|
|
Contemporary revaluation of southern local color fiction
Pegues, Dagmar ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee) ; Ewell, Barbara Claire (referee)
The objective of this study is to offer an examination of the works of Kate Chopin and Grace King, representatives of the genre of Louisiana "Local Color" fiction, and to introduce a new perspective on their fiction that is equally distanced from the national/local dichotomy and the feminist interpretative framework. This study interrogates selected aspects of the category of race in the fiction of Kate Chopin and Grace King in order to reclaim the importance of race for regional Aesthetics and to offer an alternative view on the existing interpretations that emphasize the feminist themes of their fiction and, ultimately, to expand such interpretations. A replacement of the existing theoretical frameworks applied to the works of these two authors by postcolonial theory offers a new perspective on the category of race in their fiction without reducing its complexity and interconnection with the category of gender and region. As a result, the insight into the formation of region-specific racial knowledge testifies to the complexity of the issue of race within the framework of Local Color fiction. The focal point of this examination is the representation of racial stereotypes in the fiction of Chopin and King.
|
|
|
Ethics of the self as an aesthetics of existence in Wharton's "The house of mirth" and "The age of innocence"
Černá, Pavlína ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Rhoads, Bonita (referee)
Most Edith Wharton scholars have argued The House of Mirth1 (1905) and The Age of Innocence2 (1920) to be naturalist novels interwoven with and based upon socio-economic determinism. Feminist critics, such as Judith Fetterley and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, have depicted Lily Bart in The House of Mirth as a victim of patriarchal society; meanwhile, Marxist critics like Wai-Chee Dimock have been preoccupied with the omnipresent power of the marketplace in the novel. In the case of The Age of Innocence, the criticism has often focused on Wharton's usage of the tribal world of manners as the determining and inescapable force in an individual's life.3 This thesis will engage in reading The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence as naturalist novels with an emphasis on the notion of human conduct and ethics.
|
|
|
The depiction of the changing consciousness of women in three novels of the turn of the century
Potočková, Kristýna ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
The aim of this work is to document how the substantial change in the social status of women that took place at the turn of the twentieth century is reflected in three novels of that period, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, and in the lives of the authors. The essential and common themes of these texts are marriage and motherhood, the two institutions which reflect the most the changing consciousness of women. The historical background of the period provides evidence for the division of roles in the marital institution, which was strongly established in the preceding centuries, and for the unequal position of women in general, resulting from the male superiority, mostly fortified by men's financial dominance. The heroines, akin to the authors, come from the upper or upper-middle classes which were the most active in the feminist movement because these classes had time and education to assess the situation and propose transformations. Art and sexuality are in various ways essential to the process of self-realization. The creative and sexual drives can be both an opportunity for a woman's liberation as well as an incentive for rejecting to submit to men that is enforced by men's habit of collecting works of art (inclusive of women) or...
|
|
|
Living Europe: the alien impressions of Henry James and Lambert Strether
Manire, Damian Peter ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee) ; Procházka, Martin (advisor)
Lambert Strether's position in The Ambassadors is, in my view, a metafictional allegory for James's techniques of authorial perspective. As Donald Stone notes, "It was James's contribution to fiction that [...] he not only codified the subjective nature of the novelist, but transformed the hero of fiction into a limited [...] observer."170 James effectively expresses his authorial consciousness in a novel that courts a more complicated delegation of positional plays between reader, author, and subject. Thus, I disagree with William Stowe's assertion that The Ambassadors' theme of "how life can and ought to be lived" presents problems for which neither the novel's subject nor author "has a solution, problems that challenge the reader to [sic] reexamine the very valuation of European experience which the texts seems also to be promoting."171 Considering James's formal virtuosity, it becomes clear that James has more to express to the reader than the "valuation of European experience."172 Indeed, I hope it has been made clear over these last pages that "the solution" for how "to live" is fixed in Jamesian aestheticism. James broadcasts a double perspective that simultaneously engages the aesthetic along the social fissures of modernity, producing "masterpieces of presentational technique"173 to cite Malcolm...
|
|
| |
|
|
Fictional paths to a larger truth in american new journalism
Chamonikolas, Kryštof ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Truman Garcia Capote (1924 - 1984) and Norman Kingsley Mailer (born 1923) were renown in the 1960s as both novelists and journalists. In two of their best-known and often most valued works, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965) and The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel- The Novel as History (1968), they attempted to combine their novelistic and journalistic skills to a yet unprecedented degree and create what Capote himself termed a "nonfiction novel". They wrote book-long texts which 'read like novels', but were simultaneously well-researched and highly accurate journalistic reportages on real events. Originally started as magazine assignments, they both established themselves as landmarks of the 1960s American novel and as central works of the American new journalism, a literary and journalistic movement and genre attempting to blend literary writing techniques with journalistic factuality and accuracy. Despite their common aim and status as "nonfiction novels", however, In Cold Blood and The Armies of the Night represent radically different, even antithetic types of both novel and reportage. A more detailed analysis and critical assessment of their differences and their relationship to other similar works, which I will attempt in this MA thesis, should...
