This study examines the recurrence of the image of sugarcane in Caribbean literature and traces a timeline of oppressive discourse. The image of the cane field represents a tension between silencing voice and identity independent of European nation-building ideologies. There is a history of silencing associated with sugarcane, even as Caribbean authors seek a potential to use this history to create a voice. While the authors examined employ the image of the cane field to create a voice outside of the dominant discourse, the voice of the Caribbean is nonetheless restricted. Postcolonial theory will be used to examine the history of oppression through the image of sugarcane as a negative past that authors try to get beyond, while dealing with the issue that it also helped to form their voice. My thesis investigates these issues using The Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes, a poem by James Grainger, to set up the colonial history of sugar in the Caribbean and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a reaction to that colonial discourse. / by Michael Linder. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Le roman sentimental est un des genres les plus lus, les plus traduits et les plus diffusés. Malgré sa mauvaise réputation, il est étonnant de constater le nombre de ces romans vendus, tous pays confondus. Dans les Antilles, ce phénomène est particulièrement palpable : la présence, et la réception de ces œuvres témoignent de l’engouement pour le genre. Notre étude a pour objectif de dégager d’un corpus sentimental antillais les aspects les plus significatifs. Nous analyserons, d’une part, le schéma narratif élaboré en marge de celui proposé par le roman sentimental classique et, d’autre part, l’esthétique du quotidien mise en place pour créer un sentiment d’appartenance chez le lectorat. Il nous sera ainsi possible de mettre en évidence le discours socioculturel propre à ce genre et plus spécifiquement aux femmes antillaises. Par ailleurs, cette recherche postule que l'appropriation des invariants romanesques et l'élaboration d'une visée didactique participent à l'intégration du roman sentimental antillais dans la sphère des littératures « sérieuses ». Enfin, ce mémoire défend l’idée selon laquelle l’écriture romanesque des auteures étudiées contribue au projet littéraire antillais de réappropriation identitaire. / The sentimental novel is one of the most read, translated and accessible literary genres. Considering its sales rating, its frivolous reputation seems to be a misleading one. Indeed, in the Caribbean, the overall presence and reception of the novels is an indicator of its phenomenal popularity. We consider that the following aspects of the Caribbean sentimental novel are the most significant ones. Firstly, we underline that the specificity of the narrative patterns of these novels is due to its singularity vis-à-vis the canonical sentimental novel. Secondly, these novels tend to create a very strong sense of nationhood for the readers which are generated by a careful depiction of the everyday life. These previous aspects allow us to underscore the fact that the studied novels interact with the Caribbean social-cultural discourse while insisting on the topic of the female condition. This research brings to light the fact that the appropriation of the novelistic schemes as well as the didactic within allows to consider the Caribbean sentimental novel as a part of the institutionally recognized literary productions. Finally, our essay demonstrates that the novels of these “female writers” contribute to the consolidation of the national identity.

This thesis analyses the themes of history, memory, and authorship in the works of four women playwrights from the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. In doing so, it aims to reveal the three levels of marginalization to which Caribbean women theatre practitioners are subjected: being a woman, being a French Caribbean woman, and being a French Caribbean woman who writes theatre. The thesis seeks to contribute to the expansion of the field of French Caribbean literary and drama studies, endeavours to redress the gender balance in studies on French Caribbean literature, and aspires to add to the existing body of work on French Caribbean women's writing. Therefore, the thesis aims to reveal and to analyse the world of French Caribbean women's theatre and to study how the playwrights address socio-political issues that affect their communities and influence their own writings and careers. The corpus consists of plays by Gerty Dambury, Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Suzanne Dracius from the 1980s to the early 2000s. While focussing on a different theme, each chapter rests its analysis on theatrical works of a similar genre. The analysis of the plays deploys theories of the theatre pertaining to postcolonial drama and gender. The first chapter serves as an introduction to a group of female French Caribbean writers and their predecessors. The second chapter is a study of two historical plays, focussing on the collective experience of historical events and the role played by women in those events. The third chapter analyses plays that problematize the relationship between the collective and the individual. The fourth chapter looks at the image of the French Caribbean female artist and the multiple barriers she encounters in achieving creative independence.

xi, 180 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation examines the relationship between British and American conceptualizations of the Anglophone Caribbean and the way that Anglophone Caribbean fiction writers and filmmakers tend to represent the region. Central to my project is the process of reexportation, whereby Caribbean artists attain success at home by first achieving renown abroad. I argue that the primary implication of reexportation is that British and American conceptualizations of the Anglophone Caribbean have had a determining effect upon attempts by Anglophone Caribbean fiction writers and filmmakers to represent the region. Chapter I introduces the dissertation. Chapter II, "The 'Double Audience' of Samuel Selvon and The Lonely Londoners ," concerns Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon, who--along with George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and V. S. Naipaul--is cited as being among the most important and influential of the West Indian authors who began publishing in the 1950s. Although I consider all of Selvon's ten novels in that chapter, my main concern is The Lonely Londoners (1956), Selvon's best known and perhaps most pivotal and misread novel. Chapter III, "Contrapuntally Re-reading Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come, " features a reevaluation of the Jamaican filmmaker's 1972 motion picture, which in many complex ways remains the Caribbean film. Chapter IV, " Pressure and the Caribbean," focuses on Trinidadian filmmaker Horace Ove's Pressure (1975), which I deliberately treat as a Caribbean film although it is still best known as Britain's first feature-length dramatic movie with a "black" director. Vital secondary texts include selected works by Edward Said, Mikhail Bahktin, and Richard Dyer, as well as Kenneth Ramchand, Keith Warner, and D. Elliott Parris. The three existing book-length analyses of Selvon's fiction are the main voices with which the Selvon chapter is in discourse. David Bordwell's work in cinematic narrative theory and Marcia Landy's contribution to the study of British genres are essential to the frameworks through which I read the cinematic primary texts. / Adviser: Gordon Sayre

