Thesiss

This thesis discusses the discourse on trauma as relevant to both African American female leads within the novels: The Color Purple , by Alice Walker; T heir Eyes Were Watching God , by Zora Neale Hurston; and Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison as well as the male leads that we c…

This thesis explores the universal theme of love, as analyzed by C.S. Lewis in his classical essay The Four Loves. In the course of this literary quest, selected literary works of four laureates of Nobel Prize in literature — Half a Life and Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul, Beloved …

Recently, the label "magic realism" has been accused of imposing a Western-cultural epistemology onto texts which present alternatives to a monolithic, Eurocentric world view. Insofar as critics define magic realism as an aesthetic embellishment of classic realism and go on to i…

I argue that the figure of the black male in American culture is intimately linked with "queer" (non-traditional, non-heterosexual) identity and sexuality. I take up Frantz Fanon's psychoanalytic observation in Black Skin, White Masks that black(male)ness in Western culture is l…

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…

Historically, literary representations of pregnancy, lactation and childbirth frequently depict female characters as if they were required to exercise control of themselves with either their bodies or their minds, but rarely with both their bodies and their minds. This requireme…