In my dissertation, "Narrative Representations (of Time) in the 20th Century Novel" I examine the way in which depictions of time intersect with narrative representation in the modern and postmodern novel. I specifically focus on the use of parentheses as a way to capture differing types of chronology in narrative. The parenthesis, in a purely visual sense, physically disrupts the act of reading by creating a type of barrier around one text, separating it from the main narrative. I argue that it is with this disruption that 20th century authors were able to experiment with depictions of time and the disruption of linear narrative. Borrowing Gerard Genette's phrase "temporal ellipses" I examine how authors in the 20th century used the "temporal parentheses" in order to convey different temporal experiences in narrative. For Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the parenthesis works as a way of presenting simultaneity of experiences when spatially separated. For William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, the parenthesis creates a kind of compressed time, so that the past becomes a heavy burden upon the present, as represented by the way a narrative experience can be extended within parentheses. In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children the parenthesis is used to bridge and create a dialogue between the present moment of the telling and the past moment of the story. In Toni Morrison's Sula, the parenthesis calls attention to physical placement, representing the way in which personal identity is linked to physical place and the rejection of permanence in the novel.

This thesis investigates the rise of aviation and its influence on modernist literature in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that the emergence of heavier-than-air flight facilitated experimentation and innovation in modernist writing in order to capture the new experience of flight and its impact on the modern world. Previous critical discussions largely focus on militarist and nationalist ideas and beliefs regarding the uses of the aeroplane, and in doing so overlook the diversity of attitudes and approaches towards aviation that had greater influence on modernist thought. Through a historicist reading of a selection of modernist texts, this study extends scholarly debates by linking alternative views of aviation and modernist literary and narrative experimentation. I begin my study by exploring how H.G. Wells's calls for the establishment of a world government (necessitated by the emergence of aviation) led to an increasingly assertive and urgent tone in his later writings. His works serve as a useful starting point to read the more experimental, modernist prose forms that follow in his wake. While Wells's texts were affected on a pragmatic level, those of the modernists were affected in a more imaginative, perceptual, and sensory way, which highlights the deeper extent to which aviation influenced modernist thought. For Virginia Woolf, the all-encompassing aerial view offered a new way of seeing the connections between living things, leading to an expanded narrative scope in her later writings. For William Faulkner, flight as aerial performance and spectacle was a liberating experience and became a metaphor for escape from an increasingly capitalistic and creativity-deprived world. John Dos Passos, in contrast, saw the effects of air travel as harmful to the human senses and perceptions of the world around, leading him to incorporate aspects of flight into his fast-paced, multi-modal narratives in order to convey and critique the disorienting and alienating experience of flight. Collectively, these chapters show that as much as the aeroplane was capable of causing mass destruction, it was also constructive in the way that it enabled these new ways of thinking, and it is this complex and paradoxical nature, this thesis proposes, that makes the aeroplane an important modernist symbol.

William Faulkner is famous for stating he agrees with Henri Bergson's optimistic philosophy of time, a philosophy that emphasizes human freedom and action precisely as they relate to time. However, many of Faulkner's characters are defined by their stagnant and lethargic personalities which cannot change; these characters are held immobile by an over – identification with the rich history of their mythic, southern past. This paper, through in depth explorations of Faulkner's masterpieces, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and The Fury seeks to consider human mythmaking as the key to understanding Faulkner's difficult works. This critical approach allows us to better understand these works as conflicts between diachronic (linear or "normal") time and synchronic time (mythological or circular) time or more simply conflicts between the brute, inexorable world of fact and the human, meaning making world that is often a specious undermining of reality and change.

