English Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2042

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon English Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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A Counterhistory of the Ratchet: Black Aesthetics in the New Millennium
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Thompson, Jalen; Ovalle, Priscilla
Framing my discussion in the 1990s and early 2000s, my dissertation—“A Counterhistory of the Ratchet”—explores what I term “the ratchet aesthetic” as both an aesthetic language that rejects the politics of respectability and a reading method for redressing performances of Black female hypersexuality and excess in film, television, and music video. In Black southern vernacular, “ratchet” is a term used to describe people and behaviors that are deemed socially deviant. This includes being loud, disruptive, sexually explicit, angry and a host of other non-respectable actions. The term is often used as a way to police the boundaries of respectable Black femininity. Following the work of scholars in hip hop feminism and Black feminist cultural criticism, I argue that Black femme cultural producers adopt excessive performances of Blackness that elicit an expansive viewing experience of emotions, feelings, and beauty and that challenge the viewers’ perception of Black femme expression. Chapter 1 “Preliminary Thoughts on the Ratchet Aesthetic” situates the ratchet aesthetic as an intervention in Black aesthetics. Chapter 2 titled “The Televisual Ratchet Aesthetic” analyzes Martin Lawrence’s drag embodiment of the character Sheneneh Jenkins from the television series "Martin" (1992-1997). By looking at the performance of Sheneneh’s ratchet aesthetic, I argue Lawrence’s performance as Sheneneh undermines the heterosexist and gender specific logic of the series. Chapter 3 titled “The Cinematic Ratchet Aesthetic” uses the 1997 film "Black American Princesses" (or "B.A.P.S.") starring Halle Berry (as Nisi) and the late comedian Natalie Desselle (as Mickey) to investigate the visual iconography of the Black American Princess in American culture. With a creative team including two-time Academy Award winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter and celebrity hair stylist Kim Kimble, I argue that through wardrobe, makeup, hairstyling, and nail art the film immortalizes distinct stylistic conventions of working-class excess in the latter half of the 1990s and progresses a narrative of refinement over the course of the film. Chapter 4 titled “The ‘Real’ Ratchet Aesthetic” looks at the career of the reality television star Nene Leakes from the Real Housewives of Atlanta (2008-present). I explore Leakes' blonde embodiment as a form of ghetto fabulous identity formation. Finally, my coda “The Ratchet Aesthetic in the Twenty-First Century” ends with a discussion of the rapper and reality television personality Sukihana and "baddie" culture to explore the kinds of futurity the ratchet aesthetic offers in the progression of the new millennium.
Open Access
A Double-Edged Sword: Feminist Reclamation in Neomedieval Fantasy
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Garner, Alexandra; Wheeler, Elizabeth
Heroic fantasy produced by Anglophone creators overwhelmingly and often explicitly draws on western mythopoetic literary traditions. Just as products of the Renaissance and the Victorians before them, late 20th and 21st century cultural narratives romanticize and re-frame the past to serve the needs of their contemporary present. In this dissertation, I examine one conventional element of the cultural preoccupation with heroic neomedievalism: the sword. I first articulate how neomedievalism acts as a postmodern simulacrum not only of the actual historical past but also, more prominently, as an imagined and desired inheritance to one. English claims on the United States legally ended with the American Revolution, but cultural narratives of the U.S. continue to demonstrate desire for a shared legacy of British literary and cultural heroes. I demonstrate how these continual concerns over legacy, lineage, and masculinity manifest in postmodern heroic fantasy as a double-edged sword. This is both literal and metaphorical: the subjects of neomedieval heroic fantasy conventions here are literal swords or sword-analogues; metaphorically, this sword’s edges embody myriad contradictions and tensions. Through close readings of the sword as a rhetorical, symbolic, and often queer object, I explore the desire for a claim to heroism in the style of King Arthur – aristocratic, male, able-bodied, and white – as it confronts ideological challenges associated with feminism, queerness, and racial/ethnic equality. I argue that the sword should thus be read as both an embodiment of and a challenge to traditionally phallocentric heroism. In my explorations of neomedieval sword motifs in televisual heroic fantasy, children’s and young adult fiction, and the superhero film, I show how swords rhetorically function to offer cultural critiques that engage these tensions, especially those between neomedievalism and feminism. To accomplish this, I draw on medievalism studies, narrative and cultural theories, query theory, and feminist new materialism, among other approaches. This project contributes to conversations in popular culture studies, children’s and young adult literature, medieval studies, and critical whiteness studies. This dissertation includes previously published material.
