During a time when ideological debates between Milton critics remained largely unresolved, Stanley Fish reconciled both sides of the Milton Controversy with Surprised by Sin, positing a theoretically sophisticated method that centers the poems meaning in the readers experience. Christian and non-Christian critics became enfranchised in critical debate since their reactions, according to Fish, were valid and intended by Milton. Borrowing his intentionalist approach from A.J.A. Waldock, Fish asserts his version of both author and text while implicitly employing a radically subjective hermeneutics. Fish focuses on the multiple and contradictory linguistic meanings within Paradise Lost, locating the source of these contradictions in the human mind. Viewing the problems of language as a result of human distance from the originator of language (the divine Logos), Fishs Milton strongly draws on the Christianity of C.S Lewis. In contrast to the methods of post-Derridean deconstruction, Fishs Milton evinces the instability of language in order to strengthen the mind of his reader in a metaphysically Christian faith. Over the course of four decades, Fishs historically plausible critical framework became accepted as a valuable basis for critical practice. However, his work also posed a challenge to later critics who disagreed with its ideological basis and its effect on critical method. Critical response to Fishs work often reflects an anxiety that recalls the theory of Harold Blooms Anxiety of Influence. Loosely following Blooms terms, I contend that critical reactions to Surprised by Sin reflect an ongoing anxiety over Fishs effective mediation with Miltons Paradise Lost.

This paper looks into the inner workings of Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000). Even though Almereyda updates the setting and cuts many of the lines, sometimes entire scenes, from the source text, he is able to convey the some of the themes through his use of technology and media. While some themes do transfer into the postmodern setting, the places of discord are most interesting. Of particular interest is his use of modern technologies to display the corruption found in Shakespeare's play. These technologies, including speakerphone, surveillance equipment, wiring devices, handheld camcorders, and still photography, create an atmosphere of both continual connection to and continual isolation from others. Another theme continued in this filmic version is the problems associated with memory. Because of the constant bombardment of video and still images, Hamlet, Ophelia, and Gertrude all encounter difficulties remembering the past; for Hamlet, the repetition of images eventually causes him to forget the very things he was trying to remember. By the end of the film, we, the critics, become like Hamlet. In search for the truth behind the film, we mimic his editing techniques.

In After Scotland: Irvine Welsh and the Ethic of Emergence, the authors objective is to mirror what he argues is the Scottish writer Irvine Welshs objective: to chart out a future Scotland guided by a generative life ethic. In order to achieve this objective, the author lays open and reengages Scotlands past, discovers and commits to neglected or submerged materials and energies in its past, demonstrates how Welshs work is faithful to those and newly produced materials and energies, and suggests that Welshs use of those materials and energies enables readers to envision a new Scotland that will be integral to an alternative postmodern world that countervails one ruled by late capital. Each chapter builds toward a Marxist ethic of emergence, which is composed of four virtues uncovered in Scotlands historical-material fabric: congregation, integration, emergence, and forgiveness. To bring these virtues to the surface, the author historically grounds Welshs novels and short storiesTrainspotting, Glue, Porno, Filth, The Granton Star Cause, The Two Philosophers, and Marabou Stork Nightmares. Through this historiographical process, each virtue is uncovered and analyzed in the context of a particular historical period: medieval, Reformation, Enlightenment, and postmodern. Each context presents a unique set of materials and energies; each also presents an epistemological and ethical focus. The author brings the first three contexts and virtues together to formulate the ethic of emergence within the postmodern context. Throughout, the author stresses how this ethic and each of its virtues are embedded in Welshs work and in Scotlands historical-material fabric. The author then suggests what he and Welsh hope will emerge from that fabric according to such an ethic. Because Welsh is a contemporary writer who has gained relatively little attention from literary scholars, another aim of this study is to situate Welshs work by connecting it with literature produced inside and outside of the Scottish and postmodern contexts: e.g. Gaelic prehistorical and epic literature, Chaucer, morality plays, Robert Burns, and the modern mystery genre. The author concludes the study with an afterword, relating his project to recent events that have occurred in Scottish politics.

