Department of English

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The 20th and 21st century literary afterlives of Nathaniel Hawthorne
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Kelly, Matthew; Beidler, Philip D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This 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.
Abject aesthetics in contemporary Christian art: the de-euphemizing impulse in Flannery O’Connor, Andres Serrano, and Bruce Beasley
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2020) Kim, Ariana; Crank, James A.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Examining works by Christian artists Flannery O’Connor, Andres Serrano, and Bruce Beasley, this thesis explores the role of abject aesthetics within the contemporary American devotional imagination. While recent scholarship in medieval, early modern, and seventeenth-century Christian art has turned to examine the religio-artistic value of the abject body, this study not only revises such readings to accommodate a vastly different milieu, but also employs a multivalent Kristevan conception of the abject—one that accounts for the oft-neglected social and spiritual dimensions of abjection that exist alongside the corporeal. Interpreted against a prevailing Gnostic energy within contemporary American evangelical discourse, the abject aesthetics employed by the three aforementioned artists operate as a potent discursive and aesthetic countercurrent to the compulsory euphemism and anti-corporeal logics that breed sexism, racism, classism, and ableism in Christian circles.
African American Vernacular English: affirming spaces for linguistic identity within the composition classroom
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Golar, Regina Latonya; Niiler, Lucas P.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This dissertation, "African American Vernacular English: Affirming Spaces for Linguistic Identity within the Composition Classroom," presents the findings of an IRB-approved case study on African American female identity within the first-year composition classroom. The goals of my research are to interrogate the privilege awarded to Standard American English, advocate equality among all cultural dialects, and affirm pedagogical spaces for students' linguistic identities. My research addresses the links between African American females' language and identity. The first portion of the case study involves the students' academic identities. Based on the results of the study, I argue that in order to succeed within academia, African American female students must overcome a silencing of the African American voice as well as their personal insecurities involving language. The second portion of the study involves the students' societal identities. I argue that incorporating new waves of technology that reflect students' interests provides students an outlet to explore facets of their identity that fall outside the scope of academic discourse. Within my research, I demonstrate concrete ways to apply the Conference on College Composition and Communication's position statement Student's Right to Their Own Language. I examine the gaps that exist between certain professional organizations' policy statements and the actual pedagogical practices of the members of these professional organizations. In so doing, I seek to challenge other English professionals to uphold the position statements of our professional organizations. The foundational argument of this dissertation is that language and identity are tied inextricably together; therefore, any professional policies or pedagogical practices that seek to negate students' cultural languages should be reexamined.
African-American attitudes toward higher education and their struggle with collective identity and the burden of "acting White"
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Cope, Frederick LaRon; Manora, Yolanda M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project explores the cultural shift from the value African- Americans during the time of Washington and DuBois placed on industrial and higher education to the value placed by contemporary African- Americans. This cultural shift is linked to African-American collective identity and the contemporary burden of "acting White." In an effort to understand the severity of the cultural shift, this project explores the debate between Washington and DuBois, explores how collective identity was formed within African-American culture, and provides a possible solution to eliminating the contemporary burden of "acting White" through cultural pluralism.
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 Tuscaloosa
This 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.
All about the Benjamins: the nineteenth century character assassination of Benjamin Franklin
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Dixon, Charles Robert; Crowley, John William; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Early in his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin proclaims that the chief benefit of the autobiographical form is that it affords one the opportunity to replicate oneself. In his self-replication, Franklin creates an American mythos of success that shaped America's imagined nationalist identity. Franklin's construction of the American success hero was informed by his philosophy of tangible character-building via the traits we traditionally associate with Franklin, such as industry and frugality. Yet, one of the most evident, but perplexingly overlooked features of Franklin's Autobiography is his extensive use of irony as a rhetorical and literary device. Franklin's use of irony indicates an awareness that his hero was first and foremost a written creation, which infuses his narrative with a complexity that belied the matter-of-fact prescriptions for success lying on its surface. Over the course of the nineteenth century, autobiographical emulators of Franklin appropriated his narrative to suit their own purposes, ignoring or suppressing his irony in the process. These appropriations result in a fracturing of Franklin's original character into multiple Benjamins. Franklin becomes, then, not just his own creative project, but a national creative project. This dissertation presents a lineage of Franklins created by the multiple appropriations of his story over the nineteenth century, tracking how each replication of him participates in the reshaping of the Franklinian hero into a kind of synecdoche that denies the complexity and irony present in the original sources, thus "assassinating" the original Franklinian character and, in the process, the early American concept of "character" itself.
