This thesis explores the influence of the legend of Troy on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate's Troy Book. This study seeks to understand why medieval English Christians held the pagan myth of Troy in such high regard beyond the common postcolonial critique of Trojan ancestry as a justification for political power. I begin by demonstrating how Vergil's Aeneid presents a new heroic ideal much closer to Christian virtue than Homeric values, Aeneas submitting his will to fate and earning his piety through suffering. I then turn to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, assessing how Gawain is not only descended from Aeneas but how the major events of his quest echo Aeneas' journey, especially in both heroes' submission of their wills to fate. Next, I reveal how Chaucer's Troilus enacts a platonic ascent from a state of ignorance to a state of truth, but as Troilus' name is also linked to the city of Troy itself, the fate of Troilus becomes the fate of Troy. In this way, Chaucer dramatizes the spiritual ascent of his Trojan ancestors in that they move from sin to salvation as a culture. Finally, I investigate how Lydgate …

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.

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 …

In this work, I examine and analyze women representation and themes in Pakistani literature in order to explore the emergence and development of feminist thought as reflected within it, from pre-independence to present day Pakistan. One of my central arguments is that the theorization of a workable feminism in the conflictual Pakistani state depends on understanding and accounting for the socio-political, religious, and economic milieu of the country under which women live. In the following chapters, I delineate the challenges feminism in Pakistan faces in conjunction with the analysis of selected literary works to highlight the way the figure of the woman emerges in public discourse. It is through this engagement, that I demonstrate, the complexity of Pakistani feminism and its negotiations with nationalism, religion, and patriarchy to create the basis for theorizing a workable Pakistani feminist politics. Following Dipesh Chakraborty's theorization of historicism in his book, Provincializing Europe, the basic premise of this dissertation is to explore the emergence of feminist thought in Pakistani literature while keeping the changing religio-political and socio-economic realities of the country at the forefront to establish an analysis grounded in worldliness of these texts. The goal of this exploration is to theorize a feminism …

A collection of poetry concerned with loss and the act of creation.

This dissertation is a study of supernatural doubles in Victorian literature. It argues that these doubles expand our understanding of gender variance in the Victorian period. The texts in this dissertation privilege gender non-binarism through their depictions of materiality, gender embodiment, and temporality.

Running From My Youth: Essays is a collection of nonfiction essays that explore important moments and experiences from the narrator's youth, and how he has addressed and remembered them in the years since. Some of the essays explore the narrator's time as a distance-runner, while others explore the awkwardness and discomfort onset by religion and nudity.

A study through short stories of the emotional effects on close family relationships before and after a traumatic death.

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 …

This project explores the intersection of literature and science from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century in the context of this shift in conceptions of space and time. Confronted with the rapid and immense expansion of space and time, eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophers and authors sought to locate humans' relative position in the vast void. Furthermore, their attempts to spatially and temporally map the universe led to changes in perceptions of the relationship between the exterior world and the interior self. In this dissertation I focus on a few important textual monuments that serve as landmarks on this journey. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the intersection of literary and scientific texts transformed perceptions of space and time. These transformations then led to further advancements in the way scientific knowledge was articulated. Imagination became central to scientific writing at the same time it came to dominate literary writing. My project explores these intersecting influences among literature, astronomy, cosmology, and geology, on the perceptions of expanding space and time.

In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.

A collection of creative non-fiction essays that document the life of an Indian American immigrant.

A collection of prose.

In this dissertation, I examine the complex role that the body played in early modern constructions of judgment. Moving away from an overreliance on anti-theatrical texts as the authority on the body in Shakespeare's plays, my project intervenes in the field Shakespearean studies by widening the lens through which scholars view the body's role in the early modern theater. Through readings of four plays—Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale—I demonstrate that Shakespeare uses a wide range of ideas about the human body from religious, philosophical, medical, and cultural spheres of thought to challenge Puritan accusations that the public theater audience is incapable of rational judgment. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that Richard II draws parallels between the theatrical community and the community created through the sacramental experiences of baptism and communion to show that bodies play a crucial role in establishing common experience and providing an avenue for judgment. In Chapter 3, I argue that Shakespeare establishes correspondences between bodily and social collaboration to show how both are needed for the memory-making project of the theater. In the next chapter, I show how Shakespeare appropriates what early moderns …

Failure to Yield is a collection of creative nonfiction that explores themes of presence and emotional connection and expression. The seven essays, which include three flash essays, explore the themes by reflecting on such topics as marriage, parent-child relationships and addiction. The collection is woven together by the author's relationships with her parents and children and by her experiences growing up in a small town in Iowa.

