The purpose of this study is to explore the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in five fictional narratives published between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century: Charles W. Chesnutt's "Hot-Foot Hannibal," Zora Neale Hurston's their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Cade Bambara's "My Man Bovanne," and John Edgar Wideman's "Doc's Story.".;Using Walter Ong's suggestion that the relationship between storyteller and inside-the-text listener mirrors the hoped-for relationship between writer and readership, this study examines the way these writers grappled with these factors as they generated their texts.;By paying attention to the teller/listener-writer/readership relationship, this study examines the process whereby the narrative "frame" that historically "contained" and "mediated" the black spoken voice (either through a listener/narrator or a third-person narrator) modulated and developed throughout the century, as the frame opens and closes.;The results of this study suggest that what Robert Stepto calls the African-American "discourse of distrust" was a factor from the earliest fictions and is still very much a factor today.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation seeks to expand our conception of what constitutes Native American letters by examining how the periodical became a prominent form in Native American literary production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its focus on the boarding school, Writing against Erasure provides insight into the context in which students first learned how to make complex and sophisticated choices in print. Within the contested disciplinary space of the boarding school, the periodical press functioned as a site for competing discourses on assimilation. Whereas school authorities used the white-run school newspapers to publicize their programs of cultural erasure, students used the student-run school newspapers to defend and preserve Native American identity and culture in the face of the assimilationist imperatives of the boarding schools and the dominant culture. Writing against Erasure highlights the formative impact of students' experiences with the boarding school press on the periodical practices and rhetorical strategies of two well-known Native American literary figures, Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman. By treating the periodical writings of these two prominent boarding school graduates alongside the periodical writings produced by boarding school students while they were still at school, Writing against Erasure provides a literary genealogy that reveals important continuities between these writers' strategic and political uses of the periodical press. Writing against Erasure argues that Native American boarding school students and graduates used the periodical press not to promote the interests of school authorities as some scholars have argued, but rather to preserve their cultural traditions, to speak out on behalf of indigenous interests, and to form a pan-Indian community at the turn of the twentieth century. / English

<p> The Western has been an important and iconic part of American culture since the opening of the frontier. However, very few scholars have looked closely at the way the genre constructs the past through public and private spaces like frontier towns and settlements.</p><p> The 1971 films, <i>The Hired Hand</i> and <i>McCabe &amp; Mrs. Miller</i> are two texts that revitalized, and in the process revised, the Western genre in the early 1970s. My paper examines the ways in which conflicts between public and private spaces in the films reflect the social and cultural conflicts in America at the time. Both films feature lead male characters that strive to, but ultimately fail to resurrect an older idea of public space as they attempt to reclaim their place in it. The men attempt to navigate changing ideas of public space by retreating in to domestic or feminine space and resisting the corporatization of public space.</p><p> This paper uses the works of Nancy Fraser and Richard Sennett to explore the different approaches to the nature of public space in post World War II America and sheds new light on the ways in which men adapted or, in some cases, refused to adapt to the changing social conditions of the second half of the 20^th century.</p>

<p> The subject of an American national identity has been a source of debate for centuries. Some argue it had naturally evolved by the time of the American Revolution while others argue there was no cohesive &ldquo;American&rdquo; people at the time of the war. By looking at the ways in which the American colonists interpreted the presence of the Hessian soldiers contracted by the British government during the struggle, this conversation can be continued in a new and unique way. The Hessians themselves have often been ignored by the historical record, though studying these men reveals that at the time of the American Revolution, the colonists remained divided and were rather a collection of different peoples. </p><p> I approach this study by looking primarily at the wartime press of New York and Pennsylvania, put in context with the events of the Revolution, along with some of the early American historians (Mercy Otis Warren, David Ramsay, John Marshall, and Washington Irving) writing in the decades following the Treaty of Paris. Differences and similarities in the ways they discussed the Hessian involvement during the American Revolution reveal a lack of cohesive identity during and in the decades following the war.</p>

My thesis focuses on the work of two American poets, John Ashbery and Robert Lowell. I argue that both construct a personality in their work. Lowell's construct is more obviously related to his own personality than Ashbery's is; this is perhaps unsurprising, since writing his autobiography became Lowell's primary poetic practice from Life Studies onwards. Yet despite Ashbery's well-known claim that writing about the particularities of his life does not interest him or other readers, I demonstrate that the personality in his poetry adopts attitudes which are similar to his own. I explore Lowell's admission in his later poetry that writing the self involves a fictionalisation of the self that lives and acts in the real world. In these poems, he is more keen to acknowledge the failure of his autobiographical project than to emphasise the details of his daily existence. Ashbery, too, takes the view that any representation of self distorts the truth of our everyday life, but unlike Lowell, shows no angst about this in his p~etry. I argue that, despite his cheerful acceptance of art's inability to capture the self, he nonetheless endeavours to preserve a sense of self in the work. My thesis demonstrates that he does not merely mimic the general movement of consciousness at the expense of portraying the attitudes and idiosyncrasies of a distinctive personality. At times this personality bears no discernible relation to the poet's own, but consistently Ashbery presents his idea of self as a personality, just as Lowell does in his work. We are struck by the whimsical humour of Ashbery's engaging 'character', just as we sympathise with his anxieties, fears and loneliness. In chapter one I explore Lowell and Ashbery's belief that the self is simultaneously defined and fictionalised by language. Chapter two moves on to discuss the self against its society: what relationship does the textual self have with its surroundings, and how does this relationship reflect the poets' view of their own position within society? In chapter three I argue that Lowell weakens the force of his confessions by encouraging the reader to rewrite his text. Yet Ashbery, in keeping the reader on the edge of surprise, allows a mischievous personality to reveal itself. The final chapter deals with the subject of time. Lowell's autobiographical project is hindered by his inability to revivify the past in his poems, yet the sense of personality in Ashbery's work is made more acute by the appearance of an inquisitive individual who forever needs to encounter new experiences as a stay against time's quick passing.

<p>Music has always been an essential part of the African American experience and takes center stage in Ralph Ellison?s Invisible Man. Musicality flows through every line of the novel and the impact the jazz aesthetic has on the text is undeniable. This project seeks to examine the various ways in which specific elements of the jazz aesthetic appear in the text and represent the emotional journey of the novel?s narrator. Focusing specifically on the techniques of vamping, call and response, and improvisation, this project will trace the ways in which these techniques assist the narrator in overcoming the trauma he has suffered as an African American man in a bigoted American society.

Philology, or the love of words, is a source of power in Emily Dickinson's poems. Noah Webster's dictionary was a storehouse of philological knowledge and thus a major source of linguistic power for Dickinson. Her poems show that philology is an effective way to compose and interpret texts, and that paying attention to words is a source of rhetorical power for readers and writers today. The first six chapters of the dissertation feature aspects of Dickinson's philology from the perspective of nineteenth-century rhetoric: Definition, Music, Cohesion, Dictionary Use, and Etymology. Chapter One tells the story of Emily's "Lexicon" and "Noah's Ark." Chapter Two discusses definition as a rhetorical strategy and presents a definition of terms. Chapter Three explores music as rhetorical power in the themes, prosody, and sound patterns, syntax, and lexis of Dickinson's poems. The cohesion of Dickinson's lexical choices is the focus of Chapter Four. Chapter Five focuses more intently the role of the Lexicon in Dickinson's composing processes. The role of etymology in Webster's lexicography and in Dickinson's poetry is the subject of Chapter Six. Chapter Seven uses A. L. Becker's definitions of a new philology to discuss the function of philology in contemporary English studies.