Open Access
"A Room and the Right Kind of People:" The Ideology of Romantic Comedy in Classical Hollywood Cinema
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Graman, Claire; Aronson, Michael
Screwball comedy was a unique subgenre of romantic comedy occurring in American film of the 1930s and 40s, with an emphasis on fast-paced, witty dialogue, zany physical humor, and strong female characters. This dissertation examines the origins of screwball comedy in many subgenres of romantic comedy in the 1920s and 1930s, including slapstick, sophisticated comedies, flapper comedies, sentimental comedies, and anarchic pre-Code comedies, with particular focus on the way women are represented in these comedies. By building off theories of comedy and feminist film historiography, this dissertation argues for the feminist potential of these films, as their heroines create a filmic world where gender equality is possible, before studying the decline of screwball comedy with the reification of gender roles during World War II.
Open Access
Affect, Abuse, Transgression: Orienting Ambiguity in Early Modern Texts
(University of Oregon, 2016-11-21) Myers, Katie; Saunders, Benjamin
This dissertation seeks to articulate how early modern texts formalize their affective qualities in instances of ambiguity. Positioned within the recent turn away from humoral theories of the passions and toward the rhetorical underpinnings of affect in early modern criticism, my project offers an interpretive strategy that privileges the perspective of the text by attending to the vulnerabilities of first-person perspectives in ambiguous rhetorical structures and figures. I argue that these forms signal more than sites of critical debate encoded in the text, as Shoshanna Feldman has suggested; they also privilege textual perspective and reveal affect to be a feature of form. I argue that textual ambivalence may be approached through the logic of catachresis in order to examine how these instances may be read in ways that maintain the strangeness of their didactic and disruptive capability. Reorienting how one approaches ambiguity, I suggest, exposes the potential of often ignored textual elements and suggests that early modern literature models an interpretive agenda dependent upon vulnerable perspectives. Reconceiving the interpretive strategies solicited by each text, I argue that early modern literature embraces the benefits of individual and collective vulnerability. I examine how Marlowe’s Edward II disrupts the binary structure of the king’s two bodies in order to turn an accusation of weakness against authority itself. I turn to Donne’s poetry and prose to argue that it models a hospitable interpretive method that uses form to manage ambiguity from the perspectives of his textual voices while orienting readers to welcome the strangeness of his contradictions. I then pursue an analysis of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I that reorients Falstaff’s function in the play as its unlikely focal perspective, a position that stages a resistance to the play’s power structures. Finally, I briefly consider how my analysis bears on familial and rhetorical conventions in Shakespeare’s Tempest and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Attending to the formal practices that construct literary affect, this project reconsiders the ways in which early modern English literature navigates the intersections of vulnerability that articulate a text’s orientation to the cultural networks in which it was produced.
Open Access
"An Aligned, Transformed, Constructed World": Representing Material Environments in American Literature 1835-1945
(University of Oregon, 2012) Sexton, Melissa; Sexton, Melissa; Rossi, William
This dissertation seeks to avoid two extremes that have polarized literary debate: on the one hand, a strong constructivism that reduces environments to textual effects; and, on the other hand, a strong realism that elides language's constructive power, assuming texts' mimetic transparency. Positioning itself within the ecocritical attempt to reconnect text and environment, my project articulates a constructive vision of material representation that I call "constrained realism." Katherine L. Hayles's "constrained constructivism" emphasizes the constructed nature of scientific knowledge while asserting science's truth; conversely, "constrained realism" re-emphasizes the material real's influence on literature while acknowledging representation's limitations. My project adapts Bruno Latour's work in science studies to literary texts, reconceiving written representation as a dynamic process of human/material interaction. My reassessment of literary materiality extends to both canonical and neglected American texts that address representational anxieties about materiality. First, I examine how the work of Henry David Thoreau presents the relation between a material world and written text as actively constructed and mutually constituted, a relationship that necessitates Thoreau's self-reflexive engagement with language. A similar dynamic between material observation and skepticism about language informs Frank Norris's
Open Access
"All Is Well": Victorian Mourning Aesthetics and the Poetics of Consolation
(University of Oregon, 2011-12) Holloway, Tamara C.
