This research examines the literary and philosophical dimensions of the African American Harlem Renaissance, beginning with the historical milieu of the early twentieth century. A social movement that became known as Uplift and the so-called Cabaret Movement emerged as important, competing literary and social ideologies within the Renaissance. W.E.B. Du...
The century since James Joyce published Ulysses has been an era of incredible social reconfiguration, particularly for women’s roles and rights, which Joyce foreshadowed in his major works. The developments and divisions of feminist theory ultimately return to Joyce as an author who attempted an early example of what might...
The century since James Joyce published Ulysses has been an era of incredible social reconfiguration, particularly for women’s roles and rights, which Joyce foreshadowed in his major works. The developments and divisions of feminist theory ultimately return to Joyce as an author who attempted an early example of what might...
This thesis examines the characterization of the femme fatale and the implications of this trope for late-Victorian gender and sexuality in the ghost stories of female aesthete Vernon Lee. In her treatment of the femme fatale figure, Lee both reinforces and complicates the image of the sexualized, often bestialized woman...
This thesis will compare former OSU Professor Bernard Malamud’s life in Corvallis through primary sources and documents with his parallel experience in his 1961 novel A New Life. A close examination of Malamud’s literature and investigation of his life at OSU exposes an uneven balance between academic censorship and the...
This thesis examines the discursive seeds of the European endeavor to supremacy and dominance by tracing the germination of Eurocentrism and European exceptionalism in two different eras. Through close attention to textuality, I suggest a rhetorical continuity between the medieval and the early modern eras by focusing not directly on...
This thesis examines the postmodern confrontation of representation throughout the oeuvre of Martin McDonagh. I particularly look to his later body of work, which directly and self-reflexively confronts issues of artistic representation & masculinity, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of his earliest and most controversial plays. In...
In Heart of Darkness and The Good Soldier, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford employ the narrative subjectivity inherent in their Impressionist technique to provide insight into the often-irrational processes through which political and individual identities are constructed through narrative. Contrary to traditional readings of Impressionism as a strictly aesthetic...
In his works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses
(1922), James Joyce demonstrates what he perceives to be the paralyzing effects of
those institutionalized religions that sit at the center of cultures. Drawing on Michel
Foucault's analysis of institutional dressage as well as his...
Traditional interpretations of James Joyce's Dubliners have often focused on the pervasive "paralysis" of the city, covered in the stories' range of "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life." However, these approaches have limited their focus on the women in the stories, often spotlighting the male characters--and the author--through a Freudian...