<p> This collection of poems explores the emergence of raw reality through a veil of existential questioning. The poems posit existential questions as logical alienation from material reality, and to brave mundane interactions, without a blanket of ideals, sharpens the edges of social interactions. The scope of these poems&rsquo; exploration resides in discovering a balance between illusory ideals and the sharp edges of reality.</p><p> Each piece&rsquo;s perspective focuses closely on raw events, but balances the potential violence of existence with poetics. The images avoid mediation of behavior by common courtesy. Instead they reimagine stark reality as beautiful in the way the improbable is beautiful.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines four utopian novels written by women: Sarah Scott&rsquo;s <i>Millenium Hall,</i> Mary Griffith&rsquo;s <i> Three Hundred Years Hence,</i> Harriet Beecher Stowe&rsquo;s <i> The Minister&rsquo;s Wooing,</i> and Charlotte Perkins Gilman&rsquo;s <i> Moving the Mountain.</i> The works cover a 150-year span and yet suggest some commonalities that occur when women writers create utopian visions. In each work, improved marriages become a metaphor for the larger utopian communities, and each text expands women&rsquo;s places in traditional married life. The writers attempt to create an environment that improves lived experiences, especially for women and children, and each work suggests that marriage experiences and marriage options can improve for women.</p><p> The first chapter examines Sarah Scott&rsquo;s <i>Millenium Hall, </i> a utopian vision set in an eighteenth-century English country house. Her vision creates a secluded space where women find protection from patriarchal abuses; however, a major goal of the community is to train young women for marriage. The inclusion of the founders&rsquo; biographical vignettes shows the tension between the cloistered environment and the larger, contemporary community.</p><p> Chapters Two, Three, and Four consider utopian novels written by American writers. Each text is written on the cusp of a national calamity: the financial panic of 1837, the Civil War (1861-1865), and World War I (1914-1918). In the years leading up to these national tragedies, the three writers create hopeful utopias on American soil. Griffith&rsquo;s work is the first known utopian novel written by an American woman. In it, she creates a futuristic space where women have solved many problems facing 1830&rsquo;s women and families and women have gained equality with men. In Stowe&rsquo;s utopia, women feminize religion and take on spiritual leadership roles within the domestic sphere, and former slaves live within the utopian community. Stowe&rsquo;s work demonstrates the competence and superiority of women in roles traditionally reserved for males. Gilman&rsquo;s work is a secular piece that grapples with utopia in an urban setting with females serving in leadership roles. Her text solves many social problems facing early twentieth-century America. Thus, each text radically expands contemporary marital opportunities for women. </p>

This is the first study that examines the concept of autobiography in Walter Pater's works using ecriture feminine. Ecriture feminine serves as a critical model that interrogates the semiotics behind Pater's strategy in the composition of his oeuvre. The study goes beyond the scope of traditional scholarship by reading Pater's texts not oniy as thematic expressions of his artistic ability, but also by uncovering his hidden political agenda by examining the language of the texts against the grain of his cultural milieu. By positing a speaking subject at the intersection of language and text, this study reveals how Pater uses intertextuality to portray his marginalization from the intellectual and cultural community of his time. This study focuses mainly upon "Diaphaneite," Gaston de Latour, Imaginary Portraits, and his letters. The validity of the study clearly lies in its systematic inquiry of the concept of a gendered speaking subject in Pater's texts, particularly one that is structured both rhetorically and semiotically through the typical Victorian metaphor of crisis yet enunciates a radical response to Victorian ideology.

The study takes the measure to which "self" and "self-representation" do not coincide in autobiography. Each of the writers in this study--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and Henry James--writes an autobiography that consciously divides the writing-self from the written-self. Each does this at least in part as a result of his discomfort with the patriarchal culture of nineteenth-century America. Never fitting the normative models of male action in the areas of commerce and politics, each uses his autobiographical writing to construct himself along the model of the "other." This gesture requires presenting the self as a cultural construct, fabricated in a language that is always already alienated from the writing subject. As such, the signifiers of personal and social identity are manipulable in a pervasive rhetoric of subjectivity, a rhetoric supremely adapted to the literary enterprise of autobiography. In "The Custom-House," Hawthorne insists on the separateness of the sign of the self from the signified. This separateness permits the author a dilatory space which keeps him unreadable even while being read, a gesture he reproduces in The Scarlet Letter, which is read as a fictional extention of the same rhetoric of illegibility that he presents in the autobiographical preface. In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams presents a self which figuratively corresponds to a text. The "self" is a palimpsest of all the influences that have been inscribed on it, and the job of the autobiographer is to edit that palimpsest into a self/story. Fashioning a self, therefore, is consubstantial with fashioning a book, and the two activities coincide in the autobiography. Notes of a Son and Brother shows James purporting a complementary relationship between reader and writer, whereby a reader lives in and completes the life of a writer. In the memoir, James's commemorative task as reader of the family's letters allows him to appropriate the historical personages through the acquisition of their writing. In this way, autobiography (both the activity and the product) and the self are no longer supplemental to others but originary and self-realizing.

