English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
Browse
18 results
Search Results
Item Tolkien's Two Faces of War: Paradox and Parallel Structure in The Lord of the Rings and "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth"(2010) Grybauskas, Peter; Flieger, Verlyn; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)J.R.R. Tolkien once referred to The Lord of the Rings as a "rather bitter, and very terrifying romance." This paper examines the paradoxical representation of Tolkien's war--one which is at once bitter and romantic--in The Lord of the Rings and the dramatic dialogue, "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son." Structural comparison of the works suggests that Tídwald and Torhthelm, the two voices in opposition throughout "The Homecoming," in some sense continue their unending debate on the nature of war in Books III-VI of The Lord of the Rings. The structures of these works, defined by contrasting visions of war, reflect Tolkien's ongoing struggle to square the two incompatible strands. The tension between these two views of war is a crucial ingredient to Tolkien's work--and a struggle never tidily resolved.Item In Questionable Taste: Eating Culture, Cooking Culture in Anglophone Postcolonial Texts(2009) Phillips, Delores Bobbie Jean; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation produces an extensive and intensive study of the culture of food in postcolonial literature and cookbooks that describe particular regions and cultures. My interrogation treats novels and cookbooks that depict food and eating in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean to argue that while both cookbooks and novels depict as unstable the connection between food and culture; the key difference lies in the manner in which each genre describes that instability. My dissertation uses memoir cookbooks (cookbooks that use the autobiographical accounts of their authors as a method of organizing content and providing context for recipes) and literary depictions of cooking and eating to trouble the neat tautology that establishes food and home as interchangeable cultural signifiers of equal weight. I evaluate the work that cookbooks do by comparing them to representations of cooking, eating and food in representative novels that frame depictions of citizenship and the nation in deeply ambivalent terms even as they depict delicious meals, well-laid family tables, and clean, productive kitchens. I use both cookbooks and novels to illustrate how the text under consideration in my dissertation act out the concerns that structure postcolonial critique. If regional cookbooks provide obscured or incomplete insight into the cultures they purport to authentically depict, then the novels I study provide openly ambivalent accounts of cultural identification. My dissertation begins by examining how pan-cultural cookbooks do the work of drawing multiple nations beneath the aegis of the global--and how this work fails to engage the problematic cosmopolitics of globality as revealed in two South Asian novels. I then examine African texts to analyze the difficulties that press bodies into motion--hunger and impoverishment, political disenfranchisement and oppression, and attenuated relationships with cultural traditions. The dissertation then moves to America via the Caribbean, examining diasporic longing in Cuban expatriates and the manner in which regional cookbooks and memoirs construct the past by reinventing the spaces that their authors have left behind.Item Digital (In)Humanities: Re-reading Digital Archives as a Form of Cultural Expression(2009) Dinin, Aaron; Nell Smith, Martha; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A 2007 PMLA article discussing the Walt Whitman Archive juxtaposed narrative and database as competing forms of cultural expression. This article incited a flurry of responses which continued to use the database and narrative comparison. Dinin, in his article "Digital (In)Humanities," reassesses the terms of the digital archive debate, arguing that the terms "narrative" and "database" are both constricting and misleading. The juxtaposition shouldn't be database versus narrative to see which one becomes the dominant form of cultural expression because narrative, he argues, is a form of database. The more proper juxtaposition, as presented by the paper, is one that places "digital archive" alongside "narrative" because both are products of database and both are forms of cultural expression. Dinin, in his article, then goes on to explore the potential of digital archives as a form of cultural expression.Item Disjuncted: A Collection of Stories(2009) Fang, Sarah; Lewis, William H; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of fictionalized work (long short stories, novellas, novel excerpts) represents my thematic interests as a writer: challenging traditional notions of race, class, history, and culture in American identity, via the fictionalized lenses of history, school, and family life. Most of my work tends to involve a wry look at the orthodox views of "truth" and culture, and ranges from sassy cultural musings to wallowing in tragic hybrid space.Item Reading Utopian Narratives in a Dystopian Time(2008-01-08) Taylor, Deborah; Donawerth, Jane L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a feminist study of the reading process of contemporary utopian novels by women: Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. These novels are not utopias, in the sense of place, since they are set in dystopian times. Instead, this study explores the reading process as a part of a text's presentation of utopian desire. The first chapter focuses on Le Guin's 1985 Always Coming Home, set in a future United States polluted by environmental toxins and divided between a patriarchal Condor nation, and a communal, matrilineal, and non-hierarchical Kesh culture. Le Guin uses a made-up language, constructed without hierarchies, concepts from Native American story-telling and Taoist philosophy, and multiple narrators to encourage a collaborative reading process where readers weave a utopian vision from the pieces of Kesh culture, balanced against the Condor. The