College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item "Tell Me Your Diamonds" Story Bearing in African American Women's Life History Narratives(2014) Smith, Shanna Louise; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1994, a week prior to the release of her family memoir The Sweeter the Juice, African American writer, Shirley Haizlip was a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The episode, "Denying my Race," unveiled the ways some members of Haizlip's bi-racial family sought to pass for white, while others lived successful lives as African Americans. During the publicized reunion, members of both sides of the racial coin worked toward coming to terms with their identities. In telling this story, Haizlip took on the role of the female story bearer, the writer of the family narrative who is positioned two or more generations beyond the story she tells. What does it mean to be a living archive, a black woman who carries the mantle of an uneasy familial past and makes it her body of work? What does it mean to investigate a wound in the family that is representative of larger cultural injuries that occurred during pivotal moments in black history? How can deeply entrenched cultural wounds open dialogue, establish common ground, and create spaces for empathy and understanding across race, gender, sexuality, and class? Each of the women, about whom I am writing in this dissertation, helps to address these questions. A'Lelia Bundles, Shirlee Haizlip, and (Carole) Ione have all been afforded the opportunity to labor with their fingers to corroborate the oral narratives handed to them. The fruit of their labor are their life histories: On Her Own Ground, The Sweeter the Juice, and Pride of Family, respectively. The titles signal familial pasts that intersect with the complexities of gender and labor, race and racial passing, class and privilege. Using personal life histories like that of Haizlip, Bundles, Ione and others I seek to better understand the ways in which women writers can foster more generative understandings of African American life histories and the ways in which they are situated as sites for social change.Item On the B-Side: A Dub Approach to Defining a Caribbean Literary Identity in the Contemporary Diaspora(2013) Semaj, Isis Nailah; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)United under an aesthetics of dub and utilizing both literary critique and social and musical historiography, this dissertation analyzes Caribbean texts that acknowledge a particular kind of identification that occurs in the diaspora and has implications, too, for the study of the Caribbean subject at home in the region. Inspired by dub music, which developed out of the distinct socio-political climate of newly independent Jamaica as a music juxtaposing the capital city's street violence with new nation optimism, the dub aesthetic finds application in Caribbean literary texts written within the undefined subjective space between dislocation from home and late twentieth and early twenty-first century globalism. Thus, while paying respect to Derek Walcott's pronouncement that colonialism is the common ground of the New World, this dub approach moves beyond a joint postcolonial identification to an interrogation of the overlapping histories and social realities present in the contemporary Caribbean diaspora.Item Oral Storytelling in Modernism: Narration, Ideology, and Identity(2012) Wellman, Jennifer Jean; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Oral storytellers abound in modernist texts - from T. S. Eliot's inarticulate J. Alfred Prufrock to Djuna Barnes' desultory Dr. Matthew O'Connor, from Joseph Conrad's loquacious Charlie Marlow and other men of the sea to Rebecca West's dainty Harriet Hume. This project theorizes the construction of orality and the figure of the oral storyteller in early to mid-twentieth-century literature, with a focus primarily - but not exclusively - on the British Isles. While the prevalence of such constructions has been surprisingly under-examined by modern literary critics, early to mid-twentieth-century writers were fascinated with oral storytelling, and this fascination provides vital insight into literary modernism's all-important efforts to redefine self and community through art and artistic innovation. Modernist authors employ written representations of oral storytelling to explore and attempt to negotiate the relationship between cultural authority and the formation of modern subjectivities. I examine modernist representations of oral storytelling in works such as Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" (1936), Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Rebecca West's Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929), Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931), and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (1958). By exploring how authors contextualize ideas of orality and the oral storyteller within discourses of nationalism, literary tradition, and technology, I show that the figure of the oral storyteller presents a contact site for the contesting forces that inflect the formulation of self in the early to mid-twentieth-century. These forces include: ideologies of gender and empire; narrative itself as a culturally-inflected schema for understanding experience; and new and recently emergent communication technologies, like the gramophone and radio, which shift early twentieth-century understandings of language, presence, and the limits of the body. Moreover, as inherently self-reflexive moments within texts, scenes of oral storytelling implicitly engage with the defining modernist struggle to both undermine and appropriate the authority of earlier writers and contemporary literary and social traditions. The writers examined in this study use oral storytelling scenes to explore and delineate the relationship between dominant cultural narratives, the material world, and embodied identity.