Matching Items (14)
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- All Subjects: English Literature
- All Subjects: Medical humanities
- All Subjects: Performativity
- Creators: Lussier, Mark
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Description
When discussing gay literature in the French, contemporary sphere, one of the most up
and coming and prominent authors is Édouard Louis. His works’ focus on the realism and
violence of the working class offers a critical and necessary perspective of the gay experience in
modern-day France. While recent in their creation, Louis’ works follow a connecting thread that
is inseparable from other autofiction novels that have a narrator with same sex attractions such as
Annie Ernaux’s Ce qu’ils disent or rien and Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims. Often commonly
discussed as French LGBT literature, these autofictional works that extend from Gide to Eribon
to now Louis demonstrate how the proposed societal dualities, limitations, and hierarchies
described by philosophers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler affect homosexual
performativity. Louis’ first novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, published on January 2, 2014,
offers another illustration of this analysis. It specifically describes the metaphysical
(metaphysical being the relationship between the outer stimuli and internal perspective) effects
and constraints of current poverty on homosexual performativity. By analyzing En finir avec
Eddy Bellegueule through this theoretical framework of power and poverty, this thesis adds a
theoretical and intersectional nuance to the narrative voice that current literature focusing on the
novel’s landscape mentions but does not reflect on. I argue that it is important to attach an
autofictional timeline that is necessary to promote and apply future ontological doctrines to this
genre.
ContributorsYanez, Mariano (Author) / Canovas, Frédéric (Thesis director) / Agruss, David (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Dean, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters.
ContributorsWagner, Johanna M. (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Medical Humanities is a growing field and much scholarship focuses on the promotion of empathy in professionals. I argue incorporation of literature is crucial as it develops critical thinking skills that guard against the dangers of collective thought. A Foucauldian analysis of three literary works, my own creative non-fiction short story, William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force," and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward offer the student perspective, the doctor perspective and the institutional perspective, respectively, and subversive undertones offer an example of the analytical thought developed in humanities education by challenging assumptions and elucidating implicit power relations in the medical institution.
ContributorsBlock, Courtney Samantha (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis director) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The medical field is one that depends on human interaction. I have noticed through my love of both English Literature and Medicine that one of the best ways to connect people, is by sharing their stories. To accomplish this, I interviewed eleven physicians to understand their human story. From those interviews, I worked to emulate their voices, to create a chapter for each of them. Through this, I was able to understand what they personally went through to get to where they are today. This has allowed me to better understand the field I plan to be in.
ContributorsAgha, Iya A (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis director) / Essary, Alison (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This thesis surveys several works of 17th-century English cleric, theologian, and poet Thomas Traherne (1636 or 1637 - 1674) to consider Traherne’s understanding of the contemplative self as formed in relation to a Divine Other, human Others, and natural objects. The paper focuses on Traherne’s use of images of mirrors and reflection to illustrate the relationally developing self in primary works concerned with contemplative formation: the Centuries of Meditation and two poetic sequences describing the experiences and perceptions of the poet’s infant persona, contained within the Dobell manuscript and the Poems of Felicity. Jacques Lacan’s speculative theory of the stade du miroir is employed to illuminate Traherne’s conception of identity as structured, reversible desire for a perceived Other or Others. The project situates Traherne within a contemplative tradition originating in the sixth century with Maximus the Confessor that includes sensory contemplation of material objects as wellas spiritually or intellectually directed meditation. Finally, the paper considers the ethical implications of Traherne’s relational model of dynamic mirroring exchange as grounded in mutual perceptions of the Divine-in-Other and suggests areas for further research.
ContributorsLeonard, Olivia (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Bate, Jonathan (Thesis advisor) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This thesis focuses on the nine-page diary present in Ernest J. Gaines’, A Lesson Before Dying. The diary is the only real form of communication from Jefferson, a young African American man who was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. After being stripped of his manhood while on trial, it became a group effort to assist this man in regaining his manhood. In this thesis, the diary became the topic of focus and was examined to see why it had such an important role in the novel. Separated into three chapters, each looking at specific moments and people that helped the diary come to fruition. The first chapter focuses on key moments that helped influence the diary. The second chapter focuses specifically on the content of the diary and dissects the entries. Lastly, the third chapter focuses on the effects of the diary not on the main character but to those involved in his journey. Thus, the thesis becomes centered on answering why a nine-page chapter in the African American Vernacular English uncovered one’s manhood and ultimately defines his journey to death.
