This study explores the work of Samuel Beckett through the lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's materialist philosophy. More specifically, it chases after what the French theorists refer to as the "new man" or the "man without qualities"—a stuttering, staggering creature whose language, movements, gestures, and thought confuse the organizations and institutions of the "molar world." Such a figure seeks refuge from the confines of capitalism, the oedipalized family, and other cultural systems that attempt to forge respectable citizens out of immanent bodies, molar men out of tramps. The "new man" appears in Beckett's first published novel, Murphy, and proceeds to traverse the terrain of his plays, short prose, and late texts. Significantly, Beckett often situates his stuttering figures in equally stuttering environments, revealing his ability to "carve a foreign language out of language" (as Deleuze and Guattari, following Proust, are fond of saying) and cause entire texts to shake the foundations of molarity. Like Kafka, Beckett thus demonstrates his capacity as a "minor" writer—that is, one who subjects not only his characters but his entire oeuvre to a "minor" treatment to oppose the onslaught of majoritarian ideals. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2005. / January 4, 2005. / Man Without Qualities, De-Oedipalization, Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze, Stuttering / Includes bibliographical references. / S. E. Gontarski, Professor Directing Dissertation; Mary Karen Dahl, Outside Committee Member; Karen Laughlin, Committee Member; Fred L. Standley, Committee Member.

The third quiet revolution to which my title refers is occurring now. In both literature and history, important changes are taking place, with more and more scholars seriously questioning the methods of each discipline, the validity ofthe disciplinary boundaries institutionalized by our universities, the texts (in a broad as well as narrow sense) typically studied, and the ideologies embedded within our various scholarly enterprises. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word The quotation from Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word still rings true after 17 years, as the revolution in academia she describes continues to take place. Scholars are redrawing or simply omitting boundaries, including those of nations and cultures, as well as of forms of literature. For this reason, it is time to consider how, for too long, scholars have remained quarantined within the era in which they have developed their expertise, and that narrowness has hurt literary studies. The following thesis includes a discussion of this very topic, and then sets out to demonstrate by discussing the difficult topic of origins. Where does a literary form or genre 'originate?' Is it an author, a place, an era? I contend that it is all three and neither, and no era may lay claim to any distinct form. Since this is true, compartmentalizing English departments into specialties of eras and forms with such little communication does not allow for the more complex readings necessary for understanding. This complexity of origins is demonstrated thereafter with a discussion of captivity narratives, as they have lately been theorized to be the origins of the English novel. By complicating the history of the captivity narratives as a form, and by tracking some of the influences on the form as a whole, this thesis shows that the captivity narrative as a form also lacks a true origin. Why do we begin to separate history into eras, literature into forms, and therefore, compartmentalize ourselves into titles such as "Early Americanist?" Why do so few Early Americanists attend Renaissance conferences, for example? Reaching as far out and beyond as an MA thesis will allow, my project interrogates the captivity narrative in a transatlantic context by mapping out influences and political agendas, and by breaking the divide between Early America and the Renaissance. An example of surprising information I have found by do so is that the narratives written in the English language have been influenced by Arabic culture as early as Medieval times. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2003. / September 19, 2003. / Renaissance Captivity, Ottoman Empire, Romans / Includes bibliographical references. / Dennis Moore, Professor Directing Thesis; Daniel Vitkus, Committee Member; Christopher Shinn, Committee Member.

This paper explores the transition of Margery Kempe from a married laywoman to celibate mystic in The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery grapples with three very different and distinct challenges in the course of finding her spiritual niche in the patriarchal-dominated medieval Church. Margery must first deal with overcoming the Church's view that her body was a site of sinfulness and ontological monstrosity. She then chooses to seek the aid of her spiritual predecessors and discover where she fits into the tradition of female mystics. Finally, she must come to terms with the fact that due to the fact that she was functionally illiterate, she must filter her biography through the hand of a scribe. Throughout all of her experiences, she constantly seeks validation from the male clergy, her spiritual foremothers, and other members of society. However, to alleviate her fears and anxieties, Margery must go within herself, get her narrative written and carve her own space within the Catholic Church. By doing this, she effectively makes her place within the Church, the literary canon, and creates the first autobiography in the English language. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2005. / June 29, 2005. / Female Mysticism, Religion, Gender Studies / Includes bibliographical references. / Nancy Warren, Professor Directing Thesis; David F. Johnson, Committee Member; Eugene Crook, Committee Member.

