English Theses and Dissertations

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    Ending and "Copping Out": Completeness and Closure in the Plays of Sam Shepard
    (2006-05-16) Couch, Joseph Dennis; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation analyzes the interpretive dilemmas arising from treatments of completeness and closure in Sam Shepard's plays, an undertaking that raises two key questions about its own academic exigence. Shepard's plays expand the discourse on closure by providing dramatic texts to which the terms "the open work," "the sense of ending," "anti-closure," and the reading of texts in socio-political contexts can apply. More significantly, Shepard's theory of closure as a "cop-out" to resolution complicates the previous discourse on closure with texts that complementarily deny formal and thematic closure in ways that previous critics do not explore. The "unloosened ends," specifically, that each ending does not resolve not only draw attention to the unresolved status of an American socio-political theme but actually implicate the audience in the larger and false cultural assumption that the theme was closed before the start of the play and now need the audience's help offstage and therefore outside the boundaries of the text to resolve the issue. In terms of categories within the context of closure in drama, Shepard's endings combine Schmidt's categories of "unmediated" and "ironic" as a reflection of their thematic implication of the collective American audience's "cop-out" regarding the assumed closed discourse on a socio-political issue. Additionally, the endings "frustrate" the audience's expectations for closure thematically and formally even when they provide a moment of "cessation" in Schlueter's terms. The reason lies in the fact that the "consensus" required from the audience, as Schmidt claims, relies on the audience to close the work by closing the discourse on the issue that the endings suggest that the audience should recognize as open and unresolved. The issues of fate, home, family, and memory cannot truly reach a moment of cessation, Shepard's interrogations of closure reveal, until the audience makes the discourse cease by not "copping-out" to the false sense of closure that America's conventional society, both on and offstage, provides.
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    America, Viet Nam, and the Poetics of Guilt
    (2004-05-03) Hill, Matthew Blake; Wyatt, David M.; English Language and Literature
    The "war poem" has, since Homer, served as a means for non-combatants to access the experience of warfare; evolving over time, the genre reflects and revises cultural attitudes toward war. Since the Great War, the war poem has become a tool of political protest, a declamation of war's destructiveness and a plea for understanding on behalf of the soldiers forced or duped into fighting it. As a "literature of trauma," this poetry is often seen as therapeutic exercise through which veterans can transcend the "nightmare" of war through cathartic expression. The American poetry written on Viet Nam challenges this interpretive model. Previous war poetry casts the soldier as war's ultimate victim. From Sassoon's Christ-like trench soldiers to Jarrell's eviscerated ball-turret gunner, it is what happens to the soldier, not what the soldier does that is the primary poetic focus. The violence the soldier does is a marginal concern in these poems, subordinated to a larger metaphysics of war's suffering. In Viet Nam war poetry, however, this sublimation seems impossible: the poems are overwhelmingly concerned not with the overall victimizing experience of "war," but rather with the soldier's acute sense of personal moral transgression. Many Viet Nam veteran poets resist the catharsis of an uncomplicated victimhood; instead of transcending the war experience, they dwell in it, asserting their place in the horror of war as both a victim and as an active agent of its suffering. This dissertation argues that American veteran poetry on Viet Nam is governed by a "poetics of guilt," an obsessive poetic need to articulate a sense of personal responsibility for the atrocity of modern war. The five poets discussed hereinMichael Casey, Basil T. Paquet, John Balaban, Bruce Weigl, and Yusef Komunyakaaexplore and formalize this sense of intensely personal, private guilt, creating war lyrics that, while advancing the traditional anti-war political agenda of modern war verse, resist the cathartic "renewal" or "transcendence" that in some way relieves the individual of responsibility for perpetuating war. The Introduction is an overall history of individual culpability in modern war poetry. Subsequent chapters deal with the moral isolation of American GIs, the use of images of "merging" as a response to suffering, "survival guilt" and the elegy, the attraction to violence, and the mechanics of repressing empathy.
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    Fact, Fiction, and Fabrication: History, Narrative, and the Postmodern Real from Woolf to Rushdie
    (2003-11-13) Berlatsky, Eric Lawrence; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature
    While most accounts of Western attitudes towards history in the nineteenth century suggest that Victorians had a faith in its origin, teleology and meaning, twentieth-century assessments of history more often suggest the opposite. Both poststructural theory and postmodern historiography in the wake of Hayden White's Metahistory present a relativist view of the possibility of either objectivity or material referentiality in historical discourse, particularly through the medium of narrative. From this perspective, historical narrative is defined as a discursive creation that obscures the material relations of its production and as an instrument of ideology and oppression. "Fact, Fiction, and Fabrication" investigates what political and ethical repercussions this attitude towards and theorization of history has and how much contemporary fiction typically labeled "postmodern" both initially reflects and ultimately denies this model. This study argues that the assessment of contemporary postmodern fiction as reflecting poststructural models of endless textuality denies an important element of the novels studied: their commitment to the possibility of accessing material reality and the importance of such access both for the construction of an ethics and for political agency. By looking closely at contemporary novels that explicitly theorize history and historiography, it becomes clear that they instead insist on a sense of the "real" at least in part because of these political concerns. These novels, which I label "postmodernist historical fiction," insist that although an inviolable origin, teleology, and even consistent referentiality cannot be obtained in historical reference, there can be a provisional referentiality and access to the real without a return to the classical history of foundationalism, immanence and teleology that contributes to hegemony. These texts are also tied together by their deployment of nonnarrative methods that counter the deformation of the real that takes place within narrative discourse according to White, among others. The primary texts considered are Art Spiegelman's Maus, Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Graham Swift's Waterland, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.