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Prose style criticism of literary nonfiction has faded from scholarly popularity since a boom in the 1980s. Recent literary criticism of nonfiction has focused on context while neglecting aesthetics, or left the work of style analysis to composition or rhetoric scholars. I examine the work of Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and two writers associated with the literary journal n+1, Keith Gessen and Elif Batuman, to demonstrate the way that prose style analysis is a meaningful critical approach that helps define changing nonfiction genres, including online genres. I read Didion's work across her oeuvre to demonstrate the way her prose style shifts subtly over time and between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and literary journalism. I trace the influence of David Foster Wallace's American postmodern forebears on his fictional and nonfictional prose styles, and follow that line of influence to the nonfiction writing of online genres. I conclude by discussing the way that young writers associated with the journal n+1 regard Wallace's influence on their work and the writing of their generation, and examine Gessen and Batuman's prose style on and offline to find the literary in some unlikely locations. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-11-30 22:27:36.61

This thesis investigates the "talk-story" narrative patterns, which stem from the Chinese oral tradition, in selected works of two contemporary Chinese American women writers, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston has experimented with a new kind of "talk-story" writing in blending family stories, cultural myths, fantasy, autobiographical details, and history, as she attempts to model her work on the familial talk-story culture she was nurtured in. Borrowing the term "talk story" from a pidgin Hawai'ian expression, Kingston develops a special kind of generic "talk-story" as an artistic creation in her fictions. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is often compared to The Woman Warrior and a number of critics have observed the use of "talk-story" in Tan's novels, but the talk-story components in the two writers' works have been largely discussed in relation to the mother-daughter dyads and few critics have distinguished the different usages and functions of "talk-stories" in their works. Through a literary analysis of their works, my thesis attempts to enrich the concept of "talk-story" originated from Kingston, and discusses its relation to the works of Kingston and Tan, with an aim to teasing out the two writers' differences within their sameness. While Kingston exhibits a talk-story narrative structure in her works, Tan mainly confines the talk-story elements at a textual level as a healing narrative therapy between generations. I will argue that while both writers exemplify talk-story as a form of self-expression and empowerment, their talk-stories function differently as they interact with the mainstream discourse: while Kingston remodels the Chinese talk-story pattern by making it a form of literary art, Tan refashions talk-story as a kind of "talking-cure, " as in western psychotherapy, in her fictions and writes in the popular arena.

The thesis examines the current split in American Indian literary studies between cross-cultural and tribal-centred schools of criticism through analyses of Arnold Krupat's, Louis Owens's and Gerald Vizenor's scholarship, on one side, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's and Craig Womack's critical work, on the other. The conflicting critical positions, despite their growing importance, have not received a consistent analysis in the critical discourse. The implications of this controversy for the future of American Indian studies and for the ways in which American Indian literature may be studied and taught have not been examined in depth. Particularly, there is little recognition of the validity of tribal-centred contributions to the field. The research seeks to address such gaps in the current scholarship: it develops a synoptic discussion of the opposing critical positions, assesses their strengths and drawbacks, and proposes a possible resolution of the controversy. The thesis argues that crosscultural scholarship (in conjunction with postcolonial and postmodern theory) has contributed importantly to the understanding of discursive hybridity as a vital aspect of American Indian existence, writing and anticolonial resistance. Yet, cross-cultural criticism has sidelined questions regarding tribal sovereignty discourse and tribal centred identity politics. Tribal-centred scholarship is making an important, and still ignored and misunderstood contribution to American Indian studies because it assists the understanding of these two important categories in American Indian experience and decolonisation. Assessing contributions and omissions of either critical position, the research posits that the current critical split could and should be negotiated to enable a more accurate and comprehensive reading of the political discourses that shape American Indian experience, anticolonial struggles and writing. The research illustrates the controversy and its potential mediation through a re-interpretation of two "representative" American Indian novels: Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Tracks. Part One of the research - chapters one, two and three - analyses the debate, while Part Two - chapters four and five - re-reads Ceremony and Tracks.