viii, 233 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" I mean extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry. Through case studies, I examine longstanding assumptions about these poets and the literary histories and myths surrounding their legendary texts. In carefully historicized readings of these and other iconic poems, I elucidate the pressure a single poem can exert on a poet's reputation and on American poetry broadly. I study the iconic poem in the context of the poet's corpus to demonstrate its role within the poet's oeuvre and the role assigned to it by canon makers. By tracing a poem's reception, I aim to identify the national, periodic, political, and formal boundaries these poems enforce and the distortions they create. Because iconic poems often direct and justify our inclusions and exclusions, they are of particular use in clarifying persistent obstacles to the canon reformation work of the last thirty years. While anthologies have become more inclusive in their selections and self-conscious about their ideological motives, many of the practices regarding individual poets and poems have remained unchanged over the last fifty years. Even as we include more poets in the canon, we often ironically do so by isolating a particular portion of the career, impulse in the work, or even a single poem, narrowing rather than expanding the horizon of our national literature. Through close readings situated in historical and cultural contexts, I illustrate the varying effects of iconic poems on the poet, other poems, and literary history. / Committee in charge: Dr. Karen J. Ford, Chair; Dr. John T. Gage, Member; Dr. Ernesto J. Martinez, Member; Dr. Leah W. Middlebrook, Outside Member

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:07:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 TitoMFJ_DISSERT.pdf: 1131538 bytes, checksum: cb4178f843dfdf9a5d46d5e8caebc742 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-06-02 / This master s thesis aims at investigating the way in which diasporic subjects in the novel How the Garc?a Girls Lost their Accents (1992) cope with the clash of two cultures the Caribbean one, from the Dominican Republic, and the North-American one, from the U.S., as well as the implications of such negotiations in the lives of immigrants, once it apparently depicts the plight of those who are torn between mother-lands and mother-tongues (IYER, 1993, 46). At the same time, the implications of such negotiations in the lives of immigrants are relevant issues in the writing of Julia Alvarez. For this, there is the analysis of the uses of family memories as one of the main strategies immigrant writers possess to recall their identities. Moreover, this thesis will also consider the language issue for the construction of the immigrant identity insofar as bilingualism is a key factor in the negotiation the Garc?a girls must effect between their Caribbean and their American halves in order to understand where they stand in the contemporary world. In order to build a theoretical framework that supports this master s thesis, we list the works of Homi K. Bhabha (1990, 1996, 2003, 2005), Stuart Hall (2001, 2003), Julia Kristeva (1994), Salman Rushdie (1990, 1994), Sonia Torres (2001, 2003) among other contributions that were crucial to the completion of this academic research / A presente disserta??o objetiva investigar a maneira em que sujeitos diasp?ricos ficcionais da obra How the Garc?a Girls Lost their Accents (1992), de Julia Alvarez (1950 ), negociam o embate entre duas culturas a caribenha, oriunda da Rep?blica Dominicana, no Caribe, e a estadunidense, proveniente dos Estados Unidos da Am?rica, j? que aparentemente espelha a dor daqueles que se encontram divididos entre terras natais e l?nguas maternas (IYER, 1993, p. 46). As implica??es desta negocia??o na vida do imigrante s?o quest?es relevantes na escrita de Alvarez. A autora leva em considera??o o uso das mem?rias da esfera familiar como uma das estrat?gias essenciais empregadas por escritores imigrantes para rememorar sua(s) identidade(s). A signific?ncia da escrita das reminisc?ncias do ?mbito familiar ? observada como um meio de apresentar a coletividade da escrita imigrante e, mais importante, como um meio que escritores imigrantes de diferentes lugares usam para se sentirem conectados uns com os outros. Do mesmo modo, leva-se tamb?m em considera??o a quest?o da l?ngua na constru??o da identidade imigrante para buscar entender onde as irm?s Garc?a se posicionam no mundo contempor?neo, visto que o bilinguismo ? um fator chave na negocia??o que agencia entre suas por??es caribenha e estadunidense. Dentre os autores estudados, citamos Homi K. Bhabha (1990, 1996, 2003, 2005), Stuart Hall (2001, 2003), Julia Kristeva (1994), Salman Rushdie (1990, 1994), Sonia Torres (2001, 2003) e outras contribui??es que foram imprescind?veis para a finaliza??o desta pesquisa

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