In this study, I examine the various techniques used by poets to provide consolation. With Tennyson's In Memoriam, I explore the relationship between formal and thematic consolation, i.e., the ways in which the use of formal elements of the poem, particularly rhyme scheme, is an attempt by the poet to attain and offer consolation. Early in his laureateship after the Duke of Wellington's funeral, Tennyson wrote "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," but this poem failed to meet his reading audience`s needs, as did the first major work published after Tennyson was named Poet Laureate: Maud. I argue that form and theme are as inextricably linked in Maud as they are in In Memoriam, and in many ways, Maud revises the type of mourning exhibited in In Memoriam. Later, I examine in greater detail the hallmarks of Victorian mourning. Although most Victorians did not mourn for as long or as excessively as Queen Victoria, the form her mourning took certainly is worth discussion. I argue that we can read Tennyson's "Dedication" to Idylls of the King and his "To the Mourners" as Victorian funeral sermons, each of which offers explicit (and at times, contradictory) advice to the Queen on how to mourn. Finally, I discuss the reactions to Tennyson's death in the popular press. Analyzing biographical accounts, letters, and memorial poems, I argue that Tennyson and his family were invested in the idea of "the good death"; Tennyson needed to die as he had lived--as the great Laureate.
Open Access
American Modernism's Gothic Children
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Godwin, Hannah; Whalan, Mark
This dissertation delineates a range of literary endeavors engaging the gothic contours of child life in early to mid-twentieth century America. Drawing fresh attention to fictional representations of the child in modernist narratives, I show how writers such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter turned to childhood as a potent site for negotiating cultural anxieties about physical and cultural reproduction. I reveal the implications of modernist technique for the historical formation of American childhood, demonstrating how these texts intervened in national debates about sexuality, race, and futurity. Each dissertation chapter adopts a comparative approach, indicating a shared investment in a specific formulation of the gothic child. Barnes and Faulkner, in creating the child-woman, appraise how the particular influence of psychoanalysis on childhood innocence irrevocably alters the cultural landscape. Faulkner and Toomer, through the spectral child, evaluate the exclusionary racial politics surrounding interracial intimacy which impact kinship structures in the U.S. South. Welty and Porter, in spotlighting the orphan girl-child, assess the South’s gendered social matrix through the child’s consciousness. Finally, Faulkner, in addressing children as a readership in his little-known gothic fable, The Wishing Tree, produces a compelling site to examine the relationship between literature written for the child and modernist artistic practice.
Open Access
“An Inexhaustible Ocean of Likenesses”: Reevaluating the Role of Language in Helen Keller’s The World I Live In
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Bresnahan, Daniel; Wood, Mary
From a young age, Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism over her ability to write about the material world. Such critiques were founded on an understanding of language as an abstraction meant to signify a material reality which many believed Keller was closed off from due to her deafblindness. In this paper, I argue that Keller’s The World I Live In rethinks and reclaims the role of language, metaphor, and materiality in response to such criticism, showing metaphor to be hermeneutic and co-constructive of knowledge. As such, I contend that World challenges purely rhetorical readings of metaphor pervasive in current Disabilities Studies scholarship. Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur’s discussions of metaphor and the hermeneutic quality of figurative language, I implore Disability Studies scholars to reconsider metaphor non-rhetorically and argue that Keller’s World demonstrates that the use of metaphorical language can be an empowering means for acquiring knowledge.
