R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Morris, Wesley A."

Browsing by Author "Morris, Wesley A."

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Constellations of desire: The Double and the Other in the works of Dante Gabriel and Christina Georgina Rossetti
(1995) Klein, Jeannine M. E.; Morris, Wesley A.
Theoreticians of the problem of the other have overlooked a crucial distinction between two competing modes of alterity: The Other, a classic strategy of metaphorical, externalized singularity, and The Double, a modern strategy of metonymical, internalized multiplicity. The discovery of these two modes of alterity untangles many of the difficulties encountered in attempting to reconcile the theories of writers frequently seen as inimical to one another, including Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Edward Said, and Tzvetan Todorov. These two strategic modes enable women and men, artists and writers, to create "constellations of desire"--traditional and non-traditional "imaginary" psychological outlines constructed from the fixed points or reference in our lives--to deal with loss and alterity. While this paradigm can be profitably applied to many eras of loss, one particularly enlightening local instantiation of the problem occurs in the Victorian era, specifically in the life and works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti. The Rossettis rall under the sign of Gemini in the Victorian constellations of desire: brother and sister poets, standing in the same place, they yet face in opposite directions and follow reversed trajectories with reference to their fixed stars or family, faith, and the female. The strategies of The Double and The Other occur repeatedly throughout their lives, in their interactions with their father and their siblings, where questions of voice and textual incest become prominent; in their problematical relationships to ascEtic, aesthetic, and erotic forms of faith; and in their relationship to the female--mother, fallen woman, and beloved epipsyche--both as lived experience and as envisioned/revisioned object of the gaze. Particular eruptions materialize in poems and paintings such as Dante Gabriel's "Jenny," "Blessed Damozel," "Proserpine," "Ecce Ancilla Domini!," "Sister Helen," "Ave," "Hand and Soul," "A Last Confession"; and Christina's "Goblin Market," "A Royal Princess," Sing-Song, "Maggie A Lady," "Maude Clare," and "Monna Innominata," as well as her drawings. The picture that emerges allows Christina the strength as well as the anguish of her faith, making her a more complex and interesting writer than previously acknowledged, while it recuperates Dante Gabriel's reputation from accusations of chauvinism and obscurantism.
Conversation in the novel
(1990) Davis-Brown, Kristin A.; Morris, Wesley A.
Among types of books, novels allow readers the most conversational possibilities: readers may "overhear" conversations among characters, among narrators and characters, among other voices, narrators and characters; readers may even find themselves participating in the conversation which novels demand. Because much of a novelist's style depends upon her/his conversational choices, literary critics discussing the function of conversation in novels frequently describe the ways in which dialogue serves to characterize characters. While such criticism reveals a remarkable range of novelistic conversation, it raises questions which too often it fails to answer. For example, our response to Mrs. Elton differs from our listening to Emma, to Mr. Knightley and to their narrator, and, realizing the extent to which Mrs. Elton's talk contains her, we begin to wonder why Mrs. Elton is in Emma's story. Wondering about Mrs. Elton involves recognizing a curious disequilibrium underlying conversation in Emma and in the novel. Placing Austen in conversation with James, Forester, Lawrence, Conrad and Faulkner--all novelists to whom conversation is of central importance, both stylistically and thematically--allows my study to discuss the reach of this disequilibrium, a reach which defines the novel itself. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of polyphony provides my "disequilibrium" with a theoretical context. The novels which this dissertation reads fail to achieve sustained polyphony; that is, the effects of and the opportunities for the various voices inhabiting these novels are not equal. While one might respond that the concept "sustained polyphony" fails and not the novels, identifying the disparities which handicap the relationship between a novel's speaking selves and speaking others places one at the heart of the novel. Polyphony serves as a kind of asymptote; it is a conversation whose necessity and unattainability define the novel. A particular novel's failure, then, suggests that the novel works to make its reader aware of distance, disequilibrium... and of the pain caused by distance, disequilibrium..., pain which surfaces even in the most serene comic novels. The particular failure defining the novel allows the novel to extend its conversation, to succeed precisely at its point of failure.
Feeling and knowing: A study of the relationship between emotional response and literary competence
(1996) Moore, Gwen I.; Morris, Wesley A.
