Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Sarah Piatt render the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere” ironically Unheimliche while simultaneously conveying it as the “home sweet home” the sentimental tradition prescribes it should be. These American women poets turn the domestic milieu into, as Paula Bennett phrases it, “the gothic mise en scene par excellence…the displacements, doublings, and anxieties characterizing gothic experience are the direct consequence of domestic ideology’s impact on the lives and psyches of ordinary bourgeois women (121-122).” Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath continue to represent the Unheimliche home in their poetry through the middle of the twentieth century, specifically by portraying the woman writer’s homebound experience as a fearful one; the materials of writing surrounding Plath’s and Sexton’s speakers encourage both creation and self-destruction. The speakers of Invisible Mink confront writing similarly in that the process of making a poem is couched in extreme anxiety. Poetic creation in my collection is explored via gothic conventions including the use of doubles, or poetic doppelgangers, as multiple speakers in poems. Recent poetry and criticism by Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Mary Ruefle, and Olena Kalytiak Davis navigate the space between “home” and “away” in terms of tensions between the “feminine” and the “masculine” and the “confessional” and the “experimental.” Innovations in form and content throughout Invisible Mink are encouraged by Hillman’s work with blank space on the page and Hejinian’s writings on the materiality of words and forms. The use of classic film as a guiding motif in Invisible Mink is particularly inspired by Ruefle’s erasures and Davis’ “samplings,” as termed by critic Ira Sadoff, of classical literary texts. Invisible Mink serves as an example of one woman artist’s “survival story” and is also, I hope, a testament to other women artists’ similar ordeals.

Abe Gaustad's first collection of stories, Welcome to Boomland, explores the lives of disparate characters longing for some escape. Whether a paraplegic blues aficionado or a boy who finds a strange object in the woods, they are each searching for a way out of their stagnation. Yet each character is trapped by their own unique circumstance: some of them by their mistakes, some by ruthless dictators, some by the very notion of death. As they search for their freedom, they find out new things about themselves and manage to wage quiet rebellions against those that would control them. In the end, they earn small victories, but noble ones.

With its focus on immigration to the United States and development of American identity, Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction eludes literary categorization. It engages with the various contexts of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and globalization, yet Mukherjee adamantly positions herself as an American author writing American literature. In this essay, I investigate the intersections between Mukherjee’s focus on the American character, culture, and people and developing theories and critical debates on globalization. Through Mukherjee’s works, we can see American identity in a state of flux, made possible by the immigrant and the relationships established between the transnational individual and America. Mukherjee’s immigrant characters challenge and expose American mythology from the American Dream of individual achievement to the canonical literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, rewriting them to show how foundational the immigrant is to American culture. I trace Mukherjee’s redefinition of the American character in and through three successive novels – Wife, Jasmine, and The Holder of the World. In Wife, Mukherjee challenges America’s adoption of multiculturalism because she considers it a means of essentializing ethnicity and both maintaining and enhancing difference. This multiculturalism, as part of America’s assumed principles of acceptance, alienates the protagonist Dimple from her immigrant community and the larger American culture, resulting in her violent attempts to force her Americanization. Jasmine continues to work against multiculturalism by explicitly inserting the immigrant into the American mythos, reshaping the Western literary canon to include the transnational individual and to assert the immigrant foundations of American ideology. Mukherjee expands her focus in Holder of the World as her protagonist Hannah travels to England, India, and the bourgeoning United States, rewriting The Scarlet Letter to suggest that globalizing forces have been present throughout American cultural history, not just at the end of the 20th century when critical debates began to flourish. Through analysis of these novels, I argue that Mukherjee’s reformulation of American character reasserts American ideals by including and developing with the rise of globalization theory.

In this paper, I will examine works of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers, three Southern women writers who wrote during the first half of the twentieth century. While these authors differ in a number of ways, each of them produced work that deals, often explicitly, with ideal Southern womanhood and the expectations this ideal places upon women. Additionally, each of these three authors uses the grotesque as a tool for examining ideal womanhood, most often represented through the ideal of the Southern Lady. This paper is concerned with analyzing the link between the grotesque and the ideal of the Southern Lady, specifically the ways in which O’Connor, Welty, and McCullers employ the grotesque as a tool for exposing the limiting and destructive nature of this ideal.

Throughout his career, Stephen King has created child protagonists and adults with a childlike acceptance of the world who represent “good.” These children and adults are able to observe and fight evil, especially supernatural evil, on a level that close-minded adults are unable to because of their imagination. At the same, King also has a history of adhering to traditional representations of sex in his work, presenting heteronormative relationships as good and transgressive sexualities as evil. Often, these child protagonists are faced with sexuality as a threatening, evil force. In The Shining, Danny Torrance undergoes a forced sexual awakening that aids him in defeating the Overlook Hotel; in ’Salem’s Lot, Mark Petrie is represented as a virginal hero who helps Ben Mears in defeating vampires, yet suffers as a result; in It, King aligns seven children’s journey to defeat evil with their literal sexual awakenings, but at the cost of his female characters. These novels represent a disconnect between what appear to be King’s purpose in sexual representation and what their message to the reader actually are, which is indicative of the underlying problems of his traditional, black-and-white attitude toward sexuality in his fiction.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a product of the era he was at his zenith: the roaring 1920s. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles, he was short on money and the audience for his novels and writing was waning. This work explores his time in L.A., his attitude toward cinema & the Hollywood system, and how he incorporated what he learned from screenwriting into The Last Tycoon, the unfinished novel that Fitzgerald aimed to revive his own career with.