This dissertation is a postmodern reading on some feminist and deconstructive critical theoretical projects as intended to read contemporary Spanish American narrative and poetic texts. The purpose is to describe the circumstances and the consequences of the interrelationship among those three instances: our reading/writing practice, some feminist and deconstructive critical strategies, and some Spanish American texts. The particular contribution of this study is to have textualized an on-going process of renegotiation of the social-textual meaning. Within this process we dismantle the cartesian notion of a coherent, homogeneous and universal textual object and reader subject engaged in a reciprocal and exclusively bilateral relationship. The first chapter describes, simultaneously, the discursive condition of any literary critical theoretical knowledge as a pre-existent conditioning performed by political-epistemological modi operandi and by contextual paradigms, and the way by which these elements have affected the general direction of the critical strategies of some positivist, stylistics, Russian formalist, and marxist theoretical texts. The second chapter discusses the political interpenetration of those conditioning elements with the society in which they occur as social-texts. Within the discussion we renegotiate the terms of our own reading practice, and at the same time we read some feminist texts, dismantling the notions of a logically coherent and apolitical textual semantic and decodifying reading. The third chapter describes the process of metadiscursiveness of the spatial and temporal intentionalities on controlling the social-textual meaning. Simultaneously, we read the critical strategies of some deconstructive projects. The fourth chapter dismantles the 'modern' condition of the application of critical strategies on (Spanish American) texts. We textualize the political tension among our reading practice, the feminist and deconstructive critical strategies, and the Spanish American texts.

The importance of the act of reading is one of Miguel de Cervantes's central concerns in Don Quijote de la Mancha. The Spanish author recognizes the importance of the reader and the role that he or she plays in the creation of the literary text. The departure point of the novel is based upon the imaginative encounters between chivalric texts and the mind of an obsessed reader--Don Quijote, himself. Don Quijote, however, is not only a book about an aged madman, it is also a book in which a legion of readers and aspiring writers dwell, and whose background knowledge at times clashes and at other times merges with the knight errant's to create a vivid theatrical atmosphere. This dissertation, The Quest for Meaning in Don Quijote de la Mancha, applies reader-centered theories, in particular schema theory, in order to analyse Cervantes's inclusion of characters who are knowledgeable about the chivalresque and how this affects our own quest for meaning. In reading the novel, it becomes easy to observe that the characters, like ourselves, struggle to create meaning out of their encounters with Don Quijote and the literary world that he represents. This study examines the literary codes that inscribe the characters within the system of Don Quijote de la Mancha. It also examines how the inscribed characters, readers and the most significant non-readers, contribute to the readability of the novel. In addition, it observes the codes and conventions, whether aesthetic or cultural, that the characters reveal to us, the external readers, which facilitate, or perhaps complicate, our making sense of Don Quijote. Among the central topics explored are: Don Quijote's chivalric framework and how he employs it to make the world outside of his library walls seem chivalric; Sancho Panza's acquisition of a chivalric framework which helps him to provide meaning to his adventures; how the knight errant and his squire develop the illusion of mastery in their professions; the secondary characters' employment of their background knowledge as readers in their quest to extract meaning from their encounters with Don Quijote; the characters as writers, themselves; and, finally, the texts which Don Quijote de la Mancha incorporates into itself, making them a part of its repertoire, and how this further complicates the creation of meaning for us, the external readers.

Kate Wake is a fictional narrative about two women, one contemporary (Katie) and one historical (Kate Wake). The multi-genre, poetic account also delves into the history of psychiatric health practices on the Canadian prairies. Kate Wake is loosely guided by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I understand this myth as a working-through of loss by an individual compelled to return to the original scene (of loss), a sort of underworld ruled by sleep, memory and the unconscious. Doing so is risky, but may also result in a movement towards recovery, reparation and renewal: even if uncertain, a future. Drawing on lexicons of music, visual art, poetry and psychoanalysis, Kate Wake develops themes of loss, hope and possibility as they might be found in the struggle of making a work of art. / February 2012

<p> Flann O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s novel, <i>The Third Policeman </i>, consists of many seemingly unrealistic events, thus sharing similarities with the fantastic piece, <i>Alice&rsquo;s Adventures in Wonderland. </i> The events and characters within O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s storyline obtain no source of reason, leading to another wonderland. However, if particular components of the novel are studied further, and in relation to the aftereffects of trauma, O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s work is more realistic and logical than what is fantastically portrayed on the text&rsquo;s surface.</p>

