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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literature, Modern. Literature, American. Literature, English'
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Young, William H. "The long way home: Studies in twentieth century romanticism." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/279778.
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These studies trace the development of a mid-twentieth century romanticism, a Neo-Romanticism distinct from both an earlier High Romanticism and a later Postmodernism. The focus is on six twentieth century writers, all but one American: D. H. Lawrence (English), Paul Bowles, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, William Stafford, and Tim O'Brien. Neoromantics seek to relandscape the derealized self by venturing outward; venturing outward they both empty and refurbish the self. By pursuing a new self or taking an extreme course--that is, the long way home--they come to an unexpected conclusion: they discover the illusion of liberty, of democracy, of self-agency, and thus the great truth of old orders, deeper than tradition.
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Vondrak, Amy Margaret Edmunds Susan. "Strange things: Hemingway, Woolf, and the fetish (Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf)." Related Electronic Resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
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Cottle, Brent. "Superfluous absence: The secret life of the author in twentieth-century literature and film." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/279822.
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Superfluous Absence examines how writers of fictional narratives imagine readers that might read their texts and use these imagined readers--and the voices they represent--as leavening agents for the fictions they produce. In this theory, writers do not appeal to these readers except as they function as language and its desire to be decoded--as they function as language's desire for itself. Ultimately, the texts of fiction reach real-life readers and Superfluous Absence traces how authors struggle with the leavening agent of the reader's voice when the reader's voice becomes an actual social presence in an actual historical moment. This struggle consists of writers trying to preserve a non-space, and readers try to turn this non-space into praxis and presence. In Superfluous Absence I trace this struggle in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Samuel Beckett's trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and Stephen King's Misery . I also explore what happens to this reading desire when it is translated into a visual format, as is so often the case in the twentieth-century when literature is adapted into film. The test case is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an appropriate choice as it is a movie that tries to eradicate the linguistic in favor of the purely visual. Finally, this project is not just an objective charting of the various locations and non-locations of the writer's voice in twentieth-century fiction and film, but is also a very subjective attempt on the part of this writer to understand the presence or non-presence of his authorial voice in acts of fiction. Therefore, the author of this dissertation frequently writes autobiographically and frequently turns his critical voice into the voice of fictional narration.
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Barker, Jennifer. "The aesthetics of resistance modernism and antifascism /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3178431.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2005.<br>Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: A, page: 2208. Adviser: Thomas Foster. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Nov. 27, 2006)."
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Burr, Sandra. "Science and imagination in Anglo-American children's books, 1760--1855." W&M ScholarWorks, 2005. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623463.
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Didactic, scientifically oriented children's literature crisscrossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finding wide popularity in Great Britain and the United States; yet the genre has since suffered from a reputation for being dull and pedantic and has been neglected by scholars. Challenging this scholarly devaluation, "Science and Imagination in Anglo-American Children's Books, 1760--1855" argues that didactic, scientifically oriented children's books play upon and encourage the use of the imagination. Three significant Anglo-American children's authors---Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and Nathaniel Hawthorne---infuse their writings with the wonders of science and the clear message that an active imagination is a necessary component of a moral upbringing. Indeed, these authors' books, most particularly Sandford and Merton (1783--1789), Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825), and A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852), are more than mere lessons: they are didactic fantasies intended to spark creativity within their readers.;These didactic fantasies are best understood in the context of the emerging industrial revolution and the height of the Atlantic slave trade. These phenomena, combined with the entrenchment of classicism in Anglo-American culture and the lesser-known transatlantic botany craze, shaped the ways in which Day, Edgeworth, and Hawthorne crafted their children's stories. Certainly dramatic changes on both sides of the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced the differences in the texts. More important to this study, however, are the vital connections among these stories. Each author draws heavily upon Rousseau's ubiquitous child-rearing treatise Emile and upon her or his literary predecessor to create children's books that encourage exploring nature through scientific experimentation and imaginative enterprise.;Yet these writers do not encourage the imagination run amok. Rather, they see the need for morally grounded scientific endeavor, for which they rely primarily on classicism and on gender ideology. Incorporating tales of the ancient world to inculcate the ideal of a virtuous, disinterested, and learned citizen responsible to the larger body politic, the three children's authors---but most notably and explicitly Hawthorne---tie a romanticized, classical past to the emerging industrial world.
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Alison, Cheryl. "Creatures of Habit." Thesis, Tufts University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3624685.
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<p> This dissertation contends that the kinds of consistency composition both affords and demands in order to hold together <i>as a</i> composition have a special location within European and American late modernism. In the decades surrounding the Second World War, artists acknowledged that art needed to let in disorder to reflect lived experience; yet, it still had to cohere in order to be recognizable as art, or a form of presentation. Paying attention to how diverse late modernist artists were thus creatively challenged, I argue that their works of art demonstrate historically located and informed compositional conservatism, or formal rigidity. Making the case for the breadth of composition's organizing force during the period, I focus on a different artist and disciplinary area in each of three chapters: Francis Bacon's oil paintings, Samuel Beckett's dramatic and theatrical work in <i>Endgame,</i> and Ralph Ellison's novelistic efforts in <i>Invisible Man</i> and his unfinished second manuscript. </p><p> Late modernist artwork exercises formal control in ways extreme enough to be called violent. But if "violence" signifies here how formal control stringently orders components (and excludes others) to bring them into line with composition's demands, this <i>formal</i> signification hardly removes such violence from having lived consequences. More, such components' failure to fall into line, or the artist's failure to accomplish such organization, can itself have unfortunate repercussions. Building on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's art theory, which lays the groundwork for aligning apparently dissimilar compositions, I argue that in Bacon, Beckett, and Ellison, compositional force operates in ways shared by larger physical and psychological arrangements. I show how not just home or domestic spaces, but also national and political structures, including, e.g., those defining German fascism, partake in composition's formational activities. Making use of conceptual apparatuses that extend beyond Deleuzoguattarian theory to include psychoanalysis and Frankfurt School theorists, this dissertation examines how the violence (and pleasure) of form variously subtends the period's configurations.</p>
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Moore, Grace. "Paine, Blake and Hegemony." W&M ScholarWorks, 1996. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626059.
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Nwosu, Maik. "The reinvention of meaning cultural imaginaries and the life of the sign /." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
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Wyndham, Karen Louise Smith. "Traffic in books: Ethnographic fictions of Zora Neale Hurston, Salman Rushdie, Bruce Chatwin, and Ruth Underhill." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/279845.
