Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Black South African Women Writers: Narrating the Self, Narrating the Nation(2010) Boswell, Barbara; Bolles, Lynn; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the ways in which Black women writers construct the South African nation in their fiction. Based on analyses of four novels, Miriam Tlali's Muriel at Metropolitan (1979), Lauretta Ngcobo's And They Didn't Die (1989), Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2000), and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (1998), it examines how those most disenfranchised by the policy of apartheid in South Africa articulated, configure and re-imagine the nation through their writing. It also investigates how these women writers construct themselves as writing subjects in a society that has historically denied them creative and personal agency. I view Black women's writing as a form of activism and resistance to apartheid, and situate the production of their novels within the larger political context of twentieth century South Africa. The dissertation thus focuses on the ways in which the apartheid doctrine affected Black women's lives politically and as producers of writing. Drawing theoretically on Mamphele Ramphela's conceptualizations of space, Carole Boyce Davies' formulation of Black women writers as "migratory" subjects, and life course theory, I analyze life history interviews with four writers in an attempt to map the ways they transcended their "received" identities as laborers and reproducers of labor for the apartheid nation, to become authors of their own lives and works. I expand traditional feminist definitions of agency, arguing that, for these women, writing became an act that was cumulatively agentic, instilling in them increased personal agency. This outcome was the opposite of the apartheid's state intended goal of oppressing and silencing these writers. I further argue that in writing, the authors were engaged in creative re-visioning - a subject's ability to re-envision or reimagine what is possible for her to achieve within her lifetime. The dissertation then goes on to examine four novels produced by Tlali, Ngcobo, Magona, and Wicomb, emphasizing the ways in which these texts undermine unitary, masculinist forms of nationalisms, be these apartheid or emerging African nationalisms. I conclude by proposing a Black South African feminist literary criticism as a means for producing literary texts about Black women and as a methodology for interpreting such texts.Item Postcolonial Refashionings: Reading Forms, Reading Novels(2009) Comorau, Nancy Alla; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reads the postcolonial novel through a lens of novel theory, examining the ways in which the postcolonial novel writes a new chapter in the history of the novel. I explore how Postcolonial writers deploy--even as they remodel--the form of the British novel, which provides them a unique avenue for expressing national and individual historical positions and for imaginatively renegotiating their relationships to the canon and the Commonwealth, past and present. In doing so, they remake the forms they have inherited into the genre of the postcolonial novel. The novel, due to its connection to modernity, the nation, and the formation of the subject, holds different possibilities for postcolonial writers than other forms. My dissertation answers readings of postcolonial texts, which, while often superb in their interpretation of the political, fail to focus on genre. In a fashion, postcolonial novels are read as anthropological works, providing glimpses into a culture, and in a peculiar way the novel comes to operate as the native informant. Given the proliferation of the Anglophone postcolonial novel, I argue that it is important that we consider how the postcolonial novel renders established genres into new forms. I focus on a set of postcolonial novels that specifically engage with canonical British novels, calling attention to the fact that while they share much with their predecessors, they function differently than the novels that have come before them. Unlike early postcolonial arguments about empire "writing back" to the center, which position postcolonial and "English" writers in an antipodal power struggle, I argue that the Anglophone postcolonial novel is at once a descendent of the British novel and a genre unto itself--forming a new limb from the British novel's branch. In doing so, these novels perform new ways of writing modernity, the nation, and the subject. Working from a Bakhtinian theory of the modern novel as a form that creates newness, I demonstrate how postcolonial writers use the history and tradition of the British novel to write, revise, and refashion the novel in English.Item Revolt and it expressions in the works of Williams Sassine(2009) Keita, Mamadi; Orlando, Valerie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study is an inquiry into the forms and expressions of revolt in the works of Williams Sassine. Following the chronology, I choose to begin Sassine's denunciation of the forms of domination, exploitation and alienation with the colonial period. However, beyond the colonial period, the characters of Sassine's novels often rise up against the political drift of the Third World's new independent nations. Furthermore, this study underlines the inadequacy of the education system inherited from the colonial period. In the forth chapter, I examine the question of exile, a recurrent them in the African Francophone literature. Finaly, my investigation of Sassine's novels reveals a constant quest for identity and a rejection of all foreign cultural influences.Item Screams Somehow Echoing: Trauma and Testimony in Anglophone African Literature(2008-07-26) Brown, Michelle Lynn; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Postcolonial literary critics note persistently recurring representations of colonial violence in post-independence Anglophone African novels. I suggest that complex psychological and political processes of colonial trauma compel this narrative repetition. This dissertation juxtaposes postcolonial and trauma studies in order to analyze literary representations of colonial violence in terms of race, gender, identity, and the post-independence nation-state. To do so, I engage with black feminisms, African history, Subaltern Studies, and Latin American testimonio studies. I contend that, despite variations in aesthetic mode, melancholia, haunting, and mourning recur in realist and postmodern Anglophone African and diaspora novels with interesting variations beyond the usual stylistic differences. This tendency spans sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic, and generations. My