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Browsing Department of English by Author "Beidler, Philip D."
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Item The 20th and 21st century literary afterlives of Nathaniel Hawthorne(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Kelly, Matthew; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThis project examines ways in which the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne has been appropriated, inscribed, and variously intertextualized in the writings of a collection of twentieth and twenty-first century authors. From William Faulkner's work in the 1920's to Jhumpa Lahiri in the new millennium, the project demonstrates Hawthorne's lasting impact on culture. Another thing this project demonstrates is that attempts to place Hawthorne at the center of a traditional "school" whose direction is unilateral are inherently limiting. This work examines Nathaniel Hawthorne's intertextual influence in the work of John Updike, William Faulkner, John Fowles, Maryse Condé, Suzan Lori-Parks, Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee. By emphasizing an intertextual approach, this project demonstrates that once texts are placed in conversation, individually, those texts can never be read the same way again. Intertextualities move not just forward, but backward. They are not just Anglo-American but global. Finally, this project serves to remind us of the place of reading and writing about literature in our cultural lives. As a way to teach critical thinking, as a mode of understanding how we lived historically, how we live today, and how we may choose to live tomorrow, narrative matters.Item After Mary Prince: navigating 'authenticity' in 20th-century diasporic women's migration narratives(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Simmons, Kathryn Merinda; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThis project calls for a renewed consideration of Mary Prince's 1831 Caribbean slave narrative in critical readings of 20th-century women's migration novels. Specifically, I offer readings of how the signs "gender" and "labor" are strategically deployed and manipulated in contexts of migration. Such deployments and manipulations suggest that the notion of "authenticity," often used in feminist and postcolonial readings of women's narratives, is too narrow a construct to be as productive in literary scholarship as it has been assumed. To lend textual specificity to these elements, After Mary Prince examines the ways in which Prince's History establishes a precedent for 20th-century novels where migration shapes understandings of work and gender, effectively destabilizing labels of "authenticity." Published for the first time only two years before England put its 1833 Emancipation Bill into effect, Prince's narrative was both laden with the Anti-Slavery Society's editorial agenda and subjected to legal scrutiny that questioned the text's veracity as well as Prince's own "feminine" moral character. This series of textual and sociohistorical impediments is central to my consideration of agency and how it is simultaneously created and de-centered in 20th-century women's migration narratives. My focus lies within the Caribbean and the American South, where movement is cast in terms of escape and return, and where geographical context stages complicated formations of cultural expectation, memory, and identity. Specifically, in relation to Prince's History, the chapters focus on Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Gloria Naylor's Mama Day; Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; and, as an epilogue, Edwidge Danticat's recent work The Dew Breaker. These texts perpetuate key questions of how gender and labor mutually construct, even as they struggle against, each other. This project contends that these narratives are useful counter-examples to current strands of race and gender theory that, even in the name of empowerment and liberation, maintain problematically singular tropes of "authentic" identity categories.Item The American counter gothic: monstrous women and their monstrous texts(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Whitener, Bonnie; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama TuscaloosaVarious texts theorize the wanton woman and the conditions that created her but none so much as Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. His book speaks to a particularly American wanton, monstrous woman because, as Fiedler states quite accurately, the very roots of America are a result of our relationship with the other and with fear. The puritans feared God, Satan, Indians, and women. Over time, the United States has encountered myriad others to fear as well. As a result of this fear, says Fiedler, American literature is, at its heart, gothic literature. More importantly, this fear is demonstrated through a lack of mature love relations in American plotlines and in authors' characterizations of women. Fiedler is absolutely correct in his connection of an American gothic sensibility to a problematic relationship with women. However, his discussion of Hannah Webster Foster's novel, The Coquette, is inadequate. He suggests that Foster adheres to well-worn gothic motifs when, in fact, she does not. Eliza Wharton contains elements of a gothic and sentimental heroine. However, Eliza struggles