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This dissertation studies the works of four writers who attempt cross-cultural advocacy through writing fiction based upon their fieldwork or other travels. In order to explain cultural differences, however, all four writers inadvertently rely upon the very Orientalist stereotypes, the "ethnographic fictions," which they seek to undermine. Three underlying causes for this dynamic are identified and traced through works by the authors as well as contemporary post-colonial, queer, feminist, and ethnographic interdisciplinary scholarship. First, in order to explain the significance of native cultures in the language of the mainstream or dominant one, cross-cultural advocates must balance novelty with intelligibility. A critique of an epistemology of empire, then, better taps "ethnographic fictions" through mimicry, mockery, and minstrelsy, rather than appealing to abstract, ahistorical universals. Second, Odysseun myths remain a powerful set of presumptions about the relationship between travel, individuality, and empowerment. Yet the idea that freedom and free thought are both the goals and consequences of travel fails to account for the history of pilgrims, refugees, and community-based activists. Third, Orientalism and Anthropology are organized around the idea that sex/gender roles reveal the essence of indigenous cultures. The result is a disproportionate focus upon women's living quarters (harems, zezanas, huts), and indigenous sexuality (berdaches, hijras, shamen). For the four authors, the relationship between advocacy and self-identification is a crucial element. Close reading of the writers' texts reveals how they each seek validation of their sex/gender identities through investigations abroad. As queer, feminist, and/or bi-cultural people, the writers are particularly sensitive to conventions of belonging and exclusion. This study reveals how advocacy and alienation interact in 20th-century literature and scholarship of the Other.
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Toth, Leah Hutchison. "Resonant Texts: Sound, Noise, and Technology in Modern Literature." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/29.
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“Resonant Texts” draws from literary criticism, history, biography, media theory, and the history of technology to examine representations of sound and acts of listening in modern experimental fiction and drama. I argue that sound recording technology, invented in the late 19th century, equipped 20th century authors including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and Samuel Beckett with new resources for depicting human consciousness and experience. The works in my study feature what I call “close listening,” a technique initially made possible by the phonograph, which forced listeners to focus exclusively on what they heard without the presence of an accompanying image. My study examines the literary modernists’ acute attention to the auditory in their goal to accurately represent the reality of the subjective, perceiving self in increasingly urban, technologically advanced environments.
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Bryant, Cheney Matt. "Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, and Mid-Twentieth Century US Writing." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/101.
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Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and philanthropy it purportedly replaced. In my dissertation, I theorize modern charity as a cultural narrative that found expression in a number of different writers from the start of the Great Depression and into the early 1960s, including Harold Gray, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Flannery O'Connor, and Dorothy Day.
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Wade, Brian Richard. "Improvisation and Other Stories." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1275462143.
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Menrisky, Alexander F. "WILD ABANDON: POSTWAR LITERATURE BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND AUTHENTICITY." UKnowledge, 2018. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/66.
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Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a universalist and essentialist impulse to reject self-identity in favor of an identification with the ecosystem writ large, a claim to authenticity that flattens distinctions among individuals and communities. But even as the self appears to disintegrate, an “I” always remains to testify to its disintegration. For this reason, dissolution performs a primarily critical function by foregrounding an unsurpassable representational tension between sense of self and ecosystem. Each chapter explores a different perspective on this tension as it conflicts with matters of gender and race in works by Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakauer. Assuming an anti-essentialist stance, all the texts I study acknowledge ecological interconnectivity as a universal condition but maintain the necessity of culturally mediated and individually constructed identity positions from which to recognize that condition.
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Platt, Mary Hartley. "Epic reduction : receptions of Homer and Virgil in modern American poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9d1045f5-3134-432b-8654-868c3ef9b7de.
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The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.
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Dimirouli, Foteini. "Cavafy hero : literary appropriations and cultural projections of the poet in English and American literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:84ca6361-a26c-4269-82da-4deb4b0c4664.
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The present thesis examines the way E.M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Joseph Brodsky, and James Merrill appropriated C.P. Cavafy in writings that were disseminated and consumed amongst culturally dominant literary circles, and which eventually determined the Greek-Alexandrian poet’s international reputation. I aim to contribute a new perspective on Cavafy, by evading the text-based tradition of reception studies, and proposing an alternative method of discussing the production of Cavafy's canonical status. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory, I view literary canonization as involving a variety of factors at play beyond creative achievement: in particular, relationships of 'authorial consecration' whereby writers create and circulate cultural capital through their power to legitimize other artists. The critical and fictional texts I analyse perform readings of Cavafy's poetry alongside imaginative portrayals of the poet's life and personality. I take this complementary relationship - between the image of the poet each author projects and their reading of his work - as a starting point to explore the broader ideas of aesthetics and authorial subjectivity that inform the renderings of Cavafy generated by prominent literary figures. Rather than passive recipients of influence, these figures are considered as active agents in the production of 'Cavafy narratives', appropriating the poet according to their own agendas, while also projecting onto him their own position within the cultural field. Eventually, Cavafy becomes a point of insight into the multiplicity of networks and practices involved in the production of cultural currency; in turn, the study of the construction of Cavafy's authorial identity sheds light on the cumulative processes that have defined the way the poet is read and perceived to the present day. This duality of perspective is essential to a study concerned with the cultural contexts framing the poet's steady rise to international fame throughout the 20th century.
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Stotsky, Lauren. "The Enduring Hold of the Bible on Modern Literature: Exploring the Fall Narrative as a Conceptual Metaphor for American Literature in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2020. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/581.
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There is no greater work of literature, perhaps, than the Bible. The Bible has shaped and influenced more literature, art, and culture than any other work in our time. The effects of the Bible’s words are still woven into modern literature today, illustrating that the Bible’s themes, allegories, parables, fables, metaphors, and characters are things that we humans are unable to depart far from even many decades later. One of the very first stories in the Bible, found at the beginning in Genesis, tells of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve’s depiction as the first kind of our species and the story of their creation to their Fall is one transformative story that humans seem destined to repeat. This cycle of falling is rampant in American literature, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, appearing in works by prominent authors such as R. W. B. Lewis, Leo Marx, and John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden wrestles heavily with both biblical themes and metaphors and acts as a biblical framework for the Fall narrative and the book of Genesis. This thesis seeks to examine the Fall as a conceptual metaphor for American literature and thinking through John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and attempts to explain why literature, and humans, keep endlessly returning to the Fall.
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Shank, Nathan A. "Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation of Consciousness in Postwar American Novels." UKnowledge, 2015. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/19.
