This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of womens memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision womens roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with womens prescribed place in the South. I examine novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Dorothy Allison, and Lee Smith to explore the many ways these women employ blues, gospel, and country music through tropes of female musician characters, song lyrics, or musical structures in order to re-imagine a South less constrained by paternalist ideas about sexuality, race, class, and religion. In its unique combination of music history, literary analysis, and cultural theory, I Will Learn You Something models a productive interdisciplinary approach to understanding diverse women writers rhetorical strategies for learning readers about female voices often neglected in American literary and musical history.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-03052008-075120 |
| Date | 05 March 2008 |
| Creators | George, Courtney |
| Contributors | David Smyth, Richard Moreland, Joyce Jackson, John Lowe, Katherine Henninger |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-03052008-075120/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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