This thesis analyses the responses of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair to American society in the early modern era through their treatment of the immigrant, the city, the business tycoon, women, and the labour problem. The role of Dreiser and Sinclair as critics of American society has often been dealt with and highly praised. Although the thesis also discusses this particular aspect, its main purpose lies with the comparison of Dreiser's and Sinclair's ideological and literary responses to these socio-economic issues. The study starts with an account of the literary climate of the time. It shows that American literature at the close of the nineteenth century and in the early beginning of the twentieth century stems from the socio-economic and political unrest of the Gilded Age. American writers demonstrated an increasing concern with the evil consequences of the new technological development and felt it was their duty to record the prevailing conditions and express their reactions. They used the realist technique to describe things as they were and adopted naturalism to give a scientific study of their society. As a mirror of American society at the outset of the twentieth century, American fiction reflected the unrest and contradictions of this period and gave a clearer insight into the inner responses of American writers to the new order. It revealed that in spite of a general feeling of anxiety and disillusionment among American writers, individual reactions against the current events were diverse. They varied from an attitude of resignation and pessimistic speculations about America's future to an active desire to break rising capitalism and to reform American society. This analysis of Dreiser's and Sinclair's responses to some of the problems of America has been placed to a large extent in this divided socio-economic and literary climate. Thus while the comparison shows the two writers' strong indictment of American society, it also shows two distinct ideological and literary responses to its upheavals. Then the main body of the study divides into six chapters. Chapter one compares the socio-political and literary views of Dreiser and Sinclair and gives, thus, an idea about the spirit with which they treated their subject matter and the course of their literary works. This chapter also deals with the relationship between Dreiser and Sinclair in an attempt to find traces of a debate between the two writers on the socio-economic and literary situations in America. The following chapters focus on Dreiser's and Sinclair's treatment of the immigrant, the city, the business tycoon, women, and the labour problem. Each of these chapters starts with a brief historical account of the subject of study as a background to the fiction. Then it shows Dreiser's and Sinclair's respective concern with, and experience of, the problem, and moves onto the analysis of their literary treatment of it. The aim of this thesis has been to show that no matter what their artistic, ideological, and philosophical beliefs, American writers in the years of unrest which followed the large-scale industrialisation in their country, were called to assume their social responsibilities and contribute to the cause of social improvement.

Zora Neale Hurston is a complicated figure whose work has always aroused contradictory responses. During her lifetime she was often more readily appreciated by white readers who enjoyed her boisterous accounts of apparently unthreatening 'Negroes', than by other African American writers who felt that she pandered to white stereotypes, simplifying the black experience and the black psyche. Neglected for several decades, Hurston was again brought to the attention of literary and cultural critics in the late seventies by Robert Hemenway and Alice Walker, who published seminal reconsiderations of her work. Since then Hurston has become a central figure, not only in the African American canon, but also in the mainstream, becoming, to paraphrase the critic Hazel Carby, a veritable industry in her own right. Yet she remains a writer who evokes mixed responses. For some she is an exemplary Womanist and an uncomplicated role model. For others, though, she is a reactionary individualist who offers her readers little more than escapism and unexamined nostalgia. Particularly contested is the sort of African American space Hurston describes in her work. Centred on the all-black town of Eatonville, it has seemed to some an ideal space worth recovering for the potential it possesses for sustaining a model of authentic African American life. For others though, it has seemed an irrelevant and reactionary retreat from the complexities and realities of twentieth century life and an ideal, which has little relevance for an increasingly urban black population. In this thesis I intend to examine more closely the space and place that Hurston creates in order to argue that the Eatonville of her texts is more complex and ambiguous than either of these accounts allow.

