My dissertation analyzes the rhetorical nature of nostalgia within American discourse communities. To accomplish this I analyze the construction and manipulation of nostalgia at the Middleton Place Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, and in Alan Lomax's memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began. Nostalgia is an emotional response to displacement and occurs when an individual is separated either physically or emotionally from a specific time and place. Because an individual cannot simply return to the place and moment that they long for, nostalgia is hard to remedy and easy to manipulate. The danger of nostalgia is that although it seems individual, it is controlled by social expectations. Because nostalgia can be socially controlled and manufactured, it serves the communal needs of a society rather than the needs of the individual. Therefore, nostalgia can entrench an individual even more deeply into the constructions of their society. In this manner, nostalgia acts as a mechanism of restraint in society, and history based upon or associated with nostalgia becomes a history of containment.My project argues that we recognize the rhetorical work achieved by nostalgia. Three elements must be present if nostalgia is to be rhetorical: it must be purposefully evoked, satiated, and impact the community. Here I define rhetorical activity as any activity that seeks to persuade an individual or a community towards any action. This project analyzes how sites of public memory evoke and satiate nostalgia in their visitors, and reveals the actions that sites request of their visitors. I argue that these sites familiarize their visitors with a time and a place that the visitor cannot have full access to. Because of this, the visitor is displaced and nostalgia is evoked. Sites of public memory then respond to that same nostalgia through the presentation of values, ideals, and beliefs. Consequently, visitors depart sites of public memory with reinforced and realigned values and--due to their newly acquired discourse community--a community of fellow participants. It is in this way that public sites of memory evoke nostalgia for rhetorical ends.

My thesis is part story telling, part exploration of research and part narrative of my experience in graduate school that culminated with my thesis work Piecing. My work explores how memory and history are connected to objects and the role they play in our ability to feel ‘at home’ at a moment when that is challenged in many ways. I extensively explore recent literature on the topic of nostalgia that is described as a reaction to the fragmentation and dislocation of our current moment, nostalgia as mal du siecle.

In our present image-laden environment that only seems to keep growing, the nature of how we see and interpret this visual information becomes highly relevant for me in my art. Spectacle, nostalgia, notions of portraiture, theatricality and other visual reflections of our present culture industry, are all elements that I address in my work. It is with these ideas in mind that I construct visual fields where disparate forms and images coexist, forming new narratives aside from their individual isolated implications; incorporating art production methods that construct an evolving dichotomy that contains a sense of play, tension, and irony while evoking references to our current social experiences. Keywords: spectacle, nostalgia, portraiture, collective consciousness, culture industry

The contemporary experience is profoundly rooted in the processes of remembering and recalling, recording and playing back. My work employs image and installation to speak of memory, nostalgia, and the integration of media and representation into experience. The rapid advancement of media technologies provides new immersive opportunities for the armchair traveler. Viewers may now be effortlessly transported across distances of time and space.

If There’s Anything I Can Do is a collection of nine connected short stories. Each story takes place in the fictional River City, and explores the lives of characters that frequent Cellar Door, a divey, basement bar in the heart of downtown. Bartenders, musicians, regulars, neighbors, fathers, brothers, and lovers make up the crowd at Cellar Door, and each story shows the importance of place within a community.

This thesis examines the British aristocracy in the twentieth century as perceived in contemporary writing. It asserts that the image of the aristocracy is heavily marked by and perpetuated by the use of nostalgia. It also explores the idea that the contemporary members of the aristocracy utilize the existence of nostalgia as a way to commodify their past social history for profit.

This dissertation examines a particular quality of emotion experience that has received little attention in contemporary philosophical and psychological studies of the emotions. This is inversely proportional to the significant attention it receives in literature. I will refer to it as poignancy. Poignant emotions, such as nostalgia and the lyrical feelings pervasive in poetry, are emotions about time’s passage, or the fleetingness of things. My inquiry concerns the normative evaluation of such emotion experiences. Episodes of nostalgia and lyrical emotions are typically experienced as profound while they last, but they are also notoriously apt to be dismissed as sentimental, even by those who feel their pull. Sentimentality is a term of censure that exclusively targets emotions and emotionality; if an emotion is sentimental, then something about it is supposed to be false and wrong. But what are the merits of this charge against poignant emotions? When one has a nostalgic or lyrical emotion episode and reproaches oneself for being sentimental, who is correct—the person in the first moment, convinced by the emotion, or the person in the next, who doubts or retracts it? To adjudicate these disputes, we must turn to what I call the standard model of emotion evaluation that has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. This is a normative apparatus that enjoys wide consensus, but it has been built to evaluate the standard stock of examples in the literature, such as fear. Its application to nonstandard cases has not been undertaken. A major task of this dissertation is therefore to analyze poignant emotions in such a way that renders them evaluable on this model. However, once these analyses are in place, it turns out that the normative evaluation of poignant emotions yields surprising conclusions. In spite of their stigmatization, nostalgic aestheticizations of the past are much less vulnerable to the charge of sentimentality than commonly assumed. And lyrical feelings about the fleetingness of things are almost entirely immune to the charge, in a way that risks undermining our critical discourse about such emotion experiences.

