Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 1997. / Includes vita. Bibliography: leaves 226-232.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Carol Marsh-Lockett , committee chair; Mary Zeigler, Kameelah Martin Samuel, committee members. Electronic text (99 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Nov. 19, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-99).

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, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. Maxine L. Montgomery, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 19, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 90 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Maxine Montgomery, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 9, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

This research uses the interpretive framework of the Psychological Grotesque to address a protagonist's response when she is unable to integrate the experience of interpersonal trauma into her psyche. The framework reveals a survival mechanism, identity incorporation, with roots in the transgressive and evolutionary nature of the grotesque as discussed in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Mary Douglas and Leonard Cassuto. The psychological grotesque is explicated using Stvgo by Laura Hendrie, The Life Before Her Eyes, by Laura Kasischke, and Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor.The psychological grotesque reveals how the protagonist within each of these novels, when positioned within a specific matrix of contributing factors engages in flawed survival strategies to reconcile psychic fragmentation. Drawing on theories of trauma from the work of Bessel Van Der Kolk, Dori Laub, Sigmund Freud, Mardi Horowitz, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Laurie Vickroy, Cathy Caruth, Peter Woods and Tim Middleton, the definition of the matrix includes: interpersonal trauma, prior history of emotional problems, no social support network, and self-perceived complicity in the violence. Where these criteria are present, the protagonist is incapable of achieving the repair of her damaged psyche in order to reintegrate into society and relief from the pain of trauma. In an effort to repair her brokeness through the incorporation of parts of the identity of others, the protagonist creates a grotesque mental hybrid living in fractured time. The protagonist experiences destabilization of time due to incorporating the temporal perspective of the other identities. A flawed survival strategy, identity incorporation leads to further psychic fragmentation.The psychological grotesque takes up the challenge of communicating the effects of trauma and addresses the lack of a literary interpretive mechanism for trauma literature in which a critical component of the narrative is the story of female victims of interpersonal violence. This framework confronts the fact that representations of women and trauma are problematic due to how trauma resists linguistic representation and because women have historically been denied a voice in the canon. Therefore, by drawing on elements of the grotesque, specifically hybridity and transgression, this interpretive framework recuperates the experiences of traumatized protagonists. / Department of English

This dissertation seeks to contribute to recent scholarship by demonstrating that an African-American utopian tradition persists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly in the works of African-American women writers. If liberation remains a fundamental theme in African-American literature – a definitive stance espoused by W. E. B. Du Bois and a host of other prominent African-American scholars, but also upheld by this dissertation – then such a consistently recurring goal has only been marginally completed, at best, in the United States. Despite proclamations of a universally attainable American Dream, African Americans remain disenfranchised by prison, education, and court systems as well as other integral institutions found within the United States.With this dilemma in mind and given the potentially subversive power of literature, this dissertation argues that the African-American utopian tradition in particular functions as a useful critical lens through which one can examine the often-elusive goal of revolutionary change. This lens raises the pertinent questions that one must answer in order to strive towards one’s utopia, and also exposes the systemic and thus conventional parameters latent in the too-familiar antithetical dystopias about which so many African-American narratives admonish their audiences to confront or, if they are lucky enough, avoid altogether. By focusing on a thematic continuum represented by the utopian small towns found in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997), this dissertation encapsulates a utopian tradition that inscribes race, gender, and sexuality, onto the African-American literary tradition. / English

Analyzing novels by Sheri Reynolds, Lee Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Sue Monk Kidd, I argue that these authors challenge religious structures by dramatizing the struggle between love and resentment that brings many women to the point of crisis but also inspires imaginative and generative processes of appropriation and revision, emphasizing not destination but process. Employing first-person narration in coming-of-age stories, Smith, Reynolds, and Kingsolver highlight the various narratives that govern the experiences of children born into religious cultures, including narratives of sexual development, gender identity, and religious conversion, to portray the difficulty of articulating female experience within the limited lexicon of Christian fundamentalism. As they mature into adulthood, the girl characters in these novels break from tradition to develop new consciousness by altering and adapting religious language, understood as open and malleable rather than authoritative and fixed. Smith, Kidd, and Naylor incorporate the Virgin Mary and divine maternal figures from non-Christian traditions to restore the mother-daughter relationship that is eclipsed by the Father and Son in Christian tradition. Identifying the female body as a site of spiritual knowledge, these authors present a metaphorical return to the womb that empowers their characters to embrace divine maternal love that transgresses the masculine symbolic order, displacing (but not necessarily destroying) the authority of God the Father and His human representatives. Reynolds and Walker portray physical pain, central to the Christian image of crucifixion, as destroying the ability of women to speak, denying them subjectivity. Through transgressive sexual relationships infused with religious significance, these authors disrupt the Christian moral paradigm by presenting bodily pleasure as an alternative to the Christian valorization of sacrifice. The replacement of pain with pleasure inspires imaginative work that makes private spirituality shareable through artistic creation. The novels I study present themes that also concern Christian and non-Christian feminist theologians: the development of feminine images of the divine, emphasis on immanence over transcendence, the apprehension of the divine in nature, and the necessity of challenging the reification of religious images and dualisms that undermine female subjectivity. I show the reciprocal relationship between fiction and theology, as theologians treat women's literature as sacred texts and fiction writers give life to abstract religious concepts through narrative.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1999. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2836. Typescript. Abstract appears on leaf [ii]. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-67).