Matching Items (21)
Description
This dissertation considers the literary and cultural response of the labor-class poets to the emerging forces of Foucauldian biopolitics in early modern Britain to shed new light on the cultural impacts of biopower upon the rural community in early modern Britain. The analysis demonstrates how the labor class literary response is characterized by an exterior experience with the nonhuman in an alternative mode to the Wordsworthian experience of the interior. I then use labor-class poets to counter Wordsworthian notions of the immaterial State population through a critical expose of state-Subject, subject-object, and human nonhuman exterior relations as they are depicted in the labor-class poetry of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. Employing an object-ontological reading of community, I explore how the effects of biopower were inscribed in the literary artifacts of the labor-class. As a final consideration, I explore the response to postcolonial biopolitics in J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel, Disgrace. The research takes a focused historical view, surveying a range of literary, political, and historical texts between 1760-1840 to offer new readings of Robert Bloomfield, Robert Burns, John Clare, William Cobbett, Ebenezer Elliott, Olivier Goldsmith, James Hogg, and William Wordsworth. In complement, the research offers a new reading of postcolonial biopolitics in the contemporary work of J.M Coetzee.
ContributorsBisnoff, Robert W (Author) / Lussier, Mark S. (Thesis advisor) / Bixby, Patrick (Committee member) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
"Modernist Vintages" considers the significance of wine in a selection of modernist texts that includes Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1891), Dorothy Richardson's Honeycomb (1917), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945). The representations of wine in these fictions respond to the creative and destructive depictions of wine that have imbued the narratives of myth, religion, and philosophy for thousands of years; simultaneously, these works recreate and reflect on numerous wine-related events and movements that shaped European discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The modernists use wine's conventional associations to diverse and innovative ends: as the playwright August Strindberg writes, "New forms have not been found for the new content, so that the new wine has burst the old bottles." Wine in these works alternately, and often concurrently, evokes themes that were important to the modernists, including notions of indulgence and waste, pleasure and addiction, experimentation and ritual, tradition and nostalgia, regional distinction and global expansion, wanton intoxication and artistic clarity. This project also discusses various nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts that informed these works and that continue to shape our reading of them, including the propagation of restaurant culture; the development of a gastronomic literary tradition; the condemnation of alcohol by temperance strategists; the demarcation of wine as a "luxury good"; the professionalization and slow democratization of wine drinking and buying; the rise of popular, philosophical, and professional interest in the psychological and physiological effects of intoxication; and the influence of war on wine markets and popular attitudes toward wine. "Modernist Vintages" aims to demonstrate that the inclusion of objects like wine in modernist fiction is purposeful and meaningful, and thus inspires new and fruitful discussion about the works, writers, and nature of literary modernism in Europe.
ContributorsWaugh, Laura (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Bivona, Daniel (Committee member) / Bixby, Patrick (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation considers the potential of desire to protect humans, animals, and the environment in the biopolitical times of late capitalism. Through readings of recent South African Literature in English from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, this project theorizes desire as a mode of resistance to the neocolonial and capitalist instrumentalization of communities of humans and nonhumans, where they are often seen as mere "resources" awaiting consumption and transformation into profit. Deleuze and Guattari posit this overconsumption as stemming in part from capitalism's deployment of the psychoanalytic definition of desire as lack, where all desires are defined according to the same tragedy and brought into a money economy. By defining desire, capitalism seeks to limit the productive unconscious and attempts to create manageable subjects who perform the work of the capitalist machine--subjects that facilitate the extraction of surplus value and pleasure for themselves and the dominant classes. Thinking desire differently as positive and as potentially revolutionary, after Deleuze and Guattari, offers possible resistances to this biopolitical management. This different, positive desire can also change views of others and the world as existing solely for human consumption: views which so often risk bodies towards death and render communities unsustainable. The representations of human and animal desires (and often their cross-species desires) in this literature imagine relationships to the world otherwise, outside of a colonial legacy, where ethical response obtains instead of the consumption of others and the environment by the dominant subjects of capitalism. This project also considers other attempts to protect communities such as animal rights, arguing that rethinking desire is a necessary corollary in the effort to protect communities and lives that are made available for a "non-criminal putting to death" since positive desire precedes the passing of any such laws and must exist for their proper administration. These texts often demonstrate the law's failures to protect communities through portraying corrupt officials who risk the communities they are charged with protecting when their protection competes with government officials' personal capitalist ambitions. Desire offers opportunities for imagining other creative options towards protecting communities, outside of legal discourse.
