Browsing by Subject "English"

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Autobiography and the making of modernist multiculturalism.
(2011-08) Knight, Jessica Lynn
This dissertation examines American autobiographical writing and argues that the contemporary currency of the genre is not an isolated trend but emerges from historical conditions that can be traced back to the early twentieth century. A century ago, autobiography played a unique role in relation to middle-class consumers of culture, because it offered what appeared to be a transparent window into authentic otherness, a way to perceive, and therefore understand and contain, differences that had become unmoored from their nineteenth-century foundations. I explore autobiography's popularity and profitability in terms of a burgeoning middle-class multiculturalism--what I call "modernist multiculturalism"--that, while not identical to the multiculturalism that would come to define the "culture wars" one hundred years later, nonetheless shares many of its flaws and problematic implications. I examine the production, circulation, and reception of a wide range of early twentieth century texts, including autobiographies published in popular magazines, "fake" autobiographies (popular novels passing as autobiographies), and autobiographical sketches published through workers' schools, demonstrating the complexities of representation that are masked when an individual is perceived as transparently representative of a social group. I use the history of autobiographical publication and readership to recast debates within the contemporary era of multiculturalism, where, I argue, these anxieties are recapitulated within literary pedagogy. I argue that the autobiographical has taken on a significance both more central and more unrecognized than ever before, as authors increasingly (and problematically) come to stand in as representatives of marginalized social groups.
Brain plasticity in speech training in native English speakers learning mandarin tones
(2014-05) Heinzen, Christina Carolyn
The current study employed behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures to investigate brain plasticity associated with second-language (L2) phonetic learning based on an adaptive computer training program. The program utilized the acoustic characteristics of Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) to train monolingual American English-speaking listeners to perceive Mandarin lexical tones. Behavioral identification and discrimination tasks were conducted using naturally recorded speech, carefully controlled synthetic speech, and non-speech control stimuli. The ERP experiments were conducted with selected synthetic speech stimuli in a passive listening oddball paradigm. Identical pre- and post- tests were administered on nine adult listeners, who completed two-to-three hours of perceptual training. The perceptual training sessions used pair-wise lexical tone identification, and progressed through seven levels of difficulty for each tone pair. The levels of difficulty included progression in speaker variability from one to four speakers and progression through four levels of acoustic exaggeration of duration, pitch range, and pitch contour. Behavioral results for the natural speech stimuli revealed significant training-induced improvement in identification of Tones 1, 3, and 4. Improvements in identification of Tone 4 generalized to novel stimuli as well. Additionally, comparison between discrimination of across-category and within-category stimulus pairs taken from a synthetic continuum revealed a training-induced shift toward more native-like categorical perception of the Mandarin lexical tones. Analysis of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) responses in the ERP data revealed increased amplitude and decreased latency for pre-attentive processing of across-category discrimination as a result of training. There were also laterality changes in the MMN responses to the non-speech control stimuli, which could reflect reallocation of brain resources in processing pitch patterns for the across-category lexical tone contrast. Overall, the results support the use of IDS characteristics in training non-native speech contrasts and provide impetus for further research.
The Challenge of Cooking for Chefs: Writing in the English Major
(University of Minnesota, 2001) Leyasmeyer, Archibald; Atkinson, Beverly; Gordon, Christine Mack; Nereson, Sally
"Cultural Smudging:" Appreciation and Appropriation of Black Culture through Music
(2016) Burditt, Paige;
Cultural appropriation is hotbed topic of debate as of late. This essay seeks to explore the relationship between appreciation and appropriation of black culture through music, and what the implications are surrounding the apparent valuation of black culture and simultaneous devaluation of black people. The essay first delves into the terms “appreciation” and “appropriation,” and how the two are not mutually exclusive in terms of white performance of black music. I then discuss this relationship in tandem with a brief history of both blackface minstrelsy and rock ‘n’ roll, with the final discussion revolving around the topic of rap music, particularly focused on the white, female rapper Iggy Azalea, and her controversial music and success. The phrase “cultural smudging” comes courtesy of a critic of Azalea, black female rapper Azealia Banks, and this essay discusses the phrase in relation to appreciation and appropriation. The essay concludes with implications of appropriation and consumption of black culture.
