English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Worlds beyond Brown: Black Transnational Identity and Self-Narration in the Era of Integration(2011) Myers, Shaundra; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Worlds beyond Brown" examines competing constructions of black subjectivity that emerge, on the one hand, in U.S. legal and cultural discourses and, on the other, in black transnational self-narratives written in the putatively post-integration era. I contextually analyze how nation-based discourses--such as Constitutional laws and rulings, mainstream magazine culture, and the Federal Writers' Project--have, in the name of integration, expanded yet at the same time contracted the freedoms of black subjectivity. I show how African American writers have then negotiated the resulting contradictions of national identity by suggesting the possibilities of alternative selves less bound by the nation and its racial categories and practices. Here I track the persistence of segregation's racial categories and relationships across an era of integration as well as African American literary negotiations of the consequent discrepancies of identity. I mine James Alan McPherson's Crabcakes (1998), Andrea Lee's Russian Journal (1981), and Erna Brodber's Louisiana (1994) for their theoretical insights into the making and remaking of black subjectivity as a practice of the nation. These texts suggest how we might fashion identities that resist the fixed racial formulas of the United States--its racial binaries, its racial hierarchies, and its contradictory discourses of freedom and dispossession. Just as these black transnational narratives challenge nationalist constructions of a black geography and black identity, they also necessarily contest and revise the historical frames that facilitate these nation-based geographies and subjectivities. In doing so, these texts disrupt the historical borders that help constitute the dominant narratives of the civil rights movement and standard periodizations, such as segregation and integration, that have been used to tell a seemingly fixed story of inevitable racial progress within the nation. Together, these chapters identify legal and cultural sites--U.S. court rulings, the New Yorker, and the Federal Writers' Project--of nationalist discourses of geography, identity, and history and show how black transnational texts respond by undermining the fixity of these discourses and imagining competing constructions of black spaces, subjectivities, and time.Item Are You Stek Mainard?: The Fragmented History of an Indie Rock Legend(2011) Jerome, Timothy Joseph; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Are You Stek Mainard?: The Fragmented History of an Indie Rock Legend is a biography of the singer/songwriter Stek Mainard. The text opens with Stek Mainard walking away from his music career at its peak, when mainstream success and fame are all but realized. The book's editor/writer, Timothy Jerome, is Stek's best friend, and this book his attempt to explain to the world why his best friend left his music career behind. Jerome combines stories from fans, bandmates, and critics with his own stories about him and Stek all in order to answer one big question: Why did Stek Mainard leave?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 PURELY COINCIDENTAL RESEMBLANCE TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD: WORRY AND FICTION IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIFE WRITING(2005-12-04) Eubanks, David; Leonardi, Susan J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At the end of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first, American life writing remains both an unsettled form and an unsettling practice. This study addresses six representative texts that suggest a critique of life writing as they deploy self-conscious fictionalization, experiment, and suspicion of their own strategies. Three of the works under analysis signal a noteworthy change in contemporary U.S. life writing. As they interrogate the conventions of memoir and biography, they begin to insist on notions of self, history, and agency at odds with the poststructuralisms that shape their approaches to representing selves and histories. These instances of vexed life writing, having recognized and engaged the constructedness of experience, memory, and self, nevertheless struggle to operate as nonfiction. Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace are symptomatic instances of panic in contemporary American life writing. In each of these memoirs, the life writer supplements ostensibly nonfiction narratives with metacommentary and fiction but posits neither the fantasy of an authoritative master narrative nor the jouissance of having abandoned the same. Obliged to what each memoirist identifies as his or her local responsibilities, these texts struggle toward representing freighted experiences. I read these texts as uneasy heirs to three predecessors that adopt parallel methods to represent lives but make distinct arguments about life writing. Eggers' memoir echoes the form and epistemology of Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Morris' experimental presidential biography follows Gore Vidal's Lincoln: A Novel. The Fifth Book of Peace counters Kingston's own family memoir, China Men. As the contemporary examples of life writing adopt the postmodern forfeiture of stable representation, they do so under an anxiousness that McCarthy, Vidal, and the early Kingston evade. The presence of that worry in contemporary American life writing indicates the limits of this category of text and the native tension between postmodern indeterminacy and specifically obliged life writing.