Browsing by Subject "O'Connor"
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Item Looks like the birthplace of Bela Lugosi : The Texas chainsaw massacre and films of the Southern Gothic(2014-08) Reiss, Hallie Karlyn; Frick, Caroline; Schatz, ThomasFilms depicting, made in, and recreating the American South are always categorized as other kinds of genres: horror, film noir, romantic epic, women’s pictures, etc. On the other hand, the literary tradition of the Southern Gothic is often referred to when categorizing certain kinds of Southern films, yet it is still a genre that is considered to be primarily footed in literature. In those films, the identification of the Southern Gothic is based upon the predetermined conventions of the literary genre, and is brought to life through visual and verbal clues. For the purposes of this thesis, I would like to convey how the literary genre of the Southern Gothic is also exemplified in the medium of cinema. I plan to do this by using examples from a selection of films which fall within the confines of the literary genre, but paying particular attention to the 1974 film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I hope to convince readers that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film which has its own set of predetermined genre tropes and history, might also be read in terms of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, and is a prime example of the way in which the literary genre is also cinematic. To do this I will use the 1939 film, Gone With the Wind as an example of the Old South, of which to base the opposing Southern Gothic ideals. My analysis will include case studies in which I analyze the way in which Southern hospitality is utilized in works of the Southern Gothic, and also how the Southern Gothic focuses on freakish characters to highlight the underbelly of the traditional Southern mythology.Item Necessary evil: rhetorical violence in 20th century American literature(Texas A&M University, 2007-09-17) Baker, James AndrewWayne Booth and other rhetorical critics have developed methods for examining the rhetorical aspects of fiction. In this dissertation, I examine, specifically, the use of rhetorical violence in American fiction. It is my premise that authors use rhetorical violence and the irrationality of violence created mimetically to construct ironic metaphors that comment on the irrationality of the ideology behind the violence, pushing that ideology's maxims to its logical ends. The goal of rhetorical violence, therefore, is to create the conditions for a transfer of culpability so that the act becomes transitive-transferable-loosed from its moorings. Culpability, if indeed it reflects something intrinsically awry with an ideology, becomes the fault of the ideology-????????it becomes the perpetrator of illogic and the condemnatory force associated with the act of violence gets transferred to it. Hence, if the author has created an effective metaphor, when he or she flips the violent scene'????????s "????????value," the audience is willing to follow along. The violence remains a great evil, but the culpability for the act is shifted to a representative of the ideology in question-as-victimizer; nonetheless, that transfer can only occur inasmuch as the audience is willing to force-fit the incongruities of the metaphor.I examine this rhetorical phenomenon in the works of three modern American writers: Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk. I seek to examine the ideologies questioned in these works, the contradictory beliefs expressed by the authors, and to explicate primary episodes in the works of fiction wherein rhetorical violence functions in a rhetorical fashion to promulgate the author's ideology by emotionally jarring the reader loose from commonly-held ideological assumptions in three specific appeals: first, to negate one socially-held ideology in order to promote a conflicting one (Wise Blood); second, to elicit compassion for victimized characters representing social ills (Beloved); third, to call into question the validity of social institutions and practices (Fight Club).