In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social mores of the adult world and validate adolescent subculture by reflecting that subculture's values and viewpoints. The locus of this subversion is the means by which teenagers, through the teen films, vicariously experience anxiety-provoking adult subjects such as sexual experimentation and physical violence, particularly the extreme expressions of sex and violence that society labels taboo. Through analyzing the rhetoric of teen lifestyle films, specifically the teen romance and sex farce, I explore how the films offer teens vicarious experience of many adolescent "firsts." In addition, I claim that teen films can effectively appropriate other genres while remaining identifiable as teen films. I discuss hybrid films which combine the teen film with the science fiction genre, specifically Back to …

A work of creative fiction in the form of a short novel, Asleep in the Arms of God is a limited-omniscient and omniscient narrative describing the experiences of a man named Wafer Roberts, born in Jack County, Texas, in 1900. The novel spans the years from 1900 to 1925, and moves from the Keechi Valley of North Texas, to Fort Worth and then France during World War One, and back again to the Keechi Valley. The dissertation opens with a preface, which examines the form of the novel, and regional and other aspects of this particular work, especially as they relate to the postmodern concern with fragmentation and conditional identity. Wafer confronts in the novel aspects of his own questionable history, which echo the larger concern with exploitative practices including racism, patriarchy, overplanting and overgrazing, and pollution, which contribute to and climax in the postmodern fragmentation. The novel attempts to make a critique of the exploitative rage of Western civilization.

William Blake's prophetic works are made up almost entirely of a unique combination of symbols and imagery. To understand his books it is necessary to be aware that he used his prophetic symbols because he found them apt to what he was saying, and that he changed their meanings as the reasons for their aptness changed. An awareness of this manipulation of symbols will lead to a more perceptive understanding of Blake's work. This paper is concerned with three specific uses of serpent imagery by Blake. The first chapter deals with the serpent of selfhood. Blake uses the wingless Uraeon to depict man destroying himself through his own constrictive analytic reasonings unenlightened with divine vision. Man had once possessed this divine vision, but as formal religions and a priestly class began to be formed, he lost it and worshipped only reason and cruelty. Blake also uses the image of the serpent crown to characterize priests or anyone in a position of authority. He usually mocks both religious and temporal rulers and identifies them as oppressors rather than leaders of the people. In addition to the Uraeon and the serpent crown, Blake also uses the narrow constricted body of the serpent …

This dissertation is an examination of the interiority of American authorship from 1815–1866, an era of political, social, and economic instability in the United States. Without a well-defined historical narrative or an established literary lineage, writers drew upon death and the American landscape as tropes of unity and identification in an effort to define the nation and its literary future. Instead of representing nationalism or collectivism, however, the authors in this study drew on landscapes and death to mediate the crises of authorial displacement through what I term "xenotopia," strange places wherein a venerated American landscape has been disrupted or defamiliarized and inscribed with death or mourning. As opposed to the idealized settings of utopia or the environmental degradation of dystopia, which reflect the positive or negative social currents of a writer's milieu, xenotopia record the contingencies and potential problems that have not yet played out in a nation in the process of self-definition. Beyond this, however, xenotopia register as an assertion of agency and literary definition, a way to record each writer's individual and psychological experience of authorship while answering the call for a new definition of American literature in an indeterminate and undefined space.

In this dissertation, I examine the political shift or reorientation of Arabs and Muslims from the supranational Ummah to the Western form of nation-state by attending to modern Arabic novel in the period between World War I and World War II. I explore the emergence of secularism in Arab national formation. One of my central arguments is that Arab nationalism is indeed a misleading phrase as it gives the impression of unity and coherence to a complex phenomenon that materialize in a number of trends as a form of struggle. In the first chapter, I defined the scope of my argument and the underlying structure and function of nationalism as a form of representation masked by nationalist ideologies. To investigate the reorientation of Arabs and Muslims from Ummah to adopting nation-state, I utilize Spivak's criticism of the system of representation along with Foucault's theorization of discourse. I argued along Edward Said that although the Western national discourse might have influenced the Arab nationalists, I do not believe they prevented them from consciously appropriating nationalism in a free creative way. I also explained that the Arab adoption of a secularist separatist nationalism was more an outcome than an effect in the …

