How did cinema influence the many writers who also constituted the first generation of moviegoers? In Spectatrices, I argue that early moviegoing was a rich imaginative reservoir for anglophone writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Coming to cinema from the vantage of the audience, I suggest that women of the 1920s found in moviegoing a practice of experimentation, aesthetic inquiry, and social critique. My project is focused on women writers not only as a means of reclaiming the femininized passivity of the audience, but because moviegoing offered novel opportunities for women to gather publicly. It was, for this reason, a profoundly political endeavor in the first decades of the 20th century. At the movies, writers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf developed concepts of temporary community, alternative desire, and discontinuous form that they then incorporated into their literary practice. Where most scholarship assessing cinema’s influence on literature is governed by the medium-specificity of film, my project emphasizes the public dimension of the movies, the fleeting and semi-anonymous intimacy of the moviegoing audience. In turning to moviegoing, Spectatrices opens new methods of comparison and cross-canonical reorganization, focusing on the weak social ties typified by moviegoing audiences, the libidinal permissiveness of fantasy and diva-worship, the worshipful rhetoric by which some writers transformed the theater into a church, and most significantly, the creation of new public formations for women across different axes of class, gender, and race. In this respect, cinema’s dubious universalism is both an invitation and a problem. Writers from vastly different regional, racial, linguistic, and class contexts were moviegoers, together and apart; but to say they had the same experience is obviously inaccurate. In this project, I draw from historical accounts of moviegoing practices in their specificity to highlight that whereas the mass-distributed moving image held the promise, even the premise, of shared experience, moviegoing was structured by difference. The transatlantic organization of the project is meant to engage and resist this would-be universality, charting cinema’s unprecedented global reach while describing differential scenes and modes of exhibition. Focusing on moviegoing not only permits but requires a new constellation of authors, one that includes English and American, Black and white, wealthy and working class writers alike. Across these axes of difference, women theorized the politics and possibilities of gathering, rethinking the audience as a vital and peculiar social formation.

I do not purport to give a definitive argument for or against the influences of the unconscious, for the necessary realm of expertise lies within other fields: psychiatry and psychology. However, the application of psychoanalytic literary theory of the unconscious to the lives, words, and characters of selected female authors in order to explore a richer, more meaningful purpose of their art will be the subject of this literary journey. Specifically, the intent will be an analysis of the relation between the manifest content of three classic works of literature to the unconscious intent relative to the author’s biographical perspective, or the psychology of literature.

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Ambivalent Ecologies: Representations of the Nonhuman in African American Literature, 1830-1940, argues that nonhuman animals and ecological phenomena are central to the projects undertaken by African American authors from the antebellum slave narrative through the interwar period. In four chapters that focus on the Anglophone literature of nineteenth century abolition, the late nineteenth-century conjure tales of Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, I contend that there are as many differences in how these authors marshal the nonhuman as there are similarities. Following this insight, I tease out the unevenness and tensions in these representations across the tradition. Tracing the influence of literary genre and historical developments on representations of the nonhuman, I contend that these mark a site or perhaps a vector of profound ambivalence. Pushing beyond paradigms that reflexively position the work of black creative intellectuals as always already critical of Western liberal humanism, I offer a more nuanced set of close-readings that stay with the trouble of what I theorize as the ecological ambivalence that animates African American literature’s relationship toward the colonial categories the Human, or Man. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Jackson, Frantz Fanon, and others, I position this ambivalence as a key feature of the ecology of African American life.

Drowning is a frequent mode of death for female literary characters because of the strong symbolic relationship between female sexuality and water. Drowning has long been a punishment for sexually transgressive women in literature. In the introduction, Chapter 1, I describe the drowning paradigm and analyze drowning scenes in several pre-twentieth century works to establish the tradition which twentieth-century women writers begin to transcend. In Chapter 2, I discuss three of Kate Chopin's works which include drownings, demonstrating her transition from traditional drowning themes in At Fault and “Desiree's Baby” to the drowning in The Awakening, which prefigures the survival of protagonists in later works. I discuss one of these in Chapter 3: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although Janie must rely on her husband to save her from the flood, she survives, though her husband does not. In Chapter 4, I discuss two stories by Eudora Welty, “Moon Lake” and “The Wide Net.” In “Moon Lake,” Easter nearly drowns as a corollary to her adolescent sexual awakening. Although her resuscitation is a brutal simulation of a rape, Easter survives. “The Wide Net” is a comic story that winks at the drowning woman tradition, showing a young bride who pretends to drown in order to recapture the affections of her husband. Chapter 5 analyzes a set of works by Margaret Atwood. Lady Oracle includes another faked drowning, while “The Whirlpool Rapids” and “Walking on Water” feature a protagonist who feels invulnerable after her near-drowning. The Blind Assassin includes substantial drowning imagery. Chapter 6 discusses current trends in near-drowning fiction, focusing on the river rafting adventure stories of Pam Houston.