All was well: Harry Potter in the medievalist tradition
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Wilkes, Hannah; Cook, Alexandra; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Going beyond the obvious visual medievalisms -- such as Hogwarts Castle and its sundry suits of armor -- in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and instead examining textual medievalisms -- those plot points with precedents in medieval literature -- I argue that Harry Potter is part of the tradition of medievalist literature. The tradition began as early as the sixteenth century but had its heyday in the nineteenth century, when it arose as a reaction to cultural nostalgia inspired by industrialization, and this nostalgia became an integral part of the tradition. The nostalgia to which Rowling responds, I argue, is a reaction to the politics of post-World War II Britain. The series recreates World War II but with a more positive ending, an ending that is possible because of Harry's visions in Order of the Phoenix and Deathly Hallows and others' memories, viewed in the Pensieve in Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. I argue that these visions and memories are medievalisms because of their parallels to Geoffrey Chaucer's three major dream visions, the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, and the Parliament of Fowls, and because they can be read in the terms established by Macrobius in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. By using these medievalisms to create an ending that appeals to cultural nostalgia, I argue that Rowling has inserted her text into the tradition of medievalist literature. My understanding of cultural nostalgia's role in medievalism has been largely shaped by Alice Chandler's A Dream of Order; my understanding of cultural nostalgia in modern Europe comes, in part, from Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw's article "The Dimensions of Nostalgia" in their collection The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. My definition of medievalism comes from Kathleen J. Verduin's article "The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman," which reflects on Workman's efforts to establish medievalism as a field of study.
The American counter gothic: monstrous women and their monstrous texts
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Whitener, Bonnie; Whiting, Frederick; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Various 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 simultaneously
Analyzing semantic/usage distributions of phrasal verbs across registers: a corpus-based study on PVs’ most frequent senses in academic and spoken English
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2018) Myers, Daniel J.; Liu, Dilin; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Due to L2 English speakers’ immense difficulties with phrasal verbs (PVs), this study will focus extensively on investigating their semantic usages and their distributions across the spoken and academic registers. Although other studies have taken registers into account when analyzing PVs, no other study has specifically analyzed the correlation between the register of the PV and its subsequent meaning. Using the Spoken and Written Academic English sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as data, this study analyzed semantic usages of the 150 most frequently used PVs in both the academic and spoken registers in order to evaluate if their most frequent senses remained consistent across the two registers. The findings suggest register and context plays a crucial role in the semantic usage distributions of the PVs. With this information in regards to the relationship between PV meaning and registers, L2 English students will be better equipped when evaluating the PVs they encounter in their textbooks and everyday conversations.
Any hollow place
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Browne, Ryan; Behn, Robin; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This is a collection of poems by Ryan James Browne.
