This dissertation examines memoirs and non/fiction of the Vietnam War, written by combat veterans (Tim O'Brien, Tobias Wolff, Ron Kovic), and army nurses (Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey), and war correspondents (Micheal Herr), most of whom joined the antiwar movement, and used their own war wounds as incontrovertible evidence against it. Since these authors' traumatization compromised their memories of combat, their narratives feature literary devices reflective of post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology (e.g. flashbacks, non-linear plots, repetition, disassociation). Their authenticity stems from the military jargon, lewd dialogue, and dark humor contained within. A mix of truth-telling and bullshitting paradoxically coexist in these texts; as trauma theories elucidate, improvisation (of details) does not diminish the integrity of a traumatic memory, or the memoir itself. In an era of Nixonian follies, whistleblowing became a high stakes endeavor for journalists and veterans. They exposed the military's standard operating procedures that violated the Geneva Conventions such as free-fire zones, wide-scale bombings, and chemical warfare (e.g. Napalm, Dioxin, Agent Orange). Desiring reformation, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted their own Winter Soldier Investigation into the Mỹ Lai massacre, sending spokesperson John Kerry to testify during the Fulbright Hearings. Women served thanklessly in the war, …

In the wake of a disturbing decades-long trend in both print and visual media—the appropriation of Black history and culture—another trend is observed in works of African American fiction: the reclamation of the appropriated imagery, in both neo-slave narratives and works of Afrofuturism. The image focused on specifically in this paper is that of the ship, which I argue serves at least two identifiable functions in Black fiction: first, to address the historical treatment of Africans and their American descendants, and secondly, to demonstrate Black progress and potential. Through an exploration of three works of African American fiction, works that take their Black protagonists beyond the ship's dreadful hold, the reader can see the important themes being channeled: Charles Johnson's Middle Passage sets a course on how to arrive at true freedom, enacting a process of Black liberation that begins with learning how to survive "in the wake," a concept derived Christina Sharpe's work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts demonstrates not only the effects of "the hold," but how the hold itself has evolved from its origins on the slave ship; as new holds are constructed and demanded by society, rebellion is …

The political implications of the OE prose translations of King Alfred (849-899) are overlooked by scholars who focus on the literary merits of the texts. When viewed as propaganda, Alfred's writings show a careful reshaping of their Latin sources that reaffirms Alfred's claim to power. The preface to Pastoral Care, long understood to be the inauguration of Alfred's literary reforms, is invested with highly charged language and a dramatic reinvention of English history, which both reestablishes the social hierarchy with the king more firmly in place at its head and constructs the inevitability of what is actually a quite radical translation project. The translations themselves reshape their readers' understanding of kingship, even while creating implicit comparison between Alfred and the Latin authors.

The dissertation consists of a critical preface and excerpts from the novel Patrol. The preface explores how the novel Patrol utilizes characters that engage with tropes of the Romantic Genius in order to establish their subjectivity while navigating the standardizing mechanisms of twenty-first century information technologies. The preface analyzes how the rise of the organic food movement, the usage of biotech genetic engineering, and the tactics of Big Data-era marketing all inform the critical underpinnings of Patrol, situating the novel in conversation with works of fiction and nonfiction that also explore the interplay of these topics with contemporary American culture. Set primarily in Cincinnati, Ohio, the bifurcated narrative of the novel Patrol enlists the perspectives of both a science-tech father from the Boomer generation, Tim Smith, and his millennial public relations-major daughter, Sarah Smith. Both work in industries that seek to utilize the concept of the individual genius in service of quantification. Tim and Sarah’s interactions with Alexandra Smith, a family member who transitions from female to male over the course of the novel, cause both protagonists to recognize that their own identities are malleable, and this discovery goads each into reexamining their career choices and personal relationships. The plot …

Tracing the development of his dance imagery, this dissertation argues that Yeats's collaborations with various early modern dancers influenced his conceptions of the body, gender, and Irish nationalism. The critical tendency to read Yeats's dance emblems in light of symbolist-decadent portrayals of Salome has led to exaggerated charges of misogyny, and to neglect of these emblems' relationship to the poet's nationalism. Drawing on body criticism, dance theory, and postcolonialism, this project rereads the politics that underpin Yeats's idea of the dance, calling attention to its evolution and to the heterogeneity of its manifestations in both written texts and dramatic performances. While the dancer of Yeats's texts follow the dictates of male-authored scripts, those in actual performances of his works acquired more agency by shaping choreography. In addition to working directly with Michio Ito and Ninette de Valois, Yeats indirectly collaborated with such trailblazers of early modern dance as Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, and Ruth St. Denis. These collaborations shed important light on the germination of early modern dance and on current trends in the performative arts. Registering anti-imperialist and anti-industrialist agendas, the early Yeats's dancing Sidhe personify a romantic nationalism that seeks to inspire resistance to the cultural …