ContributorsRincon, Samantha Nicole (Author) / Miller, Keith (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This thesis examines perceptions of climate change in literature through the lens of the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field that brings history, ecocriticism, and anthropology together to consider the environmental past, present and future. The project began in Iceland, during the Svartárkot Culture-Nature Program called “Human Ecology and Culture at Lake Mývatn 1700-2000: Dimensions of Environmental and Cultural Change”. Over the course of 10 days, director of the program, Viðar Hreinsson, an acclaimed literary and Icelandic Saga scholar, brought in researchers from different fields of study in Iceland to give students a holistically academic approach to their own environmental research. In this thesis, texts under consideration include the Icelandic Sagas, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, and The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. The thesis is supported by secondary works written by environmental humanists, including Andrew Ross, Steve Hartman, Ignacio Sanchez Cohen, and Joni Adamson, who specialize in archeological research on heritage sites in Iceland and/or study global weather patterns, prairie ecologies in the American Midwest, the history of water in the Southwest, and climate fiction. Chapter One, focusing on the Icelandic Sagas and My Antonia, argues that literature from different centuries, different cultures, and different parts of the world offers evidence that humans have been driving environmental degradation at the regional and planetary scales since at least the 1500s, especially as they have engaged in aggressive forms of settlement and colonization. Chapter Two, focused on Tropic of Orange, this argues that global environmental change leads to extreme weather and drought that is increasing climate migration from the Global South to the Global North. Chapter Three, focused on The Water Knife, argues that climate fiction gives readers the opportunity to think about and better prepare for a viable and sustainable future rather than wait for inevitable apocalypse. By exploring literature that depicts and represents climate change through time, environmental humanists have innovated new methods of analysis for teaching and thinking about what humans must understand about their impacts on ecosystems so that we can better prepare for the future.
ContributorsBurns, Kate S (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
By focusing on photojournalists for LIFE and Ladies’ Home Journal, I investigate mental health care in state institutions located in America during the Great Depression and World War II immediately prior to the great deinstitutionalization that began in the 1950s. Relying upon scholars of medical humanities, social theory, disability studies, feminist studies, the history of psychiatry, and the history of art, I consider the iconography used to represent mental illness in photography during the first half of the twentieth century to explore the ways mentally ill individuals were presented as disordered and lacking humanity. I explore the didactic nature of both photography and film, emphasizing how the artists and directors imbued their mediums with medical credibility and authority. The photographs of Alfred Eisenstaedt, Jerry Cooke, and Esther Bubley from the 1930-40s reveal the state of mental health care in America during the Great Depression and World War II. I will investigate the stereotypes seen in representations of mental illness in photographs and how these depictions shaped and were in dialogue with popular films like Spellbound (1945), The Snake Pit (1948), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), and Marnie (1964). As a point of contrast to the images and films representing mental illness, I examine depictions of healthy people in mental health clinics during this time. Finally, I offer four examples of public, contemporary art, including House for a Gordian Knot (2013), Bloom (2013), 1000 Shadows (2013), and Faces of Mental Health Recovery (2013), that explore mental illness to illustrate the enduring legacy of the iconography and stereotypes represented in the photography and films explored in the first half of this dissertation.
ContributorsTaggart, Vriean Diether (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Moore, Sarah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Scientific and Cultural Interpretations of Volcanoes, 1766-1901 analyzes nineteenth-century conceptions of volcanoes through interdisciplinary literature and science studies. The project considers how people in the nineteenth century used science, aesthetics, and other ways of knowing to understand volcanoes and their operations. In the mid-eighteenth century, volcanoes were seen as singular, unique features of the planet that lacked temporal and terrestrial reach. By the end of the nineteenth century, volcanoes were seen as networked, environmental phenomena that stretched through geological time and geographic space. Scientific and Cultural Interpretations of Volcanoes, 1766-1901 offers a new historical understanding of volcanoes and their environmental connections, using literature and science to show how perceptions of volcanic time and space changed over 135 years.
