Focusing on the depiction of the father-son relationship and the generational conflicts in their works, as well as the metaphorical literary father-son relationship between the two authors, this dissertation offers an intertextual reading of the works of Ernest Hemingway and Ernest J. Gaines. Part One examines Hemingways Nick Adams stories that feature the young heros growing disillusionment with and eventual rejection of his home and family. Parodying conventional stereotypes about Native American ways of life, Hemingway deconstructs prevailing notions of race by aligning Nicks father with the wilderness and the Indians. Gainess earliest short stories focus on a reunion of the historically-divided African American family. Deconstructing traditional views of gender, Gaines emphasizes the concept of the African American extended and surrogate family as ever-changing. Part Two shifts the focus from the son to the fathers. Hemingways seminal story Fathers and Sons presents a cyclical view of time, according to which the son runs the risk of repeating the fathers mistakes. The fathers sins, especially his suicide, are not resolved until Robert Jordan sacrifices himself for his friends at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls and thus becomes a father to others. The discussion of Gainess two major novels on the perspective of fathers, In My Father's House and A Gathering of Old Men, demonstrates how the generational gap can be bridged. Part Three analyzes the metaphorical father-son relationship between Hemingway and Gaines. Using Harold Blooms anxiety-of-influence theory as a model, and Ivan Turgenevs Fathers and Sons as the original text both Hemingway and Gaines studied and misread, this section compares and contrasts the generational conflicts in Hemingways The Sun Also Rises and Gainess Catherine Carmier and A Lesson Before Dying. The conclusion looks at Hemingways and Gainess works as instances of life-writing and places the two writers in two different traditions, with Hemingway representing a Western form of autobiography that emphasizes the individual and with Gaines representing an African form of autobiography that stresses the interdependence of individual and group experience.

In the aftermath of a worldwide war, the planet Xica is split into small pockets of humanoid civilization. One pocket is a divided abandoned military compound. Beyond the wall is the Outer Rim where people are free yet violence is rampant. Within the wall is the state of Sheol whose inhabitants are drugged and have few choices. Sheols ruler, Jared, conducts an experiment where children are raised without physical contact in the Complex at the center of the city. One boy, Zahid, escapes from the Complex and meets other children; Nick in Sheol and Alexandra in the Outer Rim. Together, they find the fortress by the ocean, Sheruwth, and are accepted into the community where they make friends and learn skills. Meanwhile Jared searches, thinking that Zahid has been kidnapped. Nick becomes jealous and returns to the Complex telling Jared where to find Zahid. Jareds attempts to bring Zahid back fails and he arranges an accident for Ellen, the woman who helped Zahid escape from the Complex. Nick escapes and finds Ellen severely wounded. She dies in Sheruwth. The children deal with grief, forgiveness, and guilt. Zahid proposes a plan to return to the Complex and free the other children while secretly harboring a desire to kill Jared. Some people from Sheruwth agree to go with him and the plan is set into motion. Once there, Zahid confronts Jared, and then at the last second, decides not to kill him, seeing him for the pathetic creature he is. Instead, Zahid debunks Jareds deified status in Sheol. The drugs are destroyed and the inhabitants are given the chance to leave Sheol. The children of the Complex are freed, although some decide to stay. Ten years later, Zahid has his own family and a teaching job that he loves. Jared sends word, asking for Zahid to visit him. The former ruler has lived in isolation for the past nine years, deserted by all except for his assistant. Zahid offers hope to Jared.

This dissertation is a critical assessment of <i>"biopoetics:"</i> a new literary theory that attempts to import ideas from evolutionary science to the study of literature. Borrowing from the field of evolutionary psychology, the biopoeticists argue that some literary forms and themes are particularly valuable because they result from our innate and evolved cognitive structure; they also attempt to create a normative aesthetic from the idea that evolution is progressive. In its first half, this study examines the claims of evolutionary psychology and their application by the biopoeticists; in the second half, it examines the idea that evolution is progressive, and considers the implications this may have for literary theory. In its conclusion, this work argues that biopoetics, conceived from a dissatisfaction with other contemporary literary theories--and in particular with such theories-- politicization of literature--is more dubious in its assumptions and reasoning, and more programmatically political, than the approaches that it seeks to replace.