Literary Violence in the Age of Depression explores violence in contemporary literature and popular culture by evaluating the decline of social bonds in American society and the heightening of Mertonian strain that developed in the wake of consumer culture. The influence of consumerism has given rise to what many scholars deem an age of narcissism and depression. The ideology of the American Dream incites intense feelings of externality and individualism, and the demands of work and consumerism ultimately erode social bonds leading to greater rates of isolation and dejection. Accordingly, much of the violence in American society can be attributed to increasing rates of social strain and the decline of social bonding—i.e. social strain exacerbates feelings of shame while the decrease of the social bond diminishes feelings of connection and love. This is evinced through contemporary literature and popular culture. Rather than simply serving as a dismal depiction of America’s underground drug culture, for example, Selby employs heroin addiction throughout Requiem for a Dream as a symbol for a capitalist ethos that incites social strain and dismantles social bonds. In the epilogue of Prozac Nation, Wurtzel demonstrates that her controversial book is not simply the narcissistic rantings of a young woman battling depression but, more significantly, provides an indictment concerning the current structure of feeling in an American society that has left so many of its citizens cynical, anxious, and miserable. Recent romantic comedies delineate an ambivalent view of love, often reflecting the emergence of a hookup culture, and depict traditional relationships as potentially threatening to the individual; while many remain hopeful of love American’s despondently navigate the hookup culture which typically leads to higher rates of depression. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl elucidates the effects patriarchal violence extolled by the consumer culture has on the female psyche, and, presents Amy’s deviant actions as a response to a social structure that reinforces gendered illusions of self-actualization and allows male entitlement to remain unchallenged. By focusing the plot of Breaking Bad on Walter’s impeded pursuit of financial security, Vince Gilligan presents his decision to cook methamphetamine as the product of social strain. Socialized to strive for the symbols that equate wealth and status in American society but unable to achieve them through conventional channels, Walter turns to crime as an avenue for obtaining the financial stability he so greatly desires. Strain theory likewise aids in interpreting the Hobbesian dystopia Rockstar Games’ presents as American life in GTA IV, and provides a method for explicating Bellic’s motivations for criminal innovation: GTA IV justifies Bellic’s unlawful actions by advocating the necessity of material goods within the game’s plot and hypermediated interface by romanticizing lawlessness rather than encouraging the player’s conformity to societal norms. The American rampage violence narrative, popularized following the aftermath of Columbine, focuses on the shooter’s internalization of social strain due to his inability to form social bonds within their schools and communities by presenting the killer as a psychopath in the vein of Eric Harris or a misunderstood outcast much like Dylan Klebold. Finally, the writers of Glee argue that social boding allows socially strained adolescents to feel connected to society and find a positive outlet for overcoming social strain in a negative school environment. Such literature demonstrates that the elevation of strain and shame produced by the current age of depression, criminological speaking, is an impetuous for violent behavior that America unfortunately observes on a consistent basis. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 17, 2018. / Consumer Culture, Contemporary American Literature, Depression, Social Bonding, Social Strain, Violence / Includes bibliographical references. / Leigh Edwards, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jenifer Proffitt, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Trinyan Mariano, Committee Member.

During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English commonwealth was caught between competing concepts of the political. England's political culture had traditionally combined monarchy with local autonomy, office-holding, and a republican ethos that understood politics in terms of dynamic individual action and potentiality. In the Renaissance, however, this plural and personalized political paradigm was increasingly at odds with the centralizing tendencies of the Tudor-Stuart monarchs. The tensions that resulted led to both real-world tumults (the Northern Rebellion of 1569, Essex Revolt of 1601, the Civil Wars of 1642-51) and more subtle expressions of political pessimism and anxiety across England's literary and cultural discourses. But this same period also saw a sudden surge of interest in heroism. In a moment when the political impotence of individual action was widely felt, many of England's most prominent writers turned to heroic fictions that imagined personal potential triumphing over constituted political authority. Impossible Heroes argues that we can understand this paradox only if we recognize that heroism functioned in early modern England as a complex political fantasy, one that tried to suture symbolically the widening rift between individual action and the increasing abstraction and alienation of state power. This political function is apparent across early modern English literature, from Spenser's Faerie Queene to Davenant's Gondibert and Dryden's heroic tragedies. But while these writers (and others) use heroism to reconcile the individual to the political totality of the state, Impossible Heroes focuses on four writers--Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, and William Shakespeare--who deploy heroism to craft a different political fantasy. All these writers worked during the final years of Elizabeth's reign and the early years of James I's, anxious decades when royal authoritarianism went hand-in-hand with a widespread sense of political alienation. But rather than using heroism to alleviate this alienation, they emphasized the growing incompatibility between a dynamic, action-oriented experience of political life and institutional situations that conspired (as the Earl of Essex put it) to "suppress all noble, virtuous, and heroical spirits." Sidney, Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare portray heroism as impossible in practice. But out of this practical impossibility, their work posits heroism's potential as a utopian poetic and political fantasy of individual action.