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Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to represent the state of Marianne’s mind on the night she was raped, Judd finds that simply turning to a verbalized account of her thoughts, such as “I felt terrible,” or a seeming-omniscient gloss of her mental state, such as “She suffered incredible mental turmoil,” is insufficient and incommensurate with the traumatic and painful mental state she must have endured. In cases like these, authors and narrators reject conventional models of representation and turn to partial minds to effectively articulate to the reader the mental state that the character experiences. These more effective representations are pivotal in communicating to the reader a more adequate—whether from a mimetic, synthetic, or thematic perspective—understanding of characters’ experiences. Partial minds are often the very required conditions for readers to empathize with a character. By looking at several different instantiations of partial minds in recent American novels, I show how this technique both heightens the value of cognitive narrative criticism and revises the way we read many of literature’s most interesting characters.
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Spiers, Emily. "'Alpha-Mädchen sind wir alle' (we're all Alpha Girls) : subjectivity and agency in contemporary pop-feminist writing in the US, Britain and Germany." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:21fd8597-82a0-40e7-9a21-fdcd3da27641.
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This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.
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Puello, Alfonso Sarah L. "Poetics of the urban, poetics of the self : a comparative study of selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4316585d-51c1-4b79-ae46-f5cdaf4c55d5.
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This thesis explores the poetic representation of Buenos Aires and Paris in selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda respectively. Its primary aim is to analyse the relational phenomenon between the construction of these poets' personal maps of the city and the concomitant formation of the poetic self. The principal point of departure is Jacques Réda's Ferveur de Borges (1987), a collection of essays and poems published individually between 1957 and 1986, where the author expresses his admiration for Borges, shows his broad and critical knowledge of Borges's works and establishes the similarities between their poetics of the urban and poetics of the self. Another important aim of this thesis is therefore to ascertain the extent of Borges's influential role in Réda's poetics, but also how reading Borges through Réda enhances our understanding of Borges's urban poetry. This comparison reveals that Borges and Réda gravitate towards places within the city, but mostly its periphery, characterised by their unpretentious, soulful and heterotopic qualities — places where the poets feel a sense of belonging. Their objective is to restore, through the prism of their minds and their physical investment in space, the provincial spirit of Buenos Aires and Paris, hidden behind the dynamism of the modern metropolises they have become. As a consequence of this communion between self and place they explore the possibility of being on the brink of a revelatory experience that speaks to the enigma of life. The wider scope of the thesis addresses the historical and cultural relationship between Buenos Aires and Paris, Borges's and Réda's redefinition of the centre/periphery dichotomy, the evening as a temporal locale and the distinction between poetic destiny and aesthetic experience.
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Gardam, Sarah Christine. "THE PATHOS OF TEMPORALITY IN MID-20TH CENTURY ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2018. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/487648.
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English<br>Ph.D.<br>Lack of understanding regarding the role that temporality-pathos plays in Asian American literature leads scholars to misread many textual passages as deviations from the implied authors’ political critiques. This dissertation invites scholars to recognize temporality-focused passages in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, and John Okada’s No-No Boy, as part of a pathos formula developed by avant-garde Asian American writers to resist systemic alienations experienced by Asian Americans by diagnosing and treating America’s empathy gap. I find that each of pathae examined – the pathos of finitude, the pathos of idealism, and the pathos of confusion – appears in each of the major primary texts discussed, and that these pathae not only invite similitude-based empathy from a wide readership, but also prompt, via multiple methods, the expansion of empathy. First, the authors use these pathae diagnostically: the pathos of finitude makes visible American imperialism’s destruction of prior ways of life; the pathos of idealism exposes the falsity of the futures promised by liberalism; and the pathos of confusion counters the destructive nationalisms that fractured the era. Second, the authors use these temporality pathae to identify the instrumentalist reasoning underlying these capitalist ideologies and to show how they stunt American empathy. Third, the authors deploy formal and thematic complexities that cultivate empathy-generating faculties of mind and cultivate alternative forms of reasoning.<br>Temple University--Theses
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Elizondo, Luna Roberto Carlos. "Medusa House." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1429271265.
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Cheng, Po-suen. "The theme of alienation in modern Chinese and Anglo-American fiction /." [Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong], 1985. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B12317135.
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Cooper, Catherine C. "John Gardner’s Grendel: The Importance of Community in Making Moral Art." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2019. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2599.
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John Gardner’s Grendel examines the ways in which humans make meaning out of their lives. By changing the original Beowulf monster into a creature who constantly questions the conflicting narratives set before him, Gardner encourages us to confront these tensions also. However, his emphasis on Grendel’s alienation helps us realize that community is essential to creating meaning. Most obviously, community creates relationships that foster a sense of moral obligation between its members, even in the face of the type of uncertainty felt by Grendel. Moreover, community cannot exist without dialogue, which perpetually stimulates the imagination to respond to the tensions contained in a plurality of viewpoints. Gardner encourages us to question narratives which no longer serve us and to use our imagination to tell new stories that cultivate positive ideals such as love and hope.
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Slaven, Craig D. "Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives of (Ec)centric Religion in the Works of Faulkner, O’Connor, and Hurston." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/31.
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This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct of an idealized past helped galvanize Southern evangelicalism into a religion that more readily accommodated racial hegemony in the present. The following three chapters examine Faulkner’s Light in August, O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain. I find that each of these novels embeds traces of forgotten religious dissidence. The modern nostalgia for a purer old-time religion, my readings suggest, says less about the history of religion in the South than it does about New-South efforts to merge evangelical and “Southern” values, thereby suppressing any residual opposition between them.
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Engholm, Virginia B. "The Power of Multiplying: Reproductive Control in American Culture, 1850-1930." UKnowledge, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/6.
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Prior to the advent of modern birth control beginning in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of pregnancy, post-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adult years. The average birth rate per woman in 1800 was just over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to just under than three and a half. The question that this dissertation explores is what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge in the wake of this demographic shift. What’s at stake in a woman’s decision to reproduce, for herself, her family, her nation? How do women, and society, control birth?
In order to explore these questions, this dissertation broadens the very term “birth control” from the technological and medical mechanisms by which women limit or prevent conception and birth to a conception of “controlling birth,” the societal and cultural processes that affect reproductive practices. This dissertation, then, constructs a cultural narrative of the process of controlling birth. Moving away from a focus on “negative birth control”—contraception, abortion, sterilization—the term “controlling birth” also applies to engineering or encouraging wanted or desired reproduction. While the chapters of this work often focus on traditional sites of birth control—contraceptives, abortion, and eugenics—they are not limited to those forms, uncovering previously hidden narratives of reproduction control. This new lens also reveals men’s investment in these reproductive practices.
