The system will be down for regular maintenance from 8:00-10:00am PDT on April 3rd, 2024.
Browsing Dissertations and Theses by Subject "American literature"
Now showing items 1-20 of 65
-
1848 Beyond the 19th Century: Border Fictions, Peripheral Modernities
This dissertation analyzes 20th and 21st century border fictions that recreate the meaning of 1848 by disrupting the legacies of colonial modernity, in particular the territorial preoccupation of U.S. expansionism. The ... -
19th Century American Literary Naturalism and the Grotesque
This dissertation examines the significance of the grotesque to literary naturalism’s engagement with the scientific discourse of the late 19th and early 20th century. The grotesque is a set of artistic principles surrounding ... -
19th Century American Women's Literature- Symbolic Meanings in Kate Chopin's The Awakening
When Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening in 1899, the book was instantly attacked for its blatant depiction of a woman's desire for independence and sexual freedom. It challenged the idea that a woman would be satisfied only ... -
A Tiny Miniature World Where the Proportions Are Slightly Off
I continually saw visions of a massive, black-roofed carnival structure being destroyed in the middle of the ocean. It stood on thin, wooden posts encrusted in mussels, and was intertwined with slides and rollercoasters ... -
Affective Time: American Realism as Resynchronization, 1860-1910
My dissertation, Affective Time: American Realism as Resynchronization, 1860-1910, examines the disciplinary functions of the clock and attendant temporal systems in U.S. literature and culture from the mid-19th to early ... -
An Address to One and Many: Epistolary Experiments with the Public Sphere in England and the United States - 1735, 1796, 1998
This dissertation examines the genre of the author-published familiar letter to consider the ways in which people come to understand themselves as part of a public, and as actors who might affect the shape of that public. ... -
The Art of Multiple Plotlines: A Close Examination of Three Generational Novels
In order to answer the craft question of how multiple timelines and plotlines are handled within a single novel, I perform a close reading and analysis of three multi-generational novels: Everything is Illuminated, by ... -
Baring the Windigo’s Teeth: Fearsome Figures in Native American Narratives
Whereas non-Native American fictional fearsome figures tend to produce anxiety from their resistance to categorization, their unpredictable movement, and their Otherness, many contemporary Native American writers re-imagine ... -
The Book as Object and Concept in American Poetry after Modernism
This dissertation argues that the printed book—as a unit of meaning, a sculptural and visual object, and a consumer good—has been important to American poetry after modernism, and in particular to writers who directly ... -
Border Crossings: Passing and Other(ed) Strategic Performances of Race in African American and Chicana/o Literatures
(2014-02-24)This project begins with an analysis of racial passing narratives, and considers the ways that the genre provides a useful deconstructive tool to better understand essence-based productions of race and racial authenticity ... -
California: State of Light
From the dominance of a benign and benevolent climate a specific California metaphysics emerged that I call California immateriality. Drawing on current discussions in material culture studies, I use the term “immaterial” ... -
Chairs
What drives prose if it isn’t the story? Or rather, what is a story? Anton Chekhov’s famous rule of storytelling suggests that a gun should not be included in the first act if it is not going to be fired in the second, but ... -
Choreographing Memory: Performance and Embodiment in Multimodal Narrative
Drawing from a body of philosophical and theoretical reflection about movement, Choreographing Memory explores the embodied dimensions and inherent performativity of writing and reading multimodal texts situated in late ... -
"Crafting" the Race House of the Domestic Individual: Political Subjectivities, Hierarchy and Value in the Crafting and Do-It-Yourself Labors of Domestic Fiction, 1850 - Present
`Crafting' the Race House of the Domestic Individual: Political Subjectivities, Hierarchy and Value in Crafting and Do-It-Yourself Labors of Domestic Fiction, 1850 - Present is an interdisciplinary cultural studies project ... -
Crossing the Divide Between The Western and Writing About the West
The Western as a popular fiction and, later, cinematic genre has dominated the American mythos for more than a century, but the genre itself is grotesquely inauthentic. In this essay I survey the origins of the imagery of ... -
El recuerdo como arquitectura: MartÃn Adán, William Goyen y el yo que se habla
¿Qué recordamos de los lugares donde crecimos? ¿Qué es lo que se nos escapa, artero, como una estrella fugaz o un espejismo? SerÃa lógico que los recuerdos de estos espacios y de lo que allà ocurrió tuvieran una ... -
Empire’s Imagination: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in ‘Local’ Hawaiʻi Narratives
My dissertation, “Empire’s Imagination: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in ʻLocal’ Hawaiʻi Narratives,” addresses the history of U.S. empire in Hawaiʻi, arguing that empire persists into the present through the ... -
Female Exiles in Language: Reading for New Poetic Subjects in Modern and Contemporary Feminist Experimental Poetry
The research aim in this dissertation is to analyze the experimental poetic languages of H. D., Gertrude Stein, Cathy Park Hong, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and discuss the ethico-political potential of their languages to ... -
Glancing Visions: American Literature Beyond the Gaze
This dissertation challenges the longstanding assumption that visuality in American literature of the nineteenth century through early modernism was inherently imperialistic, possessive, and theological. I acknowledge the ... -
Global Fluidity: Coalitional Worldbuilding in the Afterlife of Posthumanism
Global Fluidity argues that contemporary queer of color poetry, fiction, and popular culture theorize the relationships between property, gender, sexuality, and race in the current environmental crisis. Across genre and ...