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- Genre: Masters Thesis
Description
The study of genre literature in general, and fantasy or fairy tale literature in particular, by its very nature, falls outside the normal course of literary theory. This paper evaluates various approaches taken to create a framework within which scholarly research and evaluation of these types of genre literature might occur. This is done applying Secondary World theory to better-established literary foci, such as psychological analysis and monster theory while still respecting the premises posited in traditional literary inquiry.
ContributorsAttwood, James (Author) / Bjork, Robert E (Thesis advisor) / Corse, Douglas (Committee member) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This thesis will examine the novels and poetry of Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna) and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), exploring how they are working to maintain, control, protect and develop their spiritual Indigenous identities. I link their literary work to Article 31.1, from the United Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which states that “Indigenous people have the right to maintain, control, and protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies, and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.” I argue that both Silko and Tapahonso create narratives and characters that illustrate how indigenous identity is self-determined and maintained through resistance to colonization and assimilation. I examine how these stories and characters incorporate new knowledge, about modern lifeways, into traditional Indigenous oral traditions and histories. Both Silko and Tapahonso connect nature and history, as they illustrate how oral traditions are passed down through the continual sharing of inter-generational stories and ethnobotanical information about plants, animals and food. This study will track how oral stories help the characters (re)connect with the land, and with foodways, by re-establishing a relationship of resistance against the exploitation, assimilation, and colonization of indigenous peoples, lands, and resources and the maintenance of spirituality through oral traditions.
ContributorsWauneka, Devennie (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The popularity that regional Mexican music has achieved in the last years is impressive. The population increase of Mexican nationals in the United States and the availability to share information via web has increased the popularity of the musical genre, specially the subgenres of música norteña and banda. Regarless of the low economic class that is associated with the subgenres of música norteña and banda, nowadays they are a fundamental asset in the music industry, impart to the high volume of sales and popularity. However, even with a high index of popularity at a multinational level, the world of música grupera, how is categorized for subgenres of banda, música norteña, conjunto and duranguense, there is a low number of feminine artist that participate. The participation of women in the gupera world is very scarce, due to the patriarchal hegemony and machismo that spreads through the subgenres. Because of the low participation of women in the subgenres, they get classified the passive voice. The absence of a strong female representation has caused the expansion of a machista message though the songs implemented in the regional Mexican music. This phenomenon can be clearly appreciated in the songs "El carrito" (n.d.). "Disfruté engañarte" (2013), "La fory fay" (2013) and "Soy un desmadre" (2014). Using the ideology of power of Michel Foucault and complemented with the feminism of Hélène Cixious, the analysis and identification of the marginalized women in this examples can be reached. However, even though there are a low number of feminine artists that participate in the subgenres of música norteña and banda, their success has achieved the distortion of the hegemonic barrier imposed on society. Artist like Jenni Rivera and Los Horóscopos de Durango are some of the few artist that have distorted this socio and cultural hegemony that preexist in regional Mexican music. With the success of their songs, they have created a space of feminine expression against the machista message that marginalizes women, and opens new doors of opportunities for others. All this efforts have the intent to create equality of power in the sphere of regional Mexican music.
ContributorsCórdova, Martín (Author) / Hernández-G., Manuel J (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W (Committee member) / Garcia-Fernandez, Carlos J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
New Pastoral journeys through the altered states of the American West. Readers witness dream-fields at harvest time, watch humans become agro-industrial test subjects, and overhear an exchange of letters set in an alternate (?), [more] dystopian present. Fractured, fragmented, leaping, and stitched, the poems use disjuncture, within and/or between poems, to see with clarity and complexity a landscape that is increasingly all ecotone. In addition to environmental violence, this work explores disclosure and secrecy, intimacy and estrangement, voyeurism, political policing, and, inevitably, the mysteries of making art. Pastoral landscapes have often been compared to patchwork. Now, heavy with guilt, we walk a wounded quilt, searching, with little hope, for bandages.