Harold Bloom has insisted that during the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare invented the human. In tortured characters like Hamlet and King Lear, we find the definition of humanity. Now, if being human means that we all must wax noble and operate within a universe of types and extremities, fitting into an age-old ideal and perpetually soliloquizing in angst about actualizing this ideal, then Shakespeare did indeed imbue life into man. But if being human means living in a material world, grappling with its real circumstances, and being true to one's own personality, preferences, and aspirations, then this line of thought must be reexamined. A contemporary playwright to Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton does not presume to define the human but rather explores humanity in an imitative form. Focusing on Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Middleton's The Lady's Tragedy; The Roaring Girl; No Wit, No Help like a Woman's; and The Changeling, this paper demonstrates that Middleton breaks away from the school of thought in which Shakespeare operates and provides his audience with a more complex, more inclusive, and—in many ways—more admirable depiction of life. In this paper, I intend to show that the plays of Thomas Middleton are a decidedly more "ideal" source for understanding what it means to be human than those of William Shakespeare. I pay particular attention to how Middleton represents women and how he plays with (and thus overturns) the ideological binaries of his day. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2007. / March 28, 2007. / No Help Like a Woman's, Titus Andronicus, Marriage, Theatricality, No Wit, Feminism, Rape, Early modern, English, Shakespeare, Middleton, Lucrece, The Changeling, The Lady's Tragedy, The Second Maiden's Tragedy, The Roaring Girl / Includes bibliographical references. / Celia R. Daileader, Professor Directing Thesis; Gary Taylor, Committee Member; Nancy Bradley Warren, Committee Member.

Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake is the fictional story of John Smith--an ex-cook depressed with the superficiality of his ninety-hour-per-week job managing a high-end cigar bar and disenchanted with what he thought would be a perfect romance--who flees Denver hoping to reach the comfort of his sister's home and tiny cafe on the Gulf. He's hit with a snowstorm in the middle of the night, and he feels sorry for and picks up Ed MacGuffin, a hitchhiking murderer on the lam who is in search of a recipe for the perfect blueberry pancake. John's pickup breaks down in the snowstorm and leaves the two on foot, and John and Ed are thrown into a bizarre and sometimes violent trek across half the country. When they meet Sam, a moving-truck driver, and Gavin, Sam's loader, John begins to fall in love with Sam, and Sam's sexual ambiguity forces John to try to come to terms with himself and his pop-culture-driven expectations. All along the way, John learns about Ed, Sam, himself, and the dangers of believing anything can be perfect. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2006. / November 6, 2006. / blueberry, pancake / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suárez, Professor Directing Thesis; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

For me, there has always been a wolf at the edge of the woods, watching and waiting. My sister often cried wolf, trying to shape reality into words that fit her emotional desperation. The rest of my family simply agreed not to speak of the wolf. It is not that we believe it will go away if we don't address it; speaking of the wolf simply seemed somehow weak, definitely futile, and painfully self-indulgent. The wolf is sometimes hunger, sometimes depression, sometimes alcoholism, sometimes loneliness or fear or anger or the past or the present or the future, or anything at all that reduces us to less than the fragile concept of ourselves that we had each glued together, so alone and so patiently, each time it was smashed. But there is always a wolf, always watching. My family tried to starve the wolf by denying it language, but that only served to make it more cunning and more fierce. Poetry has helped me to gaze back at the wolf and see myself and the world in her. The wolf at the edge of the woods is what Lorca called duende, the shadow of death that reminds me that I am alive. The wolf is our escort into the woods. It is silence but it is also language itself. The wolf watches, not just me or my family, but everyone. It protects and nurtures us, but stalks us too. Words can devour us. It is through this devouring, this annihilation, that we can be reborn. We carry words around inside our heads and mouths like we own them; we have them at our fingertips like they are dogs on leashes. But it is words that make us kneel and beg. And they can blow our houses down. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2003. / May 16, 2003. / Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Thesis; Barbara Hamby, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Hunt Hawkins, Committee Member.

