Literature, Modern

This thesis examines the work of young black poets of
the sixties--LeRoi Jones, Don L. Lee, Nikki Giovanni,
Sonia Sanchez, and others-- who have played a significant
role in the cultural revolution which has accompanied the
contemporary black struggle for liberation. It establishes
the framework of the black cultural revolution, and explores
its rationale and the emerging new black aesthetic. It traces the roots and examines the themes and techniques of
the poetry itself. Finally, the response of establishment
critics to this poetry is examined along with the new black
criticism which is developing as an adjunct to the new black
aesthetic.

Cerebral Cabaret: All Voices Present and Accounted For is a collection of short stories that question identity and purpose in life. Each of the stories gravitates to a center of family, the need for love, and the search for a sense of belonging. Is success the sale of the perfect work of art, or is it taking a drive, rolling down the windows, and fighting to hold the breeze in outstretched hands? When love fails, can an unholy communion provide solace? Can a man feel at home in the house of a stranger? Do voices from the past seal the fate of our future? Does death alter love? Can life be revised? These are a few of the questions mulled over in this collection. Each character's ostensible success is not at stake, only their continued willingness to navigate the world in which they exist.

The novels of Nathanael West are preoccupied with the deconstruction of Western civilization, satirizing and parodying its most respected ideologies and literatures; they are also involved in recreating both cultural and personal identity from the deconstructed fragments of this culture by performances or masks of identity. The textual mask is a trope that performs both these functions in the work of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, but especially in West. West demonstrated the mask's destructive force and constructive potential in both his writing and his personal life. The novels---The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and The Day of the Locust---variously attack artistic or political formulae that privilege escape from culture's degradation, or that offer erroneous promises of subjective or cultural wholeness. West's life and art, then, exhibit the usefulness of the mask in the grim battle for the formation of artistic and political subjectivity.

The female subject in the late poetry of Sylvia Plath experiences a physical and intellectual transformation, as Plath attempts to challenge and redefine the social construction of woman through Virginia Woolf's influence. Plath aspires to achieve a poetic voice that embodies characteristics of both genders simultaneously, an androgynous consciousness by Woolf's account, and one that can speak despite Western culture's imposed inferiority of women writers. Since traditionally masculine language has defined women's social roles through their physical bodies, Plath's aim is to immerse her female subject in the experiences of her corporeal body as a means to transcend her physical existence and symbolically achieve a supreme consciousness unadulterated by gender designs. Through the transportation of the physical, female body, then, Plath believes that her poetic voice can emerge in the form of an androgynous spirit capable of accessing powers of both genders.

Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the Apollonian/Dionysian opposition found in The Birth of Tragedy provides a means to analyze Langston Hughes's Jesse B. Semple commentaries. The language and archetypal characters found in the Semple commentaries demonstrates the shifting balance between the struggles and the triumphs of some American Negroes. This shifting balance is represented by the Dionysian and Apollonian traits of Simple and the narrator, Boyd. By creating these characters, Hughes is able to display the importance of the low-down culture for some black artists. Through the intoxicated Dionysian insight of Semple and the Apollonian logos of the narrator, Hughes demonstrates the blending of folk tradition or myth to common sense or reality. Ultimately, the struggle between these characters constructs the image of the New Negro, as well as the creative framework of the Harlem Renaissance.

The code hero is the foundation of Hemingway interpretation and central to an understanding of his ideology. The values, ideals and actions of many of Hemingway's greatest heroes fit within this framework, and the Hemingway hero is as firm a part of American literary myth as Melville's Great White Whale. Twain's Huckleberry Finn, or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county. I will use Joseph Campbell's work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a study in which he details his conception of the monomyth---the basic underlying structure for all heroic myths---to show how the idea of the mythic hero links the Nick Adams stories together and also serves to reveal the character of Nick himself. Most importantly, however, it is my contention that Campbell's stages of the monomyth---the departure, the road of trials, and the return---can be utilized to describe and analyze the major themes found in the Nick Adam's stories.

In The Republic, Plato constructs the ideal city-state built on the principle of justice. Plato establishes an urban utopia with a set of morals through which the citizen helps the state and the state helps the citizen. Centuries after Plato's Republic, Neal Stephenson presents in Snow Crash, a cyberpunk adventure, a virtual city known as the Metaverse. Hiro Protagonist, as his name implies, defends his virtual city from a threatening virus in the same way that a citizen in Plato's Republic would protect the city-state. An analysis of Snow Crash using ideas from The Republic reveals the "hacker" to be a socially minded individual who preserves order in the cybernetic utopia that is the Metaverse. This analysis demonstrates that justice must be sought in every era, and that heroes unique to their milieu pursuit justice.

In "Smoke Ghost" (1941), Fritz Leiber created the contemporary paradigm for the "urban horror story" that has been so successfully exploited by Stephen King, Richard Matheson, Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell and many others. At the heart of Leiber's ghost stories, however, rest a firm "tradition" of supernatural fiction, stemming from primitive religion, on the one hand, and literary example on the other. While his urban settings (Chicago, San Francisco) may be seen as contemporary reinterpretations of Horace Walpole's Gothic castle, his specters are the lineal descendants of Shakespeare's, LeFanu's, and Henry James's. Leiber's later use of Jungian archetypes (Shadow and Anima) is superimposed on the traditional ghostly archetype. An analysis of his novel-length ghost story, Our Lady of Darkness , reveals the lurking malevolence of a LeFanu specter, while the ghosts of Shakespeare hover in the wings of stories in which he explores themes of sex, guilt, and death. In each of Leiber's ghost stories, the elements of the tradition combine with "haunts" from the author's personal psychic history to produce a powerful fantasy experience that persists despite threats to the genre by "science, common sense, and psychiatry."