Browsing by Department "English"

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The 2nd Earl of Essex and the history players : the factional writing of John Hayward, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and George Chapman
(2012-12) Davies, Matthew Bran; Whigham, Frank; Loehlin, James; Barret, J.K.; Friedman, Alan; Levack, Brian
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s last favorite and the last man she executed for treason, has been harshly treated by posterity. Given his leading role at court in what Patrick Collinson calls the “nasty nineties,” Essex has taken much of the blame for the divisive factional politics of Elizabeth’s final decade. However, leading recent efforts to salvage Essex’s reputation, historian Paul Hammer has uncovered a sophisticated bureaucracy operated by highly educated scholars and led by an intelligent, cultivated statesman. A considerable number of high-profile literary figures, moreover, willingly engaged with this ambitiously expanding Essex faction. This thesis proposes that evidence of interference by the censor and the Privy Council, sensitive to a politicized historiography promoting the Earl’s interests chiefly on London’s stages, discloses the presence of a loose, autonomous federation of authors associated with the Essex and post-Essex factions between 1590 and 1610. This thesis considers the suspected works of an eclectic group of writers bonded by their ideological affiliations with Essex’s “radical moderatism”: civil lawyer John Hayward’s prose history of The Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII (1599); William Shakespeare’s second “tetralogy” (1595-99) dealing with the same historical period; Samuel Daniel’s closet drama of the downfall of the Greek general Philotas (1605); and innovative playwright George Chapman’s double tragedy set in France, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608). I situate these authors within the intellectual and public relations wing of the Essex circle in order to consider how they made contact with the center and with each other, and where they resided within the broader operation of the faction; what they offered and what they expected in return; how they shaped political thinking and how their dramaturgy developed as a consequence; whether they were attracted by the purse or the person; and to what extent they were artistically or ideologically motivated. In considering, finally, whether these writers worked in collaboration or alone, on message or off-the-cuff, as propagandists or political commentators, I illuminate the critically neglected role of the factional writer in early modern England.
A Collection of Short Stories on the Subject of Medicine
(2021-05) Chmielecki, Jacob
A Collection of Short Stories on the Subject of Medicine consists of three short stories. Each revolves around the experiences of a patient with some kind of illness.
‘A Gothic Portrayal of Mothering in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’
(2023-04) Baughman, Makayla
This analytical research paper evaluates Mary Shelley's depictions of complex parent-child relationships in her novel Frankenstein, as well as the essentiality of Gothic themes, forms, and devices in shaping these depictions. I argue that the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his quasi-child mirrors the lived experience of the author, Mary Shelley, and serves as a theoretical allusion to Femininity and Matrilineal Trauma.
"A series of waves" : melodramatic rhythms in Victorian serial fiction
(2022-05-06) Christoffersen, Anna; MacKay, Carol Hanbery
The English melodramatic plays and novels of the 19th century have many notable features in common: variation between comedy and tragedy, dastardly villains and dashing heroes, and a fascination with sensationally dramatic tropes like bigamy, mistaken identity, and false death. Underwriting these superficial features, Peter Brooks identifies the melodramatic impulse, or a desire to create “a fictional system for making sense of experience” (xiii) by turning to style of moral polarization that charges every gesture with “the conflict between light and darkness, salvation and damnation” (5). Brooks’s conception of melodrama is compelling, but it fails to fully elaborate what makes melodrama so exciting to engage with. I argue that the other driving force of melodramatic tropes is the necessity of melodramatic rhythm—a cyclical pulsing wherein delicious and tantalizing suspense is built up and released over and over again. As Juliet John describes, such rhythm is “a series of waves: the moment of stasis is remarkable because it is transitory; moments of excess signify imminent excess and vice versa” (31). Turning to Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, in this paper I establish how all three authors betray an investment in melodramatic rhythm with their construction of installments. Dickens with his variation between comedic and tragic, Collins with his shameless and frequent use of intense intrigue and shattering revelations, and Braddon with her negotiation between the readers’ relative surplus and Robert Audley’s relative lack of information. All three of these authors, too, are linked by the medium of serial publication. Whether or not there is a causal relationship between publication in monthly/weekly installments and melodramatic rhythm, each author begins and ends their installments very strategically, using the gap between installments as another technique to enhance their novels’ melodramatic rhythms. Ultimately, this paper argues that the engrossing and dependable melodramatic rhythm that drives these three novels is the key to their popularity.
