Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2024, Theology

Katherine Burton (1887-1969) is a forgotten, yet prolific US Catholic writer who wrote for average, middle-class, white women in the mid-twentieth century. From her conversion to Catholicism in 1930 to her death in 1969, Katherine wrote a monthly “Woman to Woman” column in The Sign for thirty-six years, over forty-four biographies and histories of Catholic men, women, and religious communities, and countless articles for other Catholic periodicals. Her books, as well as the Catholic periodicals in which her writing regularly appeared, had a large, nationwide readership. Katherine's words hold significance for religious scholars today seeking to further understand the faith lives of middle-class women in the pews during one of the most turbulent time periods in US history. Examining Katherine's writing provides scholars with a view into how Catholicism and Catholic womanhood were understood and presented by a laywoman to her mid-twentieth century laywomen audience. Katherine's writing is also a compelling example of how intricately an author's personal life is often entwined with their work and how studying the two side by side enriches the narratives they both tell.

Committee: Bill Portier (Committee Chair); Sandra Yocum (Committee Member); Mary Henold (Committee Member); Jana Bennett (Committee Member); William Trollinger (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Religious History; Theology

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2023, English

This thesis analyzes the relationship of female novelists to women's literary history through a study of the use of the woman writer character across five novels published in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Women writer characters and the metafictional texts they produce inside these novels reflect common threads across women's literary history, providing a way to categorize these novels not only by the gender of their authors but also by their engagement with this character—and by extension with this specific vein of women's literary history. The novel, which has undergone several transformations across genres, has been accused of feminization, while also being used to categorize the work of female novelists as outside of the Anglo-American canon. Each of the five novels included in this project reflect these literary biases through metafictional texts that are similarly restricted by socially constructed boundaries of oppressive systems, including gender, race, and class.

Committee: Nicole Reynolds (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Literature; Modern Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The subject of this study is contemporary Saudi women's literature and art between 2005 to 2017. In this research, I examine a selection of novels written by Saudi women and paintings composed by Saudi women artists to discuss how women negotiate their individuality, independence and rights to personal decision-making. This research argues that Saudi women have used literature and art to transform the way their society thinks about women. Novelists intertwine love stories, a traditionally taboo topic, with social issues on which there is broad agreement, for example the critique of terrorism, thus hoping to mute criticism. Saudi women artists, on the other hand, focus on portraying women's faces and figures in ways that show emotion and reveal depth of feeling. The key themes in these novels and works of art contribute to the authors' and artists' goals. Both the novels and the paintings focus on depicting some intimate aspects of women's lives in order to create empathy and make their society think differently, thus act differently. This dissertation highlights the importance of including Saudi women's literature and art in discussions of world literature and arts. It contributes to our understanding of Saudi women's shared challenges and seeks to establish that although Saudi women struggle with some sociopolitical issues, as do other women throughout the world, they do not allow these obstacles to prevent them from having open conversations about their position within society. They create conversations by confronting the power structures that women face and using techniques that foster audience engagement. This research was designed to describe Saudi women's concerns as told through their own literary and artistic expressions, in hopes that it may also inspire women in other societies who may share similar social circumstances.

Committee: Johanna Sellman (Advisor) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art History; Comparative Literature; Literature; Middle Eastern Studies; Womens Studies

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2016, English

This thesis consists of the English translations of five short stories originally written in Spanish by contemporary female Ecuadorian authors. It also includes a critical introduction discussing the politics and ethics of translation and the specific responsibilities involved in translating works by contemporary Ecuadorian women. This thesis was written after several months of traveling, researching, and interviewing authors in Ecuador. The stories translated were chosen for their compelling prose and their salient female voices, and address topics like infidelity, identity, captivity, sexuality and legacy.

