English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Anxious Journeys: Past, Present, and Construction of Identity in American Travel Writing(2012) Packer-Kinlaw, Donna; Auchard, John; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Travel writing ostensibly narrates leisurely excursions through memorable landscapes and records the adventures associated with discovering new scenes. The journey presumably provides an escape from the burdens of daily life, and the ideal traveler embraces the differences between home and another place. Yet, the path can sometimes lead to distressing scenes, where travelers struggle to situate themselves in strange and unfamiliar places. Americans, in particular, often demonstrate anxiety about what sites they should visit and how such scenes should be interpreted. The differences between their ideas about these spaces and the reality can also foment anguish. More, American travelers seem to believe that personal and national identities are tenuous, and they often take steps to preserve their sense of self when they feel threatened by uncanny sights and scenes. Thus, their travel narratives reveal a distinct struggle with what is here identified as the anxiety of travel. This dissertation identifies its triggers, analyzes its symptoms, and examines how it operates in American-authored narratives of travel. While most critics divide these journeys into two groups (home and abroad), this dissertation considers tension in both domestic and transatlantic tours. This broader approach provides a more thorough understanding of the travel writing genre, offers more information on how this anxiety functions, and helps us to formulate a more specific theory about the roles of anxiety and travel in identity construction. It also invites a reassessment of destination and what constitutes a site, and makes it easier to recognize disguised anxiety. The first chapter examines Willa Cather's articles from her 1902 journey to England and France, and is especially concerned with Cather's anxiety over history, culture, other women, and the prospect of interpreting travel itself. The second chapter explores Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday as a dual text that reveals both Dreiser's impressions of 1915 America and his nostalgic desire to recover his lost boyhood. The third chapter analyzes Henry James's subject position as a tourist in The American Scene, tracks his touristic gaze, and studies his approach to tourism, both in Europe and in his natal land.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.