An investigation of the prominence of vision imagery in the two novels of Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, reveals the importance of vision to the themes and structures of the novels. Seeing truth in order to fulfill one's human vocation is a central concern in O'Connor's fiction. The realization or non-realization of truth by the characters is conveyed by vision imagery. O'Connor's Southern and Catholic heritage is the back-ground of her concern for vision as an integral part of her artistic theory. An analysis of vision imagery in each novel shows how the themes are developed and how the structures relate to such imagery. Each novel progresses according to the main character's clarity of sight. Contradictory patterns occur when the character's sight is not true.

My dissertation examines the correlations between the natural and supernatural, agency and authority, and meaning and language in the work of the modernist American writers H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Djuna Barnes. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, I argue that the different kinds of spectral and otherworldly figures that appear in these works – ghosts, the living dead, divinities, individuals who are also amorphous multiplicities – correlate to the modes of negation of parental imperatives that structure the language-use of their authors. I contrast H.D.‘s and Barnes‘s visions of the relation of language to meaning and the personal to the social using Lacan‘s delineation of the different modes of psychic negation that enable or disable language use: repression, disavowal, and foreclosure. According to this model, H.D.‘s work evidences foreclosure: a mode of thought and language that fails to differentiate words, thoughts, and people from one another. This incapacity endangers the psyche with the hallucinatory return of or haunting by what cannot be symbolized. In contrast, Barnes‘s work suggests disavowal, and her language renders experience in distorted forms. She repudiates power figures and the unspeakable meanings associated with them, but her work portrays the spectral, surreptitious return of these figures and meanings. Writing that witnesses or stages a return to a state of non-difference between symbol and symbolized, as Barnes‘s and H.D.‘s work does, calls for different interpretative and methodological strategies than those usual in literary criticism. To read such work primarily as symbolic communication is to lose perspective on the structures of thought and language that it grapples with. A perspective that is rigorous and radically different from the works‘ own is necessary to produce readings of it that make symbolic ―sense,‖ though it is unable to fully account for experiences that are not conceivable. To this end, I describe ―disorders,‖ types of thought and language that psychoanalysis implicates in interminable human suffering, without drawing conclusions about the range of experiences that might be concurrent with asymbolic or anti-symbolic thought and writing. / Graduate / 2019-08-31 / 0298 / 0591

This thesis explores three of Ralph Waldo Emerson's seminal texts, Nature (1836), the "Woodnotes" poems (1840, 1841), and Representative Men (1850), in a transatlantic Romantic context. Augmenting typical transatlantic explorations of Emerson's literature which often use these three works in demonstration of the various European Romantic assimilations n Emerson's writing, the texts considered in this study are understood to engage with one British work predominately. Emerson engages antagonistically in the pages of Nature with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), in the "Woodnotes" poems with William Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814), and in Representative Men with Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). In each instance, Emerson engages with a text that he understands to be particularly representative of the intellectual and creative genius that its British author wields and, as such, one that is anxiety-inducing in the influence that it wields. This thesis demonstrates that, in engaging with these works, Emerson performs with increasing sophistication a process of "'creative reading,' that is, an act of reading (influx) through which creation (efflux, expression) is made possible through a transcendence of the past. In doing so, Emerson confronts and attempts to gain independence both from the personal influence that these texts and, more significantly, their authors wield. In engaging in Nature, the "Woodnotes" poems, and Representative Men with Aids to Reflection, The Excursion, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History respectively, Emerson assimilates into his works various elements of Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's thought. Each of the three chapters comprising this thesis explores Emerson's intellectual indebtedness in this regard and, as such, the explorations incorporate a scholastic focus like that found in the majority of Emersonian transatlantic scholarship. In each instance, however, explorations of Emerson's works also reveal the American writer's performance of a liberating act of detachment or departure from the ideas with which he engages. These intellectual detachments distinguish Emerson's thought from that of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, and are often attended by formal departures from the texts with which Emerson engages. Augmenting typical transatlantic explorations of Emerson's works, this thesis focuses not only Emerson's Romantic assimilations, but also on his detachments. Finally, in each instance, Emerson's confrontations reflect Robert Weisbuch's assessment in Atlantic Double-Cross (1986) that nineteenth century Anglo-American literary relations are 'always more than personal and individual' (21). That is to say, in each instance, Emerson confronts not only Coleridge, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's personal creative and intellectual influence, but their extrapersonal or national influence as British writers. This confrontation of national influence is reflected in the fact that Emerson's detachments incorporate temporal reimaginings, re-visions of time that nullify the potency of the past and of the influence wielded by tradition by emphasising the present and the future, focusing on the subjective power of the mind. As such, Emerson's conceptions of time demonstrate a conflation of two specifically American understandings of temporality as defined by Robert Weisbuch - vertical time and futurism - both developed by nineteenth century American writers in order to nullify the influence of Old World, specifically British, tradition, and to establish an account of time in which the United States' comparative lack of distinct cultural history is excused. In precis, this thesis demonstrates that Nature, the "Woodnotes" poems, and Representative Men issue from Emerson's creative reading of Aids to Reflection, The Excursion, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History respectively. These acts of creative reading demonstrate in each instance the inextricability of Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's 'personal' creative and intellectual influence, as well as their 'extrapersonal' or national influence.

