English Theses and Dissertations
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Item VOICE SYNTHESIS, SIMULATION, AND MEDIATION IN VICTORIAN POETRY(2024) Bartlett, Aaron; Rudy, Jason; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation considers poetry as a print medium for the voice, one participating in the complex media environment ushered in by the nineteenth-century development of communications technology like the telegraph, phonograph, and telephone, and paralleled by the development of voice synthesis technology today. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have enabled machines to synthesize and simulate voices—both acoustically and in print—with startling fidelity. I situate voice synthesis as a media practice with origins in the nineteenth century and read Victorian poetry into this media history. Generative AI raises questions about subjectivity, materiality, fidelity, and truth in relation to the voice, and I bring these questions to bear on Victorian poetry. My work examines Robert Browning, William Morris, Amy Levy, and Toru Dutt. These authors demonstrate the way a mediated voice can interrogate, embrace, or problematize the materiality or textuality of their chosen medium: print. The sound of Browning’s poetry, described since the nineteenth century as stuttering or unpronounceable, foregrounds the way hissignature genre—the dramatic monologue—synthesizes voice as a formal effect. William Morris embraced a thoroughgoingly simulative aesthetics, down to the level of the page, creating art out of the mediated condition of history. The work and reception of both Amy Levy and Toru Dutt, demonstrate the way the imagination of an author’s body can impact how readers hear their voice in print, mediated by the material text. I contextualize the work of these writers within a long history of voice synthesis, which I trace from the speaking automata of the late eighteenth-century, through Herrman von Helmholtz’s nineteenth-century synthesizer, Bell Lab’s “Voder” in the twentieth century, and contemporary technology like Neural Text-to-Speech, AI chatbots, and the Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection. The development of voice synthesis technology traces changing conceptions of voice and mediation, as scientific interest moved from producing the voice by simulating its source in the vocal organs to simulating its effects on the ear. Likewise, voice synthesis technologies have long looked to achieve a kind of machinic immediacy by abstracting the voice away from the body in order to conceal the involvement of humans in the production of the machine voice. Examining Victorian poetry in this light helps to situate the challenges we confront today, within a longer legacy of media that transformed how we understand and value history, fidelity, authenticity, and truth.Item All That Hunger, All That Thirst(2024) Singh, Subraj; Brandchaft Mitchell, Emily; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)These stories are set in Guyana, and feature characters who demonstrate how the offshoots of colonialism continue to be expressed within the minds and bodies of formerly colonized peoples. Because of this, violence, avarice, addiction, oppression, and death occupy large roles within these stories, emerging out of character motivations, and emphasizing traumas experienced by both the individual and the collective. Through the use of realism and fabulism, Standard English and Guyanese Creole, as well as various storytelling structures and techniques, the narratives in this manuscript seek to highlight the sprawling and insidious nature of colonialism, and to bring attention to the harmful legacies that have been installed in its place.Item The Other Life(2024) Cronan, Anna Patrycja; Casey, Maud; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Other Life is a collection of short stories about identity in between two cultures, Polish and American, and the gifts, pressures, mysteries, celebrations, and challenges that sprout from this experience. Showcased through interconnected stories centering food, language, the natural world, and a child’s perspective, this collection depicts a first-generation Polish-American’s exploration of identity. Three children visit their grandmother’s orchard, where mysterious events unfold that make them realize their grandmother may be a baba yaga. Two Eastern European girls find solace in one another in America, until they don’t. A young woman and her grandmother embark on a foray in search of mushrooms. A village in Poland recounts its complicated history with salt mining. Throughout these stories, the yearning and longing for a life that could have been is explored as a way to make sense of the life that is.Item How to Leave Your Life Behind: Stories(2024) Daschle, Edward Sebastian; Mitchell, Emily; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The stories in this collection, How to Leave Your Life Behind: Stories, feature characters seeking purpose and authenticity as they navigate queer worlds and queer identities. In the titular story, you learn how to disappear into a new life through the process of jumping off a building, a magical escape from a dull life that creates complications for international and personal relations. In “Thistle Land,” an old woman seeks to return to the portal fantasy world she explored in her childhood while navigating the emotional baggage of her mother and daughter who respectively saw her and see her as failing their high intellectual standards. And in “Who I Am Dead,” a dead boy making an existence for himself in the afterlife seeks to discover who he was when he was alive, and what knowledge of this past life might offer him, if anything. These stories alongside three others match purpose with aimlessness, authenticity with conflicting identities, and fantasy with reality. Throughout the collection, there is trauma and pain, but always with the acknowledgement that what they are experiencing is not all there was, is, or will be.Item Mirror Made of Quartz(2024) Drummond, Kassiah Ania; Bertram, Lillian-Yvonne; Weiner, Joshua; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Mirror