Using a number of structurally innovative novels from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as a basis for study, this dissertation examines the representation of communities in postmodernist American fiction. While novels have often been critically studied from the standpoint of the individual and society, here the often neglected category of community is put under scrutiny. Yet rather than considering it from a sociological point of view, which can potentially favour historical, economic or political grounds for community, this study focuses on the ontological binds formed between individual and community. On one level this study connects formal qualities of postmodernist novels to a representation of community – especially literary conventions from the past that are foregrounded in the present texts. On another level it interrogates the limits of the individual in relation to others – how we emerge from others, how we are discrete from others, how much we can actually share with others, at what cost we stay or break with the others who have most influenced us. The primary novels studied here, each of which is deeply invested in the community as a locus for ontological interrogation, are Robert Coover’s "Gerald’s Party" (1985) and "John’s Wife" (1996), Gilbert Sorrentino’s "Crystal Vision" (1981) and "Odd Number" (1985), Harry Mathews’s "Cigarettes" (1987), Joseph McElroy’s "Women and Men" (1987), and Toni Morrison’s "Paradise" (1997). Despite their varied representations of and attitudes toward the individual in community, these texts share a common spectre of American Romanticism that inflects how we read the possibility of community in the postmodernist period.

This study examines the image of house and home as the reification of our domains as living, dwelling, housed beings in three novels: Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits; Anne-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees; and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Being human, we form through perception, build through forming, dwell in building, and perceive through dwelling. Through close reading and analysis, this thesis examines questions of: If we are how we dwell, then what happens when the structures and the spaces of our dwellings become haunted? What happens when "home" becomes a facade that suspends necessary elements of dwelling? This study projects that if we are how we dwell, the very nature of our being entails a constant questioning of what it is we allow a presence to in our how we form, build, dwell, and perceive within both tangible and intangible realms and the influential perspicacity literature bears within this process.

Zugl.: Düsseldorf, Univ., Diss., 2004

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Renee Schatteman, committee chair; Chris Kocela, Margaret Harper, committee members. Electronic text (158 [i.e. 156] p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed 23 June 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 146-156).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-226). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-09-17T15:24:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2014-02-24. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2015-09-17T15:48:06Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000844275.pdf: 1290936 bytes, checksum: ec8ede09de5c3ebdfbab0965c330a998 (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / O estudo comparativo entre os romances Paradise, da autora norte-americana Toni Morrison (1997), e Rosa Maria Egipcíaca da Vera Cruz, da autora brasileira Heloisa Maranhão (1997), apresenta a criação de imagens metafóricas de lar como forma de revisão da história oficial de formação nacional. Em ambos os romances, a construção de cronotopos subvertidos recria vivências internas do passado em lares inclusivos, elaborando espaços que revisam as características de externalidade associadas a identidades nacionais de formação histórica. A história compartilhada de vivências internas constrói locais de atuação para personagens que vivem à margem da sociedade, marcando a existência dessas vidas dentro do panorama geral de grandes eventos históricos ocorridos nos Estados Unidos e no Brasil. Com a subversão da história oficial, os romances históricos reformulam o entendimento sobre o passado e o presente, reformulando as identidades sociais compostas por determinações históricas. / The comparison between Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997) and Heloisa Maranhão's Rosa Maria Egipcíaca da Vera Cruz (1997) shows how these two novels create metaphorical images of home as a way of revising the official history of national formation. By constructing subverted chronotopes, both novels recreate inner lives in inclusive homes, presenting spaces that revise external characteristics associated with national identities. The shared history of inner lives forms the ground for marginalized characters to participate in society, making it possible for these characters' lives to be registered in the broader panorama of historical events in the United States and in Brazil. By subverting official history, historical novels reformulate our knowledge about the past and the present, reformulating social identities determined by historical characteristics.

Stereotypes and myths are created by media to simplify and mystify reality. The two are used to form negative stereotypical images that are used as tools of social oppression in today’s white patriarchy. This essay will focus on how Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye depicts black womanhood and motherhood and resists the reductive images of black women through the narrative technique. In the text we find the stereotypical images of the Mammy and the Matriarch in the character Pauline "Polly" Breedlove, both simplifying and mystifying black motherhood but also condescending towards African-American family constellations. The text resists these images by making readers inhabit Polly who at first fits in to the two archetypes, only to then give us additional information and use an engaging narrative technique that invites the reader to decide if Polly really is the Mammy and the Matriarch.

