This study of the biblical Book of Amos from Marxist and Freudian perspectives demonstrates that the critical approaches so designated complement one another well enough to be adapted and employed constructively in the study of literature and literary production. From the Marxist perspective, the method employed assumes that the literary Amos the text embodies (AmosL) has been derived from an incarnate original (AmosI) reshaped in the process of literary production to serve certain sociopolitcal interests. Following Marxs thesis that humans must be comprehended materially in the ensemble of the social relations, the social location of AmosI is theorized according to the claim that he is not a prophet but a shepherd or, as Norman Gottwald states it sociologically, a transhumant pastoral nomad. Louis Althussers concept of the idealizing function of ideology is used to argue that Amos the prophet as opposed to Amos the shepherd is a literary production of the scribes who compiled the Bible. Amos remains, however, a profound literature of alienation manifesting the high degree of hegemony that the emerging monarchical ruling class in Israel had already achieved by Amoss time.<p> From the Freudian or psychoanalytic perspective, the text exemplifies a consciousness suffering the traumatic effects of an earthquakeeffects reflected in the texts imagery, intensity of voice, incoherence, anxiety, threat of exile, and non-representability. Frank Kermodes treatment of the mythic extends the concept of the compulsion to repeat characteristic of trauma to suggest that Amos is regressively fixated upon the myth of a tribal, premonarchical Israel as a sort of golden age along the lines developed by Raymond Williams in The Country and The City. Georges Batailles concept of sacred violence in its turn underscores the potential of Amos itself to fuel fantasies and acts of violence and raises disturbing questions about the ongoing effects of the sacred canonization of violent literature.

This study of the biblical Book of Amos from Marxist and Freudian perspectives demonstrates that the critical approaches so designated complement one another well enough to be adapted and employed constructively in the study of literature and literary production. From the Marxist perspective, the method employed assumes that the literary Amos the text embodies (AmosL) has been derived from an incarnate original (AmosI) reshaped in the process of literary production to serve certain sociopolitcal interests. Following Marxs thesis that humans must be comprehended materially in the ensemble of the social relations, the social location of AmosI is theorized according to the claim that he is not a prophet but a shepherd or, as Norman Gottwald states it sociologically, a transhumant pastoral nomad. Louis Althussers concept of the idealizing function of ideology is used to argue that Amos the prophet as opposed to Amos the shepherd is a literary production of the scribes who compiled the Bible. Amos remains, however, a profound literature of alienation manifesting the high degree of hegemony that the emerging monarchical ruling class in Israel had already achieved by Amoss time.<p> From the Freudian or psychoanalytic perspective, the text exemplifies a consciousness suffering the traumatic effects of an earthquakeeffects reflected in the texts imagery, intensity of voice, incoherence, anxiety, threat of exile, and non-representability. Frank Kermodes treatment of the mythic extends the concept of the compulsion to repeat characteristic of trauma to suggest that Amos is regressively fixated upon the myth of a tribal, premonarchical Israel as a sort of golden age along the lines developed by Raymond Williams in The Country and The City. Georges Batailles concept of sacred violence in its turn underscores the potential of Amos itself to fuel fantasies and acts of violence and raises disturbing questions about the ongoing effects of the sacred canonization of violent literature.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Poetry that is rooted in that most extreme of human experiences, war, continues to grip the public imagination. When the poetry under scrutiny comes from the "losing side" in a colonial war of liberation, important moral and ethical questions arise. In this thesis, I examine the published and unpublished works of Chas Lotter, a soldier who fought in the Rhodesian Army during the Zimbabwean liberation war (1965- 1980). In investigating Lotter's artistic record of this war, I propose that a powerful, socially embedded Rhodesian national mythology was a catalyst for acceptance of, and participation in, the Rhodesian regime's ideological and military aims. A variety of postcolonial theoretical approaches will be used to explore the range of thematic concerns that emerge and to unpack the dilemmas experienced by a soldier-poet who took part in that conflict. Trauma theory, too, will be drawn upon to critically respond to the personal impact that participation in organized violence has upon combatants and non-combatants alike. The production and marketing of this cultural record will also be examined and in the conclusion, I speculate on the changes modern technology and evolving social mores may have on future developments in war literature. Finally, I conclude my case for installing the challenging work of this often conflicted and contradictory soldier-poet as a necessary adjunct to the established canon of Zimbabwean Chimurenga writing.

This project examines the ways in which several texts written in the late twentieth century by African American and Caribbean writers appropriate history and witness trauma. I read the representational practices of Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Paule Marshall, and Fred D'Aguiar as they offer distinct approaches to history and the resulting effects such reconstituted, discovered, or, in some cases, imagined histories can have on the affirmation of the self as a subject. I draw my theoretical framework from the spaces of intersection between diaspora and postcolonial theories, enabling me to explore the values of the African diaspora cross-culturally as manifested in the representational practices of these writers. This study creates an opening into recent discourses of the African diaspora by comparing texts in which the effects of history rooted in diaspora are explored, both in how this history cripples with the impact of trauma and how it empowers dynamic self-actualization and the resistance of the status quo. I argue that in these novels, challenging hegemonic historical narratives and bearing witness to the past are necessary for overcoming the isolating and disempowering effects of trauma, while affirming diasporic consciousness enhances the role of communal belonging and cultural memory in the process of self-actualization.

There is an inherent, unspoken trauma prevalent amongst the Irish men who dominate James Joyce's narratives. Often, these characters trace back to Joyce's own life and his drawing of them is thereby complicated by memory. Through literary trauma theory, the behavior of these men is better understood. Grounded in Freudian concepts, modern trauma theorists elucidate the problems of memory and response for those marked by traumatic experience. For the Irish, and thus for Joyce's characters, that response often comes through the binary of alcohol and the Church. The purpose of this essay is an attempt to verbalize the silence that surrounds those individuals marked by trauma and to shed greater light on the already vivid Irish men that Joyce creates.