Committee: Katarzyna Marciniak (Advisor); Betsy Partyka (Other) Subjects: Fine Arts; Foreign Language; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature; Mental Health; Modern Language; Modern Literature; Personal Relationships; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation attempts a comparative study of fiction by women writers from the South Asian diaspora in the United States and by women writers who live in India. It examines the possibility of building “unlikely coalitions,” to borrow a term from the feminist critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty, between these two ostensibly different groups of writers. This dissertation brings together fiction by the diasporic South Asian writers Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Thrity Umrigar and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and homeland writers such as Githa Hariharan and Shashi Deshpande to argue that despite their fraught relationship, these two groups of writers are united by a common interest in the challenges confronting female mobility in different spaces. The four main chapters correspond to the four different modes/sites of mobility that the writers explore – global migration, the domestic space, the nation-space and the city. Home exists as a common metaphor for these divergent spaces. These writers complicate the idea of home, demonstrating how home has a precarious existence on the borderline between freedom and constraint, safety and danger.

Committee: Amritjit Singh Dr. (Committee Chair); Katarzyna Marciniak Dr. (Committee Member); Ayesha Hardison Dr. (Committee Member); Susanne Dietzel Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Comparative Literature; South Asian Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This work examines Native women's activism in contemporary North American decolonizing movements. Looking at Native women's political literature with particular attention to their theories of gender, post-colonialism, Indigenism, feminism, and the reformative obligations of the writer, this study is concerned with several questions. First, how do Native women activists and writers analyze their experiences of hegemonic and patriarchal oppression, how do they outline and enact their political vision, and how do they theorize "race" and "gender" in twentieth- and twenty-first-century North America? Second, how does the history of conquest, going back at least three centuries, continue to affect contemporary Native women's theories and praxes of activism today? Third, what are the intellectual, cultural, and political responsibilities of the Native activist/writer living in modern America? Finally, how have Native women constructed their political vision against and alongside white women's movements? Can they coalesce for political reform? Native women's decolonizing movements include a critique of Eurocentrism, grounded in an analysis of specific historical contingencies, along with the reintegration of Native traditions of social and political praxes into contemporary tribal life. Several Native writers characterize this movement as "Indigenism" which presupposes several assumptions: that indigenous people worldwide share a common experience of colonization and subsumption into a capitalist, hegemonic nation state; a shared investment in the attainment of sovereign nationhood; and a fundamentally non-disruptive, integrative relationship to the natural habitat. Chapter One examines Native women's life narratives, concentrating on questions of writing as witness and the achievement of a liberatory voice through inscription. Chapter Two reviews the differences between Native and western feminist activism, arguing that these differences are determined, in part, by Native (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lisa Hogeland (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, French and Italian

This dissertation examines the problematic location of home, the traditional female activity of homemaking, and the representation of female subjectivity in contemporary cinematic, (auto)biographical, and fictional texts by several contemporary French and Francophone women artists. These writers and filmmakers question the home as a female interior space in which female protagonists traditionally become objects or accessories. They also bring to the fore multiple representations of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian femininity. In these texts, the artists embrace and foreground domestic space, female housekeeping activities, and women's ideological roles in order to (re)appropriate the normative gender discourses of their homelands. They accomplish these goals by revealing how the home within each society functions subversively as a space of socio-political-historical contention. Using Assia Djebar's work as a source of theoretical departure, this study illustrates the representation of women in body, by voice, and through the gaze in a collection of narratives created by French-speaking women artists from the Metropol and the Maghreb. Using feminist film theoretical and lifewriting critical perspectives, I examine the functions of the gaze and the effects of voicing the personal for women of France and North Africa. I also introduce theories of domesticity when considering the role and position of the home in the processes of personal identity formation and social gender construction. This dissertation considers women's coming to voice through women's (re)appropriation of hegemonic discourses of representation, use of language, and authority in speaking as made possible through the domestic space of the home and the arts of homemaking. Through a postcolonial lens of destabilization and the celebration of the in-between, hybrid spaces of first-person feminine expression and representation, I show how the relationship between “center” and “margin” becomes pr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Judith Mayne (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2008, Latin American Studies (International Studies)