In this thesis, I explore the relationship between the silk industry and England's search for a national identity as seen through the theater of 1590-1630. I have decided to focus on these years because of the exponential growth in the number of people who worked in London with foreign raw silk; in doing so, I have chosen plays which show the progression of the power of silk—from initially creating conflicting desires both to reject all things foreign and yet to emulate foreign fashions to eventually uniting the country through the quest to form England's own silk industry and in turn lay the foundation for an empire. In this project, I interrogate the relationship between silk and the formation of a national identity for England through the dramas of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and James Shirley. In Middleton's Michaelmas Term I focus on class anxieties and the manner in which the play reflects the decline of the landed gentry and the rise of the merchant class. Satin, a type of silk, plays a large part throughout the play; it in fact creates a problem in the transmission of identity as certain characters forget their original stations and ancestry. In Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday I try to demonstrate how this play promotes English nationalism by subordinating the foreign and advocating unity amongst the peoples of England regardless of social status. Theatergoers are given the chance to see what England as a nation is capable of if it bands together against the (idea of the) foreign. The formation of nationhood centers around trade in luxury items and matters of apparel. In Shirley's The Triumph of Peace, the most expensive court masque ever staged, I explore the form of the court masque and show how Shirley's masque enables the lawyers of the Inns of Court to usurp the power of the monarchy through ostentatious display in the form of silks. The Inns of Court use the medium of luxury as a signal to the King that the throne could not rule without law. This project aims to demonstrate that silk becomes a tool for nation building for England. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2008. / December 13, 2007. / Luxury Consumption, Production, National Self-hood, Native, Mimicry, Spectacle, Authority / Includes bibliographical references. / , ; Anne Coldiron, Committee Member; Daniel Vitkus, Committee Member.

Drawing upon the author's experiences of growing up white and gay in apartheid South Africa, this collection of personal essays explores themes of kitsch, displacement, love, sexuality, and forgiveness. A central question posed by the work is whether virtues such as love and forgiveness are worth the cost they frequently exact. These costs include, but are not limited to, denial of the self and individual perception in order to make possible a sense of profound union with other persons. In the end the dissertation concludes that it is best to accept a level of permanent and irrevocable yearning for connection and healing which human life will never entirely fulfill. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2005. / January 24, 2005. / Homosexuality, Apartheid, Kitsch, South Africa, Creative Nonfiction / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Jumonville, Outside Committee Member; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; Hunt Hawkins, Committee Member.

Jamaica Kincaid's semi-autobiographical novels give voice to the women of the British West Indies. Through her principal female characters within Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of my Mother, Kincaid explores the long-lasting effects slavery and colonialism have had on the psyche of the West Indian woman. Issues of patriarchy are combined with conflicting cultural perspectives to create heroines who cannot look forward without looking back. For these characters the past is ever present, and the struggle for identity is conflated with the struggle to separate themselves from their colonial pasts. The struggle for separation from the colonial past is symbolized by the heroines' struggles with their mothers, whom each woman has difficulty separating herself from. Sigmund Freud, in his quest to document female sexual development, concludes "normal" development occurs once the young female transfers her desire from the mother to the father. However, these strong mother-daughter bonds stem from a pre-verbal fixation on the part of the daughter for the mother that the young woman is unable to grow out of, much less transfer her affections to her father. Within Kincaid's three texts we discover heroines who persevere in their fixations for their mother well into young adulthood, generally lasting until puberty occurs, when these young women relocate their adoration into feelings of hate and betrayal for their mothers. The mothers and mother figures in these three texts are painted as all powerful, all knowing, and all encompassing in terms of their far-reaching impact on their daughters, similar to the deep-penetrating effects of slavery and colonialism on the islands of Dominica and Antigua. Kincaid's works have been analyzed from a psychological feminist point of view before, though the work of Sigmund Freud has never been used in this way to help trace the development of her female characters. It seems Kincaid's heroines present us with an Oedipus complex that has been turned on its head: her heroines express long-lasting desire for their mothers, while their fathers are relegated to the peripheries of their lives and affections. We never see evidence of the transferal of affection from mother to father; rather once puberty begins these women begin to resent the subservient positions of their mothers and find Oedipal replacements for their affections. These works trace the lives of the three heroines through their struggles with and alienation from their mothers, and the subsequent migrations these struggles lead to. Through the course of this paper I will trace the effects these Freudian pre-verbal fixations have had on Kincaid's heroines and their families, and how these relationships serve as metaphors for the greater West Indies and their struggle for freedom and independence from their sordid pasts. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2008. / August 8, 2008. / Mother-Daughter Relationships, Jamaica Kincaid / Includes bibliographical references. / Maxine Montgomery, Professor Directing Thesis; Dennis Moore, Committee Member; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member.

