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Beyond the Hold: The Evolution of the Ship in African American Literature
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 …
Date:
August 2022
Creator:
Najera, Joel Luis
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Construction of the Fringe Extraterrestrial of Postmodernity
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.
Date:
August 2022
Creator:
Smith, Andrew
System:
The UNT Digital Library
"Molt"
Considered privileged by social standards, with two loving parents and a spot in an elite, all-girls private school in New Jersey, Charlie should be happy. But at Oak Crest College Preparatory, if you're not a straight-A student, you're dumb. If you're not a star athlete, you're invisible. And if you don't compete to be the best? Well, you might as well flunk out. Charlie is already failing math, and it's only October. Why not throw school—and maybe her whole life—away? Then, one day, Charlie finds a suicide note in the bathroom at school, and her world is turned upside down. As she goes through the process of trying to find out who wrote it, the note writer herself remains hidden to herself and everyone else. A perfectionist all her life, she strives to be everything her parents and teachers expect, but does not know what truly makes her happy. The pressure to fulfill expectation is starting to weigh on her, but no one, except Charlie, can know she is thinking of suicide.
Date:
August 2022
Creator:
Susser, Carly
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Exploitation, Justification and Overcoming through Voice: Exploring American Slavery and the Slave Narrative in "The Handmaid's Tale"
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 …
Date:
August 2021
Creator:
Brown, Kaitlyn
System:
The UNT Digital Library
In the Way of Family
A novel about intergenerational sexual violence.
Date:
August 2021
Creator:
Bernard, Rebecca, 1984-
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Revolutionaries and Prophets: Post-Oppositionality in Kathleen Alcalá's Sonoran Desert Trilogy
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 …
Date:
August 2021
Creator:
VonTress, Aurelia Ann
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy: How Society of Spectacle Bred the Mockingjay
Using spectacle to alienate people from each other and life, President Snow's Panem from Collins' Hunger Games trilogy is Guy Debord's Society of Spectacle. As Debord predicts, the spectacle of the Annual Hunger Games causes a degradation of life for citizens in the Districts and the Capitol, leading to a society where nobody truly lives and citizens accept the narrative that President Snow and his regime promote about the Games. Using Luis Althusser to understand how President Snow links his power to that of the Games, we understand how the dictator brainwashed his citizens into compliance through his narrative, and also, how this narrative is constantly delivered through the various ISAs and SAs in Panem to degrade life into false unity and false consciousness, socially coercing citizens to fall in line with the narrative around spectacle. Katniss Everdeen is unique as she is too authentic to use her celebrity status in promotion of the Games; instead, she accidentally performs Debord's true critiques, sparking a rebellion through love. Katniss' acts of love translate into true critiques of the spectacle that is Panem and the Games, and because Snow has spent decades brainwashing his populace into a blind acceptance of celebrity and …
Date:
August 2021
Creator:
Trotter, Olivia Royce
System:
The UNT Digital Library
True War Stories: Lies, Truth, and Recovery in the Non/Fiction of Vietnam
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, …
Date:
August 2021
Creator:
Sawyer, Shannon Michele
System:
The UNT Digital Library
A Well Dressed Menagerie: Defining and Teaching Courtliness with Animals and Clothing in the Lais of Marie de France
In this dissertation, I explore how the twelfth-century poet Marie de France combines animals and clothing to define and teach noble conduct in her Lais collection. I suggest that the nexus she creates between animals, dress, and virtue is chimeric but consistent, appearing differently in each narrative situation but recurring as a means of demonstrating moral conduct. My chapters explore three of her lais that combine beasts and attire to address the unique way Marie features the animal-clothing combination in each to teach distinctive lessons in virtuous behavior. My chapter on Guigemar argues that Marie uses the magical hind and the exchange of a knotted shirt and a belt to rework Ovidian anti-love themes to teach the value of being tightly bound in loyal love. Chapter 3 analyzes the eponymous knight's removal of his clothing as the mechanism that triggers his appearance as a werewolf in Marie's lai Bisclavret. I show that Bisclavret's werewolf form is like a sartorial skin under which his selfhood remains unaltered rather than a true transformation, and I argue that Marie uses the knight's appearance as a wolf so that the loyalty he demonstrates to his king and his homosocial community becomes voluntary and therefore …
Date:
August 2021
Creator:
Clark, C. Natalie Massie
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Wrong Feast
A collection of poems with a preface.