second chapter examines Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1997). In this future, California has disintegrated into anarchy and violence, and Lauren Olamina survives the razing of her walled community, creates Earthseed - a new philosophy-religion, and founds a utopian settlement that is destroyed by Christian fundamentalists. Butler parodies false utopias--gated communities, company towns, and the Christian Right--and presents Lauren's religion, Earthseed, built on the idea of "God is Change," as a utopian alternative. Butler merges the genres of diary, scripture, jeremiad, and slave narrative to offer a collaborative reading experience. False utopian ideals of exclusivity, security, and institutionalized religion are resisted by meditating on Earthseed Scriptures. The third chapter considers Morrison's Paradise (1998), set in western United States, and recounts the story of an all-black town, Ruby, and its destruction of an all-women "convent" near the town. Because Morrison tells her story with non-chronological fragments and multiple viewpoints, the reader must become the point of view character, constructing a coherent narrative and image of paradise from conflicting accounts. Morrison explores spiritual connectedness and healing by drawing on the history of all-black townships and all-women communities. The narrative strategies of these novels--defamiliarzation, polyvocalism, fragmented structure, and meditation--encourage readers to collaborate in exploring utopian desire.Item Flight Animal(2007-05-08) DeBlassie, Katherine Priscilla; Plumly, Stanley; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Flight Animal is a collection of poetry in four sections. Specific layering of names, countries and cities frame deeply personal experience; the speaker's tone, in patterned free verse, connects events and perspectives. New Mexico, London, the Chihuahua Desert, Italy, Prague, Mexico and New York are reflected upon. Objects that aid travel ranging from buses, wings, trains, legs, bridges, planes, bicycles and cars save as both literal and metaphorical "vehicles." The title of the collection, Flight Animal, suggests the book's inherent subject of movement as a means of survival.Item Summon Up the Blood(2007-04-27) Stephens, Evan Matthew; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Summon Up the Blood is a collection of poems divided into two sections. The first, entitled "Country" deals with the relationship between the individual and the natural world, and with the tendency for one to reflect the other; the second, entitled "City" is primarily concerned with the inner life of the individual amid the stresses of society and culture, and with the difficulties of preserving a sense of self in the modern world. Both sections share the overarching goal of extensively inspecting the necessity of being an honest observer of both the interior and exterior worlds. Influences include Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Tomas Transtromer and Robert Frost.Item Brinkmanship(2007-02-05) Couts, Amy Elizabeth; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Florida is so important to the United States that if you detached the state from the rest of America, the whole country would tilt back and sink into the Pacific Ocean. The Sunshine State is a peninsula, tenuously yet critically connected to its country. The fiction in this collection mirrors that relationship. These characters are tied to their families, their communities, their own identities by feeble but necessary threads. They exist in the pinewoods and scrub of North Florida, the prairies and swamps of Central Florida and the beaches and cities of South Florida. Like their home state, these characters struggle with their identities and how to maintain their individualities while still being a member of their communities. However, one of these stories is not set in Florida. It takes place in Georgia. But of course that's just as fitting. Florida always has room for non-natives.Item Searching for Meaning in Law, Literature, and Language(2006-05-03) DeSanctis, Christy Hallam; Israel, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the potential application of literary theory and cognitive language theory to the law, specifically to the judicial process of statutory interpretation. The process of interpreting statutory text has long been the subject of a polarized debate in the law and has produced competing approaches for carrying out the task of meaning construction. Equally as intriguing as the merits of the debate itself, however, is the staunch reticence among members of the legal community to employ insights from other disciplines that have long grappled with similar debates over ways in which a written text acquires or is assigned meaning. Observations from literary theory and cognitive linguistic theory can be instructive in revealing the legal community's interpretive assumptions and in enriching the vocabulary of the legal debate.Item Polyphony(2005-09-02) Hayes, Monique Celeste; Professor, Maud Casey; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This novel excerpt focuses on Marshall, a musical prodigy, coming of age during the year of 1925, and seven years later, reflecting on the events. The piece focuses not only on the death of innocence for a young adult, but also the last golden years of New York City before the Depression, juxtaposed against the last golden age of the circus freak show. Thematically, the piece explores the very definition of humanity, and how prescribed boundaries, such as race, gender, or physicality, are put into question, especially when art is concerned. Additionally, the novel asks readers how to depict humanity and human experience through art, specifically music, which acts as a backdrop for the protagonist's experiences and informs how he sees the world. Grappling with the first awakenings of death, sexuality, the need for family, and himself as an artist, the protagonist begins viewing New York City and the circus differently, allowing for subtle observations about the impending darkness of the Depression. Therefore, the novel provides a dual awakening, of a change in self and society.