work suggests that we use the vocabulary of psychoanalysis to fruitfully read post-independence literature as testimony representing the trauma of colonial occupation. Trauma and justice studies teach that testimony is the route to surviving productively after an experience of traumatizing violence. While mine is not the first analysis of Anglophone African literature to employ the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, it is the first to suggest doing so in the context of traumatic testimony. I explore three modes of telling--testimonial bodies, censored testimony and its ghosts, and trans-generational testifying wounds--represented in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments (Ghana, the United States, and France), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe), Nuruddin Farah's Maps (Somalia), Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles (Uganda and the Netherlands), Meja Mwangi's Carcase for Hounds (Kenya), Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (Nigeria and Britain), and in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (South Africa). Modes of telling crisscross the continent, suggesting that traumatic suffering binds different communities together. Read as traumatic testimonies, the texts critique the intersected, normalizing discourses of globalization, trans-Atlantic migration, women's rights, and decolonization. They demonstrate that moments of national birth mark historical sites of potential for the collective to revise the past, create a national citizenry, and chart a socially progressive future through transformative mourning processes.Item WHO WILL BURY THE DEAD?(2008-05-05) Ehikhamenor, Victor E; William, Henry L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Who Will Bury The Dead is a collection of interconnected short stories. The characters navigate rural and urban life in an African country. These characters also traverse the world beyond their shores, all the way to a new living in America. Though the landscapes keep shifting, the village of Uwessan keeps re-occurring in memory and reality.Item The Footsteps and Other Stories(2008-05-05) Ocita, James; Norman, Howard; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Set in part in a remote Ugandan countryside and in part in the squalid slums of Kampala, The Footsteps and Other Stories explores the pains and the struggles and the aspirations of wretched lowly folks when the state not only abdicates from its responsibility of protecting them but also turns its repressive instruments against them. In their flight from misery, in their unrelenting quest for the ever elusive security, personal or economic, they discover a voice for themselves--the one thing the state cannot take away from them. In spite of themselves, their attempts to make sense of their lives, of the events that they find themselves caught up in, are often times quite comical, sometimes bordering on the farcical. And the landscapes, depicted in a language that is quite lucid and lyrical, often times mirror the situations that the characters themselves are caught up in.Item (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.Item "We Seek What We Find - We See What We Look For": Looking for Literary Production in Washington, D.C. 1921-1928(2006-08-30) Bowden, Ebony Vanessa; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though acknowledged as the intellectual and cultural hub of African American enlightenment, many artists' experiences attest that the reputation of Harlem as an artistic haven has in many ways, been overestimated. The promotion of Harlem's dominant characteristics has led many historians to overlook other culturally productive locations like Washington, D.C., which was also a major center for literary and artistic development during the twenties. My project explores Georgia Douglass Johnson as D.C.'s agent of cultural and literary production through her hostess-ship of Saturday-night literary salons held in her 1461 S. Street Northwest D.C home from 1921-1928. The discussion of this literary salon is original because it includes theories of cultural production and cultural studies submerged within a traditional literary context. Allowing room to cross interdisciplinary lines, this paper involves an investigation of members of the salons as well as the internal and external dynamics of the literary community itself.Item LA 'NOUVELLE' LITTERATURE MAROCAINE DE LANGUE FRANÇAISE ET L'ESPACE PUBLIC: LE CAS D'ABDELLATIF LAABI(2005-05-26) Babana-Hampton, Safoi; Julien, Eileen; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the strategies adopted by the 'New' Moroccan writers of French expression to creatively engage art in social and cultural debates on identity, decolonization and democracy, thus promoting the emergence of a modern public sphere through literature, against the backdrop of absolutist power and a politically repressed society. The term 'new' is understood as a defining characteristic of a certain trend of Moroccan literary writing that not so much seeks to distinguish itself from what is commonly referred to as 'colonial' writing, but that sees itself in terms of an epistemological attitude, and as an event associated with critical self-questioning and creative engagement with modernity and the colonial/postcolonial situation. The analysis of a selection of texts in our case study of Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laâbi aims at presenting a reading model that posits this literature in its relations with the evolving socio-political and intellectual environments. In order to reveal the limits and inadequacies of past approaches to the corpus of the 'New' Moroccan literature of French expression, the study draws on Habermas's notion of the 'public sphere'. For the purposes of this study, Habermas's concept allows for an interdisciplinary approach that has the advantage of exposing the intricacies of the literature/politics and literature/society relationships in the context of Moroccan society. The study engages the theories of art developed by Bakhtin, Jameson, Bourdieu, Said and others for the ultimate goal of presenting a reading model that privileges the analysis of the texts in question as literary texts seen in their relations with their context, and not as entities that are subordinate to or embedded in the realm of political activity, nor as closed entities leading an independent life of their own. The research questions raised by the thesis are set within larger postcolonial questions and themes such as the meaning of 'decolonization', the relationship between the Self and the Other, determinants of a post-independence (national) identity, the problem of language and the role of the postcolonial intellectual.