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This Man is Your Friend: Knowing "Us" and "Them" in Ethnic American Literature of the Pacific Theater
This dissertation examines representations of the Pacific theater in World War II in ethnic American literature, with a focus on its rendition of US and Japanese racism and imperialism in the mid-twentieth century. Reading a range of African, Asian, Jewish, Mexican, and Native American literary writings, I investigate their modifications of the American master narrative that the Second World War was "good" and "necessary," a war fought against fascism and for democracy, justice, and freedom. Instead of such a simplistic and reductive view, ethnic American writers envision the Pacific theater as a race war between whites and persons of color and as a conflict between two imperialist nations, the United States and Japan. Ethnic Americans' racial double consciousness functions to resist an oversimplification of the Pacific theater. In these ethnic writers' work, American characters from diverse backgrounds create friendships with those of Asian nationalities, including Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Japanese. These texts are necessary because ethnic Americans' experiences are underrepresented in the traditional WWII narrative of Western masculinity, originated by Ernest Hemingway and completed by President Truman and Douglas MacArthur. As opposed to the typical white American literary and cinematic treatment of the war as fought in the land of …
Date:
May 2022
Creator:
Matsuda, Takuya
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Dickens in the Context of Victorian Culture: an Interpretation of Three of Dickens's Novels from the Viewpoint of Darwinian Nature
The worlds of Dickens's novels and of Darwin's science reveal striking similarity in spite of their involvement in different areas. The similarity comes from the fact that they shared the ethos of Victorian society: laissez-faire capitalism. In The Origin of Species, which was published on 1859, Charles Darwin theorizes that nature has evolved through the rules of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the struggle for existence. Although his conclusion comes from the scientific evidence that was acquired from his five-year voyage, it is clear that Dawinian nature is reflected in cruel Victorian capitalism. Three novels of Charles Dickens which were published around 1859, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Our Mutual Friend, share Darwinian aspects in their fictional worlds. In Bleak House, the central image, the Court of Chancery as the background of the novel, resembles Darwinian nature which is anti-Platonic in essence. The characters in Hard Times are divided into two groups: the winners and the losers in the arena of survival. The winners survive in Coketown, and the losers disappear from the city. The rules controlling the fates of Coketown people are the same as the rules of Darwinian nature. Our Mutual Friend can be interpreted as …
Date:
August 1996
Creator:
Moon, Sangwha
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine: Voices from the Other Side of the Color Line
Access:
Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
This dissertation examines intra-racial colorism in works by writers who began their careers during the Harlem Renaissance, but whose writings span almost a century. In these writings, colorism; which can be defined as a bias directed toward an individual that is based on skin tone, is portrayed an intra-racial practice that results from the internalization of racist ideals. The practice relies on a hierarchy that most often privileges those closest to the color line. However, these depictions also show that the preponderance of skin tones can sometimes determine who is targeted. For the purposes of this study it is called reverse colorism when the bias is directed by individuals darker in skin tone toward those who are lighter. Consequently, the careful descriptions of the shades and hues of black characters becomes more than aesthetics and can be seen as a coded reference to experiential differences. While Alain Locke hailed the start of the Harlem Renaissance to signal the rise of The New Negro, the writings featured by female writers in this dissertation advance a less optimistic reality for women, who had to contend with both inter- and intra-racial bias because of their skin tone. Colorism is identified as a particularly …
Date:
December 2019
Creator:
Edwards, Cheri Paris
System:
The UNT Digital Library
“Wolf Man”
This creative nonfiction dissertation is a memoir that probes the complex life and death of the author’s father, who became addicted in his late forties to crack cocaine. While the primary concerns are the reasons and ways in which the father changed from a family man into a drug addict, the memoir is also concerned with themes of family life, childhood, and grief. After his father’s death, the author moves to Las Vegas and experiences similar addiction issues, which he then explores to help shed light on his father’s problems. To enrich the investigation, the author draws from eclectic sources, including news articles, literature, mythology, sociology, religion, music, TV, interviews, and inherited objects from his father. In dissecting the life of his father, the author simultaneously examines broader issues surrounding modern fatherhood, such as cultural expectations, as well as the problems of emptiness, isolation, and spiritual deficiency.
