The term pioneer simply means one who pushes ahead to remove obstacles and to prepare the way for others who are to follow. Nevertheless, when we speak of the pioneers in American history, we are really speaking of three different types of men who have only a little in common. All pioneers leave behind them settled communities and highly civilized life and push out into an unknown and. unsettled country;y. Also, all pioneers are seekers, but they do not all seek the same things, Some are seeking adventure. These are the explorers, the pioneers seized with the wanderlust, those who move on and on from one place to another, and, if they live long enough, finally come back; to their friends telling wonderful tales of what they have seen and done. The second group includes those who are seeking for gold, some literally and some figuratively. The miners, the trappers, the hunters might all be classed here. The third group includes those who seek an opportunity to build new homes. These are the pioneers whose work is permanent and most worthwhile. In this sense the Puritans and other early settlers were pioneers of the truest type. They were willing to leave home and friends in order to found a new and better home for themselves and their children. The explorer and gold seeker were necessary for the complete settlement of .the United States. but after all, it was the home seeker who finally conquered the forests and the plains. The home-seeker, to be a good pioneer, must have within him. however, the courage and impetuous desire of the explorer to push forward if he is to be successful. He must be willing to endure any number of hardships and even defeat if he is to carry out his purpose. It is this last type of pioneer whom the modern novelist has sought to portray and interpret, and in this discussion only those novels which deal with such pioneers will be discussed.

This study shows how the Grotesque Hero evolves from the grotesque victim in selected American novels from 1919 to 1972. In these novels, contradictory forces create a cultural dilemma. When a character is especially vulnerable to that dilemma, he becomes caught and twisted into a grotesque victim. The Grotesque Hero finds a solution to the dilemma, not by escaping his grotesque victimization, but by accepting it and making it work for him. The novels paired according to a particular contradictory dilemma include: Winesburg, Ohio and The Crying of Lot 49, As I Lay Dying and Wise Blood, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Dick Gibson Show, Cabot Wright Begins and Second Skin, The Day of the Locust and The Lime Twig, and Expensive People and The Sunlight Dialogues.

Although the term modernismo means many things to many people, it is generally agreed upon that as a literary period it gave a legitimacy to Spanish-American letters and that it was the coming of age of that continent's literature. In addition to modernista works themselves, this period has also generated an unprecedented body of criticism, both of which have been studied with a unique intensity in Latin American letters. However, in spite of this vast body of criticism, certain aspects of the modernista sensibility have never been addressed by critics. This study begins by questioning the absence of women writers of this generation (in spite of the fact that women were living and writing before, during, and after modernismo). The most celebrated female protagonist of the modernista novel, the femme fatale, contrary to her reputation as destroyer of men, frequently suffers a premature and often violent death at the hands of the male artist/protagonist/poet. While examining the turn-of-the-century ideal of womanhood, using both literary and extra-literary sources, this study postulates that because modernistas considered themselves to be a literary men's club, a fraternity, in their own words, the female writer may have purposely eschewed becoming a part of an aesthetic which destroyed women. Through the analysis of three representative modernista novels, El triunfo del ideal (Pedro César Domínici, Venezuela, 1901), Juana Lucero (Augusto d'Halmar, Chile, 1902), and La gloria de don Ramiro (Enrique Larreta, Argentina, 1908), parallels can be drawn between the modernista aesthetic and the pornographic one. While modernismo has been called the "effeminate" literature of a group of dandies, it is, in fact, profoundly misogynist. The rape, torture, murder and burning at the stake and otherwise objectification of the female protagonists tends to confirm this reading. The Latin American dichotomy of civilización/barbarie can also be expressed in the pornographic one of culture versus nature. Rather than a tragedy, the deaths of beautiful young women are perceived as a requisite for the artist's source of inspiration. If the death of a beautiful woman produces poetry, the turn-of-the-century female writer's reluctance to join this club becomes more understandable.