Open Access
Antagonistic Cooperation: Prose in American Poetry
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) LeRud, Elizabeth; Ford, Karen
Poets and critics have long agreed that any perceived differences between poetry and prose are not essential to those modes: both are comprised of words, both may be arranged typographically in various ways—in lines, in paragraphs of sentences, or otherwise—and both draw freely from the complete range of literary styles and tools, like rhythm, sound patterning, focalization, figures, imagery, narration, or address. Yet still, in modern American literature, poetry and prose remain entrenched as a binary, one just as likely to be invoked as fact by writers and scholars as by casual readers. I argue that this binary is not only prevalent but also productive for modern notions of poetry, the root of many formal innovations of the past two centuries, like the prose poem and free verse. Further, for the poets considered in this study, the poetry/prose binary is generative precisely because it is flawed, offering an opportunity for an aesthetic critique. “Antagonistic Cooperation: Prose in American Poetry” uncovers a history of innovative writing that traverses the divide between poetry and prose, writing that critiques the poetry/prose binary by combining conventions of each. These texts reveal how poetry and prose are similar, but they also explore why they seem different and even have different effects. When these writers’ texts examine this binary, they do so not only for aesthetic reasons but also to question the social and political binaries of modern American life—like rich/poor, white/black, male/female, gay/straight, natural/artificial, even living/dead—and these convergences of prose and poetry are a textual “space” each writer creates for representing those explorations. Ultimately, these texts neither choose between poetry and prose nor do they homogenize the two, affirming instead the complex effects that even faulty distinctions may have had historically, and still have, on literature—as on life. By confronting differences without reducing or erasing them, these texts imagine ways to negotiate and overcome modes of ignorance, invisibility, and oppression that may result from these flawed yet powerful dichotomies.
Open Access
Appalachian Moderns: Poetry and Music, 1936-1947
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Craven, Bob; LeMenager, Stephanie
Why has Appalachia been written out of the story of modernism? Current scholarship on American modernism’s geography proposes a bipartite model: proximal modernism in the North, a movement based in New York and Chicago concerning life in an urban zone, and distal modernism in the South, as a dispersed movement concerning life in an agrarian zone. Yet participating in another regional stream of modernism are Appalachians, a third group, whose homeland was defined neither by urbanism nor agrarianism, but was developed along a third developmental path: extractivism. This developmental model restructured state governments and laws to enlarge the region’s capacity to produce wood, minerals, coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Extractivism is thoroughly examined in works by Appalachians. This dissertation focuses on two such works, arguing that they reveal another, as yet overlooked, stream of modernism. Written on frontlines of industrial resource extraction, Gauley Mountain (1939) by West Virginian poet Louise McNeill and Folk Songs of the Hills (1947) by Kentucky musician Merle Travis make modernist interventions in form and content yet have never been classed as modernist, mostly going unnoticed by literary scholars. To better understand why this the case, I compare each of these two critically neglected figures with a historical contemporary who, at one point or another, did become established as a canonical modernist: Travis, with the undisputed “master of modernism” Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), a New Orleans musician sixteen years older than Travis but facing a similar turning point in style with his Town Hall Concert (1947); McNeill, with New York City poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), writer of The Book of the Dead (1938), who has been venerated in recent decades as a significant twentieth-century American writer. Close readings of these works, and their critical fates, reveal the geographic and regional indexing of cultural value in modernist studies. Specifically, uneven economic development positioned Appalachia within the cultural spheres of thirties poetry and forties music in a certain way, as a source not only of natural resources, but of cultural resources as well. Appalachian Moderns therefore works to widen our appreciation of American modernism’s geographic and historical dynamics.
Open Access
“Art Hurts”: Intimacy, Difficulty, and Distance in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Two Dedications”
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Mueller, Andrew; Whalan, Mark
In this thesis, I examine Gwendolyn Brooks’s diptych poems “Two Dedications” from her 1968 collection In the Mecca. Critical accounts of “Two Dedications” cast the poems as fixed oppositions between “frivolous” Western art and inspiring, communal black art. I propose that such binaries are reductive and overlook the intellectual benefits Brooks locates in abstract modernist art. Using Ezra Pound’s theories of modernist difficulty, Walter Benjamin’s concept of artistic “aura,” and the Black Arts Movement (BAM) manifestoes of Ron Karenga and Larry Neal, I argue that Brooks’s poems demonstrate the benefits of both abstract Western art and representational BAM art. Specifically, Brooks suggests that both types of art provide avenues for self-determination and liberation from institutional conventions.
