Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Dystopias in literature. Women in literature. Feminist literature'

In Marion Zimmer Bradley's retelling of the Arthurian legends, The Mists of Avalon, she creates two dystopic cultures: Avalon and Camelot. Contrasting Bradley's account of the legends with the traditional version, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, reveals that Bradley's sweeping revisions of the tradition do little to create a feminist ideal. A skeptical questioning of the text's plot and characters with the Women's Movement in mind opens an interpretation of the text as a critique of feminism itself.

This qualitative research study used a theoretical framework of third-wave feminism and reader response theory to examine two research questions: How do girls and women relate to the female protagonist in dystopian young adult literature (YAL)? and How are the responses to dystopian YAL similar and different for the targeted teen audience and the adult audience? A group of four teenaged girls and another group of three adult women read and discussed the YAL dystopian text Uglies. For this project, I collected participant journals and transcripts from individual interviews and book club discussions. I selected quotations from each data source that highlighted the participant’s reactions to the protagonist. Data were analyzed in two phases. In phase one, I used discourse analysis, and in phase two I used constant comparative analysis. The analyses revealed that participants from both groups identified with the protagonist’s attempts to improve society, which aligns both groups’ responses with inclusive aspects of third-wave feminism. However, other aspects of feminism were incorporated into their answers as well. The women participants demonstrated a broader societal concern, such as those shared by second wave feminists. The girls, in contrast, were firmly situated within individualist aspects of third-wave feminism. Whereas, the women related to the protagonist on both a personal and broader societal level, the girls related only on a personal level. Findings from this research extend reader response theory by showing that responses to literature are strongly shaped by generational position.

My goal for this thesis is to investigate the concept of (mis)labeling female protagonists in contemporary British fiction as mentally ill—historically labeled as madness—when subjected to traumatic events. The female protagonists in two novels by Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (2018) and Blue Ticket (2020), and Jenni Fagan’s 2012 novel The Panopticon, are raised in environments steeped in trauma and strict, hegemonic structures that actively work to control and mold their identities. In The Panopticon, this system is called “the experiment”; in The Water Cure, it is personified by the character King and those who follow him; and in Blue Ticket, it is the social structure as a whole reflected in the character of Doctor A. To simply label these novels’ woman protagonists as ill would be to ignore that their behavior is not mental illness but in fact rational behavior produced by the traumatic dystopian environments.

“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of supportive wives. The mode of speculative fiction is well suited to crafting counter-narratives to Exodus mythology because of its ability to place marginalized voices in the center from the stance of ‘What next?’ My project is a hybrid in that I combine critical theory with original poems. The prose section of each chapter contextualizes a novel and its author with regard to Exodus mythology. However, because novels can only reveal so much about character development, I identify spaces to engage and elaborate upon the conversation incited by these authors’ feminist protagonists. In the tradition of Black American poets such as, Ai, Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, and Tyehimba Jess, in my own personal creative work, I regularly engage historical figures through recovering the narratives of underrepresented voices. To write in persona or limited omniscient, spotlighting an event where the reader possesses incomplete information surrounding a character’s experience, the result becomes a kind of call-and-response interaction with these novels.

This study argues that novels by contemporary women writers, such as Doris Lessing, May Sarton, Barbara Pym and Jenny Diski, through their representation of older female protagonists, create alternative discourses of ageing to those that dominate Western society. By placing these figures at the centre of their narratives, the texts counteract the silence and pejorative stereotyping that routinely surrounds the lives of the aged. The technique of studying literary representations of women is not new; in fact, it is a trusted part of feminist methodology. However, one of the assertions of this dissertation is that it is rarely used to investigate texts about the senescent, reflecting feminism's failure to include the older women in their theories. Part one of the dissertation examines such issues in depth, setting out the theoretical orientation of the study. It considers popular representations and paradigms of ageing, as well as considering the power of normalising discourse and dynamics of representation. Part two uses this material to analyse the strategies that British and North American authors have employed, since the 1960's, to challenge common stereotypes of older women. The first three chapters focus on novels that portray protagonists who display emotions, not usually associated with the old, which are revealed in relation to different aspects of ageing: anger and frustration (dependency); passion and desire (sexuality); and contentment (daily life). Chapter 7, 'The Wise and Archetypal Older Woman', shifts its attention away from more realist texts to study characters who emerge from the covers of ratiocinative fiction. It argues that conventional critiques of the genre often negate its more polemical elements, which is a result of their failure to use an age- and gender-aware approach and a problem that generally greets intelligent novels about female senescence. This thesis sees itself as part of a movement that aims to create a space in which older female characters' voices can be heard and recognised. It contends that the authors treated here produce visions of ageing that are not solely concerned with stagnation and decline. They represent a varied and compelling group of protagonists and, in doing so, illustrate that older women are worthy of literary, social and feminist interest.