This dissertation presents evidence, using the vehicle of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophy, that Charles Dickens remained an optimist, contrary to critical opinion that claims he became a dark pessimist during the latter half of his life. Rousseau and Dickens shared a belief in the innate goodness of humankind and, if not in the perfectibility of humanity, at least in the redemption and possibility of betterment both of the individual, and through the individual, of society. Critical connections between the two writers are examined in Chapter 1: "A Review of the Literature." In one of his early discourses, The Origins of Inequality, Rousseau posits hypothetically that in the early stages of human development, the "natural man" existed in a state of peace and tranquillity; his identifying characteristics were self satisfaction (in Rousseau's terms, amour de soi), contentment with only the material goods necessary to sustain himself, genuineness, a self concept based on his own inner evaluative system, innocence (freedom from vice), and most notably, compassion for other human beings. When humans began to gather in groups and form societies, they evolved from natural men into "civilized men," thus developing pride (amour propre), a competitive nature, greed, pretension, a self concept determined by others, immoral and/or illegal behaviors, a lack of compassion. In the more mature writings of Rousseau he acknowledges that a return to nature is impossible, and that the only hope for the redemption of society is individual transformation, by which the individual retains or regains natural characteristics and exhibits them within the confines of society. The person who achieves this type of life is the "citizen" as presented in Rousseau's The Social Contract. While these are the works of Rousseau in which he presents the typology, he also portrays the same characteristics in Émile, Julie, and his first discourse. Evidence and illustrations of these types are presented in Chapter 2: "Rousseau's Philosophy: The Relevant Principles." In this study, characters in Dickens are measured by the sets of characteristics set forth by Rousseau. In each of the novels under discussion (Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend), at least one character represents each of the three types, natural man, civilized man, and citizen. One character per novel is presented in each of three chapters here (Chapter 3: "Dickens's Natural Man"; Chapter 4: "Dickens's Civilized Man"; and Chapter 5: "Dickens's Citizen"), with references to relevant others. For each character, evidence is presented to show that he or she displays all the characteristics of the particular type. In addition, in Chapter 6: "Geographical Significance: The Country vs. the City" the role of geography in the natural/civilized dichotomy is discussed. Rousseau believed that rural life (i.e., life in the country, away from the city and large numbers of people) is more conducive to one's remaining natural; city life, on the other hand, leads to corruption and the development of civilized characteristics, due to one's proximity to others. Dickens's novels contain a similar sentiment, although as both Dickens and Rousseau concluded, life in the country (in "nature") becomes less and less possible with the advance of civilization, so one's only choice is to become citizens, living naturally within the city. Taking into consideration the survival of natural characters throughout Dickens's literary corpus, as well as an increase in the number of redeemed characters (albeit in a civilized setting), conclusions are drawn that Dickens did not lose his optimism toward the end of his life; in fact, he presents the survival of natural goodness as possible in spite of the corruptive forces of civilization. Like Rousseau, Dickens ultimately reinforces not only humankind's innate goodness, but also its resilience and adaptability. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2009. / October 21, 2009. / Perfectibility, Natural Goodness, Natural Man, Rousseau, Dickens / Includes bibliographical references. / John Fenstermaker, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Jumonville, University Representative; Fred Standley, Committee Member; Eric Walker, Committee Member.