A study of Hawthorne's origins
(1934) Turner, Arlin; Not available
A study of the debt to Shakespeare in the Beaumont-and-Fletcher plays
(1935) McKeithan, Daniel Morley, 1902-1985; Law, Robert Adger, 1879-1961
"A" is for "archive": a case study in the American long poem
(2007) Nelson, Thomas J. ǂq (Thomas John); Bremen, Brian A.; Heinzelman, Kurt
Long poems like Ezra Pound's The Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and Louis Zukofsky's "A" collect and preserve cultural documents, much in the manner of archives. Long poems of the so-called "Pound tradition" are arrangements of discrete passages, including direct citations from sources such as letters, historical texts, and other often "non-poetic" documents. Acting as an archivist, the poet selects material for preservation. Critics have used various frames, notably the epic, the sequence, and the collection, to interpret twentieth-century long poems. Though similarities to archives have been noted, an archival frame has not been fully developed. This dissertation draws on the disciplinary practices of the archivists as well as critical imaginings of archives to develop a frame for interpreting long poems as archives. After establishing the parameters of the archival frame, the bulk of the dissertation concentrates on Zukofsky's archival tendencies. Zukofsky worked as an archivist for the Work Projects Administration's Index of American Design project, where he developed strategies for using an archive as a communicative form. He crafted and marketed his own literary archive as a means of establishing a literary reputation and as an alternative means of publication. But not only did he develop pragmatic uses of archives, he also applied his understanding of archival principles to the construction of his long poem "A". The difficulties of reading "A" parallel those of working the Zukofsky archive. Readers are overwhelmed with hermetic details, documents of personal and public incidents, and records that we are unable to relate readily to surrounding material. Reading "A" as an archive, we must respond to the documents that are the component parts of the poem, to each document's situated context, and to the relationships among the parts that make up Zukofsky's "poem of a life."
Absent fathers in Shakespeare's middle comedies
(2002-05) Dobranski, Shannon Prosser; Mallin, Eric Scott
African American Review' Special Issue - Introduction
(2007) Fishkin, S. F.; Jones, G.; Jones, M. D.; Rampersad, A.; Yarborough, R.; Jones, Meta DuEwa
Afro-Latinx literary history : identities and politics across the ethno-racial divide
(2018-05-03) Mills, Regina Marie; González, John Morán; Cox, James H; Wilks, Jennifer M; Vázquez, David J
My dissertation finds that Afro-Latinx writers have repurposed the genre of life writing in response to their marginalization in US Black and Latinx communities. Through journalistic sketches, collaborative autobiographies, and other forms of life writing, Afro-Latinxs have constructed and deployed a variety of Afro-Latinidades—the negotiation of ascribed characteristics and lived experiences that shape the confluence of migrant, Black, and Latinx identities—that take form in their writing, which critiques existing hegemonies of race, gender, politics, and religion in US, Caribbean, and Latin American institutions. The writers and organizers who are the subjects of this study recover Black contributions to politics and the arts globally, articulate a distinct strand of socialist politics, fight the stigma against Afro-diasporic religions, and reclaim the legitimacy of street practices. My dissertation ties together literary close reading with extensive archival research. Because of a certain unease about where to place Afro-Latinx writers (Black Studies or Latinx Studies) and the overtly political and pedantic structure of some Afro-Latinx memoirs, these works have been underexamined in literary studies. As the first book-length analysis focused entirely on Afro-Latinx life writing, my dissertation builds on the recovery work of the last 20 years to take seriously the literary and political contributions of Afro-Latinxs. My project contests the common articulation of Afro-Latinidad as a “bridge” between US Black and (white) Latinx communities, and in doing so, provides a literary history of Afro-Latinx communities. I draw from bell hooks’ conception of “writing from the margin” and woman of color feminist analyses to demonstrate that Afro-Latinx life writing has shaped our discussions on immigration, colonialism, socialism, and spirituality for a century. Each chapter illustrates how different Afro-Latinidades—political, cultural, spiritual, and gendered—structure the life writing used by activists, socialist organizers, santeras (priests of Afro-diasporic orisha worship), former prisoners, and 23andMe genealogists
