In this dissertation, Wallace Stevens' imagination-reality problem as depicted in his poetry is discussed in terms of an eco-critical map-territory divide. Stevens's metaphor of "the necessary angel" acts to mediate human necessity, the map, with natural necessity, the territory, in order to retain contact with changing cultural and environmental conditions. At stake in this mediation are individual freedom and the pertinence of the imagination to the experience of reality. In Chapter 2, the attempt at reconciliation of these two necessities will be described in terms of surrealism. Stevens's particular approach to surrealism emphasizes separating and delineating natural necessity from human necessity so that through the poem the reader can experience the miracle of their reconciliation. In Chapter 3, this delineation of the two necessities, map and territory, will be examined against Modernist "decreation," which is the stripping bare of human perception for the purpose of regaining glimpses of the first idea of the external world. And in Chapter 4, Stevens's approach to the problem of the map-territory divide will be considered against his alienation or internal exile: balancing nature and identity through mediating fictions results in a compromised approach to the marriage of mind and culture in a historically situated place.

Eudora Welty and Wallace Stevens share important aesthetic beliefs, especially regarding uses of the creative imagination by artists in acts of creation and characters in acts of living. A close reading of seventeen of Welty's stories, accompanied by references to related ideas in many of Stevens' poems, reveals how the imagination functions as epistemology and eucharist, while governing the shape of individual human views of the quotidian. The more abstract patterns of thought in their later works seem to move Welty closer to belief in a world beyond the quotidian than they do Stevens.

Throughout the course of this thesis, I argue that the prose of David Foster Wallace, specifically his posthumously published novel The Pale King, inhabits a middle ground between universal sincerity and the particularized authenticity of postmodern irony. I examine Lionel Trilling's definitions of sincerity and authenticity before moving toward an examination of the diverging critical response to Wallace's work, which, I argue, suggests that because so many critics have read his work as either inherently sincere or inherently authentic, his work inhabits a communal middle ground somewhere in between. To explain, I analyze Wallace's so-called manifesto of sincerity, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," as well as other instances in interviews and conversations to develop a clearer understanding of what this middle ground consists of. Further, I analyze two passages in The Pale King in which characters seek to communicate moments of profound revelation. Though these characters finally fail to truly communicate these revelations, I argue that it is the communication itself that allows both communicator and listener, and thus both reader and writer, to experience a moment of, as Wallace puts it in The Pale King, "value for both sides, both people in the relation" (227). / Graduation date: 2012

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], ii, 93 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-93).

My dissertation looks at the connections between Lacan’s four discourses and the sexuation graph in order to claim that sexuation is discursive and that, as Lacan presents it with the phallus as its quilting point, the sexuation graph is a narrative based on patriarchal hegemony, which is one of many possible narratives. I argue that through the hysteric’s discourse and a removal of the phallus as the Symbolic-Imaginary quilting point, we can begin to formulate new narratives of sexuated subjectivities. The textual objects I use for this project are literary and filmic works where women are the central topic or figure, and the works are all created and developed by men. Following Kristeva’s focus on the semiotic, in particular men’s avant-garde writing, I choose these works as illustrations of the ways in which the depiction of women has shifted in the wake of at least half a century of feminist and queer scholarship and activism. Grounded in Lacan’s claim that “Woman does not exist,” I explicate Woman as metaphor as an Imaginary construction of masculinist logic in order to develop a theory of Woman as metonymy that collapses the oppressive, Imaginary constructions and proliferations of Woman. Finally, I read closely Lacan’s sexuation graph, specifically turning it sideways and replacing the phallus with the general, empty master signifier to show the ways in which we can construct new meanings of subjectivity.

This thesis examines the diary of Ellen Wallace, a woman who lived in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, during the American Civil War. A diligent diarist, Ellen recorded not only the workings of her farm and household, but also her interactions with slaves, her worries about secession, and her shifting views on President Lincoln, emancipation and the war itself. At the start of the war, Ellen was a staunch Unionist. By war's end, she was a Confederate. This thesis will examine the factors that contributed to Ellen's changing political ideals and how she sought to reconcile her opposing beliefs. Ellen occupied a role rarely discussed in Civil War scholarship: not a member of the southern paternalist society, or a northern abolitionist. Ellen was a slave‐owning woman who supported the Union cause.

