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From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective

From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective interdisciplinary response to widening social disparities and species collapses caused by climate change in the new epoch recently being termed "the anthropocene." In response, I analyze canonical texts, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in juxtaposition with Neill Blomkamp's South African science fiction thriller District 9 and contemporary US American novels such as Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses and Richard Power's Generosity and The Echo Maker, to show how writers, filmmakers, and academics have been calling attention to dramatic climate events that consequently challenge the public to rethink the relationships among human beings to other species, and to ecological systems of low predictability, high variability, and frequent extremes. Rather than focusing solely on the "human," I examine how the relationships and livelihoods of multi-species communities shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. As a whole, this dissertation seeks to make abstract, often intangible global patterns and concepts accessible by providing models for what I call "readings in the anthropocene" or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts and film that offer insights into changing human behavior and suggesting alternative management practices of local and global commons as well as opportunities to imagine how to live in and beyond the anthropocene.
ContributorsTurner, Kyndra (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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This dissertation examines U. S. American intergenerational witnesses to the Holocaust, particularly how addressees turned addressors maintain an ethical obligation to First Generation witnesses while creating an affective relation to this history for new generations. In response to revisionism and the incommunicability of the Holocaust, a focus on (accurate) First

This dissertation examines U. S. American intergenerational witnesses to the Holocaust, particularly how addressees turned addressors maintain an ethical obligation to First Generation witnesses while creating an affective relation to this history for new generations. In response to revisionism and the incommunicability of the Holocaust, a focus on (accurate) First Generation testimony emerged that marginalizes that of intergenerational witnesses. The risk of such a position is that it paralyzes language, locking the addressee into a movement always into the past. Using examples of intergenerational witnesses (moving from close to more distant relationships), this project argues that there is a possibility for ethical intergenerational response. There are two major discussion arcs that the work follows: self-reflexivity and the use of the Banality of Evil as a theme. Self-reflexivity in intergenerational witnessing calls attention to the role of the author as transgenerational witness, an act that does not seek to appropriate the importance or position of the Holocaust survivor because it calls attention to a subjective site in relation to the survivor and the communities of memory created within the text. The other major discussion arc moves from traditional depictions of the Banality of Evil to ones that challenge the audience to consider the way evil is conceptualized after the Holocaust and its implications in contemporary life. In these ways, intergenerational witnesses move from addressee to addressors, continuing to stress the importance of this history through the imperative to pass Holocaust testimony onward into the future.
ContributorsDean, Sarah C (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Reyes, Angelita (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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"The Problem of Hope: Literary Tragedy in Mid-Twentieth Century American Fiction" examines Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar through the lens of tragedy. This thesis delves into how conflicts between internal and external identities can create a tragic individual, what

"The Problem of Hope: Literary Tragedy in Mid-Twentieth Century American Fiction" examines Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar through the lens of tragedy. This thesis delves into how conflicts between internal and external identities can create a tragic individual, what kinds of success count toward achievement of the "American Dream," and whether the tragic "common man" is the socially normative one or the socially disenfranchised one. It raises a three-dimensional theoretical approach to American tragedy and, most importantly, considers the significance of tragic hope for American literature. This paper questions the construction of American identities across class, race, and gender according to social scripts. It seeks to uncover what forces these scripts exert on American cultural myths and rereads those myths through tragedy to explore Miller's idea of a noble common man. By moving from Miller to Ellison to Plath, this thesis traces the undercurrents of tragedy through some of the most identity-focused novels of mid-twentieth century American fiction to see how the overarching American narrative changed from 1940 to 1969 as the US underwent significant social changes domestically and image changes abroad. Ultimately, this paper concludes that tragedy in mid-twentieth century American fiction points toward a new idea of American success as a success that occurs beyond social scripts.
ContributorsMedeiros, Amy Marie (Author) / Holbo, Christine (Thesis director) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
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During the mid-1930s in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway befriended Cuban artist Antonio Gattorno (1904-1980) during Hemingway's most active period of Gulf Stream fishing trips. Their relationship soon transcended ocean sojourns, and the two exchanged letters, eight of which reside in the Hemingway Collection at the J.F.K. Library in Boston. Written between

During the mid-1930s in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway befriended Cuban artist Antonio Gattorno (1904-1980) during Hemingway's most active period of Gulf Stream fishing trips. Their relationship soon transcended ocean sojourns, and the two exchanged letters, eight of which reside in the Hemingway Collection at the J.F.K. Library in Boston. Written between 1935 and 1937, the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence showcases the relationship that came to fruition between the American writer and Cuban artist in the 1930s. It also presents a lens through which to examine the cultural contact that occurred between Americans and Cubans during a decade of great political, social, and economic exchange between the two nations. In addition, the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence elucidates each country's tendency to romanticize the other before the Cuban Revolution and provides a template with which to examine current U.S.-Cuban relationships today. This thesis endeavors to first discuss the Hemingway-Gattorno relationship via a close examination of the correspondence that occurred between them. It then attests that the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence exemplifies the transatlantic glamorization that characterized pre-revolutionary U.S.-Cuban relations. The thesis explores the replay of this act of romanticizing in real time, arguing that despite governmental injunctions since 1961, Americans and Cubans alike have continued to ingeniously find ways to communicate with one another in much the same way Hemingway and Gattorno did in the 1930s. One mechanism for doing so is remembering Ernest Hemingway's life in Cuba and the home he owned there, Finca Vigía, a performance of memory that often occurs through the conduits of either the Hemingway Archives in Boston or the Finca Vigía Museum in Cuba. American and Cuban longing for the cultural contact enjoyed by Hemingway and Gattorno is expressed and performed through a glorification of Hemingway and the Finca Vigía, despite the severance of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1961. In addition, for Cubans in particular, Hemingway and the Finca Vigía present an opportunity to imagine the much more unified pre-revolutionary Cuba. Although certainly Hemingway and his home represent different realities for Cubans and Americans, in all, the thesis will show that citizens from both countries continue to find ways to create and imagine themselves in pre-revolutionary contexts like those embodied by Hemingway and Gattorno in the 1930s.
ContributorsDriscoll, Sarah (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Tobin, Beth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011