After rupture : innovative identities and the formalist poetry of Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley
(2010-08) Smith, Laura Trantham; Jones, Meta DuEwa; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cvetkovich, Ann; Hutchison, Coleman; Tejada, Roberto
This dissertation reveals a twentieth-century tradition of poetic formalism that positions race, gender, and sexuality as formal concerns, and further, as key factors in the development of contemporary formal poetics. My readings of three contemporary poets, Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley, combine formalist analysis with cultural approaches, including critical race theory and queer theory, to show how contemporary poets use form to confront racist, sexist, and homophobic representational traditions and to reshape identity discourse. This project intervenes in a critical tradition that divorces poetic form from political context and neglects formal aspects of poetries that engage with social identities, especially African American poetry. As Notley, Oliver, and Bridgforth portray racial, gender, and sexual diversity—including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered bodies—they invent and remake forms, genres, and textual strategies, from the feminist epic to the performance novel. These new forms exceed the strategies of rupture, fracture, and fragmentation that marked many modern and postmodern experiments and, in fact, reveal the limitations of rupture as a means of political critique. Instead, they widen the field of formalism, incorporating performance genres (epic, storytelling, blues) and new textual strategies to call attention to the histories of bodies and their representations, assert interdependent identities, promote pluralism, and insist on the interrelationship of literature, orality, and bodily experience.
After the archive : framing cultural memory in ex-Yugoslav collections
(2013-12) Kotecki, Kristine Elisa; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Carter, Mia; Hoad, Neville; Kuzmic, Tatiana; Shingavi, Snehal
Upon Yugoslavia’s breakup into five successor states in the 1990s, its national archives also divided according to the new national borders. This re-ordering of institutional history took most dramatic form in the systematic destruction of the archival records held by Bosnia-Herzegovina; incendiary shells destroyed the holdings of its National Library in 1992. In contrast to the national divisions that “balkanized” and obliterated the archives, ex-Yugoslav compilations draw works from and about the region together. This dissertation analyzes the collections that formed as “alternative archives” in response to Yugoslavia’s dissolution and tracks how individual works within these collections are translated and reframed as they circulate internationally. It argues that distinct texts gathered together into the unit of the collection can effectively convey the complexity and contradiction of ex-Yugoslav cultural politics. Whereas compilations of texts of texts identified as representing various nationalities approximate international alliance through unities such as “internationals women’s solidarity,” “European unification” and “Yugoslav reunification,” close reading of the texts juxtaposed within the collections can also complicate the progressive solidarity that frames them. Ex-Yugoslav collections of print and film, and the situated interpretations they engender, provide a rich archive of responses to the post-Cold-War transition toward globalization and Europeanization in the midst of ethnic and religious extremism. In this project, I describe the “collection” as the product of gathering individual texts together, arranging them, and framing them with a unifying narrative. Literary anthologies, library archives, museum exhibits and film programs at festivals thus all function as collections, or archives, of cultural materials formed during and after Yugoslavia’s dissolution. I argue that the works in these collections reflect forms of organization and alliance that disrupt the common sense of existing geopolitical alignment and put pressure on normative desires for a post-Yugoslav future based on European attachments.