By focusing on a variety of cultural texts—advertisements, fictional novels, historical writings, medical texts, popular print, and film—this project aims to create a sense of how these cultural productions work together to construct narratives about sexuality, reproduction, and reproductive control. Relying heavily on a historicizing of these issues, my project shows how these texts—both fictional and nonfictional—create a rich and valid site from which to explore the development of narratives of sexuality and reproductive practices, as well as how these narratives connect to larger cultural narratives of race, class, and nation. The interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry highlights the interrelationship between the literary productions of the nineteenth and twentieth century and American cultural history.
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Wells, Margaret A. "A New Way of Living: Bioeconomic Models in Post-Apocalyptic Dystopias." UKnowledge, 2013. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/5.
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The objective of this thesis is to explore the relationship between moralities and bioeconomies in post-apocalyptic dystopias from the Victorian era to contemporary Young Adult Fiction. In defining the terms bioeconomy and biopolitics, this works examines the ways in which literature uses food and energy systems to explore morality and immorality in social orders and systems, including capitalism and our modern techno-industrial landscapes. This work examines science fiction portrayals of apocalypses and dystopias, including After London: Or, Wild England and The Hunger Games, as well as their medieval and contextual influences. These works are analyzed in light of genre and contemporary influences, including the development of ecology and environmentalism. Ultimately, this thesis argues that authors are building a link between the types of behavior which are sustainable and morally acceptable and a person’s role in a bioeconomy; specifically, those who are moral in post-apocalyptic dystopias are providers of food and care, and do not seek to profit from aiding others. This work contends that the connection between morality and sustainable food and social systems are evidence of authorial belief that our current ways of life are damaging, and they must change in order to preserve our humanity and our world.
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Kerr, Andrew. "Heroes and enemies : American Second World War comics and propaganda." Thesis, University of Lincoln, 2016. http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/27880/.
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During the Second World War, American comic books were put to use for the war effort as carriers of propaganda. This thesis explores the propaganda in comics that were published with the cooperation of government and military institutions such as the Office of War Information and the United States Marine Corps. The propaganda contained within titles published in tandem with government institutions was primarily communicated through the interplay of the characters of the hero and the enemy or villain. Grouping these characters into recurrent types according to their characterisation allows for close reading of their particular propaganda function. This thesis establishes a connection between the Office of War Information, The Dell Publishing Company, Parents’ Magazine Press and Street and Smith Publications, carrying forward the work of Paul Hirsch (2014). Each of these publishers produced comics that included war related propaganda, as did the Office of War Information itself. Added to this sample are the war comics produced by Vincent Sullivan, the editor of Magazine Enterprises and its subsidiaries, that were published with the cooperation of the US Marine Corps and other military institutions. In addition, a sample of the comics of William Eisner are included in order to demonstrate that the same groupings of hero and enemy occur in fictional comic narratives as well as those that purport to be non-fictional. Similar to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s famous creation of Captain America, Eisner produced Uncle Sam in response to the rising patriotic fervour in 1941 as the country increasingly debated and prepared for war. Eisner was later enlisted to produce comics for the Pentagon on war related issues. There is also a discussion of Milton Caniff’s contribution to the US military publication Pocket Guide To China and the Office of War Information publication The Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States (1943). 6 As a counterpoint to the propaganda function of each type of hero and enemy contained within the commercially published sample, this thesis analyses a selection of unpublished, soldier-illustrated comics from the Second World War thanks to privileged access to the Veterans History Project (2013) at the Library of Congress. These unpublished artefacts demonstrate that the comics medium allowed space for alternative voices to express their reaction to the conflict, resisting the wider propaganda narrative exhibited by the commercial sample and reacting to the loss of individuality and authoritarian structure of the military, while stylistically demonstrating the soldiers’ affinity for comics such as George Baker’s Sad Sack and anti-heroes such as Bill Mauldin’s ‘Willie and Joe’. In this way these soldier-illustrated comics presented a democratic counter-point to the lack of democracy within the armed forces (Alpers, 2003, 158) and exhibit a form of patriotism focused on the ‘grassroots’ elements of American everyday life and culture as opposed to the jingoistic and ideological patriotism of the commercial comics. Methodologically, application of close reading to the content of comics’ narratives, on the level of a particular panel, story, advertisement, or other content, reveals comics to be significant historical sources that offer insight into the propaganda embedded in the popular culture of the period. Critical discourse analysis is applied to the rhetorical elements of the comics in order to explore how many of them served to marganilise particular groups, identifying them as the ‘enemy’ in contrast with the ‘hero’ (Brundage, 2008). Similarly, a semiotic approach informed by the work of Roland Barthes (1973; 1987) is undertaken in order to understand the significance of both visual and rhetorical elements of the texts. Alongside this approach is the methodological assumption of the ‘implied reader’ advocated by Wolfgang Iser’s (1978) that allows the analysis the virtual scope to discuss an idealised reader’s potential response to each text. This notion of the ‘implied reader’ is counterbalanced by a consideration of Stuart Hall’s (1980, 1997) three potential decoding positions in tandem with a consideration of the wider historical context. 7 Once the groups of hero and enemy are identified, subsets of both groups are developed according to their characterisation and the attributes they display. This is done in order to facilitate analysis of the ideology communicated by each of these character types. Identifying the function of each type of hero and enemy makes a new contribution to the wider field of propaganda studies. This contribution encourages a greater understanding of the role played by comics during the Second World War in encouraging ideological propaganda as well as allowing for resistance to it.
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Herald, Patrick Steven. "BOUNDARIES OF KNOWLEDGE: EXPERTISE AND PROFESSIONALISM IN BRITISH AND POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE." UKnowledge, 2017. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/60.
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The social sciences have developed robust bodies of scholarship on expertise and professionalism, yet literary analyses of the two remain comparatively sparse. I address this gap in Boundaries of Knowledge by examining recent Anglophone fiction and showing that expertise and professionalism are central concerns of contemporary authors, both as subject matter in fiction and in their public identities. I argue that the novelists studied use and abuse expertise and professionalism: they critique professions as participant observers, and also borrow the mantle of expert credibility to bolster their own cultural capital while documenting the pitfalls of expertise in their fiction.
My first chapter shows how acquired technical knowledge and professionalism are the central concerns of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In the novel, Henry Perowne’s professionalism is the site from which various ethical and political debates radiate. Perowne—depicted as a rather heroic expert in comparison to the other novels studied in the dissertation—is disturbed by a total outsider in the form of Baxter, a man with no prospects or future, professional or otherwise. McEwan aligns himself more closely with Perowne: in part through extensive research for Saturday, he has developed a reputation as a public figure who straddles the “two cultures” of the sciences and humanities, a reputation that exists in a synergistic relationship with his particular brand of realist fiction, which emphasizes hard work and professional credibility.
