Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity shaped our current understandings of queer theory not only in the academic world, but all over America as the constitutional and social rights of the LGBT+ community are hotly debated. Butler’s theory claims that gender is performed through imitation...
Jimmy Corrigan is a work steeped in what it means to live in the United States as a capitalist nation. Within the novel, the United States presents itself as a grand world power through events such as the Chicago World Exposition. In direct contrast, individuals in the work are anything...
While metaphysical turmoil is the essential human problem in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Preludes,” traditional criticism of the poems relegates the physical world to a merely rhetorical role. This thesis argues that Eliot’s use of objects in his poetry suggests they...
My thesis examines how the American identity is constructed through thinking shaped by deception and domination, as James Baldwin argues in the corpus of his work. I rely on the work of Eddie Glaude Jr., Sean Kim Butorac, and Joel Schlosser to forward love in Baldwin’s political vision as being...
The question of deep time has been widely debated in the field of American Literature, with scholar Wai Chee Dimock arguing that a deep time perspective puts the chronology of different nations against one another. However, this argument has not adequately addressed the issue of how deep time theories would...
Over the past fourteen years since the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Americans of varied political persuasions have continually identified the day as a defining moment in the history of the nation, which caused a rupture in the cultural rhythm and psyche. This sensibility is...
For centuries, continental philosophy has clung to the belief that the world only meaningfully exists through human perception--that, in other words, when a tree falls in the forest, it does not make a sound. Literary theory, which has strong roots in continental philosophy, followed suit, remaining tied to humanism even...
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Raymond J. Malewitz
For centuries, continental philosophy has clung to the belief that the
Throughout the course of this thesis, I argue that the prose of David Foster Wallace, specifically his posthumously published novel The Pale King, inhabits a middle ground between universal sincerity and the particularized authenticity of postmodern irony. I examine Lionel Trilling's definitions of sincerity and authenticity before moving toward an...
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Raymond J. Malewitz
Throughout the course of this thesis, I argue that the prose of David