English Theses and Dissertations
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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 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 Romance, Race and Resistance in Best-Selling African American Narrative(2009) Smiles, Robin Virginia; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation critically examines popular romantic fiction by African American writers and argues for its inclusion in the canons and curricula of African American literary studies. While novels that privilege themes of love and romance and that appeal primarily to a mass-market audience have tended to be cast as antithetical to matters of racial uplift and social protest, my work reverses this bias, establishing such texts as central to these concerns. I argue that popular romantic fiction and its authors have a particular story to tell in the history of African American literature, one that reveals a desire to address racial concerns but also, as importantly, to reach a wide audience. Using the work of critical race theorists and feminist studies of the romance and sentimental genres, I identify the "racial project" undertaken in the popular romantic fiction of three best-selling African American writers in the latter-half of the twentieth century-- Frank Yerby, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan. I begin my study with a discussion of the "contingencies of value" and the need for an ongoing process of canon revision in African American literary studies. In Chapter One, I argue that in his first published novel, The Foxes of Harrow (1946), Yerby uses the platform of historical romance to illuminate the instability and unreliability of racial identity. In Chapter Two, I argue that in Tar Baby (1981), Morrison integrates the narratives of romance and race to critique the popular romance genre's lack of racial diversity and perpetuation of white female beauty. In Chapter Three, I argue McMillan uses her first three novels, Mama (1987), Disappearing Acts (1989) and Waiting to Exhale (1992) to advance new paradigms of contemporary domesticity that for the young, urban, upwardly mobile black females portrayed in her novels both disrupt idealized notions of love and marriage and redefine gender roles within heterosexual unions. This study illuminates the critical biases that have shaped African American literary history, calls for a reassessment of those practices, and most importantly, in arguing for the serious study of popular romantic fiction, provides a critical framework for taking on the study of fiction - popular romantic or not - that has been similarly neglected by literary critics.Item The Lineaments of Personality: Esquire and the Problem of the Male Consumer(2006-11-28) Cieply, Stefan Konstantyn; Gilbert, James B; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)By approaching consumption as the expression or by-product of gender identity, historians and other commentators on gender fail to account for consumer culture as an important site where difference is itself constituted through the goods we purchase, the items we desire and the worlds we imagine. To this end, the male consumer becomes problematic when prevailing historiographic models construct him solely as a rational, goal-oriented purchaser of goods or as an amoral libertine who rejects responsibility for fleeting pleasures. Both approaches are untenable since they rely upon a problematic rhetoric of gender essentialism. What I argue for instead is an approach that places consumption within the unsettled discursive practice of gender. In this sense, the problem of the male consumer speaks in part to a larger issue in historiography, namely how we historicize pleasure and desire. My work on Esquire in the period from 1945-1965 attempts to address this gap by examining the role of cultural intermediaries in developing a discourse on socially legitimate forms of consumption. Against the background of the misogynistic "Masculinity Crisis" rhetoric, the postwar mass culture debates and a nascent counterculture, Esquire transformed itself from a crude men's magazine to one of America's premier periodicals. Between 1956 and 1963, Esquire published work by such distinguished figures as Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, Diana Trilling, Terry Southern, and Nat Hentoff. During this same period, Esquire also ran monthly fashion spreads, service articles on the newest consumer goods, travel advice columns and an annual Christmas gift guide. Through the figure of the "Uncommon Man," the name given to the magazine's imagined reader, and the rhetoric of the "New Sophistication," Esquire attempted to negotiate the tension inherent in its contradictory parts. Drawing on research in cultural and intellectual history, gender theory, material culture studies and the sociology of culture, my dissertation investigates how Esquire opened a discursive space in which men could simultaneously construct themselves within and outside of consumer culture.Item The Darkest Possibility and Other Stories(2006-05-30) McMullin, Jordan; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The protagonists of these four short stories seem, at first glance, to have nothing in common -- a reclusive college