Next, I demonstrate how Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reveals a deep suspicion of academia, which in the novel serves to cut disciplinary experts off both from the world outside campus and from an appreciation of the subjects they study. Smith’s academic professionals are well-intentioned but unable to look beyond field-specific boundaries to appreciate their objects of study (and unintentionally harm outsiders along the way). Larger issues such as race are always present but at the margins of the interpersonal drama that plays out between the novel’s numerous characters. I read Smith herself as reluctantly accepting academic life, teaching at New York University while maintaining a qualified distance from American academia in articles and interviews.
Chapters one and two are broadly about the advantages and drawbacks of expert knowledge, respectively. In my third chapter, Abdulrazak Gurnah offers the most circumspect view of experts yet with a fear of a “summarizing” expert or colonizer of knowledge that is only resolved by the arrival of a more authentic Zanzibari expert. In an analysis of Gurnah’s By the Sea, I show how professional networks--the United Kingdom’s immigration and refugee system, the colonial education system in Zanzibar, and the professoriate--raise questions about who is entitled to and capable of narrating people’s lives. These questions dovetail both with the novel’s shifting narrative form and with the concerns of Gurnah’s own work as a scholar of literature.
Beginning with McEwan and ending with Gurnah, Boundaries of Knowledge travels from the most socially and economically secure, elite experts to those left behind by contemporary professionalism. My title reflects this troubled landscape of expert knowledge and professionalism: who knows what, the benefits and drawbacks of the accompanying cultural capital, and the barriers between various fields, sets of knowledge, and finally people.
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Posner, Nina. "Against the Pursuit of 'Life's Delirium': Modern Queer Readings of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" and Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall"." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/898.
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Davis, Peter. ""Woven Into the Deeps of Life": Death, Redemption, and Memory in Bob Kaufman's Poetry." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_theses/220.
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The scholars who have taken up the task of writing about Bob Kaufman have most often done so in response to a perceived demand: the lack of Kaufman scholarship, readership, anthology, publicity, canonization. The basis of this need is clear: Kaufman is almost never included as even a third-string Beat, a fringe Surrealist, or an underappreciated Jazz performer. To the committed readers of Kaufman – and almost all of his readers seem to be committed ones – it’s unforgivable. These various canons, major (mid-century American poets, Beat poets) and minor (Jazz poets, American Surrealists), are clearly missing one of their most important members. The task is to reintegrate Kaufman into the company it seems he has been omitted from, the company he deserves. The problem is that once the critic has overcome all the resistance – the capitalist publishing industry, the prison system, the white-dominated west coast poetry setting, the public demands of aesthetic production – she is resisted by the poetry itself, and by Kaufman the poet. Along the lines of Claude Pelieu’s back jacket blurb of Golden Sardine – “in spite of his continuing exclusion from American anthologies, both Hip & Academic” – Kaufman has excluded the anthology, the academy. I will read death through various critical lenses – some with nearly universal critical currency among readers of Kaufman, some with little – as Kaufman’s “FOUNT OF THE CREATIVE ACT.” But this thematic circumscription is also a reading of endurance, even of life. Kaufman writes: “[THE POET’S] DEATH IS A SAVING GRACE.” This becomes the vital relation at the center of my project: how does Kaufman, like Lorca, survive in his poem? How does Kaufman’s political poetry relate with poetic death and redemption? How does jazz involve these things? Does death exist? I want to know . . .
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Reinhart, Taylor W. "Explorations into Stand-Up Comedy Through the Multimedia Essay: "Stand Up Comedy and the Essay, AKA Louis C.K. Meet Michel De Montaigne" and "You're In The Sun"." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1400456829.
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Von, Bergen Megan Kimberly. "Spiritual meaning and the prophetic mode in T.S. Eliot’s Four quartets." Thesis, Kansas State University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/4147.
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Master of Arts<br>Department of English<br>Michael L. Donnelly<br>Among the body of criticism on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, critics such as Cleo McNelly Kearns and Alireza Farahbakhsh have recently interpreted the poet’s “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” (EC II) in light of deconstructionist theory. Although the poetry does recognize the difficulty of speaking about spiritual experience, it does not embrace the resulting linguistic miscommunication. In fact, the poems resist such a move, identifying the spiritual danger of such miscommunication; instead, they seek to overcome these difficulties and accurately communicate spiritual experience – an aim achieved in the context of biblical prophecy. Louis Martz argues that the Quartets are, in fact, not prophetic; however, he defines prophecy in terms of its social interests, rather than in terms of the interest in the human-divine relationship that characterizes both biblical tradition and Eliot’s poetry. I want to argue that reading the Quartets in the context of biblical prophecy, filtered through mystical tradition, explains their ability to transcend linguistic difficulty and explore spiritual experience in human language.
In biblical tradition, the prophets overcome linguistic difficulty through a direct encounter with God, which purifies language of error and equips them to speak of divine reality. In Eliot’s Quartets, the poetry undergoes a similar purifying experience meant to replace linguistic error with a meaningful exploration of spiritual experience. For the Quartets, linguistic purification is accomplished by means of the mystical via negativa. Appropriating images associated with the via negativa, the poetry denies language tied to direct perception of spiritual reality and adopts instead a language that conveys such experience through unfamiliar words and images. In that language, the poetry is purified of its errors and made capable of exploring the human relationship with God. A poetry identified with the Incarnation, this solution communicates in human language the reality of spiritual experience. In this communication, the poetry at last explores spiritual experience in a way freed of miscommunication and meaningful for the audience, thereby fulfilling its prophetic aims.
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VanMeter, Bryan A. "The Color of Invisibility." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2019. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2650.
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This thesis is an analysis of Ralph Ellison’s use of color terminology in his novel, Invisible Man. By taking an in depth look at the circumstances in which Ellison uses specific color terms, the reader can ascertain the author’s thoughts on various historical events, as well as the differences between characters in the novel such as Ras, Dr. Bledsoe, and Rinehart.
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McIntyre-McCullough, Keisha Simone. "Teachers’ Experiences in and Perceptions of their12th-Grade British Literature Classrooms." FIU Digital Commons, 2013. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1012.
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The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences and perceptions of 12th-grade literature teachers about curriculum, Post-Colonial literature, and students. Theories posed by Piaget (1995), Vygotsky (1995), and Rosenblatt (1995) formed the framework for this micro-ethnographic study. Seven teachers from public and private schools in South Florida participated in this two-phase study; three teachers in Phase I and four in Phase II. All participants completed individual semi-structured interviews and demographic surveys. In addition, four of the teachers were observed teaching.
