English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
Browse
3 results
Search Results
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 Life and Legacy of Laskarina Bouboulina: Feminist Alternatives to Documentary Filmmaking Practices(2007-10-17) Householder, April Kalogeropoulos; Fuegi, John; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When Michael Moore won the Academy Award in 2004 for his film Fahrenheit 9/11, the documentary re-emerged as an important critical discourse in the making of culture. As a political consciousness-raising tool, the documentary fits squarely into the goals of independent media activism. With the development of digital videomaking technologies, a distinctive means through which to explore the issues of culture, class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality that have been neglected in mainstream documentary filmmaking practices has emerged. Specifically, this new methodological approach to collecting, preserving, and analyzing history provides a voice for the stories that have been under-- and misrepresented in the consumption and production of biographies of women in film and literature. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a series of social, political, cultural, and economic events convened in Europe which enabled Greece to spark the War of Independence. This national instability provided a space for the emergence of a heroine who broke all established gender codes in the area of politics and on the battlefield: Laskarina Bouboulina (1771-1825). Over the course of her life, Bouboulina owned a successful merchant fleet, became an international diplomat, and was the only woman to join the Filike Etairia, an underground organization that prepared the Greeks for the war with the Ottomans. She is the first woman in world naval history to have earned the title of Admiral for her command of the Spetses fleet in crucial naval battles. Her life represents an alternative history to the masculinist and nationalistic depictions of the Greek War of Independence, as told in both Greek and Philhellenic literatures. It is a radical re-imagining of gender and the Greek identity in the nineteenth century, and foregrounds the many contributions made by women to modern Greek history. It also provides an alternative to the images of Greek women in the historical imaginary of Hollywood and other dominant media practices. Using historical documents and artifacts, interviews with Bouboulina's descendants and specialists in the fields of Greek and Ottoman History, live footage, music and artwork of the period, as well as contemporary film and media as grounds for cultural comparison, this hour-long documentary video synthesizes multi-media artifacts to create a critical pedagogy that explores the margins of Greek history through the life and times of one of Greece's most important revolutionaries.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.