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- All Subjects: literature
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Clarke, Deborah
Description
In contemporary Indian literature, the question over which sets of Indian identities are granted access to power is highly contested. Critics such as Kathleen Waller and Sara Schotland align power with the identity of the autonomous individual, whose rights and freedoms are supposedly protected by the state, while others like David Ludden and Sandria Freitag place power with those who become a part of group identities, either on the national or communal level. The work of contemporary Indian author Aravind Adiga attempts to address this question. While Adiga's first novel The White Tiger applies the themes and ideology of the worth of the individual from African American novelists Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, Adiga's latest novel, Last Man in Tower, shifts towards a study of the consequences of colonialism, national identity, and the place of the individual within India in order to reveal a changing landscape of power and identity. Through a discussion of Adiga's collective writings, postcolonial theory, American literature, South Asian crime novels, contemporary Indian popular fiction, and some of the challenges facing Mumbai, I track Adiga's shifts and moments of growth between his two novels and evaluate Adiga's ultimate message about who holds power in Indian society: the individual or the community.
ContributorsGlady, Sarah (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, Jack (Thesis advisor) / Clarke, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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
Small fires in Black American women’s literature have been briefly and disconnectedly studied by numerous scholars. No scholar thus far, however, has aggregated the multitudinous symbolic presentations of small fire in Black American women’s literature. This thesis performs a literary criticism of several texts written by several Black American female authors, all of which contain deliberate uses of small fire. The conclusive product is a revelation of the way small fire functions within Black American women’s literature to imitate the cycle of the legendary phoenix—birth, flight, self-combustion, and rebirth—and to catalyze the multi-generational uplift that exists for Black American women who indefatigably create personal, domestic, and community renewal, and who undauntedly combat systems of racial, sexual, economic, and patriarchal oppression.
ContributorsBrooks, Jeremy David (Author) / Brown, Lois (Thesis advisor) / Clarke, Deborah (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022