student struggling to understand a suicide; a shy, fatherless boy stumbling through piano lessons; a drug addict whose most salient relationship is with a dog; a prudish teacher coming to terms with her incarcerated brother -- but some common themes bind these seemingly disparate lives together. All these characters attempt to understand the role of longing and desire in their lives -- how longing and desire equally beckon and frighten them. This collection explores various manifestations of masochism, its potential to hinder and yet define people, and its potential to be, sometimes, overcome.Item Megatextual Readings: Accessing an Archive of Korean/American Constructions(2006-05-10) Chung, Tracy; Chuh, Kandice; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation formulates an approach to reading Korean/American narratives through what I call a "megatext" in order to understand the uneven and dynamic production of Korean/Americanness. By advancing a "megatextual" approach to conceiving of identity and politics, I argue for a way of addressing the critical gap Asian Americanist practitioners continue to witness between activist demands for social justice and scholarly articulations of those demands. A megatextual approach seeks to be an alternative reading practice that bridges different realms of knowledge production. Megatexts argue for a practice of reading across an archive in which texts are actively cross-referencing each other. This approach is essential to the way we apprehend knowledge in the current economy. I define the overarching term "megatext" as a rewritable archive of information and meaning within which the processes of archiving and interpretation are taking place at the same time. I identify particular theoretical concepts leading into my formulation of megatexts and argue the political significance of this approach in terms of Asian American studies and public intellectualism. Then, I define and apply the term "Korean/American" in order to refer to the broad body of work constituting here a "Korean/American megatext." The convergences among the various discourses referenced by megatexts demonstrate how they are useful for bridging different realms. Lastly, I identify the significant constructions of "Korea" in the media as impacting Korean/American ethnic identity formations in order to establish my focus on contemporary Korean/Americanness. I apply this focus and formulate megatexts for each chapter based on individual Korean/American authors and the texts and discourses they reference. Chapter one examines a megatext of Chang-rae Lee's novels, authorship, and popularity. Chapter two expands on the concept of authorship and discusses Don Lee and his collection, Yellow, as evidence of the commodification of author and text. Chapter three examines Korean/American women's bodies in Nora Okja Keller's novels as emblematic of the gendered, neocolonial U.S.-Korea relationship. This dissertation emphasizes the importance of reading the dynamic elements of narratives as a way of contending with the shifting and relational nature of the meanings that accrue to Korean/Americanness.Item Sport, Status, Narrative, and Nation: Sport Culture as Social Analysis in the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald(2005-05-18) McDonald, Jarom Lyle; Bryer, Jackson R.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the ways that F. Scott Fitzgerald saw organized, spectator-based sports working to help structure concepts of status, community, and nationhood. With ]such an assumption, I argue that Fitzgerald sees the development of local and national spectatorship as a revealing and often paradoxical phenomenon in the interaction between the cultural narratives told by sport and the complex social relationships in America. Chapter one situates my arguments in the landscape of the late nineteenth/ early twentieth centuries by exploring how cultural stories of the modern American sports scene---those of attending ballparks, reading or listening to media, being a "fan"---cultivates communities of spectatorship inseparable from ideologies of status and hierarchy. Each of the next three chapters then takes this framework and explores how Fitzgerald's literature, conversing with sport culture historically and literarily, expresses the complexities of American class formations. Chapter two considers the "intense and dramatic spectacle" (to use Fitzgerald's words) of college football in This Side of Paradise as a lens for exploring links between spectatorship, emulation, and ideology. Chapter three continues to look at college football, this time in various short stories, in order to scrutinize relationships between the performative aspects of sports and the performative aspects of social status-groups. Chapter four scrutinizes how The Great Gatsby reveals the ways that romantic ideologies that label baseball as "America's Game" are undermined by the real class tensions surrounding baseball's spectator culture. Spectatorship creates a public arena for relating to "heroes" of sport and to fellow fans, emphasizing adulation and identification---even to the point of national identification. But at the same time, Fitzgerald's fiction demonstrates the necessity of allowing for criticism of these institutions. Through