Date:
August 2015
Creator:
Flanagan, Ryan
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Man of Law's Tale and its Analogues
This thesis examines Chaucer's "The Man of Law's Tale" from the "Canterbury Tales," and includes a comparison of the narrative treatment of Chaucer's, Gower's and Trivet's tales of Constance.
Date:
1953
Creator:
Gardner, Eva Delores
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Stories and "Burning Man"
Stories and a novel.
Date:
July 2023
Creator:
Ray, T. Scott
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Isolation and Caritas: Polar Themes in Melville's The Confidence-Man
The thesis examines isolation and caritas, or charity, in The Confidence-Man as polar themes which express, respectively, withdrawal from and suspicion of the human community and integration within and appreciation for that community. Isolation is considered a negative theme; caritas, an affirmative theme.
Date:
December 1971
Creator:
Hollen, Norman V.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Man-Nature Dialogue in the Poetry of Robert Frost
The purpose of this thesis is to examine Robert Frost's use in his poetry of ambivalent views of nature, of varieties of human character, and of interrelationships between man and nature.
Date:
August 1965
Creator:
Luke, Edith Jackson
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Common-Man Theme in the Plays of Miller and Wilder
This study emphasizes the private and public struggles of the common man as portrayed in two representative plays by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman and The Price, and two by Thornton Wilder, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. These plays demonstrate man's struggle because of failures in responsibility toward self and family and because of his inability to fully appreciate life. Miller concentrates on the pathetic part of Man's nature, caused by a breakdown in human communication. Wilder, however, focuses on the resilient part which allows man to overcome natural disasters and moral transgressions. The timelessness of man's conflict explains the motivations of symbolic character types in these plays and reveals a marked applicability to all average citizens in American society.
Date:
May 1977
Creator:
Hastings, Robert M.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Falsity in Man: Tennessee Williams' Vision of Tragedy
It is the purpose of this paper to examine the major plays of Tennessee Williams in an effort to formulate the key concepts which appear in the work of a modern successful dramatist who is sensitive to the tragedy of man and to discover Williams' beliefs in regard to man, his need, and the tragedy that results if he does not find the fulfillment of his nature.
Date:
1956
Creator:
Kindle, Betty Brewer
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Dominant Themes in the Novels of Ernest Hemingway
This thesis proposes to show that Hemingway's novels reveal a change of attitude which culminates in an increased faith in the ultimate goodness and dignity of man.
Date:
January 1961
Creator:
Davis, James Bert
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Path to Paradox: The Effects of the Falls in Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Conrad's "Lord Jim"
This study arranges symptoms of polarity into a causal sequence# beginning with the origin of contrarieties and ending with the ultimate effect. The origin is considered as the fall of man, denoting both a mythic concept and a specific act of betrayal. This study argues that a sense of separateness precedes the fall or act of separation; the act of separation produces various kinds of fragmentation; and the fragments are reunited through paradox. Therefore, a causal relationship exists between the "fall" motif and the concept of paradox.
Date:
May 1987
Creator:
Mathews, Alice McWhirter
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Matthew Arnold: The Heroic Dimensions of Man's Best Self
During Matthew Arnold's lifetime England was in permanent transition: the emergence of a modern industrial society, the new science and liberalized Christianity, and the democratic and humanitarian movements. To be a writer during this time required a curious and precarious balances an alternation of steadfastness and change. Arnold's moving back and forth between the traditions of romanticism and rationalism does present a challenge to the contemporary reader; no single or systematic approach can be applied to his works. An examination of a selection of Arnold's poems, written predominantly between 1845 and 1857, shows the author's reassessment of man's place in the new cosmology as necessitated by the scientific and technological advances of the century. The poems selected also suggest movement away from the romantic concept of the greatness of the past and yesterday's larger-than-life hero toward an acceptance of the best life as represented by the present generation of men. Arnold's theory, that the best self or right reason manifests itself in heroic men, in leaders, and confirms ordinary men, is found throughout the poems studied.
