In James Joyce criticism, and by implication Irish and modernist studies, the word paralysis has a very insular meaning. The word famously appears in the opening page of Dubliners, in “The Sisters,” which predated the collection’s 1914 publication by ten years, and in a letter to his publisher Grant Richards. The commonplace conception of the word is that it is a metaphor that emanates from the literal fact of the Reverend James Flynn’s physical condition the narrator recalls at the beginning of “The Sisters.” As a metaphor, paralysis has signified two immaterial, or spiritual, states: one individual or psychological and the other collective or social. The assumption is that as a collective and individual signifier, paralysis is the thing from which Ireland needs to be freed. Rather than relying on this received tradition of interpretation and assumptions about the term, I consider that paralysis is a two-sided term. I argue that paralysis is a problem and a solution and that sometimes what appears to be an escape from paralysis merely reinforces its negative manifestation. Paralysis cannot be avoided. Rather, it is something that should be engaged and used to redefine individual and social states.

The struggle for survival of an American family revolves around Mitch Wilcox, a relief pitcher for a fictional major league baseball team. Nearing the end of his long career, he must decide whether to retire or to sign a new contract. His dilemma centers on his wife, Nicole, who argues for his retirement; and his only child, Twylight, who has run away from home. The novel traces the final two weeks of a season, during which Mitch's team battles for a pennant and he delays his decision because of events that expose the precarious nature of both his professional and personal identities. During a crucial game, his journey culminates with a choice that directs him toward a new life.

This study politicizes the mixed relationship in Israeli-Palestinian literature. I examine Arab-Jewish and interethnic Jewish intimacy in works by Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, canonical Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, select anthologized Anglophone and translated Palestinian and Israeli poetry, and Israeli feminist writer Orly Castel-Bloom. I also examine the material cultural discourses issuing from Israel’s textile industry, in which Arabs and Jews interact. Drawing from the methodology of twentieth-century Brazilian miscegenation theorist Gilberto Freyre, I argue that mixed intimacies in the Israeli-Palestinian imaginary represent a desire to restructure a hegemonic public sphere in the same way Freyre’s Brazilian mestizo was meant to rhetorically undermine what he deemed a Western cult of uniformity. This project constitutes a threefold contribution. I offer one of the few postcolonial perspectives on Israeli literature, as it remains underrepresented in the field in comparison to its Palestinian counterparts. I also present the first sustained critique of the hetero relationship and the figure of the hybrid in Israeli-Palestinian literature, especially as I focus on its representation for political options rather than its aesthetic intrigue. Finally, I reexamine and apply Gilberto Freyre in a way that excavates him from critical interment and advocates for his global relevance.

This study explores how four medieval poems—the Junius manuscript’s Genesis B and Christ and Satan and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls—engage with medieval conjugal rights through their depictions of agentive female protagonists. Although many laws at this time sought to suppress the rights of women, especially those of wives’, both pre- and post-conquest poets illustrate women who act as subjects, exercising legal rights. Medieval canon and common law supported a certain amount of female agency in marriage but was not consistent in its understanding of what that was. By considering the shifts in law from Anglo-Saxon and fourteenth century England in relation to wives’ rights and female consent, my project asserts that the authors of Genesis B and Christ and Satan and the late-medieval poet Chaucer position their heroines to defend legislation that supports female agency in matters of marriage. The Anglo-Saxon authors do so by conceiving of Eve’s role in the Fall and harrowing of hell as similar to the legal role of a forespeca. Through Eve’s mimesis of Satan’s rhetoric, she is able to reveal an alternate way of conceiving of the law as merciful instead of legalistic. Chaucer also engages with a …

A Natural History is a collection of original poetry written over the past three years. This project represents a period of learning and growth, as well as a concentrated effort to develop an individual writing style and voice grounded in the most enduring poetic values of the past.

If I Could Live Next Door for a Day is a collection of short stories with the recurrent theme of taking life for granted. "Climbing the Fence" is a story about a sexually unfulfilled woman who has an unfulfilling affair. In "Chained Melody" a condescending young man learns about life in and out of jail. "An Educated Man" shows the inferiority of one man in the presence of others he considers more important. A deluded school counselor brings a jealous boy and his younger brother together in "Piggie and Pete," while another young man in "The Good Boy" tries to break away from his mother. Finally, a woman learns about herself and the world around her when she wins a large sum of money in "What About Ten-Fold?"

Critical work on popular American women's fiction still has not reckoned adequately with the themes of interracialism present in these novels and with interracialism's bearing on the sentimental. This thesis considers an often overlooked body of women's popular sentimental fiction, published from 1860-1865, which is interested in themes of interracial romance or reproduction, in order to provide a fuller picture of the impact that the intersection of interracialism and sentimentalism has had on American identity. By examining the literary strategy of "miscegenated narration," or the heteroglossic cacophony of narrative voices and ideological viewpoints that interracialism produces in a narrative, I argue that the hegemonic ideologies of the sentimental romance are both "deterritorialized" and "reterritorialized," a conflicted impulse that characterizes both nineteenth-century sentimental, interracial romances and the broader project of critiquing the dominant national narrative that these novels undertake.

