Browsing by Subject "Myth"
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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 The Chicano Gunfighter and the Mestiza Goddess: contemporary Chicana/o identity in Américo Paredes's(Texas Tech University, 2006-08) Benavidez, Fernando; Aycock, Wendell M.; Miner, MadonneThe notion of a complex process of identity construction due to the unique political and cultural Chicana/o situation at the U.S.-Mexico border is the focus of this thesis. What matters, that is, is how the Chicana/o "thinks" about his/her existence in such an historically conflicted space like the border after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and how the Chicanas/os define themselves there through literature. For decades, Mexican American artists, authors, musicians, philosophers, and scholars have attempted to express the Chicana/o consciousness on the border. As part of the cultural group that lost this historical battle between the U.S. and Mexico, the contemporary Mexican American border intellectual has been challenged by his/her unique existence in this “in-between” border space. In With His Pistol In His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero and in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Américo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldúa attempt to reflect different processes of identity construction, respectively. Then, the question is: How do these authors interpret this unique existence "in between both possibilities" within their works differently? In order to examine these works, I will explore the border region as a unique space from which these authors explore identity construction, implying that the U.S.-Mexico border is a cultural, social, and political space which becomes a relevant force in this process. I will also explore how each author influences the way Chicanos/as think about themselves and their socially subaltern status on the border. I will also consider how each author affects Chicana/o identity construction as well as the affect each author has on the predicament into which the Chicana/o intellectual's process of identity construction falls when facing a postmodernist world.