"Dames Are Always Pulling a Switch on You": The Disruption of the Femme Fatale in "Laura"
(2013-02-05) Engelmann, Sarah;
Dangerous and enigmatic women have fascinated people for centuries. In the United States, the femme fatale emerged during the post-war era as one of the most common archetypes in crime fiction and noir film, both genres which often perpetuated extremely masculine ideologies. Many scholars have examined the role that traditional male notions of the femme fatale play in popular culture, but what happens when these notions are complicated because the archetype materializes out of a woman’s pen? In Vera Caspary’s 1943 detective novel Laura, the role of the femme fatale is obfuscated. Who is the femme fatale in this piece? The woman who embodies the traditional characteristics of this character but is ultimately harmless, or the feminine male who turns out to be the murderer? This question is explored again, and in new ways, in Otto Preminger’s 1944 film version.
The Eastern Question, Western Europe, and the Balkans in Fin-de-Siècle Literature.
(2009-06) Tchaprazov, Stoyan Vassilev
Traditionally, the British Empire is studied through the lens of British imperial rule in Asia, Africa, or the Americas, while scholars brush aside what was the vortex of British foreign policy in the second half of the nineteenth century—the Eastern Question, or the question of what to do with the Southeastern European subject peoples of the “decaying” Ottoman Empire. Reading closely late nineteenth-century British and Balkan expository prose and fiction that deal exclusively with the Eastern Question, I demonstrate that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s foreign policy was formed not only in the context of its interests overseas, but also, and perhaps more significantly, in the context of other existing empires in central Europe, as well as in the near east, such as the Russian and the Ottoman. A defining concern of this dissertation is also to demonstrate that the Balkans’ image of the other within Europe is largely a post-Enlightenment Western European construction that was discursively hardened at the end of the nineteenth century by both Western European and Balkan intellectuals. In discursive terms, I claim, this image was virtually parallel to Orientalist constructions of Western Europe’s colonial territories in Asia or Africa. My claim stems from reading in dialogue late nineteenth-century Western European texts (Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and Balkan texts (Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganio and Dobri Voinikov’s The Misunderstood Civilization). I position these texts in relation to a critical discourse of nationalism and empire, as well as examine how these texts reflect or reconstruct these notions’ accepted meanings and connotations in the second half of the nineteenth century.
English Derivatives from Latin
(1922-06) Denneen, Marie Beatrice
The English Essay
(1909) Colberg, Ernest J.
THe fantasy of Asian America : identity, ideology, and desire.
(2009-07) Kim, Chang-Hee
This dissertation reconsiders the extant critique of Asian American identity politics in Asian American literary studies. The intellectual "war of position" initiated over claiming the legitimacy of Asian America has been articulated in the combined terms of both race and gender. I argue that the way in which the war of position is articulated in the binaries between nationalist and feminist critiques and between race-bound identity politics and non-identity politics is a misguided framework for understanding the point at issue in Asian American literary studies. The intra-racial anxiety about the identity-based politics of Asian America originates not so much in the identitarian distinction between the real and the fake or between the good subject and the bad subject; rather, it is attributed to a discursive gap in the self-affirmation of "what Asian America is" within the larger framework of American nationalism. This gap results from the variable extent to which Asian Americans make their dynamic relationship--namely, both resisting and collaborating--with American nationalism in relation to which Asian America came into being both autonomously and subordinately. Within the contextual framework, this dissertation explores the way in which the stereotypes of Asian Americans operate as fundamental to the constitution of both Asian America and white America. I make use of psychoanalysis as a methodological tool to analyze the dialectical dynamics between Asians in America and the gaze of white-centered American society where the exotic presence of the former evokes the desire and anxiety of the latter simultaneously. Within this framework, this dissertation collects some representative cultural products of Asian America as touchstones of Asian American representation. I consider the collection an ideological matrix of the symbolic reality that constitutes the uneven relations of our lives in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and takes them for granted. Simultaneously, this collection shows how both white and Asian Americas negotiate with each other to attend to both intra-racial and inter-racial anxiety and trauma caused by their racial, cultural, sexual, geographical encounters at various levels of different historical and political contexts.
Feverish fragments and dis-eased desire: the archive as fiction.
