Both William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez introduce the olfactory as a focal element in their writing, producing works that challenge the singular primacy of sight as the unrivaled means by which the New World might be understood. As they translate experiences of the New World into language, both writers record the power of olfactory perception to reflect memory and history, to shape identity, to mark unmistakably certain crisis moments of ethical action, and to delineate a form of knowledge crucial to their New World poetics of the novel. Observing and analyzing the olfactory language particular to the cultural spaces in and around Yoknapatawpha County and the village of Macondo, respectively, provides a means to enter the imaginary landscapes not only of these major novelists but of Plantation America and the New World in general. In line with those studies that examine tropes, issues, and themes common to U.S. and Spanish American literature, this study comprises an analysis of how the olfactory environment serves Faulkner and García Márquez as symbol and subject in the heroic diachronic sweeps of their respective Yoknapatawpha and Macondo narratives. Both authors use smells in order to get at truth to get closer to knowledge, and smell becomes the intersection between the structure of experience and the structure of knowledge. Their olfactory passageways mark out the South and the Caribbean, leading to a rooted, complex, nuanced understanding of truth in a world that modern civilization has paved over. In this way, their fictional olfactory situations and language establish a critique of the modern era, of an all-too-Cartesian modernity in the world, and point to a new poetics specifically for the New World, where there might still be hope for the memory and the promise of a land that is fresh from the hand of God.

Tracing a line from Lewis Carroll to 20th-century science fiction and cyberpunk, this project establishes an alternate genealogy based on the use of linguistic nonsense. Science fiction, rather than being merely a genre defined by specific narrative devices or character traits, is instead a language in and of itself. And like any language, it must be learned in order to be understood. Carroll used nonsense as a means of subverting conventional 19th-century opinions of language and, and by extension, society. Carroll was so successful at this that in 1937 American psychiatrist Paul Schilder discussed the dangers to a child's mind inherent in Carroll's work. For Schilder, Carroll's writing, through the violence he commits on language, mirrors a physical violence found in the actions of the characters in Carroll's works. The linguistic violence that Schilder points out is subtle in Carroll's works, but is made more overt in science fiction. But before jumping into science fiction, one must acknowledge James Joyce's contribution to the genre. Joyce borrows heavily from Carroll in Finnegan's Wake while he adds to the English language a multiplicity of words, phrases, and voices from outside the English language, creating a complex linguistic matrix. It is Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange that merges Carroll's nonsense with Schilder's feared violence. As cyberpunk burst onto the scene in the 1980's, with William Gibson's Neuromancer, nonsense took on new levels as technology-driven language blended with multi-cultural phrases in the fluid environment of cyberspace. The fluid environment of cyberspace, and its language, is explored through the works of Pat Cadigan and through Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Tennessee Williams expressed himself in the language of symbols. They were not ornaments to his work, but were to his mind the only satisfactory means of expressing himself as an artist, and predate almost every other consideration in the process of composition. Characterization, dialogue, plot and setting were all selected based on their potential to represent symbolically his identity and experience, and more specifically, the conflict between spirit and flesh which he felt had come to define him. However, before transforming his life into symbols, he attempted to abstract the world of his experience into something pure, something elemental and universal, as he insisted all artists should.<p> The imagery of stasis is his primary symbol for spirituality and innocence, whereas the imagery of flux, particularly of rivers flowing into oceans, is his symbol for carnality. In The Glass Menagerie, Laura and her glass figures represent spirit, while her brother Tom, who abandons her and becomes a sailor, represents flesh. Laura also represents things Williams considered related to spirituality: the Old South, romantic idealists, and what he calls those "small and tender things that relieve the austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the sensitive," entities which time, industrialism, and the modern world ultimately destroy. Virtually every element of the play serves as a symbol which amplifies the struggle between Laura and all she signifies and the forces ranged in opposition to her. In his discussion, Barnard analyzes each character in turn, explicating those symbols which pertain to him or her; thereafter, he shows how these symbols interact as the play draws to a close.