Made of Quartz" is a poetic exploration about community divided into four sections that reclaim the displaced emotion of rage with empathy. In the first section "Naming a Better Word for Love", the collection bargains the complexities of expressing love amidst trust and compromise. The next section "(Womb)an", explores how the gift of a name to a daughter, echoes the title of motherhood itself as both are becoming their new roles for the first time. The womb carries legacy, tradition, and trauma. The third section "I Think About Being Black a Lot", dedicates itself to exploring the aspects of the color as an identity, by delving into various culturally impactful folklores, redemption for the unsolved history, and new perspectives to the misunderstood. Finally, the title section, "Mirror Made of Quartz," serves as a supportive reflection of myself by commentating on my name, body, and the person I hope to become with tangible optimism.Item Haptic Listening: Analyzing Black Women’s Witnessing, Fugitivity, and Refusal in the 1990s and Early 2000s(2024) Young, Dominique; Avilez, GerShun; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 90s through early 2000s was an era marked by vociferous noises. This noise included Black popular cultural expansions in art, sonic waves of resistance via protests against police brutality, the crackling of arson fire expressing the Black community’s rage in response to anti-Blackness, and calls for reproductive justice for poor Black women among other sounds. While this era maintained the loudness of both prosperity and protest, it also nurtured quiet resistances against the U.S. carceral State. Specifically, Black women’s and girls’ vociferous and less discernible practices of refusal situated within film, literature, and music videos also propelled narrative resistance against the atmospheric violence of the State. What were the quiet and less discernible ways that Black women and girls challenged the U.S. carceral State during the 90s and in the early 2000s? What are the lenses or methodologies that make this resistance legible? What Black feminist scholars have already practiced the method of listening to that which is illegible or does not exist? What do Black girls and women gain when we can see their quiet refusal in this way? What is at stake if we cannot see this refusal? These are some of the questions that underscore this dissertation. In my dissertation I argue Black women and girls vociferously and quietly challenge the 1990s and early 2000s U.S. carceral State in film, fiction, and music videos. I maintain that the excavation of their less discernible (or “quiet”) practices of refusal within these cultural texts require a focused attention to detail and a counterintuitive practice of listening to that which is illegible, indiscernible, or hidden. In this way, Black popular culture is a site for the emergence and existence of resistance that brings to the forefront the efforts of Black women and girls who are often marginalized in resistance discourses. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images at the intersection of Haptic Media Studies, I use a framework—haptic listening—for discerning and excavating their practices of refusal that are illegible to cursory analyses. Following my introduction chapter, in chapter two I center my analysis on Leslie Harris’ film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992) and F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off (1996). Through haptic listening, I trace a cartography of witnessing informed by Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Dwight McBride’s Impossible Witnesses, and Angela Ards’ Words of Witness. I argue that specific instances of witnessing that reify Black women’s and girls’ subjection, fracture Black kinship, and disrupt Black futures are the catalysts for their resistance to the carceral State. In chapter three I examine protagonist Winter’s fugitive journey in Sister Souljah’s 1999 novel The Coldest Winter Ever. Drawing from Fred Moten’s Stolen Life, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, and Jennifer Nash’s “Black Maternal Aesthetics,” I argue that her fugitive journey begins and ends with her own vociferous haptic encounters—a process I call Circular Fugitivity. In the end, I trace a panoptic cartography that honors the emergence of her own political potential as she attempts to escape the grasp of the carceral State. And finally in chapter four I analyze the music video performances of Charli Baltimore in “Down Ass Chick” (2002) and Meagan Good in “21 Questions” (2003). Drawing from the work of Tina Campt in Listening to Images at the convergence of haptic media studies, I argue that their transformative practices of refusal are legible within and imbued by their identificatory photographs in each music video. These aesthetic practices of refusal, made obvious through haptic listening, appear throughout the music videos signaling the movement toward freedom. In the end, my project honors the less discernible practices of resistance by Black women and girls during the 1990s and early 2000s.Item AFRO-MEXICAN FOLKTALES AND POETRY IN MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES(2024) Tenorio Carrillo, Nancy Berenice; Collins, Merle; Long, Ryan; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The aim of my dissertation is to challenge what I call mestizo normativity. In creating and coining the term mestizo normativity, I borrow from Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s work on queer theory. In their work “Sex in Public” (1998), Warner and Berlant note that heterosexuality only appears to be normal because of public structures that regulate the sex binary. In their work they note that everything in public life is done with the aim of normalizing the male/female binary. This binary affects all aspects of daily life and can be seen, for example, in the male/female designations in public bathrooms and male/female categories in sports. I use the term mestizo normativity to interrogate how Afro-Mexican works of