Browsing by Author "Dr. Anne Baker, Committee Member"

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    It's an honorable choice: Rebellions Against Southern Honor in William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner
    (2009-12-04) Harrell, Laura Allison; Dr. Allen Stein, Committee Member; Dr. Anne Baker, Committee Member; Dr. Michael Grimwood, Committee Chair
    When Bertram Wyatt-Brown published Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South in 1982, he established honor as a key to understanding the culture, of the antebellum South, and created a new anthropological framework for analyzing Southern patterns of conduct. This essay describes, through the lens of honor, the attempts of Nat Turner and Margaret Whitehead to rebel against the patriarchal code of Southern honor, and explores their failures to subvert the rigid assumptions of the prevailing system. Disrespected, mistreated, and enslaved, Nat wishes to disrupt the perpetual social system of white honor and black deference; he uses his literacy and the patriarchal models of the Old Testament and his father to rebel against his social condition and to sustain his plan for insurrection and eventual liberation. Emotionally distant from the patriarchal authority of her brother and the influence of her mother, unable to communicate freely with her peers or family, and distraught and torn by her socially unacceptable belief that slavery should be abolished, Margaret rebels against these socially imposed controls and ideologically commits herself to her convictions about equality, tolerance, and Christian love. Though both Nat and Margaret actively rebel against the existing honor system, they fail to consider the influence of the public sphere. This failure to identify the public perceptions of various social communities results in the collapse of Nat’s and Margaret’s rebellions, and it contributes to their eventual deaths.
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    "The joy of meaning and design wrenched out of chaos": The Modernismpostmodernism Continuum of James Joyce's Ulysses and Don DeLillo's The Names
    (2004-01-08) Leppard, Natalie Rae; Dr. Nick Halpern, Committee Chair; Dr. John Morillo, Committee Member; Dr. Anne Baker, Committee Member
    A modern author allows language to approach the play of postmodernism. A postmodern author allows language to return to a modern sense of innocence. James Joyce and Don DeLillo, the authors in question, have both allowed language to develop a continuum of sorts between modernist and postmodernist language: giving language the freedom of postmodernism and the authorial presence of modernism. Joyce, with Molly's chapter, moves toward a postmodern use of language. The final chapter of Ulysses, employs the conventions of dream-visions and, precisely because the chapter may be termed a 'dream,' Molly's soliloquy becomes the reality of the novel which leaves the preceding male chapters to be interpreted as a perception of reality. Molly's chapter foresees the coming of postmodernism (namely in Finnegan's Wake) by abruptly changing narrative voice from the orderly thought process of males navigating a city to the stream-of-consciousness dream-vision of a female stationed in bed. The chapter prophesies the transition from modernism to postmodernism and the transition of importance from the author to the language. DeLillo, within the text of The Names, has demonstrated his refusal to allow language sole power over the text by inserting his voice into the text in order to carry a conversation with the reader concerning authorship, reading, critics, and language. With this demand that his voice be found within the text, DeLillo returns to a sort of modernist ideal of the author as god of the text. However, just as Joyce does not fully give over the text to language, DeLillo does not take complete control of his text from language. With Tap's chapter, DeLillo returns to a modern use of the innocence of language. The reader experiences an abrupt change of narrative voice from that of the male narrator/author to that of a child, a boy, Tap. Here we do not have a soliloquy but a short story that Tap has written. DeLillo, by including the child's voice, the child's writing, and by situating it in a place of importance as the final chapter, moves toward modernist thinking in that language needs to return to innocence.
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    Two Step
    (2004-11-07) Hall, Hilary Brooke; Dr. Anne Baker, Committee Member; Dr. Thomas Lisk, Committee Chair; Wilton Barnhardt, Committee Member
    "Two Step" is a collection of seven previously unpublished short stories that capture the mood and mystery of a single moment in time. "Two Step" reveals the tension between love and contempt in the relationship of a newly married couple. In "Something Borrowed" a conflict between a mother and daughter is introduced after the daughter accepts a proposal of marriage from a man who gives her an engagement cake instead of a diamond engagement ring. "Late Afternoon" is the story of a brother and sister who find the dead body of a former enemy washed up on a wooded creek bed. Through variations in point of view, style, and tense, the four "Nightswimming" stories, focus on the flux of emotion that accompanies the coming of age. More than revealing the characters themselves, the stories explore the emotions, relationships, and decisions that have brought the characters to a particular point in time.