Browsing by Author "Anne Baker, Committee Member"

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Art and Sexual Repression: Miles Coverdale and The Blithedale Romance
(2003-04-08) Beaudoin, Maria Elaine; Allen Stein, Committee Chair; Anne Baker, Committee Member; Carmine Prioli, Committee Member
Throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne's body of work, including his short stories and novels, there is a strong connection between artistic production and repressed sexual longing or genuine love for another person. Most of Hawthorne's artists repress their desires for another person because of social circumstances or the lack of courage to express them, and therefore, they channel those emotions through their artistic efforts. Not only do those artists who are sexually repressed use their art as an outlet, but Hawthorne shows that they are also those artists who produce the greatest and most long-lasting work. The artists who are able to find long-lasting love can create only minor or ephemeral art. Hawthorne's third novel, The Blithedale Romance, most fully explores the relationship between the creation of art and the expression of sexuality by the artist. This novel, with Miles Coverdale as Hawthorne's only first-person narrator, provides the most extensive portrait of a self-isolated, sexually repressed artist, which is arguably a thinly veiled portrait of Hawthorne himself. Because Coverdale remains a bachelor without ever finding an outlet for his passions, he creates a genuinely significant work of art: a fictional account of his experiences at Blithedale, The Blithedale Romance.
Author's Choice: The Relevance of Author as Casting Director on the Restoration Stage
(2006-06-23) Anderson, Jennifer Smith; Anne Baker, Committee Member; Christopher Cobb, Committee Member; John Morillo, Committee Chair
During the Restoration playwrights were often able to act as directors when their works reached the stage. Playwrights were also very public about their intentions within their plays: the attitudes they wished the audience to take and the emotions they hoped their works to instill. As a result, we are able to examine the author⁄director's choice of cast and determine how those choices were intended to directly affect interpretation. With the loss of a play's original cast, much of the author's intent was lost. John Dryden wrote his story of Antony and Cleopatra, All For Love, as a tragedy, with the intent of evoking the pity of the audience. His choice of cast for the play's premiere in 1677 reflects this intent. Though the play was still highly popular in 1718, the changing cast had counteracted the intended pity. In 1696, Sir John Vanbrugh wrote The Relapse in response to Colley Cibber's move toward sentimental comedy in Love's Last Shift. Vanbrugh's play immediately met criticism from moralists, and by the time of its performance in 1716 the changing cast indicated the first shift of many that took the play from a reaction against sentimental comedy to a specimen of the same. Dryden's most extravagant heroic drama, The Conquest of Granada, used the personalities of its original cast to add depth to the play. By the play's final production in 1709, the new cast was unable to sustain the claims and characterizations necessary to the genre. Consistent throughout the major genres of Restoration drama is a move away from author intent over time, which is exemplified in changing cast lists, and amplified by comparisons between the changing casts and the casts of each play's premiere.
Elizabeth Bishop's Quest for the Ordinary
(2007-04-27) Helm, Daniel Joseph; Nick Halpern, Committee Chair; Thomas Lisk, Committee Member; Anne Baker, Committee Member
Poetry by Elizabeth Bishop is filled with issues of domesticity and belonging, intimacy and loss, as well as transparent language and local scenes, all of which are types or expressions of ordinariness. Building from the philosophy of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell proposes that ordinariness — both ordinary language and everyday life — presents the greatest challenge to philosophical skepticism. To Cavell, skepticism threatens us with doubt and the inhumanity of disconnection from life and the world. In In Quest of the Ordinary, Cavell describes challenging the skeptical threat with the resettling of the everyday, a domestication of skepticism that makes life a livable place. Cavell's sense of a need for opposition to skepticism that makes life livable is confirmed by readers of Bishop who find her handling questions, doubts, and the frustration of loss in a way that seems manageable and a way that also emphasizes the significance of ordinariness. Cavell's work is an opportunity to characterize the recurring patterns and themes as well as the contrasts and the differences in Bishop's poems as a search for ordinariness. I claim that ordinariness in Bishop's poetry exists, as in Cavell, in dialogue with skepticism, so that Bishop's quest for the ordinary is a struggle to protect against as well as preserve skepticism. The quest, as both Cavell and Bishop depict it, is endless because ordinariness is elusive, but a struggle with and for ordinariness is appealing, both in Bishop's poetry and Cavell's philosophy, because it alternately allows hope and skepticism. Her poems are widely appreciated because, as Randall Jarrell said, they suggest —it is barely but perfectly possible— to live in the world.