poetry, folklore, ballads, and stories disrupt accepted definitions of Blackness and Latinidad in the Americas. As Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores note, in The Afro-Latin@ Reader (2010), “we are accustomed to thinking of “Afro” and “Latin@” as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@.” In essence, those who do not fall neatly along the Black/Latino binary are asked to choose between their identities. They can be either Latino or Black but not both. In a similar fashion, queers and bisexuals are made to choose between the heterosexual/homosexual binary; they can be heterosexuals or homosexuals but not both. With these definitions in mind, I read Afro-Mexican literature as queer literature. Afro-Mexicans do not fit neatly along the Afro/Latino binary; they are both, and in that two-ness lies their queerness. My dissertation adds to the field of Afro-Mexican studies by positing that Afro-Mexican literature shares similarities with African traditions, history, and culture. As Nicole von Germeten has pointed out in her work “Juan Roque’s Donation” in Afro-Latino Voices (2009), the African diaspora in Mexico is as much a part of Mexican history as Spanish history. Throughout the colonial period, Spaniards always constituted a small minority in New Spain and were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Africans throughout the colonial period. African culture, like Spanish culture, is also part of Mexico. In order to prove my thesis of mestizo normativity, I have organized my dissertation into four chapters. In chapter one I argue that Afro-Mexican folktales share similarities with West and Central African storytelling practices. In my analysis, I note that Afro-Mexican tales share similarities with trickster rabbit tales from the Bantu people in Central Africa and Hausa people in West Africa. And moreover, I note that these tales fall into the tatsuniya genre of storytelling found among the Hausa people of West and Central Africa. This genre of tales is known as a subversive category of tales, for it includes tales of small animals taking down larger animals. I argue that these tales are how Afro-Mexicans remember their African heritage. As is discussed in my first chapter, the first scholars to analyze Afro-Mexican folktales moved away from comparing them to West and Central African folklore because they understood all Mexican literature to stem from Mexico’s Amerindian and Spanish roots. That is, their readings upheld mestizo normativity. In my second chapter, I argue that the ballad tradition in the Costa Chica shares similarities with West African storytelling traditions. Moreover, I argue that through ballads, versos, and maroon poetry, Afro-Mexicans disrupt the notion of a mestizo Mexico. That is, they question the single story that has been told about Mexico and create a multifaceted and culturally complex site that they recognize as home. To drive this point home, I compare Afro-Mexican corridos to calypsos and argue for readings that include Afrodiasporic strategies of resistance when dealing with Afrodesendant peoples. In chapter three, I read Afro-Mexican works written by writers in the U.S. diaspora. I examine how these writers’ perceptions of race are formed in the U.S. Lastly, I examine how contemporary writers such as Aleida Violeta Vázquez Cisneros, Abel Emigdio Baños Delgado, and Filemón Silva Sandoval use social media to promote their written works and challenge readings that depict Mexico as a Black free space.Item Speculative Citizenship: Race, National Belonging, and the Counterfactual Imagination in the Literature of the Long Reconstruction(2024) Ewing, Annemarie Mott; Levine, Robert S.; Wong, Edlie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Speculative Citizenship: Race, National Belonging, and the Counterfactual Imagination in the Literature of the Long Reconstruction” explores how key Reconstruction writers addressed citizenship as a guiding concept. Writers such as Charles Chesnutt, Albion Tourgée, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman), and Edward A. Johnson revealed the malleable, unstable, and speculative nature of US citizenship and the Reconstruction era itself. Even as the 14th Amendment formally defined citizenship for the first time in 1868, its interpretations varied, causing citizenship to remain a contested concept with actively negotiated legal inclusions and exclusions. Debates and uncertainties about citizenship provided an opportunity for Reconstruction writers to delineate more capacious concepts of citizenship than its evolving legal definitions. This dissertation examines Reconstruction authors’ use of what I am calling the “counterfactual imaginary,” a mode characterized by dislocating, retrospective, or utopian speculation that works to represent the fluid boundaries of national belonging. The counterfactual, often signaled by conditional tenses, considers what could have been and what might be. Conditional tenses best express the expansive, utopian possibility of Reconstruction while depicting its present injustices. The authors discussed in my dissertation focus not only on citizenship’s legal definitions in their writings, but also on citizenship as it was performed and practiced. They speculate, sometimes wildly in experimental fiction, about what sort of world could still be created. They forecast a nation in which citizenship and national belonging were defined more inclusively than in the courts or Congress. Collectively, “Speculative Citizenship” illuminates inclusions and exclusions afforded by the 14th amendment. The first and fourth chapters examine literary portrayals of the ways the 14th amendment expanded citizenship in two ways—intentionally to African American men and inadvertently to corporations through the establishment of the concept of corporate personhood. The 14th amendment, Albion Tourgée and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton suggest, established corporate personhood in ways that aided Westward expansion and the dispossession and exclusion from full citizenship of Mexican Americans and Indigenous peoples. The second