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Jason Bryant Queering Home: Domestic Space and Sexuality in Postmodern American Fiction This dissertation explores narratives of homosexuals and trans men and women occupying domestic spaces, discerning the ways that “home” shapes understandings about sexuality and examining the ways that understandings of sexuality shape how domestic spaces are occupied. Queer artists and intellectuals have deconstructed the legacy of normativity that clings to the metaphor of the domestic realm. Queering Home argues that writers have used the discursive concept of home to cultivate sociopolitical communities (Audre Lorde, Zami) while also insisting upon material spaces of shelter and comfort for individuals queered by gender performance, sexual orientation, and resultant adverse economic conditions (Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues). Two novels, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Mike Albo's Hornito, challenge the coming-of-age tradition of narrating childhood/adolescence through the redeeming prism of the confident, queer adult; in particular, these novels trouble the problematic notion of domesticated maturation as a heteronormative condition that continues to cling to much contemporary American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics. The third chapter examines Marilyn Hacker's sonnet collection, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons in correspondence with Carl Phillips's collection, Cortège, as they queer the concept of domestic bliss, the goal toward which romantic partners are “supposed” to be committed. Hacker and Phillips revise the same-sex couple as a processing of gay ways of life, which resists positing normative, married futures for lesbians and homosexuals. Finally, the study investigates Terrence McNally's play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart and a series of still life paintings by Joey Terrill for their depiction of narratives of domestic spaces (pools, open-concept design, medicine cabinets), which condition the subjectification and desubjectification of gay male sexuality and domesticity in the era of HIV/AIDS. Throughout, this dissertation draws energy by challenging the “given” and “inevitable” heteronorms that condition domesticity, sexuality, and space, demonstrating how late twentieth century writers and artists have queered the home.
ContributorsBryant, Jason (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis examines Christopher Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander and George Chapman's Continuation thereof through a theoretical lens that includes theories of intimacy, sexuality and touch taken from Lee Edelman, Daniel Gil, James Bromley, Katherine Rowe and others. Hands are seen as the privileged organ of touch as well as synecdoche for human agency. Because it is all too often an unexamined sense, the theory of touch is dealt with in detail. The analysis of hands and touch leads to a discussion of how Marlowe's writing creates a picture of sexual intimacy that goes against traditional institutions and resists the traditional role of the couple in society. Marlowe's poem favors an equal, companionate intimacy that does not engage in traditional structures, while Chapman's Continuation to Marlowe's work serves to reaffirm the transgressive nature of Marlowe's poem by reasserting traditional social institutions surrounding the couple. Viewing the two pieces of literature together further supports the conclusion that Marlowe's work is transgressive because of how conservative Chapman's reaction to Hero and Leander is.
ContributorsHardman, Katherine (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Hirano Keiichirou is an award-winning, contemporary Japanese author. He experiments with many styles, and his novels explore a broad range of themes and social issues. Unfortunately, little of his work is available in English translation, and he remains largely unknown to English-reading audiences. This thesis includes a brief overview of Hirano's career as well as translations and analyses of two of his short stories, "Tojikomerareta shounen" ("Trapped," 2003) and "Hinshi no gogo to namiutsu iso no osanai kyoudai" ("A Fatal Afternoon and Young Brothers on a Wave-swept Shore," 2003). These two stories are representative of the second period of Hirano's career, in which he focused on short fiction. They integrate experimental literary styles with contemporary, real-life themes to create effective, resonant literature.
