Studies of minority literature tend to concentrate on particular ethnic groups like African Americans and Hispanics while largely neglecting a larger and more universal group who struggle under their ...own brand of oppression---the "disabled." However, difficulties exist with including disability as a part of the established identity-politics triad of race, class, and gender. By examining current disability theory as well as several literary works of the last century depicting disability, this thesis will show that while literature should strive to avoid stereotypes of disability, the answer to studying disability in literature does not lie in creating yet another minority category within literature curricula. Rather, revising the way disabled characters are studied in literature could provide a gateway to studying all characters as complex, multi-faceted individuals. Identity Studies will acknowledge and celebrate the fluid and multiple identities that define all individuals.
Many contemporary American narratives about frontiers emphasize the displacement of the “American Dream” of infinite resources to a space that is always just beyond our reach and underscore the ...effect of the frontier as a means for Americans to organize a psychic identity, an identity that achieves stability and coherence through images of exploring and colonizing “the frontier.” Such texts invoke images of power and control to suggest that to be “American” we must find and pursue frontiers. Each of the late-twentieth century American narratives I look at in this project testifies to the enduring power of the concept of the frontier to shaping the conceptual boundaries of American citizenship. These frontierist narratives transpose a utopian ideal, borrowed from our nostalgic reconfigurations of the originary American frontier, of a space with infinite resources, often repressing the specific historical conditions that were also very much a part of the originary American frontier West. In effect, the narratives demonstrate that the concept of the frontier as a space of unlimited socioeconomic and political opportunities has been conceptually colonized by American narratives and said to signify “American.” Contemporary frontierist narratives reproduce contradictions about citizenship and attempt to elide inequalities by deferring them to the promised equality of a frontierist terrain of representation.
One of the most controversial literary subjects in Turkey between 1950s and 1970s was village literature, a specific genre that refers to the realistic works of Village Institute authors. These ...works, generally focused on economic and social problems of villagers, have been criticized for having too many stereotypical elements. Therefore, authors, whose fictions are based on village, are not literarily appreciated, regarded simply as village writers. Among those is Abbas Sayar (1923-1999), the author of novels entitled Can Şenliği (1974), Çelo (1972), Dik Bayır (1977), and Yılkı Atı (1970) among others. As a village-rooted novelist, the themes of his novels are on life in Central Anatolia and the language of these works contains idioms, proverbs, and accents of this region. Yet, he also pays attention to the original sides of his subject matters and establishes his novels skillfully. Hence, on the one side, he can be classified as a village writer. On the other side, he differs from other village writers in his literary methods. In this thesis, the place of Abbas Sayar’s works in village literature is detected and the original aspects of his novels are exemplified.
Road trips within the United States have acquired a legendary status in US literature, but the reasons for taking such a journey tend to go without scrutiny. By situating road trips within a context ...of conflicts between provincial and cosmopolitan tendencies among people in the United States, I identify such journeys as the commemoration of a lost previous existence. Whereas provincials have a clear sense of their tie to the land, cosmopolitans proudly declare their lack of such a connection. In my study of four influential US novels from the middle part of the twentieth century, I identify some of the causes for separation from the land as well as the various literary efforts to reconstitute such a connection after it has been lost. While such efforts tend to end in failure or in only partial success, taken together, they offer us a means of reconstituting identity without discounting the importance of place. Efforts to return to an earlier era of intrinsic connection are doomed to failure, but the open acknowledgment of the persistence of the provincial within the cosmopolitan opens the way to a more balanced basis for self- and group-identity.
The short story cycle—a collection of independent and interrelated stories—has become an increasingly popular form, a staple in the diet of contemporary literature and film. The prevalence of the ...cycle today provides incentive for looking back at the rise of this genre in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. This project takes up that challenge, and examines this critically neglected genre to reveal unexplored connections between regionalism, often considered a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and modernism, frequently hailed for its urban bent. This dissertation looks beyond the popular misconception that the genre is a simple compromise, between authors and publishers or between the novel and the short story collection. Instead, I will demonstrate, the short story cycle mobilizes its unique, fragmented form to reconceive regional spaces disrupted themselves by forces of modernization and standardization. Unlike earlier regionalists who tend to depict rural communities nostalgically as a site of origins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Langston Hughes create what Astradur Eysteinsson has called a modernist "aesthetics of interruption." They employ the cycle's formal peculiarities to interrupt inherited ideas about regional and racial types, the relationship between the observable landscape and the fictional text, and the status of regional identities. Accounting for the circulation of mass culture in the early-twentieth century is integral to understanding these texts, which often pose a challenge to the notion of a so-called great divide. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and Hughes's Simple volumes parody novel reading, refusing to conform to the demands of publishers for unity and uniformity. Stein's Three Lives upends the conventions of earlier realism and of popular local color sketches to subvert stereotypes. Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Hemingway's In Our Time critique versions of the Midwest offered up by mainstream journalism. And Faulkner's The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses resist Hollywood's formulaic South. This genre proves to be a valuable lens through which to re-examine crucial and overlooked ties between regionalism and modernism.