and third chapters explore two exclusions of the amendment–the brief exclusion of former Confederates from the rights of full US citizenship and the ongoing exclusion of Indigenous people both in terms of a refusal to grant citizenship and a parallel refusal to recognize Indigenous sovereignty. Foregrounding the perspectives of authors like Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman) and student writers publishing in Indigenous boarding school newspapers offers new ways of looking at how citizenship and national belonging were conceptualized in the literature of the long Reconstruction era and beyond.Item The Rhetorical Power of Appearance: An Archival Study of Beauty Ideals(2024) Walston, Alexis Sabryn; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In her dissertation, “The Rhetorical Power of Appearance: An Archival Study of Beauty Ideals,”Alexis Sabryn Walston draws from embodied rhetorics and feminist theory to analyze how race, gender, and sexuality impact constructions of beauty ideals and, in turn, women’s rhetorical styling choices. She considers how rhetors craft, maintain, resist, circulate, and queer beauty ideals in three case studies: UMD etiquette books, To Do Or Not To Do, from 1937 and 1940; 1950s bleaching cream advertisements and related beauty articles in Ebony magazine; and transgender beauty guru NikkieTutorials’s YouTube channel. In all three case studies, Walston determines that women are provided embodied rhetorical instruction in how to dress and style themselves in ways that afford them social status–including men’s romantic attention and women’s admiration. Walston’s analysis ultimately argues that dominant beauty ideals are a form of epideictic rhetoric that prioritize femininity, whiteness, and heteronormativity; further, conforming to or resisting beauty ideals by styling oneself in a particular way allows rhetors to assert their embodied identity and craft their selected ethos.Item A Black Gay Sensibility: Art, Affect, and Black Male Relationality(2024) Cherry Jr, Fredrick; Avilez, GerShun; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A Black Gay Sensibility: Art, Affect, and Black Male Relationality is a multi-genre, intragenerational, comparative study between the 1980/90s black gay anthologies In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986) and Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1992) and the black gay male artistic production of the 21st century. The study focuses on affect, or feelings, and how black gay male authors deploy specific feelings methodologically that in the process develops a black gay understanding of feelings that rivals the affective turn. Chapter 1 begins by placing the anthologies within the tradition of the genre. Anthologies serve a particular function for minoritized groups: identifying the oppressions a group faces, establishing a group identity, and asserting a political or social agenda. The black gay anthologies of the 1980s/90s, which cite the writing by black women as their inspiration, follow that arc through their use of section headers and the texts that they contain, choices that highlight specific feelings. I closely read the section headers alongside a few exemplary texts from each anthology to theorize the feelings that section emphasizes. Loneliness, desire, and hope become my projects primary affective concerns. Loneliness functions as a social imposition on othered identities and develops as a weight, something to rid oneself of to be in community with others. Desire appears as the flourishing of sociality through friendships and romance; however, it is often interrupted by phenomena as varying as racial discrimination, health precarity, and loss. Hope, the final feeling, is about futurity, a cautious yearning for something beyond the present. The anthological generation demonstrates hope’s significance by writing on and through the AIDS epidemic. Contemporary writers respond to the affective foci of the anthologies and the rest of the dissertation tracks those responses. These writers take up the same feelings and either extend the theorizations found in the anthologies or undermine them towards a different end. In addition, by grounding my project in the anthologies of the 1980s and 90s, I extend the category of “black gay”, acknowledging the way that its usage consistently gestured towards the communal adhesion of black gender and sexual minorities, even if in its time, that gesturing was not always consummated. With that history in mind, my project reparatively centers the work of black trans and nonbinary writers within black gay. Chapter 2 considers Samuel Delaney’s Dark Reflections (2007) and Michael R. Jackson’s play A Strange Loop (2016) alongside the poetry of Cameron-Awkward Rich and theories of black transness to query the productivity found in purposefully residing in loneliness, a choice that presents a different relation to the social. Chapter 3 explores neo-slave narratives and mines the theoretical challenges texts like The Prophets (2021) and Insurrection: Holding History (1999) make with respect to theories of affect that regulate black feelings to the realm of the unthinkable through their centering of desire. And finally chapter 4 situates hope within the midst of discourses of afro-pessimism/optimism as well as the anti-relational turn in queer theory to consider how writers like Danez Smith in Don’t Call Us Dead (2017) and Jordan E. Cooper in Ain’t No Mo’ (2023) reconsider the feeling as an aesthetic through their focus on HIV/AIDS and black queer isolation. While centering black queer theory and writing alongside affect studies, A Black Gay Sensibility joins a cohort of scholarship that highlights the extent to which black feelings are rendered marginal or ignored by white structure most notably by way of Claudia Garcia-Rojas, Jenifer Nash, Tyrone Palmer, and William H. Mosely III. This lack of attention overlooks the way that black queer scholars and writers have theorized affect before and alongside the affective turn within queer studies. Thus, this project theorizes black queer feelings over a range of texts.