Between the Lines: Countering Contemporary American War Culture with the Gritty Lyric

This thesis considers successive transformative waves in the meaning of lyricism across different genres and mediums as they respond to a backdrop of historical, political, and social struggle in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century United States. I argue there is a new, distinctly contemporary form of the lyric that we can identify across different literary genres and music modes, one that is not confined to classic poetic forms or structures. “Gritty lyricism,” as I name it, re-appropriates and re-invents traditional notions of lyricism to develop an intricate relationship between the narrator and reader or performer and audience and subvert the notion that poetic language is not powerful. Through each of my sections, beginning at the 1991 Gulf War with Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, moving to the post-hardcore punk music scene of the early to mid-1990s with bands like Fugazi and the Riot Grrrl movement, and ending at Claudia Rankine’s poetic experiments in her “American Lyric” and the Black Lives Matter protests, I establish how the gritty lyric uses discomfort and dissonance as strategies to re-embody the reader, create productive spaces for thought and change, and stage a collaborative counter-spectacle for its readers and listeners to look both inwards and outwards with a more critical eye.

The gritty lyric does not shy away from exposing the corrupt, often violent silences in our historical and contemporary narratives. Its strategies are unique because they can be located not only in the words of novels, songs, or poetry, but also in the spaces, in between the lines both outside and within American society. In this particularly tumultuous period in American history, I conclude by arguing the gritty lyric gives us a way to re-evaluate our perspectives as readers and citizens of a nation with a complex and often hidden war culture, granting us the tools to protest our dysfunctional systems in a collaborative, meaningful manner rooted in a collective conversation off the page.
 

Authoring Female Subjectivity: Motherhood in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries

Literary critic Maureen T. Reddy identifies the early women’s movement in the United States as a “daughter’s critique.” By contrast, as Gayle Greene claims, second-wave feminists of the late twentieth century attempted to assert agency over the maternal by redefining it in their own terms. At the same time that the second-wave feminist movement found political and social power in the figure of the mother, it rejected patriarchal norms of marriage and motherhood that had suppressed women’s liberation in the past. This complex ambivalence towards motherhood that characterizes second-wave feminism makes the late twentieth-century a critical moment in which to consider literary representations of pregnancy and childbirth. This thesis offers an analysis of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries as exemplary novels in which a feminist treatment of maternity seems to inform the narrative and structural elements of the texts.

I argue that these two novels take a feminist approach to representations of pregnancy and childbirth by both rejecting normative expectations of motherhood and embracing the generative possibilities for female subjectivity that exist within these narratives. Plath and Shields each utilize a subversion of typical narrative forms, a re-imagination of the pregnant body, and an intimate exploration of childbirth in order to write against traditional conceptions of motherhood. In doing so, these authors open up space for future discursive forms to fully embrace the mother’s subjectivity.
 

An Imperfect Science: Translating Pain and Identifying Comfort in Illness Narratives

This paper explores the medical narrative as an instance where authenticity and legibility in nonfiction works are fundamentally incompatible with one another. I propose that the most successful narratives in this genre are structurally complex, non-reductionist works. While Dr. Rita Charon claims that in the doctor-patient relationship, language is insufficient for the patient to relay information, I argue that in the context of illness narratives, the written word provides the patient with both an outlet and a sense of agency in framing an understanding of their condition. I will analyze several contemporary works within the genre of “medical narrative” including those written by Oliver Sacks, Annie Janvier, Paul Kalanithi, Leslie Jamison, and Abby Norman.

The first chapter weighs the benefits and the drawbacks of two distinct forms within the genre of medical narratives: the linear narrative and the fragmented experimental form. I then transition to a chapter that analyzes the challenges that arise for the patient’s emotional well-being when using tools to translate pain and suffering. Finally, I compare the concept of comfort as it pertains to writers in distinct roles facing distinct prognoses—first, the role of comfort for the mother of a patient with an uncertain fate, and then the significance of consolation for a patient with a terminal diagnosis. Throughout the thesis, I challenge whether or not several components of the medical narrative seem to impact the legibility or accessibility of the patient story.
Ultimately, I advocate for a more complete reading of illness that considers the many influences on how the patient perceives his or her experience. I demonstrate that the more fragmented and complex texts are more representative of the emotional experience of the writer.
 

