Browsing by Subject "Gender in literature"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Gendered Undoing Through Music in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’
    (2016) Rennert, Sara; Finley, C. Stephen
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    Nourishing the Other: Reading Post-Coloniality in Zadie Smith’s NW
    (2016) Ward, Michaela; Mohan, Rajeswari
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    “The ‘Her’ They Were Talking About”: Gender, Childhood, and Queer Time in the Works of Harper Lee
    (2017) Herman, Katy; Zwarg, Christina, 1949-
    This essay analyzes both of Harper Lee’s novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, arguing that their protagonist, Scout, conceives of normative adult womanhood as restrictive and therefore finds ways to circumvent growing up linearly. Through close reading of moments demonstrating Scout’s tomboy role, her existence in liminal spaces, and her tendency towards flashback, as well as the use of queer and trauma theory as presented by authors such as Kathryn Bond Stockton, J. Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman, this essay seeks to demonstrate how gender, childhood, and time are inextricably related in both of these works. Examining the two novels together allows readers to better see how Scout refuses to move straightly, normatively, into adulthood, instead enacting a sort of sideways growth. Looking at both novels also reveals a queer timeline of Lee’s own writing process. The queer temporal patterns of Mockingbird and Watchman’s writing, setting, and release echo Scout’s own nonlinear growth and suggests that issues of gender and time were perhaps even more central to Lee than the racial themes for which the novel has come to be known. The essay concludes by aligning Scout and Lee as two figures that exemplify Stockton’s notion of queer childhood, and discussing how both the writing process and reading experience of Mockingbird and Watchman are extra-textual demonstrations of queer time that mirror Scout’s own experience in the texts.
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    Women's Voices and Imperfect Communities in Sandra Cisneros and Maryse Condé
    (2020) Li, Anran; Ricci, Roberta
    My thesis explores the representations of gendered voices in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984) and Maryse Condé's Traversée de la Mangrove (Crossing the Mangrove, 1989). I incorporate literary theories in narratology and polyphony to analyze the narrative voices in the two texts and the gendered nature of these voices. I argue that the two authors' decisions to center and/or highlight female narrative voices while also including some male voices indicate a shift from western feminist literature. The authors' strategic allocation of voices marks their intersectional approach to representing women's stories and their recognition of the complexities and imperfections of the communities they represent.