There remain two recurring criticisms of John Updike's fiction. The first comes from feminist critics who condemn his negative portrayal of women, accusing his fiction of denigrating women. The second comes from late twentieth century critics who accuse him of avoiding political and historical discussions in his fiction. However, it is my contention that Updike is willing to address both of these concerns, and I arrive at such an argument by carefully analyzing his collection of short stories compiled in Too Far To Go: The Maples Stories. Within these stories, Updike's female characters illustrate the shifting gender paradigms over the course of the fifties, sixties, and seventies amidst the middle-class, suburban American milieu. Updike's women act as agents of history providing testament to the shifting gender paradigms and historical, cultural, political, and social milestones of a maturing country and its growing pains. / by Cindy M. Rosen. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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My text formulates a theory of postmodern invisibility while examining the condition of cultural invisibility. As I track strategies of position and space in contemporary American literature and music, I propose a tactic for attaining cultural visibility that draws from Jean Baudrillard's notion of the-more-visible-than-the-visible, postmodern aesthetics and the cultural metaphor of the optics of the vision system.In our technoculture, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and his narrator's choice of an invisible identity, though wonderfully evocative, is no longer a viable solution to the dilemma of cultural invisibility. Later contemporary American fiction, especially Don DeLillo's White Noise, offers a strategy that oscillates between invisibility and visibility and is ineffective in curing cultural invisibility. My project centers on Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and her representation of a storytelling ceremony that can cure the problem of cultural invisibility. Silko proposes a narrative mode capable of representing and accomplishing cultural work by reversing the flow of culture. Nathaniel Mackey's jazz-inspired fiction, Dibot Baghostus's Run (1993), expands Silko's magical blueprint by employing a culturally dense, hyper-visible narrative mode.Like Silko and Mackey, cultural theorist Trinh Minh-ha, anthropologist Michael Taussig, and sociologist Stephen Pfohl employ the more-visible-than-the-visible composition strategy of collage. Their writings, as well as the aesthetic of hiphop, serve as a model for my text because in collage, there is room for disorientation, noise, local elements, plurality, recomposition, hyper-visibility, and the sampling of crosscultural artifacts and debris. Experiencing a montage can shock sensory perceptions into novel paradigms of representation and, as Silko and Mackey hope, bring about a meaningful cultural visibility.For Minh-ha, Silko, and Mackey, stories and other cultural artifacts circulate freely like gifts. The pleasure is in transmitting, circulating, and retransmitting the story: the pleasure of making the story more-than-visible. Then the story functions, as Minh-ha states, "as a cure and a protection [that] is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical." While my text strives to represent several of these elements, my theory of postmodern invisibility reflects and transmits a narrative mode that is capable of curing the problem of cultural invisibility. / Department of English

