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- All Subjects: literature
- Creators: Broglio, Ron
- Creators: Ison, Tara
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
Description
Set in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Midwest America, the collection of short stories follows the complicated trajectory of war-survivor to refugee and, then, immigrant. These stories---about religious prisoners who are not at all religious, about young, philosophizing boys tempting the bullets of snipers, about men retracing their fathers' steps over bridges that no longer exist---grapple with memory, imagination, and the nature of art, and explore the notion of writer as witness.
ContributorsHusić, Vedran (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation considers the literary and cultural response of the labor-class poets to the emerging forces of Foucauldian biopolitics in early modern Britain to shed new light on the cultural impacts of biopower upon the rural community in early modern Britain. The analysis demonstrates how the labor class literary response is characterized by an exterior experience with the nonhuman in an alternative mode to the Wordsworthian experience of the interior. I then use labor-class poets to counter Wordsworthian notions of the immaterial State population through a critical expose of state-Subject, subject-object, and human nonhuman exterior relations as they are depicted in the labor-class poetry of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. Employing an object-ontological reading of community, I explore how the effects of biopower were inscribed in the literary artifacts of the labor-class. As a final consideration, I explore the response to postcolonial biopolitics in J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel, Disgrace. The research takes a focused historical view, surveying a range of literary, political, and historical texts between 1760-1840 to offer new readings of Robert Bloomfield, Robert Burns, John Clare, William Cobbett, Ebenezer Elliott, Olivier Goldsmith, James Hogg, and William Wordsworth. In complement, the research offers a new reading of postcolonial biopolitics in the contemporary work of J.M Coetzee.
ContributorsBisnoff, Robert W (Author) / Lussier, Mark S. (Thesis advisor) / Bixby, Patrick (Committee member) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In this collection of stories, people find themselves face to face with great trouble: a house lost to flood, a brother lost to the river, a girl on the edge of an adulthood she can't possibly survive. Set in Northern California along the banks of the Sacramento and American Rivers, the stories feature characters who live below the radar of the middle-class. Central to the narratives are notions of loss, lust, pleasure, and struggle.
ContributorsFowler, Courtney (Author) / Mcnally, T.M. (Thesis advisor) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In Everything I See Your Hand is a collection of short stories that takes place in the "Little Armenia" neighborhood of East Hollywood, California--an ethnic enclave made up of immigrants from the former Soviet state who came to Los Angeles following the collapse of the USSR in the early '90s. These fictions are rooted in my own personal experience and are about dispossession, domesticity, and the tangled ties between generations, focusing particularly around the tensions that arose from assimilation and disillusionment, from changing attitudes towards sex and homosexuality, violence and masculinity. Many of the stories grapple with the idea of self-exile, or ruminate on the difference between leaving the motherland, and leaving the mother, or other familial bodies, in order to pursue grander desires: a better life in America, superior education in distant universities, love in marriages with foreigners, etc. The body, therefore, becomes a central motif in the collection, principally the hands and forehead, which are traditionally areas in which the destinies are written for the Armenian people. The Armenian-American protagonists of In Everything I See Your Hand struggle with the belief that their lives are already written, their futures already decided, futures that they can only escape through death or departure--if they can escape them at all.
ContributorsKuzmich, Naira (Author) / McNally, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
William Blake created a large body of artistic work over his lifetime, all of which is a testament to a unique man, a man who would not live by standards that he felt were binding and inadequate. Blake stated that he needed to create his own system so as not to be enslaved by a paradigm not of his own making. The result of this drive can be seen in his mythology and the meaning that he attempts to inscribe upon his own world. Throughout the corpus of his writings, Blake was working with complex systems. Beginning with contraries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Songs of Innocence & Experience, he then took his work in the contraries and applied it to history and psychology in Europe a Prophecy and The First Book of Urizen. In Blake's use of history and psychology, he was actually broaching the idea of social systems and how they interact with and effect psychic systems. This paper looks at the genesis of Blake's systems through the contraries, up to the point where he attempts to bring social and psychological systems together into a universal system. He uses projection and introjection to try to close the gap in double contingency. However, grappling with this problem (as well as the issue of a universal system) proves to be too much when he reaches The Four Zoas. In his later works, some of these issues are resolved, but ultimately Blake is not able create a universal system.
ContributorsFacemire, Challie (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Mann, Annika (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
A Cut Kite, a collection of linked stories about a Nepali family haunted by the past, examines the anatomy of troubled hearts. In these lyric tales, characters often seek love, but they end up finding it in the unlikeliest of places: in a moth darting toward a candle flame in a dark house, in the middle of a barrage of blows, in the seething currents, ruthless and forgetful.