in a culture of fear and convention and resists these forces as long as she can. This resistance to convention in the first novel written by a woman born in the United States indicates the beginning of a conversation with the American gothic consciousness Fiedler suggests. My claim, therefore, is that there is another set of stories and symbols that runs counter to this gothic sensibility so deeply entrenched in American literature. There are writers who create female characters that resist conventions but are aware of a "gothic "conversation, with Foster and The Coquette as the initiators of this conversation. Novels that also have this conversation include The Scarlet Letter, The Awakening, Lolita, and Sula. These texts were each simultaneouslyItem Beyond nostalgia: a walking guide to American small-town literature, 1940-1960(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Booth, Nathanael T.; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama TuscaloosaTypically, the small town in fiction is critiqued—or, at worst, ignored—as a form of nostalgia. Readers seem to go to small-town fiction as a means of seeking safety and escape from the pressures of Modernity. For some critics, such as Ryan Poll, this safety is dangerous, the small town an ideological construct which masks the workings of American imperialism. I argue that, to the contrary, the small town serves as a model in which authors examine the tensions inherent in American life. To say that a thing is a model is not to say that it is an ideal. Rather, as with scientific models, authors create arenas in which they can test American ideas and ideals. This dissertation focuses on the years during and following World War II, a time in which America found itself thrust decisively onto the world stage. At precisely the time when America was firmly established as a world power, authors writing about the small town used this national-imaginary model as a way of critiquing the strengths and weaknesses of the American experiment. My analysis is arranged spatially. Each location in the small town—Main Street, the church, the courthouse, the outskirts and the graveyard—are places of tension, places in which the ambiguities and anxieties of America at mid-century are played out. By examining the small town as such a model, the ways in which the small town functions as something beyond nostalgia become clear—nostalgia, in a redemptive sense, becomes a creative and interrogative force in American literature.Item Broken English, broken morality: English as virtue in Equiano's interesting narrative(University of Alabama Libraries, 2015) Caddis, Samantha Simmons; Smith, Cassander L.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written By Himself, is one of the earliest and most widely published slave narratives. It is an abolitionist text as well as a conversion narrative. Equiano, a cultural hybrid, has two major conversions that mirror each other in the text: his conversion to evangelical Christianity and his conversion to speaker and writer of English. In early transatlantic literature, non-native speakers of "proper" English are often portrayed as virtuous while speakers of "broken English" are portrayed as barbarous. I argue that English language acquisition in early transatlantic literature is a significant marker of whether the audience is meant to view a person of color as a "savage" or as a "noble savage." If a character can speak and write English fluently, then he or she is likely to have assimilated in other ways as well, thus furthering the probability that he or she can fit the European idea of "good." If a character continues to speak "broken English," it is a sign of resistance to English colonization and, thus, "bad" moral character. I also argue that Equiano uses his newfound religion and language to establish himself as a moral authority on slavery. By convincing his English readers of his conversion to both Christianity and English, he is able to situate himself in the sympathetic "noble savage" category, thus garnering sympathy for his abolitionist cause.Item The constitutive relationship between race and disability in African American literature: a Black critical disabilities studies approach(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Steverson, Delia; Harris, Trudier; University of Alabama TuscaloosaIn this project, I examine what disability scholars such as Ellen Samuels, Nirmala Erevelles, and Cynthia Wu label as the “constitutive relationship” between race and disability, meaning that race informs disability in the same way that disability informs race. The relationship between the two categories of difference is interconnected, yet seldom does black literary studies engage a disability studies praxis and rarely does disability studies engage with African American literature. I formulate a theory of reading race and disability as it pertains to the fiction, authors, and the larger African American and disability communities and strive to reconcile the overlooked, yet imperative, relationship between the two categories of difference. By using a Black Critical Disabilities Studies Approach, as I label it, my project breaks down the ways in which African American authors and scholars use disability as a metaphor for race, usually carrying a negative connotation. Not only do I engage the rhetorical strategies of disability in African