ContributorsGeist, Brandon (Author) / Chambers, Anthony H (Thesis advisor) / Creamer, John (Committee member) / Dutoit, Anne-Catherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The subject of this study is the work of Spanish novelist J. Á. González Sainz, comprised of Los encuentros (1989), Un mundo exasperado (1995), Volver al mundo (2003) y Ojos que no ven (2010). His work, which is structurally demanding, treats themes such as morality, terrorism, the nostos or return to one's homeland, and nature. He has been connected to the "dehumanized novel" of Juan Benet, though his career demonstrates an attempt to make clear references to historical reality. González Sainz has acquired a measure of prestige in the estimation of important critics. With his latest book, he has furthermore gained recognition for his moral commitment in opposing the terrorism of ETA, and his work has entered debates on current events. In my study I argue that this formally rigorous narrative has a singular capacity for political engagement. I argue that González Sainz is an example of the integration of ethics in a narrative discourse whose semantic density allows a commitment with moral conflicts. To situate it in the context of contemporary Spanish fiction, I relate Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the literary field to the proposals concerning the history of literature of Pablo Gil Casado, Gonzalo Sobejano, Ramón Buckley, Ignacio Soldevila Durante and others. I follow three lines of investigation: terrorism in literature; ethics; and the political engagement of the writer. Ethics, whose relation to literature has been studied by Zachary Newton, Wolfgang Hallet or Nina Rosenstand, has allowed the author a political engagement in opposition to terrorism in general and in particular in opposition to ETA. González Sainz exhibits an equilibrium between aesthetic and ethical values of literature. In the plural context of the latest fiction in Spain, his novels have found a place in the tradition that since the middle of the twentieth century has been characterized by a dialectic between political engagement and the autonomy of literature. The theme of ETA terrorism and his structural rigor situate González Sainz's work in a position that maintains the validity of this dialectic.
ContributorsMartín de Marcos, Gonzalo (Author) / García-Fernández, Carlos Javier (Thesis advisor) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Acereda, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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
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
A collection of poems that explore what it means to be from the Atomic City-- a city built atop cleared-out rural communities in East Tennessee during World War II, and with the sole and secretive purpose of enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. The poems look back to the more isolated Appalachian culture of previous generations, discovering the identity rifts caused by such massive and rushed development. In trying to understand the poet's own cultural inheritance of both nuclear weaponry and an Appalachian hardness, the poems begin to meditate on inhabitation. They ask what it means to live in a country, a local community, a body. The poems travel far beyond the Atomic City's limits, incorporating characters that live, in some sense, at the edge of a community. As he crosses the Atlantic, the Spanish poet Jiménez wonders if either sound or vision are more trustworthy tools for perception; an aging grandmother in Tennessee realizes that she still "drives" her younger body in her dreams; an American woman becomes aroused after touring the killing fields in Cambodia; and the prophet of Oak Ridge, who supposedly predicted the Manhattan Project, considers how his baby daughter has become a thing after death. The various voices show the poet grappling with her own guilt over Hiroshima, and ultimately attempt to understand the limits of both grief and love, how one inherits a tragedy.
ContributorsSams, Sara (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Ranging in subject from a Tuareg festival outside Timbuktu to the 1975 "Battle of the Sexes" race at Belmont track to a Mississippi classroom in the Delta flood plains, the poems in The Body Snatcher's Complaint explore the blurring of self hood, a feeling of foreignness within one's own physical experience of the world, in the most intimate and global contexts.
ContributorsMurray, Catherine (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Hummer, Terry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The 1920s have played a key role in the formation of the Latin American consciousness of its own cultural identity. In approaching the selected three heterogeneous regions of Latin America, the Southern Cone, the Andean Zone and the Afroantillan Caribbean, this research focuses on Latin American identity issues as a literary avant-garde construct found in the poetics and in the programmatic texts of the leading avant-garde journals of each corresponding region: Martín Fierro (1924-1927) in Argentina; revista de avance (1927-1930) in Cuba, and Amauta (1926-1930) in Perú. To carry out this kind of analysis and to fully understand the historic implications characteristics of each region, one of the initial tasks of the study has been to contextualize the period in each country in which the journals were published. After that, an analysis of each region's avant-garde production has been performed in order to categorize and situate the underlying questions of identity expressed in corresponding journals. Each region has been studied separately, yet all in view of contributing to a comprehensive and comparative study of the regions selected. The final result has been an organization of diverse principal semantic and ideological fields overlapping in and cross-crossing different regions as represented by the selected literary journals. Starting from the very same literature, which was inspired by the spirit of its time, this research has aimed at reconstructing the notions of identity that were common within the intellectual circles of the avant-garde times as expressed in the journals Martín Fierro, revista de avance, and Amauta, and, in the end, played a signal role in the development of national and continental cultural identity consciousness throughout Latin America from the beginning of the 20th century until today.
ContributorsNaciff, Marcela (Author) / Volek, Emil (Thesis advisor) / García Fernández, Carlos J (Committee member) / Acereda, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
ContributorsDaval, Charles (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-03-26