Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 2002. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-77).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2006. / Thesis directed by Glenn Hendler for the Department of English. "December 2006." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-182).

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2015. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is an exploration of the textuality of the skin, and how we approach and read wounds and scars. My discussion approaches the skin through the frame of surface reading to address three interconnected but seemingly disparate areas; namely American slavery, atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army, and self-mutilation. These areas all share the trope of the wound, and my approach is thus interdisciplinary in nature. I begin my discussion with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, focusing on the manner in which the extreme violence the characters suffer plays an instrumental role in their ability to reconcile themselves with their pasts. I focus specifically on the scars on Sethe’s back that resemble a tree, and how this tree links all of the characters together in their desire to re-member themselves. I then move to the Lord’s Resistance Army and how their mutilations of the civilian population serve a communicative function. I explore how we read images of atrocity, and how many of these images are framed and manipulated in order to garner attention. From there, I move to Kony 2012, the viral ‘documentary’ that drew the world’s attention and criticism for its gross misrepresentation of Africa and its indulgence in the stereotypes that present Africans as passive victims in need of saving. Finally, I discuss the phenomenon of self-mutilation and how the cuts and scars reveal how language is rendered incapable of expressing the inner pain and suffering of cutters. Often, these wounds and scars are misinterpreted as failed suicide attempts, an interpretation which completely ignores the expression of the symptom revealed on the surface. The negative stigma attached to self-mutilation hinders communication between those who cut and those who do not. In order for communication to be successful, all preconceived notions of what self-mutilation is need to be abandoned. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis is ʼn verkenning van die tekstualiteit van die vel, en hoe ons wonde en littekens benader en lees. My bespreking benader die vel deur die lens van oppervlak-analise om drie onderling verbonde dog uiteenlopende areas aan te spreek, naamlik, Amerikanse slawerny, gruweldade wat deur die Lord’s Resistance Army gepleeg is, en self-mutilasie. Dié areas deel saam die troop van die wond, en my benadering is dus interdissiplinêr van aard. My bespreking begin met Toni Morrison se Beloved met die fokus op die manier wat die uitermatige geweld waaraan die karakters onderwerp word ʼn integrale rol speel in hul vermoë om vrede te maak met hul verledes. Ek fokus spesifiek op die littekens op Sethe se rug wat soos ʼn boom lyk, en hoe dié boom al die karakters aan mekaar skakel in hul begeerte om hulself te ‘her-versamel’ en her-onthou. Ek beweeg dan aan na die Lord’s Resistance Army en hoe hulle verminking van die burgerbevolking ʼn kommunikatiewe funksie vervul. Ek verken hoe ons beelde van gruwel lees, en hoe baie van dié beelde geraam en gemanipuleer word om aandag te trek. Van daar beweeg ek aan na Kony 2012, die gewilde web-dokumentêr wat die wêreld se aandag en kritiek uitgelok het as gevolg van die totale wanvoorstelling wat dit van Afrika getoon het, asook die onnadenkenheid van die documentêr in terme van Afrikane wat as passiewe slagoffers wat redding benodig gestereotipeer word. Oplaas bespreek ek die fenomeen van self-mutilasie en hoe die snye en littekens ʼn openbaring maak van die ontoereikendhied van taal om innerlike pyn en lyding van snyers uit te druk. Dikwels word die wonde en littekens verkeerd geïnterpreteer as mislukte selfmoordpogings, ʼn interpretasie wat die uitdrukking van die simptome wat op die oppervalk blootgelê word ignoreer. Die negatiewe stigma wat aan self-mutilasie gekoppel word belemmer kommunikasie tussen snyers en nie-snyers. Kommunikasie kan net suksesvol wees as alle vooropgesette idees van wat self-mutilasie is agtergelaat word.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. List of figures shows incorrect page numbers. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 670-720).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Mary Donaldson-Evans, Dept. of Foreign Language & Literatures . Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Over the past three decades in South Africa, the documentation of slave history at the Cape Colony by historians has burgeoned. Congruently, interest in the history of slavery has increased in South African letters and culture. Here, literature is often employed in order to imaginatively represent the subjective view-point and experiences of slaves, as official records contained in historiography and the archive often exclude such interiority. This thesis is a study of the representations of slave subjectivity in two novels: Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book (1998) and Unconfessed (2007) by Yvette Christiansë. Its task is to investigate and traverse the multitude of readings made possible in these literary representations, and then to challenge such readings by juxtaposing the representational strategies of the two novels. Both primary texts are works of historical fiction that, in different ways, draw on the archive and historiography in order to grant historical plausibility to their narratives. Engaging with the distinct methods with which they approach and interpret such historical information, I adopt the terms “glimpsing” and “reading sideways”. Throughout this study, I engage each of these methods in order to demonstrate the value, and limits, of each technique in its engagement with the complexities of representing slave subjectivity in the wake of its (predominant) occlusion from historical and official data. Chapter One presents a brief overview of the emergence of the slave past in historiography and public spaces. Following Pumla Gqola’s statement that “slave memory [has] increase[d] in visibility in post-apartheid South Africa”, I move to a discussion of the theoretical perspectives on (re)memory as employed by writers of fiction that exemplify “a higher, more fraught level of activity to the past than simply identifying and recording it ” (“Slaves” 8) . In turn, I identify the imperative archival silence places on authors to write about slaves, and the relevance of genre in this undertaking. Specifically, I consider the romantic and tragic historical fiction genres as they are utilised by Jacobs and Christiansë in approaching representations of slave subjectivity, and how this influences emplotment. Chapter One concludes with a brief exposition of the literary representations offered by Unconfessed and The Slave Book. Chapter Two presents a detailed study of Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book as a novel of historical fiction. Jacobs takes up a methodology of “glimpsing” at the slave past through the representations available in historiography. I trace the moments at which the text seeks to convey slave subjectivity, within and without historical discourses, through such “glimpses”, and show how they are employed to establish a focus on interiority and to humanise slave characters. Chapter Three focuses on Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed and explores its explicit engagement with silences surrounding the protagonist Sila van den Kaap’s historical presence in the Cape Town Archives. I read Christiansë’s representation of these silences as “acts of looking sideways” at the discursive practices inherent in the historical documentation of slave voices that enact her resistance to “filling” these silences with detailed narrative. I argue that the various forms of silence in the narrative allow for a deeper understanding of the injustices and oppression suffered by Sila van den Kaap, and that it is these silences, ironically, which grant her voice. Chapter Four presents a comparison of the novels and their respective representational techniques of “glimpsing” versus “looking sideways”. While the distinct efficacy and implication of each approach is critically evaluated, both are ultimately found to make an invaluable addition to the literary exploration of slave subjectivity as attention is drawn to the interiority of each text’s characters. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Oor die afgelope drie dekades, het die dokumentasie wat opgelewer is deur historici in Suid- Afrika met betrekking tot die slawe in die Kaapkolonie floreer. Ooreenstemmend, het belangstelling in die geskiedenis van die slawe in die gebied van kultuur en letterkunde toegeneem. In hierdie konteks, word literatuur dikwels in diens geneem om op ‘n verbeeldingsryke manier die subjektiewe standpunt en die bestaan van die slawe te verteenwoording, wat vroeër in amptelike rekords dikwels sodanige innerlikheid uitsluit. Hierdie tesis is 'n studie van die voorstellings van slaaf subjektiwiteit in twee romans: Rayda Jacobs se The Slave Book (1998) en Unconfessed (2007) deur Yvette Christiansë. Dit beoog verder om ondersoek in te stel na die menigte lesings in literêre voorstellings en sodanige lesings uit te daag deur die vergelyking van die twee betrokke tekste. Ek neem die "skramse” en "sywaartse" sienings as metodiek vir die eien en interpretasie van argief-materiaal in die twee tekste. Deurgaans in hierdie studie gebruik ek hierdie metodieke op hulle beurt ten einde die waarde van elke tegniek te demonstreer, in terme van die voorstellingshandeling wat elk gebruik om slaaf subjektiwiteit te verteenwoordig. In Hoofstuk Een, word teoretiese perspektiewe oor ‘herinnering’ soos dit bestaan as gevolg van, en ten spyte van, die argief, beskryf en ontleed. In my oorsig van die rol en doel van die argief sowel as die onthou van 'n slaaf verlede in die hedendaagse Suid-Afrika, word benaderings wat in verskeie velde onderneem is om slawerny en sy slagoffers uit te beeld, ook in ag geneem. Ek identifiseer die noodsaaklikheid wat “stiltes” in die argief op skrywers plaas om oor slawe te skryf, asook die relevansie van die genre in hierdie onderneming. Ek kyk spesifiek na die romantiese en historiese fiksie genres soos hulle deur Jacobs en Christiansë gebruik word in hul voorstellings van slaaf subjektiwiteit, en hoe dit voorstellingshandeling beïnvloed. Hoofstuk Een word afgesluit met 'n kort uiteensetting van die literêre voorstellings, soos uitgebeeld in The Slave Book en Unconfessed. Hoofstuk Twee is 