American literature and scholarship, but I also employ a historical materialist lens to explore how, through the brutal system of slavery, the black body becomes the epitome of the disabled figure. Finally, I argue that using a Black Critical Disabilities Studies Approach allows for nuanced ways of reading African American literary texts, especially in terms of African American identity.Item A Daoist perspective on George Oppen's poetry and poetics(University of Alabama Libraries, 2016) Yang, Xiaosheng; Lazer, Hank; University of Alabama TuscaloosaI use Daoist principles of ontological simplicity and the unmediated relationship between man and the ten thousand things to analyze George Oppen’s poems and poetics. First, I conduct a survey of the current state of American poetry studies and Oppen studies in China. Second, I examine Oppen’s poetics of “a language of silence.” Third, I seek the compatibility between the two Daoist principles and Oppen’s poetic philosophy of silence and clarity. Fourth, I interpret Oppen’s representative poems, particularly his only long poem, “Of Being Numerous” through a Daoist perspective. Finally, I analyze two Chinese scholars’ translations of the first section of “Route,” and I also give an account on how I translate “Of Being Numerous” into Chinese.Item Deus ex machina: the God machine(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Pincumbe, Nicholas James; Martone, Michael; University of Alabama TuscaloosaGod is our salvation from eternal death. That's what Professor Nicholas Updown grew up believing. But what if there is no God? What then? These questions lead Nicholas down an unprecedented path of scientific exploration that unlocks the secrets to traveling through time. The wake of this discovery sweeps up a cast of odd and ambitious characters, including Updown's sultry wife, a no holds barred Presidential candidate, a mysterious hooded killer, a curious journalist, a crusading cop, the founder of Forever Life, and a whole slew of uniformed Time Travelers. Along the way, Nicholas Updown learns a thing or two about the secrets of the universe and those in his own life.Item Disjunctive nationalisms: the creation of the literature of the United States(University of Alabama Libraries, 2016) Crawford, Benjamin Darrell; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThroughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the American Republic grew both in population and cultural productions in diverse efforts to answer the nation’s questions of self-identity and direction. Poets from across diverse political, gendered, theological, and racial perspectives sought to answer those questions in disjunctive ways by using both the imagined author and the text as an imagined community as the bases for building their respective visions of American national identity. With the text as an imagined community, authors constructed interconnected literary communities not only around specific texts, but also around particular ideas and visions for the American nation. The ability to use texts as the creations of the reading public’s imagination became avenues for communicating responses to, and visions for, the nation which became reality with the publication of each new work. The constructions of these poetic visions occurred simultaneously with use of the imagined past, the imagined present, and the imagined future as avenues for exploring and communicating a variety of alternative national paths as each poet sought to prioritize her or his own voice in the cacophony of a developing American literature. The evolution of American literature as an artifact of the development of the American nation demonstrates the use of chronotopic applications of disjunctive nationalisms across time periods ranging from the deeply ancient (almost timeless in The Anarchiad), into the contemporary swirl of the political and cultural troubles of the early republic, and on into the (occasionally Millennial) infinite future of the nation. These applications came as responses to the call for a national literature, as well as to a society in a constantly fluctuating sense of national identity through its struggles for independence and sustainability in the face of challenges from within and without. The imagined past was used by such poets as Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight as they established a deeper past for the American nation that went beyond colonial histories, suggesting the nation’s roots were at least as deep as those of European nations. This work to use an imagined American past is itself a way of constructing an American literary tradition that, despite drawing on Old World genres and forms, allows for an expansion of what John Shields has termed translatio cultus. Through observing the use of the imagined past, present, and future, my dissertation expands on Shields’ idea to demonstrate that chronotopic applications were essential in the reworking of Old World stories in a New World context. Rather than simply providing re-articulations of Old World ideas as Shields suggests, chronotopic applications permitted early national American authors to respond to and expand visions of nationalism in the new nation. The imagined present provided authors with the ability to readily demonstrate their responsiveness to the currents of culture by implementing poetic responses to current events that both responded to, and reshaped, contemporary events in ways that allowed those poets to appropriate the imagined present in the construction of disjunctive nationalisms. Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, John Trumbull, and Phillis Wheatley, among others, responded to current events to demonstrate the pliability of the present when left to a literary lens, suggesting to contemporary readers the relevancy not only of each author’s voice specifically, but of the importance of literature more generally to the national experience. The imagined future allowed authors to adopt the role of national seer and declare future glories for the American nation politically, economically, and socially. The bases for these nationalistic visions ranged from Christian eschatology to humanistic deism, but almost always held forth the hope that the American nation would progress beyond its struggles of the late 18th century into a peaceful and prosperous future that presented America, and its governmental structure, as models for the rest of the globe. Through the imagined past, imagined present, and the imagined future, poets of the early national period used their texts as imagined communities that created and responded to disjunctive nationalisms from diverse perspectives that reflected the disjunctive nature of the early American republic.Item Elsie Dinsmore revisited: the utility of an outcast series(University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Farris, Kimberly Paige; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaIn this thesis, I argue that Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore series (1867-1905) deserves to be reconsidered for its potential utility in the broader arena of American literature. The series, popular during the latter half of the nineteenth century, is the special object of critical scorn amongst modern scholars despite having experienced a revival in popular circles. While other formerly-sidelined books, such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854), have been reclaimed through sustained feminist scholarship, the Elsie series remains largely blacklisted from academic conversations. Scholars such as Nina Baym and Jane Tompkins, who worked to bring respect to female writings from the 1850s and 1860s, drew a sharp distinction between fictions written for adult audiences, like The Wide, Wide World and those written for adolescents, like Elsie Dinsmore and Little Women (1867) - a distinction that has caused juvenile fiction to be largely omitted from canon expansions benefitting adult domestic fiction. I argue that the Elsie Dinsmore series has a value within the American canon by acting as the best example of transitional literature between adult domestic fiction and the girls' series books that dominated the end of the century. To develop this argument, I first examine the textual and cultural factors that have contributed to Elsie's omission from academic conversations. I then examine the extent to which the Elsie series participates in tropes of adult domestic fiction and in tropes of girls' fiction to situate the series within the progression of American female writing in the nineteenth century. I contend that the Elsie series can make a valuable addition to courses on the development of female writing in America by acting as prime examples of texts that participate in both adult and juvenile genres.Item From architecture to archetype: space and self in suburban literature(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Wells, Matthew; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama TuscaloosaMy 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.Item Gender and national identity in the American war narrative(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Wade, Elizabeth Walton; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama TuscaloosaMy dissertation, "Gender and National Identity in American War Narratives," explores the intersection of gender and genre in American War narratives from the Vietnam War to the present day, focusing on the way that women's incorporation into the American military contributed to both the transformation and redefinition of American masculinity and, by extension, America proper. Building on Susan Jeffords's tenet that "War is a crucible for the distillation of social and cultural relations," this project interrogates the manner in which literary representations of war both reflect and help constitute the American gender system and the way this system in turn offers a historical commentary on inflections of American national identity. It also investigates the ideological complexities particular to war writing as genre, exploring identity politics and the tension surrounding issues of an author's status as veteran or civilian, considering what set of generic criteria constitutes and defines a war narrative, and chronicling the specific inflections of war narratives at particular historical moments. Gender is a principal concern of war narratives, and this project follows that concern by identifying a taxonomy of sub-genres of the war narrative, ranging from what I term the direct participation narrative, the account of one who experiences the war directly, to the mediated narrative, the story of a person who strives to understand someone else's war experience, and by analyzing