English Theses and Dissertations
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Item TRANSNATIONAL JAZZ AND BLUES: AURAL AESTHETICS AND AFRICAN DIASPORIC FICTION(2010) Hartley, Daniel LeClair; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the influence of jazz and blues on African Diasporic fiction. While the influences of jazz and blues on African American cultural production have received critical attention for many decades, I contend that literary criticism neglects to recognize that jazz and blues are more than just national forms. They are international forms that have influenced a diverse group of writers and their novels. My work fills gaps in current scholarship by examining well-known and lesser-known novels that depict jazz and blues both within and without American contexts. This international approach is crucial to any examination of jazz, blues, and fiction because it expands our understanding of how authors aim to represent the experiences of African Diasporic people throughout the world. Building on the work in African American literary criticism and jazz studies, this dissertation examines the varying elements of jazz and blues -- what I refer to as "aural aesthetics" -- that writers incorporate into fiction in order to understand the continued influence of music on African Diasporic fiction. In Chapter One, I contend that Langston Hughes uses the blues as a form of protest in his first published novel Not Without Laughter (1930) to advance critiques of racism and African American involvement in World War I. In Chapter Two, I argue that Ann Petry fills her first novel The Street (1946) with a blues aesthetic that not only undergirds her representations of protest but also responds to the call for the use of vernacular forms in literature. In Chapter Three, I argue that Jackie Kay in Trumpet (1999) and Paule Marshall in The Fisher King (2000) represent the jazz-inflected solo as a means through which their characters build individual identities that challenge notions of an undifferentiated, monolithic African Diaspora. In Chapter Four, I contend that John A. Williams in Clifford's Blues (1999) and Xam Wilson Cartiér in Muse-Echo Blues (1991) present protagonists as composers that use jazz and blues as methods to assert individual African Diasporic identities and to express communal histories that are not present elsewhere in literature. By providing a critical framework for understanding the influence of jazz and blues in African Diasporic fiction, this project responds directly to criticism that limits the study of jazz and blues to American texts and contexts, calls for a reconsideration of those nationalistic tendencies, and argues for the critical engagement of jazz and blues as forms international in scope.Item American Girls: Nation and Gender in James, Wharton, and Cather(2010) Arai, Keiko; Lindemann, Marilee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the representations of the American girl in the works of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather in relation to the popular image of the American Girl at the turn of the century. During a process Alan Trachtenberg has termed "the incorporation of America," the cultural image of the American Girl, among others, functioned in contributing to the standardization and unification of the norms of nation and gender. A close examination of the three writers' representations of the American girl in this dissertation reveals the ways in which their awareness of complexity in the idea of girlhood in turn-of-the-century America leads to their critique and revision of the icon of the American Girl and makes their novels different both from the popular American Girl stories, where girls marry happily in the end, and from the ordinary New Woman novels, whose heroines seek their professions and remain single or in sisterhood. In addition, this dissertation investigates how the idea of "Americanness" is questioned in the three writers' works, showing the ways in which the Jamesian idea of Americanness is presented as "foreignness" in the other writers. Chapter one briefly examines several examples of girls represented in American literature from the Victorian era to the turn of the century, exploring how the idea of girlhood became more complicated and how popular culture nevertheless tried to pigeonhole them into one category, "the marriageable girl," whose image serves to make stable the boundaries in terms of gender, race, and nation. Chapter two investigates how Henry James continues to revise his American girls, which shows his complex and shifting view of American young women and of American democracy. Chapter three explores how Edith Wharton challenges the popular image of the American Girl by playing with the typology and revealing the artificial nature of the American Girl in turn-of-the-century materialistic society. Chapter four examines how Willa Cather's "not-American" girl stories challenge the ordinary American Girl stories and serve to present her idea of multicultural America.Item Typing the Dancing Signifier: Jim Andrews' (Vis)Poetics(2010) Flores, Leonardo Luis; Kirschenbaum, Matthew K.; Smith, Martha N.