English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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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 REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MILITARY IN 20TH CENTURY ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE(2017) Fontenot, Kara Parks; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 20th century ethnic American literature, writers deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of American hegemony, articulate relations of power, reveal how they are maintained, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. As a national institution controlled by the US government and consuming labor in the form of military service from citizens of all classes, races and ethnicities in ways that reflect existing relations of power in American society at large, the US military presents a unique and powerful site for articulation of relationships between nation, race, and class. As evidence, this dissertation explores six American novels, all published in the 20th century and taking as their subject matter US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of that era. Close readings of these novels bring our attention to three specific examples of political projects for which representations of the US military in literature have been deployed: to question constructions of American nationalism by highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies, to consider the military’s institutionalized labor practices in order to explore relationships between race and class as well as imagine means of struggling for social justice, and to critique US foreign policy and military operations overseas. These writers individually and collectively refuse to examine race and/or ethnicity in isolation but instead consider these aspects of subjectivity in the context of national identity, class relations, immigration, globalization, and other social forces. While the relationship between ethnicity and military service has been addressed in other disciplines, such as history, political science, and social science, I argue that literature is a medium especially well-suited for this exploration as it not only allows for the articulation of existing social relations but also for the imagination of not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines.Item 'Strange and Absurd Words:' Translation as Ethics and Poetics in the Transcultural U.S. 1830-1915(2011) Lauth, Laura E.; Lauth, Laura E; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: "STRANGE AND ABSURD WORDS:" TRANSLATION AS ETHICS AND POETICS IN THE TRANSCULTURAL U.S. 1830-1915 Laura E. Lauth, PhD, 2011 Directed By: Professor Martha Nell Smith Department of English This dissertation documents the emergence of "foreignizing" translation and its influence on poetic practice in the transcultural United States between 1830 and 1915--a period critical to the development of free verse in English. The study also explores the extent to which poetry translation constitutes a genre with special relevance to the multilingual U.S. In Lawrence Venuti's formulation, foreignizing signals the difference of the source text by disrupting cultural codes and literary norms in the target language (Translator's Invisibility 15). The innovative and ethically-charged translations recuperated here played a vital role in the development of "American poetry" by introducing heterodox authors, genres, and discourses into print. Despite nationalist and English-only tendencies in U.S. scholarship, the literature of the United States has always exceeded the bounds of a single language or nation. More than a mere byproduct of foreign dependency, the nineteenth-century proliferation of literary translations and non-English literatures reflected a profoundly multilingual "nation of nations." As such, this study emphasizes both the transnational and multicultural character of U.S. poetry. In tracing this often invisible tradition of foreign-bent translation, I offer five case studies spanning eighty years, two centuries, three continents, and numerous languages. From the influential debut of Bettina Brentano-von Arnim's self-translated Goethe's Correspondence with a Child (1838) to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's comparativist translation anthology, Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845); from Judith Gautier's pioneering vers libre variations on the Classical Chinese (1867) to binational poet Stuart Merrill's free verse Englishing of Gautier (1890); from Pound's heteroclite Medievalism (1905-1910) to the inaugural volume of Harriet Monroe's transnational magazine, Poetry (1912-1913), the translations considered here challenged "literary canons, professional standards, and ethical norms in the target language" (Venuti, "Strategies of Translation" 242). Taken together, these chapters offer a new transcultural perspective on modern literary translation and the development of free verse in English.Item Jackalope Hunting(2004-05-18) hancock, david; norman, howard; flieger, verlyn; collier, michael; kornblatt, joyce; English Language and LiteratureA book which follows a kid who runs away and attempts to discover his family's origins and his place in the lineage.