Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 314-331). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Janet Gabler-Hover, committee chair; Robert Sattelmeyer, Calvin Thomas, committee members. Electronic text (205 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Sept. 18, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 192-205).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2001. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 314-331).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1994. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [498]-510).

No description available.

<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.

<p> I present a study of the female protagonists of <i>The Wide, Wide World; Little Women;</i> and <i>Anne of Green Gables </i> in terms of reading and play. I posit that the lives of the girls depend on what and how they read, and insight to their reading can be gained by examining when their play interacts with their books. I also employ the use of mise en abyme to understand the overall purpose of their reading (and playing) and the contribution these characters make to the lives of their own potential readers.</p>

In this dissertation that discusses the American novels by William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright, I delineate the concept of modernist empathy as a radical urge for intersubjective immediacy, while adjusting the concept of empathy as each situation requires instead of squeezing various manifestations of empathy into a single, standardized definition. I observe how those writers struggle to represent modernist empathy by differentiating it from its similar psychological phenomena, especially sympathy. Instead of establishing empathy’s predominance over sympathy, however, I pay detailed attention to the constantly oscillating dynamic between a modernist urge for empathic immediacy and a realistic compromise of sympathetic distancing, thus revealing empathy’s instability and ambiguity. After briefly overviewing Amy Coplan’s conceptualization of empathy and sketching three categories of narrative empathy in the introduction, I have explained the concept of modernist empathy in the first chapter. In doing so, I first examine the discourse that surrounded the concept of empathy at the time, contrasting modernist empathy with its sisterly concept of sympathy. Then, since empathy and sympathy do not always form a clear dichotomy, I have argued that modernist empathy should be captured in the process of the oscillating dynamic between modernist urge for empathy and sympathetic compromise of distancing. In the second chapter, I have discussed how modernist empathy is manifested in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury according to the three categories of narrative empathy. First, I have analyzed the novel’s experimental narrative in terms of readerly empathy. Then, I have discussed the novel’s empathic and anti-empathic characters as manifestations of represented empathy. Finally, I have examined Faulkner’s writerly empathy, and I have observed how he embraces the ultimate instability of modernist empathy. In the third chapter, by considering Nathanael West as a late modernist, I have argued that his novels are critiques of modernist empathy. In the analysis of his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, I have revealed West’s dichotomy between intellectual distancing and emotional involvement. Then, I have attempted to depict how West dramatizes his protagonists’ failures of empathy in Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. In the process, I critique Martha Nussbaum’s theory of compassion in relation to empathy. I also consider the relationship of empathy to the advent of the anonymous mass in the 1930s and observed West’s critique of empathy at the age of mass culture. The focus of the final chapter is about the writerly design of the strategic use of empathy in Richard Wright’s Native Son. After reviewing the past literary criticism of the novel’s empathy, I have discussed how the novel is strategized to establish an intimate readerly empathy with Bigger Thomas. At the end of the argument, I examine the author’s strategic design of empathy and its relation to racial politics. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2017. / November 6, 2017. / american literature, empathy, modernism / Includes bibliographical references. / Ralph M. Berry, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; John Mac Kilgore, Committee Member.

<p> Wanderers in the spaces of their memories and the streets of their would-be homes, generations of suffering immigrants are traced back to the past, propelled by the crescendo of melancholic stillness that moves displaced bodies through states of in-betweenness that both dispels and teeters on the far side of either assimilation or exclusion. Many transnational narratives situate the immigrant at a crossroads in terms of a loss of the &lsquo;original&rsquo; culture in exchange for the new &lsquo;American&rsquo; culture, where national diversities are confined to a singular framework and rhetoric of displacement, overruled by the myth of successful assimilation, whereby the hardships of adjusting to foreign spaces are &lsquo;normalized&rsquo; and reduced to a series of trials. This portrayal, in turn, does not leave any room for the rhetoric of pain, or what I label as the &lsquo;migrant&rsquo;s mourning&rsquo;, where the immigrant&rsquo;s suffering is suppressed and eclipsed by a collective history of racial abjection. Insights into the psyche of the immigrant serve to map the hedge between the past and the present and absolute versus relative spaces. Applying psychoanalytical and postcolonial frameworks to literary analysis, this dissertation explores some of the prominent transnational narratives to establish that the melancholic dynamics of space, memory, and language can subvert misrepresentations and grant the immigrant mobility within the confines of homogenized spaces. It seeks to explore the ways in which the transnational American narrative employs melancholic tenor as aesthetics to empower displaced figures. Situating its protagonists at the locus of nations, these narratives underscore melancholia, mourning, and memory as tools and protocols of agency that challenge the myth of assimilation and re-think the rhetoric of displacement.</p><p>