younger Africans' literary visions, which often engage wide transnational networks instead. In contrast to this dominant critical narrative, however, the dissertation contends that younger writers have not rejected nationalism, but have revised it in myriad ways to meet contemporary needs. Moreover, I argue not against the existence of a transnational turn, but rather that there is an additional, local dimension, which has received little attention. In the texts I examine, withdrawals into smaller networks function hand in hand with reconfigurations of nationalism, ultimately resulting in what I term “narrow nationalisms.” To make this case, the dissertation focuses on a selection of novels by third generation Nigerian authors-those born after the country's 1960 independence-about three interrelated areas of crisis: oil conflict in southern Nigeria, the rise of cybercrime, and the so-called “brain drain.” I analyze how narrow nationalisms operate in Kaine Agary's Yellow-Yellow (2006), Helon Habila's Oil on Water (2010), Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2009), Sefi Atta's A Bit of Difference (2012), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013). Whether they are more about sovereignty, ideology, or belonging, the narrow nationalisms of the primary texts all contest longstanding wisdom that nationalism is about imposing ideology from above, especially as characters retreat into smaller communities from which they attempt to catalyze bottom-up, grassroots change. What, then, are the implications of Nigerian fiction's continued engagement with nationalism for the study of contemporary African literature? Further, in a country that is already fractured in terms of political control and allegiances, and in an era in which the role of the nation-state remains uncertain, what might narrow nationalisms suggest about Nigerian sovereignty? Examining narrow nationalist spaces in third generation Nigerian writing not only complicates literary critical conversations but also reveals new insight into challenges for the present-day Nigerian state-and for Africa and the global south more widely.