Stories engage a form of virtual play. Though they incorporate language and abstractions, stories engage many of the same biological systems and produce many of the same anatomical responses as simpler games. Like peek-a-boo or tickle play, stories stage dangerous or unpleasant scenarios in a controlled setting. In this way, they help develop cognitive strategies to tolerate, manage, and even enjoy uncertainty. One means is by inspiring confidence in difficult situations by tactical self-distraction. Another is to reframe negative or uncertain situations as learning opportunities, that is, to ascribe meaning to them. While both strategies are useful, each has limitations. In William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a king succumbs to the desire to make meaning where there is none, and nearly ruins himself in a self-composed tragedy. His friend restores his confidence and enables a happy ending—but only by deceiving him. This deception is benign, but the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is nearly ruined by her abductor’s confidence game. Her “happy ending” is made possible only by reframing her rape and death as redemptive transfiguration—which, as many of her readers suggest, is a dubious affair. The hero of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man spends the first half of the novel eliciting his companions’ confidence in order to swindle them, and the second half trying to inspire himself with the same confidence. The novel ends with an ominous impasse: one must trust, but one ought not to. For Samuel Beckett, this impasse is productive. In his middle novels, thought itself emerges from the interplay of spontaneous bouts of irrational confidence and distortive, after-the-fact impositions of spurious meaning. Stories create (illusory) identities, elicit (dubious) hopes, and reinforce (false) assumptions in order to help us cope with the agonies of anticipation and loss, and to transform misfortune, accident, and misery into reward, retribution, and meaning—that is, in a comedy of trauma.

This dissertation will examine the works of five contemporary Northern Irish poets who lived through the Troubles, a period of intense sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted about thirty years from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Colette Bryce, and Leontia Flynn each write in different experimental modes to express the traumatic experiences of the Troubles. Through a discussion of selected works by these poets, this dissertation will develop a revision of established trauma theory and suggest a mode of reading works about trauma that emphasizes the generative potential of writing about trauma with non-normative narrative styles and poetic techniques. Carson’s middle-era poetry transposes post-traumatic responses into poetry, using poetic form and atemporal narrative to draw the reader in. McGuckian’s deeply interior poems initially seem to resist interpretation, but ultimately, the reader as witness plays an important role in processing traumatic experiences. Muldoon’s playful and allusive poetry reflects on traumatic experiences without becoming stuck in any repeating narrative, emphasizing the generative potential for using poetry to transform the past into infinite imaginative possibilities. Colette Bryce and Leontia Flynn, writing in the “post-Agreement” era after the ceasefire, each seek distance and alternate perspectives that allow them to both look back at the past and look forward into the future. / English

"My thesis compares Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter in order to demonstrate how a) each text is a product of its moment and a reflection of corresponding critical thought and b) how an inversion of gothic tropes in Sleeping reflects a changed world dynamic, a melancholic exploration of epistemological and traumatic loss that can be seen not only as a recognition of the continued power of oppressive systems but a reflection on the failure of cosmopolitanism to “rescue” the global subject from her own isolation and recolonization. I claim that this is not only demonstrated by a change in form and how gothic tropes are presented, but in how homosexuality and deviant sexuality in particular is treated, a reminder that even in texts that attempt to condemn and reject colonizing tendencies, the political moment and its theoretical appendages continue to haunt postcolonial discourse, enabling recolonization and restratifying spaces of resistance. I claim that this recognition need not be totalizing or nihilistic, but that in the recognition itself lies the possibility for resistance, an act of rebellion that must be constantly re-enacted in order to deterritorialize what has been captured and displaced, a fluid and imaginative negotiation that, much like literature, is limitless in interpretation and offers readers constant and multiplicitous possibilities for agency in the face of equally fluid oppressive systems."--Provided by the author.

Patriarchal Trauma in Appalachian Literature examines the effects of subjugation on women as it is represented in three novels set in Appalachia. I define patriarchal trauma as an act causing mental anguish to a woman and perpetrated against her because she is a woman. I use the term to encompass violent, catastrophic harms but more particularly to pinpoint the traumatic effects of the quotidian, systemic deprivation of women’s autonomy. Reconsidering classic texts such as James Still’s River of Earth and Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage as narratives of women’s trauma establishes a lineage on the subject, which culminates in Lee Smith’s more recent Guests on Earth. This project eschews authenticity as an analytical tool, turning instead to modes of argument in feminism’s toolkit to delineate the potentially grim outcomes for women whose agency is constricted or usurped. While patriarchal control mechanisms such as domestic violence and sexual abuse inflict readily observable injuries on women, I argue that common, everyday subordination to men can exact a similar emotional toll, especially on women who strenuously defy male dominance. These traumatic states, I further contend, have previously been read as inevitable acquiescence or a genuine desire for subjugation in River and Gap Creek, respectively, while experiences of trauma in Guests are directly portrayed as mistaken interpretations of madness. Reassessing women characters’ numb, compliant, depressed, or enraged emotions as responses to patriarchal trauma challenges the practice of pathologizing women’s rebellion.

A major weakness of the literature on the regulation of freedom of expression within the field of political science is the assumption of peaceful, liberal democratic conditions. My project seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the legitimate regulation of speech by analyzing disciplinary approaches to freedom of expression through the lens of countries recovering from intractable conflict. I ask: How appropriate are current understandings of freedom of expression to the regulation of speech in post-conflict environments? Relying on insights from the field of social psychology and the case of post-genocide Rwanda, I argue that greater restrictions on freedom of expression could be legitimate in countries recovering from intractable conflict. However, rights derogations must take place within limits so as not to become a tool of authoritarian rule.