This dissertation offers the first full-length study of five feminist writing practices developed between May 1968 and the publication of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's The Pink Guitar in 1990: ecriture feminine (Helene Cixous), ecriture au feminin/writing in the feminine (Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lola Lemire Tostevin), lesbian/political writing (Monique Wittig), innecriture (Trinh T. Minh-ha), and writing as feminist practice (DuPlessis). These share what I call a feminist poetics; I develop the concept of "sympathy" (the transmission of symptoms from one body to the next) to explain how they nourish one another. I recount their poststructuralist context, and outline key historical influences, such as the student protests of 1968, the nascent women's movements in France and North America, and feminist cultural production in the 1970s. I then describe their poetics---the textual, grammatical, and semantic strategies used to undermine the patriarchal symbolic. I focus on the status and function of the female body in this feminist poetics, and suggest the body provides it with a non-essentialist theoretical foundation. I conclude by evaluating two models that best describe these writing practices: the palimpsest and the matrix. While the palimpsest, with its textual allusions, is an attractive model, I suggest that the matrix offers two advantages: its corporeal connotations and its emphasis on writing as process.

This research work is a detailed feminist reading of the poetry of a selected group of Kurdish women poets which has been written in Sorani Kurdish. The poets come from two different locations, but are originally from Iraqi Kurdistan. A group of them live in the diaspora and the rest are home-based. Thus, it is the study of the Sorani-written poetry produced by Kurdish women poets locally and externally. The study chooses the time extending from 1990 to 2009 as its scope. There are clear reasons for the selection of this time as it stands for the most hectic period when Kurdish women’s poetry flourishes at a fast pace in southern Kurdistan. The study argues that the liberation of southern Kurdistan in 1991 from the overthrown Iraqi Ba’th regime plays a vital role in the productive reemergence of Kurdish women’s poetry after decades of silence and suppression being inflicted by the male-dominated Kurdish literature. Reliance on Anglo-American feminist criticism, Showalter’s gynocritics and some limited theories about the relation between gender and nationalism for the thematic analysis of the poetry of Kurdish women poets is another influential aspect of this study. The study justifies the importance of these theories for giving Kurdish women’s poetry the literary and social value it deserves and placing it within the larger repertoire of Kurdish literature. It is these theories that reveal the misjudgment and misapprehension of Kurdish women’s poetry by Kurdish male critics. Meanwhile, an extensive thematic analysis of the poetry of diasporic and home Kurdish women poets forms the core content of this work. The work studies the poetic texts of seventeen Kurdish women poets, seven from the diaspora, and ten from home. The themes to be focused on significantly represent the life realities of Kurdish women and the attitudes of Kurdish society towards their rights and existence. Through the exposition of the themes, this study aims to present a realistic picture of Kurdish women and urge for actions required to guarantee gender justice in southern Kurdistan. The themes symbolise a long-term war waged jointly by Kurdish women poets at home and in exile against the classic Kurdish patriarchy and its misogynistic laws. They reflect the injustice committed against women in a century when the respect of women’s rights have taken big steps forward elsewhere and should theoretically be ensured. The conclusion the study reaches is an emphasis on the overall condition of Kurdish women’s poetry and the challenges lying ahead of it. It indicates the level of progress Kurdish women’s poetry has made in southern Kurdistan and the role feminist criticism in unison with certain gender theories that criticise the link between women and nation can play in further developing this type of poetry. Moreover, a rather detailed comparison between the thematic structure and form of the poetry of diasporic and home Kurdish women poets is what enriches the conclusion. The influence of exile on diasporic Kurdish women poets and its relation to freedom of expression is also underlined and measured against opposite conditions back at home. Finally, the point where the poets of the two different localities converge is not omitted.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1999.
Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2844. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as, preliminary leaves [1-2]. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-104).

