<p> Tale and myth have a long history of reinforcing, commenting on, and often subverting the ideologies at work in the society where the stories are being told. This research explores the ways three American novels, Eudora Welty&rsquo;s The Robber Bridegroom, Shirley Jackson&rsquo;s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Toni Morrison&rsquo;s The Bluest Eye, all incorporate variants of the fairytale Bluebeard: a fairytale which centers on domestic trauma. All three novels also re-vocalize the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and this re-vocalization serves to empower the female characters and subvert the dominant patriarchal paradigm. The subversion of white masculine ideology in these novels reflects a changing social structure during the thirty year span in which these three novels were published. Looking at the texts holistically while considering the ways the tale and myth interweave in each offers insight into the way these social changes for women were being narrated and explored. The question of interpretation is central to this research, which explores both feminine and masculine lenses in story. Particularly the ways a woman&rsquo;s sexual agency, decision not to marry, or even inability to escape are narrated and interpreted by the community around her. These fictional communities and the issues explored in the realm of tale reflect the larger society and ideological currents surrounding novels themselves. All three novels incorporate the Bluebeard tale, reject the masculine reading of women in that tale, and work to subvert not just patriarchal ideology but the flat literary trope and ways of writing and reading women.</p>

<p> This project analyzes historical trauma, the dominant fiction, and male subjectivity as theorized by Kaja Silverman in selected Kurt Vonnegut novels. </p><p> Chapter one examines Billy Pilgrim, the focal character of <i>Slaughterhouse-Five </i>, as well as Vonnegut-as-narrator by analyzing the way these two men exhibit Kaja Silverman&rsquo;s notions of historical trauma, characterized by their failures to embody proper hegemonic masculinity as exhibited in popular culture and the dominant fiction. Despite Billy&rsquo;s comically absurd failures as a soldier and a civilian man, he survives the war and lives a financially successful civilian life, though he&rsquo;s seen by nearly all as a laughingstock of a man. Billy is a male subject whose very existence calls into question the penis/phallus equation: the symbolically and psychoanalytically significant linkage of the male sex organ with the signifier of sexual difference and, perhaps more importantly, power. His survival refuses to endorse the violent assumption that war turns boys into men, a belief in the regenerative properties of violence, a popular American mythology, especially during the WWII and Vietnam war eras. </p><p> In chapter two, I examine John, the protagonist of <i>Cat&rsquo;s Cradle</i>. While John does not experience combat traumas as Billy and Vonnegut-as-narrator do, John experiences a loss of belief in society&rsquo;s organizing principles and narratives, in turn causing him to doubt his own power as a male subject. </p><p> Chapter three details Howard W. Campbell, Jr., of <i>Mother Night </i>, a former Nazi propagandist awaiting trial for war crimes. Campbell&rsquo;s character is Vonnegut&rsquo;s attempt to work through Hanna Arendt&rsquo;s concept of the banality of evil, while also dealing with the loss of social and phallic power. As Campbell loses everything he once found joy in during his life as a Nazi, he also loses his belief in the commensurability of the penis and the phallus, unable to exist as the man he once was. </p><p> While my selections of Vonnegut&rsquo;s texts all delve into World War II either explicitly or at the margins, I argue that Vonnegut is primarily concerned with the events of the 1960s, the decade in which <i>Slaughterhouse-Five </i>, <i>Cat&rsquo;s Cradle</i>, and <i>Mother Night</i> were published. All of these characters&rsquo; experiences are analogous to several cultural anxieties of the American 1960s: the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam war, the spread of communism, the Cuban missile crisis, and changing notions of acceptable masculinity. As such, I hope to establish that the penis/phallus equation upon which our society&rsquo;s reality is maintained is continually in danger of rupture, though through cultural binding, the equation and its organizing principles continue to shape male subjectivity and American culture as a whole.</p><p>

<p> This project examines Beat poet Elise Cowen&rsquo;s creative implementation and development of the cockroach image from culturally maligned pest to its symbolic representation of the marginalized Beat woman and artist. Set primarily against the backdrop of the cyclical gendered kitchen, the cockroach subject serves as the conduit from which Cowen underscores the Beats' relegation of women into the stifling roles of the caretaker, lover, and muse; roles that critically disable them of the time, freedom, and spontaneity of experience found outside of the home that informs the traditional Beat aesthetic. As a stand-in for her own oppressed subjectivity as a Beat artist, Cowen&rsquo;s solitary cockroach affords her the ability to reflect on and articulate her silenced frustrations and critique against her androcentric Beat community, un-fixing her marginal existence as a Beat &ldquo;other&rdquo; in the process. </p>

<p> This study interrogates the resonances of queer utopianism in Octavia Butler&rsquo;s presentation of time in Kindred in order to address the lack of existing scholarship on the novel&rsquo;s relationship with queer temporality. To conduct this interrogation, I utilize the work of queer optimists like Mu&ntilde;oz, Berlant, and Ahmed to deconstruct the text phenomenologically in conjunction with queer pessimists like Halberstam and Edelman to nuance this analysis. To prevent this analysis from being overtaken by a white gaze, I also make use of Black scholars like Morrison, Sharpe, Cooper, Gates, and Collins. In my analysis, I divide Butler&rsquo;s presentation of time into present, past, and future- whereas the present refers to the American Bicentennial and the cultural disconnect the protagonist Dana experiences in her relationship with her white husband, the past signals the pull of Antebellum era white supremacist patriarchy and Dana&rsquo;s need to engage in archival work to reconstitute the history that has been denied to her, and the future implies a nebulousness that blurs both eras together and instills the novel&rsquo;s ending with an ambiguity that lends itself to both pessimistic and optimistic readings. I emphasize how Butler positions Black temporality as a queer temporality in the novel that challenge readers&rsquo; own relationship with the dominant white patriarchal culture.</p><p>