the way those sub-genres reveal a gendering of the war narrative, both on the level of representational content and on the level of form. This work also explores the prevalence of a generic preference that dictates fidelity to the historical referent of the war being depicted. Authors may (and certainly do) fictionalize war; however, as this work argues, such fictionalization remains tightly constrained by generic conventions and broader ideological considerations of which they form a part. Although no text exists in a vacuum, the war narrative's attempt to represent a geopolitical and historical moment that carries real-life (and real death) consequences enacts a particular set of constraints as it represents America, its people, and that for which they will wage war.Item Hemingway and the textual struggle of paternity(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Schuver, Allison Rose; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaErnest Hemingway bears the legendary reputation of a hyper-masculine hunter, drinker, and womanizer, though much criticism has sought to complicate notions of gender in the author's life and fiction. This research project considers fatherhood in particular, one aspect of masculinity that was never easily-defined for Hemingway. Hemingway's fiction frequently has autobiographical roots, and his writing reflects his own obstacles with transferring from the role of a son to the role of a father. Writing as a way "to get rid of it," as Nick Adams does in "Fathers and Sons," Hemingway wrote again and again of his conflict with being a father and being a son, but never seemed to overcome his struggles or find his separate piece. Troubled by his father's suicide, the stunted rearing of his sons, and a tumultuous relationship with his youngest, cross-dressing son Gregory, Hemingway makes fatherhood remarkably present in several texts that span the decades of his career. He was known to his friends and even the public at large as "Papa," but this identity is constantly muddled and strained in his writing. This project pursues Papa Hemingway in four texts with particularly rich paternal content: "Fathers and Sons," major sections of Islands in the Stream, "I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something," and "Great News from the Mainland." Hemingway's real-life relationships with his father and his sons were filled with hardship, confusion, and self-doubt, but the repeated reworking of father-son relationships in these texts offers the potential for healing, even if this healing is simply fiction.Item "I don't know what I would do but for writing": authorship and the diary of Susan Warner (1850-3)(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Lamar, Anne Franklin; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaSusan Bogert Warner is best known for her novel The Wide, Wide World (1850), a work of domestic fiction that was second only to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in its nineteenth-century popularity. In the months before the publication of The Wide, Wide World, Warner began a diary in the pages of a discarded journal that had previously belonged to her aunt. This dissertation project consists of a transcription of the diary, a biographical sketch, and a critical analysis of the diary text. A literal transcription of the diary provides a primary source through which to analyze Warner’s life and writing by presenting an intimate portrait of her life and mind at the beginning of her career. This diary captures Warner’s journey into authorship and allows Warner the agency of narrating the three pivotal years of her early career. The diary transcription and analysis help to define how Warner sees herself as a writer and woman in Victorian America.Item "It is a privilege to see so much confusion": Marianne Moore and revision(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Whisenhunt, Eloise Arnold; White, Heather Cass; University of Alabama TuscaloosaMarianne Moore's Complete Poems is not complete; it contains sixty-six poems, which is about one-third of her published work. What has not been omitted has, in most cases, been revised. Such acts of expurgation and modification have led some critics to argue that the older Moore revised the works of her younger self. Others view Moore's history of revision as a progression leading to succinct and compact poems. The fundamental claim of this study is that Marianne Moore's revisions are not the acts of an idiosyncratic poet but are manifestations of her aesthetic. In her early poetry, Moore uses revision to "make it new." Revision allowed Moore to reinvigorate her poems after they had been published and interpreted. More importantly, in revising her poetry Moore kept her poetry genuine. "The genuine," for Moore, was that which was in a constant state of flux. Moore's revisions, then, achieve "the genuine." Moore's practice of extensive revision emphasizes the pursuit of latent meaning rather than the quick capture of patent understanding. The poems and their variants, then, serve as a "right good salvo of barks" so that Moore's reader must continue the chase, which she deems more meaningful than the arrival at understanding, and it also keeps the work genuine. In Chapter One, I examine four of Moore's early verse essays that educate her reader as to her aesthetic. These poems emphasize Moore's