This thesis involves a class-based literary criticism of working-class women s writing. I particularly focus on a selection of novels by three working-class women writers - Livi Michael, Caeia March and Joan Riley. Their work emerged in the 1980s, the era of Thatcherism, which is a definitive period in British history that spawned a renaissance of working-class literature. In my readings of the novels I look at three specific aspects of identity: gender, sexuality and race with the intersection of social class, to examine how issues of economic positioning impinge further on the experience of respectively being a woman, a lesbian and a black woman in contemporary British society. I also appropriate various feminist theories to argue for the continued relevance of social class in structuring women s lives in late capitalism. Working-class writing in general, and working-class women s writing in particular, has historically been under-represented in academic study, so that by highlighting the work of these three lesser known writers, and by indicating that they are worthy of study, this thesis is also complicit in an act of feminist historiography.

In this thesis I examine the ways in which feminist and human geographies intersect with contemporary women-centred fantasy fiction. In particular, I consider space and place to be significant to female characters in their role as a physical presence as well as an intangible location. Thus I explore the forest, the body and the mind as territories occupied by the supernatural women. These various spatial themes, I suggest, outline distinctive locations for supernatural female characters and enable them to engage in a position of resistance from patriarchal ideologies. Through a spatial analysis of selected fiction, I reflect on challenges to notions that construct identity, gender and sexuality as well as conflict among women. I argue that the supernatural woman in fiction has been frozen in one-dimensional representation within traditional male-centred texts. This one-dimensionally, I suggest, hinges on the juxtaposition of the overly simplistic good/bad binary that has often illustrated female characters within fantasy fiction. As fantasy is a genre typically more concerned with worlds than characters, the women-centred fantasy text is unique in its exploration and pursuit of the literary character. Given the contemporary and interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, I have drawn upon filmic adaptations of texts at times to illustrate a further level of cultural awareness. The main emphasis is, however, on literary texts and, thus, reference to film is meant to supplement my textual analysis.

This thesis argues that women writers of the South Asian diaspora are inscribing a literary aesthetic which is recognisably feminist. In recent decades women of the South Asian diaspora have risen to the forefront of the global literary and publishing arena, winning acclaim for their endeavours. The scope of this literature is wide, in terms of themes, styles, genres, and geographic location. Prose works range from grave novelistic explorations of female subjectivity to short story collections intent on capturing historical injustices and the experiences of migration. The thesis demonstrates, through close readings and comparative frameworks, that an overarching pattern of common aesthetic elements is deployed in this literature. This deployment is regarded as a transnational feminist practice.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.
The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on October 25, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2002.
Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 322 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-322). Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2006 Sep. 25.

Winifred Holtby was a novelist, journalist and feminist, writing in the 1920s and 1930s. This thesis focuses on her feminist resistance to the fashion for sexual division in interwar Britain. She reads it as a social and political backlash against women’s equal rights that seeks to drive women out of the workplace and back into the home. In Holtby’s view, the popularisation of Freud and the growing appeal of fascism contribute to this backlash by stressing women’s primary role as wives and mothers. For Holtby, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, sums up this fashion for sexual division when he declares in 1932, ‘we want men who are men and women who are women’. Previous scholarship has focused on Holtby’s work in dialogue with her friend and fellow feminist, Vera Brittain. This thesis adopts a more panoramic perspective to consider Holtby’s work in the context of other feminist contemporaries and in the context of feminist intellectual history. Each chapter examines how Holtby draws inspiration from a figure in feminist history in order to challenge the influences of psychology and fascism on attitudes to women between the wars. Holtby declared that Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the ‘bible of the woman’s movement’ and the first chapter examines Wollstonecraft’s influence on Holtby’s feminist thought. The second chapter considers Holtby’s defence of the spinster against interwar prejudice that castigated the spinster as sexually frustrated and psychological abnormal. By subverting Charlotte Brontë’s romance narratives for an interwar ‘feminine middlebrow’ readership, Holtby valorises women’s work in the community. The third chapter addresses the fascist veneration of motherhood, analysing how Holtby recognises and assimilates the feminist potential of Alfred Adler’s theory of Individual Psychology to her anti-fascist critique.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-332). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

