Writing Samples(introductions from a few papers) |
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October 20, 2010 The Music of the Falls: Interlace and Metaphor in Paterson and “The Desert Music” William Carlos Williams, an American poet influenced by
modern poets such as Walt Whitman, trained in medicine rather than literature,
and who found time to write during breaks from his patients, was committed to
finding a means of expressing local elements of life through the new “American
language”. As a result, his work was in
direct contrast to some of his American contemporaries who wrote from a
background steeped in traditional literary education and who favored the
traditional forms. His epic poem Paterson was symbolic of his struggle to
find a language adequate for the new American landscape and people, and representative
of the poet’s commitment to rejection of romantic poetic traditions that did
not reflect the “American idiom” of his time and place.
December 9, 2010 Wallace Stevens’ Sounds of Fiction As Wallace Stevens wrote prolifically about the creative processes of poetic invention, his creation of systems for his symbols and metaphors allowed him to readdress his material in a consistent fashion and also allows his readers to follow the development of his themes, his ultimate fiction, over time. While critics have already recognized a code at work within Stevens’ poems with regard to his use of color and partial alphabets, an examination of his use of sounds, particularly human utterances, is warranted. Throughout his works, speech occurs in various forms; readers will encounter murmuring, muttering, and mumbling from his figures. Humming, chanting, and singing also appear. In poems where these utterances appear, they serve to illuminate some aspect of the creative process, forming not a code, as his organization of color symbolism has been characterized, but a system; they reflect elements of the process involved in the organization of chaos, parts that work in concert toward an evolution of a supreme fiction.
November 6, 2010 Spirit Camps: Toward a Cultural Restoration of Alaska Native Culture The
history of the impact of Western civilization on Alaska Native communities is a
complex one and, sadly, is filled with negative effects on the Alaska Native
land, culture, and health of tribes and individuals. At this point in time, the focus of
individuals committed to the reclamation of what has been lost by Alaska
Natives over the last two centuries has shifted from land and education, the
more tangible aspects of life, toward personal and community restoration,
introspective facets of life that prove difficult to quantify, but whose
qualitative effects on the literal and figurative health of ALASKA Natives
cannot be ignored. Out of this shift in
focus, Spirit Camps have arisen. Howard
Luke and William Iggiagruk Hensely, two authors who are also an educator and a
politician respectively, have both written of Spirit Camps, recognizing the
need for them, specifying what they should provide for Alaska Native
communities, and seeing the multitude of implications of their practice. October 3, 2010 Truth and Ownership: Relative Importance and Translation Issues in Alaska Native Traditions One of the striking differences between European and Native texts is related to the concept of truth and ownership. Because Alaska Native texts have evolved in their written form from generations of oral storytelling, the value of truth and its relationship to the story has been affected by the concept that the folklore has a rich history of shared ownership. Because stories that often contain moral lessons have been told again and again, and with varying emphases dependent upon the rhetorical context, no elder sharing a story with a youth can claim that the story is their own. Thus, whether or not certain elements of the story are ‘true’ becomes less important than the message one can interpret from the tale. The thrust of European literary values upon the Alaska Native efforts to organize and record their stories lest they be forgotten, however, has resulted in a genre of written folklore that does not live up to its oral counterpart with regard to the fluidity of the importance of truth, due to translation issues that have no easy resolution.