aesthetic of pursuit and how her revisions defamiliarize the text so that the reader has to re-engage the poem and, likewise, his or her imagination. The focus of Chapter Two is "the genuine," which Moore defines in "In the Days of Prismatic Color" and in "Poetry." Her revisions of "Poetry" display "the genuine," and much of the chapter is spent considering these revisions. Chapter Three discusses the shift that occurred in Moore's poetics between the 1936 The Pangolin and Other Verse and the 1941 What Are Years. Moore's revisions of "Virginia Britannia" and "Half Deity" demonstrate a change in audience and a change in Moore's aesthetic that leads to the simplification of what had been complex.Item "The multitude of thronging thoughts and baseless dreams": the diary of Caroline Stern(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Lamar, Anne Franklin; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaCaroline Stern, the "Mother of Greenville's authors," is a legend in the Mississippi Delta, but little if anything is known about her life outside of her role as an influential teacher. Through this transcription and analysis of her diary, Stern's legacy is altered to embody her self beyond her life as a teacher, recovering her voice from the anonymity and patriarchy overshadowing it.This diary provides a voice to a woman, whose artistry was once only acknowledged through the men whom she mentored, and the transcription draws attention to her own art and exposes the internal struggles of her life in the brief period of time. Most significantly, it recovers Carrie Stern's true self: a well-rounded and educated woman and a talented artist who struggles to answer questions about herself and the world around her and to find a place of personal joy and contentment.Item The new woman of the New South: gender and class in 20th century Southern women's literature(University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Sumner, Caitlan Aleah; Manora, Yolanda M.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThe theoretical study of Southern literature has become increasingly popular in recent decades. Many of the studies focus on women's rights, racial inequality, class relations, and other injustices as they are depicted within the texts of Southern authors; this master's thesis is no different. I, too, recognize the social injustices represented in many Southern texts and seek to understand how they translate into an understanding of Southern history. One of the foundational points of my research is that the South is depicted as a grotesque region, and Southern writers have done little to dispute the grotesque label given to them by scholars. In fact, in the early twentieth century, Southern authors invented a literary genre that emphasizes the queer, distorted, and grotesque culture of the American South. Authors used images of disability, gender bending, and intersexuality as a way of representing the grotesque, economically divided South. Women writers were especially engaged in writing about these themes that generally define Southern literature. One way that Southern female writers of the twentieth century represented the grotesque in their writing was by employing the archetypal figure of the tomboy. Within the context of this study, tomboys are considered young--pubescent or pre-pubescent--girls who occupy a liminal space in the man-woman gender binary. In addition to the tomboy identity being a liminal space in the gender binary, it is also characterized by a liminal time in lives of girls who claim this identity. Tomboyism is generally given up during adolescence. Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Katherine Anne Porter's "Old Mortality" and "The Old Order" all contain iconic New South tomboys. Through their rejection of, or in some cases queering of, traditional gender norms, Mick Kelly in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding, Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Miranda in "Old Mortality" and "The Old Order" all demonstrate the intersectionality of socioeconomic status and gender in the New South era and its relationship to the Southern Gothic.Item Re-figuring the mestizo body: disability and illness in Chicano literature(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Perkins, Emily Caroline; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama TuscaloosaChicano activist literature of the 1960s depicted images of healthy bodies in its quest to promote empowerment for its people, but, paradoxically, Chicano novels written from the 1960s to the present have been filled with images of disability and illness rather than health. This project uses a disability studies perspective to present reasons for this paradox and to suggest that images of disability serve to both create and reflect contemporary attitudes toward nationalism in the Chicano nation. Unlike previous disability studies readings of Chicano literature, this study illustrates how specific historical transformations in conceptions of disability within the Chicano movement have contributed to shifting conceptions of national identity. To help illustrate these shifting conceptions, I offer the term dys-placement, which refers to post-colonial literature's convention of depicting disabled Others in effort to both register and critique a variety of social and political displacements. In