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study focuses on the work of Jim Andrews, whose electronic poems take advantage of a variety of media, authoring programs, programming languages, and file formats to create poetic experiences worthy of study. Much can be learned about electronic textuality and poetry by following the trajectory of a poet and programmer whose fascination with language in programmable media leads him to distinctive poetic explorations and collaborations. This study offers a detailed exploration of Andrews' poetry, motivations, inspirations, and poetics, while telling a piece of the story of the rise of electronic poetry from the mid 1980s until the present. Electronic poetry can be defined as first generation electronic objects that can only be read with a computer--they cannot be printed out nor read aloud without negating that which makes them "native" to the digital environment in which they were created, exist, and are experienced in. If translated to different media, they would lose the extra-textual elements that I describe in this study as behavior. These "behaviors" electronic texts exhibit are programmed instructions that cause the text to be still, move, react to user input, change, act on a schedule, or include a sound component. The conversation between the growing capabilities of computers and networks and Andrews' poetry is the most extensive part of the study, examining three areas in which he develops his poetry: visual poetry (from static to kinetic), sound poetry (from static to responsive), and code poetry (from objects to applications). In addition to being a literary biography, the close readings of Andrews' poems are media-specific analyses that demonstrate how the software and programming languages used shape the creative and production performances in significant ways. This study makes available new materials for those interested in the textual materiality of Andrews' videogame poem, Arteroids, by publishing the Arteroids Development Folder--a collection of source files, drafts, and old versions of the poem. This collection is of great value to those who wish to inform readings of the work, study the source code and its programming architecture, and even produce a critical edition of the work.Item Inching Toward Salvation(2010) Norris, Meredith Suzanne; Feitell, Merrill; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of short stories focuses on post-religion in the modern-day South. It follows the lives of characters faced with the struggle between hedonistic desire and following their fear-driven Christian upbringing.Item Hard-Boiled Anxiety in Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald(2010) Karydes, Karen Huston; Wyatt, David M.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between 1946 and 1976 Ross Macdonald produced eighteen Lew Archer novels, the heart of his achievement. The Archer series also extended the work begun by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Together these three writers invented the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, gave it romantic voice, and used it to increasingly adaptive purposes. For Macdonald, writing his books got him to the far side of pain - to a place where he could make the best of the rest of his life. He had experienced childhood as full of predatory secrets and sexual shame. As soon as he could - and by 1936 both his parents had died - Macdonald reinvented himself and prevailed in this willed performance for twenty years. In 1956, when his own child was in terrible trouble, Macdonald got help for her and, finally, for himself. "Notes of a Son & Father" is the keystone of my project: an unpublished, confessional, harrowing accounting of Macdonald's childhood, marriage, and fatherhood, written for his psychiatrist. I was lucky to find it in the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Papers at the University of California at Irvine Libraries' Special Collections & Archives. A dime-store spiral notebook with 39 pages of small, tightly penciled handwriting: an anguished exercise in courage for Macdonald to write and then give over to readers like me who might come along. In the course of his psychoanalysis, Macdonald began to hope that he could, finally, write about his past in the guise of Freudian fables. In this effort, he extended the hard-boiled genre into emotional territory that Hammett and Chandler anticipated, but never occupied. This new work culminated in the last twelve Archer novels, the best of which are The Galton Case, The Chill, and The Underground Man. In these three works, Macdonald transforms the detective figure into a listener, a man devoted to uncovering not crime but rather the power and logic of archetypal complexes, family romances, folie a deux, the repetition compulsion, and the inversion theory.Item Waking Up in Beirut(2010) El-Amine, Zein; Collier, Michael; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: WAKING UP IN BEIRUT Zein El-Amine, MFA, 2010 Directed By: Professor Michael Collier, Department of English The poems in Waking Up in Beirut are mainly obsessed with an exile‟s search for home. The first section is a sequence of poems that starts as an elegy for a friend and expands into an elegy for Washington DC. The second section charts