<p> This thesis examines the representation of domesticity in the psychological and physical lives of women in literature. The interpretive question of the argument asks, how does the haunting of domesticity affect and create meaning in the lives of female characters? Domesticity is an idea that has been used to as a means of submission by a domineering other. The idea of domesticity is a catalyst that is used to help Hulga Hopewell from Flannery O&rsquo;Connor&rsquo;s &ldquo;Good Country People&rdquo; and Eleanor Vance from Shirley Jackson&rsquo;s <i> The Haunting of Hill House</i> to break away from oppressive influences; by examining these feminist narratives we will see how two women attempt to survive the physical and mental hauntings of domesticity and its effects on their minds and bodies as they try to preserve the self. Hulga and Eleanor are women who are not following the expectations of family nor society, as they choose to take different paths in life, they face judgment and criticism for not following societal norms. These women will struggle against the domesticity that has been passed down for generations through their mothers. Hulga is forced to move back home, where she tries everything to avoid her mother&rsquo;s brand of domesticity, and Eleanor runs away trying to escape the bonds of domesticity. Both women come face to face with their deepest fears when they confront this haunting; and ultimately will be physically and mentally traumatized.</p><p>

This dissertation examines representations of undocumented aliens and explores the issue of illegality in contemporary American immigration fiction. It takes as a fundamental premise that in immigration, status matters. The importance of immigration status in the "real world" is evident not only in ongoing national debates but also in the daily experiences of immigrants, whose inclusion in or exclusion from America's social, economic and political spheres is largely dependent on their status as documented or undocumented persons. This dissertation proposes that status likewise matters in literary representations of immigration. As this project demonstrates, immigration narratives often rely on conventional structures, themes and tropes that privilege the legal immigrant subject. Indeed, the legality of protagonists is often taken for granted in many novels about immigration. Thus, by foregrounding fundamental questions concerning legal status in the study of immigration literature, this dissertation aims to show the ways in which status informs, influences and directly shapes immigration novels. While this project broadly proposes the concept of status as an analytical lens, I approach this literary inquiry primarily by critically examining the "illegal alien" as the subject of immigration novels. Focusing on three novels that feature an undocumented immigrant protagonist - Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, Gish Jen's Typical American, and Mario Bencastro's Odyssey to the North - this dissertation argues that, like its real-world counterpart who poses social, political and legal problems for the nation state, the figure of the illegal alien poses problems for the genre of immigration fiction, challenging its narrative conventions and calling into question the ideology of American exceptionalism that underpins it. By exploring the relationship between law and literature, this dissertation seeks to bring insight into the ways in which stories about immigration participate in the broader political discourse on U.S. immigration. On the one hand, it demonstrates how conventional immigration narratives perform cultural labor for the dominant legal regime by reaffirming normative modes of inclusion into the nation. On the other, it shows how literature, by wrestling with the question of illegality, can serve as means to critique the exclusionary practices of American law and society.

The history of personality in American literature has surprisingly little to do with the differentiating individuality we now tend to associate with the term. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture have defined personality either as the morally vacuous successor to the Protestant ideal of character or as the equivalent of mass-media celebrity. In both accounts, personality is deliberately constructed and displayed. However, hiding in American writings of the long modernist period (1880s-1940s) is a conception of personality as the innate capacity, possessed by few, to attract attention and elicit projection. Skeptical of the great American myth of self-making, such writers as Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes invented ways of representing individuals not by stable inner qualities but by their fascinating--and, often, gendered and racialized--blankness. For these writers, this sense of personality was not only an important theme and formal principle of their fiction and non-fiction writing; it was also a professional concern made especially salient by the rise of authorial celebrity. This dissertation both offers an alternative history of personality in American literature and culture and challenges the common critical assumption that modernist writers took the interior life to be their primary site of exploration and representation. Instead, it argues for a reassessment of American modernism as crucially concerned--in its literary texts and in its professional literary culture--with surface, blankness, and opacity, all barriers to seeing inside which nonetheless produce an impression of personal power.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.