Using a number of structurally innovative novels from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as a basis for study, this dissertation examines the representation of communities in postmodernist American fiction. While novels have often been critically studied from the standpoint of the individual and society, here the often neglected category of community is put under scrutiny. Yet rather than considering it from a sociological point of view, which can potentially favour historical, economic or political grounds for community, this study focuses on the ontological binds formed between individual and community. On one level this study connects formal qualities of postmodernist novels to a representation of community – especially literary conventions from the past that are foregrounded in the present texts. On another level it interrogates the limits of the individual in relation to others – how we emerge from others, how we are discrete from others, how much we can actually share with others, at what cost we stay or break with the others who have most influenced us. The primary novels studied here, each of which is deeply invested in the community as a locus for ontological interrogation, are Robert Coover’s "Gerald’s Party" (1985) and "John’s Wife" (1996), Gilbert Sorrentino’s "Crystal Vision" (1981) and "Odd Number" (1985), Harry Mathews’s "Cigarettes" (1987), Joseph McElroy’s "Women and Men" (1987), and Toni Morrison’s "Paradise" (1997). Despite their varied representations of and attitudes toward the individual in community, these texts share a common spectre of American Romanticism that inflects how we read the possibility of community in the postmodernist period.

The Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation preserves several vertebrate faunas and has the potential of providing critical timing information pertaining to Early Cretaceous dinosaurs and the Sierran magmatic arc. Historically, the Morrison/Cedar Mountain contact and the duration of the unconformity between them have been difficult or impossible to determine because 1) the formations were deposited in similar environments, 2) the basal Cedar Mountain Formation is composed of reworked Morrison Formation, and 3) there are no radiometric ages for the lower Cedar Mountain Formation. A stratigraphic study through central Utah reveals a diagnostic suite of pedogenic and sedimentologic characters across the previously enigmatic boundary. The uppermost Morrison Formation is characterized by redoximorphic paleosol features, including iron concentrations, manganese-coated grains, and intense red-purple-green mottling. Upsection increases in chert-pebble lags and channelized conglomerates within the paleosol section indicate a period of reduced accommodation space in the Tithonian. The paleosols are usually capped by a groundwater or pedogenic carbonate. This unit is consistently present from Green River, Utah to the Utah-Colorado border. The lower Cedar Mountain Formation above this package is a poorly sorted mixture of fine-grained material and sand-gravel sized chert grains. Within a sequence stratigraphic framework, these characters record a terrestrial sequence boundary in the uppermost Morrison Formation and degradational-aggradational systems tracts in the Cedar Mountain Formation. To resolve the lack of age control for the basal Cedar Mountain Formation, a geochronologic zircon study was conducted near the Dalton Wells dinosaur quarry, Moab, Utah. The Dalton Wells quarry, along with numerous other fossil assemblages occurs in the basal Yellowcat Member. Zircons from the Dalton Wells quarry and a correlative eggshell site place the age of this horizon near the Barremian/Aptian boundary at ~124 Ma. Thus, the Yellowcat fauna is time equivalent with the feathered dinosaurs of the Yixian Formation, of Liaoning, China. This age constrains the Morrison/Cedar Mountain unconformity to a period of magmatic quiescence in western North America from 148 Ma-124 Ma. The basal Cedar Mountain age coincides with renewed magmatic activity at ~125 Ma. The Cedar Mountain Formation covers a period of 27 Myr and likely contains numerous small unconformities.

This paper utilizes poststructuralist theory to investigate the polysemic nature of the eponymous character Beloved in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The ghostly, anachronistic presence of Beloved renders the text open to multiple interpretations and this essay sets out to explore the ways in which meaning is created and communicated. From a poststructuralist perspective, considering that the meaning is in a state of flux, a text weaves its system of meaning around an assumed center in order to provide so-called stability. Peripheral meanings are repressed by the center to secure the meaning system. However, the periphery, which has a constructive function in the organization of the text, also has the deconstructive potential. Hence, the deconstructive dynamics are already inherent in the text. In Beloved, Toni Morrison addresses, among other things, the act of speaking the unspeakable and the process of constructing a new subjectivity out of the ghost of the past. Her text deconstructs the dominant narratives that have marginalized the black motherhood experience, explores the horrors of slavery through horror elements, and eventually exposes the inadequacy of language to depict such horrors. While the textual periphery is enabled to speak louder than the center, the textual subconscious flows freely. The reader is forced to participate actively in meaning-making in order to make sense of the fragmented narrative imbued with deliberate ambiguity. Beloved, as the abject other, defies the phallogocentric symbolic order. A counter-discourse emerges from the maternal, semiotic chora and empowers the otherized heroine Sethe to construct her subjectivity. Delving into the interrelationship between traumatic memory and the act of creating one’s own narrative, the text finds reparative elements in ancestral connection and thereby blends the psychological with the historical and the micro-level with the macro-level of meaning. This paper employs deconstructive key concepts from Jacques Derrida, psychoanalytic key concepts from Julia Kristeva, and seeks to unravel the dynamics in Morrison’s text that enable Beloved to be read polysemically.