William Faulkner is famous for stating he agrees with Henri Bergson's optimistic philosophy of time, a philosophy that emphasizes human freedom and action precisely as they relate to time. However, many of Faulkner's characters are defined by their stagnant and lethargic personalities which cannot change; these characters are held immobile by an over – identification with the rich history of their mythic, southern past. This paper, through in depth explorations of Faulkner's masterpieces, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and The Fury seeks to consider human mythmaking as the key to understanding Faulkner's difficult works. This critical approach allows us to better understand these works as conflicts between diachronic (linear or "normal") time and synchronic time (mythological or circular) time or more simply conflicts between the brute, inexorable world of fact and the human, meaning making world that is often a specious undermining of reality and change.

Through the gossip and rumors in a small town in Minnesota, the townspeople discuss and react to the Levison family's claimed perfection.

ABSTRACT Charles W. Chesnutt captures the essence of the Post Civil War period and gives examples of the assimilation process for African Americans into dominant white culture. In doing so, he shows the resistance of the dominant culture as well as the resilience of the African American culture. It is his belief that through literature he could encourage moral reform and eliminate racial discrimination. As an African American author who could pass for white, he is able to share his own experiences and to develop black characters who are ambitious and intelligent. As a result, he leaves behind a legacy of great works that are both informative and entertaining.

This paper examines the feminist perspective in Didion’s collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Throughout the text, Didion looks closely at the West and the changing social climate which surrounds her. Her essays chronicle women struggling to find a balance between the domestic and independence promised by myth the West. I analyze how women are granted only limited participation within the American Dream because of the masculine power structures which dominate our society. As the values of the American Dream shift, the women that Didion depicts attempt to find identity and independence despite the restrictive forces around them.

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In the tradition of academic satire, Lady Lazarus is the fictional biography of the daughter of American rock musicians. In her late teens she rises to fame as confessional poet, who, despite only publishing one collection of poems during her brief life, becomes an overnight sensation. Author Andrew Altschul is satirizing academia’s need to be a part of popular culture and in doing so, privileges the ability to use controversy and conventional beauty to sell books as opposed to creating quality art. By focusing on how the author uses Hans Robert Jauss’ horizons of expectations, unreliable narrators, anecdotes in biography and the economics of fame as a deciding factor in academia, the author has created a dense and punitive opinion of academia’s inclusion of popular culture into its world.

The Restinga explores dysfunctional sexual relationships in the familiar context of a love triangle, but it is set in the exotic African landscape of pre-war colonial Angola in 1960, where the author spent her childhood. The Restinga evolved from a short story presented at a graduate fiction workshop led by Joseph and Amanda Boyden at the University of New Orleans’ Madrid campus in the summer of 2007. Research for this project included: Many interviews with the author’s parents Compilation and review of family home movies made at the time Interview with Richard J. Houk, author of the article: “The Hotel Terminus: A Farce without an Ending” (The Journal of African Travel-Writing, Number 1, September 1996 (pp. 42-51) Interview with Nancy Henderson-James, author of: “At Home Abroad: An American Girl in Africa” (http://nancyhendersonjames.com/) The Lover, a novel by Marguerite Duras, influenced the author in her writing of The Restinga. This ex-pat novel maps the sexual affair of a very young girl and a much older Chinese man in colonial Vietnam of the late 1920s. Both works look into the sexuality of a “tck” (third culture kid) in an exotic landscape.

Since the 1992 republication of On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, most academic work on Apess has focused on his Methodism, his Native American identity, or the intersection between these two parts of his life and work. Dr. Tim Fulford is the only scholar to have written about Apess and Romanticism. In his book Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756-1830, Fulford illustrates the elegiac modes often present in the work of Apess. This thesis will examine William Apess’ Son of the Forest as an expression of early nineteenth century American Romanticism from a post-colonial standpoint. Apess uses Romantic rhetoric to define Native American identity and through that identity, argue for Native American political agency.

Using concepts of cognitive evolutionary theory, the author explores how narrative storytelling manifests itself in Denis Johnson's novella Train Dreams. The novella form is also discussed, focusing on its manipulation of linear time, its naturalization of supernatural elements, and its deconstruction of dichotomous relationships. Utilizing the novella's distinct structural and thematic elements, Johnson's text shows the myth of American expansionism and industrial progress and that of Kootenai holism in collision, resulting in a narrative renegotiation that seeks to affirm coexistence and complexity.

There are many textual and thematic similarities between Dante’s Inferno and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. There are also significant textual similarities between the New Testament and McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God. Juxtaposing Outer Dark and Child of God to Inferno and the New Testament, respectively, suggests a common trope that redemption requires characters’ name and repent of sin.