Open Access
As the Anglo-Saxon Sees the World: Meditations on Old English Poetry
(University of Oregon, 2012) Coogle, Diana; Coogle, Diana; Earl, James
It is a pity that Old English poetry is not more widely known, not only because it is beautiful and powerful but because to read it is to experience a different way of thinking. It is also a pity - or opportunity - that many first-year Old English students express a "love-hate" relationship with the language. Therefore, it is worth trying to discover what there is in the poetry to interest the general educated public and create enthusiasts among undergraduates. The multitudinous answers, found herein, have one over-riding answer: the Anglo-Saxon way of thinking. Old English poetry opens a door into a dim past by disclosing, in puzzle-piece hints, that epistemological world, which becomes more fascinating the more one pokes around in it. This dissertation seeks to give the beginning student and the reader from the general educated public a chance to wander in this landscape where, generally, only scholars tread.
Open Access
At the Border of Subjectivity: On Literature, Space, and Subalternity
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Hernández, Teresa; Brown, Kirby
At the Border of Subjectivity: On Literature, Space, and Subalternity critically reexamines the making of the border subject within Mexican and Mexican American literature. I comparatively read texts alongside cultural studies to materially ground my analysis of border environmentalisms, border feminisms, and border citizenships. I argue that while Mexican Americans have utilized space-based identity claims to signal belonging, legitimacy, and resistance, such claims foreclose on our ability to build community with other border subjects. In my first chapter, “Uprooting and Disentangling: Endangered Border Subjects in Elena Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite and South Texas,” I consider how border women’s writing fragments a Mexican Indigenous presence and sustains settler colonial history. I pair the 1935 text with the 900-year-old Montezuma Bald Cypress in South Texas and environmental activism efforts at the Texas/Mexico border to contend with questions of lineage, genealogy, and belonging. My second chapter, “An Unsettled Border Geopoetics: Locating Community Cartographies in Sandra Cisneros’ cuentos and the Rio Grande Valley” is an expansion of my article, “Invented Geographies.” I define “border geopoetics” as a lens to read literary spatial relations within Latinx imaginaries. I use theory of “decolonization” and a South Texas GIS community mapping project to materially grapple with questions of subjectivity to further consider the fragility of citizenship. My third chapter, “The Death of Border Subjectivity: On Violence, Body, and Nation in Sara Uribe’s Antígona González and the U.S./Mexico Border” examines Mexican author Sara Uribe’s 2012 re-envisioning of the 400 BCE Sophocles tragedy, Antigone. I read Uribe’s use of el otro to access the un/knowable and in/visible violence on border bodies through the unlocatable. I center the murdered and disappeared by utilizing data, reports, and obituaries to make tangible those outside a humanistic grasp of “subject” and further address violence in the Américas. My postscript leaves readers with a “politic of tension,” which does not suggest a resolution to these contested and ongoing claims to space. At the Border of Subjectivity reframes questions of subalternity through a spatial and material framework that deconstructs the myth of nationalism and sovereignty to redefine “border futurity” beyond Chicanidad.
Open Access
At the Limits of Rhetorical Thought: Listening, Wonder, and the Problem of Silence
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Manuel, June; Crosswhite, James
What does it mean to study silence in a field that has historically been the study of speech and language in action? The discipline of rhetoric and composition relies on a foundational equivocation of speech with being and knowing that precludes the possibility of experiencing silence on its own terms. Governed by the assumption that speech is the authorized medium of power and social relation, Western rhetorical theory has represented silence as mere negation and absence of all that speech represents: thought, being, subjectivity, power, etc. Drawing on philosophies of language at the intersection of twentieth century continental philosophy and feminist rhetorical theory, this project challenges the logical binary that functions as the postulate by which the vast majority of scholarship in rhetoric and composition thinks the question of alterity and politics, this project seeks to break with that tradition by expanding theories of silence in rhetoric toward an ethics and knowing that is not rooted in speaking. While my project spans across disciplines, expanding out of rhetoric and composition toward philosophy, feminisms, decolonial theories of alterity, and ethics of interrelation, it is at its core a project concerned with the inadequacy of language and how that inadequacy impedes communication. In her 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, Toni Morrison says that the force of language is “in its reach toward the ineffable” (Morrison). By rethinking writing and communication with an emphasis on silence as ineffability, as the reaching of language toward and beyond its limitations rather than as a reproduction within preestablished limitations, we may learn how to better know ourselves, each other, and communicate ethically across difference, be they cultural, political, racial, gendered, or otherwise.