A Not So Novel Pride and Prejudice: Transmedia Storytelling and Austen’s Narrative Technique in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Based on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is an immersive, multimedia experience, which utilizes transmedia storytelling to explore how various social media platforms can construct a single narrative. This paper examines works by transmedia theorist Henry Jenkins in order to evaluate how The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’ use of different mediums reconfigures Austen’s original text to appeal to the modern-day viewer. Critics and viewers have praised how transmedia storytelling prioritizes and amplifies viewer immersion. In terms of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the first-person narration coupled with the transmedia diary strengthen the intimacy between Austen’s characters and the viewer. Similarly, Austen’s employment of free indirect speech, focalization, and first-person letters also draws readers closer to the characters in varying degrees. In fact, Austen’s various perspectives guide the reader to question and reform their first impression of the characters parallel to Elizabeth’s reevaluation of Mr. Darcy. Taking that into account, this paper asks how does transmedia storytelling capture, reproduce, and depart from Austen’s shifting perspectives within Pride and Prejudice?

This paper also incorporates disparate definitions of medium as a way to examine how The Lizzie Bennet Diaries instructs viewers to discern between various perspectives. Because viewers of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries have to reconcile different perspectives through various mediums, I propose that the subtle shifts in perspectives are contingent on the medium. While not as subtle as Austen’s shifting perspectives in Pride and Prejudice, the different mediums within The Lizzie Bennet Diaries prompt viewers to reassess their initial perception of the following characters: Charlotte Lucas, Jane Bennet, and Georgiana Darcy. Ultimately, this paper argues that transmedia storytelling within The Lizzie Bennet Diaries strengthens viewers’ understanding of Austen’s characters by simulating an experience akin to reading Pride and Prejudice.

“Yet I’ll Speak”: A New Mission for the Ensign’s Wife: A Study of Othello and Shakespearean Adaptation

In an attempt to break away from prototypical fidelity studies—by following the lead of adaptation critics like Linda Hutcheon and Katja Krebs—this paper, through comparative textual analysis, examines ‘how’ an adaptor departs from the source, in order speculate ‘why’ these choices and changes were made.

It is my belief that comparative analysis of an adaptation and its source can serve two productive functions in the aiding of literary criticism. First, location of any alterations made may represent or illustrate an adaptor’s recognition of cultural change, inspiring them to reposition the adapted narrative and/or character. Second, a close reading, watching, and/or listening to an adaptation, may provide a literary analyst familiar with the source text with a brand new perspective through thematic amplification. This amplification and repositioning may expand the analyst’s understanding of a source text, no matter how familiar they may be with it.

This study began as an examination of Othello adaptations—with Othello as the source—then changed, or rather, adapted. The initial goal was to test the ‘not just how, but why’ hypothesis by examining a highly adapted source text, in order to speculate on why adaptors made certain choices. While examining the changes that Shakespeare himself made when drawing inspiration from The Moor of Venice to construct Othello, one very peculiar departure emerged. This departure, organically became the focus of this paper.

Cinthio’s “Ensign’s wife” and Shakespeare’s “Emilia”, represent two halves of what I will often refer to as the “Emilia character.” By examining the seldom knotted, and often severed ties between the two Emilia characters, this paper will suggest that Shakespeare—through thematic amplification and character motivation reversal—repositioned Cinthio’s narrative to fit a more progressive literary world. A world where female voices like Mary Pembroke and Aemilia Bassano-Lanier were emerging.

While the actions and fate of the Othello, Desdemona, Iago, and Cassio characters in The Moor of Venice remain relatively unchanged in Othello, the Emilia character undergoes a glaringly obvious transformation. This paper seeks to prove that Shakespeare retained the Emilia character’s powers of narration possessed by the Ensign’s wife in The Moor of Venice, to voice a different tale. One that answers the arguably misogynistic insinuations of Cinthio’s tale, with a loud female voice that will no longer be silenced.

An Elegiac Case Study: Observing Isolation-Induced Depression in Old English Elegies through the Lens of Evolutionary Psychology

What happens when people are isolated from each other for extended periods of time? In a world currently under lockdown due to a global pandemic, this question is perhaps at the height of our thoughts in the past few months. It is also the central theme of most Old English elegies: first-person narrative poems whose speakers tell of lives spent in suffocating loneliness brought on by a shared experience of loss. As such, this thesis aims to explore the concept of isolation-induced depression as observed in Old English elegies.

