In order to attempt an analysis of the success of the symbol and the method of achievement, it is necessary to understand the major intentions of Hawthorne's art and his concept of the symbol; the second chapter explains these theories and with this knowledge, the symbols selected were evaluated.

Concepts of reason and imagination and their expressions through literature

This thesis looks at how Wideman takes advantage of the associative function of metaphor, creating a vast network, or web, or interconnected images. In deviating from linguistic norms, and growing steadily from page to page, this web causes the novel to appear symbolic. It also appears to have a symbolic meaning of its own, possibly representing the intricate social and spiritual connections that comprise the novel's fictional community of Homewood.

“Beyond the Battlefield: Direct and Prosthetic Memory of the American War in Viet Nam” examines shifts in American, Viet Namese, and Philippine memorial, literary, and cinematic remembrance of the war through the cultural lenses of later wars: the Gulf War (1990-1991) and the “War on Terror” that began in 2001. As opposed to earlier portrayals of the American War in Viet Nam (1964-1975), turn-to-the-twenty-first-century representations engage in an ever-broadening collected cultural memory—a compilation of multifaceted, sometimes competing, individual and group memories—of the war. “Beyond the Battlefield” begins with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) because it serves as the impetus for active participation in the reception and creation of memory. It traces a multifaceted collected cultural memory pattern through the stages of recognition for servicewomen, American women, Viet Namese Women, and reconciliation between soldiers and civilians as well as between Americans and the Viet Namese—veterans and civilians alike. Ultimately, a collected cultural memory of the war encourages prosthetic memory—memories of the war acquired via mediated representation by those with no direct experience in or hereditary connection to the war. Prosthetic memory permits an ongoing memory of the war that refuses to relegate the war to the forgotten past.

In this work, I explore how African American authors and texts have contributed to or confronted what Toni Morrison calls “Africanism” in Playing in the Dark. I argue that the construction of blackness by non-black people and its consequent racial stigma, imbuing skin color with mental and physical inferiority, functions in an intraracial context to obscure the solidarity of all African Americans irrespective of their socioeconomic status. My work spans the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, investigating representations of the middle class who seek to deny or ignore the impact that a Eurocentric value system has on their lives and the lives of the black majority. These texts also illustrate the struggle to reconcile social mobility and economic progress with the persistence of the cultural trauma of slavery and racial stigma, as well as the struggle between exclusionary claims of African American authenticity and more complicated middle-class and black majority constructions of African American identity. I correct claims that the tension between African American authenticity and educational and economic progress is a new phenomenon, demonstrating that this tension extends back to the beginning of the twentieth century and arguably even to the period of Reconstruction. My dissertation also reveals the mythical nature of the postracial ideal, suggesting that contemporary African American investment in postracial ideology is the product of a desire to reflect and obtain an elusive “Americanism” that has never been unreservedly available to African Americans.

This study attempts to establish the cross-currents of African American literary traditions and an emerging African American graphic novel aesthetic. A close analysis of the visuality foreground in the visual/textual space of the graphic novel will provide insight into how the form of the graphic novel reconciles and revises more traditional textual literary elements. Such motifs and tropes as the visuality of slave portraiture, Gates’ trope of the talking book, and the paradox of invisibility/visibility within African American creative registers will be used to highlight the creative tradition inaugurated by the African American graphic novel. Each of these elements generally associated with African American textual production, become central thematic concerns with the graphic work of artists such as Ho Che Anderson, Kyle Baker, Dwayne McDuffie, Roland Laird, Taneshia Laird, and Elihu Bey. From the historical biography of Anderson’s King and Baker’s Nat Turner, to the broad history of Laird, Laird, and Bey’s Still I Rise, and finally within the traditional superhero graphic novel of Dwayne McDuffie’s Icon, a definite tradition of African American graphic novels emerge. Understanding how these graphic novels associate themselves with, and ultimately revise, the literary aesthetics of African American texts makes possible the fuller examination of African American graphic novels as a specialized literary tradition.