The analysis yielded three themes and two sub-themes: (a) knowledge concerned teachers’ knowledge of British literature content and Post-Colonial authors and their literature; (b) freedom described teachers’ freedom to choose how to teach their content. Included in this theme was dilemmas associated with 12th-grade classrooms which described issues that were pertinent to the 12th-grade teacher and classroom that were revealed by the study; and (c) thoughts about students described teachers’ perceptions about students and how literature might affect the students. Two subthemes of knowledge were as follows:(1) text complexity described teacher responses to a Post-Colonial text’s complexity and (2) student desirability/teachability described teachers’ perception about how desirable Post-Colonial texts would be to students and whether teachers would be willing to teach these texts.
The researcher offers recommendations for understanding factors associated with 12th-grade teachers perceptions and implications for enhancing the 12th-grade experience for teachers and curriculum, based on this study: (a) build teacher morale and capacity, (b) treat all students as integral components of the teaching and learning process; teachers in this study thought teaching disenfranchised learners was a form of punishment meted out by the administration, and (c) include more Post-Colonial authors in school curricula in colleges and schools as most teachers in this study did not study this type of literature nor knew how to teach it.
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Van, Hart Rachel F. "The Editorial Double Vision of Maxwell Perkins: How the Editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe Plied His Craft." VCU Scholars Compass, 2015. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/3729.
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Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day activities, it is apparent that Perkins was guided by a unique editorial double vision—the propensity to appreciate the aesthetic experience while retaining the critical detachment necessary to appraise a literary work from a commercial standpoint—when solving the paradoxical dilemmas inherent in modern publishing.
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Mullen, Kristen. "A Cross-Generational Analysis of Spanish-to-English Lexico-Semantic Phenomena in Emerging Miami English." FIU Digital Commons, 2015. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1801.
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Sociolinguists have documented the substrate influence of various languages on the formation of dialects in numerous ethnic-regional setting throughout the United States. This literature shows that while phonological and grammatical influences from other languages may be instantiated as durable dialect features, lexical phenomena often fade over time as ethnolinguistic communities assimilate with contiguous dialect groups. In preliminary investigations of emerging Miami Latino English, we have observed that lexical forms based on Spanish lexical forms are not only ubiquitous among the speech of the first generation Cuban Americans but also of the second. Examples, observed in field work, casual observation, and studied formally in an experimental context include the following: “get down from the car,” which derives from the Spanish equivalent, bajar del carro instead of “get out of the car”. The translation task administered to thirty-one participants showed a variety lexical phenomena are still maintained at equal or higher frequencies.
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Sy, Madeline. "A Riddle in Nine Syllables: The Maternal Body in Sylvia Plath's Maternity Poems." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2018. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1103.
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This thesis endeavors to intervene in the manner Plath’s maternity poems have been discussed by examining the psychological negotiations of identity that occurred while the speaker’s in Plath’s poems are pregnant with child. The method of this thesis is also a departure from the historicized criticism and interpretations of Plath’s poems that often conflate the experience of the speaker with the details of Plath’s life. This analysis will focus on the poems “Metaphors,” “You’re” and “Nick and the Candlestick” which feature subtle imagery that not only illustrate the speaker’s preoccupation with her own pregnancy but also constructs a metaphorical representation of the maternal body as the locus for the mother’s negotiation of identity. The different forms that the maternal body is represented through, from inanimate objects to a cavernous opening, allow the speaker to fully explore a broad gamut of emotions related to motherhood. The enlargement and reduction of the maternal body, the use of relational language and local instances of transformation are all motifs and conventions that the speakers in Plath’s poems use to navigate the shifting terrain of individual identity during and after maternity. In examining the more abstract poems related to maternity that depict the maternal body through metaphor, this article endeavors to explore the disparate sensations and experiences conveyed in Plath’s poetry.
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Kottage, Robert A. "“Between the Dream and Reality”: Divination in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2013. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2310.
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Divination is a trope Cormac McCarthy employs time and again in his work. Augury, haruspicy, cartomancy, voodoo, sortition and oneiromancy all take their places in the texts, overtly or otherwise, as well as divination by bloodshed (a practice so ubiquitous as to have no formal name). But mantic practices which aim at an understanding of the divine mind prove problematic in a universe that often appears godless—or worse.
My thesis uses divination as the starting point for a close reading of each of McCarthy’s novels. Research into Babylonian, Greek, Roman and African soothsaying practices is included, as well as the insights of a number of McCarthy scholars. But the work of extra-‐literary scholars—philologists, Jungian psychologists, cultural anthropologists and religious historians whose works explore the origins of human violence and the spiritual impulse—is also invoked to shed light on McCarthy’s evolving perspective.
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Nicholson, Bob. "Looming large : America and the late-Victorian press, 1865-1902." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2012. http://repository.edgehill.ac.uk/4164/.
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Widespread popular fascination with America, and an appreciation of American culture, was not introduced by Hollywood cinema during the early decades of the 20th century, but emerged during the late-Victorian period and was driven by the popular press. By the 1880s, newspaper audiences throughout the country were consuming fragments of American life and culture on an almost daily basis. Under the impulses of the so-called ‘new journalism’, representations of America appeared regularly within an eclectic range of journalistic genres, including serialised fiction, news reports, editorials, humour columns, tit-bits, and travelogues. Forms of American popular culture – such as newspaper gags – circulated throughout Britain and enjoyed a sustained presence in bestselling papers. These imported texts also acted as vessels for the importation of other elements of American culture such as the country’s distinctive slang and dialects. This thesis argues that the late-Victorian popular press acted as the first major ‘contact zone’ between America and the British public. Chapter One tracks the growing presence of America in the Victorian press. In particular, it highlights how the expansion of the popular press, the widespread adoption of ‘scissors-and-paste’ journalism, the development of transatlantic communications networks and technologies, and a growing curiosity about life in America combined to facilitate new forms of Anglo-American cultural exchange. Chapter Two explores how the press shaped British encounters with American modernity and created a pervasive sense of a coming ‘American future’. Chapter Three focuses on the importation, circulation, and reception of American newspaper humour. Finally, Chapter Four unpacks the role played by the press in the importation, circulation, and assimilation of American slang. It makes an original contribution to a number of academic disciplines and debates. Firstly, it challenges the established chronology of Anglo-American history; America gained a significant foothold in British popular culture long before the twentieth century. Moreover, this was not a result of a forcible American ‘invasion’ but a form of voluntary transatlantic exchange driven by the tastes and desires of British newspaper readers. Secondly, it argues that America’s presence in late-Victorian popular culture has been underestimated by historians who have focused instead on domestically produced culture, engagements with Western Europe, and the cultural dimensions of Empire. Whilst the full extent of America’s significance cannot be mapped out in one study, this thesis establishes the extent of America’s cultural presence and makes the case for its insertion into future Victorian Studies scholarship. Thirdly, this thesis contributes to the growing field of press history. It maps out connections between British and American newspapers, exploring how the press served to move information between the old world and the new. Finally, this project acts as an early example of born-digital scholarship; a study conceived in response to the development of digital archives. As such, it contributes to discussions on digital methodologies and debates within the field of Digital Humanities. In particular, it demonstrates that digitisation allows researchers to research and write do new kinds of history; to ask new questions, make new connections, and develop new projects – to do things that we couldn’t do before.
