English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Translating Grace: Postsecularity in Twentieth-Century American Fiction(2021) Gonch, William; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The early twentieth century saw the rise of new, secular ways of imagining and understanding religion, especially through social sciences such as psychology and anthropology. TRANSLATING GRACE: POSTSECULARITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION investigates creative responses to this secular imaginary by novelists invested in religion’s continuing power. For the four primary subjects of this study—Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson—secular ways of imagining religion were at once challenges and opportunities. They foreclosed conventional expressions of religious ideas, experiences, and narratives, but they could be used creatively to reimagine religious stories and symbols, giving them fresh life and applying them to new challenges. I propose the metaphor of translation to understand the creative exchange between secular and religious writing. Literary translation is a creative activity that stretches the boundaries of a target language so that it may mean things that it has never meant before; similarly, writing of religion in this period is a translational attempt to stretch secular categories. Novelists jettison conventional religious narratives and symbols and invent new literary forms to make religious experiences and beliefs register for new readers. In doing so, they create new ways of experiencing and reckoning with religion. Translating Grace reassesses accounts of religion and literature by emphasizing the creative potential of religious writing. Previous studies of this period theorize a crucial break around 1960. Before that point, literature secularizes; artists look to art as a substitute for religion and treat religion’s fading as inevitable. After 1960 there is renewed interest in religious narratives, symbols, and practices, but it is “weak” religion, shorn of doctrinal and metaphysical claims. In contrast, I propose that “strong” religion persists as an important creative presence in 20th century literature. Whether strong or weak, religion becomes more self-conscious about its need to make itself comprehensible. Writers engage, sometimes subversively, sometimes playfully, with secular imaginaries. In this way, fiction drives a wider transformation of life within religious communities as they reimagine their place within a now-more-secular culture and world.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 Little Pomerania and Other Stories(2011) Earles, Thomas; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The stories in this thesis represent a portion of the work I have done during my time as a student in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland. They were ultimately chosen for their thematic links and because they--I feel--best represent the writer I have become over the last three years. Collectively, the stories deal with class, communication, culture, disappointment, displacement, marriage, and maturity, sometimes all in the same story. While each story is meant to stand alone, it is arranged here in a deliberate order, relative to the others, as there is a discernible arc.Item The Issue of Mirrors(2011) Sowash, Shenandoah; Weiner, Joshua; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection is, more than anything, a series of self-portraits. It attempts to depict how various speakers move through suffering, madness, addiction, lust, heartbreak, and settings ranging from rural Ohio to Brooklyn. The diction and syntax suggest both pathos and comedy, often within a single line. The ordinary experience becomes an opportunity for exploration and discovery, and sites of tragedy are not sites of victimhood, but spaces for productive play.Item Writing with Image: Verbal-Visual Collaboration in 20th-Century Poetry(2010) Helwig, Magdelyn Hammond; Loizeaux, Elizabeth B; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines verbal-visual collaboration in which a poet and a visual artist work cooperatively to produce a single book. Verbal-visual collaboration is a fertile genre that refigures the historically oppositional relationship between the sister arts and that anticipates today's hypertext experiments in interart forms. I confront the problem of reading a multi-media text and posit “integrated reading” as a constructive critical approach that privileges neither word nor image. Integrated reading stresses relationships and asks questions about how the verbal and visual elements interact, what they say to and about each other, and how they work together to interrogate issues of representation. Examining the nature of poetry from the stance of images, and vice versa, means questioning the nature of representation itself. A central concern of verbal-visual collaborations, and modern poetry, is representation. My integrated readings consider issues of representation demonstrated in the process, presentation, and meaning-making of verbal-visual collaborations. My dissertation has two other goals: to begin to write the history of modern verbal-visual collaboration and to develop a taxonomy of such projects. I focus on three texts: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Capriccio (1990), Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers' Stones (1957-1960), and C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster's One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2004). I trace the specific histories of these works to position each within the history of verbal-visual collaboration and to show how the creative process bears on reading a collaborative text. I describe categories of collaboration based on the working proximity of artist and poet and their relationship to material production, and my taxonomy provides a beginning for classifying the various ways in which poets interact with visual images.Item The Makings of Digital Modernism: Rereading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Poetry by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven(2009) Clement, Tanya E.; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I argue that digital methodologies offer new kinds of evidence and uncover new opportunities for changing how we do research and what we value as objects for literary study. In particular, I show how text mining, visualizations, digital editing, and social networks can be applied to make new readings of texts that have historically been undervalued within academic research. For example, I read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans at a distance by analyzing large sets of data mined from the text and visualized within various applications. I also perform close readings of the poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven differently by engaging online social networks in which textual performance, an ever-changing interpretive presentation of text, is enacted. By facilitating readings that allow submerged textual and social patterns to emerge, this research resituates digital methodologies and these modernist works within literary studies.Item America, Viet Nam, and the Poetics of Guilt(2004-05-03) Hill, Matthew Blake; Wyatt, David M.; English Language and LiteratureThe "war poem" has, since Homer, served as a means for non-combatants to access the experience of warfare; evolving over time, the genre reflects and revises cultural attitudes toward war. Since the Great War, the war poem has become a tool of political protest, a declamation of war's destructiveness and a plea for understanding on behalf of the soldiers forced or duped into fighting it. As a "literature of trauma," this poetry is often seen as therapeutic exercise through which veterans can transcend the "nightmare" of war through cathartic expression. The American poetry written on Viet Nam challenges this interpretive model. Previous war poetry casts the soldier as war's ultimate victim. From Sassoon's Christ-like trench soldiers to Jarrell's eviscerated ball-turret gunner, it is what happens to the soldier, not what the soldier does that is the primary poetic focus. The violence the soldier does is a marginal concern in these poems, subordinated to a larger metaphysics of war's suffering. In Viet Nam war poetry, however, this sublimation seems impossible: the poems are overwhelmingly concerned not with the overall victimizing experience of "war," but rather with the soldier's acute sense of personal moral transgression. Many Viet Nam veteran poets resist the catharsis of an uncomplicated victimhood; instead of transcending the war experience, they dwell in it, asserting their place in the horror of war as both a victim and as an active agent of its suffering. This dissertation argues that American veteran poetry on Viet Nam is governed by a "poetics of guilt," an obsessive poetic need to articulate a sense of personal responsibility for the atrocity of modern war. The five poets discussed hereinMichael Casey, Basil T. Paquet, John Balaban, Bruce Weigl, and Yusef Komunyakaaexplore and formalize this sense of intensely personal, private guilt, creating war lyrics that, while advancing the traditional anti-war political agenda of modern war verse, resist the cathartic "renewal" or "transcendence" that in some way relieves the individual of responsibility for perpetuating war. The Introduction is an overall history of individual culpability in modern war poetry. Subsequent chapters deal with the moral isolation of American GIs, the use of images of "merging" as a response to suffering, "survival guilt" and the elegy, the attraction to violence, and the mechanics of repressing empathy.