(2012-06) Gage, Molly Lizabeth Kelley
While the archival antipodes of accessibility and obfuscation--of order and chaos--have long captivated archive readers, such captivation has given way over the last thirty years to an obsession that, following the translation of Jacques Derrida's Mal d'Archive, is often called a fever. Although in Derrida's iteration, "archive fever" refers to the archive's dependence on both preservation and destruction, it refers today both to the archive's promotion of feverish desires (for origins, for authenticity, for paper-bound or otherwise authentic connections) and to readers' often dis-eased responses to the archive as a mediator of conflicting and conflicted meanings. My dissertation, Feverish Fragments and Dis-eased Desire: The Archive as Fiction, argues that as the archive continues to accrue broad symbolic and political significance in contemporary archival discourse and beyond, it is increasingly necessary to investigate the aetiology of its production of fevers. I consequently maintain that a full investigation of the archive's current dis-eased status demands attendance to the words of critics and other specialized archive readers, attendance to the experiences of less professional or professionalized readers, attendance to the archives and archivists themselves, and, as importantly, attendance to the fiction that takes the archive as subject and theme.
The Forest and Social change in Early Modern English literature, 1590–1700.
(2009-05) Weixel, Elizabeth Marie
The Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1590-1700 , recasts the green world of the early modern forest in a historical framework and in a literature of landscape that shaped conceptions of social power in England. I argue that Renaissance poets employ forest imagery and settings in ways that register a slow decline of land-based aristocratic influence and accompanying social markers. At a time of struggle between the Crown and the nobility, growing influence of the middle ranks, and evolving economic and political ideas, literary depictions of forests build upon the unrest associated with historical forests to suggest new social arrangements. The dissertation traces this convergence of landscape, literature, and social rank in forest law and forestry manuals, stage comedy, romance epic, brief biblical epic, and country house poetry. Chapter 1 examines forest law and an arboricultural treatise and demonstrates that their silent omission of aristocratic interests reveals a shift in thought about social power and influence tied to the English landscape. Chapter 2 examines dukes in the woods of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It and argues that forests harbor authority that transcends the social structure and is accessible to characters outside circles of power and privilege. Chapter 3 shows how the intertextual depiction of two failed forest squires in Book VI of Spenser's The Faerie Queene reflects doubt about the long-term efficacy of aristocratic social dominance and the promise it offers for personal and social advancement. Chapter 4 places the banquet temptation of Milton's Paradise Regained in the context of country house poetry by Lanyer, Jonson, and Marvell, and it traces how the poem subjugates the social hierarchy to an ideal of spiritual humility by blending religious dissent with the rumblings of social discontent latent in historical and literary forests.
Formal English Grammar and the Practical Mastery of English
(1917-06) Boraas, Julius
Frayed Homespun: colonial clothing and literary revision in Melville, Sedgwick, and Hawthorne.
(2012-02) Roth-Reinhardt, Anne Elizabeth
This study explores the colonial-based historical fiction of Melville (Israel Potter), Sedgwick (Hope Leslie), and Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables), and uses references to American textiles and apparel to analyze what John McWilliams calls "the problem of cultural memory" presented in the literature. The project, therefore, establishes clothing as an authentic repository of cultural history and demonstrates "textile analysis" -- the methodology I employ for reading representations of textiles as historical text -- as a productive mode of inquiry and a valuable pedagogical approach. Nineteenth-century American authors sought to fashion a useable past out of the history of British North America but often found the remnants of colonial dependency ill-suited to the independent frame of the United States. Although the nation longed to speed away from "colony" and toward "nation," the relative infancy of the United States forced authors to search for a myth of origin that would both predict the Revolution and present an established member of the family of nations. Sometimes with reverence but often with contempt, American authors ascended into the not-so dusty attic of colonial history to seek and to re-fashion truly American, while not always true, American stories. The fictional revisions woven from remnants of colonial dependency and newly-fashioned sovereign ideals altered American history through imaginative historical representation and, in so doing, effectively revolutionized cultural memory to fit a maturing nation. While the design of these fictional revisions depended on historical material, the physical material of colonial textiles and apparel provided the necessary shuttle between the mythic and the historical, the imaginary and the "real." Weaving material relics with archival material effectively transforms fiction into history. References to apparel disguise literary invention as believable fact and establish an authentic conduit to historical memory, albeit mitigated by the nineteenth-century author. In antebellum fiction the entwining of history with homespun and other fabrics resurrects a proto-Revolutionary colonial history even as it exposes the complicated inheritance of "tenth-generation" Americans. In this fashion, and in a major variation to David Levin's terminology, the nineteenth-century Romantic artist becomes its historian.