While the topic of depression is broad within the realm of psychology, I will be specifically focusing on an evolutionary psychological perspective of depression in order to compare what has remained consistent and see what has changed in our modern-day treatment of depression. In the introduction section of my thesis, I will address the topic of isolation-induced depression in relation to both our current pandemic situation in addition to my primary texts: The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Wife’s Lament. In the second portion of my thesis, I will take a more scientific approach to my analysis by evaluating each elegy as its own “case study” of isolation-induced depression. Drawing from both elegiac criticism and psychological studies, I will identify the secondary side effects of depression within each text and then show how together these texts create a “depression cycle” narrative.

Based on this “depression cycle” reading, I plan to highlight two main points of concern regarding medieval understandings of depression that still persist today: the misguided notion that recover from mental health disorders is the sole responsibility of the patient as opposed to a community responsibility, and the propagation of only one “true” coping mechanism for depression. From my analysis of these texts, I hope to raise awareness to the biased views of depression that exist today and push for more community-based approaches focused on reestablishing meaningful connections in shared environment of loss.
 

To Love Oneself: Queer Self-Love in the Work of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë

This thesis serves as a clap-back against the homophobic rationale that gay people didn’t exist until recently. The assertion that gay people are bred by overhearing Cher in the womb, or playing in their mother’s makeup as a child, is hardly a plausible explanation for the LGBTQ community’s urban sexual misconduct. Rather, the way we think about the interplay between sexuality and gender has changed, nearly as much these aspects of our personhood express themselves. In order to support this theory that members of the LGBTQ community have been around since the beginning of civil society, this thesis does two things. One of which is to focus on one identity, “queer,” and think about what it means to be queer, express queerness, and navigate sociopolitical landscapes as a queer person. The second is to look back at two of English literature’s most canonical works to date, and excavate the queerness within them. By drawing parallels between our contemporary understanding of queerness and the peculiarities of famous English heroines, we can take just one angle into the defense against efforts to stifle queer history. This thesis is heavily informed by theorists such as Talia Schaffer and Eve Sedgwick, both known for their work in the field of queer literary theory. Additionally, its case studies, Emma and Jane Eyre, are well-known novels that are still largely studied in high school and university curriculums. The works of queer theorists in conjunction with the contemporary romantic phenomenon of “self-partnering,” as made popular by activist and actress Emma Watson, help us to think critically about what queerness could have looked like in the nineteenth century.
 

End of the Road, Pardner: The Desert in American Fiction of the End of the 1960s

In this thesis I examine the desert as a unique space from which history can be made sense of in American fiction set at the end of the 1960s. I begin with Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009), a novel that is set in Los Angeles in 1970 and understood to be both his retrospective on the sixties’ foreclosure, as well as a “lite,” unambitious genre-novel with few of the literary qualities that established him as one of the most important American novelists. I argue that in this poor reception a surprising lack of critical attention is given to the episodes of the book that take place in Las Vegas and “Arrepentimiento,” the utopian hippie housing complex in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Rather than a mere setting, the Mojave constitutes Pynchon’s vision of the major new historical era that began in 1970; “Arrepentimiento” is thus a crucial and all-encompassing metaphor for the ill-fated countercultural movements of the preceding decade.

In the second chapter, I turn toward Joan Didion’s 1970 Play It as It Lays, which is often read as an outlier in Didion’s oeuvre as a temporally isolated moral allegory that, unlike her nonfiction, has no thematic interest in the events of the 1960s or “history” in the most general sense. Noting that “history” has been Didion’s primary intellectual interest since the beginning of her career in the mid-sixties, I build off the typical moral-allegorical reading of Play It as It Lays by decoding a number of cryptic temporal clues buried under the surface of the novel; in doing so, I argue that Play It As It Lays is a coded historical allegory for the major cultural transformations undergone by the country in between the years of 1968 and 1969, citing Maria Wyeth’s climactic desert sojourn as representative of this precise historical moment.

I conclude by demonstrating that despite their dissimilar authorial voices and political outlooks, both Didion and Pynchon view the 1960s as an era in which “history” as a concept began to disintegrate for both youth counterculture and the “forces of Old and Evil” that they were meant to supersede. For both authors, this is not only the most consequential change of the decade, but also the most tragic, as it gives way to an artificial and deeply alienated national culture that cannot offer individuals a stable or meaningful “place” in society or history.
 

