UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item Un asunto minúsculo: Constelaciones contemporáneas en las narrativas de lo cotidiano(2024) hernandez, daniela paz; Demaría, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Este trabajo explora cómo lo cotidiano, conceptualizado como 'minúsculo', es representado en las obras de cinco autores contemporáneos latinoamericanos: Teoría de la gravedad, de Leila Guerriero; Leer y dormir, de Gonzalo Maier; Ómnibus, de Elvio Gandolfo; Los llanos, de Federico Falco y Ella estuvo entre nosotros, de Belén Fernández Llanos. Estas narrativas varían en contenido y estilo, pero hablan de rutinas, detalles y asuntos pequeños, como lavar platos, viajar al trabajo u ordenar la casa. El objetivo principal de este análisis es ilustrar cómo estos aspectos aparentemente irrelevantes, mundanos o imperceptibles de lo cotidiano arrojan luz sobre la complejidad del presente y sus discursos de subjetividad. Para comprender el valor de lo cotidiano se estudia, primero, la capacidad de estas escrituras para construir materialidades autónomas y vibrantes; segundo, cómo estos pequeños asuntos minúsculos ayudan a distinguir lo familiar y crear en él un espacio de experimentación para el sujeto; y tercero, cómo producen una temporalidad única e íntima que se lee como una alternativa al tiempo uniforme e industrializado. Estos tres puntos se analizan utilizando herramientas de la teoría de los afectos, nuevos materialismos y los estudios culturales de lo cotidiano. El valor de esta investigación radica en su capacidad para ofrecer un punto de vista único, que va más allá de los límites de lo literario para abarcar una reflexión más amplia sobre el presente. En una era inundada de información y perpetuamente bajo el influjo de lo nuevo, este estudio fomenta la contemplación y la reflexión, ofreciendo una pausa, un contrapunto, al ritmo frenético de la vida moderna. Este trabajo sostiene que estas narrativas crean espacios para un compromiso más deliberado e introspectivo con la realidad y promueven un cambio sutil pero transformador, lo que representa en sí mismo un acto revolucionario.Item American Hospitality: The Politics of Conditionality in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction(2020) Gleich, Lewis S; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)American Hospitality rereads the canon of American literature by focusing attention on the centrality of hospitality to the twentieth-century American literary imagination. It argues that twentieth-century U.S. authors employ scenes of hospitality (scenes of welcoming and withholding, of invitation and rejection, of accommodation and imposition) and figures of hospitality (hosts and guests, strangers and trespassers, homes and thresholds, gifts and reciprocations) for three specific purposes: first, to reproduce dominant American discourses of hospitality; second, to critique these same discourses; and third, to model an alternative ethics of hospitality. Faced with the closing of the western frontier, rapid increases in immigration, the growing need to provide assistance to large segments of the population, an escalating call to secure and police the national borders, and the widespread demand to make public accommodations in all parts of the country more hospitable to racialized others, U.S. authors during the twentieth century utilized discourses of hospitality to reflect on the effects that sweeping historical changes were having on the nation’s ability to remain hospitable to peoples both inside and outside its borders. In examining discourses of hospitality in twentieth-century U.S. fiction, American Hospitality makes three principal contributions to scholarship. First, it opens the canon of American literature to reconstruction by tracing the central importance of scenes of hospitality across a wide range of twentieth-century American texts and genres, from highly canonical texts like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to less canonical texts like Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends and Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s The Crown of Columbus. Second, it expands on existing work on the subject of American exceptionalism by showing how American exceptionalist narratives rely heavily on scenes and figures of hospitality to justify and disavow acts of exclusion, dispossession, exploitation, and violence. Third, it lays the foundation for theorizing an alternative ethics of American hospitality. Modeled by the texts featured in American Hospitality, this alternative ethics, which I term affirmative hospitality, has four core principles: recognition of the conditional nature of all hospitality exchanges, affirmation of the singularity of the individual, accommodation, and deliberation.Item PROTEAN GODS: A RETELLING OF HISPANIOLA’S STORY THROUGH THE MAROON(2018) Rivera, Ines Pastora; Ontiveros, Randy; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that an exploration of the maroon, or the runaway slave, in literature can be a means to acknowledging the too-often-repressed historical, political, and cultural connections between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and can also help us uncover more accurate and less restrictive versions of Hispaniola’s story. Hispaniola’s story is often told through the