The method proposed by David Bleich in Readings and Feelings has been studied in a small group to determine if emotional involvement with literary works may be increased and, if so, what effect such increase would have on traditional literary competence. Results show that Bleich's method does increase emotional involvement with concurrent improvement in literary skills, particularly in the selection of more significant themes for student writing. Discussion of the method's application in regular classrooms is included.
"Going native" in the twentieth century
(2001) Fontaine, Dorothy Ann; Morris, Wesley A.
Originally a pejorative label assigned to someone who has left a structured, civilized, sophisticated society for one (presumably) less responsible, less structured, and less industrious than the original, going native seems deceptively simple to define in its implications. However, it raises critical questions about one's sense of self within a group or nationality, opening up new categories within old oppositions. As the term's pejorative nature seems to continue to moderate, this text seeks to find the spaces in which the term "going native" places itself in the writing and film of the 1900's. The term is originally a British term for a phenomenon that touches all historical multicultural contacts and clashes. I am looking at a one-way street in examining this term: the characters involved were all created (in the case of fiction) or born (in the non-fiction examples) Anglo-American or British but found their ways into cultural settings that these two particular cultures find extremely foreign and mysterious. The Introduction looks briefly at the Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized to find a space for the idea of going native as well as looking the linguistic construction itself, its issues for Anthropology, and transculturation. Chapter One looks at the personality of the new native in Sokolov's Native Intelligence, Tidwell's Amazon Stranger and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (as well as Roeg's film of Conrad's novella and Coppola's Apocalypse Now ). Chapter Two examines the texts and films about Archie Belaney/Grey Owl and why a white man at the turn of the century would want to trade a white racial identity for that of an Indian at a time of such social disparity between the races. Chapter Three examines the intersection of going native and treason, focusing on Harry St. John Bridger Philby, Kim Philby, Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga and the writings of Rebecca West. The final chapter looks at an extreme of going native---going feral---(where the new native joins another species rather than another culture) through Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and the story of Dian Fossey.
Grotesque Subjects: Dostoevsky and Modern Southern Fiction, 1930-1960
(2012-09-05) Saxton, Benjamin; Lamos, Colleen; Morris, Wesley A.; Thompson, Ewa
As 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.
Ideologies of forgetting: American erasure of women's sexual trauma in the Vietnam War
(2007) Weaver, Gina Marie; Morris, Wesley A.
Vietnam War literature frequently mentions the rape of Vietnamese women. Academic histories of the war and literary criticism largely refuse to address rape and sexual assault, however, and popular American narratives of the war seem to have forgotten this type of atrocity entirely. This dissertation argues that the erasure of Vietnamese women's rape from the Vietnam War story has been necessary for the rehabilitation of the Vietnam veteran as a victim and has largely occurred through film. Through an analysis of Vietnamese writing and testimony, American veterans' testimony, and literature by veterans, this dissertation demonstrates that war rape by American soldiers was a widespread phenomenon. This analysis also indicates reasons Vietnamese women were particularly subject to sexual violence; it makes manifest veterans' own interpretation of the causes of their aggressive acts. It suggests that American rape of Vietnamese women was ultimately the byproduct of the military's misogynist training techniques and the ideals of masculinity prized in and validated by Cold War American culture. Though veterans have long testified to such abuses, Hollywood productions of the war have altered or contained veteran narratives in such a way as to deny these atrocities occurred or to suggest that they were the acts of deviants rather than typical soldiers. Trauma studies has been an enabler of these narratives of victimhood, as it has conferred a blanket victim status to all Vietnam veterans. Such status denies that much of the trauma from which Vietnam veterans suffer stems from the aggressive acts they committed against the Vietnamese and is thus of a different nature than the trauma of Holocaust or incest survivors. This dissertation argues that American narratives of the war have used the "victimized veteran" to represent the U.S. itself as a victim in the Vietnam War rather than the aggressor. Ultimately, the dissertation suggests that true healing and acceptance of Vietnam veterans cannot occur until the truth of the acts committed in Vietnam are acknowledged and understood.
Missing persons: Race and aphanisis in the twentieth-century American novel
(1995) Sullivan, Martha Nell; Morris, Wesley A.