In the late 20th century and beyond, American social movements advocating equality have increased national attention to issues of exclusion, inclusion, and multiculturalism within communities. As a result, studying the nature of communitieshow the term "community" might be defined, who belongs to a given group or social structure, who does not belong, and whyhas become increasingly important. American artists have responded by exploring these sites of social, political, and personal change in their works. Separation Anxieties: Representations of Separatist Communities in Late Twentieth Century Fiction and Film analyzes seven fictional works in which some group is philosophically and/or geographically isolatedsometimes by choice, sometimes notfrom mainstream America. Each chapter in this study focuses on works that represent and explore a different separatist iteration. Each work utilizes a different representation of Americas dominant community. Their respective separatist characters distance themselves from dominant American society and create a new community defined by a limited set of characteristicsgender and sexuality, religious beliefs, experience, race. Yet the complexities of American life continually creep into their separatist spheres, complicating the characters attempts to belong; these complications often lead to conflicts within, or even to the dissolution of, the separatist communities. In these works, accepting complexities and individual voices is represented as more conducive to communal survival than suppressing alternate ideas and/or dissent. Studying these texts leads to a reconsideration of traditional American myththe "Union," equality, inalienable rights, the various freedoms that America is supposed to embodyand to a reexamination of why those myths might be rejected, of what kinds of communities might be formed, and of how those communities might succeed and fail. Separation Anxieties is an attempt to engage with and understand narrative constructions and, through them, the real-life ideals, communities, and people recognizable in the representation.

“Solitary Blessings: Solitude in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, and Kate Chopin” examines a construction of solitude in which nature is alien and perilous, the self confronts rejection and death, the subject is subordinated to an unknown, and the revealed truth is experienced as both gift and curse. Arising out of fictional portraits of people under duress, this interpretation counters a more dominant construction in American literature, enunciated by Edwards, Emerson, and Thoreau, that shows solitude as composed and calming, subordinating nature to mind, and revealing an underlying truth in presentable form. Solitude has been equated with privation and exile since antiquity; the Christian era added a contrasting context of interior communion with God. Romanticism revived and secularized both connotations, mixing the joy of inner communion with the potential for dark, destructive discoveries. Further analysis of solitude in this study employs concepts from authors Virginia Woolf and Albert Camus, cultural theorist Victor Turner, philosopher Gaston Bachelard, psychoanalyst Anthony Storr, and composition theorist Linda Brodkey. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne balances the sympathetic portrayal of Hester Prynne with her presentation by a narrator respectful, even fearful, of Puritan authority, thereby keeping the experience of rejection and privation active in constructing the meaning of her experience. Hester’s solitude leads her through self-condemnation and rebellion to a clear-sighted sympathy and an alternative authority of her own. Melville’s characters confront solitude radically. Bartleby seems to possess the hard-won wisdom of solitude already in an absolute form, and the lawyer-narrator must come to terms with it. Pip’s episode in Moby-Dick presents the encounter with solitude at its most condensed: forced into an extreme, inexplicable confrontation with nature and death, stripped of sanity, the sufferer of solitude achieves a God-like wisdom of indifference. Edna Pontellier’s quest for solitude in Chopin’s The Awakening causes her to withdraw gradually from everything including herself as she becomes the poet-thinker alone. She takes charge of the process of self-discovery in solitude, outlining a path to autonomy, but her quest for a truth of the self without limits leads to the ultimate limit of death.

The Iconography of Nationalism: Icons, Popular Culture, and American Nationalism develops a model of cultural icons, defining icons as highly visible, culturally variable, and overdetermined auratic images. Situating icons within the context of mass reproduction technologies and American nationalism, this study seeks to demystify the simple images presented by infantile, national, and scapegoat icons in literature, film, and political rhetoric. This dissertation argues that icons participate in the American nationalist project by channeling citizens political and patriotic feelings through seemingly simple images. While acknowledging that icons are necessary to construct what Benedict Anderson calls the imagined community of the nation, this study complicates a quick and easy reading of an icons manifest content and uses narrative to reveal the latent content in images like Marilyn Monroe, Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley, Pocahontas, Uncle Sam, Big Brother, and Adolf Hitler.

