The power of English and academic literacy: Students' perceptions and theoretical, political, and pedagogical implications. A case study of students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Abstract
"As Long As She Cracks She Holds": Thoreau's Anticipation of Dying
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation is the first full-length study to address Thoreau's ideas about death and dying. Death, for Thoreau, was an unnatural state, while dying was part of the cyclical course of nature. As he moves through nature's slow time, Thoreau is able to anticipate dying. Thoreau's transcendentalist use of time makes anticipating the seasons, and all changes in nature, a form of prophecy in the traditional sense, in that while the prophet is speaking, what he is prophesying is already happening in the eternal present. Anticipation itself becomes a form of prophecy, and ultimately what is anticipated is dying. In this sense, Thoreau is always prophysying dying while he experiences the living cycles of nature.
Skin Game: The Confidence Man and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Author:
Margaret Robertson
Year of Dissertation:
2012
In the century and a half that has passed since the publication of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, the text has come to be regarded as the quintessential novel on the subject of confidence men and confidence games in mid-nineteenth-century America. Melville's confidence man, however, scarcely resembles the readily recognizable, fast-talking white flimflammer that twentieth- and twenty-first century readers have come to expect. By turns black or white, rich or poor, verbose or mute, greedy or charitable, Melville's confidence man -- indeed, the true confidence man of the nineteenth century -- proves a far more diverse and interesting subject. In this dissertation I argue that, for the most part, antebellum Americans did not make the same distinctions as modern scholars between white and black confidence men, but rather recognized them as players of the same game, a "skin game" in which actual skin had an important role to play. Evidence for this claim abounds: we find it in the discourse of the pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy, in the works of Melville and William Wells Brown, in the writings of proslavery novelists and public letters of abolitionists, and in the works of freemen and women, former slaves, and their descendants. These writers and thinkers were fascinated by the twin problems of race and confidence in equal measure, and were, moreover, inclined to equate these two problems with one another, a fact that has gone largely unexamined in literary scholarship. This dissertation strives to recover that lost connection and restore the confidence man to his rightful place at the heart of American racial discourse.
"WHEN WE WAS BOYS": tHE AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SOUTH BRONX TEEN PROGRAM
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation concerns itself with the experiences of a six-year long poetry class at a South Bronx community center's teen program. In it I will be interweaving our writings, my teaching beliefs, South Bronx history, teenage code--dress and speech as well as poetry-specific written/performed code, and my own particular historical narrative as poet/scholar in comparison to my students' in an attempt to decipher and represent access, or lack thereof, to poet/scholar identity. This is my attempt, actually, to analyze what it means and what it takes to define oneself as a poet for young Bronx minority public school students. This will serve to exemplify the role poetics (can) play in developing and expanding the critical consciousness proponents of composition and education believe formal schooling promotes when even a cursory look at racial and ethnic backgrounds of college graduates and high school dropouts obviously proves how rarely minority students survive formal education and how infrequently they take up a place in the halls of the academy's ivory tower.
Embodied Politics: Crowds in Late Nineteenth American Fiction
Author:
Justin Rogers-Cooper
Year of Dissertation:
2011
In this dissertation I examine descriptions and representations of politically excited crowds in selected nineteenth century American fiction from the Civil War to the turn of the century. I argue that these depictions of crowds provide new opportunities for addressing theoretical concerns about collective agency and political action in contemporary accounts of Marxist informed literary scholarship. In particular, the dissertation turns to the political and ethical philosophies of Benedict de Spinoza to emphasize the importance of thinking collective agency through embodied politics. With Spinoza's concept of affect in mind, I assert that we can best understand the collective cognition of crowd behavior in the selected fiction by reframing our interpretative strategies toward theories that develop models of bodily intelligence. To this end, the dissertation offers a new genealogy for the study of crowds that primarily attends to the fiction of Martin R. Delany, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Frank Norris. It it also introduces new theoretical perspectives through intensive readings of texts on group psychology, animal behavior, religious ecstasy, financial crisis, and social emotions. I imagine here a radical ambiguity about the potential for crowd behavior to become a sovereign force for collective action, but I contend that crowd sovereignty is powerful because assemblages of bodies have the capacity to act in the name of life and death through excited expressions of synchronized gestures and symbolic production.