<p> By re-positioning the works of Elaine Showalter, Phyllis Chesler, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar alongside Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, reading the literary texts through the feminist theories in order to expand them, this dissertation aims to contribute to an intersectional feminist practice that challenges claims of universality and continues to decolonize the female body and mind. Through an intersectional analysis of narratives written by women of color, applying and re-visioning theories of madness and transgression, this dissertation will present a counter-narrative to the &ldquo;essential womanness&rdquo; developed within and sustained by white feminist practices throughout the 1970s. Each chapter pairs white feminist theorists with an author whose work complicates notions of universal female experience: Dunbar-Nelson/ Showalter, Larsen/ Chesler, Hurston/Gilbert and Gubar. These pairings create tension between theories of universality and the realities of difference. The addition of three different narratives, each representing a broader range of intersectional female experience, enriches the heteroglossia surrounding feminist conceptions of mental illness. The result is a poly-vocal conversation that employs a scaffold of intersectional identity politics in order to (re)consider the relationship between the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and the performativity of gender.</p><p>

In an interdisciplinary fashion, this dissertation on Brazilian women writers in English focuses on translation and gender issues and employs an historical and statistical approach. Following an investigation of the proportion of men to women writers in the corpora of Brazilian literature and its English translations, I offer an analysis of the English translation of three contemporary Brazilian women writers. Then, drawing on models developed by Javier Franco Aixelá and Carla Melibeu Bentes, I evaluate the "foreignizing" or "domesticating" character of the translations by examining Culture-Specific Terms (CSTs) and provide a new model to analyze translation strategies for Gender-Marked Terms (GMTs). The first part of the dissertation (chapters two and three) consists of a quantitative macro analysis of women writers' representation in Brazilian literature, based on a recent reference work, the Enciclopédia de literatura brasileira (2001), and on my own diachronic survey of translated authors. The surprising results, graphically represented in tables and charts, point to the visibility of Brazilian women writers in translation and raise questions regarding the process of cross-cultural transmission. In the second part (chapters four through six), I undertake a qualitative contrastive micro analysis examining the strategies used to translate CSTs and GMTs - presented in tables and charts–in seven books by three Brazilian women writers. Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), the most widely translated and best known in Brazil and abroad, has published highly introspective works. Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977), briefly famous after the publication of her exposé of favela life, found unexpected success in English translation, which motivated her book's re-publication in Brazil. Ana Maria Machado (1940-), famous for her children's books, is one of the few Brazilian authors of this genre published in English. English translators tended to keep most CSTs (50%) in Portuguese; 68% of GMTs were equivalently translated; however, domesticating (CSTs) and neutralizing (GMTs) strategies had a significant impact on the translations. Such macro and micro analyses introduce an evidence-based dimension that complements contemporary translation studies, at times contradicting the presuppositions of theorists, and offers new avenues of research for understanding the processes by which Brazilian works enter the English-language market.

This dissertation examines how contemporary African American women writers have used the novel of selfhood to represent African American girls' and women's struggle to achieve self-understanding and development during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In doing so, this dissertation expounds on the ways in which race, class, gender, sexuality, social justice movements, and community affect African American female characters' journey toward selfhood. Through this study I am interested in exploring the messages African American communities communicate to girls and women about life, race, gender, and sexuality. How characters interpret this information and then negotiate between their individual desires and goals and the expectations of their communities, as well as the effect learning about African American or African Diaspora history and culture has on protagonists are also central concerns here. The novels analyzed in this study are Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), and Toni Morrison's Love (2003). Drawing upon male, female, and African American Bildungsroman scholarship, Civil Rights and Black Power ideology, and black feminist theoretical frameworks, this study offers an interdisciplinary close textual analysis of African American women's novels of selfhood depicting several models of self-development to illuminate the struggles African American women face in their journey toward selfhood. This dissertation diverges from previous scholarship in that it places greater emphasis on the role of community and explores the influence the social justice movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, specifically the Civil Rights, Black Power/Black Arts, and Women's liberation movements had on African American women's self-concept.

In his 1962 essay "The Creative Process," James Baldwin begins by stating, "Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone." By the 1960s, Baldwin knew all-too-well the state of black male subjectivity in an America fraught with social disharmony. His musings highlight that while the struggles of black manhood can be reduced to discussions of race, class, and/or sexuality, its fate is primarily governed by a subtler phenomenon, namely—this "state of being alone." Baldwin's consideration is a sort of self-dichotomization, as he is at once both artist and man, and while suggesting that the artist must cultivate "loneliness," he also recognizes the necessity for its avoidance. In this regard, James Baldwin as writer emerges as a critical recourse for James Baldwin as man, becomes the medium through which he, through himself and for himself, reaches a particular end. This project examines the male emotion and vulnerability in the novels of James Baldwin. Within his novels, from Go Tell it on the Mountain to Just Above My Head, James Baldwin foregrounds male relationships in a way that exposes fraternal crises. This fraternal crisis, in one vein, points to this project as a theory of space, as it denotes an absence of male intimacy, a state of being where distance, disconnect, unwillingness and fear shape a symbolic space-in-between men. In another sense, it reflects how Baldwin's preoccupation with the state of being alone leads to his fictional pursuit of the fraternal, a metaphysical construction of spatial manhood detectable by intimacy: the vulnerable, emotional and physical closeness of men. Essentially, the search for the fraternal in Baldwin's fiction captures black manhood's cry for male intimacy in a world of isolation, rejection, and oppression while marking the redemptive power of male love through the emergence of salvific manhood.