This thesis explores the use of music in the literary works of author Willa Cather.

In this memoir, I use the elements and conventions of creative nonfiction to examine particular strands of my experience for significance. Initiated as an inquiry into my father's suicide, this book quickly shifted focus, re-centering around my own development as an individual, a woman, and a writer. Both my father's suicide and the subsequent birth of my daughter serve as focal points for this inquiry, which I use to articulate and explore questions related to identity development, male-female relationships and gender roles, female sexuality, mental illness, trauma, loss, grief, and the inheritance of intergenerational traumas. In places, my investigation also broadens to consider the social, economic, and cultural contexts in which my story, and my family's story, have taken place. My goal in writing this book was to reclaim something of value from a series of personal and familial tragedies and triumphs. I believe that the act of using tragedy as raw material for a new creation is in itself an act of hope. By bearing witness—both to the events that have occurred, and to my personal experience of these events—I see myself as contributing to a larger human project. Every contribution to this project, whether technological innovation or philosophical …

This critical introduction to the works of John Fowles focuses upon his three novels, with secondary attention to his poetry, essays, and The Aristos, his non-fiction book of personal philosophy. Giving some biographical detail, the first chapter treats the influence of other writers upon Fowles's work and discusses his thought--especially as it appears in The Aristos, the poems, and the essays. The second chapter is a study of The Magus, Fowles's first novel, although published second. The Aristos is especially important to an understanding of this consolidation of personal philosophy into a fictional structure; the two key influences upon The Magus are Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes and Jungian psychology. The third chapter deals with The Collector, revealing much of Fowles's feeling about the artist in society and the imbalance of social justice that spawns ignorance and cruelty. The fourth chapter examines his most successful novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, unusual for its combination of thematic modernity with Victorian narrative style. The final chapter summarizes Fowles's leading place in contemporary fiction three months before publication of The Ebony Tower, his forthcoming collection including four short stories and one novella. Fowles's fiction has established him among the finest of today's artists in …

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.

Critics and audiences alike have neglected the idea of Wilde as a precursor to Beckett. But I contend that a closer look at each writer's aesthetic and philosophic tendencies-for instance, their interest in the fluid nature of self, their understanding of identity as a performance, and their belief in language as both a way in and a way out of stagnancy -will connect them in surprising and highly significant ways. This thesis will focus on the ways in which Wilde prefigures Beckett as a dramatist. Indeed, many of the themes that Beckett, free from the constraints of a censor and from the societal restrictions of Victorian England, unabashedly details in his drama are to be found residing obscurely in Wilde. Understanding Beckett's major dramatic themes and motifs therefore yields new strategies for reading Wilde.

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.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate ontological relationality in literary theory and criticism by critically reflecting on modern theories of literature and by practically examining the literary texts of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde. Traditional studies of literary texts have been oriented toward interpretative or hermeneutic methodologies, focusing on an independent and individual subject in literature. Instead, I explore how relational ontology uncovers the interactive structures interposed between the author, the text, and the audience by examining the system of how the author's creative positioning provokes the reader's reaction through the text. In Chapter I, I critically inquire into modern literary theories of "irony" in Romanticism, New Criticism, and Deconstructionism to show how they tend to disregard the dynamic dimension of interactive relationships between different literary subjects. Chapter II scrutinizes Wilde's humor in An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in order to reveal the ontological relationships triggered by a creative positioning. In chapter III, I examine Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) and the laughter in "The Miller's Tale" in particular, to examine the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of its interactive relationships. In Chapter IV, I explore Much Ado About Nothing …

Because You Previously Liked or Played is a poetry manuscript that attempts to respond to the Trump administration in a new way unique to the medium of poetry. Trump is the central, all-pervading subject of this text, but the rise of web 2.0 and new media which normalizes a quick and unrelenting consumption of information is another essential focal point. The manuscript works both within and against the various political channels, discourses, and entanglements, within and against the various ways these mediums affect and are affected by Trump. Ultimately, the problems associated with our information age inform much of the manuscript's sense of loss, confusion, and questioning, but they also give shape to a spirit of cultural critique, amounting to a register that both speaks from within but looks from outside the Trump-Technology continuum. In order to achieve this effect, the manuscript approaches this Trump-Technology continuum and the ensuing political climate from a variety of contradictory emotions and responses to the reality we find ourselves in via a multitude of psychological frames, outlooks, and experiences, however uncomfortable, that this presidency has altered. And it does this through poetry's unique ability to provide the reader with an embodied and immediate experience, …

This paper will examine Chekhov's attitudes toward love and marriage as revealed in his short stories. An attempt will be made to find certain themes which recur frequently and to discover the reasons for their recurrence.