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), one of the foremost modern American poets, lived in Brasil during seventeen-odd years beginning in 1951. During this time she composed the poetry collection Questions of Travel, stand-alone poems, and fragments as well as prose pieces and translations. This study builds on the work of critics such as Brett Millier and Lorrie Goldensohn who have covered Bishop’s poetry during her Brasil years. However, most American critics have lacked expertise in both Brasilian culture and the Portuguese language that influenced Bishop’s poetry. Since 2000, in contrast, Brasilian critic Paulo Henriques Britto has explored issues of translating Bishop’s poetry into Portuguese, while Maria Lúcia Martins and Regina Przybycien have examined Bishop’s Brasil poems from a Brasilian perspective. However, American and Brasilian scholars have yet to recognize Bishop’s journey of acculturation as displayed through her poetry chronologically or the importance of her belated reception by Brasilian literary and popular culture. This study argues that Bishop’s Brasil poetry reveals her gradual transformation from a tourist outsider to a cultural insider through her encounters with Brasilian history, culture, language, and politics. It encompasses Bishop’s published and unpublished Brasil poetry, including drafts from the Elizabeth Bishop Papers at Vassar College. On a secondary …

Home: A Memoir, a creative non-fiction thesis, is a memoir in the form of personal essays, each exploring some aspect of the meaning of home, how my sense of self has been formed by my relationship to home, and the inevitability of leaving home. Chapter I explores the nature of memory and of memoir, their relationship to each other and to truth, and how a writer's voice shapes memoir. Chapter II, “Paternity,” is an attempt to remember my father, resulting in renewed interest in his past and renewed awareness of his legacy. Chapter III, “Home,” is on the surface about my grandparents' house, but is really about my grandmother. Chapter IV, “Dixie,” is about my contradictory feelings for the South, and my eventual acceptance of the South's complexities.

To what extent does Margaret Atwood draw from American slavery to write The Handmaid's Tale? How does Offred's narrative compare with traditional slave narratives, and to what effect? This thesis explores intersectionality (or lack thereof) in The Handmaid's Tale and compares Offred's narrative to traditional slave narratives to find answers to why Atwood chose to draw from American slavery to write her novel in the first place. Offred's narrative is compared to three traditional slave narratives written/orated by three women, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, and Mary Prince, to demonstrate how enslavement dehumanizes Offred in similar or different ways to these three women, and to reveal how the enslavement of and violence committed against the female slave body ultimately deforms even the most intimate human relationships in both Gilead and in historical American slavery. I discuss other tactics used to maintain control of the slaves both in Gilead and in historical American slavery, with particular emphasis on the development of justifications for enslavement in both societies. Violence against the body is not enough in Gilead, so Gilead implements religious rhetoric and controls knowledge to maintain its control of the Handmaids. Despite being used to control, religion also becomes a source of …

Crazy People, a collection of short stories, presents characters and their various psychological crutches. The preface explores the concept of negative space as it applies to short fiction, manifesting itself in the form of open-ended endings, miscommunication between characters, rhetorical questions, and allusions to unspecified characters. The preface seeks to differentiate "good" space from "bad" space by citing examples from the author's own work, as well as the works of Raymond Carver, Dan Chaon, and Stanley Fish.

Nineteenth-century British fiction is often dismissed as necrophillic or obsessed with death. While the label of necrophilia is an apt description of the fetishistic representations of dead women prevalent at the end of the century, it is too narrow to fit literature produced earlier in the century. This is not to say that abnormal attitudes toward death are only a feature of the late nineteenth century. In fact, pathological attitudes toward death abound in the literature, but the relationship between the deceased and the survivor is not always sexual in nature. Rather, there is a clear shift in attitudes, from the chaste death fantasy, or attraction to the idea of death, prevalent in Gothic works, to the destructive, stagnant mourning visible in mid-century texts, and culminating in the perverse sexualization of dead women at the turn of the century. This literary shift is most likely attributable to the concurrent changes in attitudes toward sex and death. As sex became more acceptable, more public, via the channels of scientific discourse, death became a less acceptable idea. This “denial of death” is a direct reaction to the religious uncertainties brought about by industrialization. As scientists and industrialists uncovered increasing evidence against a …