Date:
December 1973
Creator:
DeShane, Connie Jean
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Don Juan in Hell: a Key to Reading Shaw
Since George Bernard Shaw claims that the third act of Man and Superman is a complete commentary on his philosophy, this thesis is a revealing of the philosophy demonstrated in the Dream Scene, and it is an intensive study of the third act based upon a reading of the play.
Date:
August 1961
Creator:
Hanks, Harry S.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Fielding's Creative Psychology: A Belief in the Good-Natured Man
The philosophy of Henry Fielding turns more upon a study of human nature than upon any stated adherence to a system of beliefs. The thesis of this paper is that he was a moderate law-and-order Anglican of his time, but strongly influenced by the deist Shaftesbury's studies of the psychological characteristics of men. These inquiries into motivations and Shaftesbury's advocacy of the social virtue of desiring good for others seem to have helped determine Fielding's philosophy.
Date:
December 1972
Creator:
Dundas, Doris Hart
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) the Man and His Work
The purpose of this thesis is to "delve into the life and poetry of A. E. Housman to try to discover, not what made Housman the man he was, but why his poetry has appeal." p. 3
Date:
August 1962
Creator:
Smith, Mary M.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction : Man in a Falling World
This thesis argues that Katherine Anne Porter's novel, Ship of Fools, "is not a departure from the body of Porter's work which precedes it, but a culmination in theme and technical achievement."
Date:
August 1968
Creator:
Ferguson, Susan Margaret
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Transnational Compositionality and Hemon, Shteyngart, Díaz; A No Man's Land, Etc.
Contemporary transnational literature presents a unique interpretive problem, due to new methods of language and culture negotiation in the information age. The resulting condition, transnational compositionality, is evidenced by specific linguistic artifacts; to illustrate this I use three American novels as a case study: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. By extension, many conventional literary elements are changed in the transnational since modernity: satire is no longer a lampooning of cultures but a questioning of the methods by which humans blend cultures together; similarly, complex symbolic constructions may no longer be taken at face value, for they now communicate more about cultural identity processes than static ideologies. If scholars are to achieve adequate interpretations of these elements, we must consider the global framework that has so intimately shaped them in the twenty-first century.
Date:
August 2009
Creator:
Miner, Joshua D.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Natural Innocence in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", the Nick Adams Stories, and "The Old Man and the Sea"
Hemingway claims in Green Hills of Africa that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." If this basic idea is applied to his own work, elements of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appear in some of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and his novel The Old Man and the Sea. All major characters and several minor characters in these works share the quality of natural innocence, composed of their primitivism, sensibility, and active morality. Hemingway's Nick, Santiago, and Manolin, and Twain's Huck Finn and Jim reflect their authors' similar backgrounds and experiences and themselves come from similar environments. These environments are directly related to their continued possession and expression of their natural innocence.