From water margins to borderlands: boundaries and the fantastic in fantasy, Native American, and Asian American literatures.
(2009-12) Miller, Jennifer L.
This dissertation examines the tropes of boundaries and the fantastic in Asian American, Native American, and fantasy literature, in works by authors ranging from Sherman Alexie and Stephen King to Maxine Hong Kingston and J.K. Rowling. Because both race and the fantastic engage the theme of boundaries, by focusing on the elements of the fantastic in these works of contemporary literature, the theme of race can be brought to the fore as well. The fantastic proves to be particularly valuable in challenging the binary relationship between Self and Other, suggesting new ways to think about the process of identity formation. Furthermore, because of the hesitation and uncertainty inherent in the trope of the fantastic, this same uncertainty is transferred to the discussion of race in these texts, highlighting the way in which many authors simultaneously embrace and reject stereotypical racial fantasies. Additionally, examining the limitations of the fantastic provides another challenge to expected portrayals of race and difference in the way it blurs the line between reader and text and compels the reader to become a more active participant in discussions of race. In this way, reading these works through the lens of the fantastic moves questions of race in popular texts to the center of the discussion, forcing readers to acknowledge the complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory ways in which race is portrayed in contemporary works of fantasy, Asian American, and Native American fiction.
The ghost and the corpse: figuring the mind/brain complex at the turn of the twentieth century.
(2010-12) Kamerbeek, Christopher
My dissertation investigates how debates about the relationship of the mind and the brain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are refracted through literature and early cinema. I engage select literary texts and films of the period--including the private letters and public fictions of Henry James, the psychology of William James, the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, the correspondence and case studies of Sigmund Freud, the films of the Edison Film Company, and the novels of Edward Bellamy--in order to demonstrate how concerns about the limits of the human body correspond with concerns about the limits of the text and the frame. Each of my chapters addresses the "afterlife" of posthumous interpretation--how individual subjects become objects of study, how individual bodies give way to literary archives, psychological cases, and film stock. I contend that the competing diagnostic practices of psychology and neurology model competing modes of seeing and reading and that the figures of the ghost and the corpse--the representative bodies of psychic and anatomical space--emerge as metaphors for the material and immaterial detritus of works of art.
Gothic heroines and cultural trauma in 20th Century literature and film
(2015-01) Brownell, Eric
Analyzes how 20th Century British writers and Hollywood filmmakers have adapted common features of the Gothic literary tradition - the imperiled but investigative heroine, the attractive but coercive villain, and the portrait of a female predecessor - to address massive traumas that have been repressed by, but which continue to affect, modern cultures. Argues that, in each case, the text "acts out" the repressed cultural trauma underlying its narrative through the heroine's narcissistic over-identification with a portrait of a female predecessor. However, through scenes that disturbingly mirror the heroine and the villain, each work portrays the consequence of that repression: an irruption of traumatic past violence in the present. While the works I consider thereby address the shortcomings of public narratives that strive to evade or redeem collective trauma, they also foreground Gothic ambiguity and excess to acknowledge the limits of their own representational responses.
A Hermitage Revisited: The Literary Afterlife of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse
(2016) Reinken, Brian;
High theory, the teaching of writing, and the crisis of the University.
