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...
Traditional readings of George Bernard Shaw's texts suggest that he is not a pure
Marxist socialist because of the spiritual and nationalist aspects of his vision. This thesis
attempts to confront Shaw's politics in order to demonstrate that he indeed offers a viable
socialist program. Overlaying his socialism with Louis...
This thesis traces the relationship between the First World War, constructions of masculinity, and the life and poetry of T.S. Eliot. Central to this relationship is a study of homoeroticism, which the author characterizes as different from homosexuality but not exclusive of it, in late 19th and early 20th century...
The popularity and pervasiveness of eugenic discourse during the modernist period in England and Ireland raised many questions about race, class, and gender. While Hitler's Nazi "experiment" ultimately demonstrated the consequences of implementing eugenic ideas, forcing eugenicists to abandon, or at least mask, their theories, the eugenics movement before World...
This thesis uses both feminist and new historic theories to argue that the women's romance novels The Last September (1929) by Elizabeth Bowen and The Country Girl's Trilogy (1960, 1962, 1964) by Edna O'Brien are tragic bildungsroman that subvert and challenge the Irish patriarchal marriage expectations of their respective time...