English Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766

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Cosmopolitanism and National Identity: English-Language Poetry, 1820-1920
(2015) Hoffmann, Natalie Phillips; Rudy, Jason R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Through readings of English-language poems produced in Britain, Italy, India, and South Africa, my dissertation argues that poetry functions as an especially powerful tool for resisting and reshaping nineteenth-century nationalist and imperialist discourses. In the project, I examine the various poetic strategies--particularly the use of affect to promote cross-cultural sympathy and the blending of Eastern and Western forms--that transnational, English-language poets used to interrogate dominant understandings of nationality. Poets studied include Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Toru Dutt, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sarojini Naidu, and Rudyard Kipling. I contend that a school of English-language poets--men and women from diverse backgrounds working in Europe and the colonies--together played a special role in nineteenth-century culture by presenting to their global readership a cosmopolitan alternative to traditional nationalist narratives. Key to English-language poets' ability to offer such a radical reimagining of nationality was their ability to subvert, both through form and content, the imagined divisions among people upon which nationalist narratives rely. I understand environments rife with nationalist fervor--the Risorgimento period in Italy, the ascendency of Indian nationalism, and the Boer War years in South Africa--as locations of parallel experience for these poets. I read their work as foregrounding in important ways the increasingly global nature of the lived experiences and intellectual projects of nineteenth-century elites in both Eastern and Western cultures. By structuring the dissertation as a comparative reading of poetic challenges to dominant nationalist narratives occurring simultaneously in Europe and the colonies, my work participates in a scholarly conversation that reimagines as multidirectional the forces that shaped Indo-Anglian and other colonial relationships. My dissertation joins ongoing efforts to recuperate the voices of English-language poets in India, to better attend to the oft-marginalized political poetry of canonical British poets, and to pay equitable critical attention to the contributions of women poets. It also reinforces recent critical challenges to nationalist canonization practices by imagining a multinational school of poets that together articulate a more cosmopolitan understanding of national identity. The project aims to be of interest to scholars working in poetry, nineteenth-century Anglophone literature, postcolonial literature, and women's studies.
Emotional Evidence, Personal Testimony, and Public Debate: A Case Study of the Post-Abortion Movement
(2010) Brown, Heather; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation investigates a new movement within the abortion debates in the United States known as the Post-Abortion Movement. Bypassing the stalemate between pro-life and pro-choice, activists in this movement focus on the potential psychological trauma of abortion, and in the last twenty years, they have argued for their views in different forums, grounding their case in the personal testimony of women who have undergone abortions. They have emphasized the validity of their narratives in defining their experience over the authority of medical professionals. This project assembles an archive of this movement, from its early advocacy literature to its professional discourse in journals, to its proliferating presence on websites. While offering a case study of how a movement gets started and has an impact on the public's perception of an issue, the Post-Abortion Movement and its tactics also raise important questions in rhetorical theory concerning the role of personal testimony in arguments. In five chapters, this dissertation gives the history of the Post-Abortion Movement and uses rhetorical theory to analyze its tactics. Its most effective tactic has been the creation of a new diagnostic category: "post-abortion syndrome." In a case study of advocacy, professional, and online genres, this project trace the rhetorical development of this concept and show how stakeholders use women's first-person accounts of their abortion experiences--women whom they identify as "post-abortive." This dissertation argues that Post-Abortion Movement supporters use personal testimonies as both a source of evidence for social science claims in policy arguments and a force for building a community of advocates. While contributing to the growing body of scholarship on narrative and the rhetoric of health and medicine, this dissertation shows how the Post-Abortion Movement's persistent casting of abortion as a potentially negative--rather than therapeutic or liberating--event has significantly influenced the current debate on women's responses to abortion.