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Zheng, Baoxuan, and 鄭寶璇. "The theme of alienation in modern Chinese and Anglo-American fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1985. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31206803.
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Ramos, Sefferino. "Silence, Power, and Mexicans in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2016. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/280.
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In The Song of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather does something extraordinary by presenting a well-rounded and likeable Mexican character. This is quite different from her contemporaries’ stereotypical depictions of minorities. To include immigrants in a modern novel was avant-garde and radical subject matter; and presenting a realistic, likeable Mexican character was unheard of because the colonized and immigrants were largely ignored in American literature, or deliberately overlooked. When they were included, persistent demeaning views and unflattering Mexican stereotypes were the norm. This paper seeks to explain how positively Cather depicts Mexican characters, decades before Civil Rights. Cather includes the plight of Mexicans in her novel and gives voice to those that were silenced and ignored. Even though she was a bestselling author and considered one of the best American writers of the era, she has not been properly credited for how progressive she was in her treatment of minorities. It is well documented that Cather used juxtaposition and absences in her writing to convey meaning; I build on these absences to add in rhetorical silence and connect her use of silence to the academic conversation about speech in post-colonial analyses. By contextualizing her writings within the period, I demonstrate how progressive her novels are. Even though most depictions of minorities at the turn of the century were stereotypical, Cather diverges from the racism, which makes her decades ahead of her contemporaries in including good immigrants and minorities in American literature.
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Strmel, Melody. "Magical Me: Self-Insertion Fanfiction as Literary Critique." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/486.
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This thesis examines the traditions of textual interaction that impact the forms of reading engaged in with fanfiction. This thesis continues by exploring how self-insertion fanfiction functions as a medium through which authors express their reading of the text primary through the emotional impact of the text through wish fulfillment, and the interaction of their cultural moment and the text. Furthermore, it argues that self-insertion fanfiction is a mode of literary critique in which the author acknowledges the effect of a mediated world on their perception of self and reality. Through this recognition of a constructed self, the author rejects the attractiveness of objective analysis, allowing them to critique the work from their subject position influenced by the text.
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Stubbs, Tara M. C. "'Irish by descent' : Marianne Moore, Irish writers and the American-Irish Inheritance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bf87b5ea-4baa-4a46-9509-2c59e738e2a1.
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Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.
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Davidson, Ryan J. "Affinities of influence : exploring the relationship between Walt Whitman and William Blake." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5590/.
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This project explores the nature and extent of the relationship between Blake and Whitman. I examine their works to find affinities in tone, style and themes and seek to understand the origin of these affinities. The resultant discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that, because of Whitman’s lack of exposure to Blake’s work, these affinities must be accounted for through a coterie of indirect influences on Whitman. Over the course of the introductory chapter, I establish the critical proclivity of connecting William Blake and Walt Whitman, providing examples of such critical interpretation; in addition, I provide an introduction to the key figures, terms, and works with which this thesis engages. The work of the second chapter of this project is to uncover in Whitman’s work, before he could have read Blake, those elements that are read as points of contact between them. Through close readings, I show that those aspects of Whitman’s work which are read as points of contact between Blake and Whitman predate Whitman’s exposure to Blake’s work, and so necessitate an engagement with influences shared by Blake and Whitman. The third chapter articulates the notion that a variety of influences affected Whitman’s composition of Leaves of Grass, and these various influences serve as an explanation for those apparent similarities between Blake and Whitman discussed in chapter two. The final element this chapter engages with is that of nineteenth-century periodical culture; this aspect of the influences articulated in this chapter provides a secondary explanation for the similarities discussed in the second chapter. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the 1860 and 1867 iterations of Leaves of Grass and the 1867 and 1871–72 versions of Leaves of Grass, respectively, both with special emphasis on the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” The changes seen throughout these iterations will be used to understand Whitman’s evolving prosody as well as his changing public persona. These chapters also engage with the work of Swinburne, in chapter five, and of Gilchrist, in chapter four, as integral elements of this mediated influence of Blake on Whitman. In the final chapter of this work, I summarize my findings, suggest possible avenues for further inquiry, and discuss the implications of this research. There is a trend in Anglo-American literary criticism to see the relationship between America and England as adversarial rather than generative. The concluding chapter of this work will explore the idea of the Anglo-American literary tradition as a continuum—a complex of acceptance, extension, transformation, and refusal—and place the relationship of Whitman to Blake accurately on this continuum.
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Kim, Christine. "Munui (문의): Modern Adaptations of Korean Folk and Fairy Tales". Scholarship @ Claremont, 2018. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1911.
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Evans, David B. "Scepticism at sea : Herman Melville and philosophical doubt." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a842c507-0efc-4b73-9aaa-ccc36f54a7a5.
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This thesis explores Herman Melville’s relationship to sceptical philosophy. By reading Melville’s fictions of the 1840s and 1850s alongside the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I seek to show that they manifest by turns expression, rebuttal, and mitigated acceptance of philosophical doubt. Melville was an attentive reader of philosophical texts, and he refers specifically to concepts such as Berkeleyan immaterialism and the Kantian “noumenon”. But Melville does not simply dramatise pre-existing theories; rather, in works such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he enacts sceptical and anti-sceptical ideas through his literary strategies, demonstrating their relevance in particular regions of human experience. In so doing he makes a substantive contribution to a philosophical discourse that has often been criticised – by commentators including Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift – for its tendency to abstraction. Melville’s interest in scepticism might be read as part of a wider cultural response to a period of unprecedented social and political change in antebellum America, and with this in mind I compare and contrast his work with that of Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau. But in many respects Melville’s distinctive and original treatment of scepticism sets him apart from his contemporaries, and in order to fully make sense of it one must range more widely through the canons of philosophy and literature. His exploration of the ethical consequences of doubt in The Piazza Tales, for example, can be seen to anticipate with remarkable precision the theories of twentieth-century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. I work chronologically though selected prose from the period 1849-1857, paying close attention to the textual effects and philosophical allusions in each work. In so doing I hope to offer fresh ways of looking at Melville’s handling of literary form and the wider shape of his career. I conclude with reflections on how Melville’s normative emphasis on the acknowledgement of epistemological limitation might inform the practice of literary criticism.