April 28, 2010 Thomas Sutpen: Dirt and the Grand Design Absalom, Absalom!, a frontier narrative that takes place largely in Jefferson, Mississippi, a fictional town of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, features a protagonist that challenges some of the most widely held conceptions about the Old South, which is often portrayed as genteel and aristocratic. This is a South in which traditionally lineage, which often includes land as much as the family name associated with it, has been integral to the establishment of not only heritage, but class. Thomas Sutpen, who rides into Jefferson out of nowhere, and with no discernible lineage, wrests his mansion out of the earth and ruthlessly carries out his grand design, phase by phase. He aims to own “everything he could see from a given point, with every stick and blade and hoof and heel on it to remind him (if he ever forgot it) that he was the biggest thing in their sight and in his own too”.[1] The first phase of his plans takes place at a very young age, as Sutpen, the 14 year old son of a Scotch Irish tenant farmer, leaves his family suddenly to make large amounts of money, and quickly. They had come from the mountains of what was to become West Virginia to the Tidewater Virginia area to live in a cabin on a wealthy planter’s land, so that his father could work (179). Before long, the reality of Sutpen’s low position on the class hierarchy is shockingly revealed to him by the planter’s house slave, cleaner and better dressed than he. Sutpen’s sudden awareness of his filthy, ragged appearance is the impetus for his grand design, which will bring him not only the mansion and the acreage, which become known as Sutpen’s Hundred, but which he believes will also bring him hard won respectability and male heirs to carry on the Sutpen name. Ironically, all the phases of his grand design, which he carries out to rid himself of the filth and rags of his past and his white, working class, are as mired in the soil he works to rid himself of as Sutpen’s Hundred is in the swamp he erects it from. All of Jefferson is characterized by the dirt one imagines to find on the developing frontier; the mud created by April rains, the dust kicked up by carriage wheels hanging in the stagnant September air, or even floating in the airless rooms of long shut-in homes. For Sutpen, dirt in the most recognizable sense provides an avenue for his ascent of the social scale, initially of Haiti and finally of Jefferson; soil is the matter that yields the cotton which is to sustain his fortune, mud is his protection from mosquitoes as he and his wild negroes build his mansion (27-8). But in the acquisition of first his Spanish coin and his Mississippi land, there is a question about his methods. The people of Jefferson are suspicious of Sutpen’s sudden appearance, his shadowy lineage, and the disappearing acts that culminate with him riding back to town laden with fantastic furnishings for his newly erected empire (26). Being unsure of his heritage, they cannot vouch for his morals; they suspect him of ‘doing dirt,’ of committing dishonest acts, in order to make his fortune. The activities fabled to take place out on Sutpen’s Hundred, to which the men of Jefferson are invited to watch, the raree shows (12), the negro fights (20), while largely morally unacceptable, or dirty, form a bond between himself and the men of Jefferson that allows for the unfurling of his plans. In many instances, however, Sutpen pushes his agenda at the stake of relationships integral to his design; he employs endless dirty tactics to see his plans come to fruition, as morality takes a backseat to the creation of his dynasty. Throughout Sutpen’s life, which is largely remembered and retold by Jefferson community members, he, through acts of sheer power and will, shapes a legacy, constructs a heritage for his family line from the very soil of Jefferson. However, his grand design ultimately fails as his fatal flaws come back to haunt him, ghosts of his shadowy, dirty past. Thomas Sutpen’s greed, haste and the dirty tactics he employs to acquire more land than he needs to survive on, a violation of that which Faulkner often discussed as the natural order of land ownership, a violation that he believed brought a curse onto the South, was his own undoing.[i] [1] Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International. 1990. Print. p. 290. All further references to this novel will have in-text citations. [i] Breaden, Dale G. “William Faulkner and the Land”. American Quarterly. 10.3 (1958) 334-357. Breaden compares Faulkner’s views on land ownership to those of several philosophers, including Henry George, who believed, “When one person . . . devises a method of controlling more land than the share he uses for his family’s support, then destiny becomes perverted, evil stalks the earth, for natural law has been violated and the natural order disturbed,” (346) as “Faulkner seems to see the South as cursed by the origins of its land titles and by the fact that the land is owned at all” (347).
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 January 28, 2011
Runty Trash: Hierarchy and Allegory in The Time of Man Ellen Chesser exhibits many characteristics of cultural blackness, with her socioeconomic status being perhaps the most telling. However, some passages in The Time of Man illuminate elements of her person and character that she shares with the animals of the farm, whose sole function is to work or provide, as is hers. It is interesting to consider that black field hands, white field hands, and working and producing animals seem to share a rung on the socioeconomic hierarchy of 1920’s Kentucky Knob country. A walk over the MacMurtrie grounds serves as an allegorical model that not only interconnects aspects of her blackness with her similarities to animals of burden, but also foreshadows her inability to overcome her status as “work animal” in the course of her lifetime. December 4, 2010 Velma Wallis as Ethnographer: A Dangerous Assumption Alaska Native literary works have undergone interesting transformations in the face of increasingly literate audiences and a decline of fluent speakers of many Alaska Native languages. One development that has resulted is the transformation of oral folklore to written form. Naming of the stories that have been told for generations and organization of the stories into anthologies have proved to be problematic, as has the designation of authorship. This is because the emphasis of the content within the stories has been meant for generations to be fluid, dependent on the context of the story telling and the purpose of the story teller. Velma Wallis, a Gwich’in Athabaskan author, has put stories told to her by her mother, to paper in the form of short novels. Her versions of oral folklore, Two Old Women, published in 1994, and Bird Girl and the Man who Followed the Sun, published in 1997 receive much criticism regarding the content and function of the tales; they have often been regarded as ethnographic works. Likewise, Wallis has at times been deemed an ethnographer, which is actually a specialist in the field of anthropology. While there clearly are ethnographic elements of her works, generalizing Wallis’ approach and her stories as purely ethnographic, discourages readers from considering other aspects of their literary complexity, stripping them of their relevance and potential for continued literary study.
