This project traces the genealogy of two works by Toni Morrison, Beloved and The Black Book through their shared genesis at the site of the black archive and the dilemma it presents over black presence amidst sustained black historical absence. This project asserts that both texts intervene into that challenge through their practice of imaginative narrative configuration. This project argues that each text, through the scrapbook technique of juxtaposition, advances a reading of history as an imaginative emotional patchworking. Both The Black Book and Beloved are invested in ownership of the narrative fragments that plague the story of black striving in the black archive and the possibilities of meaning unlocked through these fragments creative collaboration -- scraps strengthening other scraps. The scrapbooks dedication to contents destabilization and mixture through the technique of juxtaposition provides the methodology necessary for The Black Book and Beloved to execute a response to the challenge of black history presented by the archives limit, a limit that might block access to moments of black presence, imagined or actual. From the textual vantage point of juxtaposition, Morrison makes the case through contact of narrative fragments in The Black Book and Beloved the necessary act of willed imagination to move past the archival limit and use, instead, what the archive makes available for black emotional self-fashioning.

This thesis works to connect the literature of two geographically and historically disparate people the Irish and the Palestinians. One can observe patterns of disjuncture, identity crisis, and identity formation in the history of one people; one can then apply the principles learned to analogous historical situations. I argue that the Irish and the Palestinians share a kind of communal psychological trauma brought about by the experience of imperial/colonial domination, violence, and especially diaspora. Because of this shared trauma, Irelands historical experience can offer insight into that of Palestine. The situations are unique, but at certain human levels they have a great deal in common. Out of a shared struggle for identity, competing and sometimes mutually exclusive claims to legitimacy rise but so too do voices calling for humility, empathy, and unity. These are the voices I attempt to locate in the literature I engage. In the first chapter, I introduce the initial theoretical framework I employ to analyze two Irish novels. Bakhtin offers an understanding of speech in the context of a novel that I find to be a valuable lens through which to view Irish (and later, Palestinian) society itself. I identify Bakhtins heteroglossia as an inalienable truth underlying the makeup of all societies. I then note some of the connections not only theoretical, but political, social, and ideological between the Irish experience of diaspora and identity formation and the Palestinian experience of the same. In the second chapter, I deepen my theoretical approach significantly to supplement the theory I borrow and modify from Bakhtin. I then use several Palestinian works to locate certain trauma-induced commonalities between the texts, and show how this trauma creates an anxious field of possibilities for the diasporic population. I conclude by showing that current events continue to point to the ongoing traumatization and polarization of Israelis and Palestinians, and note that even in Ireland and Northern Ireland peace can be an anxious state. I attempt to show how real peace can only be found through empathy, which comes through listening to and caring for the voices of the Other.

Gullickson, Michelle, M.A., Spring 2014 We on the Land: Collected Essays in Ecocriticism Chairperson: Dr. David Gilcrest This portfolio thesis contains three separates essays that provide ecocritical readings of: 1. Catharine Maria Sedgwicks 1827 novel Hope Leslie 2. William Apesss body of work, especially A Son of the Forest (1829) and Eulogy on King Phillip (1837) 3. Virginia Woolfs work, especially A Room of Ones Own (1929), A Mark on the Wall (1921), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Between the Acts (1941). 1. It seems that Sedgwick attempts to portray shared land as a device that allows Magawisca and Hope (the two heroines of the novel) to share experience and create friendship. However, the novel does not maintain Magawisca and Hope in a shared place; rather, the whites racial privilege in the novel causes them to possess space. Noticing the importance of appeals to the land and the spatiality, I find it helpful to draw from landscape ecology and consider the term ecotone in modeling and interpreting the world of Hope Leslie. 2. The forest is close and important to Apess on a spiritual level, and Apesss work shows the persistence of New England forest. Additionally, Apess uses the forest to depict different versions of race in relation to nature. First showing the myth of devils of the forest, then showing natives as natural in Christian forests. Finally, While Apess does not depict 19th century New England as a completely damaged or desolate landscape, he does build a case for the violence to and on the land to encourage cooperative action to counter colonial violence. 3. Rejecting the idea that substance outside of perception cannot be proved, Woolf insists on the autonomy and actually of the thing itself. For Woolf, the thing itself isnt always part of the natural world, but often it is. Though Woolf is a writer, and controls the representation of the natural world within her texts, linguistically and thematically she suggests that in the real world the thing itself is something that exists on its own terms, rather than as a constructed image. I use A Room of Ones Own as a text to introduce this idea, then use her 1921 short story The Mark on the Wall and her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse to demonstrate how Woolf develops this concepts in her fiction.

