English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item “SO HARD A STEPMOTHER” TO POESY: LEVERAGING THE TRADITIONAL BALLAD AS EPIDEICTIC RHETORIC AND SOCIAL ACTION(2020) Danielson, Kathy Anne; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Poetics are foundational to both social ideology and rational forms of argumentation. Highlighting a foundational role for rhetorical poetics, I suggest the traditional, third-person narrative ballad idiom as epideictic rhetoric and look at the agential intent of the ballad form from within the foundational elements of its construction/re-construction: its story selection, protagonist selection, narrative sequencing, authorial gaze, and narrative outcomes. The traditional ballad is most widely viewed as a folklore representative of cultural values and beliefs, yet the traditional ballad is also a site of social contest, a challenge to normative cultural ideology and harmful social structures. Despite its distanced wrappings, often we find the “traditional” ballad is a rhetoric narratively structured to apportion blame, an epideictic seeding conviction for the necessity of social change.Item HASIDIC HAGIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION – A HISTORICAL AND LITERARY PERSPECTIVE.(2020) Mandel-Edrei, Chen; Zakim, Eric; Jelen, Sheila E; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Hasidic Hagiography in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” sheds light on a neglected genre in the scholarship of modern Hebrew literature – Hasidic hagiography. Nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment activists, influenced by Romanticism with its perspective on “primitive,” “national” literatures, read Hasidic hagiographies as folklore; until today this genre is excluded from the canon of Modern Hebrew literature and from critical literary discourse. My work challenges this myopia and offers a critical perspective on the complex relationships among religion, mysticism, and modernity within the Hasidic stories; it shows how Hasidic hagiography represented an alternative path for Jewish modernization that rejected the binary lens of the Enlightenment’s secular rationalism. The dissertation’s title references Walter Benjamin, who revolutionized an understanding of literature as a reaction to changes in society wrought by industrialization and market capitalization. My dissertation applies a similar perspicacity to the study of Hasidic hagiography. The 1848 revolutions, the growing political and cultural awareness, and the influences of print-capitalism in Galicia, prompted two Hasidim–Menachem Mendel Bodek (1825-1874) and Michael Levi Rodkinson (1845-1904) to print oral Hasidic hagiographical stories in the popular format of folktale collections, thereby constituting Hasidic hagiography as a new genre in Hebrew literature. These projects marked a sharp transition from oral and intimate gatherings with the tsadik to popular printed experience of the masses. The process through which mechanical reproduction replicates the first-hand meeting with the tsadik for the masses, reflects the Hasidic engagement with the project of Jewish modernity. Distributed through networks of popular media, Hasidic hagiography became the device through which Hasidism integrated into contemporary Jewish and secular discourses, responding to ideas such as nationalism and individualism. The goal of this project is twofold: first, to offer a new critical methodology for reading those texts and establish a framework for discussing similar cases of marginalized texts in world literature; and secondly, to offer a new understanding of the political role of Hasidic hagiography and its promise for modern Jewish experience and literature. Finally, my dissertation contributes to our understanding of the political and cultural functions of popular literature, and illuminates alternatives to historiographies of national literatures.Item The Family Sadness(2019) Fruchter, Temima Sarah; Fuentes, Gabrielle L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Family Sadness is a novel-in-progress that spans four generations of women in one Eastern European Jewish family and engages the idea of a speculative queer lineage. The story zigzags geographically and temporally, moving from Poland in the 1920’s to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, to Maryland in the 1980’s, and finally to contemporary Warsaw. The characters communicate across space and time, and their stories are woven through a body of invented Jewish folklore that collages age-old Jewish folk tropes with a contemporary queer sensibility. The narration of this book is polyphonic – humans and other creatures, animate and inanimate, contemporaries and time-travelers all participate in building this universe. Shiva, the youngest in this lineage, travels to Warsaw amidst ancestral refractions. This is, in part, a story about how stories are made. About how what feels impossible is sometimes truest, and about what is visible when we start to pay attention.Item Furrow(2017) Neal, Laura; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Furrow is a testimony of leaving and returning, challenging the quotidian perception of country life primarily rooted in rural South Carolina. The speaker is a silent observer, a witness, and at times an unwilling participant who interrogates the connections and disconnections between family and the natural world.Item Soundings(2013) Knowlton, Daniel Aaron; Casey, Maud; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of stories features characters who "sound" their pasts, their childhoods, their families, and their obsessions, sometimes surfacing with gained clarity, and sometimes losing themselves to the depths. The collection takes its title from the opening story where the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with tracking a group of whales by sound. The title holds the literal meaning of whales sounding (diving), and the metaphorical idea of delving into some unknown or revisited place or memory, sending out a voice or a thought, and listening to the echoes. The ensuing stories further explore this theme in a mix of realistic and fantastical settings, from a cub scout pack and a small town church, to communities inhabited by a Father Time character and miniature doppelgangers. The collection also holds a particularly strong attachment to the forests, coastline, and small towns of New England.Item By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow(2006-11-29) Moody, Shirley C.; Washington, Mary Helen; Pearson, Barry Lee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow establishes folklore as a contested site in the construction of racial identity during the emergence and solidification of legalized racial segregation at the end of the nineteenth century. By examining institutional interests, popular culture performances, and political rhetoric, I demonstrate how representations of black folklore played a seminal role in perpetuating a public discourse of racial difference. Alternately, my work introduces new scholarship examining the counter-narratives posed by nineteenth-century African American scholars, writers and folklorists who employed folklore in their various academic works and artistic productions as a vehicle to expose and critique post-Reconstruction racial hierarchies. In chapter one I reveal how constructions of black folklore in ante- and post-bellum popular culture intersected