The American Romantic writers laid a broad foundation for the historic and heroic Abraham Lincoln who has evolved as our national myth. The writers were attracted to Lincoln by his eloquent expression of the body of ideals and beliefs they shared with him, especially the ideal of individual liberty and the belief that achievement of the ideal would bring about an amelioration of the human condition. The time, place and conditions in which they lived enhanced the attraction, and Lincoln's able leadership during the Civil War strengthened their estimation of him. His martyrdom was the catalyst which enabled the Romantic writers to lay the foundation of the Lincoln myth which has made his name synonymous with individual freedom everywhere even today.

This study is concerned with the artistic use of classical rhetorical figures in Shakespeare's I Henry IV.After the Introduction, Chapter II examines the history of rhetoric, focusing on the use of the rhetorical figures in Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Medieval Europe. Chapter III investigates rhetorical principles and uses of the rhetorical figures during the English Renaissance and examines the probable influence of rhetoric and the figures on William Shakespeare. Chapter IV discusses themes, characterization, structure, and language in I Henry IV and presents the contribution of the rhetorical figures to the drama's action and characterization. Chapter V considers the contribution of the figures to the major themes of I Henry IV and concludes that the figures, when used with other artistic elements, enhance meaning.

This dissertation examines the role of stage properties-props, slangily-in the construction and expression of characters' identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707-for example, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1677)-I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control of a character's props often accords a person control of the character to whom the props belong. Props consequently make visual the relationships of power and subjugation that exist among characters. The severed body parts, bodies, miniature portraits, and containers of these plays are the mechanisms by which characters attempt to differentiate themselves from others. The characters deploy objects as proof of their identities-for example, when the women in Behn's Rover circulate miniatures of themselves-yet other characters must also interpret these objects. The props, and therefore the characters' identities, are at all times vulnerable to misinterpretation. Much as the props' meanings are often disputed, so too are characters' private identities often at odds with their public personae. The boundaries of selfhood that the characters wish to protect are made vulnerable by the objects that they use …

The purpose of this thesis is to consider Camus's use of the death metaphor and its probable meaning for him.

In this study of several novels each by Barbara Pym, Fay Weldon, and Margaret Atwood, I focus on two areas: the ways in which female protagonists break out of their victimization by individuals, by institutions, and by cultural tradition, and the ways in which each author uses a structural pattern in her novels to propel her characters to solve their dilemmas to the best of their abilities and according to each woman's personality and strengths.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of the warrior-hero ideal as it evolves in Shakespeare's English and Roman plays, and its ultimate failure as a standard for exemplary conduct. What this study demonstrates is that the ideal of kingship that is developed in the English histories, especially in the Second Tetralogy, and which reaches its zenith in Henry V, is quite literally overturned in three Roman plays--Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. The method of determining this difference is a detailed analysis of these groups of plays. This analysis utilizes the body of Shakespearean criticism in order to note the almost total silence on what this study shows to be Shakespeare's growing disillusionment with the hero-king ideal and his final portrait of this ideal as a failure. It is the main conclusion of this study that in certain plays, and most particularly in the Roman plays, Shakespeare demonstrates a consciousness of something more valuable than political expediency and political legality. Indeed, the tragedy of these political heroes lies precisely in their allegiance to the standard of conduct of the soldier-king. Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus, among others, suffer defeat in their striving to capture a higher …

This paper presents the lives and early feminist works of two modernist era poets, Laura Riding Jackson and Muriel Rukeyser. Despite differences of style, the two poets shared a common theme of essentialist feminism before its popularization by 1950s and 60s second wave feminists. The two poets also endured periods of poetic silence or self censorship which can be attributed to modernism, McCarthyism, and rising conservatism. Analysis of their poems helps to remedy their exclusion from the common canon.

