Hagood, Taylor

An interdisciplinary study of the life and work of Jim Harrison. Through the lens of cultural and intellectual history, this dissertation places Harrison within the canon of American literature, from Emerson and Thoreau through Hemingway and Kerouac, and argues that the fundamental thread connecting these writers is their response to industrialization, suburbanization, and consumerism that undermine Americans’ connection to nature and limits an authentic experience with the world. In his novels, novellas, and essays Jim Harrison explores the meaning of the well-lived life, reflecting on the importance of cultivating both a life of the hands and of the mind, of action and contemplation, of nature and literature.

Both research and lived experience indicate that intangible things such as myths and absences may acquire agency, becoming Latourian actants and causing changes in people’s thoughts, beliefs, and actions. This dissertation focuses on myths and absences located in Spain’s 20th century—specifically Francoist-generated political myths, the absences of those disappeared by the Franco regime, and the literary myths created by authors of historical fiction set during the Spanish Civil War, the resulting dictatorship, and the Transition to Democracy. The argument is made that these three actants— political myth, absence, and literary myth—have acted and interacted in the following sequence: the political myths put forth by the Francoists and presented as facts led to the complicity of many of the Spanish people in the extermination of those considered dangerous or undesirable to the regime; once released into the popular imagination, the political myths gained agency, spurring the bigoted beliefs and persecutory actions that led to the absences of the maligned people. The presence of these tragic absences in the lives of their surviving loved ones then gained agency, indelibly marking the survivors and causing grief, anger, and bewilderment as well as fear, humiliation, silence, and transgenerational trauma. The absences also caused the desire among contemporary writers of historical fiction, some of them descendants of the disappeared who grew up under the cloud of fear and silence perpetuated by those disappearances, to write alternate histories pointing out the absurdities and atrocities connected to the earlier political myths and the resulting absences of undesirables. These literary myths thus acquired their own agency, changing the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of readers who were able to finally see through the truths and tragedies that lay hidden for so long behind the hostile myths. In these chapters, eight historical fictions—five novels, two plays, one film—and one non-fiction account, described by its author as “a novel without fiction”—are analyzed for evidence of the presence and the agency of political myth, absence, and literary myth.

In William Faulkner’s the Sound and the Fury, many scholars have debated about Caddy as Eve, the functionality of hermeneutic structure in relation to narrative function, and the use of Edenic scenery as a metaphor for Quentin Compsons’ world coming to an end. However, there is yet to be an analysis of Faulkner’s text in relation to trauma and ecocriticism and its influence on later Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. It is through the female and the aquatic bodies that widen the interpretation of Faulkner’s exploration of Southern male identity in relation to trauma, water, and memory its reflection onto the Southern environment. In Conroy’s text, he mirrors the way in which trauma is explored through the idea of water and the Faulknerian narrative technique, the stream of consciousness, which is activated only with the remembrance of the sister and her social ruin. Faulkner and Conroy delve into the South and communicate it as a site of decay, ruin, and a liminal space that inevitably exposes one to trauma. The men within Faulkner’s and Conroy’s texts must sift through their memories, both present and past, to define and identify the wound that disrupts their psyche [and its consequences]. This thesis aims to unpack Faulkner’s utilization of the female, terrestrial, and aquatic bodies as spaces that communicate male trauma. This thesis aims to suggest that, as an echo of Faulkner, Conroy’s text expands and further adapts the canon of Southern literature that takes an ecological approach to explore trauma in the form of water and the female body. This analysis aims to propose that the construction of Faulkner’s Southern ecology and its intersection between ecocriticism and trauma studies in relation to water influenced this approach and framework for Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides.

In 1935, as the first cinematic horror sequel in Hollywood, James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein helped ignite a new spark in cinema. Woman-gendered monsters, for the first time in cinema, were alive, in the flesh, and projected to massive proportions onto thousands of screens. While this was taking place on screen, women authors of the era of American literary modernism were producing works in which characters discussed, considered, and narrated their experience with monstrosity and their experience with seeing themselves as monstrous in their own respective contexts. Zelda Fitzgerald, the infamously “mad” wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, published works in which her narrator experiences feeling “monstrous” and “sick.” Zora Neale Hurston, working in fields of anthropology, literature, and playwriting, integrated monstrous references (like the increasingly popular Haitian Zombie) to represent historical, political, racial and gendered oppressions of the time. Djuna Barnes, known for her theatrical columns in The New Yorker, in which she underwent physical pain and extreme conditions for her work, published Nightwood which is now celebrated as one of the first major works of queer literature. In it, characters consider their own monstrosity in the context of gender and sexuality.
In this study, I pair three of the era’s films featuring monstrous women (Bride of Frankenstein, White Zombie, and Dracula’s Daughter) with readings of major works by Zelda Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, and Djuna Barnes, while also considering these writers’ representation in press and publication in the 1930s United States. I use this to trace what I am identifying as the emergence of a trend of monstrous womanhood at this time, in which women characters emerged who refer to themselves as monstrous and whose existence and surroundings (social, material, and language-based) provide critique of the time’s conception of identity (gender-based, ability-based, race-based, and sexuality-based in particular). I root this discussion in the modern era in order to highlight ways that this trend of monstrous womanhood was born out of 1930s America’s particular cultural moment of intersection of mass-produced literature and film, especially as popular films and horror sequels amplified their existence for widespread audiences.