ContributorsPrice, Jason (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Mallot, J. Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
John Herdman provides a brief explanation for neglecting the Victorian sensational double in his work The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "Nor have I ventured into the vast hinterland of Victorian popular fiction in which doubles roam in abundance, as these are invariably derivative in origin and break no distinctive new territory of their own" (xi). To be sure the popular fiction of the Victorian Era would not produce such penetrating and resonate doubles found in the continental, and even American, literature of the same period until the works of Scottish writers James Hogg and later Robert Louis Stevenson; and while popular English writers have been rightly accused of "exploit[ing] it [the double] for sensational effects," (Herdman 19) the indictment of possessing "no distinctive new territory of their own" is hardly adequate. In particular, two immensely popular works of fiction in the 1860's, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), employ the convention of the double for a simultaneous sensational and sociological effect. However, the sociological influence of the double in these two texts is not achieved alone: the "guise of lunacy" deployed as a cover-up for criminality acts symbiotically with the sensational double. The double motif provides female characters within these works the opportunity to manipulate the "guise of lunacy" to transgress patriarchal boundaries cemented within the socio-economic hierarchy as well as within other patriarchal institutions: marriage and the sanatorium. Overall this presentation formulates "new distinctive territory" in the land of the Victorian sensational double through the works of Collins and Braddon.
ContributorsSims, Rachel (Author) / Bivona, Dan (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This research conceptualizes Gothic literature featuring undead characters produced and popularized by Britain in the early nineteenth century as educational texts. As an influx of new ideas at home and abroad disrupted the lives of the Romantics, not to mention the literal uprising of bodies in the French Revolution and the lost war with the North American colonies, British citizens dedicated themselves to preserving the relative safety of their shores from external and internal threats. I expand the definition of the “undead” to include any tangible, corporeal being once technically dead and now reanimated. In doing so, I invite a broader range of texts, and authors, into the conversation of Gothic literature and the genre’s continued legacy. My work reads male and female authors in dialogue with one another, both sexes working within common networks, rather than as creating separate or disparate traditions. The production of instructive undead bodies becomes particularly important to the development of British national identity and reveals a reliance on the maternal to educate and inform future citizens. The texts examined in this dissertation reveal the necessity of contemplating the histories and experiences of the past, of non-white voices, and of the female influence.
The texts range in publication date from 1805 to 1863 and thus demonstrate the continued used of the undead in the Gothic genre. An examination of the reanimated corpse in Romantic narrative demonstrates how authors utilized the undead as an educational tool both for the characters inside the text and the actual individuals reading the narrative. The undead offers a lens to look at the Gothic not regarding authorial gender or even a character’s gender, but rather in how the genre portrays bodies, and how those bodies interact with and instruct others. This dissertation’s perception of the undead as a powerful educational force in literature assists in the attempt to complete a more comprehensive analysis of Gothic, and therefore Romantic, literature.
ContributorsZarka, Emily (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Looser, Devoney (Committee member) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
The coyote of the natural world is an anthropomorphic figure that occupies many places within Southwestern Pueblo cultures in oral traditions as well as the natural environs. The modern-day coyote is a marginalized occupant of Southwestern milieu portrayed as an iconic character found in cartooned animations or conceptualized as a shadowed symbol of a doglike creature howling in front of a rising full moon. Coyote is also a label given to a person who transports undocumented immigrants across the United States–Mexico border. This wild dog is known as coyote, Coyote, Canis latrans, tsócki (Keresan for coyote), trickster, Wylie Coyote, and coywolf. When the biology, history, accounts, myths, and cultural constructs are placed together within the spectrum of coyote names or descriptions, a transmergent materiality emerges at the center of those contributing factors. Coyote is many things. It is constantly adapting to the environment in which it has survived for millions of years. The Southwest landscape was first occupied by rudimentary components of life evolving into a place first populated by animals, followed by humans. To a great extent, the continued existence of both animals and humans relies on their ability to obtain food and find a suitable niche in which to live. This dissertation unpacks how the coyote that is embedded in American Pueblo literature and culture depicts a transmergent materiality representing the constantly changing human–animal interface as it interprets the likewise transformative state of food systems in the American Southwest in the present day.
