Furman, Andrew

In Jazz and Beloved Morrison explores the difficulties of the acquisition of selfhood for African Americans. In the novels, Morrison examines these difficulties focussing especially on the maternal role. Offering no facile solutions, these narratives do share characteristics common to individuals attaining individuation. A person's relationship with the mother and ability to confront his history, no matter how painful, are integral elements to any presence of self-worth. Although far from didactic, one truth examined in the novels is the need for Africans in America to create their own definitions of their history. African American figures, maternal and otherwise have been traditionally defined by the oppressive society, using stereotypes inherited from slavery. Jazz and Beloved are reclamations of these definitions. Reclamations Morrison has asserted are necessary for the posterity of her people. How do African Americans attain selfhood when they do not even own themselves? The solutions to this problem are multifaceted. Morrison's novels urge the African American to confront the history and redefine myths that have often undermined the process.

Anne Tyler, who lived a "Romantic" childhood in mountain-terrained communes of North Carolina, borrowed ideas from Wordsworth and Coleridge for her 1985 novel The Accidental Tourist. Reflections of these Romantic poets are seen primarily in images but are also seen in Tyler's simple writing style. Macon Leary, the protagonist of the novel, is a wandering writer who loves the English language, but struggles to communicate his feelings verbally, a reflection of Romantic ideology. Other motifs include home as a place abandoned as well as a refuge for the mind and body; the destructive and renewing powers of the city; physical heights used for inspiration and reflection; and endurance after tragedy. Tyler, who is married to a psychiatrist, parodies the Romantics when she brings endurance into the self-help age of the 1980s. Macon Leary not only endures but, with assistance, triumphs.

Nature is an important symbol in Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo. The metaphorical comparisons are interlaced within the colonial usurpation which fuels the novel into becoming an ecocritical statement, because without the health of the environment, both human and non-human species alike decay and die because of colonial encroachment. Shani Mootoo illustrates the ecological clash between the wetlands and the tropics through an intricate narrative involving people who are dominated by their environments and cultures, or lack thereof, which create great chasms to overcome. Through critical nature symbols such as the town of Paradise versus the wetlands, the cereus plant, the bugs, the birds, and the cat, important ecocritical connections can be made as to the survival of the characters and the island.

Philip Roth's novel I Married a Communist exhibits an important thematic current, one which demonstrates how immoderation in individual human character both reflects and proliferates an irrational and insidious political divisiveness, and more importantly, the far-reaching and devastating effects that extremism has on the individual. This theme is clearly derivative of Aristotle's ideas regarding literature and ethics. Furthermore, applying these ideas with those in Aristotle's Poetics, namely the concept of hamartia, I demonstrate how immoderation becomes the impetus for peripeteia, the reversal of fortune that ultimately destroys the novel's tragic hero, as defined by Aristotle.

Saul Bellow's Herzog is more than just a story of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a result of his wife's ruthless infidelities. It is a story about the re-affirmation of life in spite of horrible circumstances. Although Bellow is widely recognized as a Jewish author, Herzog is written with a foundation that also focuses on Christian idealogy, a belief that Bellow was introduced to as a young child. Being an ardent admirer of Saul Bellow's work, I was surprised that few critics have paid close attention to the prolific amount of religious parallels that can be found in his novels. This thesis is a result of my interest in both the Old and New Testament allusions that appear in this novel.

The pastoral form is one of the oldest in the literary tradition. Historically, the definition of "pastoral" was limited to eclogues and idylls that epitomize a simple way of life, usually with shepherds as their subject. Over time, the pastoral genre has undergone numerous metamorphoses that retain some aspects of a simplistic vision, while contradicting the more complex matters that help to define the human condition. These transformations have allowed for pastoral motifs set in direct opposition to everyday life in order to exemplify human frailties. In Flannery O'Connor's works, the simplicities of natural southern settings are in direct contrast to the complexities of her characters' situations. Her use of the pastoral mode serves to sharpen the emotions and define the limitations of the all too human characters who inhabit her potentially pastoral ideal.