Beauty, Tradition, and Shame in Exile: A comparison of Pai Hsien-Yung’s Crystal Boys and Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile

The Taiwanese coming-of-age novel, Notes of a Crocodile details the love affair of anonymous lesbian Lazi, and her “beautiful” classmate Shui Ling through a disconnected series of letters, diary entries, and ramblings. Intensely intelligent yet profoundly depressed, a lot of Lazi’s disillusionment manifests not just with her turbulent understanding of gender, or her relationships with women, but instead with how all these frustrations come together in her inability to possess the beautiful.

Ten years earlier, in 1983, Pai Hsien-Yung published Crystal Boys, the first exposure modern Chinese audiences had to LGBTQ literature. The son of a prominent Kuomintang general, Pai expressed only confusion when asked about the location of his homeland: “It is not anywhere geographical. It is traditional Chinese culture.” Nostalgic and melancholic in his prose, Pai not only celebrates the past and tradition, but ties his associations with the past with that of beauty.

This thesis asks what beauty means to exile — by comparing two seminal works of LGBTQ literature, Notes of a Crocodile and Crystal Boys, I trace how beauty informs the exile’s relationship to home. Through my analysis of these two texts, I notice how beauty, with its mythicism, reverence, and physicality, stresses the distance the exile has to their home. More importantly, I examine how this distance is emphasized by the exile’s shame. Beauty, in both Notes of a Crocodile and Crystal Boys, is constantly opposed by the deep shame and monstrosity these characters feel in their nonconformity — so the question is what existence is created in a life lived so intensely in contrasts and distance?

Ultimately, my thesis argues that this distance between shame and beauty creates a space of fantasy for the exile, a fantasy that, in contrast to the deep tragedy of their real lives, often borderlines on the absurd, the exaggerated, and the cartoonish. Through caricature, theater, drama, and more importantly performance, the queer exile is able to pantomime the ownership of the beautiful, using the cartoon and bastardization of this beautiful form to express the alienness the exile permanently struggles with. I borrow the critical frameworks of C.T. Hsia, Eve Sedgewick, and Susan Sontag to further my argument.
 

Dave Chappelle: Crying Laughing

Dave Chappelle began stand-up comedy at the age of fourteen in Washington D.C. Since then his career has followed an unusual track, as is due an unusual talent. He infamously left show business in 2005, only to return in 2015 to massive commercial and critical success. His work, past and present, is plagued by controversy. People continue to accuse him of intentionally bullying marginalized groups. I argue that the outrage he sparks is not only intentional, but used by Chappelle in order to direct the audience's attention towards his own perspectives on race and cultural identity in America. I argue that Chappelle structures his shows and makes statements that are intentionally inflammatory as a tool to get audiences more invested in the progression of his show, as well as to lead them to a wider context that both explains the apparent outrage of his statements, as well as leading the audience to Chappelle’s understanding of American racial and cultural identities. An understanding that highlights both the absurdity and necessity of certain stereotypes, and above all, prioritizing the individual.

Through the concepts of joke creation put forth by John Limon, I analyze audience reactions to Chappelle in his stand up special For What It’s Worth (2004), to better understand how his particular form of comedy influences audiences, as well as how audience reactions define his work as something more than just comedy. Additionally, I delve into the concepts of charged humor and cultural citizenship put forth By Rebecca creafting to understand what, exactly, the points his comedy is leading to are about. The cultural identity that Chappelle is both part of, and separate from. I propose that through outrage, Chappelle is able to point towards specific racial injustices and issues, while also working to reduce the element of race to a feature of the joke, without making it the punchline itself.
 

“This Silent and Forgotten Country”: Orhan Pamuk, Kazuo Ishiguro, and the Ambient Metaphor of Postmemory

In his 2017 Nobel Prize Address, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asked whether “stable, free nations really be built on foundations of willful amnesia and frustrated justice?” (Ishiguro 31). What Ishiguro is exploring is a phenomenon parallel to that of “postmemory,” defined by scholar Marianne Hirsch as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before - to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (Hirsch).

Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant is premised on this precise investigation, utilizing the setting of mythical, post-Arthurian Britain to examine the troubling questions of why societies turn to “willful amnesia” in the wake of collective trauma. Ishiguro’s concepts of “the buried giant” and “the mist of forgetfulness” will serve as the theoretical framework for this project’s analysis of Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel, Snow.

