UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Seen From Above(2009) Wylder, Sarah; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Seen from Above" is largely about being out of place and being an outsider. Settings for these poems range from laboratories to city parks. A tropical hummingbird gets lost and finds its way to Wisconsin. A pack of coyotes moves into an urban cemetery. A clone of an extinct species paws at the glass of its cage. The humans in these poems are as uncomfortable in their own skin as on the streets of a foreign city. The fat woman dreams of being someone else. The fake saints, even in the afterlife, still struggle with ambiguous roles and questions without answers. A young woman sees a dead body and an extinct bird, but no one will hear her alarm.Item Postcolonial Refashionings: Reading Forms, Reading Novels(2009) Comorau, Nancy Alla; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reads the postcolonial novel through a lens of novel theory, examining the ways in which the postcolonial novel writes a new chapter in the history of the novel. I explore how Postcolonial writers deploy--even as they remodel--the form of the British novel, which provides them a unique avenue for expressing national and individual historical positions and for imaginatively renegotiating their relationships to the canon and the Commonwealth, past and present. In doing so, they remake the forms they have inherited into the genre of the postcolonial novel. The novel, due to its connection to modernity, the nation, and the formation of the subject, holds different possibilities for postcolonial writers than other forms. My dissertation answers readings of postcolonial texts, which, while often superb in their interpretation of the political, fail to focus on genre. In a fashion, postcolonial novels are read as anthropological works, providing glimpses into a culture, and in a peculiar way the novel comes to operate as the native informant. Given the proliferation of the Anglophone postcolonial novel, I argue that it is important that we consider how the postcolonial novel renders established genres into new forms. I focus on a set of postcolonial novels that specifically engage with canonical British novels, calling attention to the fact that while they share much with their predecessors, they function differently than the novels that have come before them. Unlike early postcolonial arguments about empire "writing back" to the center, which position postcolonial and "English" writers in an antipodal power struggle, I argue that the Anglophone postcolonial novel is at once a descendent of the British novel and a genre unto itself--forming a new limb from the British novel's branch. In doing so, these novels perform new ways of writing modernity, the nation, and the subject. Working from a Bakhtinian theory of the modern novel as a form that creates newness, I demonstrate how postcolonial writers use the history and tradition of the British novel to write, revise, and refashion the novel in English.Item The Prescribed Burn(2009) Wirstiuk, Laryssa Andrea; Feitell, Merrill; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Veda is a young Ukrainian-American woman from New Jersey who is creative, insightful, and observant. Her concerns are ordinary yet pressing, and she struggles with obsession, physical distance, and personal identity. Though she loves home, life forces her to leave again and again. Veda is moved by Wildwood, the Pine Barrens, the PATH train, and the Meadowlands. Memories of her favorite landscape ground her, no matter where she happens to be. Veda's parents are a steady, dependable presence, but her peer relationships are her greatest source of interest and inner conflict. Madsy is her best friend and confidante, Arthur is her first love, and Theo inspires such tumultuous passion that he nearly ruins her. Art is her redemptive force. In order to grow, Veda must simultaneously destroy and create.Item Feigned Histories: Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Spanish Chivalric Romance(2009) Crowley, Timothy D.; Hamilton, Donna B.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study re-evaluates Sidney's method and purpose for inventing Arcadia, through analyzing his fiction in tandem with the Spanish genre of chivalric "feigned history." It introduces the new perspective that Arcadia exploits structural and thematic focus on clandestine marriage in Feliciano de Silva's feigned Chronicle of Florisel de Niquea, Part Three (1535), as rendered in translation by Jacques Gohory as "Book" Eleven in the French Amadis cycle (1554). Old Arcadia follows that chivalric paradigm in Books One through Three; then it employs motifs from ancient prose fiction by Apuleius and Heliodorus in Books Four and Five to amplify plot conflict tied to the protagonist lovers' secret marriages. Imitation of Spanish pastoral romances by Montemayor and Gil Polo in Old Arcadia's Eclogues supplements the work's primary narrative plane and also facilitates Protestant aesthetic impressions of marriage and affective individual piety. Shifts