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Description
This paper utilizes insights from emerging monster theory, particularly the idea that monsters are cultural representations, to examine the representation of the Gyant and the figure Talus in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. The thesis posits that contrary to most critical readings, the episode concerning the Gyant focuses on a portion of the 16th century English Cultural Body-the peasants, rather than the Irish or another cultural subgroup. The thesis also argues that through the application of monster theory, the complicated political sympathies of the author towards the English lower class emerge, and the English third estate gains a voice.
ContributorsTurney, Brittany (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Corse, Taylor (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
For over a century, writings in the Law & Literature genre have been largely restricted to works concerning lawyers and courtrooms. This despite early preeminent Law& Literature scholars' assertions that the genre should incorporate any writing that examines the intersection of law, crime, morality, and society. For over a half-century, Detroit novelist Elmore Leonard has been producing well-written, introspective novels about criminals, violence, and society's need to both understand and condemn these things, all under the broad, oft-marginalized genre of crime and detective fiction. This paper pairs the work of Elmore Leonard, using his successful novel Out of Sight as a stylistic framework, with the Law & Literature genre. After a dissection of the true definition of a Law & Literature and detective fiction, as well as an excavation of underlying themes and imports of Out of Sight, it is found that Law & Literature scholars need to be more inclusive of crime novels like Leonard's. And, given the characteristics of both genres, Leonard's novels are more appropriately classified as Law & Literature rather than detective fiction.
ContributorsWeier, Nicholas (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Critical thinking has driven pedagogical development and captured the attention of educators for years and is now an important focus in classrooms today (Fahim, 2014, p. 141). Common core and STEM education are both impressive additions to the educational process and practice and exist to encourage students to ask questions, analyze information, and create their own solutions or ideas. During my time studying education at Arizona State University, I noticed that a majority of references to critical thinking were in conjunction to STEM subjects. In this study, I explore and defend the benefit of using classical literature to promote critical thinking in 21st century classrooms. Included in this study is a section of curriculum during a unit studying the novel The Great Gatsby that is centered around developing critical thinking and problem solving skills.
ContributorsSherry, Alyssa Lyn (Author) / Smudde, Christopher (Thesis director) / Esch, Mark (Committee member) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Modern and contemporary African American writers employ science fiction in order to recast ideas on past, present, and future black culture. This dissertation examines Afrofuturism’s cultural aesthetics, which appropriate devices from science fiction and fantasy in order to revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events insufficiently treated by literary realism. The dissertation includes treatments of George Schuyler, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Chicana/ofuturism.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.
ContributorsKim, Myungsung (Author) / Lockard, Joe (Thesis advisor) / Lester, Neal (Committee member) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This thesis analyzes the unsettling presence of the Holocaust in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (1980), Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2013). Characters in these texts struggle to maintain a stable sense of what it means to be Jewish in America outside of a relationship to the Holocaust. This leaves the characters only able to form negative associations about what it means to live with the memory of the Holocaust or to over-identify so heavily with the memory that they can’t lead a normal life. These authors construct a re-formed memory of the Holocaust in ways that prompt a new focus on how permanently intertwined the Holocaust and Jewish identity are. In this context, re-formed means the way Jewish American writers have reconstructed the connection between Jewish identity and its relation to the Holocaust in ways that highlight issues of over-identification and negative identity associations.
By pushing past the trope of unspeakability that often surrounds the Holocaust, these authors construct a re-formed memory that allows for the formation of Jewish American identity as permanently bound with constant Holocaust preoccupation, the memory of Anne Frank, and the Holocaust itself. The authors’ treatment of issues surrounding Jewish identity contribute to the genre of post-Holocaust literature, which focuses on re-forming the discussion about present day Jewish American connection to the Holocaust. Giving voice to the Holocaust in new ways provides an opportunity for current and future generations of Jewish Americans to again consider the continued importance of the Holocaust as a historical event within the Jewish community.