I will analyze how Pamuk, a writer and political dissident, and Ishiguro utilize the twin allegories of “snow” and “the mist of forgetfulness” as ambient metaphors for generational and historical silencing. This analysis revolves around the rhetorical strategies through which silence and postmemory are channeled in the literature of post-conflict environments. I will study Snow and The Buried Giant alongside the journalism of Martha Gellhorn and the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Roland Barthes, Patrick Deer, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In this thesis, I also study Pamuk’s narrative techniques by reading Snow’s narratological subversion in conjunction with Iranian New Wave cinema, engaging with Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) and Jafar Panahi’s Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015). By engaging further with Said’s theory, I confront how the role of the author, or director, can be placed within a work of literature or art as a means of political dissent.

The paramount goal of this thesis is to study how these works of literature become vessels of history and human rights by studying the truths that have been “buried” by deliberate generational silences. Through this project, I determine what differentiates a “novel as history” from a “historical novel,” and how literature can become a vehicle of human rights and history in and of itself.
 

‘Do Not Be A Pawn of the Olympians’: How Imperialist Aesthetics are Constructed and/or Challenged in The Lightning Thief and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Scholars have studied the connection between children’s literature and imperialism for a long time, but how do modern children’s fantasy authors reckon with this connection when they want to encourage their readers to challenge imperial systems of power (Rose 1993; Kutzer 2000; Mendlesohn 2008)? This thesis explores how The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (2005) and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (1998) use imperial power structures that are coded as morally ‘good’ to shape the fantasy worlds in their novels, and how the novels’ main characters, Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, respond to them. It argues that each main character’s ability to challenge the imperial power structure he inhabits is shaped by the degree to which each text relies on two major concepts that the children’s fantasy genre has used for a long time: Victorian assumptions about who a child is and how they should be raised, and the moralization of each fantasy world’s magic system through the use or disuse of portals and the fairy tale form (Rose 1993; Jones 1995; Wullschlager 1996; Sánchez-Eppler 2005; Mendlesohn 2008; Crain 2016). ‘Good’ imperial systems in each text attempt to impose these concepts on their child subjects through various means in order to shape the children under their control into ideal subjects, but they will only be successful if the text structures itself in a way which endorses a traditional view of the concepts. Because of this, this thesis concludes that Percy Jackson is able to take a stronger stance against imperialist power structures than Harry Potter is because The Lightning Thief diverges from traditional uses of these concepts to shape its narrative.

Cyclops and Exile: An Exilic Reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses

This paper explores the Cyclops chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses through the lens of the exile. In so doing, I aim to challenge the traditional readings of the chapter, which have been almost universally pervaded by strong, anti-nationalist feelings.

In my first chapter I seek to establish a suitable framework within which to affect an exilic reading. Furthermore, I seek to demonstrate that Joyce can be read as an exilic author. My first chapter is thus in three parts: (1) an examination of the critical conception of exile in literature; (2) a development of my own interpretation of exilic creations; (3) a brief biography of Joyce, demonstrating the seeds of rancor and nostalgia which clearly mark him out as an exilic author.

In my second chapter, I approach the Cyclops episode itself, again in three parts, subdivided so as to examine three critical pieces of the chapter in relief: (1) the Citizen, who has been thoroughly abused by the critical tradition; (2) the interpolated narrative style of the chapter, which has been but dimly comprehended by much of the critical tradition; (3) Mr. Bloom, in whom I find Joyce’s rendering of the postcolonial, exilic figure.

In brief, I have attempted, through a careful deployment of the language of exile, to develop a more nuanced interpretation of the Cyclops chapter. I have attempted to add careful attenuation to the text where I may. My aim has been to further elucidate difficult and troubling moments in a difficult and troubling text.
 

Postmodern Latina Folk Sensibilities 

This thesis explores texts that have paved the way for postmodern literary expression under the umbrella of Latine literature. Opting to explore this subcategory of writers because of the vacancies that exist in archival and critical explorations of this marginalized community, I draw from Latine literary critics including Christopher Gonzalez, Jose Esteban Muñoz, and Ellen McCracken to analyze the texts of Achy Obejas, Ana Castillo, and Carmen Maria Machado. Among the texts, I explore their narrative tactics of disruption and fragmentation, political stakes, and their use of folk imagery. The first part of my thesis analyzes Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, identifying its strides toward Latina postmodernism with invested stakes in folk allusion. These gestures are then traced to Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, a 2019 experimental memoir that deconstructs its form at every turn while insisting on a connection between queer Latina representations of memory and folk sensibilities. With the patterns established between Castillo and Machado, postmodern Latina folk sensibilities provide a way to revisit Achy Obejas’ presentation of traumatic queer memory in her 1996 novel, Memory Mambo. Each of these texts relies on postmodern fragmentation and spatiotemporal disruptions imbued with a folk sensibility to advance literary experimentation in Latine literature, as well as to present their own iterations of queer futurity. Ultimately, I argue that these Latina texts turn to folk imagery when writing postmodern texts as a way to build upon quintessential postmodern tenets of temporal disruption and literary fragmentation in a way that reiterates queer Latine literature’s need to respond to its historical context while maintaining an emphasis on its re-imaginative aspects.