This project explores representations of the road, and ideas of mobility, in various artistic mediums, specifically the novel, film, and music, across the twentieth century. My discussion begins with ...the novelist John Dos Passos, who uses narrative techniques that borrow from film and music to draw on a uniquely American, spatially defined, concept of individual freedom as he develops an ambivalent romanticization of vagrants who remain in constant motion in order to retain a sense of integrated self in the face of fragmentation. As opposed to road texts that romanticize vagabondage, Dos Passos sees the assertion of autonomy through mobility as a negative submission to fate that nevertheless is a necessary response to a modernity that “steamrolls” individualism. I label the characters that adhere to such an ontology “hobo-heroes” and seek, in my first two chapters, to link Dos Passos’s ambivalent concepts of stasis and mobility to a common theme found throughout American culture—dating back at least to St. John de Crèvecœur—that should be considered central to any understanding of road narratives. Filtering this American conceptualization through contemporary sociology, such as the works of Georg Simmel and Zygmunt Bauman, and the philosophical writings of Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, I develop a conversation between road texts that romantically seek a utopian destination and those that ambivalently use motion as a response to modernity. My third chapter identifies a “beat” ethos of mobility that works decidedly against the ontology of the hobo-hero. Specifically, I use examples from the novels of Jack Kerouac and John Updike, and the film Easy Rider. My fourth chapter contrasts such artists with Bob Dylan’s performance literature that notably mirrors and expands upon Dos Passos’s use of mobility, therein providing an alternative to postmodern fragmentation. My conclusion attempts to utilize this dichotomy between road texts to begin a broader discussion of contemporary uses of mobility—such as the novelist Paul Auster and the film Y tu mamá también—in an effort to show how “American” culture and literature, like the road, is a fluid medium and is struggling to remain so in the twenty-first century.
Thinking Locally produces an account of twentieth-century literary history that counters the literary-historical over-reliance on wars as framing events. Eschewing the standard break between ...pre-World War II and post-World War II periods, this dissertation identifies a debate over the relative merits of provincialism and cosmopolitanism running from James Agee's modernist regionalism through recent books by Maxine Hong Kingston, Russell Banks, and Jonathan Franzen. The writers examined here are not commentators who take sides in this debate, plugging for either the city or the country. Instead, they use the unresolved terms of the debate to shape formal innovations. The introduction surveys the contemporary academic discussion of cosmopolitanism and then makes a case for the importance of Wright Morris, an author whose centrality is foreclosed by a stress on the cold war as the inevitable framework for the writing of the 1950s. Chapters One through Four offer extended readings of four major works: Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Jack Kerouac's On the Road; Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey; and Banks's Affliction.
Concrete River: Horse Stories of East L.A. and Beyond is a collection of short fiction that explores the human condition in many environments. There is the drug-user who finds comfort in her horse ...when her boyfriend abandons her. Monica and Lorenzo find that a solid commitment must survive through unfair weather. Carlos finds out that the way to his roots is on the back of a mare who has seen better days. A young school teacher finds the doldrums are interrupted when confronted with a stray horse on the freeway. A lonely woman goes on her own search for Mr. Goodbar. Two young couples search for sanctuary on the Veracruz coast. The author hopes to reveal how place often defines or directs our lives both by happenstance and circumstance. Many of the stories share the same geography that serves to represent a microcosm of greater Los Angeles. The stories explore differing perspectives and use varying narrative techniques.
The poems in this collection seek to examine those experiences that make up the blueprint of my life. As the blueprint of my life reflects a diversity of influences so does my poetry. Many of my ...poems testify to a variety of subject matters, including childhood nostalgia, gender, family, marriage, religion, and social relationships. In addition to writing about a myriad of subject matters, my poetry reflects a multiplicity of poetic aesthetics. My primary goal is that all of my poems contain within them a central "heart" or "core," which speaks to an essential truth about the human condition.
What Are Students Reading?
Publishers Weekly,
12/2015, Letnik:
262, Številka:
50
Trade Publication Article
Follett, distributor of technologies, services and digital and print content to the educational market, has created Follett Students' Choice, a new tool that ranks the top 50 books with the most ...checkouts in a given month as determined by information gathered by Destiny Library Manager, a Follett service used by more than 60,000 schools. Below are the top titles from October 2015. Top 10 Elementary School Rank Title Author Publisher 1 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days Jeff Kinney Abrams/Amulet 2 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck 3 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules 4 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw 5 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth 6 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul 7 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Greg Heffley's Journal 8 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever 9 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel 10 Tales from a Not-So-Talented Pop Star Rachel Renée Russell S&S/Aladdin Top 10 Middle School Rank Title Author Publisher 1 The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins Scholastic Press 2 The Maze Runner James Dashner Delacorte 3 Catching Fire 4 The Scorch Trials 5 Wonder R.J. Palacio Knopf 6 Smile Raina Telgemeier Graphix 7 Mockingjay 8 Sisters 9 Insurgent Veronica Roth Harper/Tegen 10 Drama Raina Telgemeier Top 10 High School Rank Title Author Publisher 1 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee Grand Central 2 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald Scribner 3 The Maze Runner James Dashner Delacorte 4 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury Simon & Schuster 5 Night Elie Wiesel Bantam 6 The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins Scholastic Press 7 The Fault in Our Stars John Green Dutton 8 Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck Penguin 9 Divergent Veronica Roth Harper/Tegen 10 Paper Towns Penguin/Speak