'n ondersoek na die funksie van Rayda Jacobs se The Slave Book as 'n historiese fiksie-roman. Jacobs se roman bepeins die geskiedenis van slawerny deur die voorstellingshandeling van ‘n "skramse kyk”. Ek ondersoek die waarde van die romanse wat in die roman opgeneem word, sowel as Jacobs se gebruik van historiografie om haar verhaal te ondersteun. Hoofstuk Drie fokus op Yvette Christiansë se Unconfessed en die wyse waarop die slaaf karakter as protagonis die stiltes as gemarginaliseerde aan die leser kommunikeer, en daaropvolgend, die wyse waarop die historiese figuur, ten spyte van die stiltes in die argief, kommunikeer. Hierdie metodiek bestempel ek as die "sywaartse kyk". Ek argumenteer dat die stiltes in die roman ‘n leemte laat vir 'n dieper begrip van die onreg en onderdrukking wat deur die protagonis gely word, en dat, ironies genoeg, dit hierdie stiltes is wat aan haar ‘n “stem” gee. Hoofstuk Vier is 'n vergelyking tussen die romans en hul doeltreffendheid. Altwee tekste, van ewe belang nagaande die bevordering van subjektiwiteit van slawe tydens die Kaapkolonie, beslaan elk 'n ander benadering tot die argief en geskiedenis self. Dit is met hierdie perspektiewe waarmee hierdie studie omgaan. Beide tekste vorm ‘n waardevolle toevoeging tot die literêre verkenning van slaaf subjektiwiteit deurdat aandag op die innerlikheid van elke teks se protagoniste gevestig word. Verder, deurdat die tekste met historiografie en die argief omgaan, spreek hulle diskursiewe kwessies rakende slaaf subjektiwiteit en die voorstellings daarvan aan.

The three novels examined in this thesis do not deal with the subject of slavery directly; however, I argue that, much like slave narratives, they all depict oppressive master/slave relationships and feature protagonists who fight for freedom through literacy and/or education. This thesis outlines three contemporary novels that take place during or after the Civil Rights Movement, what I call "freedom narratives," that not only signify on, but pay tribute to, the slave and neo-slave narrative tradition. These novels borrow from the tradition, not only in terms of structure, but also in terms of plot, point of view, theme, and resolution. Additionally, through the novels, one can see how the trauma of slavery in America permeates contemporary American homes, both White and Black. This thesis focuses on PUSH by Sapphire, The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips, and Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison to illustrate the significance and the impact of the traditional slave narrative and the trauma of slavery on contemporary novels and American people. / by Samantha Messinger. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between fiction and slavery in American literary culture. “Prisoners of Style” shows how writers from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, including Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and William Faulkner, wrestled with enslavement. They found it not only a subject to be written about, but also a problem of characterization. Slavery and the ontological sorcery through which it produced a new kind of individual—the individual who is also a thing—led these authors to rethink basic formal assumptions about realist fiction, especially about what constitutes a literary character. The writers I discuss did not set out to argue for the slave’s humanity or to render her interiority, but instead sought to represent the systematic unmaking of black personhood perpetrated by the laws and institutions that governed chattel slavery in the US. They set out to reveal the ideological violence perpetrated against enslaved blacks, and they did so by writing characters who embodied the categorical uncertainty of the slave, characters who were not allegories for real, full people. The tradition of writing I describe does not represent the fullness of enslaved “persons”; instead it renders something far more abstract: the epistemology that undergirded enslavement—those patterns of thought that preconditioned slavery itself. The authors I study understood fictionality as a thorny ethical, epistemological, and political problem. In my chapter on Crafts, for example, I look at The Bondwoman’s Narrative alongside a set of non-fiction texts about Jane Johnson, the slave who preceded her in John Hill Wheeler’s household. Reading the novel against legal documents, pamphlets, and histories about Johnson and her escape from Wheeler, the chapter explores what fiction could do that these other modes of writing could not. In moments of sleep, amnesia, and daydreaming, Crafts resists the normative logic of subjecthood and individual rights that underpins the representations of Johnson. In the second half of the project, I demonstrate the significance of fictionality to American literary realism’s evolution into modernism. The final chapter, on Faulkner, places two of his Yoknapatawpha novels within the context of his interest in modernist painting and sculpture. Work by Picasso, Matisse, and other visual artists inspired his concern with surfaces and flatness, leading to a meditation on artifice that runs throughout his major novels. I argue that his flatness—his insistence on the non-referential quality of fiction—is crucial for understanding his characterization and philosophy of history history, in particular the history of Southern plantation slavery.

