English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item TRANS WORLDING WITHIN: DECOLONIAL EXAMINATIONS OF TRANS OF COLOR INTERIORITY(2021) Aftab, Aqdas; Avilez, GerShun; Lothian, Alexis; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for the importance of reading for interiority in trans of color cultural productions. With so many representations of racialized trans people foregrounding the violated body, the cultural imaginary around trans of color life is saturated with notions of corporeality. In this context, I develop a transworld hermeneutic that refuses an emphasis on the racialized and colonized trans body, which is fetishized by the medical industrial complex and by cultural productions, and instead, turns towards the interior. Examining Black and Dalit diasporic texts, from postcolonial classics such as Nuruddin Farah’s Maps to contemporary novels like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater to Mimi Mondal’s speculative short stories, I argue that while the corporeal is surveilled by the cis colonial gaze, the interior shows glimpses of world-making practices that are protected from the pornotropic violence of spectacle. While Western epistemologies define trans identity through the lens of Enlightenment-based models of science that focus on the sexed body’s transitions, my emphasis on interiority reconceptualizes trans of color life as intuitive, ecstatic, speculative and spiritual. Using the affective interior as a central framework, my transworld reading strategy offers a departure from essentialist as well as performative understandings of gender: informed by the theories of the spirit, the interior strives to remain opaque to the external gaze, hence guarded from performative effects. Overall, my research reveals how Black and Dalit exclusions from the colonial Human create the possibility of trans becoming; in other words, colonial and racist violence forcibly constructs transness, an experience that is utilized strategically by Black and Dalit writers as a decolonial tool for challenging, dismantling, and rewriting scripts of humanness.Item Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011(2021) Wei, Tung-An; Richardson, Brian; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In “Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011,” I focus on a radical, underexamined type of difficulty which presents irreducible interpretive dilemmas at fundamental narrative levels—for example, a reader may be required to fill in gaps to complete the narrative but is unable to. Unlike what James Phelan calls “the difficult,” recalcitrance does not yield to our interpretation. Existing scholarship has mostly focused on the canonical works of “the difficult” in modernist and postmodern literature. I intervene in the scholarship by investigating the wide appeal to recalcitrance across the century, including previously overlooked late modernist and contemporary literature. Moreover, I analyze various forms of recalcitrance in different types of fiction, not just canonical or highbrow. This large scope allows me to trace how later authors repurpose modernist techniques, including recalcitrance, for new ends. I argue that recalcitrance is an effective strategy to lay bare the workings of a text. For example, in Molloy, Samuel Beckett taps into the recalcitrant lists and catechism in James Joyce’s Ulysses to fashion his lists and in turn critique traditional emplotment. Moreover, in The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes uses unreliable narration to keep readers interested in tracing the narrator’s reevaluation of his past. Recalcitrance is equally powerful in foregrounding social issues that are so complex that they can never be fully solved. For instance, Joseph Conrad’s underappreciated wartime story “The Tale” uses recalcitrance to register the public’s antithetical attitudes toward wartime rumors of submarine attacks. In the afterword, I analyze how Malaysian-Taiwanese novelist Yong-Ping Li’s The End of the River critiques colonial exploitation of Indigenous women by reworking Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Through my afterword, I gesture toward future work on 1) additional sites of recalcitrance beyond British or Anglophone literature and 2) the transformations of modernist narrative techniques, including those bearing on recalcitrance, in global novels. My dissertation contributes to the New Modernist Studies by accounting for transnational exchange (such as Li’s rewriting of Conrad) and drawing attention to authors who are largely unfamiliar to American academia, namely Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Li.Item Blossoming(2014) Wang, Vanessa; Mitchell, Emily; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Blossoming is a collection of four short stories and a novel-in-progress that explores the mysteries of relationships amidst a world of ever-thinning international borders. In Blossoming, four friends in Taiwan drink tea while comparing how their lives have turned out; in The Moon Is Fuller in A Foreign Country, oceans are crossed and familial ties are tested; in Animal Spirits, Sun tries to protect her younger sister growing up in an environment that views her as foreign; in Flea Market, Wenwen seeks a way to mourn the father she had never met; and in Duende, two men and two women interpret the meanings of life through flamenco, ballet, and lust.Item Sangam, A Confluence(2012) Desai, Aditya; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Sangam, Sanskrit for "confluence," is a novel set across three storylines, all connected by a single ghazal poem, the evolution of which spans the lives and times of three men. In medieval India, Sufi poet Amir Khusrow arrives at the ruins of an ancient Hindu Temple, seeking inspiration and revival for his work; centuries later, at the turn of India's independence from Britain, young lawyer Jayant finds his idealism tested in against the nation's messy beginnings; in the present day, a young Indian-American disc jockey navigates the night club scene, hoping to become the modern music star. The novel is meant to mimic how music is sampled, re-appropriated, and remixed over time. In the same way songs are matched by a DJ for beats and melody, so too are the themes and emotional arcs of each man's story line meant to echo one another, and resonate as a whole.