In the years following the end of World War Q, a new kind of landscape emerged in the United States, one that would immeasurably alter the way Americans think about place. Critics and commentators greeted the emergence of the environment we know as “suburbia” with a mixed reaction: for some, the suburbs represented the material embodiment of the “American Dream”: for others, architectural and environmental homogeneity marked the new suburbs as an alienating, even dangerous terrain. In the half-century since the onset of mass-suburbanization, the United States — which has, by now, become a primarily suburban nation — has continued to struggle with the image and cultural meanings of suburbia. Our vexed cultural relationship to the suburban landscape, evident even before the onset of postwar masssuburbanization, has characterized a small but compelling body of fictional and cinematic works set in the suburbs. This dissertation examines the representations of suburban life and landscape in fictional works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Updike, Ann Beattie, and Gloria Naylor, and in films by Frank Capra, Frank Perry, Mike Nichols, Bryan Forbes, and Reginald Hudlin. I argue that these writers and filmmakers self-consciously explore the dynamics of the suburban environment in their works, revealing the cultural aspirations and anxieties undergirding our relationship to suburbia as a lived environment and an idea(l). Their works present contrasting visions of the suburbs, reflecting America’s troubled and increasingly complex relationship to an environment that, ultimately, mirrors the fantasies and phobias of the culture at

Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century American Fiction and Film

by Brett Paice Whereas the Gothic traditionally relied upon supernatural figures of evil (vampires, ghosts, monsters) to produce the sensation of fear or terror, contemporary manifestations of the Gothic repudiate such abstracted constructions, favoring, instead, metonymical and everyday representations of terror. In this project, I argue that the works of artists Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, and Steve Erickson signify, what I term, the postmodern American Gothic, through their production of a symbolic economy of fear, paranoia, and dread. I contend that these artists’ works represent narrative critiques of the United States’ culture of consumption and history of imperialism dating back to the myth of Manifest Destiny. Moreover, these artists’ historiographic narratives rigorously complicate traditional conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, nationhood, and colonialism as aspects of American history. Deconstructing the tropic elements of the gothic genre distinguishes these artists’ creation of a gothic aesthetic that privileges the lived horrors of historical record (slavery, the Holocaust, imperial modernity, oppression engendered through male-centered master

Postmodern American Gothic: The politics of fear in the works of Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, and Steve Erickson

W hat London seems to be suggesting, then, in “T o Build a Fire,” is not any kind of animalistic return for man to a presymbolic state of existence in order to survive; on the contrary, he seems to strongly imply that animals survive through instinct; men of limited mental capacity fail; and that human beings who exercise good judgment, tempered with emotional insights are the human beings who win out over a hostile environment. J a m e s K . B o w e n , Southern Oregon College

Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature

Through a reading of the heroic, female bodies available in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books (1983–2011) and Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles (2012–2015), this thesis demonstrates how mythopoeic YA fantasy contests the dominant, hegemonic narratives of female adolescence. Owing to the system of binary oppositions structuring this space, the adolescent girl is offered— through the heavily stylised and always-edited images of popular and media culture—a very narrow and limited means of becoming self, one insisting on a discourse of self-through-appearance at the expense of the body’s fleshiness. Demonstrating a creationary or world-building mind-set, this vein of speculative fiction offers a sub or counter-cultural space in which alternative frameworks of living and being an adolescent female body are possible.

Through the sometimes-fantastical transformations of the body in Pierce and Meyer’s fantasy, this thesis engages liminality, focusing on the adolescent (between child/adult), the body (between self/other), and young adult literature (YAL) (between children’s/adult literature). Drawing from a variety of fields: YAL and feminist theory, studies of myth and folklore as well as popular culture and cultural anthropology, this thesis speaks to and from the places between oppositions, and does so in order to refuse the individuality and isolation required by hegemonic models, while also offering a re-mapping of the body’s curves and contours, one that takes “lumps,” “bumps,” and “scars” into account. To counter the dominant framework of adolescence, this thesis concludes by offering, through a metaphor of “the Pack,” a model of interdependency and relation. Formed by repetition and connection, this model frustrates the economy of opposition, while also taking into account the body’s raised and irregular surfaces and demonstrating how individuals may be “scored into uniqueness” through relationality.

Myth (un)making : the adolescent female body in mythopoeic YA fantasy

....................................................................................................................... v Öz ................................................................................................................................ vi Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... viii Table of

The interface between the oral and the written in Ottoman Literature : the reader notes on the manuscript of the Story of Firuzşah

The American Dream and the Popular Novel.

Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow.

LUDWIG Wittgenstein once noted that "Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through."1 However, as Kierkegaard and others have forcefully argued, the prospect of death is life's central fact and the repression of this fact life's primary task. For Ernest Becker, moreover, man's heroism lies in his impossible efforts to transcend creatureliness, to deny death by means of "lifeenhancing illusion."2 Among such illusions might be placed statements such as Wittgenstein's and the fiction of Richard Brautigan. As Becker writes early in The Denial of Death, "The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive" (p. 66). For Becker, this dilemma is inherent to consciousness, a consequence of human nature more than nurture. His views thus oppose those of Marcuse or Norman 0. Brown, whose works speak to the desire for unrepressed living while pointing an accusing finger at society as the cause of repression. Yet throughout the Sixties, Brautigan created characters seeking not greater freedom but greater control over their lives: over their creatureliness, their thoughts and emotions. But further, although shrinking from life should not be seen exclusively as a result of social antagonism toward freedom and self-expansiveness, society can exacerbate this existential timidity. And in Trout Fishing in America (completed 196I,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2925782.pdf

Richard Brautigan's Search for Control over Death

For other critics, the real bone of contention has been the fact that, despite her efforts to forge a black aesthetic, Brooks has practiced a poetics indebted as much to T. S. Eliot as to Langston Hughes (though brought to bear on black subject matter). This white style/black content debate can be heard clearly in Houston A. Baker's Singers of Daybreak: "Mrs. Brooks," says Baker, "writes tense, complex, rhythmic verse that contains the metaphysical complexities of John Donne and the word magic of Apollinaire, Pound, and Eliot." Yet this style is employed "to explicate the condition of the black American trapped behind a veil that separates him from the white world. What one seems to have is 'white' style and 'black' content-two warring ideals in one dark body."2

Brooke K. Horvath

Papers

The American Dream and the Popular Novel.

Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow.

Richard Brautigan's Search for Control over Death

The Satisfactions of what's Difficult in Gwendolyn Brooks's Poetry

The Fiction of William Gass: The Consolation of Language.