Browsing by Department "English"
Now showing items 1-20 of 146
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Against Compulsory Sexuality: Asexual Figures of Resistance
(2022)In the aftermath of the #MeToo moment, we are called to revisit old conversations about human dignity, gendered power, and the conditions under which consent can be freely given. To date, the shape of this discourse in the ... -
Akrasia and the Aesthetic: Human Agency and the Site of Literature, 1760-1820
(2016)This study focuses on a series of foundational stylistic and formal innovations in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and argues that they can be cumulatively attributed to the distinct challenges authors faced ... -
"Am not I your Rosalind?": Ovidian Identity and Transformation in Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
(2008-12-01)"'Am not I your Rosalind?': Negotiating Ovidian Identity and Transformation in Shakespeare's As You Like It" argues that the theatrical self-masquerade, that rare and uniquely Shakespearean moment in which a character ... -
American Experiments: Science, Aesthetics, and Politics in Clinical Practices of Twentieth-Century American Literature
(2013)This dissertation is concerned with the relationships between experiments in literature, science, and politics in twentieth-century United States culture. I argue that the three can be considered together by understanding ... -
An Eden With No Snake in It: Pure Comedy and Chaste Camp in the English Novel
(2019)In this dissertation I use an old and unfashionable form of literary criticism, close reading, to offer a new and unfashionable account of the literary subgenre called camp. Drawing on the work of, among many others, Susan ... -
Automatic Modernism: Habit, Embodiment, and the Politics of Literary Form
(2012)Literary modernism followed a century during which philosophical speculations about the mechanistic basis of human life found experimental validation in the work of physiologists, who stressed the power of environment to ... -
Back in the World: Vietnam Veterans through Popular Culture
(2009)In his Dispatches, Michael Herr quotes the gonzo photojournalist Tim Page: "Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?[...] Ohhhh, war is good for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. ... -
Beautiful Infidels: Romance, Internationalism, and Mistranslation
(2010)This dissertation explores the particular significance of South Asia to international literary and political spheres, beginning with the formative moments of modernist internationalism. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, ... -
Beyond Blood and Belonging: Alternarratives for a Global Citizenry
(2011)In my dissertation, I interrogate the ways blood influences identity construction and how it shifts into a paradigmatic story, known as a blood narrative, that further determines belonging. In five chapters, I argue that ... -
Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism
(2013)"Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism" considers are the aesthetic practices found in BlackPentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that ... -
Bodily Trespass: An Ecology of the Fantastic in Twentieth-Century African American Literature
(2011)<italic>Bodily Trespass</italic> situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate ... -
Chaucer and the Disconsolations of Philosophy: Boethius, Agency, and Literary Form in Late Medieval Literature
(2016)This study argues that Chaucer's poetry belongs to a far-reaching conversation about the forms of consolation (philosophical, theological, and poetic) that are available to human persons. Chaucer's entry point to ... -
Coons, Queers, and "Human Curiosities": White Fantasies of Black Masculinity, 1840-1915
(2010)Forwarding a narrative that, in many ways, runs contrary to `official'/sanctioned accounts which designate the body of the black woman as the principal star of nineteenth-century racial science's empirical investigations ... -
Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Modernism: State, Self and Style in Four Authors
(2011)This study examines Irish modernist literature in order to complicate established critical modes which read modernist movements as reflective of distinctly vernacular or cosmopolitan aesthetic and political commitments. ... -
Creative Impulse in the Modern Age: The Embodiment of Anxiety in the Early Poetry of T. S. Eliot (1910-1917)
(2017-05-04)Through focused analysis of T. S. Eliot’s early poetry (1910-1917), this work investigates whether, and if so, how anxiety may be worthwhile or particularly constructive for poetic production in the modern world. In order ... -
Crisis: Masculinity and an Ethic of Care in American Literature
(2023)This dissertation takes three crisis periods that have occurred throughout American history—times of war, times of disease, and times of apocalypse—and examines how such periods simultaneously provoke what can be called ... -
Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel
(2020)“Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel,” reanimates and repoliticizes the idea of “cruel aesthetics” within contemporary literature by placing cruelty at the crux of global capitalism’s ... -
Cut/Copy/Paste: Composing Devotion at Little Gidding
(2015)At the community of Little Gidding from the late 1620s through the 1640s, in a special room known as the Concordance Chamber, Mary Ferrar, Anna Collett, and their sisters sliced apart printed Bibles and engravings, then ... -
Defining Properties: Literary Cultivation and National Character in Early American Literature
(2013)In the decades following the English Civil War, as the Anglophone world began transitioning to a social order structured by market and finance capitalism, the word cultivation, which earlier had referred exclusively ...