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Basso, Ann McCauley. "Bel-Imperia: The (Early) Modern Woman in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy." Scholar Commons, 2006. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3776.
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At the heart of Thomas Kyd's revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy lies an arranged marriage around which all of the other action revolves. Bel-Imperia of Spain has been betrothed against her will to Prince Balthazar of Portugal, but she is no ordinary woman, and she has plans of her own. Bel-Imperia's unwillingness to participate in the arranged marriage is indicative of the rise of the companionate marriage; it represents a rejection of the arranged marriage that dominated upper class society in earlier years.
This study seeks to throw light upon early modern attitudes towards marriage, focusing particularly on the arranged marriage, the companionate marriage, and the state marriage. Additionally, it examines the role of woman as peace-weaver, a practice that dates back as far as the Beowulf manuscript. Using historical as well as literary sources to delineate these forms, I apply this information to a study of the play itself, with an emphasis on its performative value. Since the proposed marriage dictates all of the action of the play, an analysis of the bartered bride, Bel-Imperia, is of particular importance. This essay examines her character in depth as well as her relationships with Andrea and Horatio, who love her; with Lorenzo, the King, and her father, who seek to exploit her; and with Hieronimo, who becomes her partner in revenge. Additionally, I contrast her with Isabella, one of only two other female characters in the play and conclude by delineating how my analysis would affect a performance of the play and by "directing" a hypothetical interpretation of The Spanish Tragedy.
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Reuter, Victoria. "Penelope differently : feminist re-visions of myth." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4f1ffe10-d690-441d-8726-7fe1df896cb4.
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This thesis examines feminist rewritings of the Penelope myth and the intersections between poetry, myth, and feminist theory. The theoretical framework develops from Rosi Braidotti’s theory of memory and subjectivity which has its roots in the work of Michel Foucault. In Braidotti’s understanding, subjectivity is constructed through narratives of the past including myth. In order to support new, minority, and dissident subjectivities, a re-remembering of mythical narratives needs to happen. This process is linked to Judith Butler’s recent work on narrating the self and to Adrienne Rich’s idea of “Re-vision”. What Butler’s theory adds to Braidotti’s is the notion of dispossession: that as subjects we do not own our identities. We are, instead, dependent on others for recognition. This co-dependence based notion of subjectivity has ethical implications for how we interact with one another and what kind of narratives we iterate and reiterate. The writers discussed in this thesis, namely, Francisca Aguirre, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Gail Holst-Warhaft, and Margaret Atwood, not only rewrite Penelope, but perform Re-visions of the myth. They look back at it with a critical eye and remake it. This thesis further contends that Re-vision provides contemporary feminist writers with a reading and writing strategy that allows them to engage with myth in a way that parallels feminist theory’s efforts to construct new forms of subjectivity. Chapter 1 frames feminist appropriations of myth in a contemporary context and discusses Adrienne Rich’s theory of Re- vision. The next four chapters focus on specific writers who carry out a sustained dialogue with Penelope; they each take an element of the myth and tease it out towards a modern relevance. In looking at how Penelope is revised, this thesis demonstrates that women writers are engaged in a process of remaking canonical, mythic texts in such a way that speaks to contemporary issues of ethical subjectivity and self-making.
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Delgado, López David. "POÉTICAS MINIMALISTAS DE LA CIUDAD CONTEMPORÁNEA: IRIBARREN, MÍNGUEZ Y DEL VAL." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/hisp_etds/39.
Full textAbstract:
Throughout the Spanish poetic production of the 20th century, cities have developed a relevant role as a recurring space at the same time as society urbanized and an exodus took place from agricultural areas to the work centers offered by the cities. Since the second half of the 19th century the city has been the meeting place for people from different backgrounds where the poet found, from his exclusive point of view, a new universe to develop in his work. However, the evolution of capitalist society sponsored the poet's transition from an artist to a worker in the service sector, now able to describe the everyday life through that "other voice" that Octavio Paz so well exhibited in his work (Paz 1990). This way, I argue that with the passage of time and the disappearance of the romanticized figure of the poet, writers who describe the daily commute of the inhabitants of the cities emerged among the working classes through a simple style that has come to be related with other transcultural artistic movements such as Minimalism or Dirty Realism.
My dissertation studies the representation of the urban working class in three contemporary Spanish poets: Karmelo C. Iribarren, Itziar Mínguez Arnáiz, and Fernando del Val. I analyze their shared poetics of the city with a focus on the omnipresent common objects that seem to represent the urban everyday life. In Chapter One, I develop a conceptual “trialectic” lens through which to approach all three poets based on the convergence of urban studies, the analysis of poetic form in relation to the artistic current of Minimalism, and the imprint that U.S. author Raymond Carver-as both literary persona and style-left on Spain since his publication in translation in the late 1980s. In Chapter Two, I analyze how the processes of gentrification and privatization of public spaces reflect an experience of suffering by the working class in Iribarren's poetry. In Chapter Three, I study gender-space relations as I analyze what it means for working class women to walk the city and occupy public spaces traditionally reserved for men in Mínguez Arnáiz’ poetry. In Chapter Four, I follow Spanish expatriates across the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to explore resistance movements against spatial exploitation that force working classes into geographical oblivion in Del Val's “New York trilogy.”
To carry out this project, I propose to analyze the works of these three authors emphasizing not only the common characteristics that each one of them presents but also those that make them unique. With this, I intend to find out the paths Spanish poetry is taking and how this realist-style poetry differs from the realistic trends of "the poetry of experience" and the "dirty realism" so popular in the 80s and 90s. I argue that with the entry of the new millennium and especially with the extensive implementation of neoliberal policies that led to the economic crisis of 2008, there is a boom in the poetry of resistance that seeks to prove that an egalitarian right to the city is more urgent than ever.
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McCrotty, Micah. "North of Ourselves: Identity and Place in Jim Wayne Miller’s Poetry." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2019. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3581.
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Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, Miller argues that an essential piece of people’s identity is linked with the land, and, through recognition of the importance of topography on the development of the self, individuals can foster a deeper sense of community through appreciation of their place.