with emergent white folklore studies to provide a taxonomy for codifying racial difference, while simultaneously designating folklore as the medium through which racial representation would be debated. Chapter two recovers the important, but virtually unacknowledged role of African American folklorists in brokering public and academic access to black folk culture and in providing an alternative to the racist constructions of black folklore prevalent in the post-Reconstruction era. Chapter three re-contextualizes Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman as both a response to the larger national discourse surrounding black folklore and also as part of a concerted effort among black intellectuals to first expose how perceptions of racial realities were constructed through representations of black folklore, and then to redefine the role of black folklore in African American cultural and literary works. In sum, my dissertation provides a cultural history of a formative moment in the construction of a late nineteenth century racialized discourse that placed representations of black folklore at its center. My research both recovers the neglected role of early black folklorists and writers in studying and interpreting black cultural traditions and asserts the profound significance of representations of black folklore in negotiating the perceptions and practices that have worked to define US racial ideologies in the nineteenth century and beyond.Item Ukhu Mankakuna: Culinary Representations in Quechua Cultural Texts(2006-04-28) Krogel, Alison Marie; Harrison, Regina; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores culinary representations within colonial and contemporary Quechua texts selected from the genres of oral narrative, photography, painting, historical chronicle, song, poetry and the novel. The first chapter presents a cultural history of Andean foodstuffs, as well as an ethnographic narrative based on interviews with vendors and cooks in the Cuzco Central Market. The ensuing analysis reveals some of the conflicts and negotiations associated with the market's hierarchy of profits and prestige. Chapter two focuses on pre-colonial and colonial culinary representations as portrayed in various Incaic Quechua hymns, the Comentarios reales and religious canvases, while the third chapter explores contemporary representations of Quechua female cooks in Los ríos profundos, Asunta Quispe Huamán's Autobiografia and the photographs of Martín Chambi. Chapter four discusses the representation of the malevolent layqa wayk'uq ('witch cook') in a number of Quechua willakuy (oral narrations) which I recorded, transcribed and translated in highland villages of Southern Perú. In analyzing the nuances and levels of meaning contained within examples of Quechua expressive art, I offer semantic and syntactic readings of the texts while also considering the socio-economic, historical and political contexts in which they were created. I also explore the ways in which Quechua artists manipulate the representation of Andean foodstuffs and cooks as an oppositional tactic for evading and manipulating the repressive tendencies of powerful political, economic and social discourses. I argue that in these texts, the 'everyday practice' of cooking allows Quechua women to take an active role in shaping their society and the lives of their families and community. In addition to exploring some of the unique aspects of Quechua aesthetic expression in both colonial and contemporary texts, this dissertation concludes with a discussion of food politics and policies in contemporary Perú. Scholars studying food's role in society have long provided important insights in disciplines such as history, philosophy, anthropology, literature and sociology. By strategically crossing over these disciplinary boundaries in choosing theoretical and methodological tools, this dissertation creates a dialogue with the fields of Andean Studies, Latin American Studies, Native American Studies, Comparative Literature, Anthropology and Food Studies.Item Playing for the "Center:" "Marginal Modernism" in Sh. An-sky's "Der Dybuk" and Zora Neale Hurston's _Polk County_(2004-05-03) Jablon, Rachel Leah; Isaacs, Miriam; Comparative LiteratureBoth Sh. An-sky's "Der Dybuk" and Zora Neale Hurston's _Polk County_ epitomize the concept of "marginal modernism." Marginal literature is literature written by a member of a community that is in some way disenfranchised from the dominant, mainstream society in which the community resides--and in a language other than that which is used by the dominant, mainstream society. It often articulates the needs, desires, values, and nuances of the community. Marginality, in certain ways, is the ultimate indicator of modernism, in that the margin challenges the conventions established by the center, just as modernist literature challenges literary conventions. An-sky's and Hurston's styles, techniques, and goals match those of the modernist movements of their times and locations: An-sky's the Russian revolutions of the early 1900s and Hurston's the African American arts movement of the Harlem Renaissance.Item Baptized by Fire: Collected Memories of Little Zion Baptist Church(2003-11-25) O'Foran, Shelly Ann; Pearson, Barry; Flieger, Verlyn; Logan, Shirley; Parks, Sheri; English Language and LiteratureThis dissertation explores oral narratives collected at Little Zion Baptist Church after the small, rural African American church's destruction by probable arson in 1996, and its subsequent rebuilding. As a construction volunteer, I realized the church could not be contained by its building. Rather, Little Zion lives in its people's inherited traditions, which they practice and teach to their children today to ensure the church's continued vitality tomorrow. I conceived of this folklore studies project to trace the outlines of a structure that exists beyond the building, built solid of another kind of material vulnerable perhaps to the passage of time and process of forgetting, but not to fire. This dissertation also examines Little Zion's place in a pattern of African American church burnings in the late 1990s, and documents efforts to make sense of the violence. But the focus moves immediately inward, constructing a history of more than a century of activity at Little Zion told primarily through the voices of church members. As a white outsider, I examine my own biases and subordinate my opinions to those of church members throughout the project. Finally, this dissertation joins a debate among folklife scholars about the politics of collection and uses a self-reflexive method of presentation that allows an outsider such as me to move toward an insider's view of the Little Zion culture. Chapter II considers memories of the church's role in Greene County, Alabama, from the Depression, through the Civil Rights Movement, to a largely segregated present. Chapter IV looks at church practices and events such as services, weddings and funerals. Chapter V documents personal religious beliefs and experiences, from conversion to baptism to the call to preach. Chapters III and VI present uninterrupted narratives by two church members, attempting to remove as much as possible the filter of my perspective. The Little Zion community generously embraced this project, and I conducted fieldwork from 1996-2003 to record the approximately 75 hours of interviews and church events that shape this dissertation.