Date:
August 2021
Creator:
Clifton, Brian
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Because You Previously Liked or Played
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, …
Date:
August 2020
Creator:
Redmond, James Delmar
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Just Ask: A Memoir of My Father
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 …
Date:
August 2020
Creator:
Jones, Allyson L.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Postmodernity and Pakistani Postmodernist Literature
Though scholars have discussed postmodernism in Islam and South Asia before, they tend to (i) assume Muslims as a monolithic group, bypassing the diversity of different cultures and the interaction of these cultures with indigenous practices of Islam; (ii) study postmodernity synchronically, thereby eliding histor(ies) and the possibility of multiple temporalities; and (iii) compare postmodernity in non-Western countries with Western standards, and when these countries fail this test, declare them not-yet-postmodern, or even modern. Negligible and scant discussions of postmodernity that do take place inside Pakistan, most of which are published in newspaper articles, tend to focus on Western postmodernity and its evolution and contemporary position. There is no book-length discussion of postmodernity and postmodernist literary texts from Pakistan and its curious sociopolitical blend of Indo-Muslim and Anglo-Indian influences and interaction with the Islamic political foundations of the country. This project discusses postmodernity and postmodern literature in Pakistan. I argue that, because of a different political, cultural, and literary climate, postmodernity and postmodern literature in Pakistan are distinct from their Western counterparts. Because of technological advancement and neoliberal globalization, Pakistan experiences a different kind of postmodernity resulting in the production of a different kind of postmodern literature. I trace the …
Date:
August 2020
Creator:
Shagufta, Iqra
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Stalking Dickens: Predatory Disturbances in the Novels of Charles Dickens
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.
Date:
August 2020
Creator:
Stuart, Daniel
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Where We Split
Nearly 30 years after its publication Gloria E. Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza remains more relevant than ever, particularly her discussion of borderlands as more than physical boundaries. In her book, she theorizes and explores how borders can possess psychic, social, and geopolitical qualities, and in order to articulate the nuances and challenges of border-culture, she invents a new language for underrepresented poets to discuss their poetics. The goal in crafting this essay is to reclaim Anzaldúa as an author worthy of consideration for her poetics. History and bloodlines are central to Anzaldúa's argument that poetry allows for language to transform violence, or historical and bloodline traumas, into one's own new myth-making. The capacity to redefine a border and make it borderless is discussed through the works of Natalie Scenter-Zapcio and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's poems, in addition to a few key anthologies and my own collection, which seeks to sit in ambiguities and to reclaim and affirm histories. Ultimately, conversations about the poetics of Anzaldúa and her influence on other poets should expand our discussion of American poetics. Her focus on "psychic unrest" gives power to language over ambiguity and could be greatly useful to other poets beyond …
Date:
August 2020
Creator:
Paramo, Sebastian Hasani
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Winter
Short novel in the fantasy genre centered around the son of a single mother in small-town Texas who becomes apprenticed to a witch to learn magic.
Date:
August 2020
Creator:
Foster, Natalie
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Constructing Taiwan: Taiwanese Literature and National Identity
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 …
Date:
August 2018
Creator:
Lu, Tsung Che
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Hoboken War Bride: A Novel
The Hoboken War Bride is a work of historical fiction set in Hoboken, New Jersey during World War II. A young soldier named Daniel and an aspiring actress named Hildy marry days after meeting, though the marriage is doomed to fail. This young couple is not compatible. Daniel ships out to basic training the day after their hasty marriage, leaving Hildy behind with his family, the Anellos, who she quickly becomes attached to. Hildy is exposed to family in a way she had never lived with her own, embracing them even though she doubts she'll ever have a future with Daniel. When Daniel returns after the end of the war, the young couple try to make their marriage work, but it fails almost immediately. Both Hildy and Daniel struggle to pick themselves up after their divorce, finding themselves making choices they never thought they would when they were younger.