Date:
May 1990
Creator:
Hall, Robert L. (Robert Lee), 1956-
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Themes of Exodus and Revolution in Ellison's Invisible Man, Morrison's Beloved, and Doctorow's Ragtime
In my dissertation I examine the steps in and performance of revolution through the writings of three Postmodern authors, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and E. L. Doctorow, in light of the model of the biblical Exodus journey and the revolution which precipitated that movement. I suggest that the revolution which began with the Israelites' bondage in Egypt has provided the foundation for American literature. I show that Invisible Man, Beloved, and Ragtime not only employ the motif of the Exodus journey; they also perpetuate the silent revolution begun by the Israelites while held captive in Egypt. This dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter One provides the introduction to the project. Chapter Two provides the model for this study by defining the characteristics of the Exodus journey, Moses as the leader of the Israelites, and the pattern of revolution established by Michael Walzer in Exodus and Revolution. In Chapters Three, Four, and Five, I apply the model established in Chapter Two to the individual texts. In Chapter Six, I draw three conclusions which arise from my study. My first conclusion is that the master story of the Exodus journey and the Israelites' liberation from Egypt informs all Western literaturewhether the literature …
Date:
December 2000
Creator:
Turner, Tracy Peterson
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Gender and Desire in Thomas Lovell Beddoes' The Brides' Tragedy and Death's Jest-Book
Access:
Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
Thomas Lovell Beddoes' female dramatic characters are, for the most part, objectified and static, but these passive women perform a crucial narrative and thematic function in the plays. Alongside the destructive activity of the male characters, they dramatize masculine-feminine unions as idealized and contrived and, thus, unstable. Desire, power and influence, as well as the constrictive aspects of physicality, all become gendered concepts in Beddoes' plays, and socially normative relationships between men and women, including heterosexual courtship and marriage, are scrutinized and found wanting. In The Brides' Tragedy, Floribel and Olivia, the eponymous brides, represent archetypes of innocence, purity, and Romantic nature. Their bridegroom, Hesperus, embodies Romantic masculinity, desiring the feminine and aspiring to androgyny, but ultimately unable to relinquish masculine power. The consequences of Hesperus' attempts to unite with the feminine other are the destruction of that other and of himself, with no hope for the spiritual union in death that the Romantic Hesperus espouses as his ultimate desire. Death's Jest-Book expands upon the theme of male-female incompatibility, presenting heterosexual relationships in the context of triangulated desire. The erotic triangles created by Melveric, Sibylla, and Wolfram and Athulf, Amala, and Adalmar are inherently unstable, because they depend upon the …
Date:
May 2002
Creator:
Rees, Shelley S.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Thundershowers: A Novella, with a Commentary
Thundershowers, an original novella, represents one person's perception of relationships between women and men. The first-person narrator, Anna Slone, records her limited observations of married and unmarried couples while she pursues her own involvement with a man. She observes nothing admirable in any of the relationships between men and women in the story, and her own romance falls short of her expectations. The only nurturing love that she records passes between herself and two other women, her mother and a friend. Thundershowers is not meant to be a suggestion that all woman-man relationships are soulless or that real love can exist only between women. Set in a Colorado resort, the action focuses on several concurrent love-interests, including a faltering marriage, a traditional marriage, the engagement of two young lovers, a lighthearted sexual affair, and the short-lived but painful romance of Anna and a man whom she meets at the resort.
Date:
August 1979
Creator:
Butts, Nina
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Strife, Balance, and Allegiance : The Schemata of Will in Five Novels of D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence made the final break through the mask of Victorian prudery to gain a full conception of man and his role in the universe. His principal emphasis is on the restoration of man's conception of himself as animal, an animal capable of conceptualizing, but essentially animal all the same. In attempting to restore man to the mindless state of irrational animism, Lawrence did away with the conventional idea of man as the perfection of God's created universe. Lawrence did not conceive of man as being controller of the natural universe; he thought of man as being, like Mellors in Lady Chatterly's Lover, a warden who lives within natural order. He attacks vain intellectual sophistry of the scientific, industrial society and finds man to be a brute spirit caged by the conventions of his puny reason and his self-imposed social customs. Philosophically, he changes the emphasis from being to becoming.
Date:
August 1968
Creator:
Fiddes, Teresa Monahan
System:
The UNT Digital Library
"Money Only Pays for It" and other stories.
This thesis includes a novel of eight short stories and a critical preface. The preface begins with a section placing the stories in their literary historical context in regards to masculinity theory. It goes on to discuss the craft of fictionalizing autobiographical stories. Finally, the preface talks about the choice of a first person narrator. Each of the stories should stand alone, though they follow the narrator's life for a number of years. Todd Welles is the narrator of all the stories, with the exception of a few. In the stories where Todd does not do all of the narration, he is interrupted by the narration of his "friend," Percy 2 Hard Welles, III.
Date:
August 2004
Creator:
Edgington, Manford L.
System:
The UNT Digital Library