English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers(2019) Okereke-Beshel, Uchechi Ada; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers” examines the fiction of contemporary African Diaspora writers that introduces new tropes of reading and writing in narrating the experiences of African migrants to Europe and the United States. The writers who are the focus of this dissertation—Teju Cole, Chimamanda Adichie, Brian Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo— grapple with the difficulties of migration and its impact on preconceived notions of the self and the world. Each writer links the different pathways that their immigrant characters must take to multiple forms of teaching and learning, demonstrating that literacy is a contextual cultural practice that fosters social connections across the African Diaspora, even as it takes power relations into account. Using the work of Brian Street and other New Literacy theorists, I explore four versions of literacy as a socially embedded cultural practice in novels mainly about Nigerian and Zimbabwean immigrants in the United States and Britain. These theorists are key to my understanding of how revised attitudes to self in an expanded community are being developed in the contemporary African novel because they enable a shift in attention from learning to read and write in order to master a stable and transferrable set of skills to teaching and learning to read and write using a range of codes that characterize hybrid environments. Early criticisms of the African novel focused on the integration of written and oral forms in literature that would nurture a nationalist and postcolonial agenda. Twenty-first century African Diaspora literature expands these goals in demonstrating the transnational and transcultural evolution of both writing and orality. My dissertation organizes each chapter around an exemplary novel to argue that contemporary African novelists writing in English and living in and outside of Africa address the defining question of literacy they have inherited from previous generations by suggesting that multiple and fluid forms of literacy characterize the experience of Africans in the context of migration in the Diaspora.Item The Invented Indian: Race, Empire, and National Identity in Twentieth-Century US Literature(2018) Humud, Sarah Bonnie; Nunes, Zita; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines representations of ‘Indians’ to expose how these fictions underpin white male hegemony and US imperialism. As team mascots, Western sidekicks, or Thanksgiving staples, ‘Indians’ permeate US culture in the twentieth century, though scholars have largely focused on the nineteenth. In the era of US expansion, representations of savage and vanishing Indians justified Native genocide. Scholars have highlighted the role these nineteenth-century ‘Indians’ played in maintaining white male dominance, but this focus on early American literature has obscured the Indian’s ongoing role in maintaining white hegemony. Fictions of Indian incompetence have led to continued abuses and assaults on sovereignty, and despite the social justice gains of the last century, Native land, water, and human rights are still under attack. By analyzing a range of writers including authors of color, women, and white men, my project intervenes in earlier scholarship to reveal an enduring, though often unconscious, commitment to colonial ideologies in twentieth-century US literature. Americans of all races and genders participate in a culture steeped in Indian characters, costumes, and literary tropes. Race and racism are part of the fabric of US culture and language, and US authors reiterate race issues in literature, even if they do so unintentionally. In both canonical and activist literatures, the ‘Indian’ sustains white supremacy by propagating as neutral, if not invisible. In its normalcy, it resists critical inquiry. This dissertation makes three interventions in American literature and Native American studies. First, it highlights the continued colonial mindset in the twentieth century and its consequences for Native peoples. Second, it reveals how the invented Indian in US fiction helps maintain white hegemony. Finally, it underscores that even activist literatures rely on the figure of the ‘Indian,’ meaning they, too, often unconsciously support white male hegemony. As Americans use Indian caricatures to better understand themselves, these metaphors ultimately displace Native peoples and their realities, further obscuring and normalizing their colonization. By examining dominant and resistant literatures side-by-side, my analysis reveals that colonial ideologies remain mostly unquestioned and intact in US culture.Item Making English Low: A History of Laureate Poetics, 1399-1616(2018) Maffuccio, Christine; Coletti, Theresa; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation analyzes lowbrow literary forms, tropes, and modes in the writings of three would-be laureates, writers who otherwise sought to align themselves with cultural and political authorities and who themselves aspired to national prominence: Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1367-1426), John Skelton (c. 1460-1529), and Ben Jonson (1572-1637). In so doing, my