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.

This dissertation is mainly based on the reading of three American novels to explore how female characters deal with their illegitimate pregnancies and how their solutions re-shape their futures and affect their inner growth. Chapter 1 discusses Dorinda Oakley's premarital pregnancy in Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground and draws the circle of limits from Barbara Welter's "four cardinal virtues" (purity, submissiveness, domesticity, and piety) which connect to the analogous female roles (daughter, sister, wife, and mother). Dorinda's childless survival reconstructs a typical household from her domination and absence of maternity. Chapter 2 examines Ántonia Shimerda's struggles and endurance in My Ántonia by Willa Cather before and after Ántonia gives birth to a premarital daughter. Ántonia devotes herself to being a caring mother and to looking after a big family although her marriage is also friendship-centered. Chapter 3 adopts a different approach to analyze Charlotte Rittenmeyer's extramarital pregnancy in The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. As opposed to Dorinda and Ántonia who re-enter domesticity to survive, Charlotte runs out on her family and dies of a botched abortion. To help explain the aftermath of illicit pregnancies, I extend or shorten John Duvall's formula of female role mutations: "virgin>sexually active (called whore)>wife" to …

"Distance" and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories and a novella that explore the themes of isolation and personal revelation. The dissertation opens with a preface which describes my background as a writer and the forces that shape my work, including science fiction, technology and the internet, cultural marginalization, and Joseph Campbell's hero's motif.

George Eliot's fiction is filled with mentoring relationships which generally consist of a wise male mentor and a foolish, egotistic female mentee. The mentoring narratives relate the conversion of the mentee from narcissism to selfless devotion to the community. By retaining the Christian value of self-abnegation and the Christian tendency to devalue nature, Eliot, nominally a secular humanist who abandoned Christianity, reveals herself still to be a covert Christian. In Chapter 1 I introduce the moral mentoring theme and provide background material. Chapter 2 consists of an examination of Felix Holt, which clearly displays Eliot's crucial dichotomy: the moral is superior to the natural. In Chapter 3 I present a Freudian analysis of Gwendolen Harleth, the mentee most fully developed. In Chapter 4 I examine two early mentees, who differ from later mentees primarily in that they are not egotists and can be treated with sympathy. Chapter 5 covers three gender-modified relationships. These relationships show contrasting views of nature: in the Dinah Morris-Hetty Sorrel narrative, like most of the others, Eliot privileges the transcendence of nature. The other two, Mary Garth-Fred Vincy and Dolly Winthrop-Silas Marner, are exceptions as Eliot portrays in them a Wordsworthian reconciliation with nature. In Chapter …

Hegel and Eliot have been chosen for this study not because of their differences but because of similarities in their thought. Although most of Hegel's works are obscure and pedantic, it is possible to show that his early thinking reflects a deep awareness of many of the implications of the new age. A growing number of philosophers and theologians today are apparently "rediscovering" Hegel as one who caught a vision of the transition in man's history and whose insights are valuable today.

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 paper explores the role of children and childhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. Moreover, it asserts that the child and childhood are keys to a better understanding of Hawthorne's fiction.

This study focuses on the discourse that orders and creates a logic of the extraterrestrial during postmodernity, what I term "Fringe." Using Foucault's notion of discourse, I define and theorize Fringe and its formation during postmodernity, looking at the particular features of the historical moment post-1960 that contributed to the creation and regulation of a particular extraterrestrial. I then investigate historical conceptions of the extraterrestrial from Aquinas to Kant. This genealogy of the extraterrestrial reveals a rich history of the extraterrestrial and compares this history with Fringe. After this I discuss two precursors of Fringe discourse: the Society for Psychical Research and the writings of anomalous researcher Charles Fort. This investigation of pre-Fringe notions of the psychical in discourse shows how the SPR and Fort's work both created new ways of looking at and speaking about phenomena falling outside the purview of "normal science" and contributed to the formation of Fringe while also being distinguishable from it. Finally, I analyze two popular iterations of Fringe discourse—the ancient aliens hypothesis and the abduction narrative—as popularized in the works of Erich von Däniken and Whitley Strieber.