Against against affect (again) : æffect in Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American deaths and disasters
(2014-06-11) Boruszak, Jeffrey Kyle; Moore, Lisa L.; Bennett, Chad
Recent scholarship on conceptual writing has turned to the role of affect in poetry. Critics such as Calvin Bedient claim that by using appropriated text and appealing to intellectual encounters with poetry based around a central “concept,” conceptual writing diminishes or even ignores affect. Bedient in particular is concerned with affect's relationship with political efficacy, a relationship I call “æffect.” I make the case that because of its use of appropriated material, we must examine the transformation from source text to poetic work when discussing affect in conceptual writing. Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which consists of transcriptions of audio recordings made during and immediately following major American tragedies, involves a specific kind of affective transformation: the cliché. I discuss what makes a cliché, especially in relation to affect, before turning to Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings and her concept of “stuplimity.” Stuplimity is an often ignored and not easily articulated affect that arises from boredom and repetition. Stuplimity is critical for Seven American Deaths and Disasters, especially for the “open feeling” that it produces in its wake. This uncanny feeling indicates a changing tide in conversations about conceptual writing. Rather than focus on the affect of æffect, we should instead turn to the effect.
Against against affect (again) : æffect in Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American deaths and disasters
(2014-05) Boruszak, Jeffrey Kyle; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne)
Recent scholarship on conceptual writing has turned to the role of affect in poetry. Critics such as Calvin Bedient claim that by using appropriated text and appealing to intellectual encounters with poetry based around a central “concept,” conceptual writing diminishes or even ignores affect. Bedient in particular is concerned with affect's relationship with political efficacy, a relationship I call “æffect.” I make the case that because of its use of appropriated material, we must examine the transformation from source text to poetic work when discussing affect in conceptual writing. Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which consists of transcriptions of audio recordings made during and immediately following major American tragedies, involves a specific kind of affective transformation: the cliché. I discuss what makes a cliché, especially in relation to affect, before turning to Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings and her concept of “stuplimity.” Stuplimity is an often ignored and not easily articulated affect that arises from boredom and repetition. Stuplimity is critical for Seven American Deaths and Disasters, especially for the “open feeling” that it produces in its wake. This uncanny feeling indicates a changing tide in conversations about conceptual writing. Rather than focus on the affect of æffect, we should instead turn to the effect.
Agents of change : stewardship and the ethic of care in nineteenth-century British literary representations of social change
(2015-08) Smith, Melissa Ann, Ph. D.; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Ferreira-Buckley, Linda; Moore, Lisa L; MacDuffie, Edward A; Christian, George S
The steward was a ubiquitous figure in England for the centuries during which the landed estate dominated both the geographical and political landscape and figured prominently in Victorian religious and economic discourses. However, the figure of the steward and the role and the ethic of stewardship have not been subjected to sustained critical scrutiny in literature studies. This study therefore adopts a social historical approach to explore the function of stewards and stewardship in representations of social change in nineteenth-century English fiction, including George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72; 1874), Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) and Charlotte Brönte’s Villette (1853). Stewards managed the property of England’s major landholders and ensured the financial prosperity of their estates by carefully managing social relations. Their duties required them to connect, communicate, and reconcile the varied interests of different classes and groups and especially to synthesize profit and sympathy, economy and feeling. These duties made stewards ideally situated to observe, accommodate, resist, and participate in processes like enclosure, parliamentary reform, and industrialization that altered landscapes and changed people’s relationships to property. Based on this historical reality, this project proposes that stewardship represented to Victorians a non-possessive approach to property management that made stewards important figures through which to represent and imagine processes of transition that emphasized growth, development, and change based on de-centralized, inclusive principles, principles often conceptualized as acts of caring and the establishment of community. It therefore applies the framework of the ethic of care to explore how stewards represent the ways that Victorians dealt with concerns about changing definitions of and relationships to property that defined agency and power in the nineteenth century. Observing characters who act as stewards under the ethic of care rubric reveals maps of power in these novels that indicate that values like care and community could be instrumentalized to secure the authority and predominance of the socially powerful. The project also explores how novels and novelists mirrored both the functions and the moral ambivalence of the steward as they participated in aesthetic projects and acts of representation associated with affective community creation.