With its focus on immigration to the United States and development of American identity, Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction eludes literary categorization. It engages with the various contexts of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and globalization, yet Mukherjee adamantly positions herself as an American author writing American literature. In this essay, I investigate the intersections between Mukherjee’s focus on the American character, culture, and people and developing theories and critical debates on globalization. Through Mukherjee’s works, we can see American identity in a state of flux, made possible by the immigrant and the relationships established between the transnational individual and America. Mukherjee’s immigrant characters challenge and expose American mythology from the American Dream of individual achievement to the canonical literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, rewriting them to show how foundational the immigrant is to American culture. I trace Mukherjee’s redefinition of the American character in and through three successive novels – Wife, Jasmine, and The Holder of the World. In Wife, Mukherjee challenges America’s adoption of multiculturalism because she considers it a means of essentializing ethnicity and both maintaining and enhancing difference. This multiculturalism, as part of America’s assumed principles of acceptance, alienates the protagonist Dimple from her immigrant community and the larger American culture, resulting in her violent attempts to force her Americanization. Jasmine continues to work against multiculturalism by explicitly inserting the immigrant into the American mythos, reshaping the Western literary canon to include the transnational individual and to assert the immigrant foundations of American ideology. Mukherjee expands her focus in Holder of the World as her protagonist Hannah travels to England, India, and the bourgeoning United States, rewriting The Scarlet Letter to suggest that globalizing forces have been present throughout American cultural history, not just at the end of the 20th century when critical debates began to flourish. Through analysis of these novels, I argue that Mukherjee’s reformulation of American character reasserts American ideals by including and developing with the rise of globalization theory.

This thesis uses literature, film, satire, poetry, and news rhetoric to explore the evolving face of gender in today’s society. It is framed by interviews with two women who are residents of the senior living community Pilgrim Place. Each interview brings up themes and feminist concerns that are explored in the essay that follows it. In putting together this work I interviewed the two Pilgrim Place women, Teresa and Anne Marie, and discussed with them their concerns about contemporary feminism and feminist activism differences between our generations. These concerns are distilled into a series of essays that compare themes and concerns shared by the two women with a work of literature or media that compliments and complicates relevant issues. Half of the interviews included are verbatim transcripts of what was said, the other half are works of oral historical fiction based on interviews and subsequent research into the historical events in question. This thesis engages with the question of who owns a movement and whether the recognition of (or refusal to recognize) a history does damage to the movement. This thesis brings into conversation contemporary and modern media to illustrate the changing world of feminism in a way that celebrates the past and anticipates the future.

This is a coming of age story about two very different boys – Jason, a Northerner who ends up stuck in a small Southern town and Billy, a Southern boy with an abusive father. The boys become friends and grow up learning the dark secrets that are allowed to fester in a tiny southern town ruled by the Good Ol’ Boy System of justice. The story chronicles how their shared experiences change them in ways they never imagined and ultimately destroys their friendship and their lives. Through a history of violence and prejudice, Billy and Jason learn who they really are and just how far they’re willing to go to get what they want. They discover the true meaning of strength and weakness and how to survive in a world where they don’t fit in. The story explores the issues of violence, drug abuse, and murder that often lie hidden beneath the façade of fanatic Christianity, propriety, and status in seemingly innocent, charming Southern towns.

Elder Olson has said that at the Biblical Tower of Babel the people did not begin to talk nonsense but only what seemed like nonsense. This paper concerns an intellectual tower where important debates are held, but unfortunately the language is not a universal one; therefor, because all too often terms have evolved without adequate definition, disagreement occurs where reconciliation appears impossible. The very title of this thesis could be misleading to the reader if he considers debate in its formal sense. What is here intended is the controversy in the efforts of respected scholars to understand and establish the nature of poetry, and for me it is also a personal debate as I follow their assumptions in order to make some judgments in the concluding chapter about their successes and limitations. The informality of the structure of the debate does not diminish the seriousness of its dialectic. To the contrary, the debate is very serious not only to those involved but to any person who concerns himself with the state of the literary arts in the modern world. The debate is among critics representing certain generally defined schools of criticism; however they are not primarily spokesman for a school: they are among the mainstays. Each represents high scholarship, and each is deserving of praise solely as an isolated critic – or a critic without a collective classification. At the same time they each acknowledge themselves to be members of their respective schools of criticism. The debate is not constructed on the basis of two teams, negative and affirmative, with two members for each side. Instead there will be three positions presented by four critics. The essence of the debate is their scholarly struggle to bring to the poetic arts the most responsible and valuable critical approach and their sincere disagreement among themselves as to what the nature of poetry is and how the critic should deal with its subject matter.