The frontier has long been an important part of mythic American ideology as a space with untapped resources offering the potential for social mobility. This thesis looks at writing representing the three types of frontiers identified by Lucy Lockwood Hazard to demonstrate how this boundary between the “civilized” and “savage” actually reveals the instability and inaccessibility of the American Dream. Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail is one of the quintessential narratives about the geographical frontier; while deeply racist and sexist, it manifests doubts about the rhetoric of inhumanity attributed to indigenous populations. The industrial frontier’s creation of exploitative factory structures that were then translated into domestic spaces is illustrated by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The canonical novel speaks to the inability of the poor to achieve social mobility and the reemergence of social hubs as the space of opportunity. Finally, Jade Chang’s 2016 debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World, works to completely reframe the frontier genre by positing characters of color as protagonists, resisting their typical location on the “savage” side of the frontier binary. Chang uses the concept of the spiritual frontier to foreground the difficulties minorities face in order to be accepted into white society. The instabilities manifested by each of these frontiers ultimately point to the ways in which the American Dream has historically been an escapist impossibility and inflicted violence on women, lower classes, and people of color.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2006. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Feb. 8, 2007). Thesis advisor: Thomas Haddox. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Gilberto Freyre's Casa-grande & senzala (1933) (The Masters and the Slaves) and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) revisit and reevaluate Romantic notions of history, especially national progress and attendant accounts of racial purity and whiteness of "the people." The plantation home emerges in their texts as the common locus of historical and cultural experiences and as the principle symbol and metaphor for the domination of colonial forces. This dissertation explores how Freyre and Faulkner both take up the contemporary issue of miscegenation as the primary theme in their respective works. They elaborate this theme and explore its ramifications through the central, grounding image of the plantation home, which they approach through a historical sensibility and from a historical perspective. Freyre and Faulkner work from within paradigms from Europe to rewrite them, as they re-think the legacies of colonialism and of the plantation organization in non-national, non-ethnic, non-Hegelian, generative, deterministic terms. Their works seek to offer viable and independent counter-discourses to the dominant European cultural models -- new, non-nationalist narratives of historical destiny based on culture and economics rather than on any overarching political-historical destiny, as the epics of Europe's nations had been told in the era. This dissertation hopes to contribute to the scholarship that questions the essentialist notions of race and nation, as they were conceived on the plantation in rural regions of the New World. This project recovers a transnational tradition of political opposition -- a tradition that roots itself in the anthropology of experience rather than in the determinism of origin and inheritance. It will also argue for disciplinary realignments in the literature of the Americas, by proposing that further efforts be made to study the New World plantation and its effective geography. On the basis of the discussion on Faulkner, Southern literature ought to observe a new division between the Upper South and the Lower South, demarcated by the border between North and South Carolina, on the basis of the demographics, economics, and, in turn, self-understanding of these respective regions. / text

Southern literature, from the first half of the twentieth century, deals primarily with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. The conflict in the Southern novel is a result of the protagonist's inability to transition from the structure of the Old to the New South. The Southern protagonist is often quite unconscious of his inability to adapt to the modern world because he suffers from a "diffusion of time perspective." As the protagonist struggles to find a harmonic balance between traditional and modern, he is ultimately unable to avoid a tragic fate. The "violence" that must take place in Southern literature is often a final resort of the character when all other alternatives have failed. He is inevitably drawn by fate (or by the hand of God) towards the crossroads where a choice must be made between the agrarian or industrial, between archaic morality or modern atheism, a collision that must be radically violent to be justified. This violent collision reaches its pinnacle of expression in violence involving the automobile.

That slavery was largely excised from the cultural memory of the Civil War in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly by white Americans, is well documented; Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory moves beyond that story of omission to ask how slavery has been represented in U.S. culture and, necessarily, how it figures into some of the twentieth century's most popular Civil War narratives. The study begins in the 1930s with the publication of Gone with the Wind--arguably the most popular Civil War novel of all time--and reads Margaret Mitchell's pervasive tale of ex-slaveholder adversity against contemporaneous narratives like Black Reconstruction in America , Absalom, Absalom!, and Black Boy/American Hunger , which contradict Mitchell's account of slavery, the war, and Reconstruction. Spanning nearly seven decades, this study tells the story of how cultural productions have continued to reinterpret slavery. Focusing primarily on novels and films but also drawing on interviews with ex-slaves, private journals, and court records, each chapter explores how slavery is represented in a particular historical epoch and highlights each narrative's contribution to the creation of cultural memory, particularly its conformity to earlier works or its revision of antecedents. In addition, Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory traces representations of slavery through recurring themes such as hunger, disease, marriage, and madness and seeks to understand how the narratives in question comment directly on the concept of memory. Among the topics discussed are the Civil War centennial; how Margaret Walker's Jubilee relates slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s; the controversy over The Confessions of Nat Turner; the Roots phenomenon, and the copyright lawsuit filed against the publisher of Alice Randall's unauthorized parody, The Wind Done Gone. The study concludes in 2005, with March, Geraldine Brooks's reimagining of Little Women, and E.L. Doctorow's The March, about Sherman's campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas. A pattern emerges in the final chapters that shows recent authors conjuring, in order to revise, elements of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone With the Wind.

William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, Harry Crews in A Feast of Snakes, and Kathryn Stockett in The Help each depict African Americans in roles as domestic servants. The differing historical situations of the novels play a large part in the disparity among the depictions. However, each novel clearly holds black domestic laborers in contrast to their white employers. These texts’ depictions of black domestic servants and the whites for whom they care are at different points strikingly similar and tellingly disparate. The overlaps and fissures between black domestic servants portrayed as mammy’s and uncles and black domestic servants characterized as powerful and morally upright human beings and what those overlaps and fissures demonstrate about the novels and the historical moments of their creations will be the focus of this study.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. / Title from title page screen (viewed on February 1, 2006). Thesis advisor: Thomas Haddox. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.