fatal-conflict narrative, reducing Haitian-Dominican relations to an unending cockfight. The fatal-conflict narrative paints the Dominican Republic and Haiti as two nations fated to regard one another as ultimate, foreign archenemies,destined to be in total conflict. It also paints the Dominican Republic and Haiti as two nations whose fight for Hispaniola and for the preservation of their respective cultures is fatal. The formation of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti has bolstered the fatal-conflict narrative, silencing a shared history of resistance and cross-pollination. My work extends and contributes to existing scholarship by uncovering instances of cooperation and collaboration that suggest alternative views of a united island and that complicate contemporary political and social realities in the Dominican Republic. Rather than reaffirming a discourse of national difference through a focus on the border, I focus on the maroon as a protean figure who undoes the fatal-conflict narrative. I argue that these change agents, the maroons, anchor the island in what Cedric Robinson calls the Black Radical Tradition, the evolving resistance of African people to oppression. Maroon figures also reveal different angles to Hispaniola’s story through their forms of resistance and penchant for metamorphoses. I also examine twentieth and twenty-first century maroons found in Dominican and Dominican American literature. Like their counterparts from the past, modern-day maroons take flight, resist forms of enslavement and oppression, and undergo transformations that challenge conventional ways of thinking about Haitian-Dominican relations and the island of Hispaniola. Writers from the Dominican diaspora—among them Angie Cruz, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario—have played a pivotal role in interrogating history, and more specifically, memories of violence and the repercussions associated with migration. Not only does this interrogation rewrite history, but it offers a means of forging a new, fuller story that erodes the border and expands the island’s boundaries, all the while magnifying the role of the Black Freedom struggle in the making of a whole Hispaniola.Item Myland Farms(2014) Skudrna, Radford; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in this collection radiate from the emotional atmosphere of familial life. Foregrounded in the landscape of my grandfather's flower nursery, these poems convert particular energies of experience into the heat of universal understanding. When the metaphysical greenhouse collapses, however, the necessary warmth of language is both absorbed into and released from the surface of the page. In this sense, the poems themselves burgeon new life, each line another root beneath our feet.Item Worlds Trodden and Untrodden: Political Disillusionment, Literary Displacement, and the Conflicted Publicity of British Romanticism(2013) Byrne, Joseph E.; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study focuses on four first-generation British Romantic writers and their misadventures in the highly-politicized public sphere of the 1790s, which was riven by class conflict and media war. I argue that as a result of their negative experiences with publicity, these writers--William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake--recoiled from the pressures of public engagement and developed in reaction a depoliticized aesthetic program aligned with various forms of privacy. However, a "spectral" form of publicity haunts the subsequent works of these writers, which troubles and complicates the traditional identification of Romanticism with privacy. All were forced, in different ways, to negotiate the discursive space between privacy and publicity, and this effort inflected their ideas concerning literature. Thus, in sociological terms, British Romantic literature emerged not from the private sphere but rather from the inchoate space between privacy and publicity. My understanding of both privacy and publicity is informed by Jürgen Habermas's well-known model of the British public sphere in the eighteenth century. However, I broaden the discussion to include other models of publicity, such as those elaborated by feminist and Marxist critics. In my discussion of class conflict in late-eighteenth-century Britain, I make use of the tools of class analysis, hegemony theory, and ideology critique, as used by new historicist literary critics. To explain media war in the 1790s, I utilize the media theory of Raymond Williams, particularly his conception of media as "material social practice." All the writers in this study were profoundly engaged in the class conflict, media war, and politicized publicity of the British 1790s. They were similar in that they were negatively impacted by these phenomena, but different in their responses, depending on their discrete experiences and concerns. The various results were new conceptions of sensibility and the Gothic, new attitudes towards solitude and obscurity, all eventually incorporated into a new kind of literature now called "Romantic."Item "And There See Justice Done": The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition(2012) Brown, Christopher Michael; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that careful attention to African American literature reveals