Modeling the Feminine: The Princess Story in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The fictional princess has long been a model for emulation and explication, and this was no different in and immediately following the twentieth century in America. In a princess story, the protagonist either is a princess or is attempting to become one: the girl transforms into or identifies herself as a princess through marriage or through discovered identity, or both. Princess lessons often accompany this transformation, lessons which not only educate the fictional girl but also the reader.
"YOU CAN TRANSCEND THIS STUPID bad girl REALITY": A Study of Hannah Weiner's "Clair-Style"
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation is a study of the poetics of Hannah Weiner, a postmodern American experimental poet who hallucinated words. She believed that these words, though debilitating, life-altering interruptions, were clairvoyantly received directions and commentary from unseen guiding spirits. Weiner created her "clair-style" poetics to record her experience as she struggled to regain control of her life and decipher the instructions for healing, transcendence, and literary success that she believed were locked in the words she saw. I argue that her mission of documenting her life is not mere transcription, but a sophisticated engagement with her disability/gift and reflection on the role of the reader. Her personal agency is diluted, but Weiner trades authority for what she wants more: poetry that leads to enlightenment by facilitating her quest.
Sympathy with the Devil: Ethics and Genre in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Sympathy with the Devil considers textual and visual cultures in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa to examine how practices of reading and "ways of seeing" contributed to the formation of ethical relation during a period largely characterized by the absence of ethics. It focuses on reading populations generally underexamined in studies of reader response and ethical criticism, arguing that this neglect reinforces hegemonic discourses of cultural production and consumption that overprivilege the responses of certain types of readers to certain types of textual objects. By focusing on readers in positions of subjection and exploitation who consume a wide variety of textual and visual genres, Sympathy with the Devil seeks to carve out a place in the study of audience and reader reception that recognizes the ethical importance of all acts of reading.
Reading Films: Words on the Silent Screens of American Cinema
Year of Dissertation:
2010
In spite of frequent appearances of words on the cinematic screen, contributions of written language are often ignored or marginalized in discussions of film language. I investigate why verbal text is employed in the distinctly visual medium of film and how screen words function within the frames and on the fringes of a cinematic composition. The micro-level of analysis, the focus of the first chapter, highlights potentialities of word and image interplay within the pictorial space. On the macro-level of analysis, in the second chapter, the discussion of written language in film is situated in the context of narrative structures, cinematic tradition, authorship and ownership, and the relation to the audience. I categorize screen words into five kinds: 1) title sequences and end credits, 2) intertitles, 3) subtitles, 4) integrated verbal elements, and 5) words as the only images on the screen. Within the five categories, I outline types and functions of written language, as applicable to silent and sound films.
The Specter of Art in the American Business Novel: 1885-1917
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation is an examination of the interconnection between aesthetics and business practice as it is imagined in the work of American novelists during the final decade and a half of the nineteenth century and the first decade and a half of the twentieth. Through a reading of novels about businessmen composed during the years when "men of commerce" first received wide fictional representation, The Specter of Art in the American Business Novel explores the network of values connoted by the terms "business" and "art," and finds a secretly shared vocabulary existing alongside the recognized antagonisms between activities commonly thought to comprise opposing poles of cultural heroism. Appropriating as a structuring allegory the fateful encounter between the expatriate artist and his ghostly "American" businessman double in Henry James's "The Jolly Corner," I argue that novelists such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Abraham Cahan perform acts of self-analysis, even exorcism, through the imaginative creation of what cultural historian Henry Nash Smith called the "capitalist hero."