project proposes a new approach to early English laureateship. Previous studies assume that aspiration English writers fashioned their new mantles exclusively from high learning, refined verse, and the moral virtues of elite poetry. In the writings and self-fashionings that I analyze, however, these would-be laureates employed literary low culture to insert themselves into a prestigious, international lineage; they did so even while creating personas that were uniquely English. Previous studies have also neglected the development of early laureateship and nationalist poetics across the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Examining the ways that cultural cachet—once the sole property of the elite—became accessible to popular audiences, my project accounts for and depends on a long view. My first two chapters analyze writers whose idiosyncrasies have afforded them a marginal position in literary histories. In Chapter 1, I argue that Hoccleve channels Chaucer’s Host, Harry Bailly, in the Male Regle and the Series. Like Harry, Hoccleve draws upon quotidian London experiences to create a uniquely English writerly voice worthy of laureate status. In Chapter 2, I argue that Skelton enshrine the poet’s own fleeting historical experience in the Garlande of Laurell and Phyllyp Sparowe by employing contrasting prosodies to juxtapose the rhythms of tradition with his own demotic meter. I approach Ben Jonson along the path paved by his medieval precursors. In Chapter 3, I argue that in Bartholomew Fair Jonson blends classical comic form with unwieldy city chatter, simultaneously investing the lowbrow with poetic authority and English laureateship with tavern noise. Like Hoccleve and Skelton, Jonson reappears as a product and producer not only of the local literary system to which he was immediately bound, but of a national culture, in no small measure lowbrow, at least two centuries in the makingItem Immigrant Self-representation: Chinese American Immigrant Writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li in the International Context(2018) Liu, Shuang; Wang, Edlie; Chu, Patricia; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I talk about how first-generation Chinese immigrant writers contribute to Chinese American literature through their unique representations of immigrant life. Due to language barriers and other historical reasons, a majority of representations of immigrant life in Chinese American literature have been written by the descendants of immigrants, second-generation writers. Now, there are more Chinese immigrant writers who write immigrant stories in America. To some extent, immigrant writers’ representation of immigrant life is a “self-representation,” since they are writing their own stories. By comparing immigrant writers’ works to those from second-generation writers, I argue that Ha Jin and Yiyun Li are immigrant writers who have contributed to Chinese American literature in three aspects: genre, theme, and language.Item Play Studies: Integrating Drama, Games, and Ludi from the Medieval to the Digital Age(2017) Kelber, Nathan; Kirschenbaum, Matthew; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At first glance, the fact that the English word for drama is “play” must strike the modern reader as odd. Playing is usually an activity we associate with games (or musical instruments), yet this odd linguistic trace is a forgotten marker of how far the modern sense of drama has strayed from its antecedents. This dissertation recovers the historical relationship of drama, play, and games, developing a shared discourse under the rubric of “play studies.” Play is defined in two complementary phenomenological frameworks, methexis and mimesis, to enable scholarship that transcends historical, cultural, and material boundaries. The first chapter engages the linguistic confusion surrounding late medieval drama (with examples from Mankind, cycle plays, and Fulgens and Lucres) and medieval games (The Game and Playe of the Chesse, The Book of Games), arguing that the medieval English view of play can help correct and complicate modern game scholarship. The second chapter takes up this medieval perspective of play-as-methexis and demonstrates its applicability to digital media of the late 20th century with examples from video games like Tetris and Dragon’s Lair. Along the way, this chapter also makes ontological arguments in relation to early computer history, software studies, and media archaeology, advocating that a fuller understanding of games depends on the willingness of humanities scholars to build, hack, and play with media using methods normally reserved for artists and scientists. The final chapter considers the lasting legacy of the medieval play-as-game, particularly how the development of English drama is indebted to the theater buildings that created a space for the sustained collaboration of players with a variety of skills. The final section considers the current state of Shakespeare-as-play, including 21st-century productions, digital video games, and board games.Item The Literature of Disaffection: Political Dysphoria and British Modernism after 1930(2016) Underland, Nathaniel; Walter, Christina; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that “disaffection” is an