The aim of this study was to examine the changing image of women in the oeuvre of Francis Imbuga. Focusing on seven stage plays and two novels published between 1976 and 2011, the study examines the depiction of female characters within the social, cultural and political contexts of post-independence African societies. The depiction of female characters in literature has attracted the attention of numerous scholars globally, particularly with regards to negative female stereotypes in male authored works. This study explores Imbuga’s attitude towards female stereotypes and gender inequalities in literary texts. Using an eclectic framework that includes feminist criticism, feminist stylistics, gender theory and the formal strategies of literature, the study examined gender relations in these texts through the analysis of language and discourse of characters. Further, the study uses the interpretive methods of textual analysis to categorize these works into three phases based on their portrayal of female characters. This method reveals a systematic transformation in the characterization of women from disadvantaged positions in the patriarchal society to more prominent positions in the contemporary society. The study demonstrates that Imbuga makes a positive response to feminism and devices a unique perspective on feminism that celebrates both the domestic and public roles of female characters. In this sense, the female characters contribute to the moral content and aesthetic values of Imbuga’s works. The study concludes that Imbuga views the transformation of female characters in literary texts as part of the broader social change that is desirable in the society. Ultimately, this vision involves shifting focus from the preoccupation with gender inequalities to concern for the welfare and dignity of the human person. Based on the conclusions, recommendations for further study include investigation into the educative and social role of the performing arts as a means of raising consciousness on issues such as HIV/Aids, use of indigenous knowledge in solving contemporary issues, incorporation of African morality and traditions in contemporary literature and a comparative study of Imbuga’s feministic vision with that of other writers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1997.
Advisors: Kirk Denton and Marlene Longenecker, Interdisciplinary Program. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-202). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Within the latitude of a science-fictional elsewhere and elsewhen, women can establish their own social norms and accepted praxis. The modification encountered in alternate feminist spacetimes specifically incorporate many new ideologies concerning motherhood. Central to this discussion is the means by which feminist authors regard the influences of patriarchal institutions and the subsequent changes in society because of, or in spite of, these changes. The male-dominated fields of technological patriarchy (reproduction and fertility "specialists") and the military, for example, are areas upon which feminist authors speculate. Three feminist strategies for coping with a patriarchal social order, as seen in the works of science-fiction, are entrance into the male world and attempts to change it, competition in the patriarchal world on its own terms and total retreat from an oppressive society, accompanied by the creation of a feminist utopian otherworld. These feminist spacetimes share a number of convictions. Most important, conception is never an unwilled experience. The "maternal instinct", is redefined as a calling which, in some cases, extends to males and non-biological mothers. Traits that are salient in the childraisers are those which are mirrored by these alternate feminist spacetimes as a whole and which contribute to the definition of these societies as utopias. The treatment and/or possession of children as property is frowned upon in the novels. Some points of dissent amongst feminist SF authors include the existence of technology in an utopian or dystopian future for motherhood, and whether or not males are permitted and/or encouraged to participate in society as a whole and more precisely in the experience of mothering. The dystopia, for its part, can thus be regarded as a warning against the encroachment of rampant patriarchal enterprises through their representation of the extrapolation of male-centred value systems. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

According to Lewis Seifert, “Fairy tales are obsessed with femininity … These narratives are concerned above all else with defining what makes women different from men and, more precisely, what is and is not acceptable feminine behaviour” (1996: 175). This study, then, will demonstrate how certain patriarchal ideas associated with fairy tales are disseminated when fairy tale elements are reworked in film, visual art and the novel. The aim of this project, more specifically, is to show how certain stereotypical representations of women endure in works that could be read as feminist appropriations of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. Stereotypical representations of women are numerous and may include: depicting females as fitting neatly into what is often called the virgin/whore or Madonna/whore binary opposition; depicting women as being caring and kind, but also passive, submissive and weak; and depicting older women as being sexually unattractive and evil (Goodwin and Fiske 2001:358; Sullivan 2010: 4). It must be said that the list of stereotypes relating to women given here is far from exhaustive.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 1999.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 237-258). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9955910.