In the tradition of Jon Lance Bacon and Steve Pinkerton, this work endeavors to show how Flannery OConnor, along with her secular humanist contemporaries, voices a critique of modern American culture that depicts the conflicting elements of consumerism as detrimental to an individuals personal and social well-being. This study will focus on Wise Blood, in particular, as it represents a consumerist way of life as antithetical to a religious way of life. By illustrating the emptiness of materialism and the nihilism of consumerism, OConnor hopes to persuade her readers that Christianity is a preferable alternative. The body of this study has two parts. The first chapter, Led By Ropes, Scents, and Dog Whistles, drawing on the language of cultural critics Marshal McLuhan, C. Wright Mills, and Vance Packard, explicates the novels conflicting conceptions of wise blood. OConnor juxtaposes an authentic wise blood defined by its drive for salvation with a parodic version that is simply an introjection of the promises of advertising. Enoch, as a representative of the latter, seeks to improve his life through increased participation in consumerism, which ultimately ends in grotesque frustration. In the second chapter, No One Was Paying Attention to the Sky, I expand on the first chapters premise by illustrating how OConnor presents a return to Christianitythe exercise of an authentic wise bloodas the only way to address the issues of modernity. The chapter traces the dialectical structure of Hazels spiritual journey from the naïve faith of his youth, through his apostasy during the war and turn towards consumerism, and finally to the humbling of his secular egoism and return to a Christian faith. His return to faith, however, is grotesque and unsettling. Drawing on the work of John Hawkes, Frederick Crews, and John Ruskin, the conclusion will explore some of the questions that OConnors emphasis on the grotesque raises. Particularly, can such an unsympathetic narrative tone positively and accurately depict an elevated spiritual life, or does it simply revel in the moral and spiritual squalor that it claims to reject?

Since its publication in 2011, critics have written about David Foster Wallaces final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, by looking for resonances with his career-long interests of irony, alienation, and the texts relation to the reader, but few have written of his final fiction as exhibiting a new approach to these topics. To further such criticism, I argue that in The Pale King Wallace uses new means religious, and specifically mystic, vocabularies of experience to seek ethical practices for living in a period heavily influenced by Postmodern irony. In the process, Wallaces characters end up advocating a mystical both/and style of living-through both irony and sincerity, boredom and attention, loneliness and relation. In investigating Wallaces work, I draw on the fields of Mystics, narrative ethics, Postsecularism, and (Post)Postmodern literary studies to show the valences of cultural interest at play in Wallaces fictional world. Throughout my main chapter, I discuss how Wallace premises his characters routinized lives as IRS employees on the concept of boredom and its relationships with capitalism and mysticism. While many characters have become accustomed to boredoms ubiquitous presence, some characters respond to pervasive alienation by seeking practices tinged with mystical overtones to center their living around, such as the practice of personal relationship, experiences of grace, or self-made ascetic rituals. Throughout my explication of these themes, I show how Wallace importantly mirrors his treatments of boredom with his formal choices as well. In my final section, I write toward a speculative explanation of these formal oddities: the readers metafictional involvement in both boredom-filled living and spiritual practices, an endeavor linked to the connection between life and literature that Wallace emphasized throughout his career. In my conclusion, I write of my hesitation to identify as a postsecular critic: namely, Postsecularisms lack of interest in collective spiritual practices, a perspective shared by Wallace. As a result, I point to some contemporary writers who share Wallaces interests in finding the ethical link between life and literature through reimagining spiritual practices, whose work may develop Wallaces focus on individual experiences toward a collective vision.