that the different terms through which we understand race and law are in fact incommensurable, and that the clash of their competing logics constitutes a fundamental, and unremarked upon, organizing theme of the black literary tradition. The law's relationship with its racialized subjects - and its troubled and troubling relationship with African Americans in particular - emblematizes this collision of radically different perspectives. The meaning of equality and freedom, for instance, are ideas often understood in radically different terms by the law and by the literature that critiques it. The rupture produced by this divergence is revealed in the competing texts of the two cultures: on the one hand, in legal disputes and legal texts, in laws and in the deliberations out of which they are constructed; and on the other, in the cultural productions of the African American community, and in particular in its rich tradition of letters. Reading a broad range of works across that tradition, from the earliest slave petitions to the contemporary novel, I offer a new way to understand the relationship between the law, the African American experience of the law, and the texts that narrate their fundamental disjuncture. Showing that African American literature actually begins with the law, I first investigate the transition of black writing from legal petitions and pamphlets to more literary forms at the end of the eighteenth century. These first black narratives anticipate the inevitable failure of their more legalistic counterparts to remedy injustice, and instead cast their critiques of the law in metaphor. My project then reads both canonical and less-celebrated texts across the entire tradition of African American letters - from Equiano's 1789 Interesting Narrative to Edward Jones' 2003 The Known World - to show that the formal and figurative elements of much of the tradition of African American writing are in fact premised in the law: unexpected and repeated scenes of madness and incompetence attack the illogic of slavery; literary portrayals of black traitors reveal the fundamental tension between black loyalty to the nation and the nation's betrayal of the race; the passing narrative satirizes white anxiety about the law's inability to police the color line; the figure of blindness belies a twenty-first century critique of the law's own colorblindness. And finally, I develop the larger claim that theorizing the rupture between these legal and literary texts can help us to solidify the coherence of an African American literary tradition that is increasingly understood as fractured, and simultaneously resist the law's compulsion to universalize the particular narratives of its many diverse subjects.Item Constructions of Violent Jamaican Masculinity in Film and Literature(2008-07-28) Harewood, Gia; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy sketch out what they see as an emergent postcolonial aesthetic percolating in the postcolonial artist's imagination. According to their analysis, postcolonial artists make meaning in their work through three critical motifs that help shape this aesthetic: "counterhegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions" (19, italics in original). Counterhegemonic representation "rework[s] the center-versus-periphery distinction . . . to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses, new ways of being" (24). Double coding combines "two or more fields of reference or idiom in any given work" pulling images from places such as "the East and the West, the first world and the Third, the colonial master and the slave" (26). And utopic visions are about "imagining possibility even when faced with impossible barriers" (30). My project is fundamentally interested in constructing healthy (masculine) identities and its arguments are ultimately guided by their first and third motifs. Using feminist theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, I focus on the representation of black Jamaican men as violent criminal beings in three films (The Harder They Come, Third World Cop and Shottas), two novels (The Harder They Come and For Nothing at All) and one ethnographic travelogue (Born Fi' Dead). I argue that "real/reel" Jamaican masculinity is ultimately connected to gun violence and the most popular films out of Jamaica over the past thirty years only perpetuate this image. While not the only source for role models, visual images play a significant role in the lives of young men (and women) who are trying to live up to social standards of masculinity. With limited access to social mobility, they often emulate the shotta (gangster) glory that they see sparkling on the screen. Through close readings of these texts, I show how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and reveal that non-violent models of masculinity do exist, despite being overshadowed by violent "heroes." I call for that "utopic vision," to excavate the vulnerable and intervene on behalf of peace to help young men and boys find alternative models of masculinity and ultimately create sustainable communities.Item Metaphor Instruction in One English Teacher's Classroom: His Understandings, Instructional Practices, and Attitudes(2008-07-02) Schugar, Jordan T.; Slater, Wayne H.