This study examines trauma, particularly in the thematic contexts of the individual and the community as reflected in her novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. By utilizing the specific theoretical modes of new historicism and trauma theory, the veil of double consciousness imposed on African Americans is explicated and exposes various forms of trauma in the individual and the community. The unspoken atrocities experienced as a result of slavery, Jim Crow, and physical and sexual violence in many of Morrison’s novels, suggest the common thread of trauma. The particular traumas depicted in Morrison’s novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, damage agency, lead to detachment and paralysis in the individual. The scope of this study is limited to the novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved as they best illustrate trauma in Morrison’s characters and the damage it causes to agency, leading to detachment and paralysis in the individual. The literary theories of new historicism and psychoanalysis provide cultural and literary context for the novels and allow for a deeper rendering of the characteristics of trauma and provide the context for the term dynamic trauma. of oppression as a mean of dysfunction in the thematic These novels reveal a pathology of trauma disguised as normalcy in the African American community, which leads to disrupted lives, relationships, and communities. Morrison not only depicts these dysfunctional behaviors due to traumatic circumstances but also offers a remedy for the dysfunction—acceptance without acquiescence.

The aim of this essay is to explore motherhood in two postcolonial literary works by African American author Toni Morrison and British author Caryl Phillips, who was born in the Caribbean. The essay is based on Morrison’s award winning novel Beloved, which was published in 1987 and was inspired by the escaping African American slave Margareth Garner. It is set just after the American Civil War and the novels deals with the trauma of slavery from the perspective of Sethe, a slave who kills her own daughter to save her from slavery. The second novel on which this essay is based is Caryl Phillips’ novel Crossing the River, which was published 1993 and focused on the African diaspora from different perspectives. Crossing the River is a non-chronological narrative covering four different characters (three African American people and one white slave trader during the eighteenth century). This essay, however, only deals with the last of the four narratives depicting white British Joyce who mothers a child with African American soldier Travis. The hypothesis on which the essay is based is that the institution of American slavery has denied the female protagonists in the two novels, Sethe and Joyce, their maternal selves. The analysis revealed that both women suffer from racial domination, and race, or simply skin color, is what leads to the maternal loss of the two protagonists. Both authors depict the world of the colonizer and the colonized and they address the common pain and guilt shared by black as well as white people.

This thesis examines the links between and intersections of violence and subjectivity in a comparative, transatlantic and transnational study of the fiction of four recognized international authors, namely, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, J. M. Coetzee, and Yvonne Vera. Despite their differing geographical, temporal, cultural and socio-political situations and situatedness, these writers’ common, thematic concerns with taboo topics of violence such as rape, incest, infanticide and necrophilia, situate violence as a constitutive, intimate and intricate part of subjectivity. In providing varied, and not unproblematic, renderings of the mutuality of violence and subjectivity, their novels do not just reveal the ambiguous and ambivalent character and the fragile and tenuous processes of (exercising and asserting) subjectivity; their fiction enacts and engenders its own kind of textual violence that reflects and refracts the (metaphysical and epistemological) violence of the subjective process. Raising crucial questions about the place, role and efficacy of literature in articulating violence and subjectivity, this thesis argues that violence is meaningful to and constitutive of the subjective process in these authors’ works that offer an experiential, lived appreciation of subjectivity. Providing an historical and socio-political contextualization of the novels, the thesis maintains that these authors’ specific interpretations of violence in their fiction necessarily interrogates and reconfigures questions of race and culture, gender and sexuality, as well as morality; that is, it reexamines and repositions conventional interpretations of being and belonging, of subjectivity in general. In this way, their fiction reveals literature’s ability not merely to disprove theory but, through its very textuality, extend and enhance it to reflect the materiality of being.

Aaron Kohn’s career as a driven professional crime fighter with the Special Citizens Investigative Committee, and later the Metropolitan Crime Commission, began after the Kefauver Hearings on organized crime, one of the first Senate investigative committee hearings broadcast on the evolving medium of television, gripped the American public in 1950. Sen. Estes Kefauver’s committee visited cities across America, including New Orleans. The hearings’ popularity revealed public thirst for coverage of sensational topics like organized crime, and established how Kohn would soon approach the SCIC job: with force and bombast, featuring flair and sometimes bended truth. Aaron Kohn combined Kefauver’s crusading spirit and media savvy and attempted to apply it to his own long career as a citizen crime fighter in New Orleans, but he met limited success taking on a corrupt establishment in a career that could ultimately be deemed a failure.

The Middle-Upper Jurassic sedimentary rocks (i.e., the Entrada Sandstone, Wanakah Formation, and Morrison Formation) in western Colorado were mostly deposited in the Paradox Basin and form part of the modern-day Colorado Plateau in the Cordilleran foreland region. These rocks were deposited in the Mesozoic during periods of active tectonic processes in western and eastern Laurentia due to the Cordilleran magmatism and continued rifting of Pangaea, respectively. The Middle-Late Jurassic sedimentary record in the Paradox Basin shows rapid transition in depositional environments, pulses in sedimentation, post-depositional alteration, and changes in provenance. This dissertation project utilizes three main scientific tools to address pertinent geologic questions regarding the stratigraphic evolution of these units in the Paradox Basin. U-Pb detrital zircon geochronology of sandstones from these units show local and distal provenance sources. The anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) of sediments and rock magnetism attribute the post-depositional alteration to percolation of ferruginous fluids driven by an adjacent regional uplift. Multi-geochemical proxies in paleosols suggest variable redox conditions, and a sub-humid to humid paleoclimate with seasonal precipitation during sedimentary hiatus in the Paradox Basin.

