Department of English

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Browsing Department of English by Author "Adrian, Lynne M."

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    From architecture to archetype: space and self in suburban literature
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Wells, Matthew; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    My project examines the complex correlations between architectural changes in the suburban home and representations of the suburban man. For years, these ideas have been discussed separately, but I forward a reading that presents architecture and archetype in concert. My project focuses on architectural changes to the suburban home and how those changes affect middle class anxieties of the midcentury. To further my argument, I rely on twentieth century suburban literature, starting with Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and ending with John Cheever, Richard Yates, and John Updike. By comparing literature and architecture, I highlight the cracks in the monolithic image of the suburban man in media. To identify shifts in his character, I study the suburban man’s home. Material and architectural changes to the suburban home create specific zones within the house. For this project, I have designation the bedroom, office, living room, lawn, and kitchen as the key spaces to understanding the suburban man. The suburban man responds to the changing issues of his time, and the design modifications in the twentieth century work in tandem with the nuanced changes of the archetype. The suburban man performs a different identity dependent upon the room he is in, and as the rooms change, so does the suburban man. Despite his attempts to adapt, economic, social, and architectural changes leave him grasping for an identity that is no longer relevant to a world in which he lacks total control over his social and occupational life.
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    Tracing Zora's Janie: reimagining Janie as an archetypal character in 20th and 21st century contemporary literature
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2015) Gholston, Tracey Marcel; Manora, Yolanda M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Since the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, African American women authors, consciously or subconsciously, have re-imagined Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie Mae Crawford character in various settings with conflicts pertinent to their respective era. Hurston’s Janie is an archetype for African American women characters who are involved in quest fiction. Janie’s primary objective is to experience romantic love and sexual expression. During her quests she combats intense influences in her life that threaten to ruin her dream, influences such as her Nanny’s Victorian principles of respectability and loveless marriages. Despite her struggles, Janie is successful in her quest; therefore, she is a self-actualized character. A guiding question for this project is what becomes of Hurston’s once-self-actualized Janie? I address this question by examining Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) and A Deeper Love Inside: The Porsche Santiaga Story (2012). These three texts by African American authors each feature a Black woman protagonist at the helm of the story. I read the main women characters as literary reiterations of Archetypal Janie. Petry’s and Souljah’s texts, which span more than eight decades, and emphasize realistic social, cultural and political issues, can be read as modernized versions of Archetypal Janie’s quest story. This project does the following through literary and cultural analyses: 1) provides background on and justification for the pairing of street literature with canonical texts; 2) establishes a “Self-Actualized Janie” or a “Tragic Janie” as the two particular categories for Black women characters since Hurston’s Janie; 3) analyzes the internal and external factors that contribute to the character’s self-actualization or tragic outcome; and 4) emphasizes the importance of community and ancestral guides to the character’s development and actualization.
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    Unsettling hope: Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and the record of a reform friendship
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Ellis, Elizabeth Anne; Bilwakesh, Nikhil; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    In my thesis I reassess the relationship between two of nineteenth-century America's most radical figures: Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Dickinson, of course, is a private radical, in her invention and interrogation of poetic forms. Higginson, conversely, is a public radical, as militant abolitionist, member of the Secret Six, and commander of the first regiment of emancipated slaves. This friendship, I contend, finds its roots in the reform movement--an effort in which men and women in nineteenth-century America crossed socially imposed boundaries to forge friendships that might aid them as they sought to remake their world.