Embargo
Beautiful Empire: Race, Gender, and the Asian/American Femme on U.S. Network Television
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Seid, Danielle; Ovalle, Priscilla
Since the earliest days of broadcast television in the 1950s, network television has maintained a keen fascination with Asian/American women, who implicitly helped secure the boundaries of white women’s “empire of the home.” This dissertation inquires into when and how Asian/American women have been represented on U.S. network television. Bringing together questions and analyses of beauty, race, and gender to better understand how Asian/American femininity has been negotiated within the conventions of network television, I argue that the figure I call the Asian/American femme—suspended between feminine subject and feminized object—appeared on network television to mediate and obscure moments of U.S. national and imperial crisis. In addition to analyses of specific programs and network television texts, this dissertation examines the racialized and gendered mistreatment that Asian/American performers have experienced working within the television industry. By combining textual analysis with analysis of industrial practices and performers’ star-texts, I work to understand how network television has imagined Asian/American women’s gender and sexual debts to the nation, as well as how key Asian/American performers, through their own feminine labor, enact the “resolution” of Asian/American women’s tenuous status in the nation. Far from advancing in a linear progression from stereotypical to more sensitive and complex representations, the Asian/American femme on U.S. network television, I argue, instead demonstrates how television, as a social and racial technology, accommodates shifting racial, gender, and sexual discourses in U.S. dominant culture.
Open Access
Being a Thing Immortal: Shakespeare, Young Adult Culture, and the Motifs of the Undead
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Harper, Gavin; Freinkel, Lisa
In the early decades of the twenty-first century William Shakespeare’s works and figure began to arise in Young Adult adaptations and transnarratives focusing upon the undead. These works of werewolf, vampire, and zombie fiction represented Shakespeare as a creature of the undead or as a heroic savior. I argue that the figure of Shakespeare appears as an ambivalent symbol of corrupt authority or redeeming power within these YA undead adaptations because we are unable to reconcile Shakespeare’s centrality in literary studies with our twenty-first century social, political, and moral ideals such as multiculturalism, gender equality, and race relations. Essentially, these undead adaptations manifest the figure of Shakespeare as a crisis of our own faith in the “dead white European male” model of authority. Many of the works offer a rather dim view of the author and the cultural authority that he once represented. And the image these YA narratives conjure is often that of a zombie Shakespeare who is both immortal and rotting. Or alternatively, the absolute power of a vampire Shakespeare: cold, white, male, feeding upon the blood of the living. I argue that the YA protagonists must destroy the corrupt authority figures who hold power over them to create a “new world order” in these narratives, and Shakespeare’s position as “the author of authors” serves as the prime target. Alternatively, the contrasting narratives place Shakespeare in opposition to the undead hordes that are attacking humanity. In these novels and films, the figure of Shakespeare is an iteration of viable knowledge and authority solving not only his era’s problems, but those of our own, as well. I argue that these narratives seek to renew and add to Shakespeare’s authority through a metaphor of undead hybridity. By analyzing the werewolf or zombie-hunter in both film and literature, I demonstrate that many narratives utilize Shakespeare as a hybrid of both historical/literary authority and our own modern ideals. Rather than simply wolf or slayer, the Shakespeare of these narratives is both early modern authority and twenty-first century social/political hero.
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Between "Ernest" and "Game": The Aesthetics of Knowing and Poetics of "Witte" in William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
(University of Oregon, 2013-10-10) Nelson, Sharity; Ginsberg, Warren
A common assumption in theories of the aesthetic is that it is a concept and experience that belongs to modernity. However, as Umberto Eco has shown, the aesthetic was a topic of great consideration by medieval thinkers. As this project demonstrates in the study of the poetry of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, the aesthetic was, in fact, a dynamic and complex concept in the Middle Ages that could affirm institutional ideologies even as it challenged them and suggested alternative perspectives for comprehending truth. This project focuses on the ways in which the poets' respective vernacular literary masterpieces, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, individually craft theories of the aesthetic and defend its role as a privileged discursive epistemology. I argue that, for Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic is a discursive mode through which the reader comes to possess a complex knowledge that matches his or her nature, material and immaterial, sensitive and intellective; the reader arrives at this knowledge by engaging his or her wits in a translation of the poetics of Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. For Langland, this translative exercise is evoked by the complex interplay of allegory and irony, and the result of the aesthetic experience is an embodied knowledge of God's truth that he refers to as "kind knowing." For Chaucer, the aesthetic is configured through the experience of irony, a figure that engages the process of translation as it confirms the complexity of truth as we can comprehend it. The aesthetic is also, for Chaucer, represented by the privileged mode of parody, which allows the reader to hear, as it were, what is missing and, in reading, supply the missing voice and create a dialogue--between text and reader and/or tale and tale--that in effect remasters whatever is monoaural by translating it into stereo. Ultimately, for both Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic engenders instruction and pleasure, and both together are essential to our embodied comprehension of truth.
