Browsing by Subject "Literature"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 55
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    Anticipation of Wordsworth's Philosophy of Nature
    (1921-05) Nelson, Norman Edward
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    Aspects of Social Life Revealed in Beowulf
    (1910-05) True, Blanche Lucinda
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    Babel's Apology: Religious Nostalgia and Literary Engagement with the Postsecular Age
    (2018-12) Miller, Grace
    Postsecularism has recently become a popular field of inquiry in literary criticism, but literary critics frequently overlook religious writers and texts in their studies. This dissertation argues that religious works share many similar traits with the established canon of postsecular literature and bring many aspects of their value systems into dialogue. These postsecular religious works are marked by two noteworthy elements; first, they adapt their approach to their own religion to emphasize the same aspects that postmodern theologians and postsecular writers tend to emphasize: mysticism beyond rationalization and faith versus practice, a tendency that is possibly meant to make the works more palatable to postsecular readers. These authors do not need to wander from their own religious traditions to accomplish this; they simply incorporate their religions’ own traditions in the realm of mysticism or aesthetic experience. The second aspect of these works, however, which provides some tension to the narrative, is a keen sense of religious nostalgia and loss. This loss influences every narrative differently; sometimes it ungrounds the faith experience from history, emphasizing the transitory nature of lived experience, including religious experience. At other times, it brings into stark relief the modern age’s inability to provide enough comforts to dull the passions of the human spirit. As this argument progresses, the implications of religious nostalgia—and the sense of loss that often comes with it—become increasingly grave, from the death of an individual in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to the destruction of an entire culture as portrayed throughout Louise Erdrich’s novels, then examining eschatologies in the work of Walker Percy, and finally, Don DeLillo’s portrayal of religious history as it might be applied to mass destruction and death. Each of these narratives illustrate, in their own way, the way these authors and their characters abandon theological authority in favor of emphasizing aspects of religion that can be preserved in the postmodern world, namely, its mystical, ineffable characteristics. As they write, they erase unnecessary difference and preserve the aspects of their faith that deserve preservation, achieving what Habermas called “the mystical fusion with a consciousness that embraces the universe.”
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    Byronism in Alfred de Musset
    (1918-05) Clefton, Herbert
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    Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia
    (2019-08) Ding, Yuan
    Since the 1970s, the focus of the field of Asian American Studies has gone through dramatic shifts, from its early archival efforts to preserve the immigrant experience, repudiate orientalist stereotypes and demand for civil liberties, to a more recent turn towards globalization and transnationalism. Since the 1965 immigration reform, which abolished the long-standing discriminatory national quota system limiting Asian immigration into the US, Asian Americans have surpassed Hispanics to become the fastest growing minority group in the US. This influx of Asian Americans in the last half of the 20th century coincides with the ascension of Asia in the global economy, and both developments anticipate the adoption of neoliberal multiculturalist policies within the US nation-state. These developments challenge Asian American Studies to shift away from cultural nationalist debates over representational authenticity vs. cultural hybridity towards a more self-reflective engagement with the demands of the neoliberal literary and cultural market. Addressing this change of direction in the field, my dissertation, “Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia,” analyzes the ways in which race gets capitalized in the works by contemporary diasporic Asian writers, who deploy economic tropes and neoliberal logics to narrate the Asian diasporic identity and experience. In dialogue with other recent critical interventions that have sought to reframe the Asian American and Asian diasporic identity in relation to the proliferation of global capitalism such as Flexible Citizenship (1999), Economic Citizens (2007) and Liquidated (2009), “Capitalizing Race” argues that Asian diasporic agency is shaped by and in turn regulates the proliferation of flexible, transnational capital. Examining how contemporary fiction situates the Asian diaspora in the context of the global circulation of capital and mass media imaginaries, “Capitalizing Race” concludes that the rhetorical production of “ethnicity” is an economic process, governed by the neoliberal logic of the literary, cultural market. Delving into the ways in which human mobility is dictated by and signified through financial liquidity, “Capitalizing Race” illuminates the neoliberal multiculturalist aesthetics operating in some of the texts analyzed here. I’m weary of the uncritical celebration of their flexible accumulation of cultural capital, which, I argue, detracts from the Asian diasporic community’s effort to achieve greater political representation and equality.