Domesticity has endured as a facet of everyday life in the late twentieth century and beyond, despite cultural acceptance of feminist beliefs and ideals which encourage womens movement away from the private sphere of the home. A tumultuous and remarkable cultural transformation has marked the four decades since the publication of Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique, a key text of early second-wave feminism. Equality and choice seem viable and attainable, yet many women today feel overwhelmed by responsibilities and the pressure to live up to the idealization of motherhood. Domesticity can be used as a tool of oppression, against which feminisms may provide useful forms of resistance; but feminisms and domesticity can also function in concert, which can strengthen their potential to transform individual womens lives and cultural attitudes about women. Interior Revolutions: Doing Domesticity, Advocating Feminism in Contemporary American Fiction examines how various late twentieth century writers represent this complex relationship and reveals domesticitys potential as a site of transformative feminist discourse and praxis. Through a third-wave, feminist poststructuralist lens I analyze nine contemporary works of fiction from a variety of genres and one key feminist text, The Feminine Mystique, in order to reconsider the scope of American domestic fiction. Interior Revolutions illustrates how advocating feminism is a useful means of personal and political transformation for characters, readers, and American women. Representations of domesticity convey ways that our culture perceives women and their relationship to domestic space; such representations may in turn influence how women see their own relationship to domestic spaces and responsibilities. Engaging with these representations can spur women to reconsider and revise their conceptions of the ways that feminism and domesticity function in their own lives, potentially prompting them to advocate feminism. Interior Revolutions examines texts and discourses about feminisms, domesticity, and the meaningful connections between these concepts.

Emma Baronne is mourning her lifelong dream of losing her teeth. When her company folds and her on-again-off-again boyfriend gets engaged to another woman, Emma wants to make a fort in the living room and never come out. But, she soon realizes with the help of her quirky Catholic family and a coven of French Quarter cat ladies puberty is often easier the second time around.

This project addresses the narrative voice(s) in Flannery OConnors short stories, particularly in relation to her conception of art. OConnor critics often polarize the cultural and religious worth of her stories. As a Catholic, OConnor was convinced that the the ultimate reality is the Incarnation (HB 92). As an artist, OConnor believed that fiction should begin with a writers attention to the natural world as she comprehends it through the senses. It is no wonder, then, that her fiction lends itself well to critics interested in both her theology and her presentation of issues of race, class, and gender. My project describes how OConnors use of free indirect discourse, a narrative mode that blends third and first person narrative elements, positions her theology within her culture especially in the short story form. While many OConnor critics address issues of narrative voice, few have explored OConnors use of free indirect discourse, a characteristic feature of her stories. Through free indirect discourse, OConnor presents third person stories through a single characters perspective, a perspective that proves insufficient by the storys epiphanic end. That characters perspective, rooted in OConnors observations of a racially charged Southern climate in the mid-twentieth century, speaks to his cultural situation. Because OConnor positions the perspectives of her characters within a larger framework that questions their validity, she draws on her characters cultural situations to reveal human limitation and disconnectedness, both important elements of her theology. My project shifts its focus to race to emphasize the extent to which OConnor is drawing on her culture. Ultimately, OConnors stories, when analyzed through their use of free indirect discourse, answer how manners reveal mystery, how culture informs theology, and finally, how we might investigate OConnors stories, mindful of both their religious and cultural impact.

Although Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad are generally regarded as sea writers, both wrote numerous works concerned primarily with events on land. But critical approaches to both writers display a tendency to prioritize one set of environments. A result of such approaches is to overlook the manner in which Melville and Conrad explore the relationship between land and sea. This paper argues that one way to analyze how both writers examine that relationship is by locating it within the space of the modern world-system. Immanuel Wallerstein defines the modern world-system as the capitalist world-economy that qualifies as the only historical system on the globe--a role it has occupied since the sixteenth century. Thus, the modern world-system provides a global frame within which to position Melville and Conrad. Works such as Melvilles MARDI (1849) and Conrads NOSTROMO (1904) provide a unique approach to the world-system by employing a distinct process of spatial exploration as a means of examining geographic areas of the world that are at least partially imaginary. In the end, both Melville and Conrad are not merely sea writers, but rather world-system writers.