English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Hidden Networks of Loss: Multi-Ethnic Media and Mourning in Twentieth Century American Literature(2015) Stanutz, Katherine Anne; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mourning may be generally thought of as a private matter, but it is also a set of socially regulated practices designed to determine which lives are considered socially valuable and relevant. These normative modes of mourning often dismiss the losses and griefs of certain groups. In such scenarios, how do those affected communities mourn and represent their losses? How do marginalized peoples incorporate their losses into public discourse, and how can such losses be understood as publicly grievable? As Judith Butler has demonstrated, grievability has immense political importance: to be grievable is to be acknowledged as living, while being ungrievable denies a person his or her humanity. This dissertation explores these questions via spaces of confinement – internment camps, prisons, and reservations – as they encapsulate the way dominant discourse literally brackets and marginalizes certain groups. Indeed, mainstream networks of information dissemination (like mass media) often do not imagine these communities or their grief, and if they do, it is often sensationalized. The dual pressure of confinement – restrictions regarding circulation and exclusion from normative structures of public grief – then creates a representational bind for authors. But by changing the discursive forms of mourning, writers can reach and appeal to different audiences. This project draws from literary and media sources, charting the public networks that transmitted recordings of loss and shape mourning practices from the 1930s to the 1990s, a period of increased literary publication from marginalized subjects. I use this archive to demonstrate how breaking mourning out of traditional genres – like elegy, eulogy, and epitaph – allows grief to infiltrate dominant discourse, teaching its audiences how to read loss. In other words, genre, and its accompanying expectations, creates alternative ways of expressing (and interpreting) loss that can expand the bounds of what is grievable. By crafting a history of grievable life in American literature, I show how contemporary meditations on loss are rooted in a long-standing cultural discourse and how this history can help us better understand present political protests – and further social justice aims.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.