a return to the poet‟s geographical home, and deals more directly with the poet‟s ethnic identity. This section delivers more elegies in the form of narrative, mostly dealing with three women who were central to the poet‟s life. In the third section the poet attempts to break out of the narrative into the lyrical. This last section defines the poet‟s evolution through his apprenticeship and represents an embarkation point for future works.Item Girlhood in African American Literature 1827-1949(2010) Wright, Nazera Sadiq; Washington, Mary Helen; Peterson, Carla L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: GIRLHOOD IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1827-1949 Nazera Sadiq Wright, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Carla L. Peterson Professor Mary Helen Washington Department of English This dissertation examines African American literature through the social construction and the allegorical function of girlhood. By exploring the figure of the black girl between 1827--when the nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was published and slavery was abolished in New York--and 1949--the publication date of Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection poems, I argue that representations of the girl in African American literature are based on behavioral codes that acquired political meaning in print culture before and after Emancipation. In the canonical and rarely-read texts I examine, the varied images of the black girl as orphaned and unruly, educated and mothered, functioned as models for black citizenship. The Introduction argues that Lucy Terry and Phillis Wheatley become foundational models of intellectual achievement through their growth from slave girl to poet. Chapter One, "Antebellum Girlhood in African American Literature" argues that articles selected by black male editors of Freedom's Journal and Colored American, and works by black women writers, such as Maria Stewart's "The First Stage of Life" (1861), Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) adopted the black girl from the LucyTerry/ Phillis Wheatley paradigm and appropriated her image to represent their own, specific citizenship pursuits. In Chapter Two, "Black Girlhood Post-Emancipation," the racially-indeterminate girl figure in Christian Recorder stories, Mrs. N. F. Mossell's advice columns published in the New York Freeman, and Frances Harper's depiction of Annette in Trial and Triumph (1888-1889) represented the newly emancipated black girl figure and her grooming for racial uplift efforts. Chapter Three, "Race Girls in Floyd's Flowers," argues that in Silas X. Floyd's conduct book, Floyd's Flowers; or Duty and Beauty for Colored Children (1905), black girl figures return to the domestic sphere and defer to black male leadership due to an increase in violence at the turn of the century. Chapter Four, "Black Girlhood in Gwendolyn Brooks's Annie Allen (1949)," argues that Gwendolyn Brooks's modernist poems offer an alternative to the conduct manual by privileging the black girl's interiority and freeing her from an instructive role.Item Prehistoric to Posthuman: Animality, Inheritance, and Identity in American Evolutionary Narratives(2010) Bailin, Deborah; Wyatt, David M; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how Darwinian discourse has influenced representations of the relationship between animality and humanness in twentieth-century American literature. Scholarship in the conceptually rich and growing field of animal studies, to which my dissertation contributes, covers a wide range of topics, from the symbolic and metaphoric treatment of nonhuman animals to the ethics of representation and the politics of animal rights. Recent theoretical work has further broadened the scope of inquiry by raising questions about the cultural construction of animality and its relationship to definitions of the human. Although some scholars have argued for the importance of embodiment in (re)considering twentieth-century representations of the human, challenging the opposition between "animal" and "human," only a few have addressed how Darwin's descriptions of prehuman ancestry and a potentially posthuman future might have shaped these representations. My study aims to rectify this critical lack. By examining how evolutionary narratives of growth, mutation, and transformation intersect with American narratives of history, progress, and identity, my dissertation complicates traditional associations between the cultural impact of Darwin's ideas and the determinism and social Darwinism often associated with literary naturalism during its classic phase. Beginning with a chapter comparing the treatment of animality and evolution in works by Frank Norris and Jack London, I trace the imaginative and metanaturalistic reshaping of these narratives across the century through chapters on abolition and evolution in novels by William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, evolution as apocalypse in Bernard Malamud's God's Grace and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy, and animals, evolution, and language in Edward Albee's plays. Varying in the scope of its concerns about natural and cultural inheritance, each