in literary source material occur as means to extend and enrich thematic focus and narrative poetics of those first three Books. Sidney's narrative establishes admiratio for its protagonist lovers and reader complicity with them, while imposing comic and tragic distance from other main characters. These observations revise dominant critical assumptions about Old Arcadia. Building upon its chivalric source material, Sidney's fiction increases verisimilitude and invents its own rhetorical focus on dynastic union through clandestine marriage. This study observes for the first time that political tension and legal debate in Old Arcadia's conclusion revolve around that issue. Sidney's fiction figures forth a succession crisis contingent upon legal complications with the issue of clandestine marriage in Arcadia, in a manner congruous with Genevan, French, and Tridentine legal reform on that matter, as well as with England's unique legal situation regarding secret marriage. The story's intellectual focus on justice and equity complements its author's concern with the case of his uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. While Sidney composed Arcadia, his own political and economic prospects remained largely contingent upon Leicester's secret marriage. This study opens new avenues for research on continuity in Sidney's oeuvre and on New Arcadia's influence in English prose fiction and drama of the 1590s and the seventeenth century.Item Romantic Vacancy: British Women's Poetry, Skepticism, and Epistemology(2009) Singer, Katherine; Fraistat, Neil; Wang, Orrin N. C.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship on Romantic women's writing has frequently been preoccupied with the loss, suffering, and sensibility central to women's poetry. My dissertation investigates how four women poets after the French Revolution eventually react against the cult of emotion that trapped them as primarily feeling subjects. Rather than passively depicting absence, they employ various figures of vacancy, a poetic tactic that productively and actively empties out habituated language and the regnant ideologies of the day. In vacating reified thought, women poets more importantly reconceptualize the Enlightenment thinking subject, rejecting two dominant modes of thought--sensibility and progressive reason--instead experimenting with anhedonia, non-meaning, and counterfactuals. Because these women poets view language as necessarily imposing structures of thinking, their varying poetics propose home-grown epistemologies, in dialogue with English and continental philosophy as well as Romantic theories about the revolutionary potential of language. Moreover, since these poets all share a belief in the intimate connection between poetic form and cognition, my chapters reveal how the poets' formal techniques reify, alter, and create ways of thinking. Though they often work from traditional forms, they make use of repetition, caesura, and footnotes to alter the way poems make and unmake meaning. Even more broadly, these poems about thought do not fall prey to Romanticism's tendency to escape from history into the imagination, yet neither do women poets allow themselves to be confined by either their historical place or their embodied identities. Instead, Romanticism might be defined as a movement that employs non-understanding as a means of keeping ideology, and the history that ideology presupposes, at bay. My first chapter defines vacancy as a trope for linguistic or cognitive breakdown, and my next two chapters on Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson explore how these writers engage respectively with Kantian ideas of free beauty and empiricist epistemologies about idiots. My chapter on Felicia Hemans discusses her use of brain-based models of the mind to create perceptual overload that challenges imperialist thinking, and the final piece demonstrates how Maria Jane Jewsbury uses images to dislodge reified visual representations of gendered or colonial landscapes and bodies.Item Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Gothic(2009) Brookshire, David; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation participates in a developing body of Romantic criticism that seeks to trace the crucial, yet uncertain, relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic. Recent studies argue persuasively for the influence of gothic aesthetics on the major poets of the Romantic era, yet surprisingly little attention has been given to Percy Bysshe Shelley, for whom, more than any other Romantic, the gothic sensibility arguably provided the most powerful and lasting influence during the course of his career. Shelley's earliest publications, including his two gothic novels--Zastrozzi, a Romance and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian--have received scant critical attention and demand an analysis that approaches these early works with the same theoretical rigor that his mature poetry receives. I employ the insights of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interrogate my distinction between the Shelleyan