Air-borne bards : Anglo-Irish writers and the BBC, 1931-1968
(2012-08) Bloom, Emily Catherine; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Friedman, Alan W; Hutchison, Coleman; Savage, Robert J
This dissertation defines and explores “radiogenic aesthetics” in late modernism that emerged alongside radio broadcasting, World War II era propaganda, censorship, and paper shortages, and the transnational networks forming in the shadow of British imperial collapse. The Anglo-Irish writers in this study—W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett—addressed a changing media environment that mapped on to the socio-cultural flux of the period following Irish Independence. Transcending the newly minted national boundaries between Ireland and England, the British Broadcasting Corporation became a locus for shaping transnational literary networks, this in spite of the nationalist rhetoric surrounding broadcasting. By analyzing broadcasts alongside print literature, I identify a circuit of influence coursing between modernism and broadcasting, rather than a unidirectional flow. This body of work, which includes drama (radio and stage), feature broadcasts, poetry, and fiction, offers a counter-narrative to literary historical theories that position modernist aesthetics as a reaction against popular mass media. Motifs of uncanny repetition—returns, echoes, and hauntings—are typical of these radiogenic aesthetics and reveal tensions between orality and literacy, embodiment and disembodiment, communalism and individualism, ephemerality and permanence, and tradition and “the now.” These tensions become definitive features of late modernism as the self-assurance of modernism’s first practitioners gives way to troubling questions about the future of literature in the unstable media environments surrounding World War II. Adapting traditional literary forms from the novel, poem, and play for the broadcast medium and incorporating radio’s epistemologies into their literary theories, Yeats, MacNeice, Bowen, and Beckett draw attention to fundamental questions about mediation itself. In so doing, they anticipate the hypermediacy of postmodernism without, however, relinquishing the modernist pursuit of authenticity or the quest for forms capable of transcending the widening distance between author and audience.
All Mutual Aid is Speculative Fiction: Critical Fabulation and its Role in Achieving Abolition
(2021) Alvarez, Adaylin; Rivera-Dundas, Adena
Through the practice of critical fabulation, authors of speculative fiction can practice mutual aid with the goal of achieving abolition. Critical fabulation within speculative fiction allows authors to use their imagine to create worlds free of prisons, war, and capitalism. Both critical fabulation and speculative fiction, in practicing mutual aid, then become tools that work within the confines of and against the white supremacist, colonial archive, the prison industrial complex, and the non-profit industrial complex—those tools help authors and readers imagine a world of abolition. Through a literary analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, this paper aims to find instances of mutual aid within those works of speculative fiction in order to prove that all mutual aid is speculative fiction. The combination of Adaylin’s personal experiences in practicing mutual aid and her literary analysis of works of speculative fiction then allows her to describe her process in applying both to write her own speculative fiction story.
"Almost unnamable" : suicide in the modernist novel
(2008-05) Chung, Christopher Damien, 1979-; Friedman, Alan Warren
Since Presocratic Greece, suicide in the West has been “known” and controlled, both politically and discursively. Groups as diverse as theologians and literary critics have propagated many different views of self-killing, but, determining its cause and moralizing about it, they have commonly exerted interpretive power over suicide, making it nameable, explicable, and predominantly reprehensible. The four modernist authors that I consider in this dissertation -- Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner -- break completely with the tradition of knowing suicide by insisting on its inscrutability, refusing to judge it, and ultimately rendering it “almost unnamable,” identifiable but indefinable. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Victory, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury, respectively, these authors portray illustrative, but by no means definitive, modernist self-killings; they construct a distinctive representational space around suicide, one free of causal, moral, theoretical or thematic meaning and, I argue, imbued with the power to disrupt interpretation. “‘Almost Unnamable’: Suicide in the Modernist Novel” examines the power of self-killing’s representational space in early twentieth-century fiction, arguing for its importance not only to the history of suicide in the West but also to the portrayal of death in the twentieth-century novel.