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this case study, I describe one high quality English teacher's understandings, instructional practices, and attitudes towards explicit and direct metaphor instruction. In this study I focused on ecological validity because the participating English teacher, and his classroom, have been studied under real-world and authentic circumstances. The participating English teacher was selected based on a pre-existing set of established criteria. Specifically, the participating English teacher was state licensed in English teaching, has demonstrated a commitment to the field of English education through promotions and recommendations, and had a willingness and the time to allow his pedagogy, and those variables that influence his pedagogy to be studied. An independent school was selected as the site for this study because of the particular heavy emphasis on reading literature and for convenient research access. This research has the potential to make two important contributions to the research and theory of metaphor instruction. First, by studying a high quality English teacher's understandings, instructional practices, and attitudes I am able to describe some of those variables that have influenced the students' comprehension of literal and figurative language in this particularly rich literature environment such as learning critical reading skills. Second, using, applying, and understanding metaphors is more than just simply comparing two unlike things, and by contrasting current metaphor theory to the prevailing definitions English teachers have been using in their classrooms, I am able to make recommendations regarding needed research and practice in this important line of inquiry.Item Ad/ministering Education: Gender, Colonialism, and Christianity in Belize and the Anglophone Caribbean(2008-01-28) Rellihan, Heather; Bolles, Augusta L; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation looks at the relationship between educational achievement and power in the Anglophone Caribbean, with particular emphasis on Belize. Girls are outperforming boys at every level of education, but women still have higher unemployment rates and hold the lowest paying jobs, while men are in more decision-making positions in every sector of the economy. This project considers one major question: Why do women remain in less powerful positions even when they are better educated? To explore this question I look at the role that missionary groups played in administering education under British colonialism. I focus on Belize where religious groups maintain a high level of control over education in the postcolonial era. I use twentieth-century Caribbean literature to suggest the effects of Christian ideology on the hidden curriculum and on women's social, economic, and political power. The literature I discuss includes George Lamming's In the Castle of my Skin (Barbados), Austin Clarke's Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack (Barbados), Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey (Trinidad), Merle Collins's Angel (Grenada), Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Lucy (Antigua), and Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb (Belize).Item Sisters in the Spirit: Transnational Constructions of Diaspora in Late Twentieth-Century Black Women's Literature of the Americas(2007-04-24) Minto, Deonne Nicole; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that draws upon literary theory, diaspora and transnational studies, black feminism, and anthropology. It argues that, in contrast to their male counterparts who produce "high theory" about the African diaspora in the Americas -- a theory that tends to exclude or marginalize women and remains tethered to nationalist constructions -- black women writers use their literary works to unsettle the dominant gendered racial hierarchy, to critique national discourses, and to offer a vision of a transnational Americas. This study invokes an 1891 conception of the Americas advanced by the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti, and it explores how the vision of these women writers rearticulates Marti's early concept of "Nuestra America" (Our America), transcending geographic, temporal, and linguistic boundaries. Organized around issues of historiography, black cultural formation, gender and sexual politics, and racial spacialization, this project cuts across the North/Central/South/Caribbean division of the Americas, topples the primacy of "America" (read as the United States of America) in diasporic discourses, and engages the writing of black women of the Americas in terms of their literary characterization of the transnational exchanges that have produced and continue to re-articulate diaspora in the region. Furthermore, this study engages and enlarges a notion of a "Dutch pot diaspora," as presented in Maxine Bailey and Sharon Mareeka Lewis's play Sistahs. This transnational conception of diaspora recognizes the persistence of nation and the ways in which black subjects across the Americas negotiate limiting national constructions through transnational identifications. Using poetry, drama, and novels by authors from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, such as Toni Morrison, Erna Brodber, Luz Argentina Chiriboga, and Tessa McWatt, this dissertation reveals a transnational, diasporic poetics of the Americas.