This dissertation excavates the Islamic presence in Toni Morrison's Paradise and highlights the narrative's intertextual evocation of the politics of the harem, a major proclamation of gender boundaries in Islam. In particular, this study shows how Morrison's Paradise initiates …
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Despite being a literary style for more than half a century, magical realism is an enigma that is difficult to define. While the term is seamlessly associated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, magical realism’s loose definition has led critics to question its value to the progression…
Cathy Caruth's pioneering study of trauma and the posttraumatic forges a connection between the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the literary as such. Since trauma defies linguistic processing, she explains, the language used to describe it will always be figura…
From fourteenth century medieval literature to contemporary American and African American literature, researchers have singled out and analyzed writing from every genre that is prophetic in nature, predicting or warning about events, both revolutionary and dire, to come. One twe…
This study analyzes female friendship in four novels written by black diasporic women and examines the impact of race, class and gender on women's relationships. The novels emphasize how women face the challenges of patriarchal institutions and other attempts to subjugate then t…
How do we read the novel as a record of the ways in which communities recuperate from violence? How is resistance to violence possible through the act of narration? This project focuses on select contemporary novels in which women characters resist violence and redefine notions …
African Americans' pursuit of reparations began in the eighteenth century and continues in the present. At the twilight of the twentieth century, African American slavery and reparations for that experience became a controversial topic in popular and public discourse. Inevitably…
Contemporary Historical Fiction and the Unsettling of America reads the novels of Wilson Harris, Ishmael Reed, Bharati Mukherjee, and Toni Morrison as revisions of American spatial myths, from Biblical discourses of wilderness and typologies of a New Israel to nostalgic depictio…
This dissertation examines the imaginative ways in which three postcolonial writers overcome a fractured collective past by creating a double-voiced discourse narrative framework that allows them to envision a reality that might-have-been while acknowledging the presence of domi…
This five-chapter dissertation examines how ethnic and cultural differences are negotiated in post-war Germany. It specifically focuses on the reception, including both literary criticism and translation, of cross-cultural literature. The approach of this study is a comparative …
Drawing upon three modern novels from various cultural contexts, (Marie Cardinal's The Words to Say It, J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and Toni Morrison's Beloved), Christ as Madwoman, Beggar, and Black Memory is an effort to speak about Christ in a manner that is r…
Recent media attention on the trial and conviction of Andrea Yates, the Texas woman convicted of drowning her five children, as well as on female suicide bombers in Israel, indicates not only “a morbid curiosity in the United States relating to mothers killing their children” (M…
This thesis considers the status of the "end" in the literature of the late twentieth century. The very proliferation of announcements on the end (of truth, man, history, the world) has undermined to some extent the force of the apocalypse. In an age where "the sense of an endin…
Polite Americans do not publicly discuss religion or class, particularly in mundane, daily conversation. The taboo against the merging of these conversational topics helps obscure a double standard—while American ideology maintains that we revere religious freedom and do not hav…
A cross-cultural feminist study of writings about motherhood and colonialism, this dissertation analyzes three contemporary literary works of women of color dealing with the maternal experience of enslaved and colonized women. The works are Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) set in …
Over the past twelve years, Jesmyn Ward has published three novels, one memoir, one anthology, and a series of articles. After two National Book Awards, Ward has risen to the top ranks of contemporary literature, invited to universities and lecture series across the country. Thi…
This dissertation argues that the novels of Toni Morrison, Tahar ben Jelloun and Salman Rushdie are neither realist nor anti-realist, nor can they be accurately defined as magical realist. They are better understood as attempts to reimagine the possibilities for realism in a pos…
Male authors intent on critiquing American racism, specifically William Faulkner and Richard Wright, have been more successful in defining the parameters surrounding the discussion of violence in American society than have their female counterparts. Intent to illuminate the conn…