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Between Animals and Angels: Rethinking Extracategorical Bodies in Medieval Literature
(University of Oregon, 2012) Henson, Chelsea; Henson, Chelsea; Laskaya, Anne
Medieval bodies often push against easy categorization. Hybrids, saints, giants, and transformative bodies are represented in literature as falling between or occupying multiple taxonomic hierarchical positions of divine, human, or animal.
Open Access
Between Us We Can Kill a Fly: Intersubjectivity and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy
(University of Oregon, 2018-04-10) Macrae, Mitchell; Bovilsky, Lara
Using recent scholarship on intersubjectivity and cultural cognitive narratology, this project explores the disruption and reformation of early modern identity in Elizabethan revenge tragedies. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how revenge tragedies contribute to the prevalence of a dialogical rather than monological self in early modern culture. My chapter on Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy synthesizes Debora Shuger’s work on the cultural significance of early modern mirrors--which posits early modern self-recognition as a typological process--with recent scholarship on the early modern dialogical self. The chapter reveals how audiences and mirrors function in the play as cognitive artifacts that enable complex experiences of intersubjectivity. In my chapter on Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, I trace how characters construct new identities in relation to their shared suffering while also exploring intersubjectivity’s potential violence. When characters in Titus imagine the inward experience of others, they project a plausible narrative of interiority derived from inwardness’s external signifiers (such as tears, pleas, or gestures). These projections and receptions between characters can lead to reciprocated sympathy or violent aggression. My reading of John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge explores revenge as a mode of competition. Marston suggests a similarity between the market conditions of dramatic performance (competition between playwrights, acting companies, and rival theaters) and the convention of one-upmanship in revenge tragedy, i.e. the need to surpass preceding acts of violence. While other Elizabethan revenge tragedies represent reciprocity and collusion between characters as important aspects of intersubjective self-reintegration, Marston’s play emphasizes competition and rivalry as the dominant force that shapes his characters. My final chapter provides an analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I argue that recent scholarship on intersubjectivity and cognitive cultural studies can help us re-historicize the nature of Hamlet’s “that within which passes show.” Hamlet’s desire for the eradication of his consciousness explores the consequences of feeling disconnected from others in a culture wherein identity, consciousness, and even memory itself depend on interpersonal relations.
Open Access
Beyond Binaries: Rediscovering The Fantastic Four through a Multi-Dimensional Lens
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Brambley, Matthew; Saunders, Ben
Contemporary trends in literary and cultural analysis are predicated on a reading practice that reduces their subjects to a binary dichotomy that can be summarized as a hegemonic-versus-subversive discourse where, in the former case, the text promotes and enables the dominance of politically and economically privileged social groups over others and in the latter, the text resists such dominance in its subversive deployment of artistic and literary forms and conventions. Such patterns are especially pronounced in the burgeoning field of comics studies, specifically regarding the superhero comic book. This article attempts to destabilize this dichotomy by demonstrating the inherent overlap of these two reading models. In my analysis of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four (1961-1970), I argue that such analyses tend to reduce the narratives, characters, and underlying themes in superhero comic books to mere instruments of dominant cultural norms on the one hand or expressions of radical difference on the other. In juxtaposing diverging analyses, I highlight how such conclusions necessitate a disregard for contradictory evidence, thereby oversimplifying the interactions between these unique cultural productions and their socio-political surroundings while also obscuring other analytical frameworks crucial for a more comprehensive understanding of this material. I assert that the superhero comic book facilitates subversive and hegemonic readings simultaneously, demonstrating this through my close readings of various characters and stories, and conclude by proposing alternative methodologies with which to analyze the superhero comic book. Ultimately, my analysis challenges privileged reading models ingrained in academia and begs the question, “How do we read?”