This essay presents a conceptual analysis of my piece Unavoidably Sentimental for Large Ensemble. Specifically, the paper traces the roots of the musical thinking in the piece to a notion of Sincerity that emerges from David Foster Wallace’s books and essays. The term New Sincerity, coined by Adam Kelly, is deployed to consider what a post-postmodern Sincerity could sound like in contemporary music. The paper provides general background to the literary discourse around the concept of New Sincerity as an extension of Lionel Trilling’s formalization of Sincerity and Authenticity. It suggests some examples of how a renewed sense of Sincerity could incarnate in contemporary music. As a background for the analysis of Unavoidably Sentimental itself, the paper provides background to my prior engagement with concepts like irony and authenticity in music. Unavoidably Sentimental is analyzed as a linear process, in which the piece tries to emerge out of a net of self-aware referential musical objects into the creation of sonic states of unmediated human communication between the musicians and the audience. I present different musical strategies in which the piece confronts the limitations of human communication through music, contextualized with reference to the portrayal of communication in Wallace’s writings.

As writer, essayist, environmentalist, and westerner, Wallace Earle Stegner (1909-1993) confronted what he understood to be an imagined and literal American West constructed by myths of frontier conquest, pioneer settlement in and transformation of the western landscape, and cowboy exceptionalism that erased an historical legacy of hardship, failure, and destruction of land and people, and also a West constructed by Eastern publishers and literary critics who diminished western American literature to local color writing. In Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962), Stegner uses fiction, history, and memoir to engage the mythic West's silencing of his family's failed homesteading experiences in a specific western place and the relationship of his childhood and adult selves to this place, to its history, to experiences there, and to the cultural myths that characterize his western past and present and position the West as a symbolic container of hope, opportunity, and reward for the individual and America. In an historicized western place and from childhood experiences, Stegner locates an Other western narrative and an authentic western voice that disrupts the monomythic voice and values that are out of touch not only with a modern, multicultural, urban West but also with a rural West. <br>Coming after Wolf Willow, a series of essays--"Born a Square" (1964), "On the Writing of History" (1965), and "History, Myth, and the Western Writer" (1967), reprinted in the popular The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)-- present Stegner's new theory of western American literature that re-visions the West's literary heritage and reclaims the western story, what he called "another kind of western story-telling" that engages both the present and the past Wests, acknowledges past crimes against racial others and against western lands, promotes a sense of hope for a native western art, and raises America's consciousness of the personal, environmental, and cultural costs of adhering to the metanarratives of the culturally dominant mythic West of formula fiction, Hollywood films, and television series of the 1940s through 1960s. While Stegner scholars have examined the essays independently and deem them important to Stegner's works and to the trajectory of western American literature in the 1970s forward, no study has undertaken an extended analysis of these three essays in relation to Wolf Willow to argue, as this dissertation does, that Wolf Willow contains in germinal form the foundation of Stegner's realist, place-based, and historicist theoretical construct for western American literature he advocated for in the 1960's essays. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / English / PhD / Dissertation

My dissertation looks at the connections between Lacan’s four discourses and the sexuation graph in order to claim that sexuation is discursive and that, as Lacan presents it with the phallus as its quilting point, the sexuation graph is a narrative based on patriarchal hegemony, which is one of many possible narratives. I argue that through the hysteric’s discourse and a removal of the phallus as the Symbolic-Imaginary quilting point, we can begin to formulate new narratives of sexuated subjectivities. The textual objects I use for this project are literary and filmic works where women are the central topic or figure, and the works are all created and developed by men. Following Kristeva’s focus on the semiotic, in particular men’s avant-garde writing, I choose these works as illustrations of the ways in which the depiction of women has shifted in the wake of at least half a century of feminist and queer scholarship and activism. Grounded in Lacan’s claim that “Woman does not exist,” I explicate Woman as metaphor as an Imaginary construction of masculinist logic in order to develop a theory of Woman as metonymy that collapses the oppressive, Imaginary constructions and proliferations of Woman. Finally, I read closely Lacan’s sexuation graph, specifically turning it sideways and replacing the phallus with the general, empty master signifier to show the ways in which we can construct new meanings of subjectivity.

Texte remanié de: Ph. D.--Knoxville--University of Tennessee, 1998. / Bibliogr. p. 119-125. Index.