(2012-07) Pawlowski, Lucia
Post-structuralism, a theory of signs for written texts, would seem an obvious resource for a field like Composition Studies that has "writing" at its center. Yet the post-structuralist turn in Composition Studies is hamstrung by the deep division between camps in the field that are committed to political critique on the one hand or to textual critique on the other. In this polarization, too often post-structuralism is posited as mere ludic play, while serious political critique is considered the domain of other bodies of research, such as social-epistemic rhetoric. Political critique is especially important at this historical juncture for academia, where the neoliberalization of the university means a less just university. While social-epistemic rhetoric is necessary to a political critique, social-epistemic rhetoric is insufficient because it lacks a micropolitical critique--one that works at the level of specific institutions (in this case, the university). The exemplary case of social-epistemic work that is necessarily political but insufficiently micropoiltical is David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University." In this essay, he argues that composition teachers must teach first-year writing students the conventions of academic discourse as one would teach the social conventions of any culture in order to acculturate the newcomers. This project posits queer theory as a micropolitical post-structuralism: a theory that can co-articulate post-structuralism and social-epistemic rhetoric, while paying attention to the kind of institution into which students are expected to be acculturated (academia). Queer theory, with its critique of heternormativity, has obvious political implications. At the same time, with its post-humanist notion of the subject and of semiotics, queer theory is post-structuralist. This dissertation proposes that composition teachers use the concept of "drag" in queer theory to "teach academic discourse in drag," which means to teach academic discourse as a kind of identity--like gender--that students "perform" without identifying with or subscribing to the institution--neoliberalized academia--from which its emanates. I propose a "rhetoric of drag" for post-structuralist composition teachers who are critical of the neoliberal university. This professional rhetoric consolidates the diverse attempts in social-epistemic rhetoric to teach academic discourse while critiquing academia for its neoliberalization. But the metaphor of drag does more than consolidate existing statements in Composition Studies: the metaphor of "drag" politicizes the process of acculturation in a way that "inventing" does not. The metaphor of "drag" draws attention to how the discourse of any oppressive institution--be it heteronormativity or academia--is exclusionary, oppressive, and compels a creative, parodic response. By teaching academic discourse in drag, college writing teachers give students the opportunity to reconcile the need to learn the discursive conventions of academia even while resisting the institution of academia. The act of disidentification that "drag" offers has special purchase for marginalized students--first-generation students, students of color, and working-class students--who already have a resistant or oppositional relationship to academia. Teaching academic discourse in drag acknowledges this oppositional stance, a stance that we can expect to become more prevalent the "non-traditional" student becomes the norm in our writing classrooms.
A Historical and Semasiological Study of Some Synonyms, Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives, Denoting "Pleasure"
(1910-05) Hegland, Martin
"In a shattered language": a feminist poetics of trauma.
(2011-10) Griffiths, Amy Kathleen
In a Shattered Language": A Feminist Poetics of Trauma, fuses theories of traumatic stress with studies of contemporary poetry and poetics. This project intervenes in debates over the ways trauma is experienced, remembered, and represented by positing poetry as an alternative form of discourse--one which endures the pressures of testimonial coherence while simultaneously preserving the aporias of knowledge and memory that characterize traumatization. My analysis also revises trauma theory from a feminist perspective by investigating domestic traumas such as rape, incest, and mental illness as portrayed in poetry by North American women writers in the twentieth century. The dissertation opens with a brief Prologue, which views the 2010 Korean film Poetry as a text through which the major concerns of this project are refracted. The first chapter, "Difficult Word: The Interpretation of `Trauma' and the Trauma of Interpretation," traces a genealogy of trauma as an intellectual concept prone to semantic slippage, and calls for a Poetics of Trauma to reconfigure the role of linguistic form in conceptualizing trauma and its aftermath. The second chapter, "`While Someone Else is Eating': The Dialectic of the Extreme and the Everyday in Frances Driscoll's. The Rape Poems," conducts close readings of poetry by a survivor of intruder rape, and argues that a feminist perspective qualifies the core tenet of trauma theory which locates traumata in extreme external events. The third chapter, "Traumatizing the Lyric `I': Poetic Subjectivity in Betsy Warland's. The Bat Had Blue Eyes," considers theories of the traumatized "self" as they pertain to an adult survivor of childhood incest, and argues that poetry-writing generates a phenomenological selfhood through which survival becomes perpetual revision. The final chapter, "Traumatic Consciousness: The Poetry of Interpretation in Hannah Weiner's Archive," encounters Weiner's work as a means of critiquing the psychopathology model of trauma. This chapter finds that Weiner's avant-garde poetics both does and does not evince symptoms of her struggle with schizophrenia, and as such, suggests how conventional language itself traumatizes consciousness. This chapter weaves together research in Weiner's unpublished journals with a personal narrative to form an implicit theory of the poetics of reading and writing trauma.

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