Through images of disintegration and disappearance, American narratives reveal the black subject's problematic relationship to the (white) Other's desire and the language of that desire. Jacques Lacan's theories of subjectivity--especially the mirror stage and aphanisis, the subject's disappearance behind the signifier--illuminate the impact of racist signification on black bodies in twentieth-century American novels, where epithets like "nigger" invoke the mutilation and disappearance of African American subjects. Images of corporal disintegration reveal the reversal of the mirror-stage identification inaugurated by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, lynching, and scientific and literary manifestations of Negrophobia. Post-Plessy novels often feature Jim Crow segregation and the "black" body's destruction by the "white" voice. The Negrophobe rape plot infects James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) after the anonymous narrator is called "nigger." He chooses to "pass" for white after failing to project his disintegration onto his uncanny doubles. In Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Irene reenacts Lacan's mirror stage by assuming Clare as her idealized image. But "Nig"--the signifier Clare's white husband supplies--invokes Clare's death and undoes Irene, whose final fainting is aphanisis. In William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), Joe Christmas' homicidal violence and suicidal "shattering" represent capitulations to Yoknapatawpha's insistence that he is a "nigger." Exemplary of the literary responses to racist signification since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Toni Morrison's progression from The Bluest Eye (1970) to Beloved (1987) charts the restoration of voice and body to historically "missing persons" effaced by cultural institutions designed to "teach" them their place. Schooled in the white standards of worth symbolized by the primer motif, characters in The Bluest Eye cannot resist aphanisis; in Beloved, however, characters combat aphanisis by refusing the masters' prerogative to define them. This triumph over aphanisis also emerges in the reappropriation of the black body-in-pieces inspired by Jet magazine's 1955 photographs of Emmett Till's mutilated corpse. Till symbolizes African American integrity in works by Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Madison Jones and others.
Narratives of astonishment: Miscegenation in New World literature
(1994) Buaas, John Wesley; Morris, Wesley A.
Through readings of a variety of literary and historical narratives from throughout the Americas dating from the 16th century to the present, I show that miscegenation, its sudden and disrupting revelation in these narratives serving as the catalyst for utopian and/or apocalyptic rhetoric, becomes a trope for New World cultural identity (Utopia and Apocalypse themselves being crucial ideas for this hemisphere). I call by the name "Astonishment" the resulting space created by the sudden revelation of miscegenation in these narratives.
Psychological intersexuals: Gender in the novels of Toni Morrison
(2001) Horton, Lorena Jean; Morris, Wesley A.
In Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Paradise, Toni Morrison creates characters who cannot be neatly categorized as exclusively male or female. These "psychologically intersexed" characters claim their own agency to demolish male/female, homosexual/heterosexual, White/Black binaries. Morrison's open-ended examination of gender roles leads her readers to see the "intersectional" forces behind our gender assumptions. Thus, by disrupting white heterosexual patriarchy, Morrison succeeds in her stated quest to "open a wider landscape" in American literature, allowing these bigendered characters the freedom to search for new identities and giving them a new language that more accurately reflects the authentic individuals they are striving to become.
Rethinking "The Political Unconscious"
(1992) Muhlestein, Daniel Kay; Morris, Wesley A.
Although The Political Unconscious is an effective advocate of "the perspectives of Marxism as necessary preconditions for adequate literary comprehension" (75), Fredric Jameson's method of interpretation suffers from a number of determinate insufficiencies: (1) its claim to a properly structural causality is ultimately unjustifiable; (2) its "horizon" of Cultural Revolution is grounded in mechanical and expressive causality; (3) its application to literary texts is an act of interpretive impoverishment; (4) its defense of a Marxian "master narrative" of history is a conflation of the Historical Real and its histories; and (5) its attempt at "articulating a properly Marxian version of meaning beyond the purely ideological" (285) is a kind of ideological conditioning in which an impulse common to all classes is harnessed to the ideological production of a single class. Nevertheless, The Political Unconscious is a critically important text in that it points toward--though it does not make clear--the means of production by which that physical necessity which is the material effect of the Historical Real is in the Symbolic Order (re)textualized into the various narrative forms of causality with which we attempt to understand and explain the determinate relations between the Real and its alienating necessities.