James Arthur Baldwin argues that the issue of humanity—what it means to be human and whether or not all people bear the same measure of human worth—supersedes all issues, including socially popular ones such as race and religion. As a former child preacher, Baldwin claims, like others shaped by both the African-American faith tradition and Judeo-Christianity, that human equality stands as a divinely mandated and philosophically sound concept. As a literary artist and social commentator, Baldwin argues that truth in any narrative text, whether fictional or non-fictional, lies in its embrace or rejection of human equality. Truth-telling narrative texts uphold human equality; false-witnessing texts do not. Baldwin shows in four of his novels the prevalence of the latter narrative type. Within the fictional societies of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979), Baldwin reveals how society’s powerful bear false witness against the marginalized through stereotyping social narratives. However, Baldwin uses his novels to show the humanity of the marginalized. In so doing, he connects his works, as well as the works of contemporary black literary artists, to the concept of Christian spirituality.

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

The purpose of this project was to prepare a group interpretation script which is derived from the books cited in the title. An effort was made to prepare a unified script reflecting contemporary American Indian concepts of mysticism, philosophy, ecology, psychology, and education by selecting appropriate portions from the three books. The thesis includes a production concept, production procedures, the rationale for selection of excerpts, and the finished script, It is designed to employ seven readers and is divided into six parts. Those elements may be altered to fit various physical arrangements and program lengths.

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to Keith Michael Green who argue for broader and more complex approaches to writers’ strategies for recognizing the full personhood of African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. In the last fifteen to twenty years, hospitality theory has reshaped social science research, particularly around issues of race, immigration, and citizenship. In literary studies, scholars are only now beginning to mine the ways that theorists from diverse backgrounds—including continental philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, womanist philosopher and theologian N. Lynne Westerfield, and post-colonial writers and scholars such as Tahar Ben Jelloun—can expand the reading of nineteenth century literature by examining the discourse and practice of hospitality. When host and guest meet at the threshold they must acknowledge the full personhood of the other; the relationship of hospitality is dependent on beginning in a state of equilibrium grounded in mutual respect. In this project I argue that because of the acknowledgement of mutual humanness required in acts of hospitality, hospitality functions as a humanizing narrative across the spectrum of antebellum black experience: slave and free, male and female, uneducated and highly educated. In chapter one, “Unmasking Southern Hospitality: Discursive Passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” I examine Stowe’s use of a black fugitive slave host who behaves like a southern gentleman to undermine the ethos of southern honor culture and to disrupt the ideology that supports chattel slavery. In chapter two, “Transformative Hospitality and Interracial Education in Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” I examine how the race-centered scenes of hospitality in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends creates educational opportunities where northern racist ideology can be uncovered and rejected by white men and women living close to, but still outside, the free black community of Philadelphia. In the final chapter, “Slavery’s Subversion of Hospitality in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I examine how Linda Brent’s engagement in acts of hospitality (both as guest and host) bring to light the warping influence of chattel slavery on hospitality in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In conclusion, my project reframes the practices of antebellum hospitality as yet another form of nonviolent everyday resistance to racist ideology rampant in both the North and the South. This project furthers the ways that American literature scholars understand active resistance to racial oppression in the nineteenth century, putting hospitality on an equal footing with other subversive practices, such as learning to read or racial passing.

"Since an award is an indication that someone believes a book is superior or significant in some respect, knowledge of literary prizes is of obvious value to a librarian responsible for the selection of suitable books to meet patrons' needs and interests. With this in mind I have undertaken a study of the annual book award of the Friends of American Writers. The purpose of this paper is to describe the prize and the F.A.W. Award books since 1948, when a change in policy raised the annual book award to $1,000, to examine the prize-winning books in relation to the opinion of the critics, to determine the meaning of 'high ideals' as expressed by the group offering the award, and to find how the prize-winning selections are chosen"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "June, 1960." / "Submitted to the Graduate School of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Sarah Rebecca Reed, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-40).