|
|
|
William Faulkner's Light in August: constructing race in the community
Jelínková, Karolína ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor)
When William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, he entered the times of the high tide of racial extremism that marked the post-Reconstruction era and the beginning of the 20th century. The small domestic world of the Falkner family William lived in as a small boy also afforded him contact with racial differences, most memorably through the servant of the Falkner family - Caroline Barr. This was a harmonious contact. The Falkner boys called Caroline "Mammy" Callie; "she cooked, she cleaned, and she cared for them but most of all the boys liked her stories - of animals in the woods, ghosts, and the 'Old Days' of slavery. The boys loved her dearly" (Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History 153). However, William was soon confronted with the other side of the racially divided world. This must have happened most powerfully in the year 1908, when Oxford, Mississippi witnessed the lynching of Nelse Patton, "a black convict, but also [ ... ] a 'trusty'" (Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History 157) who was allowed to run errands all over the town. He killed Mattie McMillan, a white woman, to whom he delivered a message, but refused to leave her house. She attempted to draw a pistol, but he stopped her and "drew a razor blade across [her] throat [ ... ], almost severing her head from her...
|
|
|
Frustrated sensibilities in the context of the conventions of the New York elite of Wharton's fiction
Křenková, Markéta ; Quinn, Justin (referee) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor)
The following essay examines Wharton's fiction within the context of a set of societal conventions in which her writing is framed and the ways in which these conventions work to frustrate the natural development of the individual life-narrative. The frustrations depicted in the following works here looked at result from the specific societal conditions in which her characters find themselves. The old New York aristocracy to which Wharton's parents belonged, with its conventional morality and inflexible standards of "scrupulous probity in business and private affairs", 1 is represented by Wharton as having a numbing effect on the moral and sexual development of her female protagonists. The foregoing will form the focus of my analysis in the sections dealing with frustrated moral integrity and frustrated femininity. Also to be found in this chapter is an examination of the specific manners on the basis of which this society operated, and the way in which these manners, as the physical manifestations of strict conventions, compound these individual frustrations. The social elite of New York changed with the impact of a newly emerging industrial society in the 1880s. Wharton focuses on the transitional stage between the merging of these two societies and exposes the damaging consequences of the materialism that...
|
|
|
An Analysis of Francis Fukuyama's Arguments Exemplified on Contemporary Dystopian Cultural Production
Šinaľ, Martin ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
In this thesis I analyze and problematize Francis Fukuyama's position on posthumanism, largely expressed in his 2002 book Our Posthuman Future. In it he warns against the likely negative outcome of a potential biotechnological revolution, which could enable easy access to interfering with human genome via practices such as genetic modification or human cloning. Fukuyama's major assumption is that all members of society must meet some limited standards of humanity in order to be equal, because if people acquire different levels of artificially altered "human natures," the outcome will be stratification, irrecuperable inequality and perhaps even class warfare. For this reason, Fukuyama calls for a pre-emptive regulation of genetic manipulation so as to avoid a "posthuman future." I contrast this theory with a selection of transhumanist and feminist theorists as well as with examples from fiction, namely the trilogy Lilith's Brood (1987-1989) by Octavia Butler and the novel Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro. Drawing on these sources I conclude that Fukuyama's position is harmfully exclusionary and divisive; and also counter- productive in the sense that in his pursuit of securing freedom and equality he renders potential posthuman subjects fundamentally inferior, thus principally defeating his...
|
|
|
No pain, no gain. A study in narratives of suffering. Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster & Lauren Slater's Lying
Libovická, Barbora ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
"The experience of suffering both provokes and resists narration. It is at the hearl of many of the world's great stories (the Odyssey, the Book of Job, the Gospels, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost) and yet absent, in a fundamental way, from every story. Because intense suffering takes language away, retrospective narration can seem futile, even falsifying. Moreover, it often raises more questions than it answers. (Who or what is responsible for suffering? Is it merited? What ends it? How can it be made commensurable with the rest of ones's life? What is its meaning? How does one cope with it?) In spite of all this, sufferers continue to tug at the shirls/eeves of passersby, and passersby continue to stop, listen and fall into the sufferers's story. Why?" My opening paragraph is a description of a course that I discovered in the Bard College Course Catalogue for the fall semester 2001 - the year of the falling towers. I was immediately intrigued by the description, having myself experienced great loss, and suffering from it again despite a long passage of time and coping. The course was called Narratives of Suffering, drew on literature from the American literary canon, and proved to be very enriching and inspiring. Starting chronologically with short stories of captivity and shipwreck narratives, we later...
|
guest ::