Because you flinch
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2010) Morrison, Brian Daniel; Behn, Robin; Brouwer, Joel; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This thesis is a lyric examination of child abuse which deals directly with the psychological issues that surface in abused children as they grow into adulthood. I'm trying to show that the harm done by abuse is often projected onto others later in life, especially onto the self as well as how violence cycles from one generation to the next. I am also trying to show that the circle of violence can be closed--there can be an end. Some of the psychological issues I have tried to illustrate in this thesis are gender construction and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Beyond fig leaves and scarlet letters: women voicing themselves in diaries and blogs
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) McKnight, Elizabeth Simpson; Voss, Ralph F.; Dayton, Amy E.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This project explores the reasons that women write in diaries and blogs and the ways that they reckon with audience and identity through private writing in public spaces. It observes that women write to work through difficult experiences, to give substance to the tasks of impermanence that fill their days and lives, to forge connections with other women related to issues of mutual interest and concern, and to assert themselves as subjects of their own making in the face of competing social constructions of who they should be. The importance of this subject matter lies in the ways that writing is a source of strength to individuals who have been silenced or otherwise isolated through the circumstances of their lives. I have chosen to look at the value of writing for women, but the principles that I set forth are applicable to other groups of people, particularly those who have experienced marginalization or loss of some kind. The research traces the history of the diary and its significance for women, the evolution of the diary's function as it has moved online, the relationship between the diary and identity formation for its writer, and finally, the relationships between writers and their audiences, particularly with the diary in its incarnation as the blog. I develop the metaphors of fig leaves and scarlet letters to represent the ways in which women negotiate the dynamics of truth, identity, and audience in textual practice and assert that emerging technologies such as the blog allow for women to move beyond the silences that these images symbolize, create communities, and give voice to their lives.
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 Tuscaloosa
Typically, 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.
Black Feminist Rhetorical Praxis: The Agency of Holistic Black Women in Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Contemporary Works
(2019) McGee, Alexis; Love, Bettina; Waters, Billye Sankofa; Evans-Winters, Venus; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This chapter critiques Lauryn Hill's debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, through a Black feminist and rhetorical lens. I argue that looking at Hill's album as a body of work provides a blueprint for acknowledging Black women as holistic agents of change.
Black feminist utopianism and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2021) Patel, Megha D.; Manora, Yolanda; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The feminist utopia was a prominent literary genre for women writers throughout the 1900s. Otherworldly separatist societies in novels such as Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Female Man (1975) by Joanna Russ featured speculative elements to present feminist issues to readers and advocate for a space created by and for women. But often lacking from popular depictions of feminist utopianism is the inclusion or even the presence of Black women’s voices and perspectives. Many of the most integral texts of the “feminist utopian” genre are largely white-centered and feature white women’s voices at the forefront. The questions then arise: where do Black women and their voices enter in? Is there such a thing as a Black feminist utopia? I posit that Black feminist utopian literature does exist, but that it often does not align with the same set of standards that a non-Black feminist utopia, as it was popularly conceived by 20th century white women writers, would adhere to. This project seeks to locate and articulate possible features of Black feminist utopianism that may then allow such fictions to be ‘read’ as utopian. Some of these characteristics may include connections to African folk traditions, a focus on the lived experiences of Black women and their communities, and a home place that is created against systemic oppression. Through a Black feminist theoretical approach, I will illustrate how possible Black feminist utopias exist in many spaces and places, with Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day as an exemplary text. Through the figure of Sapphira Wade, who is mother, goddess, and creator of the utopia, and through her descendants, nuanced portrayals of traditions such as conjure take prominence. And the island itself is a liminal home for a community that challenges Western paradigms, in a space that is built and owned by its people. In her depiction of the island of Willow Springs and the women of the Day family, Naylor presents us with one version of a Black feminist utopia, and in particular, one that endures through its centering of Black women’s intersectional experiences.