A presente tese analisa a peça We Are Three Sisters - escrita em 2011 pelo poeta e dramaturgo britânico Philip Blake Morrison - com o objetivo de discutir as ligações entre as instâncias do ficcional, do real, do imagético e do biográfico. Morrison utiliza como pano de fundo para a elaboração de We Are Three Sisters o texto As Três Irmãs (1902) do dramaturgo russo Anton Chekhov. Morrison preenche sua peça com dados sobre a vida das irmãs Brontë, como retratados pela historiadora e biógrafa Juliet Barker em The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, que foi curadora da biblioteca da Brontë Society durante anos, confiou a Morrison os dados de sua pesquisa e o auxiliou a transportá-los para a peça que ele estava escrevendo. Considero importante examinar como se dá esse processo de esgarçamento das fronteiras entre o real e o ficcional através do conteúdo simbólico e imagético, porque ele reflete um tipo de prática cada vez mais utilizada por autores contemporâneos. O diálogo entre a Rússia de Chekhov da virada do século XIX/XX e o cenário (interiorano) do norte (industrial) da Inglaterra no período vitoriano, quando equacionados por Morrison no contexto dos dias de hoje, convidam-nos a traçar considerações que muito têm a nos dizer sobre os parâmetros da dramaturgia contemporânea. Além de serem três grandes autoras do cânone vitoriano, as irmãs Brontë surgem também como ícones culturais britânicos, tantas vezes já representadas como personagens em biografias ficcionais, romances, filmes, balés e peças de teatro. Para escrever sua apropriação da vida das Brontë, Morrison ampara-se na biografia de Juliet Barker, ao mesmo tempo em que utiliza a peça de Chekhov como um texto-sombra, uma matriz que serve como base para sua criação, um andaime em torno do qual constrói seu enredo. O movimento de entrelaçamento de realidade e ficção realizado por Morrison e a produção do conteúdo simbólico através da análise de imagens arquetípicas são o principal foco de interesse desta tese. Escolhi como metodologia de trabalho a aproximação entre os três textos, o de Morrison, o de Barker e o de Chekhov, através de ferramentas dos Estudos do Imaginário, representados pela análise de conteúdos imagéticos nos termos propostos por Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung e Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, uma vez que a tese aponta para possibilidades dialógicas entre imagem e palavra dentro dos paradigmas da cena teatral contemporânea. / This PhD dissertation analyzes the play We Are Three Sisters, written in 2011 by the poet and British playwright Philip Blake Morrison, in order to discuss the links between the instances of the fictional, the real, imagery and biography. Morrison uses as a backdrop for the elaboration of We Are Three Sisters the text Three Sisters (1900), by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Morrison fills his play with data on the life of the Brontë sisters, as depicted by the historian and biographer Juliet Barker in The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, who was for years curator of the library of the Brontë Society, entrusted Morrison data from her research and helped Morrison to transport them to the play he was writing. I consider it important to examine how this process of fraying of the borders between the real and the fictional, through symbolic imagery and content, takes place, because it reflects a kind of practice increasingly used by contemporary authors. The dialogue between the turn of Chekhov’s Russia of the nineteenth/twentieth century and the (countryside) scenario (industrial) north of England in the Victorian period, when equated by Morrison in the context of today, invites us to make some considerations that have much to tell us about the parameters of contemporary dramaturgy. Besides, being three great authors of the Victorian canon, the Brontë sisters also come as British cultural icons, so often represented as characters in fictional biographies, novels, movies, ballets and plays. To write his appropriation of the Brontë’s life, Morrison is supported by Juliet Barker’s biography, while using Chekhov’s play as a shadow text, a matrix which serves as the basis for its creation, a scaffold around which he builds its plot. The intertwining movement of reality and fiction conceived by Morrison and the production of symbolic content through the analysis of archetypical images are the main focus of this PhD dissertation. I chose as a working methodology the approach of the three texts, Morrison’s, Barker’s and Chekhov’s, through the tools of the Studies of the Imaginary, represented by the analysis of imagery content as proposed by Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung and Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, since the work points to dialogic possibilities between image and word within the paradigms of the contemporary theater scene.

No description available.

No description available.

This essay is a close-reading study of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. The purpose of this essay is to investigate and describe Gérard Genette's narratological theories and their function in the novel when looking at how the story is told. The questions that are being answered are how flashbacks actually affect the chronological order of events and who the narrator is that’s telling the story. The methods that are being used in the report are a close-reading of Beloved and making a selection of previous research. The selected research will show an overview of some examples of areas and theories that has been used in other essays. In the summary it appears from the result of the analysis that flashbacks functions as explanations of the characters' thoughts or actions in the present and that the narrator most of the time is the character that is in a particular situation.

This thesis examines the relationship between dramatic structure and women's responses to oppression. By looking at Blasted by Sarah Kane, Father Comes Home from the Wars Parts 1, 2, & 3 by Suzan-Lori Parks, and Feminaal by Nina Morrison, I examine the ways that questions of structure become questions of gender. I argue that these plays’ forms are purposeful embodiments of resistance and aggression and that the energetic connection between these plays is a current of anger.