Manhood Matters: Lynching and the Politics of Constructed Masculinities
(2008-12-05) Wilder, Blake Aaron; Jon Thompson, Committee Chair; Anne Baker, Committee Member; Milton Welch, Committee Member
This study utilizes lynching as the focal point of a methodological approach to re-examine the language of American culture and several canonical works of literature from the lynching era. The emphasis on symbolic values of the ritualized lynching event organizes theories of race, gender, and violence and provides an approach to decode the social constructions and literary representations that are based on the structural consequences of the ideological usage of lynching as a force of terror. The lynching era, the ninety-year period from 1877 to the mid-1960s, begins with the collapse of Reconstruction that allowed lynching to emerge as means to reaffirm the destabilized white patriarchal power of slavery and ends when the Voting Rights Act finally reversed the direct political disenfranchisement that was, perhaps, the most restrictive social consequence of the violence of lynching. The direct connection between lynching and the destabilized power structures of slavery is often overlooked because the rise of lynching is commonly associated with the great surge of lynching murders in the 1890s and separated from slavery by the intervening period of Reconstruction. Looking at key works of American literature, through the interpretive lens of lynching as a metaphor, can serve the double purpose of illuminating the history of lynching in American culture and of uncovering a deeper meaning within the texts themselves. Chapter one approaches Mark Twainâ€™s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a theoretical understanding of lynching as an ideological terror that is both racial and sexual to reveal a reflective historical trajectory embodied in the fluctuating masculinity of Jim. Moving from the subordinate masculinity of slavery to a full character of fatherly affection and protection on the river, Jimâ€™s forced return to the minstrel caricature under the romantic machinations of Tom Sawyer connects slavery to active re-imposition of racial hierarchies through the symbolic masculinities created in the ritual of castration and lynching. Chapter two examines the intricate narrative juxtapositions and an exponentially complex use of symbolism of William Faulknerâ€™s Go Down, Moses to foreground a vast potential to expose and critique the lasting effects of the lynching era. Born in 1898, just one year after Plessy v. Ferguson and the institutionalization of â€œseparate but equalâ€ gave legal credibility to growing racial segregation, William Faulkner grew up in a world of indoctrinated racial difference and the continued presence of lynching, and much of his fiction is concerned with understanding the roots of Southern racism. This study utilizes lynching as the focal point of a methodological approach to re-examine the language of American culture and several canonical works of literature from the lynching era. The emphasis on the symbolic values of the ritualized lynching event organizes theories of race, gender, and violence and provides an approach to decode the social constructions and literary representations that are based on the structural consequences of the ideological usage of lynching as a force of terror. The lynching era, the ninety-year period from 1877 to the mid-1960s, begins with the collapse of Reconstruction that allowed lynching to emerge as means to reaffirm the destabilized white patriarchal power of slavery and ends when the Voting Rights Act finally reversed the direct political disenfranchisement that was, perhaps, the most restrictive social consequence of the violence of lynching. The direct connection between lynching and the destabilized power structures of slavery is often overlooked because the rise of lynching is commonly associated with the great surge of lynching murders in the 1890s and separated from slavery by the intervening period of Reconstruction. Looking at key works of American literature, through the interpretive lens of lynching as a metaphor, can serve the double purpose of illuminating the history of lynching in American culture and of uncovering a deeper meaning within the texts themselves. Chapter one approaches Mark Twainâ€™s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a theoretical understanding of lynching as an ideological terror that is both racial and sexual to reveal a reflective historical trajectory embodied in the fluctuating masculinity of Jim. Moving from the subordinate masculinity of slavery to a full character of fatherly affection and protection on the river, Jimâ€™s forced return to the minstrel caricature under the romantic machinations of Tom Sawyer connects slavery to active re-imposition of racial hierarchies through the symbolic masculinities created in the ritual of castration and lynching. Chapter two examines the intricate narrative juxtapositions and an exponentially complex use of symbolism of William Faulknerâ€™s Go Down, Moses to foreground a vast potential to expose and critique the lasting effects of the lynching era. Born in 1898, just one year after Plessy v. Ferguson and the institutionalization of â€œseparate but equalâ€ gave legal credibility to growing racial segregation, William Faulkner grew up in a world of indoctrinated racial difference and the continued presence of lynching, and much of his fiction is concerned with understanding the roots of Southern racism. Chapter three looks to James Baldwinâ€™s 1965 short-story, â€œGoing to Meet the Man,â€ to illustrate not only the social constructions that were spawned by the rise of lynching but also the dynamics that allowed them to be so long misunderstood. By employing a sequential structure of retrospective investigation, Baldwin is able to trace the rigid racial categories of the segregated society back to lynching as the symbolic representation (as well as the physical manifestation) of the desire to destroy black masculinity and empower white patriarchy. Most importantly, by featuring a literal lynching event and incorporating the coded symbolic values of the segregated society, â€œGoing to Meet the Manâ€ becomes a representational illustration of the structures and consequences of lynching.
