Browsing by Author "Stadler, Gustavus"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 44
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    A Livelier Vein of Conversation: Reading the Influence of Gothic Conventions on Feminist Criticism Through Dialogue
    (2015) Fagan, Jacqueline; Stadler, Gustavus
    Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel, follows the protagonist, for whom the title is named, in a rags-to-riches bildungsroman told as an autobiography. Jane's new, distinctively personalized voice gave rise to the novel's place as one the most widely studied nineteenth-century texts and feminist critics, in particular, have found the novel a generative one (Kaplan 16; Lodge). Within the feminist critical body of literature, Bronte's appropriation of the Gothic genre in Jane Eyre has not gone unnoticed. The relationship between the two plays a role in informing Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's landmark text The Madwoman in the Attic, as well as many other critical works that expand upon and push against Gilbert and Gubar's. Gilbert and Gubar propose that Jane's anger within the novel is a product of the frustration and anxiety associated with both the enforcement of gender norms and the suppression of her inner passion. Gilbert and Gubar then show how a Gothic trope, the double, works within the novel, proposing that Bertha Mason, Edward Fairfax Rochester's unstable wife, serves as Jane's angry double and, to some degree, Bronte's. Their primary concern, however, is not the role of the Gothic genre, though their framework brings forth the link, also seen in later readings, between critical feminist interpretations and Gothic conventions. I will argue that the relationship Gothic conventions have to feminist readings may be better understood specifically through Jane's focus in relaying her time at Mr. Rochester's estate, where her compelling interactions with Mr. Rochester are at the forefront of her experience.
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    Beyond the sentimental text: the practice and pedagogy of critical literacy in Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird
    (2004) Dunne, Lindsay; Stadler, Gustavus
    Many readers and teachers approach Harper Lee's novel as a moral fable or self-interpreting text, because of its strong emotional appeal to readers. Beyond its sentimental surface, however, Lee's text both demonstrates and proposes a more expansive mode of critical reading. This essay traces the factors that affect the main character Scout in her development of critical literacy - a literacy of consciousness beyond the basic skills of reading and writing. Through her encounters with Maycomb's characters, her problematic interactions with her father Atticus, and her own social performances, Scout expands her ability to read both the written word and the texts of her social world, and consequently develops a sense of her own agency in response to a stifling social structure. As the narrator of her story, Scout constructs her text to advocate such active critical literacy.
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    Celebrity and the Body in 'The Bostonians'
    (2012) Miller, Lawrence J.; Stadler, Gustavus
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    Colonialist Ideals in an Un-Colonial Place: "Terra Australis Nondum Cognita”
    (2007) Dalke, Samuel; Stadler, Gustavus
    I am looking at how Antarctic exploration functions as a belated extension of the colonial imagination. This is important because the British nation has attempted to use polar exploration as iconic of their larger enterprise, an embodiment of adventure and science untarnished by the horrors of empire. Using critical theory concerning mapping impulses, literature and travel writing, I work through The Worst Journey in the World, a travel narrative that stands as a paradigmatic example of polar exploration.
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    Creating an Image of Walt Whitman in the "Oda a Watlt [sic] Whitman"
    (1999) Carrasquillo, Pedro; Burshatin, Israel; Roberts, Deborah H.; Stadler, Gustavus
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    Dickinson's Sound Machine
    (2013) Fiedler-Kawaguchi, Cole; Stadler, Gustavus
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    Discourses of Truth in Jackie Kay's 'Trumpet'
    (2004) Liem, Yaya; Stadler, Gustavus
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    Elaine's Field Theory of Femininity: A Study of Gravity and Shame in Margaret Atwood's ​Cat's Eye
    (2020) Richie, Rebecca; Stadler, Gustavus
    The Edenic trope of the fallen woman structures the original Fall as Eve's punishment for her embodied desire, for breaking the rules, and has thus permeated literature with feminine characters who are met with repeated punishment when they break social rules: death, sickness, social exclusion, and the like. Through the concept of falling women, Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye confronts the Edenic structure of the fallen woman. Atwood's falling women are punished because the reality of feminine embodiment necessarily breaks the rules of Western social order. I argue that this principle of falling emerges as a result of the shame-incurring social landscape in which Western femininity is experienced. Cat's Eye's protagonist, Elaine, marks herself in relation to femininity by a feeling of "wrongness," a feeling of shame that permeates her relationships with other women, as well as with her own body. In approaching Western femininity, the essay turns to Denise Riley's deconstruction of the concept of "woman." Elaine both literally and figuratively falls from girlhood into womanhood, a fall that marks the beginning of her disillusioned relationship with her body that is reinforced by her social landscape. The novel's structural analepsis flashes between Elaine's girlhood and her womanhood, recounting the formative experiences that structure her sense of gendered embodiment around the guiding principle of shame. This thesis identifies feminine shame as a symptom of a shaming society, thus reconceptualizing the Edenic trope that locates shame as the punishment for feminine desire. In Cat's Eye, embodied femininity itself is the original sin.
