Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Robert Coover directs his readers to view his works as elaborate metaphors. He asks that we see reflected in them the process through which man--Christian or non-Christian, "primitive" or scientist--turns his metaphoric apprehension of his universe into mythic "truth," and then gives it power over him. Focusing on Coover's latest and most ambitious novel, The Public Burning, this study examines his fiction with respect to the way in which he juxtaposes contemporary societal myths or "America's Civil Religion" with the more generalized world-myths as described (and mythified) by cultural anthropologists. By making each stand metaphorically for the other, Coover makes his readers see both in terms of the "root" metaphors which underlie them, and thereby, "demythifies" both. The Introduction discusses Coover's "place" in contemporary literature, especially as "metafictionist," in order to illustrate the limitations and confusion inherent in current categorizations of his work. In addition it surveys the fictions of other contemporary writers who work with similar materials. Part I, explores Coover's use of metaphor in creating the "designs" for his work. It then, considers his early fictions as they reveal his primary and contentual concerns. Of special interest is the concept of "dream time," as found in Australian Aboriginal mythology and as described by Emile Durkheim and Roger Caillois. Dream time refers to a symbolic return to a mythic primordial era of chaotic creative energy, which a society undertakes in order to revitalize itself. It involves sacrifice, the breaking of taboos, the rehearsal of origins, and the reversal of order. It is an attempt to re-establish the old order and to adapt it to inevitable change. Along with its "paired/opposite" apocalypse, dream time constitutes one of the major elements in Coover's metaphor. Part I also traces the evolution in metaphoric design in Coover's fictions. After a brief chapter on "The Cat in the Hat for President" as anticipatory, Part II begins the discussion of The Public Burning as parody and mock-epic. It concentrates on the novel's structure around "significant" numbers and on the omniscient chapters as they unfold the pseudo-apocalypse cum dream time of the early 1950's which culiminates in the ritualistic sacrifice of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It also treats Coover's various parodies of literary myth-making. Part III examines Richard Nixon's first person chapters as the "confessions" of a dream time hero. It explores Coover's use of the heroic paradigm to create a trickster/parody hero, who, through determination and finally submission to the myth, secures a place in the society's hierarchy. Part IV places The Public Burning within a long-lived tradition of trickster/parody heroes in the pre-Cervantian literature which Coover says influenced his development. Beginning with Hermes, Odysseus, and the classic-medieval fool, it concludes with a look at the romantic hero as a source for Coover's parody and, finally, the picaro. The picaresque hero, as exemplified by Lazarillo de Tormes not Don Quixote, proves to be an archetypal antecedent for Richard Nixon. In the picaro's trials and moderate triumphs, self-awareness and self-delusion lie Nixon's roots. The Part also discusses the volatile societal conditions under which each of these heroes arose and which make their literatures "literatures of dream time." In concluding, the study examines more fully the prophetic nature of dream time literature for society and art, including Coover's fiction.

The first chapter of this dissertation reviews the major Classical and Christian rhetoricians from Plato to Ramus with particular emphasis on their discussion of the pressures placed upon author, audience, and language by a theocentric world vision. The succeeding four chapters demonstrate the presence of those same concerns in the writings of John Cotton, William Bradford, Edward Johnson, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Cotton Mather. In each case placing these authors in their proper rhetorical tradition alters and refines our understanding of how, and therefore what, the texts mean. In addition such a rhetorical analysis reveals underlying functional similarities in Puritan writings despite superficial differences in style.

Because the Vietnam war was like no other, it is not so surprising that the fiction and other literature written about this war experience is also different from that which has followed America's involvement in other conflicts. While there are clear affinities with previous "war novels," the best fiction of Vietnam uses literary forms and strategies for meaning-making which are as different from those of the earlier periods as are the sophisticated high-technology weapons from the muzzle-loaders of America's Civil War. Stephen Wright, Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, James Webb, Ron Kovic, and other Vietnam writers have been on a narrative quest, searching for a way to examine the truth of Vietnam. The quest has changed the traditional effort to portray "the war novel" in a generically pure idiom. Efforts to recall a life through autobiography find difficulty in keeping Vietnam in perspective, reflecting profoundly changed men's difficulty in coming home unshattered.

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My dissertation desegregates nineteenth-century American literary history by reconstructing cross-ethnic dialogues between traditions too often seen as distinct. Drawing particularly on captivity narratives, slave narratives, and other forms of autobiography, I show that white, Native American, and African American authors' conceptions of themselves and the nation were relational, dependent on dynamic exchanges across ethnic lines. My methodology is "transethnic" in that it posits a horizontal rather than a vertical axis, examining writers in conversation with their contemporaries at pivotal historical moments in national identity formation rather than primarily as participants in isolated ethnic traditions. This emphasis on dialogical reading brings the boundary-crossing gains of transnationalist studies to bear on comparative multiethnic literature, suggesting that American identities were fashioned in multiethnic as well as international matrices. Chapter one argues that William Apess's <italic>Eulogy on King Philip</italic> (1836) marshals source material by Washington Irving and historian Samuel Drake to intervene in the narrative of national origin wherein Puritans become proto-Revolutionaries, the Indians vanish, and the new republic is fated to dominate the continent. The subsequent two chapters take up Apess's call to counter the myth of the "vanishing Indian" by examining the overlooked role of Native Americans in the slave narrators' adaptations of the captivity narrative genre. Chapter two shows how Native and African American autobiographers including Apess, Black Hawk, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth create "counter-captivity narratives" that leverage the childrearing values of their time to expose the constructedness of white childhood and national purity. Chapter three turns to the place of Native Americans in African Americans' rhetorical self-fashioning, focusing on the late eighteenth-century Black Atlantic trope of the talking book and antebellum slave narratives. Chapter four demonstrates that a transethnic analysis of nineteenth-century American literature sheds new light on transnational identities at the turn of the twentieth century, arguing that double consciousness serves as a figure for cross-ethnic identification among white, black, and ethnic immigrant writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Henry James, and Mary Antin. For these unlikely interlocutors, whose social circles overlapped, duality becomes an indispensible trope that is nevertheless insufficient to describe personal and national identity.

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Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / A collection of poems about life in Latin America and the United States. / 2031-01-01

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