Date:
August 2018
Creator:
Riccardelli, Charlie Frank
System:
The UNT Digital Library
"Let It Run"
Let It Run is the story of Oakley Isom, a neurotic, disturbed young woman stuck in a small town of two thousand people where she lives with her father, Waldemyre, a fly-fishing guide. Oakley works at the local newspaper as the editor of the "What's Biting?" section, something the fishermen live by. Oakley also works nights at a therapeutic boarding school for troubled youth. Entrenched in a world of self-loathing and obsessive thoughts, Oakley spends her time dreaming of a way out of Victor, Idaho. When a murder in the small town pulls Oakley into its eddy, she attempts to escape into her own compulsive thoughts, and the friendship of a striking young therapist at the boarding school. Unusual events continue to unfold, reeling Oakley in, and she must face a reality far more disturbing than a killer on the loose. Cosmic bottom line, the dissertation novel is about the issues of human identity, and if memory is fixed or dynamic, unified or multiple—and how readers deal with loss, guilt, and regret.
Date:
August 2018
Creator:
Hyde, Spencer
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Developer
A chapbook-length collection of poems.
Date:
August 2017
Creator:
Braun, Caleb
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Momentarium
"Momentarium" is a collection of poems that examines the instability of moments. By engaging with photography, the poems examine the strengths and flaws in representation. Qualified accuracy, in other words representations that exact no absolute authenticity, are paradoxically, most accurate. The original poems attempt to express both empathy an end to empathy, "I mean to give you what you cannot keep: a blue twice as true" and "I mean to give you what I cannot." The competing forces animate a contingent moment, before it becomes the past.
Date:
August 2017
Creator:
Zuehlke, Karl
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Second Life, Second Chance
This is a collection of two stories, one fiction and one non-fiction, in communication with one another. Both stories explore how trauma can transform a life. In "Tabula Rasa," Mena is unable to recall her past after being beaten and left for dead. She must choose whether to uncover her past or forget it and move forward with her life. Set in a town run by witches, Mena learns that both choices are dangerous. In "Eternal Second," the narrator recounts the aftermath of her husband's suicide. She explores how trauma invades all aspects of her life. In both stories, women must navigate a new life created by the destruction of the old one.
Date:
August 2017
Creator:
Beattie, Jessica K.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
"Counting Out The Harvest"
"Counting Out The Harvest" is a collection of poems exploring intimate encounters. The poems reflect on encounters with memories, family, and the natural and cosmic worlds. In one of the poems, "Red-Throated Anole," the speaker works desperately to save a small dying lizard. In "Ice Storm, Post-Divorce," the speaker attempts to decipher a cluster of ladybugs taking refuge in her room. In the title poem, a couple wonders patiently if their crop will eventually grow. In each of these poems there is a present longing for the construction of a meaningful identity by means of the encounter, but the intersection between speaker and world falls short of satisfaction, whether the faultiness lies in the body's inability to find full sustenance, or in the ever-changing fluidity of memory to find stability. But the poems progress from pressing against this difficulty toward finding a contented resignation to the world's cyclical order. The final line of the manuscript, "disrobe a layer to begin again," indicates an arrival at satisfaction, which is found ultimately in continuation.
Date:
August 2016
Creator:
Lischau, Carol
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Nym (A Novel)
This dissertation consists of a literary novel. A preface deals with issue of introducing philosophical ideas into fictional works, with special emphasis on the techniques of ambiguity and destabilization of reality, as deployed in the novel.
Date:
August 2016
Creator:
Sweeney, Mark
System:
The UNT Digital Library