When Ursula K. LeGuin revisited the world of Earthsea with Tehanu (1990), her return to an established classic of the fantasy genre came with a powerful desire to revisit its construction and reinterpret its assumptions from a female perspective. Drawn to the side of her dying former tutor, protagonist Tenar is repeatedly posed with the question of what to do with his lore books, which could never offer to her what they had his conventionally male students. Even if this time-honored tradition excludes her, however, Tenar cannot bring herself to discard or abandon the books, for all that they seem "nothing to her, big leather boxes full of paper." Traveling on foot, forced often to flee for her life and pack light, she feels compelled to carry these book on her back. For Tenar, the tomes are a considerably "heavy burden," and, given the context in which this novel appears, this female protagonist's struggle with the weight of traditional, respected patriarchal male text is particularly significant. In LeGuin's fantasy, the image of Tenar traversing her story with Ogion's great "lore-books" strapped to her back is emblematic of the struggle many authors have faced in negotiating the received texts and tropes of their generic inheritance in order to create female-centered fantasy. Indeed, the transformation of Ogion's great lore-books into Tenar's conflicted baggage literalizes what many other texts have more figuratively confronted. My dissertation, "A Noted Departure: Metafiction and Feminist Revision within a Tradition of Fantasy Writing," considers the compelling frequency of such self-conscious textual moments in female-centered fantasy of the 80s and 90s and argues for their importance as a writing strategy that challenges the assumptions of more formulaic fantasy texts and tropes, especially those that inform expectations about roles for women. Examining this moment in which the legacy of a revisionist feminist impulse converges with a post-modern, post-structural metafictional critique of traditional narrative forms and the ideologies they encode, my dissertation sheds light on many critically ignored self-conscious fantasy texts which feature heroines whose critical, textual negotiations bring readers to reconsider the nature of fantasy and the danger and wonder, the limits and liberty, of fictional representation. Taken together, as important and largely overlooked entries in a genre which thrives on the tension between tradition and innovation, these works represent a significant transitional moment in the fantasy genre, bridging the gap between a relatively limited female presence and a more contemporary diversity. My first chapter, "Doing the "Not Done": Wrede's 'Improper' Princess and her Whimsical Revision of Fairy-Tale Expectation and Convention," demonstrates the fluid link between the established tradition of feminist fairy tale revision and the self-critical generic departure my dissertation presents as an important literary moment in the fantasy genre. As the archive my dissertation constitutes might be understood as the answer to Angela Carter's frustrated plea that we must "move beyond revision," this chapter acknowledges the fairy tale's potency as a purveyor of romantic archetypes and, thereby, of cultural precepts for young women in a reading of The Enchanted Forest Chronicles (1990-5). In threading seemingly simple and conventional plotlines together with unexpected and innovative departures, Wrede upsets narrative expectation and undercuts generic convention, particularly those associated with the 'princess' trope. Achieving her critical commentary on the commonplaces of the genre by first invoking the traditional before establishing a heroine who positions herself against it, Wrede's plot also reveals the importance of textual negotiation and interpretation, and this chapter underscores the generative relationship this kind of critical interplay bears on the need for new plots and narrative options. Chapter two, "'In Search of 'Something New': Metafiction as Critical and Creative Discourse" offers a sustained discussion of the theoretical work of metafiction. Opening with an examination of the historical precedent of feminist metafiction and its desire to create an alternative tradition to a limited masculinist tradition in the 60s, 70s and early 80s, I demonstrate how aptly feminist metafiction aligns with a fantasist's impulse to challenge the same constraints within genre. Examining how metafiction can function as a critical and creative narrative strategy within a generic context, I adapt the conceptions of theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jean Genette, Gayle Greene, Amie A. Doughty, and Brian Stonehill to an understanding of how metafiction functions in fantasy. "Plotting Change, Imagining Alternatives: Metafiction as Revision in Feminist Fantasy," argues that while thematic or plot-based investigations into feminist fantasy are useful, understanding the way in which generic push-back occurs requires closer attention to the writing strategies which articulate such artistic feats and aesthetic negotiations. This third chapter examines several significant but critically ignored fantasy works which demonstrate how writers of this period signal their departure from generic tradition through key metafictional moments in which a heroine herself invokes text or turns, within her own story, to a text that exists within her own world. Alanna of Trebond in The Song of the Lioness series (1983, 84, 86, 88), Daikin of The Farthest Away Mountain (1976), and Talia in The Heralds of Valdemaar series ("Arrows Trilogy," 1987-88) all experience transformative and liberatory adventures that afford a break with tradition that is drawn along lines of both gender and narrative. Thus, texts occupy a central role in these adventures, providing opportunities to investigate the cultural role they play and the tensions they surface between providing inspiration and motivation on the one hand and limitations that must be overcome on the other. As revisionist quest-narratives which are also