This thesis analyzes Pasos bajo el agua (Steps under Water) and Bosquejo de alturas (Impressions of Heights), texts from the Argentine writer Alicia Kozameh, as examples of an embodied l'ecriture feminine. The reading of the literary texts through the theories of French feminists Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Michel Foucault, responds to the main arguments of the thesis. First, women empower themselves through language within power relationships established in patriarchal societies; the empowered female language is written through the female body. Second, l'ecriture feminine is a style of writing not exclusive to women; it is part of heteroglossia and can be written by any person, regardless of the sex. Third, l'ecriture feminine is a legitimate voice in social discourses, deconstructs the male/female dichotomy, and establishes a horizontal and dialectic relationship between different discursive voices. Finally, heteroglossia contributes to the reconstruction of gender relationships.

Committee: Nicole M. Reynolds PhD (Committee Chair); Jose Delgado PhD (Committee Member); Patrick Barr-Melej PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Latin American Literature; Literature; Womens Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Arts and Sciences: English

The Gothic is a genre that fixates on, and represents, the blurring of boundaries of such dualities as self/other, past/present, male/female, life/death, visible/invisible, subject/object, and familiar/strange. Focusing on the ambiguities caused by these blurred boundaries, Haunting the Female Body reads the Gothic not only as a genre but as a lens, or system of reading, that reveals otherwise invisible cultural truths, remnants, and repressions buried in literature or other forms of narrative. Building on Derrida's concepts of hauntology, spectrality, and the trace, I apply the Gothic lens to different texts written by, and about, women since 1960. In all my readings, I seek to confront the ghosts repressed in these texts and resurrect that which has otherwise been buried or forgotten in culture. I first explore Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, seeking a deeper understanding of how patriarchal society limits women's identities, and how the unlived lives that societal limitation precludes end up haunting the protagonist, Esther Greenwood. Next, I look at Toni Morrison's Beloved, and how the women's bodies in that story become sites for the inscription of slavery; even Denver and Beloved, who did not experience slavery firsthand, seem to inherit the traumas from their mother and grandmother—traumas manifested as ghosts that haunt their very bodies. While the first two chapters of my dissertation read texts that are frequently classified as Gothic, my next two chapters show how the Gothic lens can be used to read contemporary texts that have not yet been identified as Gothic, but which nonetheless overflow with Gothic conventions. As my third chapter argues, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), is a novel in which the Gothic lens offers the most appropriate and useful way to analyze the text's exploration of such themes of diasporic literature as the impossibility of defining identity and the haunting influence of the past. Finally, in taking invisibility as its (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tamar Heller Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jennifer Glaser Ph.D. (Committee Member); Beth Ash Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2023, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The religious content of nineteenth-century American sentimental texts is often overlooked as a subject of study itself and is instead analyzed as a means to another end, such as its contributions to the abolition of slavery or to women's rights. Both are powerful uses of religion in writing; by contrast, this dissertation analyzes the use of religion in nineteenth-century American sentimental texts as an active and evolving blueprint by which to live everyday life. Utilizing the sociological/historical theory of ‘lived religion' and emphasizing the literary mode of ‘surface reading,' I explore how women writers of sentimental texts—Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances E. W. Harper—implemented religious themes and lessons in their sermons, essays, speeches, novels, and poetry in serving the purpose of faith itself. The analysis of lived religion focuses on how these women and their personal theology and religious practices interacted and evolved, which they then taught to society through their writing and speaking.

Committee: Wesley Raabe (Advisor); Babacar M'Baye (Committee Member); David Kaplan (Committee Member); Elaine Frantz (Parsons) (Committee Member); Jennifer MacLure (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American Literature; Bible; History; Literature; Religion; Religious History; Sociology; Theology; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Portuguese