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    The clarity of the Cold War: truth and literary communism between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in the era of postmodern globalization.
    (2012-07) Gill, Meredith Morgan
    This dissertation examines the cultural logic of the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, as a symptom of postmodern globalization. Following Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson's 1947 proclamation that Cold War propaganda should be crafted as "clearer than truth," this study investigates the complicated relationships among truth, production, and interpretation that emerged in similar manners between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War period. In particular, I consider literary, visual, and critical texts that contest a logic of truth which seeks to dissociate truth from its conditions of production. In so doing, I assert that a second Cold War took place between a global creative class, which has been termed "the multitude," and the (unwittingly) allied forces of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Accordingly, I argue that the Cold War cannot be understood simply as a battle between East and West, capitalism and communism, two world orders, or disparate modes of production. In chapter one, I explore the transition to postmodernism, as the cultural logic of late capitalism, to detail the changing conditions for aesthetic and political dissent against the neo-liberal management of American capitalism and the socialist management of Soviet state capitalism. I explore diplomatic correspondences between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as well as a number of examples of aesthetic dissent ranging from popular magazines to Soviet subcultures to Leftist American avant-garde visual art and a ten-year old American schoolgirl's quest to discover the truth about the Cold War. In chapter two, I provide a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, a meta-fictional, "autobiographical" novel about political life during the Cold War period. I read this text alongside Louis Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, to examine the complexities of locating truth that have resulted from postmodernity's complication of the distinction between subjects and objects. Chapter three presents a historical case study of how the concept of truth was contested within samizdat, the underground late-Soviet self-publishing movement. In particular, I look at Metropol, a 1979 samizdat literary anthology, which, I argue exemplifies a form of literary communism within the creative block of actually lived "communism." The fourth and final chapter explores the autobiography of Assata Shakur--communist, former Black Panther, and escaped convict who writes from socialist Cuba. I argue that the complex interplay of narrative forms in her text, as well as her use of intuition as a methodology, exposes a logic of truth that is non-representational, points to similarities between late capitalist and prison temporalities, and radically remaps the discursive parameters of the Cold War.
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    Divergent Narratives on Chinese Internet Censorship: Western-centric versus Local Perspectives
    (2021-05) Deutmeyer, Dana
    Chinese Internet censorship refers to the Chinese government’s policies that attempt to control the circulation of online information. Internet censorship as a focus of study produces multiple, incongruent perspectives, especially among Western academics and authors. This thesis discusses “black-and-white” and “shades-of-grey” perspectives of Chinese Internet censorship. “Black and white” perspectives present Internet censorship as necessarily being oppressive, and are informed by Western-centric biases rooted in an ideologized, essentialized view of democratic principles and Orientalism. “Shades of grey” perspectives emphasize understanding censorship from a local perspective, including how it prompts the development of certain online behaviors. Under the umbrella of Chinese censorship lies various aspects, including the goal of the government to prevent collective action, as well as the underlying motivation of producing a shared understanding of reality. It also includes how netizens experience Internet censorship, how they react to it, and the influences it has on online culture. Importantly, this discussion of Chinese Internet censorship also considers how the West interprets it, which is usually in a very critical manner, as censorship is viewed as antithetical to Western-centric essentialized values of democracy and freedom.
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    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.
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    The Humor of Fielding and Sterne: A Comparison
    (1920-08) Cowie, Alexander
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    An Index of Anglo-Norman Verse
    (1918-06) Brown, Margery Lorraine
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    The Inlfuence of Godwin on Charles Brockden Brown
    (1920-06) Hudson, Dorothy Rose