Significant returns: Lacan, masculinity, and modernist traditions
(2002) Armintor, Marshall Needleman; Morris, Wesley A.
This dissertation explores the grounding of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the intellectual and artistic movements of the modernist period, and reads masculine anxiety in the modernist novel in terms of Lacan's work on psychosis, masochism, and narcissism. The thrust of my dissertation is twofold. The first half aims at a reinterpretation of Jacques Lacan's work in light of his early intellectual engagements with Freud, G. G. de Clerambault, and Heidegger, and as such establishes the basis for Lacan's early work in the traditions of Freudian dream analysis, experimental French psychiatry, and existential phenomenology. The second half, starting with a discussion of Lacan's third seminar, The Psychoses, and D. P. Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, examines Henry James's enigmatic 1901 novella The Sacred Fount as a meditation on the uniquely masculine anxiety over negotiating same-sex intellectual relationships, manifested as psychosis. The subsequent chapters on Proust, Sacher-Masoch, and Joyce, read with the later Lacan of Seminars XX and available sections of XXIII, explore and flesh out possible Lacanian readings of masochism and narcissism with regard to paternal (or pseudo-paternal) relationships. The major theme of my dissertation is that of vexed intellectual relationships between men separated by generational difference. Situating Lacan's discourse in the context of the modernist period, I illustrate how Lacan's intellectual apprenticeships and encounters (real and imagined) play out in his mature work, beginning with the first seminars of the 1950s. With numerous polymathic allusions, jokes, and non sequiturs, Lacan attempts a "return" and a self-conscious rewriting of Freud from the perspective of a rank outsider, pre-emptively exiled from the Freudian school for having been born too late, in the wrong country, and medically trained outside of the psychoanalytic tradition. By the same token, texts such as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Ulysses depict the psychic contortions of sidestepping Oedipal conflict through elaborate delusions and blunt disavowals of the father's potency. In sum, the trajectory of modernist intellectual life, especially psychoanalysis, turns on tendentious and broken relationships between teachers and students, as technical and artistic disciplines struggled to keep pace with cultural upheavals of the period.
The ethics of Mimesis: Postmodernism and the possibility of history
(1988) Langford, Larry L.; Morris, Wesley A.
Almost every attempt to distinguish literature from history begins in empiricism and ends in ethics. Much depends upon this long-standing distinction and much may potentially be lost if it is compromised or collapses. But as a discipline, historiography today must confront the problem that, as in all polarities and oppositions, historical and fictional discourses adhere to one another in a symbiotic manner that makes the existence and meaning of one impossible without the other. In order to legitimate its claims to truthfulness, history has had to repress a fundamental truth about itself: any attempt to represent the past is actually a literary re-creation that is as much the result of the projection or transference of desire as of objective description and analysis. At stake in the history/fiction contrast is not just a pedagogical separation of truth from falsehood, but rather the more fundamental question of social relationships and the ability of human beings to transcend the so-called state of nature. Although Nietzsche noted with approval that the animal lives unhistorically, just such a prospect often underlies those arguments seeking to protect history from fiction. Modern conceptions of the differences between nature and human society, and of history and fiction as well, can be traced back to the Enlightenment and its attempt to universalize the idea of reason as the standard by which to measure historical progression. But the Enlightenment's success at this project proved to be (in the eyes of many) its great failure. From the eighteenth century through to the modernist movement and beyond to postmodernism, we can trace a series of dissensions, not against the idea reason and history per se, but against an idea that promises emancipation through a process of domination, constraint and control of both the natural world and human nature. Within such a process, the "historical" continually places itself in opposition to the "natural," with historical narrative acting as the main line of defense against the expression of individual desire which fiction makes possible.
Thoreau and contemporary American nonfiction narrative prose of place
(1991) Walker, Pamela; Morris, Wesley A.
