Browsing by Author "Kubitschek, Missy Dehn"
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Item Dance and Identity Politics in Caribbean Literature: Culture, Community, and Commemoration(2011-06-03) Tressler, Gretchen E.; Springer, Jennifer Thorington; Kubitschek, Missy Dehn; Shepherd, Susan CarolDance appears often in Anglophone Caribbean literature, usually when a character chooses to celebrate and emphasize her/his freedom from the physical, emotional, and societal constraints that normally keep the body in check. This study examines how a character's political consciousness often emerges in chorus with aesthetic bodily movement and analyzes the symbolic force and political significance of Caribbean dance--both celebratory (as in Carnival) and defensive (as in warrior dances). Furthermore, this study observes how the weight of Western views on dance influences Caribbean transmutations and translations of cultural behavior, ritual acts, and spontaneous movement. The novels studied include Samuel Selvon's "The Lonely Londoners" (1956), Earl Lovelace's "The Dragon Can't Dance" (1979), Paule Marshall's "Praisesong for the Widow" (1983), and Marie-Elena John's "Unburnable" (2006).Item Herstory: female artists' resistance in The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker(2017-06) Schaefer, Mercedez L.; Thorington-Springer, Jennifer; Kubitschek, Missy Dehn; Kovacik, KarenFor women in patriarchal societies, life is stitched with silence and violence. This is especially true for women of color. In a world that has cast women as invisible and voiceless, to create from the margins is to demand to be seen and heard. Thus, women’s art has never had the privilege of being art for art’s sake and instead is necessarily involved in the work of articulating and (re)writing female experience. When women seek, through their work and art, to feel deeply and connect with other women, they tap into what Audre Lorde has famously termed “the power of the erotic.” Lorde suggests that to acknowledge and trust those deepest feelings within our bodies is a subversive power that spurs social change. In the following work, novels by Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, and Edwidge Danticat are linked by their female characters who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Furthermore, because the authors themselves are engaged in rendering the female experience visible, the novels discussed actively converse with their respective waves of feminism and propel social activism and feminist discourse. Hence, this project provides both a close reading of The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker, and a broader contention on the role of women’s literature in social justice.Item Mangled Bodies, Mangled Selves: Hurston, A. Walker and Morrison(2008-06-16T11:13:30Z) Raab, Angela R.; Kubitschek, Missy Dehn; Thorington, Jennifer; Marvin, TomBroken bodies litter the landscape of African American women’s literature. Missing limbs and teeth, paralyzed appendages, lost hair, and deformities appear frequently in the works of authors like Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Pearl Cleage, and Octavia Butler. While many white authors also include broken bodies in their works, Hemingway’s preoccupation with synecdoche in terms of body parts perhaps being the most notable example, the motif permeates the tradition of African American women’s fiction like no other genre, appearing in the work of almost every major African American woman author. In the case of some authors, Morrison and Walker for example, broken bodies appear in every novel of their corpuses. In fact, every story in Walker’s first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, features a broken body. Several questions arise from the ubiquity of this motif in the texts of African American women authors: Where did the motif originate? Why does the motif persist? Do the authors use the motif in the same way? What does the trail of broken bodies reveal about how African American women authors interpret the relationship between body and self? Surprisingly, given the prevalence of the motif and the number of critical comments on one or another text, no critic has essayed a comprehensive examination of the motif in African American literature. While this paper does not have the scope to cover the African American canon as a whole, it will discuss the motif across the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.Item "Quiet as it's Kept": Secrecy and Silence in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Jazz, and Paradise(2011-11-18) Smith, Whitney Renee; Johnson, Karen Ramsay; Kubitschek, Missy Dehn; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-Secrets and silence appear frequently in the work of Toni Morrison. In three novels, The Bluest Eye, Jazz, and Paradise, she repeats a specific phrase that acts as a signal to the reader. Morrison three times writes, “Quiet as it’s kept” in her novels to alert readers to the particular significance secrets and silence play in these novels. Morrison portrays this secrecy and silence as a barrier to building strong communities and even a strong self-identity. While the phrase appears in the same form, with each subsequent appearance, Morrison takes the idea a step further. In each novel she demonstrates how breaking the silence and refusing to keep quiet is an act of healing or salvation and she expands this healing to be increasingly inclusive. What begins as a single voice breaking the silence in The Bluest Eye becomes a group of people sharing their secrets in Jazz, and finally an entire town coming to terms with the power of speaking up. This thesis looks at the secrets and their impact on characters in each novel and explores the progression of the power in refusing to keep quiet.