A GENRE OF DEFENSE: HYBRIDITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN'S DEFENSES OF WOMEN'S PREACHING
(2009) Zimmerelli, Lisa Dawn; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation explores how nineteenth-century Protestant women negotiated genre in order to manage more effectively the controversial rhetorical project of defending women's right to preach. After providing a comprehensive overview of the debate of women's preaching in America, this project presents a genre study of a subset of these defenses: those women who do not adhere strictly to their "home" genres, but rather demonstrate a range of generic blending and manipulation in their defenses of women's preaching. This study further reads religion as an integral identity category that was the seat for other activist rhetorics; by extension, then, women's defenses of women's preaching is an important site of activism and rhetorical discourse. Foote, Willard, and Woosley are rhetoricians and theologians; the hybrid form of their books provides them with a textual space for the intersections of their rhetoric and theology. This study examines three books within the tradition of defenses of women's preaching--Julia Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879), Frances Willard's Woman in the Pulpit (1888), and Louisa Woosley's Shall Woman Preach? (1891)--as representative of the journey a genre takes from early adaptation to solidification, what Carolyn Miller calls "typified rhetorical action" (151) and as the containers for an egalitarian theology. Foote adapts the genre of spiritual autobiography to include the oral and textual discourses of letters, sermons, and hymn in order to present her holiness theology. Willard experiments with the epistolary genre in order to present her Social Gospel theology. Woosley includes all of the genres of defenses of women's preaching: sermon, spiritual autobiography, editorial letter, and speech; she also appropriates Masonic rhetoric in order to merge the defense of women's preaching with another kind of defense prevalent at the time: the scriptural defense of women. Significantly, each woman resolves "separate spheres" ideology by suggesting a new religious sphere where men and women participate equally: Foote's sphere is the sphere of holiness; Willard's is her reconceptualized Kingdom of God; and Woosley's is a world of action, where men and women, after ritualized initiation, are responsible for building the temple of God.
Romance, Race and Resistance in Best-Selling African American Narrative
(2009) Smiles, Robin Virginia; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation critically examines popular romantic fiction by African American writers and argues for its inclusion in the canons and curricula of African American literary studies. While novels that privilege themes of love and romance and that appeal primarily to a mass-market audience have tended to be cast as antithetical to matters of racial uplift and social protest, my work reverses this bias, establishing such texts as central to these concerns. I argue that popular romantic fiction and its authors have a particular story to tell in the history of African American literature, one that reveals a desire to address racial concerns but also, as importantly, to reach a wide audience. Using the work of critical race theorists and feminist studies of the romance and sentimental genres, I identify the "racial project" undertaken in the popular romantic fiction of three best-selling African American writers in the latter-half of the twentieth century-- Frank Yerby, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan. I begin my study with a discussion of the "contingencies of value" and the need for an ongoing process of canon revision in African American literary studies. In Chapter One, I argue that in his first published novel, The Foxes of Harrow (1946), Yerby uses the platform of historical romance to illuminate the instability and unreliability of racial identity. In Chapter Two, I argue that in Tar Baby (1981), Morrison integrates the narratives of romance and race to critique the popular romance genre's lack of racial diversity and perpetuation of white female beauty. In Chapter Three, I argue McMillan uses her first three novels, Mama (1987), Disappearing Acts (1989) and Waiting to Exhale (1992) to advance new paradigms of contemporary domesticity that for the young, urban, upwardly mobile black females portrayed in her novels both disrupt idealized notions of love and marriage and redefine gender roles within heterosexual unions. This study illuminates the critical biases that have shaped African American literary history, calls for a reassessment of those practices, and most importantly, in arguing for the serious study of popular romantic fiction, provides a critical framework for taking on the study of fiction - popular romantic or not - that has been similarly neglected by literary critics.
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.
"Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond
(2007-05-01) Drake, Simone; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The 1970s were a prolific era for Black women's writing. During what is now referred to as the Black Women's Literary Renaissance, Black women writers worked to center Black women's experiences in American and African American literary "traditions" that had theretofore excluded them. This project examines how more recent writing by Black women signifies on the issues and concerns that defined the Renaissance, particularly issues of historical recovery and Black male sexism. Despite the progressive nature of the Renaissance, Black women consistently found that their work was at odds with what Farah Jasmine Griffin calls, "the promise of protection," propagated by Black Nationalism. In response to this patriarchal promise, writers like Toni Morrison, for example, created characters, who like Sula Peace, chose a space of solitude over the patriarchal offer of "protection." I argue that contemporary Black women writers are re-thinking spaces of solitude, and instead proposing a "promise of partnership" that is grounded in a critical gender consciousness. "Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond" is an interdisciplinary study of reformed partnership in the cultural productions of four contemporary Black women writers. Appropriating Homi Bhabha's concept of "dwelling in the beyond," I discuss how these writers imagine a productive and secure space for intra-racial, heterosexual dialogue in Toni Morrison's, Paradise, Erna Brodber's, Louisiana, Kasi Lemmons' film, Eve's Bayou, and Danzy Senna's short story, "The Land of Beulah." Each of these texts suggest that not only do promises of protection leave characters needing "something more," but that previous narratives of kinship and family that were a hallmark of Black women's Renaissance era writing, leave the characters needing "something more," as well. As the texts interrogate familial and heterosexual relationships, they consistently conclude that "the more" is a reformed heterosexual partnership that is grounded in unmotivated respect.
Essentially Powerful: Political Motherhood in the United States and Argentina
(2007-04-29) Gibbons, Meghan Keary; Peres, Phyllis A.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
"Essentially Powerful" explores the roles of essentialism around motherhood in the political protests of two groups in the United States and Argentina. Another Mother for Peace in the U.S. and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina based their protests on their identities as mothers, authorizing themselves to challenge their states' actions around their children. The states themselves also used the figure of the mother to promote specific behaviors that limited political opposition. The contrast between these two approaches problematizes the figure of the subject within poststructuralist and feminist debates about resistance. The subject is seen alternately as an active agent who can use essentialism strategically and a discursive construction that can be easily manipulated by ideology. This study explores the ground between these two poles, mapping the ways in which essentialisms around motherhood can be proscriptive in the hands of hegemons, but empowering when used by subjects themselves, who blend experience with essence. Interviews with participants in both groups as well as testimonial accounts, films and media coverage of the groups combine to allow a rich exploration of essentialisms by the mothers and their states. My first chapter explores how the Madres and the dictatorship used essentialism to struggle for discursive control over Argentine motherhood. The Madres' authorization of themselves as public, political subjects -in interviews, testimonies and letters-- challenged the dictatorship's formation of motherhood as a private, domestic identity. Chapter two examines the representation of the Madres' protests in film, exploring the ambivalence that Argentine audiences experienced in the women's blurring of several traditional binaries: emotion and reason, family and state, private and public. My third and fourth chapters analyze the narrative strategies of Another Mother for Peace. These North American mothers used essentialism to justify their movement into the public, political sphere, while still performing traditional, domestic motherhood in strategic ways. My final section explores how distinct cultural, religious and historical paradigms inflected the experiences of these two mothers' groups differently, facilitating and/or problematizing their uses of essentialist identities. This analysis critiques the limitations of both proscriptive and biological essentialisms, and allows us to see how the mothers' own experiences of motherhood pushed them beyond the boundaries of traditional essentialism and into new subjectivities.