Among the most important characters in contemporary writer Anne Tyler's nine novels of modern American life are her skillfully-drawn managing women who choose the family circle as the arena in which to use their skills and exert their influence. Strong, competent, independent, capable of caring for themselves, their husbands, their children, and others, too, as well as holding outside jobs, these women are the linchpins of their families. Among their most outstanding qualities are their abilities to endure hardships with heads high and skills unhampered. Within this broad category of managing women, Tyler clearly delineates two types of managers: the regenerative managing woman and the rigid managing woman. A major character in every novel, the regenerative managing woman not only endures, she also adapts. The key to her development and her strength is her capacity for trying again, renewing herself, and her family relationships. The evolution of a vital regenerative woman from a lonely childhood through the beginning of her vibrant womanhood is a key element in every Tyler novel. This development always includes an escape from her original family? an attempt to establish her own family; at least one major hardship that often sends her reeling home; and finally, …

The dissertation is a collection of creative and non-fiction work, including a novel with critical introduction, four short stories, and three essays. The novel is a modern day Grail quest that takes place primarily in the Southwestern United States. The short stories are mostly set in the southwest as well, and take for their topic what Paul Fussel refers to as "hope abridged." The essays are non-fiction.

This novel of the Vietnam War examines the effects of prolonged stress on individuals and groups. The narrative, which is told from the points of view of four widely different characters, follows an infantry company through three days and two nights of combat on a small island off the coast of the northern I Corps military region. The story's principal themes are the loss of communication that contributes to and is caused by the background of chaos that arises from combat; the effect of brutal warfare on the individual spirit; and the way groups reorganize themselves to cope with the confusion of the battlefield. The thesis includes an explication of the novel, explaining some of the technical details of its production.

Swift appears in many of his poems either in his o person or behind a poetic mask which does little to conceal his identity. The poems contain Swift's view of his own character. Even in the poems addressed to others, the most important subject is Swift himself. This study is divided into chapters which examine the various roles Swift assumed in both his private and public lives. Following a brief introduction are two chapters of more interest than significance. The first of these is concerned with poems on Swift as a houseguest. These poems frequently relate the difficulties Swift's eccentric behavior caused his hosts. The second deals with poems on Swift's relationships with friends such as Thomas Sheridan and Patrick Delany, as well as with a public adversary, Jonathan Smedley.

The dissertation traces the trope of the incomplete character in four twentieth-century cosmopolitan novels that reflect European colonialism in a global context. I argue that, by creating characters sharply aware of the insufficiency of the Self and thus constantly seeking the constitutive participation of the Other, the four authors E. M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Congwen Shen all dramatize the incomplete character as an agent of postcolonial resistance to Western humanism that, tending to enforce the divide between the Self and the Other, provided the epistemological basis for the emergence of European colonialism. For example, Fielding's good-willed aspiration to forge cross-cultural friendship in A Passage to India; Murphy's dogged search for recognition of his Irish identity in Murphy; Susan's unfailing compassion to restore Friday's lost speech in Foe; and Changshun Teng, the Chinese orange-grower's warm-hearted generosity toward his customers in Long River--all these textual occasions dramatize the incomplete character's anxiety over the Other's rejection that will impair the fullness of his or her being, rendering it solitary and empty. I relate this anxiety to the theory of "posthumanism" advanced by such thinkers as Marx, Bakhtin, Sartre, and Lacan; in their texts the humanist view of the individual …

Stalking in the nineteenth century was a dangerous, increasingly violent behavior pattern circulating in society. It was as much a criminal act then as now, and one the Victorian novel exposes as a problematic form of unwanted intrusion. The realist novel of this period alongside its more sensational counterparts not only depicts scenes of close surveillance, obsession, and harassment as harmful. It exposes the inability of social laws to regulate such conduct. I argue Charles Dickens is the most pivotal figure in observing how stalking emerged as not only a fictional motif, but as an inescapable, criminal behavior pattern. Throughout his work and its nuanced characters, Dickens reveals underlying truths about stalking and stalkers. Early books like Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop feature Gothic villains and predatory motifs adapted from prior literary genres. The works of his middle period foreground stalking in the context of the modern city and institutional power. In the final decade of his life, problems associated with unrequited love examine the pathological patterns of romantic obsession in modern stalker archetypes. Such an analysis and its transformative insight perceive crucial truths about unwanted intrusion, social attachment, and problem of predatory behavior.