"Never Otherwise Than Analytic": Poe's Science of the Divine
(2005-07-19) Elder, Matthew Stephen; Christopher J. Cobb, Committee Member; Anne Baker, Committee Member; Allen F. Stein, Committee Chair
When the writers of the American Romantic period were eschewing the Enlightenment values of reason and objectivity in favor of subjective, individual human experience, Edgar Allan Poe clung to rationality and claimed that it is a vital tool in the creation of art and in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Critics, however, have long disputed whether Poe sincerely valued science and rationality or if he treated those concepts with irony and destabilized any knowledge that his characters acquire through rational, empirical truth seeking. This thesis seeks to explain how Enlightenment values figure in Poe's vision of art and the cosmos and to dispute the postmodern interpretations that claim that Poe's valorization of rationality and its products (namely science and technology) is ironic. To that end, I investigate, specifically, the connection of Poe's positivistic (rather than phenomenological) philosophy to his theological vision. The successful application of rational principles by Poe's narrators is consistently rendered in language and imagery suggestive of the divine, and it results in the spiritual enlightenment of the characters. Chapter one of this thesis examines Poe's science fiction against the philosophical backdrop established by Eureka and 'Sonnet — To Science' and argues that as the narrators apply rationality successfully, they come to resemble the God with whom they seek to commune. Chapter two reads Poe?s detective tales as allegories assigning cosmic significance to the concepts of reason, embodied by the God-like C. Auguste Dupin, and unreason, embodied by Dupin's adversaries.
Power Benighted or Souls Uplifted: Mother-Daughter Relationships in The Bluest Eye, Corregidora, and The View from Here
(2006-04-26) Sanders, LaRonda Meeshay; Anne Baker, Committee Member; Deborah Hooker, Committee Member; Sheila Smith- McKoy, Committee Chair
This work examines the extent of African American maternal power and the effect of that power on mother-daughter relationships. The term Black matriarch, developed and perpetuated by white society, defines Black women as neglectful mothers and emasculating wives thereby ignoring the absence of actual power in the political, economic, and social realms that Black women have. Acceptance of this matriarchal fallacy leads mothers to embrace facades of power that negatively impact their own and their daughters' psychological development. Using Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Gayle Jones' Corregidora, and Brian Keith Jackson's The View From Here, this study examines how the presence or absence of maternal power can either foster or hinder feminine growth. Because of the dangers posed by patriarchal structure and white hegemony, Black mothers need to fortify their daughters through their matriline, which is a nurturing and supportive network of maternal figures. This thesis further explores the power that the matriline accords Black mothers. Morrison illustrates the repercussions of helplessness and false power, as a ruptured matriline leaves both mothers and daughters vulnerable to the white gaze. From a different perspective, Jones exposes the dangers of a matriline that allows traumatic history to deprive future generations of their individuality. Jackson reveals how the inadvertent internalization of patriarchy can overshadow actual economic, social, and matrilineal power. Each of these novels highlight the extent of matrilinial power, which suggest a degree of influence that justifies the term matriarch. If positive and flexible, the matriline is the most salient protection of Black womanhood and Black girlhood. This study determines that the matriline shaped by mothers, other-mothers, and the women who are imprinted by it—is the most significant legacy of matriarchal power.
Stubborn Back-looking Ghosts: Mourning as a Control Mechanism in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished
(2008-04-25) Page, Summerlin Leigh; Nick Halpern, Committee Chair; Anne Baker, Committee Member; Michael Grimwood, Committee Member