ContributorsLama, Shertok (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This dissertation considers the potential of desire to protect humans, animals, and the environment in the biopolitical times of late capitalism. Through readings of recent South African Literature in English from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, this project theorizes desire as a mode of resistance to the neocolonial and capitalist instrumentalization of communities of humans and nonhumans, where they are often seen as mere "resources" awaiting consumption and transformation into profit. Deleuze and Guattari posit this overconsumption as stemming in part from capitalism's deployment of the psychoanalytic definition of desire as lack, where all desires are defined according to the same tragedy and brought into a money economy. By defining desire, capitalism seeks to limit the productive unconscious and attempts to create manageable subjects who perform the work of the capitalist machine--subjects that facilitate the extraction of surplus value and pleasure for themselves and the dominant classes. Thinking desire differently as positive and as potentially revolutionary, after Deleuze and Guattari, offers possible resistances to this biopolitical management. This different, positive desire can also change views of others and the world as existing solely for human consumption: views which so often risk bodies towards death and render communities unsustainable. The representations of human and animal desires (and often their cross-species desires) in this literature imagine relationships to the world otherwise, outside of a colonial legacy, where ethical response obtains instead of the consumption of others and the environment by the dominant subjects of capitalism. This project also considers other attempts to protect communities such as animal rights, arguing that rethinking desire is a necessary corollary in the effort to protect communities and lives that are made available for a "non-criminal putting to death" since positive desire precedes the passing of any such laws and must exist for their proper administration. These texts often demonstrate the law's failures to protect communities through portraying corrupt officials who risk the communities they are charged with protecting when their protection competes with government officials' personal capitalist ambitions. Desire offers opportunities for imagining other creative options towards protecting communities, outside of legal discourse.
ContributorsPrice, Jason (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Mallot, J. Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
John Herdman provides a brief explanation for neglecting the Victorian sensational double in his work The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "Nor have I ventured into the vast hinterland of Victorian popular fiction in which doubles roam in abundance, as these are invariably derivative in origin and break no distinctive new territory of their own" (xi). To be sure the popular fiction of the Victorian Era would not produce such penetrating and resonate doubles found in the continental, and even American, literature of the same period until the works of Scottish writers James Hogg and later Robert Louis Stevenson; and while popular English writers have been rightly accused of "exploit[ing] it [the double] for sensational effects," (Herdman 19) the indictment of possessing "no distinctive new territory of their own" is hardly adequate. In particular, two immensely popular works of fiction in the 1860's, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), employ the convention of the double for a simultaneous sensational and sociological effect. However, the sociological influence of the double in these two texts is not achieved alone: the "guise of lunacy" deployed as a cover-up for criminality acts symbiotically with the sensational double. The double motif provides female characters within these works the opportunity to manipulate the "guise of lunacy" to transgress patriarchal boundaries cemented within the socio-economic hierarchy as well as within other patriarchal institutions: marriage and the sanatorium. Overall this presentation formulates "new distinctive territory" in the land of the Victorian sensational double through the works of Collins and Braddon.
ContributorsSims, Rachel (Author) / Bivona, Dan (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
DescriptionThe stories in this document are only loosely related thematically. They cohere instead by way of other mechanisms. They are often the products of significant formal experimentation. They are an attempt to privilege mystery and asymmetricality over causality and shapeliness.
ContributorsCorbin, Kent (Author) / Turchi, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Mcnally, T.M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This thesis is an experiment in confessional academic writing, an attempt to read two surrealist texts closely and critically while simultaneously employing creative, lyrical prose and narration. The thesis, in both style and content, has bridged the realms of academic and creative writing in order to fully embody the concepts explored within: abstractions of the self, how abstracted selves interact with space, and how such abstractions lead to an ever-evolving and contactable conceptualization of personhood. Further, the thesis explores and reaches for a submergence of selves into space and other abstracted selves while grappling with and resisting against the occasional failure of language and spatial experience, which leads to a detrimental distance between the self and its experience in the world. Surrealism's advocacy for blind submission, for indulging the dream and embracing dream-like modes of appearance, and for locating an unconscious and automatic medium for expression (as seen in André Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 and his 1928 novel Nadja) licenses an understanding of being that allows for multidimensional embodiment through one's presence and absence and through indistinctions between the self and space. The thesis recognizes and works through potentially problematic power dynamics within such notions of possession and dispossession while articulating a full faithfulness in the imagination's ability to uncover expansive personhood and the ways this kind of personhood is more wholly enabled to authentically and productively connect the disparity between persons, space, language, and reality. While analytical and textually supported, and accompanied by a photo essay that explores the aforementioned concepts visually, this thesis indulges in poetic impulses and offers a critical and personal investigation on being which allows us to consider ourselves as things that are endlessly becoming.
ContributorsDenson, Tabitha (Author) / McGregor, Francine (Thesis director) / Hanlon, Christopher (Committee member) / Mann, Annika (Committee member) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05