May 2010, Thesis Abstract
This critical analysis of three works by Toni Morrison, Love, Sula, and A Mercy, serves as an exposure of the ways in which early and modern American society has created a set of social and economic politics that effectively work together to oppress Black women. Black woman are affected by these politics differently than Black men (with whom they share race) and white women (with whom they share gender) because of the unique way that race and gender pair with sexual politics to influence their economic class. Barbara Smith, a Black feminist critic, writer, and activist who began publishing in the Seventies, has outlined principles that critics should employ when evaluating the works of Black women in accordance with the elements of their work that represent the ways that these social politics affect their characters. Her work, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” serves as a touchstone for the examination of the implications of patriarchal values and practice upon the lives of Black women, in print and in life.
April, 2011 The Repeating, Rewarding Cycles of Delta Wedding Delta Wedding, a lively examination of Mississippi’s Fairchild
family in preparation for their daughter Dabney’s wedding, develops many
interesting characters through the use of episodic narrative. The novel relies on recursive story telling
by the characters themselves, as well as the interlacing of reappearing symbols
to draw the parts of the whole together thematically. The effect of repetition and cyclical
development of themes and characters highlight a woman centric notion of time
as it works on Shellmound, the family’s plantation home. While some critics
have cited the episodic nature of this novel, the complexity of the interwoven
elements of the novel support Ellen’s own realization that “the repeating
cycles and season of her own life . . . the monotony itself that was beautiful,
rewarding . . . one moment told you the great things” and contribute to the
novel’s theme of underlying anxieties about increasing modernity and progress
in the lives of the plantation family (240).
April 29, 2010 Backyard Trails: Race, Sex, Sin, and the Women of Strange Fruit Lillian Smith shocked audiences with her novel Strange Fruit, as her portrayal of ‘miscegenation,’ a term she herself loathed[i], exposed a quintessentially Southern taboo to the nation in 1944. Through her characters, Smith overturns many readers’ conceptions of a monolithic South, in which community members remain confined to the archetypal roles repeatedly depicted in traditional Southern literature. Smith’s most famous work has been conceptualized within the genre of postsouthern; it exudes a “skepticism of the traditional features of Southern literature” and works to re-imagine many of the tropes her readers are familiar with.[ii] Smith writes of the ‘race-sex-sin spiral’ unique to historical Southern communities in terms of the trails made first by the slave master and used even into the Reconstruction and segregation eras to perpetuate a social hierarchy dependent on the taboo issues of race, sex, and sin: the more trails a man made to backyard cabins, the higher he raises his wife on her pedestal, when he returned to the big house. The higher the pedestal, the less he enjoyed her whom he put there, for statues, after all, are only nice things to look at. More and more numerous became the little trails of escape from the statuary and more and more intricately they began to weave in and out of Southern life.[iii] In order to expose the depth of Smith’s skepticism of Southern community, we will examine the effects of these trails, these unique Southern constructions, on the women of Strange Fruit. Being a part of the community of Maxwell, Georgia, where white men follow familiar paths to Colored Town at night, lynchings are acceptable forms of justice, and revivals help wash away “white guilt,” affects Nonnie, Bess, Dessie, Laura and Sadie in ways the reader might not expect. Smith’s female characters, living in the aftermath of the backyard trail, the race-sex-sin spiral, effectively undermine the common conception of traditional black and white womanhood through their bodies and their activities; the black women are not simply virile bodies lacking any semblance of consciousness to develop their characters, the white women are not frail, gentle specimens requiring the need of protection from their male counterparts. [i] In the biography, Lillian Smith, she is quoted as saying, “The “strange fruit” I wrote of was not lynching or miscegenation (a word I hate) but the white man himself and his children and his Tobacco Roads and his own wasted life; the “strange fruit” was man dehumanized by a culture that is not good for the growth of either white or colored children”. Blackwell, L. and Clay, F. Lillian Smith. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1971. Print. 41-2.
[ii] Haddox, Thomas F. “Elizabeth Spencer, the White Civil Rights Novel, and the PostSouthern”. MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly. 65.4 (December 2004). 566. [iii] Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936. Louisiana State University Press, 1981, Print. 10. |
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