This thesis argues that Barthelme's major 1985 essay "Not-Knowing" contains within its title Barthelme's central artistic idea, and that not-knowing informs both the subject of his fiction and his philosophy of art. This study will be the first critical treatment of Barthelme that positions his work from beginning to end in terms of the dimensions of not-knowing that came out of his own reading in psychology, art theory, philosophy, religion, and education, offering coherent readings of content and suggesting the ways in which content relates to form. The Introduction explores the origins of Barthelme's ideas of not-knowing, paying special attention to the influence of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Beckett on Barthelme's first characterisations of not-knowing, creativity, and reception. The first chapter gives an in-depth reading of Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Barthelme's first collection of stories. Though Barthelme had not yet begun to formally theorise his ideas of not-knowing, they were already latent in Come Back, Dr. Caligari's characterisation of psychological experience, specifically in relation to anxiety, boredom, and interpretation. The second chapter looks at the ways in which Harold Rosenberg’s theories of the visual arts, and especially collage, which Barthelme encountered while co-editing Location magazine with Rosenberg in the early 1960s, address form and not-knowing, and how Barthelme treats these issues in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (1971), Sadness (1972), Guilty Pleasures (1974), and Amateurs (1976). The third chapter shows how Barthelme's university studies in 19th century philosophy, especially Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony (1841) and Kierkegaard's treatment of Schlegel in that treatise, inform his concern with irony, both in theory and practice, in City Life (1970), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Chapter Four argues that Kierkegaard's theories of education and religion in Either/Or (1843) and The Present Age (1846), as well as the contemporary incarnation of Dewey's ideas of progressive education, both had a profound influence on Barthelme's ideas about the way a society is educated into knowingness, the artist's aspiration toward not-knowing, and the validity of religion in the postmodern world. The conclusion to the thesis reexamines the Introduction's argument about literary influence through a brief reading of The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme is recognised as one of the most important American postmodernist writers, and yet there has been relatively little critical treatment of his oeuvre. The major books that address Barthelme's work, which include Jerome Klinkowitz's Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (1975) and Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition (1991), as well as Alan Wilde's Horizons of Assent (1981) and Stanley Trachtenberg's Understanding Donald Barthelme (1990), belong to a two-decade span of classifying writers such as Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth using a limited set of ideas about postmodernism that were interesting as theory at the time, but did little to explore the actual literary, philosophical, and aesthetic content and contexts of these writers' works (with the possible exception of Pynchon). This thesis aims to rescue Barthelme from now-hackneyed ways of talking about postmodernism, which include lumping various aesthetic techniques under the rubric of "metafiction," claiming that the era's sole interest is in surface at the expense of depth, and that the dependence upon clichés is a deliberate expression of artistic exhaustion.

American writers of narrative fiction frequently manipulate the words of their narrators in order to convey a significance of which the author and the reader are aware but the narrator is not. By causing the narrator to reveal information unwittingly, the author develops covert themes that are antithetical to those espoused by the narrator. Particularly subject to such subversion is the first-person narrator whose "I" is not to be interpreted as the voice of the author. This study examines how and why the first-person narrator is subverted in four works of twentieth-century American fiction: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to , and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus

This dissertation explores a history of the grotesque and its meaning in art and literature along with those of its related term, the arabesque, since their co-existence, specifically in literature, is later treated by a well-known nineteenth-century American writer in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Theories or views of the grotesque (used in literature), both in Europe and America, belong to twelve theorists of different eras, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present period, especially Modernism (approximately from 1910 to 1945)--Rabelais, Hegel, Scott, Wright, Hugo, Symonds, Ruskin, Santayana, Kayser, Bakhtin, (William Van) O'Connor, and Spiegel. My study examines the grotesque in American literature, as treated by both nineteenth-century writers--Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and, significantly, by modernist writers--Anderson, West, and Steinbeck in Northern (or non-Southern) literature; Faulkner, McCullers, and (Flannery) O'Connor in Southern literature. I survey several novels and short stories of these American writers for their grotesqueries in characterization and episodes. The grotesque, as treated by these earlier American writers is often despised, feared, or mistrusted by other characters, but is the opposite in modernist fiction.

Women characters in American literature of the nineteenth century form an overwhelmingly lovely group, but a search through some of the overlooked works reveals a thin but discernible thread of plain, even homely, heroines. Most of these fall into the stereotypical "old maid" category, and, like their real-life counterparts, these "undesirable" women are considered failures, even if they have money or satisfying careers, because they do not have boyfriends, husbands, or children. During the twentieth century, the old maid figure develops into someone not just homely, but downright ugly; in addition, the number of these characters increases, especially in the latter half of the century. In many works written since the 1960s, the woman's ugliness is such an intrinsic part of the story that it could not take place if she were beautiful. In subtle ways, these "ugly woman" stories begin to question the overwhelming value placed on beauty, to question the narrow definition of beauty in American society as a whole, and to suggest that the price for such a "blessing" might indeed be too high. Rather than settling for being a mere "heroine"—which still carries feminine connotations of passive behavior and second-class status—the ugly woman's increase in power over her own life and the lives of others, allows her to achieve a status more in keeping with the more "masculine" and active role of hero.