overlooked but foundational posture of mid-twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature. Previously misdiagnosed as quietism or apathy, disaffection instead describes how many late modernist writers mediated between their ideological misgivings and the pressure to respond to dire political crises, from the Second World War to the creation of new postcolonial nations. Stylists of disaffection—such as Henry Green, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and V. S. Naipaul—grappled with how limiting cultural assumptions, for instance, about class and nation, seemed to inhere in particular aesthetic techniques like stream of consciousness or realism. Disaffected literature appeals to but then disrupts a given technique’s projection of these assumptions and the social totality that they imagine. This literary “bait-and-switch” creates a feeling of dysphoria whereby readers experience a text unnervingly different from what they had been led to expect. Recognizing the formative work of literary disaffection in late modernism offers an original way to conceptualize the transition between modernist and postmodernist literature in the twentieth century.Item A Heart in the River(2011) Dempsey, Jennifer Lynn; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Exploring the boundaries of relationships, A Heart in the River questions the personal connections through which we identify the self. Through poems about war, poker, and family history, the speaker delves into memory and the devolution --then renewal-- of trust. The Midwest, particularly northern Michigan, grounds the manuscript in nature; landscapes with rivers, birds, and a black walnut tree juxtapose with the artificial scenery and actions of civilization. The thesis is organized in three sections, each creating emotional and physical borders the speaker wishes to break, and it is only through sound and movement --both thematically and formally-- that any reconciliation may be reached.Item Sutton E. Griggs and the African American Literary Tradition of Pamphleteering(2015) Curry, Eric M.; Levine, Robert S.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that pamphlets have been neglected as a literary antecedent to the novel by scholars of African American literature. The dissertation focuses in particular on a narrative tradition of black uplift philosophy in early African American pamphlets published between the Revolutionary and antebellum eras, and argues that this tradition established a form of quasi-novelistic discourse that had a significant influence on Sutton E. Griggs, turn-of-the-century African American novelist and pamphleteer. I contend that the pamphlet was one of, if not the, most important genres of political and literary representation for early African American writers. By pointing to different ways of reading Griggs and positioning his works in African American literary history, the dissertation works to correct what I see as a misapprehension of the author’s legacy by the editors of the recent critical volume, Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs. I tell a new story about this legacy that begins by looking back to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century black pamphleteering and the rise of the African American novel in order to get a better understanding of Griggs’s literary activism from 1899 to 1923.Item In The Hall of The Great North American Mammal(2015) Henderson, Mason; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"In The Hall of The Great North American Mammal" is a collection of poems in three parts that examines a speaker as he grapples with the concept of his own inevitable adulthood, finding, ultimately, that the depths of his heart linger in the romanticized promise of perceived adolescence. The dissonance he finds between the two stages of himself is treated as a real geography, a physical space where the forces of "other" and "self" wander and meet, where the unexpected or dangerous environment proves or tests the trajectory of this speaker's growth. Through the narrative of the extended poem in section two, this landscape becomes a way to flesh out the dissonance created by the speaker's maturing, while still attempting to recognize and celebrate the work that comes with forging or finding a path in an unfamiliar world.Item Isamu Dreams of Flying(2015) Kauffman, Ashlie; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fictionalized events in the life of Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) are woven with the story of a boy fascinated with airplanes, who grows up to be an artist. This section shows Isamu and his mother, Leonie Gilmour, traveling to Japan to live with his father, poet Yone Noguchi. In Japan, Isamu is raised solely by Leonie. He is surprised when she gives birth to his sister, the dancer Ailes Gilmour. Facing racial discrimination and feeling envy toward Ailes, he departs in 1918 for boarding school in Indiana. Interspersed with this is the story of a boy, David, who builds a model airplane that he wishes to show his mother when he visits her for a week. Raised by his father, he is envious of attention his mother gives her boyfriend. As an adult, David begins dating a woman named Elizabeth, before he moves to Japan to teach art.