American callings : humanitarian selfhood in American literature from Reconstruction to the American century
(2010-12) Warren, Kathryn Hamilton; Murphy, Gretchen, 1971-; Barrish, Phillip; Kevorkian, Martin; Walker, Jeffrey; Robbins, Sarah
In "American Callings" I argue that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American literature dealing with cross-cultural humanitarianism contains a strand that sought to rectify the potentially oppressive shortcomings of humanitarian practice. The authors whose work I examine--novelists William Dean Howells and Albion Tourgeé, reformer Jane Addams, humorist George Ade, and memoirists Mary Fee and George Freer--grappled in their writing with two reciprocal questions. First, they meditated on how humanitarianism shapes, changes, and constitutes the self. Second, they theorized how increased self-awareness and self-criticism might help the humanitarian actor avoid the pitfalls of humanitarian practice that critics, in their time and ours, have seized upon. "American Callings" thus challenges three critiques that have been instrumental to American literary studies for decades: critiques of sentimental humanitarianism's complicity in projects of cultural domination, realism's investment in the status quo, and reform's role in maintaining social discipline through surveillance. The dissertation disputes the prevalent assertion that literature dealing with cross-cultural humanitarianism constitutes a sentimental, imperialistic, and ultimately violent discourse. I accomplish this by looking to instances of what Gregory Eiselein (1996) has called "eccentric" reform, efforts articulated from within a culture but in opposition to certain aspects of it. Drawing on narratives of what I call "humanitarian selfhood" in three historical contexts--industrializing urban centers in the North, the South during Reconstruction, and the Philippines during the U.S. occupation--"American Callings" traces an "eccentric" literary genealogy, one that offers up the humanitarian dynamic as a heuristic wherein the humanitarian agent arrives at a new kind of self-understanding by way of wrestling with the questions raised by service to others. The literature written by and about these humanitarians, I suggest, then provides an opportunity for readers to be transformed, as well.
American ruins: nostalgia, amnesia, and Blitzkrieg bop
(2006) Briante, Susan; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-
“American Ruins: Nostalgia, Amnesia, and Blitzkrieg Bop” considers the symbolic role of contemporary urban ruins in the American imagination and in their relationship to America’s past. The United States contains more urban ruins than any other developed nation, yet ruins remain largely ignored as official sites of commemoration. This dissertation takes a look at the prominence of ruins as well as their invisibility, considering their role as sites of cultural memory, as well as how they are represented in literature, film, the visual arts, and the media. Throughout this study, an analysis of ruins as a motif in Romantic literature demonstrates how contemporary ways of seeing American ruins both challenge and conform to Romantic modes of contemplating these structures. In Chapter One, the fate of Civil War ruins is set against the history of Civil War commemoration and preservation in order to trace what narratives have been promoted about the conflict and what narratives have been erased. Chapter Two focuses on amusement ruins in Asbury Park, New Jersey. In popular recollections of Asbury Park, these ruins recall a legacy of racism and corruption as well as inspire nostalgia for the “glory days” of a working-class resort. In Chapter Three, the Aliso Village Housing Project ruins in Los Angeles testify to the ways in which attitudes towards age and ruin can help to justify the displacement and disruption of low-income communities. The final chapter studies the ruins of the World Trade Center in light of a history of New York City ruins beginning with the South Bronx during the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate how ruins can reflect the cultural memories of communities that remain under-represented by national monuments and memorials. The sites considered in this dissertation highlight examples of insidious traumas that frame the American experience (racism, displacement, economic upheaval), issues that put the process of commemoration/signification in crisis. These examples suggest possibilities for the incorporation of ruins into a commemorative landscape that would recognize America’s violent past and convulsive economic changes, as well offer a place to mourn and learn.