No description available.

This thesis explores the presence of the movement theories of Irmgard Bartenieff, Peggy Hackney, and Rudolf Von Laban in the following texts: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Linda Brent (1861), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). The terms and phrases of movement theory will be introduced to the contemporary critical discussion already surrounding the texts, both furthering and challenging existing arguments.

In this paper, Kait Spong examines alternative practices of mothering that are strategic nature, heavily analyzing Patricia Hill Collins’ concepts of “othermothering” and “preservative love” as applied to Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved and Harriet Jacob’s 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Using literary analysis as a vehicle, Spong then applies these West African notions of motherhood to a modern context by evaluating contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matter where black mothers have played a prominent role in making public statements against systemic issues such as police brutality, heightened surveillance, and the prison industrial complex.

This thesis explores the psycho-socio-cultural dynamics that surrounded black womanhood in antebellumGeorgia. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how slave narratives, testimonies, and interviews depicted the plight of enslaved black women through a womanist lens and second, to discover what political and socio-cultural constructions enabled the severe slave institution that was endemic toGeorgia. Womanist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and trauma theory are addressed in this study to focus on antebellum or pre-Civil WarGeorgia.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-181). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1999. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2836. Typescript. Abstract appears on leaf [ii]. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-67).

No description available.

No description available.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This essay explores a broad range of literary works that treat long-term grief as a natural response to the death of a child. Literary examples show gaps in the medical and social sciences’ considerations of grief, since these disciplines judge bereaved mothers’ grief as excessive or label it bereavement disorder. By contrast, authors who employ the ancient storyline of child death illuminate maternal grieving practices, which are commonly marked with a vigilance that expresses itself in wildness. Many of these authors treat grief as a forced pilgrimage, but question the possibility of returning to a previous state of psychological balance. Instead, the mothers in their stories and poems resist external pressure for closure and silence and favor lasting memory. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Emily Dickinson, in letters to bereaved mother Susan Gilbert Dickinson and in the poetry included in these letters, represent maternal child loss as compelling a movement into a new state and emphasize the lasting pain and disruption of this loss.

This thesis investigates the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in five of Sylvia Plath’s 1962 poems: “Berck-Plage”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103°”, and “Death & Co.”. Furthermore, it looks at how the biographical circumstances in which the poet found herself while writing the poems, may have influenced them. Drawing mainly on Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” and the 2003 The Uncanny by Nicholas Royle, this thesis examines a variety of elements in Plath’s poems including, but not limited to, the beach as a liminal space, aposiopesis as intellectual uncertainty and as an example of l’écriture féminine, thresholds in the form of windows, shoes, and locked boxes, severed limbs as examples of Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, Latin as a heimlich/unheimlich language, the uncanny effect of darkness, silence, and solitude, the double as a harbinger of death, the wish to both include and exclude the specter and that which is strange, and breathlessness and euphoria as manifestations of madness. Furthermore, it examines hitherto unexplored potential influences on Plath’s poetry, including but not limited to, the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thérèse of Lisieux, Franz Kafka, and Knut Hamsun. Because of the ambiguity of the concept of the uncanny, this thesis incorporates a host of material such as taped interviews conducted by Harriet Rosenstein, Subha Mukherji’s Thinking on Thresholds, Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves, and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In conclusion, this thesis argues that the uncanny is an instrumental key to the comprehension of Plath’s late poetry.