Unlikely Rhetorical Allies: How Science Warranted U.S. Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Sexuality
(2007-04-26) Hayden, Wendy; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation reads the nineteenth-century discourses on female sexuality of the free love and social purity movements against the background of the scientific discoveries of the time. At the same time that scientists produced new knowledge of the body, American feminists in social movements for free love and social purity began to critique how the marriage system allowed the sexual subjugation of women, to demand the right to control when they chose to have sex and under what conditions, and to urge the elimination of sexual double-standards, repressive ideologies of female sexuality, and even the marriage system itself. The central scientific disciplines of physiology, bacteriology, embryology, heredity provide the basis for these women's arguments. Each chapter of this dissertation recounts the scientific discoveries in a particular discipline, then traces the dissemination of the new scientific knowledge through medical popularizations, and then reads the discourse of the reformers as entering this larger conversation about sexuality and women's rights. Using the rhetorical theories of Lloyd Bitzer's "rhetorical situation" and Stephen Toulmin's model of argument, it shows how women drew on the exigence, framework, and warrants of the new sciences to make arguments for women's rights. Reading these women's arguments against the background of science reveals new dimensions to their arguments. It also shows that science provided the warrants for women's rights. Finally, it concludes that new warrants from science "refreshed" old arguments for women's rights, giving new life and new meaning to the claims of free love rhetors Mary Gove Nichols, Victoria Woodhull, Juliet Severance, Angela Heywood, Lois Waisbrooker, and Hulda Potter-Loomis, among others. This dissertation counters the traditional view of the relationship between science and feminism by showing that science was a source of feminist arguments. This project participates in the growing recovery and rereading of nineteenth-century women's rhetorical practices and enlarges our view of what these women spoke about and what their sources of argument were.
(Re)Constructing A Homeland: Reflective Nostalgia In The Works Of Contemporary Francophone North African Jewish Women Writers
(2007-04-23) Strongson, Julie Deborah; Eades, Caroline; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This work examines the role of nostalgia in texts by Judeo-Maghrebian women writers who write retrospectively about their lives in North Africa. I study authors from Algeria (Rachel Kahn, Myriam Ben, Hélène Cixous and Annie Cohen), Tunisia (Annie Goldmann and Nine Moati), and Morocco (Paule Darmon). I specifically look at the ways in which these authors' multiple layers of identity--as Jews, as Arabs, as, in many cases, French citizens, and as women--inform their works and fuel the nostalgic tone of their narratives, shaping the way in which they recreate their homelands through their texts. Drawing on theoretical discussions of "home" and nostalgia, I consider these authors' writing processes, including their own reflections on nostalgia; their reliance on symbols related to nature and the body; their diverse depictions of the relationships between the North African Jews and their fellow non-Jews; and their representation of women's roles in Jewish and North African cultures.
Cartographic Memories and Geographies of Pain: Bodily Representations in Caribbean Women's Art
(2006-11-08) Wallace, Belinda Deneen; Collins, Merle; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Definitely, this dissertation's central intellectual and political aims are rooted in a guiding principle of Caribbean womanhood; and, with black women's bodies located at the center, the goal of this study is to provide new alternatives to understanding "writing the body" by looking to Caribbean women's cultural products as sites of theory formation. The artists and the works selected for this study demonstrate an awareness of the need for a re-evaluation of the metaphor of writing the body which takes into account the specificities of race, ethnicity and nationality. To that end, this study focuses on texts and performances by Caribbean women in order to examine the development of a Caribbean feminist consciousness and its ability to not only convey but also legitimate Caribbean female perspectives and experiences. Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Marion Hall, Joan Riley and Myriam Warner-Vieyra provide us with an opportunity to trace the processes through which Caribbean women artists write their own bodies and how those bodies can be used to explore larger issues around identity, geography and history. In the music and performances of Marion Hall this project looks closely at the intricacies that comprise women's sexuality, sexual autonomy and sexual identity beyond their objectification as sexual objects for men. In Warner-Vierya's Juletane, Riley's The Unbelonging and Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, the study examines the metropolis as a source of contamination that forces us to recognize madness as a socio-cultural and historical construct with gender specific consequences. Finally, the study concludes with Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Brand's In Another Place, Not Here, where it investigates literary representations of the female body as a representative text that disrupts the official narrative and brings forth a uniquely female historical subjectivity.

English Theses and Dissertations

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