Thoreau is read chiefly as the author of the only two books he published during his life, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. However, Thoreau composed two other books, Cape Cod and The Maine Woods, which reveal a very different Thoreau in relation to time and place. A rhetorical analysis of the dialectic between lyrical, or metaphorical, nonnarrative and metonymic narrative in Thoreau's four books reveals a Thoreau increasingly engaged in natural and temporal human practice. By contrast with metaphorical writing's greater self-referentiality and insistence on its own mediation of experience, metonymy in conjunction with the mimesis of a narrative plot serves Thoreau simultaneously to mediate temporal human practice and yet also to point toward practice apart from mediation. In this way, metonymic narrative demonstrates simultaneously the necessity of human construction of experience and yet the contingency of human construction too. Such narrative, then, combines daring with deference to all that eludes construction. This disposition toward living and writing makes possible the articulation and exploration of crucial questions like how consciousness relates to practice, whether preservation of wilderness is necessary, and whether natural life is imperative and human life expendable. A rhetorical analysis of Thoreau's four books not only reveals a more historically engaged Thoreau than emerges when he is read as the author of only A Week and Walden, but it also shows Thoreau's rhetorical and thematic relation with several contemporary writers of nonfiction narrative prose of place. James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men perhaps more than any other single contemporary work embodies the conflict of rhetoric and purposes of all four of Thoreau's books. Looking at Agee in light of Thoreau as the author of four books illuminates within American nonfiction prose of place a persistent conflict between rhetorical strategies and related psychosexual and epistemological goals. However, the more this conflict resolves itself in favor of the rhetoric of metonymic narrative, as it does in Thoreau's Cape Cod and The Maine Woods and in William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, John McPhee's narratives, Ann Zwinger's Run, River, Run, and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the more salient become the themes of social criticism.
Voice and origin in Margaret Atwood's fiction
(1992) Burnham, Julie E.; Morris, Wesley A.
In contradiction to Lyotard, who posits an equal relationship between listener and speaker in Just Gaming and The Postmodern Condition, Atwood examines the ways in which women's voices are stifled by men's terroristic control of the speaking position. Her novels reveal a significant flaw in Lyotard's work: he ignores the effects which a political or hierarchical system has on his ideal language grid. Within contemporary patriarchal societies, Atwood's heroines must struggle against male dominance in order to fulfill what Lyotard calls "the obligation to retell." Irigaray argues that women's exclusion from discourse can be traced back to Plato's myth of the cave, in which both men and women are encouraged to forget their maternal origins. In Atwood's novels, women must return to and revalue their maternal origins in order to find a voice, and the stories they must retell are altered versions of those of the mother.
'You shall hear the nightingale sing on as if in pain': The Philomena myth as metaphor of transformation and resistance in the works of Susan Glaspell and Alice Walker
(1996) Michalos, Constantina; Morris, Wesley A.
The story of Philomela and Procne has long been a figure of violence in literature. However, male mythologizers write Philomela out of existence, whereas women writers use the myth as a metaphor for female oppression and silencing. This paper examines the mutually exclusive strategies of Philomela's male and female mythographers. Chapters one through three explore how classical and medieval poets rewrote the myth to sublimate their fear which the story's themes represent. Rendered speechless, hence powerless within a masculine construct, Philomela creates a new idiom and reconstitutes her identity in weaving. Recognizing the immanent consequence of this feminine poetic, male mythologizers, epitomized by Coleridge in the nineteenth century, seek to silence Philomela once and for all. Nevertheless, the Philomela/Procne myth resonates throughout the texts of women. Chapter four analyzes Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers", by Susan Glaspell, revealing the life of a frontier woman domineered by an unyielding husband she finally kills. The male investigators overlook evidence they deem "trifles" because it lies in woman's work. The neighbor women, on the other hand, deduce the truth of Minnie's existence, and unite to subvert the law and establish a new form of justice based on the caring and connectedness of women, not the abstract principles of men. Chapter five illustrates Alice Walker's utilization of the myth to expose the worldwide oppression of women. In The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy, Celie and Tashi find meaning for their existence in a confederacy of women who bond to repudiate the tyranny of culture and redefine themselves as worthy and whole. Philomela raped, mutilated and silenced is a familiar image for women. The strength in an otherwise horrific tale lies in Philomela's ability to subvert the patriarchy that would subjugate her by usurping the power of language into a call to sisterhood and an affirmation of such power in that bond.

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