"Now lakketh us no tales mo than oon": An Analysis of the Problems, Voices, and Implications of Fragment X of the Canterbury Tales

Easily the most problematic portion of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is its ending. Fragment X, or Group I, consisting of the Parson’s Prologue and Tale as well as Chaucer’s Retraction, is winding and opaque, and feels largely distinct from the rest of the text as it lacks overt interaction with the frame narrative (apart from the brief Parson’s Prologue) and is concerned primarily with the Parson’s views on penance, sin, and the perceived follies of his fellow pilgrims to Canterbury. This, in combination with the apparent recanting of the Tales that appears in Chaucer’s Retraction, makes Fragment X difficult to reconcile with the rest of the text, thematically or otherwise, as it shares little in common with those that precede it and thus impedes or even contradicts readings of various other sections, particularly those pertaining to Chaucer’s commentary on or satirization of social institutions. This paper will explore Fragment X, with particular attention paid to attempting to disentangle and identify each of the voices therein, in order to argue both that the Parson speaks true to his character, and with knowledge of the frame narrative, and thus does not, as some have argued, speak on behalf of the poet; and that Chaucer’s voice in Fragment X, as in other parts of the Tales in which he speaks, is that of the fictionalized Chaucer the pilgrim, and thus should not be assumed to speak on behalf of Chaucer the poet.

The “Orientalist Muse”: “The Use of the “East” in Romantic Poetry and Literary Criticism

In his 1978 seminal postcolonial study, Orientalism, Edward Said emphasized that Orientalism was not merely a European fantasy about the Orient, but “a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment. Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient into Western consciousness, just as the same investment multiplied…the statements proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture” (Said 6). Among Said’s achievements was to highlight for contemporary readers how “soon the Romantic vision that envisaged a Europe revived by eastern spirituality was followed by ‘a swing of the pendulum’ by which ‘the Orient suddenly appeared lamentably under-humanized, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric and so forth” (Said; Nash, 89). In this thesis, I explore the relationship between romantic writing and “the East'' by investigating and juxtaposing two Romantic works that are not typically brought together: Wordsworth’s The Prelude, with a particular focus on the Arab dream in Book V, and Thomas Moore’s Lallah Rookh: An Oriental Romance. Both texts can serve as ‘cases’ of “Orientalist'' poiseis in the period; I further ask, however, what happens when we put an autobiographical epic with a brief Orientalizing scene alongside other poems that have more sustained Orientalist commitments? Are there similarities or differences in the way Wordsworth and Moore represent the Orient? What kinds of colonial and Orientalist frameworks are at play in these poems and how do they complicate Said’s definitions of Orientalism?

I follow in the footsteps of romanticist scholars and Orientalist scholars like Marliyn Butler, Nigel Leask, and Mansour Bonakdarian who challenge—even while being indebted to—Said’s monolithic and Westernized account of “the East:” they pursue questions of romantic writing in relation to the period’s literature of travel, empire (imperial ideology), and literary value. I explore how The Prelude and Lallah Rookh, when put side by side, offer a complex view of Orientalism in the period. Wordsworth’s view and treatment of the Orient in The Prelude are based heavily on larger philosophical ideas concerning poetic power, creativity and naturalization, whilst Moore’s Lallah Rookh reinterprets the Orient by engaging in romantic writing that considers mostly, if not only, the historicity of the Orient’s culture and identity in relation to Britain’s imperial ambitions in the period. Both poets interact with modes of cultural theory about “other” “cultures,” poet’s vocation, and cultural formation in the past, yet they differ in their execution, presentation, and interpretation of these ideas. I argue that these similarities and differences serve to further complicate our understanding of romantic Orientalism in that they remind us that the interest in the Orient, though presented through different “uses” of the “East,” was driven by a competitive correspondence and engagement of romantic poets with each other and their works. By questioning the intricate nature of this relationship we can navigate how these ideas have affected our ongoing view of “Eastern” identity.