This study explores the notion of female cultural difference in the context of dominant patriarchal and other oppressive patriarchal structures. Essentially, its focus is on deconstructing stereotypical images of women, who are often perceived as homogenous. Throughout the study I argue that as much as their sensibilities are varied, African and African American women respond differently to the oppressive conditions they find themselves in. The following selected texts provided the opportunities for exploring and evaluating the genealogy of female cultural difference that is central to my research: Anthills of the Savannah (Chinua Achebe); Scarlet Song (Mariama Ba); The Joys of Motherhood and Kehinde (BuchiEmecheta); Their Eyes Were Watching God (Nora Zeale Hurston); Bitches Brew and Seven Steps to Heaven (Fred Khumalo). In the process of analyzing these texts, I demonstrated that the notion of cultural difference is often narrowly and erroneously construed. I discovered that the protagonists in these texts are not only conscious of their oppressed condition but often adopt strategic agency to contest male privileges that silence them. In pursuit of this critical perspective, I have proceeded to apply relevant theoretical frameworks constructed by Cornel West, Hudson-Weems, Bakhtin and a conflation of others whose philosophical tenets support the major theoretical frameworks. The aforementioned literary critics have enabled me to come up with a more comprehensive and richer analysis of the set texts. In my analysis I have advanced the argument that female visibility manifests itself variously and temporally through individual and sometimes sisterly attempts at empowerment, self- definition and esoteric discursive features. I noted that all this is evidence of the nascent creative potential in African women who refuse to be silenced. In my analysis of the Seven texts I have incorporated, modified and developed some of the insights from critical thinkers who engage in the ongoing debate about female cultural difference. This approach has enabled me to come up with new insights that ferret out veneers of African women’s rich cultural diversity, in light of the ever changing nature of women’s operational spaces. It is this transcendental vision that basically informs and resonates with my study. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

Living in tune with nature means respecting the natural environment and realizing its power and the ways it manifests in daily life. This essay focuses on the ways in which respect for nature is expressed through animal imagery in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mark Twain's "The Stolen White Elephant," Roughing It, and Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Jack London's The Call of the Wild. Each author encouraged readers to seek the benefits of nature in order to become better human beings, forge stronger communities, and develop a more unified nation and world. By learning from the positive example of the animals, we learn how to share our world with them and with each other.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Broken bodies litter the landscape of African American women’s literature. Missing limbs and teeth, paralyzed appendages, lost hair, and deformities appear frequently in the works of authors like Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Pearl Cleage, and Octavia Butler. While many white authors also include broken bodies in their works, Hemingway’s preoccupation with synecdoche in terms of body parts perhaps being the most notable example, the motif permeates the tradition of African American women’s fiction like no other genre, appearing in the work of almost every major African American woman author. In the case of some authors, Morrison and Walker for example, broken bodies appear in every novel of their corpuses. In fact, every story in Walker’s first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, features a broken body. Several questions arise from the ubiquity of this motif in the texts of African American women authors: Where did the motif originate? Why does the motif persist? Do the authors use the motif in the same way? What does the trail of broken bodies reveal about how African American women authors interpret the relationship between body and self? Surprisingly, given the prevalence of the motif and the number of critical comments on one or another text, no critic has essayed a comprehensive examination of the motif in African American literature. While this paper does not have the scope to cover the African American canon as a whole, it will discuss the motif across the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African-American women's fiction is relational and expresses these writers' "ethic of caring" that stems from their folk and womanist world view. Found primarily in slave narratives and in domestic fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatic animal metaphors and/or similes provide direct analogies between the treatment of African-Americans and animals. Here, these writers often engage in rhetoric that challenges pro-slavery apologists, who attempted to disprove the humanity of African-Americans by portraying them as animals fit to be enslaved. Animals, therefore, become the metaphor of both the abolitionist and the slavery apologist for all that is not human. The second function of animals-as-trope in the fiction of African-American women writers goes beyond the pragmatic goal of proving African-Americans's common humanity, even though one could argue that this goal is still present in contemporary African-American fiction. Animals-as-trope also functions to express the African-American woman writer's understanding that 1) all oppressions stem from the same source; 2) that the division between nature/culture is a false onethat a universal connection exists between all living creatures; and 3) that an ethic of caring, or relational epistemology, can be extended to include non-human animals. Twentieth-century African-American writers such as Hurston, Walker, and Morrison participate in what anthropologists term, "neototemism," which is the contemporary view that humankind is part of nature, or a vision that Morrison would most likely attribute to the "folk." This perspective places their celebration of the continuous relations between humans and animals within a spiritual, indeed, tribal, cosmological construction. What makes these particular writers primarily different from their literary mothers, however, is a stronger sense that they are reclaiming the past, both an African and African-American history. What I hope to contribute with this dissertation is a new perspective of African-American women writers' literary tradition via their usage of animals as an expression of their "ethic of caring" and their awareness that all oppression stems from a single source.