effect, dys-placement contributes to a shifting of values within the post-colonized culture to aid in the culture's survival. In the process of dys -placement, disability tends to retain specific meanings in specific eras, and these meanings encapsulate the post-colonized culture's contemporary consciousness. This study will track the changing meanings of disability in Chicano novels published from the 1970s through the 1990s, but it will primarily focus on Miguel Mendez's Peregrinos de Aztlán (early to mid-1970s), Rudolfo Anaya's Tortuga: A Novel (mid to late 1970s), Arturo Islas' The Rain God: A Desert Tale (1980s), and Benjamin Saenz's Carry Me Like Water (1990s), which offer conceptions of Chicano identity that are exemplary of other Chicano literary works from their respective eras. These historically-specific meanings of disability are typical of dys-placement because images of disability originate from trends in political activism and literature, and authors often suggest particular meanings of disability by framing it accordingly to particular models of disability in the ascendant at the time of their writing. In the four eras I explore, authors use the materialist, the rehabilitation, the social, and the cultural models, respectively. The process of dys-placement is also examined through Chicano culture's historically-specific manipulation of its cultural nationalist rallying symbol Aztlán.Item The reader's progress: Thomas Pynchon's novels as allegories of critical reading practices since 1945(University of Alabama Libraries, 2010) Meinel, Tobias Julian; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThis project describes the influence of post-1945 cultural, societal, and political developments on reading practices in literature departments in the United States. Reading has been central to the way academics saw themselves in relation to their socio-political surroundings and has been a direct response to or expression of contemporary pressures between the years after World War II and the present. The distinct reading zeitgeist of each of these decades allows us to identify a number of paradigmatic reading stances: readers in the ivory tower, paranoid readers, doubtful readers, resisting readers, meta-readers, Luddite readers, and iconoclast readers. Thomas Pynchon is one of the few American authors who have published over this exact time span. His novels, when interpreted as allegories of reading, not only reflect the complex changes that have taken place in the reading zeitgeist since 1945 but also lure their readers into assuming certain roles. This "interpellative" function of Pynchon's novels works in a way that disrupts and challenges the dominant reading paradigm. Pynchon's sustained preoccupation with reading not only unifies his later novels with his "classical" work of the 1960s and 1970s but also shows him as the most prominent observer of and commentator on post-1945 reading practices in the academy.Item Self, world, and God in the poetry of Dickinson and Melville(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Gilliland, Don; White, Heather Cass; University of Alabama TuscaloosaEmily Dickinson and Herman Melville are the major nineteenth-century representatives of a strain of American poetry that may be termed, following Elisa New, "religiocentric." In support of this proposition, this study explores the following ideas: the meaning of the term "religiocentric;" the vexed issue of the value of Melville's poetry generally; form, content, and value Melville's Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876); the religious views of Melville and Dickinson, and the areas where they overlap; the interrelationships of religion and textuality in Dickinson's work. In describing "religiocentric" poetry, I begin with R.W.B. Lewis's ideas of the emergence in the nineteenth century of what he calls the parties of "Hope" (exemplified by Emerson), "Memory" (for example, in sentimentalist literature and piety), and "Irony" (for example, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's sympathies with both of the other parties but his refusal to embrace either). I locate Dickinson and Melville in the party of Irony. Elisa New's recent work identifies the dominance of the effects of Emersonianism and the party of Hope in American poetry and describes a different strain which retains an idea of Original Sin and generally has a clear awareness of the problem of suffering. I follow her description of this strain as "religiocentric." Chapters 2 and 3 argue that Melville should be ranked with Dickinson and Walt Whitman as major American nineteenth-century poets. I discuss two relatively recent articles, by Helen Vendler and Rosanna Warren, which make forceful arguments on behalf of Melville's poetry, Warren more fruitfully than Vendler. I propose that Melville's immense and difficult Clarel has aesthetic value in addition to its service as a vehicle for the expression of various religious points of view. Dickinson and Melville were deeply interested in and troubled by religion. Though there are important differences in their outlooks, they were both theists and were both firmly grounded in the text of the Bible, even if their theisms ranged outside Christianity. The particular issue of textuality in Dickinson's poetry permits us to see a synthesis in her religious outlook of the transcendent and the material.