“Southern Fringes: Little Magazines and Larry Brown’s Early Short Fiction” seeks to revitalize and expand the scholarly field of the New Southern Studies, employing textuality, book history, and postcritique perspectives towards the study of literary events and objects. Whereas the New Southern Studies rightly problematizes and dismantles notions of the signifier southern named in connection with literary works, such approaches often ignore paratextual elements, including material and sociological features, that work to frame and support these narratives. This dissertation addresses such shortcomings, arguing that paratextual formations function as vital spaces for constructing senses of southernness in service of both bibliographic identity and readers’ literary discernments. Exploring public epitext in a variety of locations, as well as four cases of Larry Brown’s short stories appearing in Mississippi Review, The Greensboro Review, and The Chattahoochee Review, this dissertation demonstrates how Brown’s writing emerges as southern fringe: a joint presence of autobiographic, material, perceptual, and other paratextual elements that frame Brown’s writing in unique locales outside of the literary mainstream. This dissertation's implications include adopting a mode of reading and analysis, focusing on case studies and surface readings of paratext serving specific bibliographic documents, as a way to move beyond generalizing and broad claims about the nature, function, and interpretation of literature. Additionally, this dissertation focuses on little magazines, materiality, and paratext as expanded sites and perspectives for the continued growth and development of interdisciplinary humanities fields such as the New Southern Studies.

Among slaughterhouses and suffragists—writers of the American Modernist movement were called to the creative task of reimagining boundaries between human and nonhuman while also extending this conversation onto the site of “New Women.” The threat to “civilized man” by “primal nonhuman animal” becomes tied up with the threat of an independent “wild” woman to a system which traditionally depends upon her domestication. Female animality in modernist texts thus emerges as a symbol of both masculine anxiety and feminine liberation. When women begin to challenge traditional institutions which would see her survive exclusively by contract to a male “keeper,” men become increasingly desperate to establish an apex social, economic, and political position. As such, female animality in these texts is designed to reinforce or resist standard constructs of human/nonhuman and masculine/feminine, yet both assert the feminine-animal-character as a hybrid commodity bred for patriarchal consumption.
Despite the heteronormative compulsion to sketch woman as an elusive animal to be hunted (courtship), caged (marriage), and kept (children)—there is also an advantage in recognizing one’s place in such a “jungle,” as scholars have often described progressive-era America. By examining the intersection of animality and feminist theory within modernist literature, it becomes clear that the category of nonhuman animal is one historically manipulated through patriarchal systems to delegate women’s bodies as a site of oppression and subordination.

The purpose of this project is to establish the connections between southern women writers, autotheory, and grotesque descriptions of disability in Gothic Literature as a significant subset of literature. Southern women writers transform their bodily experiences through the language of the grotesque in testimony to re-create a life that has been unmade by pain. Their autobiographical narratives serve as an expression for the inexpressible, affirm their experiences for themselves, and call upon others to join in witnessing their impact. The introduction uses prominent theories from various critical fields to establish a new theory, and the following chapters reflect on that theory from the lives and literature of three disabled southern women writers: Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Zelda Fitzgerald. As demonstrated in these women’s lives and literature, in a society which others odd, obscure experiences, using the testimonial voice is necessary to the personal and social survival of disability. Writing offers the opportunity for disabled people to make a permanent impact by creating from the knowledge of personal suffering to impact the world and its perceptions surrounding life with disability.

This study addresses the relationship between animals and capitalism in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. These texts and their authors attempted to change the conversation surrounding animals and imagine alternatives to traditional thinking surrounding animal subjectivity. Despite their intentions, however, the authors fail to depict non-exploitative relationships with animals within capitalist systems, suggesting an inherently exploitative relationship between animals and biopolitical capitalism.

Classifying any body of literature is a difficult process, and for United States
southern literature, the difficulty of classification and the resounding implications are
amplified because of the difficulty in defining what "southern" is. On-going critical
discussion of the South has explored these issues, thus far, scholarly discourse on
southern literature and the problems of classification has been limited to the realm of the
theoretical. The primary focus of this study, however, is to consider practical
implications of this problem by evaluating the way subject headings implemented by the
Library of Congress not only classify, but also influence and shape southern literature.
Considering how southern literature is defined by these subject headings may prove to be
a useful tool, aiding the in the current reevaluation of the South and its literature, and
shedding light on how constructed borders affect users, as well as the literature itself.

Toni Morrison’s later novels Love and Home bring forth an issue of identity
anxiety for those involved in the narrative: author, narrators, and readers. Featuring both
first-person and third-person narrators, these works offer conflicting narratives in which
the writer, Morrison, allows her characters to question her own authorial voice. Greater
agency is given to the first-person narrators through which they deconstruct the
traditional objectivity of third-person narratives. As such, this thesis argues, the structures
of Love and Home extend their inside conversations to the real world of readers who must
reconsider where their narrative trust has been. Moreover, Morrison’s challenge to her
authorial voice becomes the means through which she questions the hegemony of U.S.
historical narratives. In the end, it is the subjective voices of the first-person narrators
which offer a more reliable, counter narrative of not only Morrison’s fictional stories, but
that of the nation’s historical past.