Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.childhood

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Terminus and Other Stories
    (2013) Hennessee, Alison Emilia; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This collection of short fiction includes four stories. Though the situations and characters in each are unrelated, the collection as a whole treats recurring thematic interests: individual and shared origins; tension between loving one's home and needing to leave it; childhood and parenthood; and the American South. The stories are ordered to create a chronological arc from wild uncertainty of childhood to the measured acceptance of late middle age.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Meena's Dream: Theatrical Process and Production
    (2013) Yadav, Anupama Singh; Smith, Ashley H; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Meena's Dream is a one-woman play that portrays a young girl's epic conversation with God through the archetypal hero's journey, a metaphor for the universal battle to act with courage while coming face-to-face with our deepest fears. During the day, nine-year-old Meena wishes that her mother Aisha could get well; and by night, Hindu God Lord Krishna appears, entreating Meena's help in his war against the Worry Machine. Meena's Dream creates a fantastical world through storytelling and live music, from South Indian classical to indie folk, as Meena wrestles with life's unanswerable questions of mortality, suffering, and God's own existence.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Accidents of Water
    (2012) Walsh, Cherie Thompson; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This collection, consisting of poems that take their imagery and dramatic situations from motherhood, childhood, Christian mythology, and art, enacts a belief in the power of naming, storytelling, and the making of meaningful objects. Most of the poems treat the issue of loss, personal or collective. Some poems accept loss, for example, through an honoring of what has gone. Others operate more radically, seeking to remake their stories in order to allow for a transformation of their elements.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Infant Nation: Childhood Innocence and the Politics of Race in Contemporary American Fiction
    (2004-04-27) Werrlein, Debra Tonkin; Kauffman, Linda; Chuh, Kandice; English Language and Literature
    Infant Nation considers literary representations of childhood as sites where anxieties about race, class and gender inequalities converge. Popular and canonical representations of American childhood often revere it as a condition that precedes history, lacks knowledge, and thus, avoids accountability. I argue that invocations of this depoliticized ideal mask systems of privilege, particularly relating to white middle-class masculinity. My study highlights literature published between 1970 and 1999, a period marked by growing concern regarding boundaries of race and nation. With special attention to postcolonial and critical race theories, I argue that the authors here portray the United States as a nation infantilized by its desire to reclaim a mythically innocent past. In untidy formulations of nation that mirror their disjointed narrative styles, the novels interfere with the operation of nostalgia in American memory. They revise the ideal of innocent childhood to model a form of citizenship deeply engaged in acts of historical recuperation. I respond to theories of postmodern literature and cultural studies that emphasize the central role memory plays in shaping our future, presenting an analysis I feel is especially urgent at a time when neo-conservative policy-makers subscribe to a Trent Lott-style nostalgia for a mythically innocent pre-Civil Rights era. Chapter One examines Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990). I argue that Hagedorn cedes authentic history to the corrosive powers of assimilationism and consumerism, invoking multiple stories of history’s loss instead. In Chapter Two, I shift focus to the white middle class of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984). I argue that DeLillo implicates patriarchal families and profiteering universities in the cultivation of “innocent” consumer identities that ultimately turn violent. In Chapter Three I discuss Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). Morrison challenges the myth of American meritocracy, I contend, suggesting that race, class and gender oppressions exist not only in American culture, but in American childhoods. Finally, I examine Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging (1997). I argue that by representing children as historically savvy social critics and not as innocents, Yamanaka models a new adult citizenry. With the other novelists here, she warns a forgetful nation against embracing the infantilized present.