The disjunction between the oral and the literate in the works of William Faulkner reveals the different ways these distinct modes of organization combine to structure a text. The oral in Faulkner's fiction makes its presence known not only as offset speech but also as a mode of action and narrative whose logic is conjunctive rather than disjunctive. According to the literate mode, a form organizes novelistic matter. According to the oral mode, forces that function as signs rather than organizers of their form rule the action and narrative. When the disjunction between the oral and the literate is so complete that oral experience may be displayed and contained but not spoken, the result is the disorienting structures of The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!. Yet examination of each of these novels in terms of the relationship between the oral and the literate reveals their apparently unstable structures as ordered nonetheless. Go Down, Moses presents the problem of story and its transmission at a meta-narrative level, according to which each chapter is the part of a whole whose interrelations remain unmediated either by the oral or the literate. As a result, the message transmitted from the past to the present remains embedded within a collage that cannot itself speak it. At the same time, Go Down, Moses contemplates the matter of the oral and the literate at the level of story more explicitly than in the earlier novels, revealing Faulkner's growing respect for an orality that obtains in a literate world. Finally, in The Reivers, Faulkner presents a text in which the literate and the oral are triply enfolded within a narrative technique that allows for the articulation both. And while this technique preserves the fundamental ordering principle of each, it ironically comments upon the limitations of either revealing, in the end, that for Faulkner the literate text is always already oral.

For this dissertation, the following novels have been chosen as examples of the many issues that are involved in mothering in United States society: Chapter 1: Dorothy Allisons Bastard Out of Carolina and Toni Morrisons Beloved, Chapter 2: Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon and Dorothy Wests The Wedding, Chapter 3: Amy Tans The Kitchen Gods Wife and Christina Garcías Dreaming in Cuban, and Chapter 4: Betty Smiths A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Paule Marshalls Brown Girl, Brownstones. For this study, the term mothering is specifically related to the rearing of children by the female parent. Rearing is defined as the bringing up of a child to maturity and at least to the legal age of eighteen. In Mothers at Work: Representations of Maternal Practice in Literature, Elizabeth Bourque Johnson examines the following definition of mothering: Mothering is a job, a kind of work. The word mother may also indicate a relationship or a title or a way of caring, but primarily a mother is a worker, a person who takes responsibility for the care and development of a child (22). In this dissertation, I argue that oppressive circumstances in the examples in these novels create similar coping strategies for the mother characters, especially when mothering daughters. In addition and contrary to what some might believe, those coping strategies are not confined exclusively to particular cultural groups. The chapters of this study show how different mothers who rear children under different negative circumstances may benefit from similar coping strategies, and they examine these coping strategies from the least to the greatest examples of their success.

This is a novel about a hack of a novelist who guides a fraud of a novelist around an allegorical version of the United States of America. It tests the limits of its readers patience with irony and metafiction. Themes that are explored, mocked, and then explored again include belief, identity, reality, geography, the intersections of the aforementioned, and the comical futility of such exploration. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

This dissertation argues that readings of the Civil War novels published in America since 1955 should be informed by a consciousness of the social forces at work in each authors time. Part One consists of a study of the popular Civil War novel, 1955s Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor; part two, 1974s The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Chapters One through Three explain that Kantor was especially fitted for the ideological work going on in Andersonville, then outlines the way that novel tried to contribute to the transition between World War II and the Cold War. The book attempted to aid in the process by which Americans were persuaded to shoulder the financial and military burden for the protection of West Germany and West Berlin. Chapters Three and Four examine The Killer Angels, arguing that Shaaras decision to feature Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Twentieth Maines defense of Little Round Top is a working-through of the longing for a different, more creative style of leadership after the Vietnam War came to be perceived widely as a disaster. On the Confederate side, the conflict between Generals Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet parallels the conflict over the war in Vietnam. Part Three examines about a dozen Civil War novels published in America in the past twenty-five years. In Chapter Five, I argue that these novels partake in the postmodern tendency toward the creation of characters who experience a confusion of perception and identity in the face of the unending cascade of information coming at them, and respond in ways typical of postmodern characters. Chapter Six offers three models for the way contemporary novels explore the Civil Wars meaning: the multiplicity novel, the 1990s anti-war model, and the counter-narrative model, which are all described using examples of each kind of book.