subject of Romanticism and the Shelleyesque subject of Gothicism. Where the Shelleyan gaze finds synthesis, desire, pleasure, sublimity, benevolence, and being; the Shelleyesque gaze finds antagonism, drive, jouissance, monstrosity, perversion, and lack. Rather than an undisciplined juvenile phase of Shelley's development, the Shelleyesque continues to operate throughout his mature poetry in unsettling and provocative ways, particularly in works such as Prometheus Unbound--generally considered to be Shelley's most idealistic attempt to transcend the political, sexual, and psychological antagonisms associated with the gothic tradition--further complicating the uncanny relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic.Item Sawing the Air Thus: American Sign Language Translations of Shakespeare and the Echoes of Rhetorical Gesture(2009) Snyder, Lindsey Diane; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) signed in1990 states that "no individual may be discriminated against on the basis of disability." The creation of anti-discrimination laws did not, however, legislate community understanding and equality of access. Focusing on access for the Deaf community to Shakespeare in performance, I am interested in developing both a theoretical and practical document. This document will explore the seemingly disparate fields of Performance theory, Shakespeare studies, Sign language studies, and Deaf studies in order to formalize a structure for interpreting text to create a communal experience for both Deaf and Hearing audiences. The virtuosity of Shakespeare makes his stories universal, enabling them to be translated into countless languages. Signed languages, as a part of the translation studies of Shakespeare, are often considered insignificant to the field because the interpretation into ASL is as temporal as a performance or is perceived by some to be limited to a small community of understanding. By formalizing a process of translation that uses elements of both ASL and gesture, not only does this research provide a structure for creating formal ASL translations, but reexamines the importance of rhetorical gesture in Shakespeare studies. I begin by providing an overview of my methodology and interdisciplinary approach to gesture, ASL, Shakespeare and performance theory. Next, I examine a historical and theoretical framework for gesture in both the D/deaf and performance communities. I go on to discuss the use of gesture (rhetorical, performance, and sign language) in production through an analysis of sketches, charts, and embedded video. Finally, I document my experiences as an interpreter in an original staging practices environment. This documentation illustrates the uses of the previously discussed elements converging in practice. This dissertation will serve as a first step towards practitioners, academics, and interpreters working together to fully interpret Shakespeare's texts and redefine the concept of access.Item Antler(2009) O'Connor, Kimberly; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in Antler are perhaps best described through the methods used to write them. The earliest poems in the collection--those written first, such as "Before" and "Joint"--are attempts to linger in an event or memory, to allow the imagination to elaborate and recreate without any particular end in mind. Some of the poems--"The Lake," for example, or "Long Black Veil"--are explorations in juxtaposition and layering. Later poems, like "To Someone," are focused on incorporating sound and song at the earliest stages of composition and onward. Many of these poems seek to capture family stories. Others explore "family" in a larger sense: "our" (people's) connections to each other, to art or nature, and to wonder and disaster.Item A Precipice of Inches: Poems and Translations(2009) Leichum, Laura; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection represents an enduring fascination with how language connects sense and perception, whether it be a response to a work of art or an attempt to describe the condition of vertigo. Through lyric and narrative under lyric pressure, these poems explore different ways of making experience manifest by invoking memory, both personal and cultural. In some poems, memory transforms experience or vice versa, whereas others attempt to reconcile experience and memory and what may have been lost and gained over time. In addition, German language and literature are a constant touchstone. The translations included in the middle section reflect an interest in literary translation as its own creative project as well as its influence.Item Strange Capacities(2009) Nyman, Melissa Suzanne; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in this collection draw on various events, ranging from a family member's violent death to natural disasters and phenomena. The speakers here repeatedly confront how one unique experience can permanently alter the psyche. As such, these poems often rely on an intense curiosity about the natural world, as well as the mysterious yet infinitely documented realm of the human body.