Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-216). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Advisor: Dr. Maxine L. Montgomery, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 2, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2003. / "July 1, 2003." Title taken from PDF title screen (viewed September 10, 2007). Includes bibliographical references.

Cathy Caruth's pioneering study of trauma and the posttraumatic forges a connection between the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the literary as such. Since trauma defies linguistic processing, she explains, the language used to describe it will always be figural. For this reason Caruth privileges imaginative literature, with its highly mediated nature, as a means of representing the otherwise "unclaimed" experience of trauma. Her influential reflections inform a crucial direction within trauma studies: the search for a narrative voice that articulates trauma effectively. But how should we think about trauma that is not a singular "event" but a chronic occurrence? Over the last twenty years trauma scholarship has explored how trauma outstrips discursive and representational resources, but has only begun to address the ways gender, race, and class must complicate our understanding of the posttraumatic. I argue that in order to frame an adequate approach to the posttraumatic, we must take account of the cultural, political, and social matrix of trauma. The feminist psychotherapist Maria Root has developed an idea that she calls "insidious trauma" to refer to the cumulative degradation directed toward individuals whose identities, such as gender, color, and class, differ from what is valued by those in power. Though not always blatant or violent, these effects threaten the basic well being of the person who suffers them. Root's conceptualization provides a useful framework for understanding certain long-term consequences of the institutionalized sexism, racism, and classism that systematically denigrate the self worth of the socially othered who are rendered voiceless. Where Caruth privileges literary representations of the traumatic, I explore how literature can also be a privileged site for the articulation of insidious trauma. My study addresses literary representations of father-daughter incest and the complex trauma associated with it, showing how--in very different ways--six works of modern American literature compel us to confront the traumatogenic nature of social oppression, especially that which is endemic to the structure of the heteropatriarchal family and American racism and classism. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night ambivalently exposes the gendered politics of psychological trauma, particularly the conspiracy of silence perpetuated by a psychiatric culture that revictimizes the female victim of incest. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man uses a story of paternal incest to work through the trauma of racism, challenging stereotypes of black masculinity even as it reinscribes patriarchal phallocentrism. Referencing Ellison's depiction of father-daughter incest, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye marks a watershed in the inscription of incest narratives as it is written mostly from the perspective of what I call a "could-be" victim of incest. Morrison includes the perspective of the father while foregrounding the experience of the daughter, exposing child abuse as an extensive social and political problem ultimately supported by imperialist ideals. Enabled by Morrison, Dorothy Allison's semiautobiographical Bastard Out of Carolina is narrated by a young "white trash" woman who shares her story of sexual violation in defiance of that culture's patriarchal structure. Conforming to certain class stereotypes of father-daughter incest, Bastard Out of Carolina escaped the hostile backlash provoked by Kathryn Harrison's memoir, The Kiss, whose critical reception suggests that, even while allowing some discussion of incest, mainstream culture continued to collude in its silencing within the context of the white middle-class. Finally, I revisit a particularly infamous literary narrative of father-daughter incest, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, but in terms of the feminist appropriation of Nabokov effected in Azar Nafisi's memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Problematically downplaying the sexual abuse of Lolita, Nafisi appropriates Nabokov's work to bear witness to the patriarchal subjugation of women in her home country, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

My study highlights a link of U.S. American hypermasculinity running through Cormac McCarthy's two novels Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), and James Baldwin's Another Country (1960). My literary interpretations of these texts suggest that U.S. American hypermasculine man originated in the American frontier and transformed into a definition of hegemonic masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. These southern rural American men then concocted the myth of the black rapist in order to justify the mass murder of African American men after Reconstruction, inadvertently creating a figure more hypermasculine than themselves. Many black men embraced the myth of the black rapist as well as the baser patriarchal aspects of white male southern power. Consequently, black hypermasculinity evolved into the paragon of American hypermasculinity. Failed Heroes further argues that some protagonists in postwar American literature heroically fail in order not to perpetuate hypermasculinities. Continuing a modernist trend of anti-heroism, the selected protagonists develop into marginalized men due to their failure to live up to hypermasculine societal expectations. The protagonists' failure to perpetuate hypermasculinities proves heroic since it illustrates the destructiveness of these sensibilities; as a result, a sense of ironic heroism emerges from the narratives. In Blood Meridian, set in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. American West, the kid fails heroically to construct a masculine identity outside of the textual order of the judge, indicting the hypermasculine philosophies of the judge and calling into question the book's violence. In no way is the kid a classic hero; rather, his collapse exists as a direct critique of the judge's destructive philosophies. In All the Pretty Horses, set in the mid-twentieth century U.S. American South, John Grady fails to actualize his cowboy fantasy, but proves heroic in exposing its danger and destructiveness. At the end of the novel he vanishes into the countryside a failure, but unlike the mythic cowboy, he assumes the role of heroic failure because his narrative contributes to the relinquishment of a destructive male myth. In Song of Solomon, set in Ohio and Virginia during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, Milkman Dead functions as a black man who has the opportunity to break free from choking definitions of black masculinity. In the end he fails to break free and flies to Africa, leaving his family and his only hope at real freedom, his aunt Pilate, to die. Continuing a cycle of male flight at the expense of his family, community, and cultural guide renders him a failure. Morrison's final critique of hypermasculinity positions Pilate as the failed hero and shifts the emphasis of the novel to the women who represent victims of kinship systems and the incest taboo. The incest in the novel functions as a metaphor for Pilate's philosophy that black identity ought to come from black culture, a notion I call cultural incest. Another Country, set in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, details the plight of an urban African American man struggling to reconcile his homosexual desire with the black hypermasculine cool pose he dons as overcompensation. Rufus Scott's death proves heroic as a critique of the rigid definitions of urban black masculinity. African Americans, and by extension all Americans, might employ their U.S. American history of oppression as a platform for a new vision of masculinity based on heteronormative failure and queerness. The association of blackness with oppression, and as a result non-normative sexuality, presents an opportunity to redefine blackness as abjection. The very failure of African Americans in measuring up to destructive notions of hypermasculinity might exist as a new definition of blackness and masculinity for all Americans.