This dissertation analyzes the literary portrayal of literacy events in memoirs and novels written by Appalachian women during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing from contemporary literacy scholarship, my project engages several definitions of the term "literacy," including theories defining it as a technical skill, a social act, cultural knowledge, or a potent form of ideological power. In a region historically (and often inaccurately) stigmatized as illiterate, "literacy" is a loaded term, a concept doubly associated with cultural pride and with cultural loss. By applying literacy theories to Appalachian literature, I analyze the identity conflicts literacy attainment causes for several female Appalachian authors and characters. Ethnographic research concludes that some Appalachians think of reading, as well as other literate practices, as womans work. This feminized domestication of literacy functions as an important theme in the works this project considers since female characters and authors inevitably face more literacy-initiated dilemmas. I pay special attention to scenes in which literacy acquisition (whether technical, social, or cultural) causes characters to become aware that their way of speaking, acting, and thinking is at odds with that of mainstream society and the gender expectations of their home discourse communities. In doing so, I discuss the resulting negotiations authors and characters encounter regarding their discourse community affiliation, arguing that such literary exploration adds to, and even revises, contemporary literacy theories. Chapter one discusses Appalachian illiteracy stereotypes, moving into a discussion about literacy definitions and how they operate for the authors in this project. Chapter two argues that in The Dollmaker, Harriette Simpson Arnow issues a warning to readers to maintain flexibility when negotiating discourse community divides caused by literacy attainment. Chapter three explores how in Creeker: A Womans Journey and Songs of Life and Grace Linda Scott DeRosier negotiates the same dilemmas Arnows characters face, both in her life and through memoir writing. Chapter four interrogates how reading initially discourages writing in Denise Giardinas The Unquiet Earth, signaling the sometimes negative influence of technical literacy. Chapter five explores the literacy-initiated path from silence to voicing in Lee Smiths Oral History and Fair and Tender Ladies.

This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of womens memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision womens roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with womens prescribed place in the South. I examine novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Dorothy Allison, and Lee Smith to explore the many ways these women employ blues, gospel, and country music through tropes of female musician characters, song lyrics, or musical structures in order to re-imagine a South less constrained by paternalist ideas about sexuality, race, class, and religion. In its unique combination of music history, literary analysis, and cultural theory, I Will Learn You Something models a productive interdisciplinary approach to understanding diverse women writers rhetorical strategies for learning readers about female voices often neglected in American literary and musical history.

Focusing on historical accounts (1684-1734) by English, French, and Spanish witnesses, this dissertation establishes a continuity in fictionalized representations of anti-heroic pirates from the buccaneering period to the Golden Age of Piracy. Informed by history, literary, myth, and performance theory, the analysis identifies significant distortions in reports by observers and participants. The distortions that pertain to mythmaking patterns are classified and analyzed further. Conflicting and ambivalent representations of the pirate as an anti-hero are resolved through the positing of a literary scapegoat hypothesis drawing from René Girard and Joseph Roach. While demonstrating mythical archetypes at work in the construction of the colonial pirate figure, the analysis also takes into account the effects of confluent early modern processes such as the rise of colonial capitalism, print culture, and the middle class in Britain.

The field of folklore in general, but specifically Africana folklore studies can be enriched by greater analyses of Black female contributions. In this study, I position folk music as the primary interest and chosen location to acknowledge Black womens participation from beyond the margins. My inquiry reveals folk music as a lens into the myriad ways in which Black women have translated vernacular traditions into a means to deconstruct the master narrative as well as interrogate racist patriarchy. Specifically, this study examines how Nina Simone, Tracy Chapman, and Lauryn Hill have appropriated the folk aesthetic as a vehicle for social activism and cultural autobiography. I examine: 1) how folk music functions as a strategic discursive space for politically conscious creative expression and 2) how folk music functions communally as cultural autobiography/autoethnography and as a tool for community or nation-building. Situated at the forefront of my textual analysis are three women performers, Simone, Chapman, and Hill, whom I regard as most emblematic of a radical Black folk consciousness. I extensively read these womens performative, personal, and lyrical acts using a multi-layered theoretical framework, including but not limited to: Feminism/Womanism, Cultural Autobiography Studies, Black Nationalism, and Marxism. This discussion builds upon and extends the scholarship of autobiography and folklore as tools of subversion as well as recurring themes in African American female rhetorical practices.

