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Making Sense: Race and Modern Vision
“Making Sense: Race and Modern Vision” explores how race as we know it becomes visually recognizable. It does so by historicizing the perceptual knowledge produced by race and vision and by demonstrating how the relationship between race and vision has come to be regarded as common sensical. In particular the dissertation ...
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 fearsome figures and monstrous systems as modeled after, and emergent from settler-colonial transgressions ...
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 The Western in European hero myths and its translation into American colonial frontier mythology and then ...
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 Jonathan Safran Foer; World’s End, by T.C. Boyle; and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.
"Sorrow Brought Forth Joy": Feelings of Faith in American Literature
Feelings of Faith draws upon religious thought, specifically, Christian theological traditions, in a reconsideration of major debates in contemporary affect theory. The dissertation is a study of American literature across historical periods. Its nine short chapters discuss the captivity narrative of Puritan Mary Rowlandson; ...
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 dissertation demonstrates that while the consequent border asymmetries have since dictated material formations ...
Pedagogies of U.S. Imperialism: Racial Education from Reconstruction to the Progressive Era
Pedagogies of U.S. Imperialism: Racial Education from Reconstruction to the Progressive Era constructs a genealogy of racial education through pedagogies developed at manual training and industrial institutes, settlement schools, and in philosophies of racial liberal education that were founded in contexts of slavery and its ...
"I Know Who I Am: Self-constitution and the Unreliable Narrator"
This essay explores the unreliable narrator in 20th and 21st century American and English literature, the current scholarship surrounding unreliable narration, and theories of self-constitution and self-presentation as a means of understanding the relationship between author and narrator.
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 sustain “new” female poetic subjects and new experiences for them. For this purpose, throughout the main ...
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” to refer to the world of things that are physically imperceptible, as that which needs to undergo processes ...