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This thesis explores the use and significance of technologies of representation in the work of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), particularly in relation to the development of ideas of free and improvisatory expression in the 1950s. More specifically it focuses on the role played by the technologies of the typewriter and tape recorder in the textual production of key works of each writer and how these technologies are also thematically important in their exploration of the topics of individual creativity and freedom in relation to social and technological control. It also examines the centrality of epistolary practice in the creative process. The focus on these technologies will allow the thesis to develop from this base into a wider exploration of many of the key themes of Kerouac’s and Burroughs’ work, placing them within a context of wider debates and concerns over the power of mass media and technology among contemporary social commentators as well as writers of the Beat generation. The thesis is broadly divided into two sections, with the first half concentrating on Kerouac and the second half on Burroughs. Chapter one explores Kerouac’s writing practices in an analysis of the scroll draft of On The Road. Chapter two examines Kerouac’s representation of a variety of media including the printed word and radio in Doctor Sax. In chapter three, I look at Kerouac’s spontaneous prose method in an analysis of The Subterraneans. Chapter four concentrates specifically on Kerouac’s experimentation with the tape recorder in Visions of Cody. Chapter five focuses on framing Burroughs’ Junky and Queer in terms of cybernetics. In chapter six I present an analysis of Naked Lunch, looking at the techniques that Burroughs uses to disrupt the traditional narrative form, and in chapter seven I look at Burroughs’ cut-up method by examining his Nova trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.

The American writer Paul Bowles lived in Morocco from 1947 until his death in 1999, apart from visits to North Africa, Europe, Ceylon, India and the United States during this period. Bowles’ expatriation and subsequent itineraries are quite well known, but this thesis explores his interest in – indeed, preoccupation with – mediations and a state of being ‘in-between’ in a selection of his texts: the translations, his autobiography and his fiction. Only a few commentators on Bowles’ work have noted a meta-fictional dimension in his texts, possibly because the facts of his life are so intriguing and even startling. Though not explicitly meta-fictional, in the manner of somewhat later writers, Bowles does not tell us directly how he understands the various in-betweens that may be identified in his work, and their relationship to the individual and social crises about which he writes. His work unravels the effects of crises as not directly redeemable but as mediated and over-determined in complex and subtle forms. There are no explicit postmodern textual strategies; rather, Bowles draws on the basic resources of fiction to locate, temporally and spatially, the in-between: plot, character, description and background are intertwined in order, at once, to give a work its unity and to reveal, sometimes quite incidentally, a supplementary quality that threatens to undermine that unity. Bowles’ experimentation with different genres and forms may be understood as part of this problematic, even as a form of textual travelling that leaves no single genre or form as a summation of his achievement. Using close, even – at times – deconstructive readings of a selection of texts across different genres, the thesis supplements the dominant approach to Paul Bowles’ relationship with Morocco, namely a life-and-work approach. It develops what might be called a postcolonial approach to Bowles, but, again, through close reading and an in situ use of theory that is appropriate to the texts in question, rather than through a heavy-handed theoretical approach. For instance, liminality as an encounter with the ambivalent process of hybridity is useful across Bowles’ work. Further, narrative ambivalence is helpful in the chapter on the translations, while Derrida’s exploration of a general versus a restricted economy informs my discussion of Let it Come Down. Bowles is, of course, vulnerable to a postcolonial critique that focuses on the exotic, and I share some of these concerns, as will be apparent in the following chapters. Chapter 2, for instance, deals with translation and argues that Bowles’ role moves between simple translator and facilitator to initiator and creator of the text in complex and often creative ways, especially in relation to Larbi Layachi and Mohamed Mrabet’s stories. In Chapter 3, the fictional treatment of the transitional stages in Bowles’ journey are analysed to show how Bowles enacts liminality as a non-unitary mode of understanding. The thesis concludes by arguing that there is always a pattern in Morocco. It suggests that Bowles is more subtle and more ambivalent than some of the simple oppositions might suggest. This subtlety is conveyed in the first part of my title, ‘Inhabiting the exotic’.