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to Keith Michael Green who argue for broader and more complex approaches to writers’ strategies for recognizing the full personhood of African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. In the last fifteen to twenty years, hospitality theory has reshaped social science research, particularly around issues of race, immigration, and citizenship. In literary studies, scholars are only now beginning to mine the ways that theorists from diverse backgrounds—including continental philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, womanist philosopher and theologian N. Lynne Westerfield, and post-colonial writers and scholars such as Tahar Ben Jelloun—can expand the reading of nineteenth century literature by examining the discourse and practice of hospitality. When host and guest meet at the threshold they must acknowledge the full personhood of the other; the relationship of hospitality is dependent on beginning in a state of equilibrium grounded in mutual respect. In this project I argue that because of the acknowledgement of mutual humanness required in acts of hospitality, hospitality functions as a humanizing narrative across the spectrum of antebellum black experience: slave and free, male and female, uneducated and highly educated. In chapter one, “Unmasking Southern Hospitality: Discursive Passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” I examine Stowe’s use of a black fugitive slave host who behaves like a southern gentleman to undermine the ethos of southern honor culture and to disrupt the ideology that supports chattel slavery. In chapter two, “Transformative Hospitality and Interracial Education in Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” I examine how the race-centered scenes of hospitality in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends creates educational opportunities where northern racist ideology can be uncovered and rejected by white men and women living close to, but still outside, the free black community of Philadelphia. In the final chapter, “Slavery’s Subversion of Hospitality in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I examine how Linda Brent’s engagement in acts of hospitality (both as guest and host) bring to light the warping influence of chattel slavery on hospitality in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In conclusion, my project reframes the practices of antebellum hospitality as yet another form of nonviolent everyday resistance to racist ideology rampant in both the North and the South. This project furthers the ways that American literature scholars understand active resistance to racial oppression in the nineteenth century, putting hospitality on an equal footing with other subversive practices, such as learning to read or racial passing.

Orientador: Sidney Chalhoub / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T05:27:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Facanha_Dayana_M.pdf: 1731704 bytes, checksum: a584536369156703ba35c89967d232a9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Esta dissertação explora a relação entre O tronco do ipê, romance de José de Alencar, e a experiência política do romancista como deputado e ex-ministro da Justiça. Como a obra foi publicada no início de 1871, o intento da pesquisa foi estudar a experiência parlamentar que precedeu a produção do romance, em 1870. Como metodologia de pesquisa, fez-se o cotejo entre O tronco do ipê e os anais parlamentares de 1870, que, por sua vez, foram estudados em seu veículo original de publicação, as páginas do Jornal do Commercio. Com isso, buscava-se uma relação mais densa entre os debates e sua repercussão na imprensa, a procura de um contexto amplo no qual inserir a produção literária. A dissertação analisa a forma como as discussões em torno da exoneração de José de Alencar do cargo de ministro da Justiça afetaram a produção de O tronco do ipê, dentre outras obras publicadas a partir do final de 1870, bem como a crítica à política imperial inserida no romance. Nesse contexto, formula-se uma hipótese acerca do surgimento do pseudônimo Sênio. Além disso, principalmente, a dissertação examina a relação que o romance de Alencar estabelece com os debates em torno da emancipação escrava no início da década de 1870, assim como o sentido político da representação da escravidão e das personagens escravas em O tronco do ipê / Abstract: This dissertation explores the relations between O tronco do ipê, a novel by José de Alencar, and the political experience of the novelist as a congressman and as former State Minister. As the novel was published in the beginning of the year of 1871, the intention was to study the parliamentary experience which preceded the writing of the novel, in 1870. As a research method we confronted O tronco do ipê with the 1870 parliamentary annals, which, in their turn, were studied at their original context, in the pages of Jornal do Commercio. The aim was to search for a more complex dialogue between the parliamentary discourses and its reverberation in the press, looking for a wide context in which to situate the literary production. The dissertation studies the ways in which Alencar¿s political experiences affected the writing of O tronco do ipê, as well as the political criticism inserted in the book. In this context it formulates a hypothesis about the appearing of the pseudonym Sênio. Moreover, the dissertation analyses the relation that Alencar¿s novel develops with the political debates about the slave emancipation in the beginning of 1870¿s, as well as the political meanings of the representations of slavery and slave characters in O tronco do ipê / Mestrado / Historia Social / Mestra em História