This research explores connections between Zora Neale Hurston's <EM>Their Eyes Were Watching God</EM> and Alice Walker's <EM>Meridian</EM>, two important novels in the African American canon rarely studied in conjunction. I examine the novels' portrayals of Black mothers, comparing and contrasting Nanny Crawford and Mrs. Hill as central mother figures. I also examine Leafy Crawford, Meridian Hill, and other minor Black mother/women characters. Though Hurston's and Walker's presentations of Black mothers differ, both authors work toward dismantling traditional stereotypes of Black motherhood, particularly the Black superwoman stereotype, and, thereby, ultimately redefining Black womanhood. In defending this claim, I explore Hurston's "motherly" influence upon Walker and other contemporary writers who have questioned traditional (usually male) portrayals of Black mothers. Toni Morrison and Sherley Anne Williams, for example, acknowledge(d) Hurston as a literary foremother and have drawn from her writing in generating their own work. Walker also acknowledges Hurston's weighty presence in, among other works, <EM>In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose</EM> and <EM>Meridian</EM>. In the latter, Walker directly alludes to <EM>Their Eyes Were Watching God</EM>. Perhaps most interesting, however, is how differently Walker and Hurston portray motherhood in these novels. Whereas Hurston's Nanny seemingly fits the affectionate, overly-caring Black mammy stereotype, Mrs. Hill resents her children and withdraws emotionally from them. Yet the characters are eerily similar in that both withhold valuable sexual information from their (grand)daughters, lie to force Janie and Meridian into lives similar to their mother figures' unenviable existences, vent their frustrations and disappointments upon their children, and use guilt in an attempt to keep the young women under their control. Both, in other words, represent traditional stereotypes of Black women and, therefore, become obstacles the daughter figures must defy to achieve personally fulfilling lives. Drawing from Hurston's and Walker's memoirs, I explore the authors' personal views of motherhood (how they claim to feel about their own mothers and/or grandmothers, and how Walker claims to feel about becoming a mother) and how those views translate into their writing. Finally, I work to clarify and distinguish my take on the two authors' portrayals of motherhood from other critical perspectives.

On the title: for a dichotomy of vulnerability and resistance; for self as plural and/or changeable; for acts of claiming. To hint at tone, setting, and content. On sound: to shape a poem's mood, and because these pieces should leave your mouth a little tired if you read them out loud. On lineation: to highlight the near-misses in language-ambiguities, double meanings, troublesome literalization-and to see these not as pitfalls but as opportunities. On stanza and strophe breaks: if a stanza is a room, the breaks between must be doorways, and who wants to sit down and rest in a doorway? The aim is to stretch the reader across the distance, leave him/her hanging and anxious to get to the next words. The same strategy, less intensely, informs line breaks as well. On punctuation or its omission: used where pacing, voice, or logic require it, but otherwise considered unnecessary. On orthography: at times because it's redundant (the words should signal beginnings and ends of thoughts regardless of capitalization); at times because capitalizing proper nouns signals an impossible surety of reference (who understands America enough to claim they're describing it completely and accurately?). Additionally, to encourage ideas to collide. On the lowercase i specifically: this isn't about autobiography, but about writing good poems. Perspective changes as the writing dictates; be wary. On voice: bifurcated, bilocated, liminal in identity (say, an ex-carney holding a one-woman picket line) and method (fragmentation; juxtaposition; ellipsis; word play). Passionate and linguistically lush. On why: not to break the rules of discourse, but to break them open, exposing what's inside.

In this paper I argue for the value of literature in ethical instruction. Following Martha Nussbaum, I argue that literature often promotes the kind of context-specific judgment, respect for the cognitive value of the emotions and empathy for others that are foundational to the kind of ethical judgment Nussbaum and I support. Like Nussbaum, I find that Henry James's novels evince these same ethical values and that his novels, especially the novels of the late phase, are therefore useful for ethical instruction. Unlike Nussbaum, however, I do not believe that James portrays erotic love as an emotion that is incompatible with ethical judgment. Instead I believe that James makes a distinction between desire and love and that the former is incompatible with ethical judgment but the latter is not. In fact, I argue that James portrays erotic love as a stimulus to the kind of openness to the other that is necessary for accurate judgment, and I demonstrate this by examining the main characters of three novels of the experimental phase <u>The Spoils of Poynton</u>, <u>What Maisie Knew</u>, and <u>The Awkward Age</u>and exposing the ways in which their love for others, especially their erotic love for others, encourages (or could have encouraged, in cases where the characters fail to love) their capacity for ethical judgment. By focusing on three novels from the experimental period I also expose the connections between the thematic concerns of the experimental and late periods and suggest that James is as preoccupied in his middle period as is in his late period with the relationship between awareness of others and an appreciation and affection for them.