deeply internal feminist Bildungsroman, the frequently close relationship between heroine and text in these works is deeply telling; such metafictional moments allow their adventures to advance not only plot or individual story, but a critical conversation about the literary conventions and cultural traditions which condition their representation. In calling attention to the critical work of these metafictional moments, I reveal that the most fruitful feminist fantasy criticism must not be only about plot, but the possibility of plot. Indeed, as these heroines become legends themselves, their narratives not only deconstruct traditional discourses, engaging with the need to re-write tradition, to counter narrative expectation and convention with the creation of new stories; they also more collectively re-mythologize. In creating new stories and new patterns of storytelling, this chapter reveals how these writers do not just expose the cultural power of tradition and myth and critique the representation of women within them, but counter its absences and suppressions with their own mythopoesis. Taken together, such a wealth of significant but critically ignored examples demonstrates how writers employ metafiction as a strategy to enact criticism and imagine alternatives in the fantasy genre, particularly in terms of expanding narrative possibilities for heroines. My fourth chapter, "Convention Undone: UnLunDun's Unchosen Heroine and Narrative (Re)Vision," examines China Miéville's UnLunDun (2007) as a deliberate response to a tradition of fantasy writing, lampooning, in particular, the portal-quest fantasy. Revealing narrative adherence to traditional patterns as false and hollow, and those who trust them uncritically as foolishly naïve, Miéville reminds readers of the importance of innovation, of critical interaction with narrative tradition, and the unfinished nature of both narrative and identity. In a tour-de-force of a self-and-genre-conscious metafictionality, Miéville explores the pit-falls of expectation and the potential which comes from the creation of an alternative narrative--and with it, an alternative heroine in Deeba, whose journey works both with and against the perspective traditions of 'The Book' (a talking tome whose authority proves less than accurate). Ultimately, I argue that Deeba's quest and her transformation into a celebrated, unchosen heroine reveals the degree to which success lies in making the old useful again, and the narrative she reshapes is a vivid illustration of both what it means to revise or reimagine and the necessity of such a critical process. In a world of fragments and the discarded, this book speaks to the genre at large, asking what might be constructed from the inherited baggage of traditional understandings, and what can be done in spite of their limitations and previously established identities or functions. Commonly engaged in the construction of questioning, questing stories, the writers I study have crafted pioneering, uncertain heroines who act out a self-conscious awareness that presses against the genre's limits. As these writers must struggle with the loaded material they wish to weave into new story shapes, so, too, do their fictional creations meditate upon the way in which their journey or character diverges from the expected. These are heroines in the making, heroines whose identities are not fixed easily in text but who must constitute it through an engagement with texts both familiar and new. As books which are also about books, as stories which take story as explicit subject matter, these works feature textual negotiation as a necessary critical process at the level of plot. Moreover, in presenting such metafictions as a critical, questioning comparison to a traditional norm, generic expectation, or narrative inheritance experienced as limited or confining, these works also shed light on the possibility of alternative plots and call special attention to the kinds of artistic and ideological negotiations necessary for such stories to be told in our own realistic worlds as well as in our fantasies. Thus, my dissertation highlights the importance of a writer's impulse to reflect and revise the tradition in which they participate and underscores the creative and critical potential of furthering dialogue between texts and conventions. As my readings demonstrate, the fascination fantasy holds as an enduring art form may well be contingent upon the genre's potential for self-conscious interplay and its protean capacity to refigure narration as a meaningful form of discourse.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2004.
Title from title page screen, viewed May 23, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Charles Harris (chair), Christopher Breu, Janice Neuleib. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-163) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 300-310). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This study explores the interaction between feminist science fiction and feminist theory, focusing on the body and embodiment. Specifically, it aims to demonstrate that feminist science fiction novels of the 1990s offer an excellent platform for exploring the critical theories of the body put forward by Judith Butler in particular, and other feminist/queer theorists in general. The thesis opens with a brief history of science fiction's depiction of the body and feminist science fiction's subversions and rewritings of this, as well as an overview of Judith Butler's theories relating to the body and embodiment. It then considers a wide range of feminist science fiction novels from the 1990s, focusing on four key areas; bodies materialised outside patriarchal systems in women-only or women-ruled worlds, alien bodies, cyborg bodies and bodies in cyberspace. An in-depth analysis of the selected texts reveals that they have important contributions to make to the consideration of bodies as they develop and expand the issues raised by theorists such as Butler, Elisabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.