This dissertation examines a particular quality of emotion experience that has received little attention in contemporary philosophical and psychological studies of the emotions. This is inversely proportional to the significant attention it receives in literature. I will refer to it as poignancy. Poignant emotions, such as nostalgia and the lyrical feelings pervasive in poetry, are emotions about time’s passage, or the fleetingness of things. My inquiry concerns the normative evaluation of such emotion experiences. Episodes of nostalgia and lyrical emotions are typically experienced as profound while they last, but they are also notoriously apt to be dismissed as sentimental, even by those who feel their pull. Sentimentality is a term of censure that exclusively targets emotions and emotionality; if an emotion is sentimental, then something about it is supposed to be false and wrong. But what are the merits of this charge against poignant emotions? When one has a nostalgic or lyrical emotion episode and reproaches oneself for being sentimental, who is correct—the person in the first moment, convinced by the emotion, or the person in the next, who doubts or retracts it? To adjudicate these disputes, we must turn to what I call the standard model of emotion evaluation that has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. This is a normative apparatus that enjoys wide consensus, but it has been built to evaluate the standard stock of examples in the literature, such as fear. Its application to nonstandard cases has not been undertaken. A major task of this dissertation is therefore to analyze poignant emotions in such a way that renders them evaluable on this model. However, once these analyses are in place, it turns out that the normative evaluation of poignant emotions yields surprising conclusions. In spite of their stigmatization, nostalgic aestheticizations of the past are much less vulnerable to the charge of sentimentality than commonly assumed. And lyrical feelings about the fleetingness of things are almost entirely immune to the charge, in a way that risks undermining our critical discourse about such emotion experiences.

Jamaica is rich in contradictions. Life, like the landscape, is made up of great highs and lows, a wealth of beauty paralleled by intense desperation. This report explores these contradictions through an examination of the image of Jamaica packaged and presented to the world as a consumable tourism product. In 2012 as Jamaica prepares to celebrate 50 years of (in)dependence, the small nation finds itself battling (neo)colonialism, dependence, dispossession. Tourism is Jamaica’s main source of revenue and the industry is a major employer. The island’s role as a premier tourist destination is thus inseparable from Jamaicans’ daily lives. The current marketing slogan says to tourists ‘Once you go, you know”, I argue that this assertion is representative of the form tourism takes in Jamaica. By literally and figuratively granting understanding and ownership of the island and its resources to foreigners, the construction of Jamaica’s tourism product systematically commodifies Jamaica, its people, and culture. I seek to interrogate the role of tourism in Jamaica’s continued exploitation and to question the presence of secrecy, colonial nostalgia and national lies in how Jamaicans self identify and in how we are portrayed. / text

For over a century there has been a large ongoing migration from Newfoundland to other parts of Canada and the US. Between 1971 and 1998 alone, net out-migration amounted to 20% of the province’s population. This exodus has become a significant part of Newfoundland culture. While many literary critics, writers, and sociologists have referred to Newfoundland out-migration as a “diaspora,” few have examined the theoretical implications of applying this emotionally charged term to a predominantly white, economically motivated, inter-provincial movement. My dissertation addresses these issues, ultimately arguing that “diaspora” is an appropriate and helpful term to describe Newfoundland out-migration and its literature, because it connotes the painful displacement of a group that continues to identify with each other and with the homeland. I argue that considering Newfoundland a “diaspora” also provides a useful contribution to theoretical work on diaspora, because it reveals the ways in which labour movements and intra-national migrations can be meaningfully considered diasporic. It also rejects the Canadian tendency to conflate diaspora with racialized subjectivities, a tendency that problematically posits racialized Others as always from elsewhere, and that threatens to refigure experiences of racism as a problem of integration rather than of systemic, institutionalized racism. I examine several important literary works of the Newfoundland diaspora, including the poetry of E.J. Pratt and Carl Leggo, the drama of David French, the fiction of Donna Morrissey and Wayne Johnston, and the memoirs of Helen M. Buss/ Margaret Clarke and David Macfarlane. These works also become the sites of a broader inquiry into several theoretical flashpoints, including diasporic authenticity, nostalgia, nationalism, race and whiteness, and ethnicity. I show that diasporic Newfoundlanders’ identifications involve a complex, self-reflexive, postmodern negotiation between the sometimes contradictory conditions of white privilege, cultural marginalization, and national and regional appropriations. Through these negotiations they both construct imagined literary communities, and problematize Newfoundland’s place within Canadian culture and a globalized world.