Browsing by Author "Lamos, Colleen"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Grotesque Subjects: Dostoevsky and Modern Southern Fiction, 1930-1960(2012-09-05) Saxton, Benjamin; Lamos, Colleen; Morris, Wesley A.; Thompson, EwaAs a reassessment of the southern grotesque, this dissertation places Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner in context and conversation with the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky. While many southern artists and intellectuals have testified to his importance as a creative model and personal inspiration, Dostoevsky’s relationship to southern writers has rarely been the focus of sustained analysis. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s deeply positive understanding of grotesque realism, I see the grotesque as an empowering aesthetic strategy that, for O’Connor, McCullers, and Faulkner, captured their characters’ unfinished struggles to achieve renewal despite alienation and pain. My project suggests that the preponderance of a specific type of character in their fiction—a physically or mentally deformed outsider—accounts for both the distinctiveness of the southern grotesque and its affinity with Dostoevsky’s artistic approach. His grotesque characters, consequently, can fruitfully illuminate the misfits, mystics, and madmen who stand at the heart—and the margins—of modern southern fiction. By locating one source of the southern grotesque in Dostoevsky’s fiction, I assume that the southern literary imagination is not directed incestuously inward toward its southern past but also outward beyond the nation or even the hemisphere. This study thus offers one of the first evaluations of Dostoevsky’s impact on southern writers as a group.Item Revolutionary symbolism: Identity and ideology in Depression-era leftist literature(2003) Yerkes, Andrew Corey; Lamos, ColleenThis dissertation argues for the importance of works of leftist literary criticism, fiction, and poetry in our understanding of the cultural history of American modernism. Despite the scientific Marxist tendencies apparent in the critical debates that were conducted in the New Masses and at the 1935 American Writers' Congress, the leftist fiction of the decade reflects a critical Marxist stance, focused on alienation and the possibilities of formulating narrative strategies to overcome the distortions of ideology. Novels deployed a form of Lukacsian ideological critique, I argue, insofar as they engaged the stereotypes of high literary culture, as well as mass and popular culture, with historical materialism. This strategy is apparent in John Steinbeck's California labor novels, Nathanael West's surreal apocalyptic novels, and in Richard Wright's Thirties fiction, as well as in the lesser-known works of Robert Cantwell and Agnes Smedley. These works reveal a lineage of critical Marxism, engaging the dialectic of identity and ideology, a productive tension between subjective and objective forms of knowledge. The dialectic of ideology and identity explores human subjectivity in-itself and for-itself, both as a knowable object of rational inquiry as a radically unknowable experiential process. The latter prospect dovetailed with the nationalist paradigm of the American self, a figure of autonomous self-fashioning and reinvention that is central to the American novel tradition. While some novels enclose one aspect of the dialectic into the other, explaining away the ideological commitments of characters as symptoms of their psychological pathologies, for instance, as Steinbeck does, or on the other hand, underestimating the real effects of identity, as Wright does at his most ideological, the best works sustained the contradictions between these two discursive modes, "tarrying with the negative," to use the Hegelian phrase. The continued relevance of these works of literary leftism resides in their critical power, confronting and deconstructing the encroaching patterns of mass culture and gesturing beyond our categories of knowledge, not hubristically but warily.Item Seduction rhetoric, masculinity, and homoeroticism in Wilde, Gide, Stoker, and Forster(2003) Kuzmanovic, Dejan; Lamos, ColleenThis dissertation employs the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche in order to analyze the role of the "rhetoric of seduction" in masculine self-identifications and in transformations of the meaning of masculinity between 1890 and 1918. Seduction is understood as simultaneously a process of disrupting the subject's illusion of a stable masculine identity and a process through which that illusion is regained and sustained. Chapter 1 discusses the competing discourses of corruption and the Platonic model of male bonding in the Oscar Wilde trials and the unstable boundary between self-development and influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chapter 2 focuses on Andre Gide's construction of an "authentic," masculine homosexual identity in his memoir If It Die and in The Immoralist, arguing that such an identity necessarily contains the impulse of its own internal disintegration. Chapter 3 argues that the vampire in Bram Stoker's Dracula resembles the psychoanalyst in facilitating the subject's access to his unconscious but also serving the subject's retreat within the boundaries of a stable ego formation. Finally, Chapter 4 explores E. M. Forster's Maurice as an account of the development of a masculinity appropriate for a "liberal individualist," through an emphasis on the role of sexuality and personal relationships in Forster's political vision.