In the novel, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe examines a wide range of complex issues. Defoe takes the typical adventure theme and transforms it into a thought-provoking reflection of many issues involving society. A blending of economic and religious issues is created by first focusing on economy, then bringing the issue of religion in, and finally allowing for the portrayal of the interpenetration between each. Defoe proves that it is possible to live by economic practices and monetary values while still maintaining a good, moral character. The emphasis on economic issues is extremely apparent, as Defoe calls into question the concept of money and its value, as well as its place in society. Crusoe is first portrayed as a man defined by money and ruled by economic principles. Even when removed from society, he is impelled to practice many economic conventions, such as investment, moderation and the idea of profit. Defoe creates Crusoe to be so greatly influenced by money and the economy in the beginning so as to better emphasize the intertwining of his economic side with his religious side. The Christian values and morals of Crusoe dominate the latter part of the novel. He rediscovers the Bible and its teachings and learns the importance of repentance and giving thanks. The provocative progression in unveiling the many layers of Crusoe allows for the reader to see that the man they thought to be defined by money is rather a man trying to live by the Word of God.

This is a collection of short stories derived from the author's experiences at the United States Naval Academy.

The psychological construction of Robert Penn Warren's characters is an established tenet among Warren critics as is the influence of Sigmund Freud's work upon Warren's fiction. Specifically the oedipal nature of Warren's male characters has been widely discussed especially in regard to plots culminating in patricide. Based upon this criticism of Robert Penn Warren's novels to date, Warren's female characters are revealed to be developed likewise upon an oedipal paradigm. The female paradigm which corresponds to Freud's Oedipus complex in women is the Cinderella tale. These stories, some at least a thousand years old, were critically divided into three main types by Marian Roalfe Cox a century ago. These three archetypes as well as the writings of Sigmund Freud were a part of the intellectual climate from which Warren as artist drew. The eleven females in Warren's ten novels that are developed sufficiently for study—given physical, emotional, and psychological construction—correspond to the three Cinderella archetypes. As such this reading offers a new understanding of Warren's fictional women by revealing them not as aberrations of "normal" women but simply as types of women first revealed to us in our earliest childhood tales.

In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement note that Michelet and Freud "both thought that the repressed past survives in woman; woman, more than anyone else, is dedicated to reminiscence" (5). Whether or not this is true of woman, that expectation of her—as keeper of the past—has perhaps subsisted in the deepest realms of the collective unconscious. From the work of Cixous and Clement, Julia Kristeva and Angela Leighton, I ultimately deduce that there are two perceptions of time: man's time has been associated with the straight, the linear, the historical, and the prosaic; woman's time has been associated with the circular, the cyclical, the monumental, and the poetic. Each time has its obstacles to overcome: man's time is stubbornly rooted in patriarchal language; woman's time is dizzyingly enigmatic. The struggles between these two times manifest themselves in the poetry of perhaps the two most canonical American women poets, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. In the corpus of each, I find a common mode of operation that attempts to reconcile man's and woman's time, to varying degrees of success. Emily Dickinson uses the language of linear history to stretch its boundaries; she experiments with the nature of time and memory as related to trauma, beginning to question and reform historical memory (men's and women's) and our experience of it in poems such as #1458, "Time's wily Chargers will not wait"; #563, "I could not prove the Years had feet"; #33, "If recollecting were forgetting"; and #312, "Her - 'last Poems'—." Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, is not as certain that the two can be so easily reconciled. Determined to establish her place in literary history and lay claim to posterity, but terrified that doing so will take away her present voice, Plath often represents woman—sometimes literally, as in "All the Dead Dears," and sometimes metaphorically, as in "The Courage of Shutting- Up"—as a potential museum, a live body always in danger of drying out and immobilizing, being admired as she is, frozen in the present moment, but denied future evolution. Through close readings of the poets' afore-mentioned works and others, in conjunction with the frequent application of critical/theoretical scholarship in feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and postcolonial veins, I will explore the attempted reconciliation of man's and woman's time in four chapters: "The Thrust of Manliness" concerns the limitations of linear time, including entropy, atrophy, and the charge of feminine reminiscence; "Morning Glory: Cycles and Resurrection" outlines the advantages of a circular perspective, including possibilities for change and resurrection; "Secretaries of Aporia: Recording without Meaning" explores the limitations of cyclical time as encased in linear time, particularly in the literary charge to detail without explaining; and "The Time of Trauma" underlines the historical and political implications of both the burden of reminiscence without return and the study of women's poetry in linear time.