This thesis examines how three films directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men, and The Possibility of Hope, represent the impact of globalization on society and the environment. These films are thematically related, and intended to be considered in connection with one another, as indicated by both interviews with Cuarón, and by critical commentary informing audience reception of these works. Each film uses melancholy as a plot device, and as an ambient presence to elucidate Cuaróns underlying message that we must re-examine the problematic social, economic and environmental consequences of neo-liberal capitalist models of globalization. Melancholy contextualizes Cuaróns technical de-stabilization of his central narratives, and informs audiences consideration of loss as represented by these films.

This paper explores the poetry of Robert Duncan and the political potential of melancholy. Relying on Judith Butlers examination of the difference between mourning and melancholy in Precarious Lives, I argue that Robert Duncan enacts a condition of melancholia that he might respond to what Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands identifies in Queer Ecologies as the psychically ungrievable: homosexual desire and the environment. I contend in this thesis that one might enact an active experience of melancholy as both a preservative and rejuvenative force. In the first chapter of the thesis I explore Robert Duncans revisitation of a passage from Ovids Metamorphoses in his 1964 poem Cyparissus, arguing that Duncan recovers the myth from Ovids implicitly homophobic subtext. In the second chapter of the thesis I examine Duncans use of what Timothy Morton terms ambient poetics, arguing that in his 1968 poem The Fire, Passages 13, Duncan enacts an intertextual and melancholic ambience as a means to critique the environmental violence and trauma experienced as a cultural byproduct of the Vietnam War.

The aim of this masters thesis is to explore and discuss the narrative representation of temporal experience, taking as a lens the emerging discourse of queer temporality, its foundational vocabulary and preoccupations. The papers in this portfolio find three works of literary fiction from the twentieth-century to be particularly rich opportunities for discussion of both conventional and radical expectations of time's shape and directionality in relation to human sexuality. The first paper explores the role of temporal expectation in the competing discourses of modernism. Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain locates a tension between linear futurity and the dialectic of past and present characteristic of the avant-garde. Mann's novel illustrates the emergence of queerness as a lens with which to disrupt dominant ideologies and conventions, offering a stage upon which the novels protagonist may view the oppositional systems of cultural meaning at work. The second paper considers the bodys relationship to time in Virginia Woolfs Orlando. Woolf puts forth the susceptibility of the physical self to time as a catalyst for self- expression, depicting a correlation between temporal fluidity and flexible identity performance̶in Orlandos case, gendered multiplicity. The final paper reflects upon categories of sexual orientation and the understanding of the term 'queer' itself. Michael Cunninghams The Hours further imagines the queer moment as a conversion between sexually oriented identities, highlighting the liminal space that essentialist categories inevitably create and reaffirming the work of the queer lens to disrupt architectures of assumed homogeneity. The result of these three papers as a group is an exploration of time, its relationship to perceptions of the self, particularly sexual identity, and a further imagining of temporal experience as both individual and interpretable.

In proposing to devote this thesis to a study of the leading women characters in George Eliot's novels, I am confronted with the necessity of choosing from each novel the woman or women to be discussed. In The Mill On The Floss, Silas Marner, and in the stories from Scenes of Clerical Life (The Sad Fortunes Of The Reverend Amos Barton, Janet's Repentance, and Mr. Gilfil's Love Story) the choice is obvious.

This study of Pope's rhetoric and diction began as an examination of his "poetical diction". It soon became evident, however, that an examination of diction per se was not inclusive enough, and that anti-neoclassic quarrels with Pope's diction were merely symptoms of a process in aesthetic theory which has been taking place since the Renaissance. Therefore the subject was expanded to take this development into account. If it appears that the backdrop occasionally shadows almost entirely the dwarf of Twickenham, it must be granted that few poets have been so representative of their age as at the same time head and shoulders above it.