This study is an examination of the rhetorical concept of the dialectic as it is realized in selected works of North American dystopian literature. The dialectic is one of the main factors in curtailing enlightenment rationalism which, taken to an extreme, would deny man freedom while claiming to bestow freedom upon him. The focus of this dissertation is on an analysis of twentieth-century dystopias and the dialectic of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable which is a precursor to dystopian literature. The Grand Inquisitor parable of The Brothers Karamazov is a blueprint for dystopian states delineated in anti-utopian fiction. Also, Dostoevsky's parable constitutes a powerful dialectical struggle between polar opposites which are presented in the following twentieth-century dystopias: Zamiatin's Me, Bradbury's Farenheit 451, Vonnegut's Player Piano, and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The dialectic in the dystopian genre presents a give and take between the opposites of faith and doubt, liberty and slavery, and it often presents the individual of the anti-utopian state with a choice. When presented with the dialectic, then, the individual is presented with the capacity to make a real choice; therefore, he is presented with a hope for salvation in the totalitarian dystopias of modern twentieth-century literature.

The subject of this thesis is concerned with the organization of a course of study for slow learners in the English class using both full-length and short films to stimulate their discussion and writing.

The purpose of this thesis is to point out the three levels of mythic structure contained in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a novel published in 1958 by the British novelist Alan Sillitoe. The novel has been criticized almost solely in its role as a work dealing exclusively with the English proletariat; the critics have ignored mythic content in the novel, and in doing so have missed valuable meaning and structure which each myth adds to the novel.

This dissertation examines the role of aesthetic activity in the pursuit of political agency in readings of several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Tempest (1610), the history plays of the second tetralogy (1595-9), Julius Caesar (1599), and Coriolanus (1605). I demonstrate how Shakespeare models political subjectivity—the capacity for individuals to participate meaningfully in the political realm—as necessitating active aesthetic agency. This aesthetic agency entails the fashioning of artistically conceived public personae that potential political subjects enact in the public sphere and the critical engagement of the aesthetic and political discourses of the subjects’ culture in a self-reflective and appropriative manner. Furthermore, these subjects should be wary auditors of the texts and personae they encounter within the public sphere in order to avoid internalizing constraining ideologies that reify their identities into forms less conducive to the pursuit of liberty and social mobility. Early modern audiences could discover several models for doing so in Shakespeare’s works. For example, Hamlet posits a model of Machiavellian theatricality that masks the Prince's interiority as he resists the biopolitical force and disciplinary discourses of Claudius's Denmark. Julius Caesar and Coriolanus advance a model of citizenship through the plays’ nameless …

This study is aimed to read Shakespeare's problem comedies, Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure into the historical and cultural context of dynamically-changing English Renaissance society at the turn of the sixteenth century. In the historical context of emerging capitalism, growing economic crisis, reformed theology, changing social hierarchy, and increasing sexual control, this study investigates the nature of complicated moral problems that the plays consistently present. The primary argument is that the serious and dark picture of human dilemma is attributed not to Shakespeare's private imagination, but to social, political, economic, and religious crises in early modern England.

Early American writer Hugh Henry Brackenridge conceived and developed a code of modern chivalry in his writings that culminated in the long prose satire Modern Chivalry. He first introduced his code in the poem "The Modern Chevalier," in which a modern knight is shown traveling about the country in an attempt to understand and correct the political absurdities of the people. In Modern Chivalry, this code is developed in the three major themes of rationalism, morality, and moderation and the related concern that man recognize his proper place in society. Satire is Brackenridge's weapon as well as the primary aesthetic virtue of his novel. The metaphor of modern chivalry serves to tie the various elements of the rambling book into a unified whole.