of my chapters considers how animality operates as a recursive trope against the disembodiment of the subject, expressing both possibilities and fears about what it means to be human.Item The President's Pen: A Literary History of American Presidential Autobiographies(2010) Cole, Allen Fletcher; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: The President's Pen: A Literary History of American Presidential Autobiographies Allen Fletcher Cole, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Robert Levine, Department of English Approximately half of American presidents have produced either a full or partial narrative record of their lives, and recent presidential autobiographies have been released to full-scale media attention. Yet, despite the genre's familiarity, there has been no comprehensive analysis of this set of presidential autobiographies. The goal of this project is to examine a selected number of presidential memoirs in order to chart the development of this genre. Aside from considering the merits of the individual texts through extended readings, this dissertation will trace the history of the publication, marketing, and reception of these texts. In addition, it will trace the formal changes and development of the presidential memoir in the context of the changing relationships between the president and the American people, popular conceptions of public and private, and the confluence of politics and celebrity. In order to achieve these goals, the dissertation is arranged chronologically and centers on selected texts that mark the genre's evolution. The first chapters are devoted to the earliest presidential autobiographies, those of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe. These three works demonstrate a careful delineation between public and private and ostensibly serve public ends. The second chapter focuses on books by James Buchanan and Ulysses Grant, both of whom sought to market their life narratives in order to reach the broadest possible audience. The third chapter takes up the autobiographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, two presidents who used the expansion of technology to project carefully constructed public characters to the American electorate. Therefore, their texts take on the voice and character of these public characters, stamping them distinctively and underscoring both men's popular images. The final chapter posits Ronald Reagan as the ultimate blending of celebrity and politics and suggests that comparing his two autobiographies--one the story of a movie star and the other the story of a president--demonstrates the uneasy line between institutionalized power and popular celebrity.Item "Something Sweetly Personal and Sweetly Social": Modernism, Metadrama, and the Avant Garde in the Plays of the Provincetown Players(2009) Eisenhauer, Louis Andrew; Bryer, Jackson R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The argument of this study is that many of the experimental productions of the original Provincetown Players (1915-22) should be viewed not simply as modern, but as a mixture of modernist and avant-garde theatre. The Players' early comic spoofs critiqued the modernist zeal for nouveau social and cultural topics of their era, such as free love, psychoanalysis, and post-impressionist art, and were the first American plays to explore the personal as political. Hutchins Hapgood, a founding Provincetown Player, described these dramas as containing at once "something sweetly personal and sweetly social" (Victorian 394). Often employing metatheatrical techniques in their critique of modern institutions, Provincetown productions, this study argues, echoed two key attributes of avant-garde theory: The self-critique of modernism's social role recalls Peter Bürger's description of avant-garde movements developing out of a fear of" art's lack of social impact" in aestheticism and entering a "stage of self-criticism" (Bürger 22). Additionally, by integrating performance into the life of their community, the Players' echo Bürger's theory that the avant-garde attempts to reintegrate autonomous art into the "praxis of everyday life" (22). Discussed in this study are plays created during the summers of 1915 and 1916, including Neith Boyce's Constancy (1915), Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook's Suppressed Desires (1915), John Reed's The Eternal Quadrangle (1916), Wilbur Daniel Steele's Not Smart (1916), and Louise Bryant's The Game (1916). Also considered is Floyd Dell's Liberal Club satire St. George in Greenwich (1913). A second group of expressionistic plays analyzed in this study include verse plays by poet, editor, and troubadour Alfred Kreymborg, such as Lima Beans (1916), Jack's House (1918), and Vote the New Moon (1920) and Djuna Barnes's exploration of Nietzsche in Three From the Earth (1919). A third focus of the study is a group of full-length plays by Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, and Eugene O'Neill: Glaspell's The Verge (1921) and Inheritors (1921); Cook's The Athenian Women (1918); and O'Neill's Before Breakfast (1916), produced by the Provincetown Players, and Bread and Butter (written 1913-14) and Now I Ask You (written 1916), both unproduced.