This project examines rape culture in American literature and society, exploring factors of rape culture through the narratives of literary protagonists and current women alike. Each chapter is grounded in a work of literature, which serves as a lens through which to analyze a factor of rape culture, and is then broadened in scope to incorporate recent court cases that have had significant sociocultural impacts. The introduction includes a critical review of rape in feminist theory, from Susan Brownmiller to Ann J. Cahill. The first chapter treats the rape of Dolores Haze and victim blaming in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita, and the 2010 Cleveland, Texas gang rapes of an eleven-year-old girl, who was cast as a “Lolita” by her community and the media. The second chapter discusses the rape of women with disabilities in Elmer Harris’s 1940 Johnny Belinda, and two 2012 cases in California and Connecticut involving the rapes of women with disabilities and the issue of consent, both of which influenced legislation. The third chapter focuses on the use of mass rape as a weapon of war in Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Ruined, and the narratives and testimonies of rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where nearly 2 million women have been raped since 1998. As the literature illustrates, when rape functions as an instrument of power and control certain similarities arise, such as victim blaming, consent, and the use of rape to demoralize and subjugate women, all of which are primary features of rape culture.

This project reconceives the methods critics use to define and analyze the critical field of documentary poetry. Although scholarship on documentary in the visual arts abounds, literary criticism that explores poetry through a documentary lens is sparse. Documentary poetics criticism focuses almost exclusively on socioeconomic class within the poems and on defining the genre. Critics have not attended to the ways that the category “document” inflects this poetic arena. I argue that documentary poetics includes engagement with specific documents and with the power they hold within a given historical moment. This requires attending to what I call document culture: a document’s visual and stylistic norms, in addition to the customs of its subject matter and material/medium. In addition to contributing to critical theory, this project traces documents’ shift from the twentieth century into the twenty-first from wood pulp to strings of code. I focus on representative collections of poetry that foreground the effects particular documents, like congressional hearings, dictionaries, and social media posts, have on people based on their position within the society in which they live. These documentary poems function differently than other poems that engage documents. A second category, poem-documents, interrogate the historical genre of English-language poetry in the nominally postcolonial US, with special focus on the African and Jewish diasporas, and experiences of indigenous people in the colonizing nation. These poems confront the genre’s social position and critically-imposed limitations to demonstrate poetry’s potential to act as a document that names and remembers injustices. My project emphasizes poetry by women, particularly women of color, in order to revise documentary poetics criticism’s interest in class and style to include textual resonances of race, gender, sexuality and nation. Just as the collections documentary poets offer are interdisciplinary in ethos, so is this project, with roots in documentary studies, media studies, feminist criticism, queer studies, and critical race studies in addition to literary criticism. Each chapter of this project follows the slippage between poem-documents and documentary poems. Chapter one grounds documentary culture in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938), widely considered to be the first American documentary poem. I juxtapose Rukeyser’s interest in document cultures and theory of poetry’s ethical possibilities in The Life of Poetry (1949) with, in Chapter two, Irena Klepfisz’s A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New 1971-1990, a collection that reframes lyric poetry as mode of documentation. Chapter three places Harryette Mullen’s critique of English-language reference texts and the accumulations of connotative meaning, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), in conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), which re-documents African women’s experiences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The final chapter addresses Citizen (2014), in which Claudia Rankine re-envisions the archive of anti-black racism to include speech and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), Joy Harjo’s polyvocal and iconoclastic collection that uses poetry to redefine the archive’s temporality in a way that might counter the erasure of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The nuanced ruminations these poets offer illustrate that, as an area of study with its own investments, interests, and modes of inquiry, critical documentary poetics has just begun.