This dissertation examines the thematic connections and the formal structure shared between the literary texts written by several black women authors in Portugal and Brazil over the last five years. Since literary and academic events transitioned to virtual platforms in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, black women writers from Portugal and Brazil, both Portuguese speaking countries, found a place online, in the form of a kind of virtual diaspora, where they could come together to discuss their lives as black women in their respective countries through their written literary works. Here, I analyze the texts of seven prominent black women writers: Bianca Santana, Conceicao Evaristo, Cristiane Sobral, and Cidinha da Silva from Brazil, and Djaimilia Pereira, Telma Tvon and Yara Monteiro from Portugal. My analysis shows that several similar themes (e.g., racism against blacks, recognition of the importance of African culture, and constructing of a multicultural identity), the use of Polyphony, Magical Realism, Animism Realism, and an Autobiographic style of writing all work to shape these women's narratives, while alluding to the oral tradition of African culture. The stories of these black women, enriched by their experiences, share a common objective – combating racism and sexism and understanding their multicultural identity. Taking from an idea described by Professor Conceicao Evaristo in her 2003 talk at the Federal University of Paraiba, I frequently use the concept of “escrevivencias”, which translates to “writings about their experiences”, and include additional supporting evidence from other authors such as Lelia Gonzalez, Teofilo de Queiroz Junior, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha to understand, in depth, how individuals from African diasporas are described in each analyzed text. I also provide examples of the use of Magical Realism described by Alejo Carpentier, Animism Realism by Pepetela, polyphony by Mikhail Bakhtin a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Isis Barra Costa (Advisor); Richard Vasques (Committee Member); Laura Podalsky (Committee Member); Pedro Pereira (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Gender Studies; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Spanish and Portuguese

The present work reflects on the most noteworthy recent trends in contemporary, postcolonial Portuguese literature authored by women writers, namely Isabela Figueiredo's Caderno de memorias coloniais (2009), Dulce Maria Cardoso's O retorno (2011), Aida Gomes's Os pretos de Pousaflores (2011), Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's Esse cabelo (2015), Isabela Figueiredo's most recent novel A Gorda (2016), and Alexandra Lucas Coelho's Deus-dara (2016). Specifically, I address how these women writers engage the public sphere through their fiction's focus on formative but still controversial events in Portugal's recent history. I argue that the novels I analyze play a critical and transformative role as they question the still imperialist discourse of Portuguese national culture produced by the state and the media, among others. By giving voice to other stories and/or experiences that were, and still are, traditionally excluded by the hegemonic narratives of the nation, and inspired by the sociology of absences developed by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I claim that they form a canon of a "literature of absences" that focuses on colonialism and its aftermath in order to push the boundaries of the still crystalized representations of the Portuguese empire, and to showcase their myriad reverberations in postcolonial Portugal. Ultimately, in times that call for an urgent and necessary decolonization of the former European empires, this dissertation aims to contribute to surveying the different ways contemporary, women-authored fiction in Portugal imagines a post-imperial condition.

Committee: Pedro Pereira Ph.D. (Advisor); Ignacio Corona Ph.D. (Committee Member); Isis Barra Costa Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Romance Literature

Master of Humanities (MHum), Wright State University, 2019, Humanities

This thesis explores the status of German women writers in the 18th century during the era of Enlightenment and Romanticism. I will examine the philosophical ideas and beliefs during these times, and the impact these ideas had on La Roche and Schlegel specifically, as well as society as a whole. While studying the life style, upbringing, and the most important literary works of the two women writers, I will show the advancements made by them towards greater autonomy for other women writers emphasizing their courage, alongside the hardship they often endured. Seeking greater recognition and freedom from male tutelage, La Roche and Schlegel took their destiny into their own hands, yet often retained, and even chose their traditional roles in life over a complete need to change their status. The question if these courageous women actually achieved advancement for future women writers is explored in detail.