Detective fiction highlights those qualities of masculinity that are most valuable to a contemporary culture. In mysteries a cultural context is more thoroughly revealed than in any other genre of literature. Through the crimes, an audience can understand not only the fears of a particular society but also the level of calumny that society assigns to a crime. As each generation has needed a particular set of qualities in its defense, so the detective has provided them. Through the detective's response to particular crimes, the reader can learn the delineation of forgivable and unforgivable acts. These detectives illustrate positive masculinity, proving that fiction has more uses than mere entertainment. In this paper, I trace four detectives, each from a different era. Sherlock Holmes lives to solve problems. His primary function is to solve a riddle. Lord Peter Wimsey takes on the moral question of why anyone should detect at all. His stories involve the difficulty of justifying putting oneself in the morally superior position of judge. The Mike Hammer stories treat the difficulty of dealing with criminals who use the law to protect themselves. They have perverted the protections of society, and Hammer must find a way to bring them …

This thesis includes seven short stories and a critical afterword. The afterword places the stories in their literary historical context in regards to creative nonfiction. It goes on to discuss the craft of fictionalizing autobiographical stories. Each of the stories should stand alone, though they follow the narrator's life for a number of years. Harlin Anderson is the narrator of all the stories.

In this dissertation, I examine the Sonoran Desert trilogy by Kathleen Alcalá through the lens of post-oppositional theory as developed by AnaLouise Keating. Moving beyond the use of post-oppositional theory to analyze non-fiction works, I apply this theory instead to the fiction of Kathleen Alcalá—whose work appears in such anthologies as The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. Alcalá, though well published, is underrepresented in contemporary literary criticism, as can be seen by the only eight entries under her name in the MLA International Bibliography. Therefore, I have chosen her most significant fiction work, her trilogy about the Sonoran Desert, as the perfect text upon which to map post-oppositional theory. Through analysis of her three novels, I show that her work is an ideal example of post-oppositionality in action and that her characters act as post-oppositional revolutionaries and prophets within the pages of the text. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that post-oppositionality can be seen in Alcalá through gender bending, looking at the characters of Membrillo and Manzana, Corey, and Rosalinda. In Chapter 3, I argue that the characters of Estela, La Señorita, and Magdalena are enacting post-oppositionality through their transcendence of …

This study addresses the ideological properties of the two main modal strains in fictional representation of romance and realism in order to provide an antidote to the currently extremely negative view of the representational function of fiction. In the course of the discussion, three received positions in traditional literary criticism are challenged. Firstly, the view of literary form as ideology-free is undermined by demonstrating the ideological properties of the two modes. Secondly, the realism/romance binary opposition regarding the mode of fictional representation is critiqued by both uncovering the misconception of the former's competence for transparent representation and evincing the two modes' ideologically interactive relation. Lastly, the categorization of Henry James as an aesthete is problematized by historicizing and socializing his three texts.

In this work, I trace and reconstruct Taiwan's nation-formation as it is reflected in literary texts produced primarily during the country's two periods of colonial rule, Japanese (1895-1945) and Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) (1945-1987). One of my central arguments is that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has historically emerged from the interstices of several official and formal nationalisms: Japanese, Chinese, and later Taiwanese. In the following chapters, I argue that the concepts of Taiwan and Taiwanese have been formed and enriched over time in response to the pressures exerted by the state's, colonial or otherwise, pedagogical nation-building discourses. It is through an engagement with these various discourses that the idea of a Taiwanese nation has come to be gradually defined, negotiated, and reinvented by Taiwanese intellectuals of various ethnic backgrounds. I, therefore, focus on authors whose works actively respond to and engage with the state's official nationalism. Following Homi Bhabha's explication in his famous essay "DissemiNation," the basic premise of this dissertation is that the nation, as a narrated space, is not simply shaped by the homogenizing and historicist discourse of nationalism but is realized through people's diverse lived experience. Thus, in reading Taiwanese literature, it is …

This collection consists of a critical preface and nine short stories. Extrapolating from the work and legacy of Michel Foucault, the preface theorizes a genre of “heterotopian fiction” as constitutive of a fundamentally ethical approach to narrative creativity, distinguishing its functional and methodological characteristics from works that privilege aesthetic, thematic, or technical artistry. The stories explore spaces of madness, alterity, incomprehensibility, and liminal experience. Collection includes the stories “Mexico,” “Civilizations without Boats,” The Widow’s Mother,” “Guys Like Us,” “Everything You’d Hoped It Would Be,” “A Concerned Friend,” “Crisis Hotline,” “Coast to Coast,” and “The Ghosts of Rich Men.”