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    Embracing Queer Failure and Reaching for Queer Utopia within Chen Chen’s Poetry
    (2023) Toole, Grayson; Stadler, Gustavus
    This thesis explores Jack Halberstam’s theory queer failure within his The Art of Failure and José Muñoz’s theory of queer utopia in his Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Futurity through two of Chen Chen’s poetry collections. The two collections of Chen Chen’s I include, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, navigate growing up as a queer child in a ChineseAmerican family, failing capitalist societal standards as a child of immigrants, and his nuanced relationships with his mom, other family, and partner. To fully elucidate these topics, I also include temporal queer theory from Elizabeth Freeman and Kathryn Stockton as well as queer grief theory from David Eng and Wen Liu. The main issue this thesis addresses is how queer people lead a fulfilled and hopeful life in a world that has expectations that do not serve or are not attainable for queer people under oppressive systems. I also address how we as individuals navigate our relationships and live within the United States when so much queer news, media, and experiences are surrounded by grief. Chen’s tragic and outreaching humor provides a wonderful medium to explore how we can embrace failure within our own lives and turn toward glimpses of utopia whether we find it in domestic bliss, erotic intimacy outside of a heterosexual gaze, or through mutual care and community building.
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    Fashioning Taste: Earl Shinn, Art Criticism, and National Identity in Gilded Age America
    (2005) Lenehan, Daniel Timothy; Stadler, Gustavus; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-
    “The pictures which we are beginning to put in our churches, the statues and historical pieces which our Government and our States are beginning to command, and our more elaborate easel-pictures, are still very lacking in Americanism, in solidity and vigor,” Earl Shinn lamented in 1878.1 His criticism, that the country’s art lacked “Americanism,” reflects the identity crisis that American art experienced in the years following the Civil War. By 1870, the epic landscapes of Thomas Cole and other painters of the Hudson River School, which had stirred in the hearts of antebellum Americans a sense of pride in their country and its artistic capabilities, had lost favor among critics. However, a new ‘school,’ a distinctly American style, did not fill the void left by the Hudson River School. Instead, American art entered a phase of uncertainty and anxiety. Compared to the industrial forces unleashed during and after the war, the fine arts in the United States looked stagnant and underdeveloped, trailing behind other aspects of the blossoming national culture. A younger generation of artists and writers, many of whom studied in Europe, began to question the artistic traditions they had inherited from their predecessors. What made art ‘American?’ Was it possible for artists to thrive in a democratic society? If so, what were the conditions for a national art culture to flourish? With greater exposure to the art of Europe through travel and technology, Americans increasingly perceived their nation’s artistic productions in relation to those from across the Atlantic. The efforts to define American art and make it comparable in style and quality to the art of Europe would thus dominate the energies of artists and writers during the postwar.
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    Horror of Intimacy/Intimacy of Horror - William Gaddis, The Recognitions 725/919 Counterfeit, Simulation, and the Uncanny in William Gaddis' The Recognitions
    (2013) Richardson, David; Stadler, Gustavus
    William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitions concerns a young painter, Wyatt Gwyon, and his involvement in a forgery ring in New York City. The characters of Gaddis’ New York, alongside Wyatt’s forged artworks, are observed to be bound to a perpetual cycle of misrecognition; they miss each other and are missed in return; thus the universe of The Recognitions, alongside Gaddis' text, is plagued by a persistent but untraceable sense of loss and anxiety. This untraceable sense of loss is underscored and multiplied by the motif of the counterfeit. Through the work of counterfeiting, Gaddis brokers a reality wherein recognition becomes a work of violence that serves to render the strange familiar, and the familiar, infinitely strange. Insofar as the familiar is made foreign and vice versa, the universe of the novel becomes a site of Freudian uncanny encounters with an ungraspable past that at once lords over and abandons the reality of Gaddis' characters, initiating a palindromic oscillation between the "horror of intimacy" (Gaddis 725) and the "intimacy of horror" (Gaddis 919). Wyatt’s attempts to come to terms with this shifting reality of misrecognition, displacement, and loss and his implication in its foundational work results in the corruption of his identity and of Gaddis’ text at large. Through the narrative and textual incorporation of simulation, Gaddis’ novel prefigures many of the concerns of postmodern literature, namely the death of the author, the infinite shift of the meaning of the text, and the subsequent birth of the reader. These concerns engender a new literature.
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    How do I know you?: Identity Problems and Failure of Racial Binary in Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
    (2011) Shu, Ling; Stadler, Gustavus
    This thesis explores Poe's representations and understandings of race in Pym. After grounding the reader in racial understanding of Poe's time (1830's), the thesis explores binary theory in the context of race, where the key racial matrix is white versus non-white. Based on the understanding that binary pairs are negatively defined and thus structurally unstable and fluid, we can see evidence of racial trait blurring and identity bleeding in Pym. Racial identity determination is based upon both a physical (body) criterion and a performative criterion. We can see tension and contractions where the text struggles to uphold a racial binary but, to an extent, fails. These tensions and contradictions grow increasingly frequent as the narrative progresses. Identity is fluid and cannibalistic in nature. In a limited way, this thesis also addresses colonialism.
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    I Darena Lat You In: The Child Ballads, Academic Canons, and the Folk Tradition
    (2024) Bishop, Jared; Stadler, Gustavus
    Much academic criticism has been levied against proto-folklorist Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (ESPB), primarily focused around how he attempted to define and canonize an entire folk tradition. This thesis argues that while critics may be right about the extent to which the ESPB can be used as an anthology, there still is need and use for looking at this text, especially as it has sprouted adjacent traditions based solely around it. By tracing the ESPB from its origins to its placement in modern academia and the larger folk community today, I explore the canonization of the ESPB as a way of revealing the tension between the closed, rigid nature of academia, and the explosively mutable and communal nature of folk.
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