Committee: Renate Sturdevant Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Donovan Miyasaki Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Elfe Dona Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature; Literature

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2018, English-Literature

At a time when the moral nature of women was questioned, anxiety surrounding female sexuality invaded many public areas, and various writers took to addressing those anxieties. The possibility for women to fantasize and act on their sexual desires defies norms for the period. The cultural construction that framed female sexuality was a limiting one that barred women from actively engaging in their sexual desires. This thesis focuses on three major genres for the period: ballads, plays, and prose romances. By critically analyzing these genres for their construction of female sexual agency, readers can begin to understand how authors described sexual agency and how they used it to influence their various audience members. Chapter One, “Desire, Death, and the Broadside Ballad,” focuses on broadside ballads. Broadside ballads were published on a single sheet of paper and typically featured an illustration alongside their text. This chapter focuses explicitly on murderous wife ballads, which is a sub-genre that featured women who murdered their husband. By the end of each ballad, the murderous wife is executed and silenced. In many cases, the murderous wife would articulate her motive lying behind the want to commit adultery, which shows active agents in control of their sexuality. Having a murderous wife articulate her desire, especially towards someone outside of her marriage, would have been extremely transgressive. Balladeers used these women's stories to turn a profit and further push against women discovering their agency and to remind listeners of the extremes that can happen to a woman who becomes independent, and they knew that sensationalizing these rare criminal acts would reinforce anxieties among many about these acts happening to other people. Chapter Two, “Tyrannous Agency: Shakespeare and Female Desire,” moves away from broadside ballads to discuss Shakespeare's construction of female sexual agency through an examination of A Midsummer Night's Dream and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Hillary Nunn Dr. (Advisor); Jon Miller Dr. (Committee Member); Joseph Ceccio Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Romance Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Germanic Languages and Literatures

The end of the nineteenth century marked the slow shift from home births towards an increased hospitalization of birthing, which became a firmly established practice in twentieth-century German-speaking countries. In this project, I analyze and contextualize representations of birthing, birthing assistants, and the medicalization of the female body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Helene Boehlau's Halbtier! (1899), Ilse Frapan's Arbeit (1903), and Gabriele Reuter's Das Traenenhaus (1908). Boehlau, Frapan, and Reuter wrote their novels at the cusp of a new approach to birthing, and their protagonists grapple with the transition from giving birth at home with minimal medical intervention to viewing birth as a pathological condition that requires support from medical personnel. By bringing together theoretical discourses on the body and on medicalization, I examine what effect the restructuring of birthing assistance, and later the development of the medical specialty of obstetrics, had on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how women perceived these changed birthing conditions. I argue that each of these literary works challenges the medical history narratives that have portrayed medical advances in obstetrics as a positive change for women across the world. Rather, these works take up questions of female agency and the human cost resulting from medical advancements. I identify the three authors' preoccupation with unwed mothers' birthing experiences and the socio-economic and moral factors that influence their patient care and access to health care as a crucial commonality between the works examined. The project begins with a historical overview of the medicalization of birthing in German-speaking countries and of the changing discourses about the female procreative body from the 1750s onwards. The subsequent three literature chapters focus on the portrayal of women's perceptions of the birthing experience, the loc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Barbara Becker-Cantarino PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Katra Byram PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Anna Grotans PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2015, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

For centuries, conduct books have doled out advice, established gender expectations, and maintained social codes of conduct. These books prove to be valuable resources for observing how womanhood was defined throughout the nineteenth century and for illuminating how gender roles were constructed and how the concept of proper behavior changed with the make up of society. Using these conduct texts alongside novels by Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton re-engages discussions of womanhood started by Nina Baym, Frances Cogan, and Barbara Welter and enlarges the discussion of these women writers and their portrayals of women. Examining these novelists in conjunction with conduct books forges connections between these conduct texts, novels, and authors that have not been fully examined and illuminates a subtext of social expectations and gender performance running through each of these novels. Each of these authors included characters in her novels that challenged codes of conduct. The texts in this dissertation explore the tension between the reality and the ideal of womanhood, while highlighting the gender performance required in the attempt to live up to the societal expectations of women. Each of these authors demonstrates how influential the social codes of conduct and societal expectations of women were throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Committee: Wesley Raabe (Advisor); Robert Trogdon (Advisor); Babacar M'Baye (Committee Member); Stephane Booth (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2013, English

16th and 17th century women's writing contains a pervasive language of self-effacement, which has been documented and analyzed by scholars, but the focus remains on the sincerity of the act, even though humility was often employed as a successful rhetorical tool by both classic orators and Renaissance male writers. Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum has been read in this tradition of sincere humility, and even when it has not, scholars have focused on the dedicatory paratext, thus minimizing Lanyer's poetic prowess. I argue that Lanyer's poem-proper employs modesty as a strategic rhetorical device, giving added credibility and importance to her work. By removing the lens of modesty as sincerity, I hope to encourage a reexamination of the texts of Renaissance women and remove them from their 'silent, chaste and obedient' allocation by/for the modern reader.