ContributorsSlinker, Nathan (Author) / Dubie Jr, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Ball, Sara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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 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
Race is a complex system founded on social ideologies that categorize and evaluate human beings into different groups based on their visible characteristics (e.g., skin color) that, according to this notion of race, indicate a person's personal traits (e.g., intelligence). The concept of race has been an integral part of American society since the ratification of the United States Constitution in the late 18th century. Early on, the practice of race within American society established one particular group as the norm: the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the distinctions among racial groups essentially came down to "white" and "nonwhite." Consequently, certain social inequalities were bestowed upon those groups that did not fit the model of the dominant "white" group. Autobiographies, especially those from marginalized groups, can serve as an important source of these social disparities since the author is able to recount their own social experiences vis-à-vis racial practices within society. With this in mind, this thesis analyses the concept of race in relation to the personal experiences of two authors through their respective autobiographies: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) by Richard Rodriguez and How Did You Get to Be Mexican?: A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity (1999) by Kevin R. Johnson. The critical work of Paula M. L. Moya, Linda Martín Alcoff, Hazel Rose Markus, George M. Fredrickson, Genaro M. Padilla and others are used as the theoretical framework in the literary analysis of these authors' texts. In summary, the results of this study demonstrate the concept of race as a salient aspect in regards to the ideological formation of each respective author.
ContributorsMancillas, Jorge E (Author) / Rosales, Jesus (Thesis advisor) / Hernández-Gutierrez, Manuel J (Thesis advisor) / Garcia-Fernandez, Carlos J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
A Brief Introduction to the Small Beast of Hearts starts from the basic assumption that the apocalypse is ongoing. From there it explores grief, loss, and the dangers of human ambition. At the same time, it seeks to provide and investigate comfort--in the notion that our beautiful endangered world and all the life on it are very little pieces of a little multi-planetary vehicle diving through space; that time is a construct and, just as likely as not, we've been through all this before; that birds might whisper songs from sleep and may flash and fly above our houses, even after death; that civilizations in the depths of outer space have ineffective politicians and are subject to the exigencies of decay too!; that there are mysteries, mysteries, mysteries, including, but not limited to, friendship; and that, of course, should all else fail, we can always rely on the corporeal, though largely unknown, imaginary friend of our entire world, the small beast of hearts.
ContributorsHanvik, Spencer (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Savard, Jeannine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
DescriptionHolidays. Anniversaries. Cocktail parties. In No One Wants to Be Here and No One Wants to Leave, loneliness surfaces in crowded rooms across America. Having gathered to mark special occasions, the people in these stories instead encounter moments where celebration and sadness intermingle.
ContributorsAlbers, Jeffrey (Author) / Mcnally, T.M. (Thesis advisor) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Turchi, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
During the 1960s, American youth were coming of age in a post–war period marked by an unprecedented availability of both money and leisure time. These conditions afforded young people new opportunities for exploring fresh ways of thinking and living, beyond the traditional norms of their parents' generation. Tom Wolfe recognized that a revolution was taking place, in terms of manners and morals, spearheaded by this latest generation. He built a career for himself reporting on the diverse groups that were developing on the periphery of the mainstream society and the various ways they were creating social spaces, what he termed “statuspheres,” for themselves, in which to live by their own terms. Using the techniques of the New Journalism—“immersion” reporting that incorporated literary devices traditionally reserved for writers of fiction—Wolfe crafted creative non–fiction pieces that attempted not only to offer a glimpse into the lives of these fringe groups, but also to place the reader within their subjective experiences. This thesis positions Wolfe as a sort of liminal trickster figure, who is able to bridge the gap between disparate worlds, both physical and figurative. Analyzing several of Wolfe's works from the time period, it works to demonstrate the almost magical way in which Wolfe infiltrates various radical, counterculture and otherwise “fringe” groups, while borrowing freely from elements across lines of literary genre, in order to make his subjects' experiences come alive on the page. This work attempts to shed light on his special ability to occupy multiple spaces and perspectives simultaneously, to offer the reader a multidimensional look into the lives of cultural outsiders and the impact that they had and continue to have on the overarching discussion of the American Experience. Ultimately, this paper argues that by exposing these various outlying facets of American culture to the mainstream readership, Wolfe acts as a catalyst to reincorporate these fringe elements within the larger conversation of what it means to be American, thereby spurring a greater cultural awareness and an expansion of the collective American consciousness.
ContributorsKilduff, Josiah (Author) / Ortiz, Simon J. (Thesis advisor) / De La Garza, Sarah A. (Committee member) / Gutkind, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014