close, textual reading augmented with new historicist research and analysis, I examine why Fitzgerald's understanding of American sport culture helps us better realize how sport perpetuates American ideologies of status while simultaneously belying inherent ironies in American class stratification.Item The Body Made Visible: Scientific Practices of Seeing and Literary Naturalism(2004-11-29) Solomon, Jennifer Welch; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how ideas about the body in the late 19th century--how to see them better and how best to represent them--are circulating in discussions among physiologists and sociologists, and how naturalist writers engage these discussions with their own representational strategies. Often, what their works create is a strong tension between methods of corporeal control--immobilizing bodies, abstracting bodies, establishing distance from bodies--and the fact that many bodies refuse to submit to any normative power. I argue that scientists develop visual strategies as a way of learning more about bodies, and ultimately this knowledge can be used for purposes of social reform and regulation. Likewise, naturalist writers focus their narrative upon the body as a way of demonstrating lack of agency and problems with developing identity. In using some of the strategies for bodily representation that physiologists and sociologists do, naturalist writers also point to social problems that warrant change. In Chapter One, I trace the desire for bodily penetration on the part of physiologists and naturalist writers such as Émile Zola and Frank Norris. I argue that the bodily interior is conceived of as mechanistic and that naturalist writers use visual methods of magnification and immobilizationsuccessful in the physiological fieldto elicit a sense of the interior. In Chapter Two, I discuss how physiologists and sociologists use abstraction to reduce bodies to an essence as a way of ordering excessive detail for measuring purposes. I argue that naturalist writers like Norris and Stephen Crane also engage in abstraction, producing familiar types on the one hand and surreal figures on the other. Finally, in Chapter Three, I examine the multitude of bodiesthe crowds. Again, I examine the relationship between social science and visual strategies of order. I juxtapose the early actualities of Edison and the Lumière Brothers with naturalist texts by Edith Wharton, Norris, and Crane, examining ways that visual strategies of ordering crowdschiefly by establishing distance and perspectiveare used and subverted in literary texts so as to highlight the disruptive power of the crowd.Item A Stage for a Bima: American Jewish Theater and the Politics of Representation(2004-06-08) Solomon, David Lyle; Bryer, Jackson R.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how contemporary American Jewish playwrights and performers have presented Jewish identities in light of multiculturalism. Although American Jews have by large been supporters of the multicultural movement, in practice multiculturalism has been problematic for Jews because of its privileging of race and gender: are Jews different enough to be included in a multicultural portrait? Jews see themselves as outsiders to an American establishment, but are viewed as insiders. I investigate how contemporary Jewish voices in American theater have portrayed "Jewishness" as a permanent attribute of Jewish identity. In doing so, they articulate Jewish difference through the rhetoric of multiculturalism so that Jews are clearly positioned as distinct from an American mainstream. Contemporary Jewish playwrights have responded to popular culture's schizophrenic representation of Jews, questioning its portrayal of Jews as everymen figures while revisiting its stereotypical representations of Jews that were intended to mark Jews as different from mainstream America. Though Jewish American culture has sought to escape stereotypes, Jewish playwrights continue to evoke them, even as they debate the value of such tropes. If stereotypes disappear, does an articulated Jewish difference disappear with them? In chapter one, I discuss my theoretical approach and the difficulties in defining stereotypical "Jewishness." In chapter two, I discuss how Jewish playwrights and performers have responded to the shifting definitions of race in their presentations of Jewish identity by portraying contemporary Jewish identity through the model of the African-American experience. In chapter three, I look at how Wendy Wasserstein has presented complicated female Jewish characters by rooting them, ironically enough, in the gender-based stereotypes that have surrounded Jewish women, stereotypes initially designed to differentiate Jewish women from idealized genteel American women. In chapter four, I discuss how playwrights Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner have linked Jewish and gay stereotypes and experiences in order to complicate contemporary political paradigms that tend to lump all traditionally disenfranchised groups under the same umbrella. Finally, in chapter five, I discuss how stage portrayals of Judaism have been associated with the body, a connection that denotes the problematic nature of defining Jews solely as a religious group.