Cyborg Trouble: Reevaluating Science Fiction Classics As Precursors to Postgenderism

While many male science fiction protagonists are challenged to confront their masculinity, very few find meaningful escape. The immediate instinct is to pin this on science fiction’s fraught relationship with feminism — even today, there are many science fiction enthusiasts for whom feminism is merely an indistinct bogeyman. This instinct is not without merit; however, it would be wrong to suggest that the greats of science fiction were entirely unaware of gender’s limitations. In this thesis, I explore the relationship between cybernetics and gender across seminal science fiction works and suggest that the advent of cybernetic bodies coincides with the deconstruction of gender in mid-to-late 20th century science fiction.

Starting with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, I will discuss how masculinity burdens science fiction protagonists in more nuanced ways than many critics give credit. However, I will also highlight how the novel’s problematic construction of the intersection between technology and domestic life prevents it from arriving at a satisfying alternative — something that later works will rectify by way of speculative cybernetics. I will then turn my focus towards Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a novel which I believe reconfigures both technology and domesticity to better suit the issue of masculinity. I argue that by introducing the android, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep questions the value of gender itself, but still falls short of presenting a true alternative. Finally, I will look at William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a seminal cyberpunk novel which has been maligned by what little feminist criticism of it exists. I argue that Neuromancer not only takes cues from its proto-cyberpunk predecessors but also actively anticipates the issues that remain in an apparently postgender society. In doing so, I will demonstrate not only that “non-feminist” science fiction is more keenly interested in gender politics than might initially appear but also that its insights eventually anticipate and account for the very critiques leveled at it.

Never One of the Crowd: Trauma Theory and the Need for Superiority in “William Wilson” and The Picture of Dorian Gray

This thesis employs contemporary trauma theory as a lens through which a larger dimension of late-Gothic texts such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray can be appreciated. Using the concept of endemic societal trauma, as defined by Laurie Vickroy and Stef Craps, this thesis demonstrates that the protagonists of both Gothic texts combat societal trauma by striving to assert superiority, and explores to what extent such exertions are viable. The Introduction shows how the Gothic and trauma theory are relevant to the analysis. Chapter 1 examines assertions of power in “William Wilson” and establishes a model in which the narrator, faced with someone who shares his name and features, fears commonality and is driven to achieve superiority over others. Chapter 2 applies this model to Dorian Gray and suggests that Dorian associates commonality with aging, embraces the immortality of art, and attempts to become the ultimate masterpiece by evading aging. Chapter 3 highlights the curative prospects of trauma theory, which advocate accepting commonality and sharing with other victims as a route to healing from endemic societal trauma. The Conclusion addresses the question of whether the Gothic protagonist can experience character growth and healing in a similar manner. The thesis concludes by suggesting that texts such as “William Wilson” and The Picture of Dorian Gray offer glimpses into the human condition as perceived by the Gothic, and proposes a connection between the condition of the Gothic protagonist and that of the 21st-century human.
 

Preservation or Treachery: Style in Poetry Translation: A Computational Approach

In this thesis, I explore the mechanics of poetry translation, what separates poetry from prose, and the unique role of poets as translators of poetry. I use the methods of computational stylistics, which analyze corpuses of texts based on their word frequencies. This approach allows us to uncover patterns that may not be feasibly studied using close reading alone. In the first section, I build on the work of David Hoover, who found that translators of novels are effectively “invisible”—that is, despite the fact that every word in the text has been replaced by each translator, the original author’s style prevails. I test a corpus of English translations of Italian epics, and find that this result holds at the level of the author, but not text identity, suggesting that the translator’s style is more visible in poetry. In the second section, I build on the work of John Burrows, who found that some poet-translators are more likely than others to inject their own style into their translations. I use the poetry and translations of Ezra Pound, a controversial translator, and A.S. Kline, a prolific translator writing partly in opposition to Pound, as case studies of poet-translators. I find that A.S. Kline’s poetry is consistently very different from his translations, suggesting that he has different voices as a poet and as a translator, while Pound shows no such division, suggesting that his “translations” are effectively authored by him. These results uncover differences between poetry and prose translation, and between poet-translators, raising interesting questions about the desirability of the invisible translator, the effect of narrative elements and form restrictions on similarity of translations, the behavior of Figure, and whether poet-translators have distinct voices as poets and as translators.