In his Book of the Courtier, Castiglione appeals to the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning, the idea that individuals could shape their identity rather than relying solely on the influence of external factors such as birth, social class, or fate. While other early modern authors explore the practice of self-fashioning—Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, surveys numerous princes identifying ways they have molded themselves—Castiglione emphasizes the necessity of modeling one's-self after a variety of sources, "[taking] various qualities now from one man and now from another." In this way, Castiglione advocates for a self-fashioning grounded in a discriminating kind of synthesis, the generation of a new ideal form through the selective combination of various source materials. While Castiglione focuses on the moves necessary for an individual to fashion himself through this act of discriminatory mimesis, his views can explain the ways authors of the period use source material in the process of textual production. As poets and playwrights fashioned their texts, they did so by consciously combining various source materials in order to create not individuals, as Castiglione suggests, but characters to represent new cultural ideals and values. Early moderns viewed the process of textual, as well as cultural production, as a kind …

A mosaic of past and present, mother and daughter, body and spirit: A Kind of Ghost inhabits memory and imagined spaces, haunting and begging to be remembered.

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.

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.

Unclean Slates: Stories is a collection of seven short stories that comments on the nature of family ties, and how such ties help form a sense of identity. Each story focuses on a separate protagonist, all of whom strive for a new beginning or an escape from some aspect of their current lives. The short story cycle of this collection is held together not by place or characters, but ultimately by the theme of wishing for a new beginning: they share a desire to fix some dissatisfying element of their lives. Mostly from the point of view of blue-collar characters leading mundane middle-class lives, these stories provide commentary on what it means to run from the conditions that make up one's sense of identity. Most of the revelations formed throughout these stories lead to a sense of acceptance of these conditions, and an understanding that family and history make up part of human consciousness. While the specific locations presented in these stories are not necessarily the same, each story seeks to focus on a location that proves to be fundamental to the makeup of the protagonist. The cities and geographic locations themselves are not as important as the specifics: the …

Preface: A consideration of the New Sincerity movement in contemporary American poetics in the work of Tao Lin, Matt Hart, and Dorothea Lasky. Creative work: A three section book of poetry exploring elegy, form, and the intersection of strangeness and domesticity.

Refugees, a novel in progress, begins in the collective first-person with a group of people who live on the same residential street of middle-class homes in an east coast American city and are experiencing the most exquisitely vivid aurora borealis to appear in recorded history. But they quickly learn that this gorgeous wonder is a harbinger of civilization's demise and possibly the end of all life on the planet, because the solar storms causing the sky's fantastic nightly coloring is also slowly stripping away the atmosphere and leeching oxygen into space. This "we" narrative switches to third person, moving between two characters—Julie and Amira—as the narrative moves forward. The first chapter covers the first few months of this apocalyptic crisis, and Julie and Amira are central as they are forced decide if they still have the strength and the will to even attempt survival in these new and brutal circumstances. The second chapter, also told in third person, picks up seventeen years in the future with Aya, Amira's daughter who was six during the initial atmospheric disaster. A small group survived in an underwater refuge, recently discovered the atmosphere above had healed over time, and sent an excursion group, including …

The essays featured in this collection highlight the gaps, as well as parallels, between mental illness and the human condition. In "Appearances," the narrator struggles with her own visual identity especially after reflecting on her Mom's own lengthy history with the mirror. In "Migrations," the lyrical voice of the narrator carries the reader through the typical day of a clinically depressed female character. Lastly, "Attempting the Fall," addresses the issues society has with mental illness by following the narrator from her suicide attempt to the mental ward.

This thesis consists of a collection of poems. By virtue of its content and arrangement, the collection ruminates on and attempts to work through the problem of corporeality and bodily experience: the anxieties surrounding illness, mortality, and the physicality of contemporary life. This collection explores the tension inherent in the mind/body duality and, rather than prescribing solutions, offers multiple avenues and perspectives through which to view bodily experience, as well as how that experience affects an individual’s identity, agency, and sense of self.