ContributorsMasek, Paris (Author) / Ortiz, Simon J (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Blasingame, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
In this paper, I analyze representations of nature in popular film, using the feminist / deconstructionist concept of a dualism to structure my critique. Using Val Plumwood’s analysis of the logical structure of dualism and the 5 ‘features of a dualism’ that she identifies, I critique 5 popular movies – Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Brave, Grizzly Man, and Planet Earth – by locating within each of them one of the 5 features and explaining how the movie functions to reinforce the Nature/Culture dualism . By showing how the Nature/Culture dualism shapes and is shaped by popular cinema, I show how “Nature” is a social construct, created as part of this very dualism, and reified through popular culture. I conclude with the introduction of a number of ‘subversive’ pieces of visual art that undermine and actively deconstruct the Nature/Culture dualism and show to the viewer a more honest presentation of the non-human world.
ContributorsBarton, Christopher Joseph (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis director) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
"The Hunger Games: What a Dystopic World Reveals about Modern Society" is an interdisciplinary thesis that examines the impossibility of revolutionary stories or concepts in popular culture by specifically analyzing the Hunger Games project. First, an analysis of what young adult fiction is and how it is written is provided. The formulaic way in which modern adolescent literature is written provides the basic structure for Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. The second chapter examines the main character of the Hunger Games series, Katniss Everdeen. The way in which this young female heroine relinquishes her independence and courage due to being consistently undermined by the men and political leaders in her life is traced by following the development of the story throughout the three novels. The third chapter of the thesis delves into how the entire Hunger Games project of novels and films fits into current popular culture. An analysis of the mass production of the novels, and then turning the books into films, merchandise, and further commercialization of the story is discussed in detail throughout the chapter. Finally, the thesis discusses the responsibility authors of young adult literature should assume when addressing a young impressionable audience and how Collins took advantage of the position she had in telling the story of Katniss Everdeen.
ContributorsHeath, Elisabeth Rose (Author) / Gruber, Diane (Thesis director) / Bixby, Patrick (Committee member) / Roy, Sohinee (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Sense of Place, Place Attachment, and Student Perceptions of Sustainability in the Salt River Valley
Description
The purpose of this study was to investigate undergraduate sustainability students' engagement with sustainability in relation to their sense of place in the broader Salt River Valley community. The study was guided by two research questions 1) How do undergraduate Sustainability students explain their sense of place in the Valley with relation to their perceptions of sustainability? 2) Does residency in a different city, town, or state prior to entering the Sustainability program influence students' sense of place in the Valley? The study consisted of two distinct parts. In the first part, twenty students were interviewed using a narrative inquiry process to understand their perceptions of sustainability, their sense of place in the Valley, and how those two components influenced their engagement with sustainability in their communities. In the second part, these narratives were analyzed, synthesized, and samples of the stories were placed into a creative nonfiction collection to express an overall picture of sustainability in the Valley. Results showed that students generally relied on academic, professional, and social factors to identify places in which they could practice or engage with sustainability. Regardless of previous residencies, students expressed similar frustrations or limitations in expressing their sense of place, as related to sustainability, in the Valley.
ContributorsAllen, Emily Elizabeth (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis director) / Goggin, Peter (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
As one of the three central characters in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh plays a complicated and significant role in both the arc of the narrative and in the characterization of the others in the novel. One of his most significant functions is to illuminate the precarious mental practice of internally correcting his failures to mitigate feelings of social inferiority. His character serves as a commentary on the processes of inner life and the compensation that can result from obsessive self-fashioning. In this essay, I aim to prove how, within Woolf's narrative, Walsh retreats to the realm of inner life, reimagining himself and those around him to correct his shortcomings and the failures of his past.
ContributorsRushe, David Wesley (Author) / Castle, Gregory (Thesis director) / Bixby, Patrick (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05