Trauma novel refers to a work of fiction that discloses serious loss or intense fear on individuals and groups. The traumatic experience is repetitious, timeless, and unspeakable. Gayl Jones, Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison are only a few authors who have written this type of novel. The traumatic events that occur in the books are rape, miscarriage of justice, and slavery, to name a few. The experienced trauma manifest as fragmented memory, silence, commitment phobia, intimate distance, and feelings of abandonment. In her book, Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, J. Brooks Bouson argues that the traumatic experience of slavery and "white racist practices" throughout history produced a "collective African-American experience" which appears in fiction and in the fabric of American culture (4) as intergenerational trauma. African American authors are reimaging history told primarily in first and third person limited, and even if the novel has an omniscient point of view, it can change to third person limited. They use point of view to adeptly navigate the effects of trauma on the psyche interweaving closeness and distance to manipulate the emotional, intellectual, and moral responses the author desires. …

The dissertation consists of a critical analysis as well as the novel Tigers Born in the Same Year. The critical analysis interrogates the relationship between Asian American subject position in the United States, the history of Asian American literatures, and the conflict between inherited binary narratives and nuanced, specific story-telling. In order to move beyond such narratives as struggling with the label "model minority," wrestling between "Asian" and "American," and being "Asian enough," it is necessary to synthesize these literary and sociocultural inheritances with nuanced, specific lenses. From synthesis may arise a new space, one where rather than alienation and measuring up, there can be a sense of home. Tigers Born in the Same Year seeks language for social reckoning through personal discovery, representing a challenge to established narratives while recognizing the need to explore how they were built, the impacts they have, and what exists in the spaces beyond them. In Tigers Born in the Same Year, when 13-year Minyoung Walsh witnesses the molestation of her sister by their older brother, she must make one of three choices: stay silent, fight back, or shout. Based on these three possibilities, three lives are braided together in the novel. All three …

Still House is a poetry manuscript that explores the relationship between traditional gender roles and traditional poetic forms. The poems in this collections seek to revise the role of the homemaker and interrogate whether it is okay to take comfort and pleasure in tasks that are often labeled as feminine (i.e. cooking, baking, decorating, organizing, shopping, choosing outfits) while rejecting other parts of the homemaker archetype, such as subservience to and dependence upon men. Limited gender roles, patriarchy, sexist comments, capitalism, toxic masculinity, the cis-hetero-white-male gaze, trauma, physical pain, illness—these all can make it feel like we are not fully in control and ownership of our bodies, like something is encroaching. The poems in Still House are invested in using the poetics of embodiment (a poetics centered around telling stories about the body through immersive sensory details) to reclaim the body from trauma, patriarchy, and chronic pain and illness.

Oklahoma History is a collection of poetry that examines the speaker's relationship to and critique of her home state, Oklahoma. The poems navigate race and gender as they intersect with local histories, culture, and religion, which complicates and often contradicts what the speaker is taught through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical preface which looks at how the poems and other writings of Oklahoma poet Joy Harjo impact the author's writing.

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 …

Louisiana Saturday Nights is a collection of poetry and accompanying critical introduction written for the doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing.

Somehow Holier ruminates playfully on the problem of suffering and our responses to it. These poems take as their subjects theology, history, art, my wife's struggle with chronic migraines, and gardening. "Res Gestae Variorum," a crown of sonnets at the center of the book, recounts the lives of would-be Christian saints, like the third-century theologian Origen, whose penchant for suffering obstructed them on the path to holiness. In "Mater Misericordiae" I flip through a calendar filled with famous depictions of Mary while my wife consults with a doctor. These poems blend humor and pathos, striving at once to laugh in the face of pain and account for its awful cost. Throughout, I'm in conversation with the poets who've influenced my voice as a writer: Charles Wright, Phillip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney.

A collection of poems and critical introduction.

This dissertation begins with a critical preface that examines the haunted present and its impact on writing for third and fourth generation Holocaust survivors. Then follows a collection of poetry and prose that examine themes of intergenerational trauma, experiences of the Shoah, grief, and chronic illness.

A collection of poetry.

This study shows how the Grotesque Hero evolves from the grotesque victim in selected American novels from 1919 to 1972. In these novels, contradictory forces create a cultural dilemma. When a character is especially vulnerable to that dilemma, he becomes caught and twisted into a grotesque victim. The Grotesque Hero finds a solution to the dilemma, not by escaping his grotesque victimization, but by accepting it and making it work for him. The novels paired according to a particular contradictory dilemma include: Winesburg, Ohio and The Crying of Lot 49, As I Lay Dying and Wise Blood, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Dick Gibson Show, Cabot Wright Begins and Second Skin, The Day of the Locust and The Lime Twig, and Expensive People and The Sunlight Dialogues.

"With the Earth in Mind" responds to some of the most cutting-edge research in the field of ecocriticism, which centers on ecological loss and the grief that ensues. Ecocritics argue that ecological objects of loss abound--for instance, species are disappearing and landscapes are becoming increasingly compromised--and yet, such loss is often deemed "ungrievable." While humans regularly grieve human losses, we understand very little about how to genuinely grieve the loss of nonhuman being, natural environments, and ecological processes. My dissertation calls attention to our society's tendency to participate in superficial nature-nostalgia, rather than active and engaged environmental mourning, and ultimately activism. Herein, I investigate how an array of postwar and contemporary American novels represent a complex relationship between environmental degradation and mental illness. Literature, I suggest, is crucial to investigations of this problem because it can reveal the human consequences of ecological loss in a way that is unavailable to political, philosophical, scientific, and even psychological discourse.

This paradoxically titled collection of poems explores what the blues and blindness has come to mean to the author.

This thesis considers how Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, Mohegan writers in Early America, used the hymns of English hymnodist, Isaac Watts. Each chapter traces how either Samson Occom or Joseph Johnson's adapted Isaac Watts's hymns for Native communities and how these texts are sites of affective sovereignty.

The Ends of Smaller Worlds is a collection of short stories set in Indiana. The preface is about the representation of the information age using elements of dirty realism and Gothic fiction.

Some Names for Empty Space is a collection of poems that considers how poetry and language operate to define human experience, reconciling the 'empty spaces' between the self and the abstracted variables of all things. The poems here often find their impetus in fatherhood and a parent's efforts to explain the world to a child.