This thesis locates Ibsen within the intellectual context pertaining to gender that is provided by such influential nineteenth-century texts as Mill's The Subjection of Women and Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht, both of which seemingly feminist works in actuality foreground women only for their importance in the production of better-quality sons who will ensure the endurance of the patriarchy. The attraction of feminists to the dramas of a playwright who avowedly wrote from this patriarchal standpoint is elucidated by a consideration of the appropriation of the woman-centered texts of patriarchal "feminism" by recent feminists seeking material to reinforce their own movement. The apparently paradoxical project of the analysis of three Ibsen characters, Nora Helmer, Rebekka West and Hedda Gabler, in terms of contemporary feminist literary theory suggests a parallel means of appropriation. These potentially redefined female characters are afforded an added dimension of reality by their embodiment by actresses in stage performances that allows theatre history to be related to real-life history, in which, contemporaneously, nineteenth-century women were beginning to take part.

Thesis (MA (Afrikaans and Dutch))—University of Stellenbosch, 2005.
The aim of this study is to investigate the position that has been allocated to women authors by literary theorists. Some literary theorists are of the opinion that the action of writing can be compared to fatherhood, ownership and being a creator, all of which are male dominated images. Women writers have historically been marginalized by literary theorists, since there is a perception that women cannot write because they are not male. Harold Bloom has postulated that a male writer looks to a precursor in order to write and find his own voice. Before the writer can claim his own, original voice, he must enter into an Oedipal battle with the precusor, and, figuratively speaking, ‘kill’ him in his writing. According to Gilbert & Gubar, who serve here as representatives of the feminist literary theorists, women writers make use of monsterlike figures which serve as metaphors for the inner battle they have to endure to put pen to paper. The problem, however, is that women writers have no (female) precursors to look to. Elaine Showalter postulates 4 models that women writers may use in search of a female precursor or female body of writing, but she does not offer a clear solution. I am of the opinion that women writers can identity with a female figure or role model. The figure that I propose is Scheherazade, a storytelling character from the Thousand and One Nights, who told stories for a thousand and one nights in order for escape death. I identify a few texts from international literature that make use of this figure, whether as a character in the text, a metaphor for the female character who tells stories or as a metaphor for the author herself. This study focuses on texts from 3 genres in Afrikaans literature, namely children’s stories, short stories and a novel. It appears from the analysis of the texts that women writers have successfully made use of the Scheherazade character, to address issues concerning the social role and position allocated to women by a patriarchial society. Along with this women writers’ search and longing for a voice of their own and their own identity gets highlighted with the use of a Scheherazade-like female character who tells stories. Lastly it became clear that this figure is also being used by women writers to contemplate the dynamics of writing and to contextualise the role that self-doubt and self-actualisation play in telling and writing stories. Scheherazade thus becomes a vehicle for finding a voice as well as agency.