This dissertation focuses on the use of funeral commemoration in religious and political controversies in early modern England. By examining the rhetoric used in funeral sermons and elegies, I show that commemorative writers use figural interpretation of the Bible to legitimize praise by linking the deceased to characters from scripture. Figural interpretation places the dead into a framework of ecclesiastical history and creates Protestant saints used as exempla in political and religious debates. This dissertation examines funeral sermons, elegies, and other commemorative poems written between 1558 and 1625. Chapter one discusses the development of figural interpretation in Elizabethan funeral sermons. By reading sermons by Edmund Grindal, Thomas Sparke, Matthew Parker, and William Barlow, I show that figural interpretation allows preachers to use funeral sermons as reformed counterparts to medieval cults of political saints. Chapter two examines elegies written by George Whetstone, Thomas Churchyard, John Phillips, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Sidney after Sir Philip Sidneys death in 1586. These poets support military intervention on the continent against Roman Catholic States by using figural interpretation to represent Sidney as a martyr. Chapter three discusses commemoration as a polemical tool for militant Protestants in Elizabethan Ireland by discussing funeral sermons for three Lords Deputy of Ireland and Book V of Edmund Spensers The Faerie Queene. Chapter four considers the commemoration of Prince Henry in 1612 and argues that poets George Wither, Joshua Sylvester, and Henry Peacham, and the preacher Daniel Price use biblical figurae of kings David and Josiah to represent Henry as a militant Protestant saint. I also show that John Donne uses figural interpretation in his elegy to advance an agenda of religious pacifism. Chapter five examines funeral sermons preached after James Is 1625 death. I argue that militant Protestant preachers like Daniel Price and Phineas Hodson and conformist preachers like John Donne and James Williams used different sets of figurae to support their sides in the debate over ceremonies in the English church. The conclusion calls for further research on the role of commemoration in early modern England as a whole, and in Donnes work in particular.

This dissertation considers the dynamic and resilient influence of the jeremiad, an early American religious and literary mode, on contemporary American literature and culture. It argues that the polemical, dystopian, and apocalyptic narratives so abundant in twentieth-century literature and film participate in an ingrained literary tradition that accounts for society's misfortunes as penalty for its social and moral evils while, at the same time, emphasizing an American exceptionalism born out of a belief in the society's election through its covenant with God. The project makes connections between early-American texts and related works of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and science fiction in order to engage issues of American nationalism and to interrogate how these texts construct and reinforce an American identity. It investigates how groups during different historical periods adapted the jeremiad either to advocate or to critique political and cultural movements. Chapter one discusses this history of the jeremiad, situates the project within previous scholarship on the form, and argues for the continued relevance of the jeremiad in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. Chapter two considers the role of the jeremiad in the work of Robert A. Heinlein during the cultural Cold War. Chapter three concerns the indebtedness of environmental science fiction and film to the American jeremiad tradition and, more specifically, how their dual imperatives of polemical and exceptionalism rhetoric continue to shape the ways that Americans conceive of environmental problems and policy. Finally, chapter four interrogates the role of the jeremiad in science fiction films since 1980 that function as countersubversive texts and, subsequently, in films that serve as critical responses to earlier attempts at foreclosing dissent.

My work deals with what I call (im)possible encounters, possible (mis)understandings between the West and the Rim of the World (in my case The Maghreb). I focus on writers (such as Paul Bowles, Patricia Highsmith, Edith Wharton, Tayeb Salih, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Ahdaf Soueif) who stepped across the cultural dividing line to claim a voice of their own; a voice that enabled them to represent and at times misrepresent the host culture they chose to live in, and which acts as a lieu and at times milieu de mémoire. It is what the late Edward Said aptly called intertwined histories, overlapping territories. I analyze the trope of shared space, food, song, pleasure, sexuality, laughter, and even the concept of time between the cultures as they appear in In Morocco, The Sheltering Sky, Tremor of Forgery, Season of Migration to the North, Memory in the Flesh, and Map of Love. My approach is variational in that it seeks to look at what Raymond Williams termed the alternative: a telling that looks at both sides of the storyfrom the bottom up as well as from the top down. Suffice it to add that my way of seeing and/or narrating is hybrid insofar as it draws on Maghrebian, American, and European history, culture, and story-telling. It is meant to be worldly: its intention and method goes so far as to break down the boundaries of race, gender, creed, and even pleasure. I examine three works written by Western authors and three novels written by North African authors in order to trace and classify (mis)presentations of the other. My goal is to implement a way of reading that transcends Manichean binaries and to introduce Mezzaterra, a utopian meeting ground made up of fragments of recognition between various cultures, as a concept inherent in Post-Colonial literature and a transnational world. In tracing these encounters, I re-contextualize the actual time and space of shared history while reading the narratives not as unique depictions of encounters but as classic examples of (mis)recognitions between cultures.