Black women as monuments in Nella Larsen's Quicksand
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2015) Barksdale, Nadia Ashae; Manora, Yolanda M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Given examples such as the Statue of Liberty and various Civil War monuments to the Confederate “Lost Cause,” it is clear that many monuments rooted in the American landscape take the form of the female body. I propose that this public prevalence translates into a rootedness in the American consciousness as well. With monuments, we honor the past and attempt to make permanent the ideologies that fit with and bolster our collective memory. This collective memory is, of course, a testament to the greater hegemonic forces that structure societies. Thus, marginalized bodies are often not inscribed within this narrative. Women’s bodies, however, are used to convey these hegemonic, masculine-centered ideologies in the form of monuments. Because this phenomenon is so present in the American (sub)conscious, I argue that such consciousness bleeds into the literary realm. This thesis attempts to make sense of the process of monumentalization and its deleterious effects on women, who, because they resemble such monuments, are subject to this process. As men construct physical monuments on the landscape in order to bolster their own masculine-centered power structures and ideologies, so do they attempt to construct femininity in such a way that achieves the same effect in every day life. I use Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand as an example of how men and masculine-centered forces attempt and, ultimately fail, to monumentalize living women, specifically women of color, who face a unique set of constraints on their sexuality and identity within society. With Helga Crane as an example of a woman who undergoes attempted monumentalization in several different environments and by several different men or male-centered societal forces, I examine the deleterious effects that monumentalization has on the woman’s ability to self-fashion her own identity.
Blood nativity: poems
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2010) Pinho, Kirk; Brouwer, Joel; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Blood Nativity: Poems.
Bodies at war: the female ruler in John Webster's the Duchess of Malfi and Lope de Vega's El Mayordomo de la Duquesa de Amalfi
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2014) Reinwald, Elizabeth Marie Beaumont; O'Dair, Sharon; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This thesis uses the theory of the king's two bodies to interrogate the portrayal of the female ruler in both Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Lope de Vega's El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi. These two plays are based upon the same source text, and therefore illuminate the differing concerns of both playwrights and both nations. Lope's text portrays the female ruler in a much less positive light because it is more concerned with questioning whether honra (inner virtue) or honor de opinion (bloodline/nobility/reputation) should be prioritized in male rulers. Through its portrayal of Antonio, the male steward and de facto ruler, El mayordomo advocates for a new social order based on merit rather than nobility, although the play does ultimately end with the restoration of the traditional patriarchal order. Like El mayordomo, The Duchess of Malfi also advocates for a new social order based on merit rather than blood, but it does so through its portrayal of the Duchess and the problems of her two bodies. Her brother Ferdinand displays incestuous desire for her body as a result of his conflation of the body natural and the body politic. The Duchess prioritizes the body natural over the body politic despite the traditional prioritization of the body politic. This prioritization extends to the end of the play, when Delio suggests that Antonio and the Duchess's son, rather than the young Duke of Malfi, will inherit the duchy. The Duchess's murder ensures the audience will be on the Duchess's side, and consequently the new social order suggested at the end of the play. More research needs to be done on the effect of Elizabeth I on both plays, as well as the connection of the theory of the king's two bodies to hermaphrodites.
A body of suffering: reading Shakespeare's tragedies through cognitive theory
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Helms, Nicholas Ryan; O'Dair, Sharon; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
In this thesis I attempt to build and use a cognitive theory of tragedy. I base this theory upon the work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner, whose studies of embodied metaphor and conceptual blending offer a new linguistic understanding of the way human beings think. When applied to tragedy, these cognitive theories enable a radical rethinking of the tragic hero, catharsis, and suffering itself. My thesis contains three major sections. In the first, I lay out the foundation of my theory, describing the basic processes of embodied metaphor and conceptual blending and linking these processes to theoretical accounts of paradigm shift and pattern, specifically those of Thomas Kuhn and Daniel Dennett. I then describe cognitive theory's relationship to traditional tragic theorists, including Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Terry Eagleton. Finally, I offer a cognitive reading of two plays: Romeo and Juliet and King Lear. Throughout, I hope to illustrate the links between thought, metaphor, and human action. Metaphors are not simply linguistic expressions: they are tools of the mind, and our use of those tools can bring great success or great tragedy. As such, tragedy is not merely an aesthetic genre. It is a cognitive event, a presentation of metaphor and of the consequences of metaphor.
Book Review of Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy
(2016) McGee, Alexis; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This book review of Other People's English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy provides an outline of this edited collection. Here, I summarize the contemporary discussions surrounding African American Language, code-switching, and code-meshing as factors impacting the classroom.

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