‘She Shall Not Be Moved’: Black Women’s Spiritual Practice in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, and Home argues that from The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s debut novel, to her 2012 novel, Home, Morrison brings her female characters to voice, autonomy, and personal divinity through unconventional spiritual work. The project addresses the history of Black women’s activist and spiritual work, Toni Morrison’s engagement with unconventional spiritual practice, and closes with a personal interrogation of the author’s connection to Black women’s spiritual practice.

The decades following two world wars, the European Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation presented American authors with an occupational dilemma: catastrophic histories call out for recognition, but any representation of them risks adding violence to violence by falsifying the account or conflating historical acts of violence with their artificial doubles. This project reimagines the political aesthetics of postmodern American fiction through two major interventions. First, I identify an aesthetic structure of apposition--a parallel relationship between abstract works of art and the everyday world that I take from William Carlos Williams--that allows me to productively resolve a tension in the aesthetics of Hannah Arendt: because representation takes mimesis as a particular end, Arendt disqualifies representational art from politics, which she defines as open-ended action between human beings and not as end-centered state-craft. At the same time, Arendt claims that art is a product of thought, the cognitive activity she associates with political action over and against fabrication. My heterodox reading of Arendt shows that appositional narratives, like political actors, perform their own self-disclosure, beginning the open-ended chain of actions and reactions that Arendt identifies as the substantial form of politics and ethics. Second, I use my revision of Arendt to demonstrate that appositional narratives act politically through the very same metafictional tropes that critics often label as escapist or solipsistic. Rather than copy historical experience, appositional narratives reject illusionary representation and present themselves as actors, inciting their readers to respond with pluralistic, provisional judgment. Taking Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison--three central but rarely-juxtaposed postmodern novelists--as case studies, I show that we cannot properly assess the political implications of postmodern fiction without understanding the specific mechanisms of narrative apposition. Appositional works stand temporarily and self-consciously in the place of the world, displacing it in the experience of their readers. This narrative strategy provides a political alternative for novelists facing the ethical crises of postmodernity. Appositional narratives displace their readers' settled beliefs and press them to exercise their human capacity for judgment. They embrace their responsibility for the world by refusing to represent it. / text

This essay focuses on the way in which three narrative devices expand upon three types of love depicted in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. The three narrative devices examined in this essay are narrator, paratext and the irony of the Breedlove family name. These devices all serve the purpose of conveying different types of love in Morrison’s novel and how these types of love affect the characters of the novel, especially the protagonist Pecola Breedlove. Narrator plays an important role because the narrative voice changes throughout the novel, shifting between Claudia MacTeer and a third-person omniscient narrator. This shifting perspective shows the reader how the types of love affect Pecola both through a child’s perspective and as well as through third-person narration. The Dick and Jane paratext contrasts the Breedlove family to white American ideals of familial love and happiness. Finally, the lack of familial love within the Breedlove family truly shows the irony of the Breedlove family name. The lack of love forces Pecola to internalize her self-hatred while the destructive, distant and judgmental relationship between Mrs. Breedlove and Pecola causes both characters to become delusional and dissatisfied with their sense of self. Friendship is the only place where Pecola finds love, shown to her by Claudia and Frieda; however, Pecola has already descended too far into madness for their love to help her. Although Pecola should find solace in the three types of love that are presented through the novel’s narrative devices, they all contribute to her disillusionment and, ultimately, her descent into madness.

No description available.

This dissertation comprises a literary investigation of the way in which Toni Morrison is able to transcend stereotypes associated with African American masculinity within a selection of her works namely, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and Paradise. I apply Carl Jung’s transcendent concept of the paradoxical Self as a lens through which to analyse Morrison’s different representations, illustrating how this concept affects the formation of identity and an understanding of masculinity. I also make use of Frantz Fanon, who suggests that Jung’s concept of the Self is a way in which black men are able to understand their experience of the world, in that such an experience is paradoxical in nature. It is this paradoxical experience of the world that I argue Morrison highlights in her male characters. In examining Morrison’s representations of masculinity, I also illustrate the intersection of race and gender and how this intersection affects identity creation, given the unique position that African American men occupy within American society. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.