In a world that is once again becoming increasingly anti-semitic as a result of the current political climate, white supremacist riots, desecration of Jewish grave sites, and shootings at temples, the discussion that these texts open up is increasingly important and should remain at the forefront of American consciousness. The research in this thesis reveals that through the process of Holocaust memory constantly being re-formed through the work of these Jewish American authors, its continued influence on Jewish American culture is not forgotten.
By pushing past the trope of unspeakability that often surrounds the Holocaust, these authors construct a re-formed memory that allows for the formation of Jewish American identity as permanently bound with constant Holocaust preoccupation, the memory of Anne Frank, and the Holocaust itself. The authors’ treatment of issues surrounding Jewish identity contribute to the genre of post-Holocaust literature, which focuses on re-forming the discussion about present day Jewish American connection to the Holocaust. Giving voice to the Holocaust in new ways provides an opportunity for current and future generations of Jewish Americans to again consider the continued importance of the Holocaust as a historical event within the Jewish community.
In a world that is once again becoming increasingly anti-semitic as a result of the current political climate, white supremacist riots, desecration of Jewish grave sites, and shootings at temples, the discussion that these texts open up is increasingly important and should remain at the forefront of American consciousness. The research in this thesis reveals that through the process of Holocaust memory constantly being re-formed through the work of these Jewish American authors, its continued influence on Jewish American culture is not forgotten.
ContributorsMiller, Samantha Tracy (Author) / Goodman, Brian (Thesis advisor) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Lockard, Joe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States Midwest stood poised to lead the nation economically, politically, and ideologically. Its literary productions of this time open upon a landscape of seemingly endless possibilities and expansive futures. My project studies the ideological constitution of these possibilities, finding that they arise from the condition of unprecedented secularity which marked early twentieth-century U.S. modernity. I employ Charles Taylor’s definition of secularization as the shift to belief as possibility rather than assumption, in which new options for belief or unbelief expand like a spiritual nova. This definition makes visible in Midwest texts the different attempts protagonists make to achieve authenticity in a secular age that offers new options for living meaningfully. Like windows onto a figurative landscape, different texts reveal unique vantages as well as startling parallels. I examine the following text grouping, which underscores the heterogeneity of the Midwest: O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and Black Elk and John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. As rural texts, they collaboratively depict the rural Midwest as a region that is both heartland and subaltern, at once the center of the nation but also estranged from supposed loci of modernity. I argue that their peculiar searches for authenticity offer insight on modern selfhood in a secular age, which constitutes the meaning of the Midwest then and now.
ContributorsClare, Caroline (Author) / Holbo, Christine (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Carlson, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This thesis explores how to read the American experimental novel VAS: An Opera inFlatland, a collaboration between Steve Tomasula and graphic designer Stephen Farrell.
VAS demonstrates how twenty-first-century tools and technology can construct a
narrative that resembles the human experience shaped by contemporary tools and
technology. VAS includes not only a conventional story line but also narrative elements
outside the story line, such as collage material and a multimodality, all of which
contribute to the novel’s emerging, posthuman narrative. The reading experience of the
conventional novel is immersive; experiments with the novel disrupt the immersion of
reading, and this disruption produces a presence: the reader becomes conscious of
reading, of narrative structure, of the broken conventions, and even of the novel itself.
Martin Heidegger’s analyses of tools and technology can elucidate how novels produce
presence by breaking conventions, for conventions are like tools, and broken tools, such
as a broken hammer, become present to the user that was a moment ago immersed in
their use. The reading of VAS that results is two-fold: (1) a stylistic comparison of VAS
and This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, two experimental novels that differ in the
technology used and represented and, ultimately, the presence made, and (2) a reading of
VAS that considers how the novel makes present its narrative dimensions, out of which
emerges the novel’s narrative.
ContributorsStewart, Nicholas J (Author) / Hope, Jonathan (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022