The first chapter, using texts by Sir William Hamilton, Hester Piozzi, and Priscilla Wakefield, argues that in the late eighteenth century important aspects of volcanoes, like their impact upon human life and their existence through time, were beginning to be defined in texts ranging from the scientific to the educational. The second chapter focuses on works by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Lyell to demonstrate the ways that volcanoes were stripped of metaphysical or symbolic meaning as the nineteenth century progressed. The third chapter contrasts the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa with Constance Gordon-Cumming’s travels to Kīlauea. The chapter shows how even towards the end of the century, trying to connect human minds with the process of volcanic phenomenon was a substantial challenge, but that volcanoes like Kīlauea allowed for new conceptions of volcanic action. The last chapter, through a post-apocalyptic novel by M. P. Shiel, shows how volcanoes were finally beginning to be categorized as a primary agent within the environment, shaping all life including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that the change in thinking about volcanoes parallels today’s shift in thinking about global climate change. My work provides insight into how we imagine ecological catastrophes like volcanic eruptions or climate change in the past and present and what that means for their impact on people.
The first chapter, using texts by Sir William Hamilton, Hester Piozzi, and Priscilla Wakefield, argues that in the late eighteenth century important aspects of volcanoes, like their impact upon human life and their existence through time, were beginning to be defined in texts ranging from the scientific to the educational. The second chapter focuses on works by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Lyell to demonstrate the ways that volcanoes were stripped of metaphysical or symbolic meaning as the nineteenth century progressed. The third chapter contrasts the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa with Constance Gordon-Cumming’s travels to Kīlauea. The chapter shows how even towards the end of the century, trying to connect human minds with the process of volcanic phenomenon was a substantial challenge, but that volcanoes like Kīlauea allowed for new conceptions of volcanic action. The last chapter, through a post-apocalyptic novel by M. P. Shiel, shows how volcanoes were finally beginning to be categorized as a primary agent within the environment, shaping all life including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that the change in thinking about volcanoes parallels today’s shift in thinking about global climate change. My work provides insight into how we imagine ecological catastrophes like volcanic eruptions or climate change in the past and present and what that means for their impact on people.
ContributorsLinthicum, Kent Robert (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Bivona, Daniel (Committee member) / Looser, Devoney (Committee member) / Tromp, Marlene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The union between England and Scotland, which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain, generated heated discussion both before and after the Acts of Union took effect on May 1, 1707. Members of Parliament, the nobility, clergymen, pamphleteers, and authors from both nations participated in debates on the Union, in many kinds of writing, for many years after 1707. The voices of British women, however, have not been sufficiently considered in our scholarship, and are often conspicuously absent from our accounts of these polemical wars, which were still raging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap in the academic conversation by taking Scottish, English, and British nationalisms as its theoretical paradigm in approaching writing by female authors. The dissertation's chapters examine how the Anglo-Scottish Union figures in the works by five women writers (Jane Austen, Cassandra Cooke, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Brunton, and Susan Ferrier) publishing from 1780 to 1820.
I argue that, in the aftermath of the Union, these women writers often expressed specifically gendered concerns— such as the maintenance of social etiquette, better education for women, making sense of national prejudices, and the erasure of regional socio-economic differences. In doing so, they ranged beyond a typically masculine focus on parliamentary politics, international military endeavors, macro economy, and national churches. English women writers' attitudes towards the Union were more positive than those entertained by Scots authors, but compared with contemporary male writers, both sides were less optimistic about the potential for building a blanket national identity for the entire Kingdom.
Taken together, the chapters of the dissertation provide a more comprehensive view of how the Anglo-Scottish Union figured in the minds of Britons, male and female, a century after its establishment, when the Kingdom was going through the Napoleonic Wars and another union with Ireland. The dissertation enriches our research on women's use of literary genres and techniques when taking part in political debates. It also serves to point out the need for more extensive surveys of the nuances of individual women writers' national affiliations.
I argue that, in the aftermath of the Union, these women writers often expressed specifically gendered concerns— such as the maintenance of social etiquette, better education for women, making sense of national prejudices, and the erasure of regional socio-economic differences. In doing so, they ranged beyond a typically masculine focus on parliamentary politics, international military endeavors, macro economy, and national churches. English women writers' attitudes towards the Union were more positive than those entertained by Scots authors, but compared with contemporary male writers, both sides were less optimistic about the potential for building a blanket national identity for the entire Kingdom.
Taken together, the chapters of the dissertation provide a more comprehensive view of how the Anglo-Scottish Union figured in the minds of Britons, male and female, a century after its establishment, when the Kingdom was going through the Napoleonic Wars and another union with Ireland. The dissertation enriches our research on women's use of literary genres and techniques when taking part in political debates. It also serves to point out the need for more extensive surveys of the nuances of individual women writers' national affiliations.
ContributorsYu, Tong (Author) / Looser, Devoney (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Lockard, Joe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016