This dissertation argues that early modern writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell played a critical role in the transition from the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics. I demonstrate how the Protestant Reformation, with its special emphasis on the depravity of human nature, prompted writers to critique models of aesthetic judgment and experience that depended on high faith in human goodness and rationality. These writers in turn used their literary works to popularize skepticism about the human mind's ability to perceive and appreciate beauty accurately. In doing so, early modern writers helped create an intellectual culture in which aesthetics would emerge as a distinct branch of philosophy.

One rarely sees the names James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway together in the same sentence. Their obvious differences in writing styles, nationalities, and lifestyles prevent any automatic comparison from being made. But when one compares their early short story collections, Dubliners and In Our Time, many surprisingly similarities appear. Both are collections of short stories unified in some way, written by expatriates who knew each other in Paris. A mood of despair and hopelessness pervades the stories as the characters are trapped in the human condition. By examining the commonalities found in their methods of organization, handling of point of view, attitudes toward their subjects, stylistic techniques, and modes of writing, one is continually brought back to the differences between Joyce and Hemingway in each of these areas. For it is their differences that make these artists important; how each author chose to develop his craft gives him a significant place in literature.

It is the purpose of this paper to explore how Morris' novel relates to life in Twin Oaks, primarily as depicted in two books: Living the Dream (1983) by Ingrid Komar, a long-term visitor to the commune and Kinkade's Is It Utopia Yet? (1996). This comparison will demonstrate that the experiences of contemporary intentional communities such as Twin Oaks provide a meaningful context for reading News from Nowhere because of the similarities in goals and philosophy. It will further demonstrate that though Twin Oaks was originally inspired by a utopian novel much more in the tradition of Bellamy's work than Morris', the community's subsequent evolution has brought it much closer in philosophy to News from Nowhere than Looking Backward.

Have You Ever Had Broken Heart? is a collection of essays that interrogate memory, loss, and grief through the intersection of personal narrative, films, the actress Frances Farmer, and woman saints and mystics from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries who were punished for daring to speak to G-d. The essays engage with autotheory and include a myriad of forms, such as segmented, one sentence, and hybrid works. The films discussed range from the philosophical, such as Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), to Graeme Clifford's biopic, Frances (1982), to catechize the grief of the persona losing her mother and sister to a hit and run car wreck in June 2022. The persona traverses the realm of the mystics and saints, including Marguerite Porete, Sor Juana Inez De La Cruz, and Joan of Arc, examining their respective quests to experience the unseen and often silent divine, while questioning her longing for G-d, and simultaneously believing G-d cannot exist. Yet, within this confusion, she finds herself immersed in memories which carry the presence of her mother's love.

This analysis of Tan's first two novels reveals that her female characters suffer from the strains critics like Amy Ling say result from the double paradox of filling the roles of mother or daughter as minority women in a white, male society. Recognizing this double paradox offers Tan's characters, and her readers, the opportunity to resolve the conflicts between mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. Using the theories of psychologist Kathie Carlson helps readers understand how the protagonist of The Kitchen God's Wife resolves similar conflicts with her daughter and her own mother by seeking support from a mythic mother-figure, a Goddess of her own making.

With the publication of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn. N. Scott Momaday ended a three-decade hiatus in the production of works written by Native American writers, and contributed to the renaissance of a rich literature. The critical acclaim that the novel received helped to establish Native American literature as a legitimate addition to American literature at large and inspired other Native Americans to write. Contemporary Native American literature from 1969 to 1974 focuses on the themes of the alienated mixed-blood protagonist and his struggle to survive, and the progressive return to a forgotten or rejected Indian identity. For example, works such as Leslie Silko's Ceremony and James Welch's Winter in the Blood illustrate this dual focal point. As a result, scholarly attention on these works has focused on the theme of struggle to the extent that Native American literature can be perceived as necessarily presenting victimized characters. Yet, Native American literature is essentially a literature of survival and continuance, and not a literature of defeat. New writers such as Louise Erdrich, Hanay Geiogamah, and Simon Ortiz write to celebrate their Indian heritage and the survival of their people, even though they still use the themes of …