Committee: Elizabeth Mackay Ph.D (Committee Co-Chair); Rebecca Potter Ph.D (Committee Co-Chair); Sheila Hassell Hughes Ph.D (Other) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Gender; Literature; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : Germanic Languages and Literature

The quintessentially modern human being, Marlen Haushofer (1920-1970) spent her fifty years on earth torn between an innate spirituality, and the cynicism and nihilism provoked by the modern age. The dualism of her fundamental world-view permeated every facet of her reality and resulted in a body of literary work that is defined by division and contradiction. This study examines these elements present in the Haushofer novels, and in the masterful novella, Wir Toten Stella. The investigation seeks to elucidate Haushofer's dualistic and contradictory perceptions through analysis of two major themes: nature, and the relationship between men and women. Nature plays a vital role in the Haushofer oeuvre and represents the chief means through which the author conveys her ontological struggles. Depiction of the male and female has been of great interest to feminist critics. Many see in Haushofer an early feminist and an ardent critic of male culture, and of patriarchy. Scrutiny of the works leads to a rather complex conclusion. Haushofer's views on the subject are dualistic, and also extraordinarily replete with contradiction. Traditionallly "male" and "female" characteristics are liberally apportioned to both sexes. While overt criticism of men abounds, male figures are at times portrayed quite positively. The presentation of female characters is surprisingly negative. Ultimately, it is difficult to determine Haushofer's position regarding not only the sexes, but nearly every other aspect of life. Only one pronouncement can be made with true conviction: with few exceptions, Marlen Haushofer was unable to commit to a given position on any given subject. The tension between opposites is the defining quality of her work.

Committee: Jerry Glenn (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, Germanic

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation analyzes how contemporary African-American women writers transform the Euro-American Bildungsroman into a suitable vehicle to express the experiences and aspirations of Black girls. Writers such as Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gayl Jones, Sapphire, Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, and Jacqueline Woodson use African-American cultural references, young women's issues, and orature to create contemporary African-American female Bildungsromane that accurately depict Black girls' lives. In the process, these writers reveal how "race," gender, and class as they exist in a racist society have complicated the maturation process of Black adolescents. Chapters One through Three explore specific issues that are important to the lives of young Black girls, silencing and sexual violence, western standards of beauty, and integration into an unwelcoming "white space" during the Civil Rights Era. Chapter Four compares and contrasts the depictions of young Black girls in novels written specifically for a young adult audience with those written for an adult audience. Ultimately, this literary study illustrates how young Black girls as depicted in the novels struggle to develop healthy cultural and individual identities despite the presence of racism and sexism in their lives.

Committee: Arlene Elder (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2011, Arts and Sciences: Romance Languages and Literatures

In my dissertation I focus on selected works by Assia Djebar (1936-) and Julia Kristeva (1941-), two prominent women writers who have chosen to write in French and explore the issues of being a foreigner and a literary and intellectual figure in their essays, talks and fictional texts. The reception of their works has recently culminated in prestigious international awards. In October 2004, Julia Kristeva became the first laureate of the Holberg Prize, a prize recognizing extraordinary contributions to the Humanities and similar to the Nobel Prize. In June 2005, Assia Djebar was elected into the French Academy: she is the first postcolonial woman writer to enter the almost five-century-old institution. This international recognition shows that in the “imaginary community”of the Francophone world something is happening – the periphery has moved to the center, to the very core of the French and Western culture, inscribing itself as an exile literature. I examine how Kristeva and Djebar as exile writers have reflected upon and dramatized their relationship with the Other language, French, in their works of fiction and numerous essays. On the other hand, they represent the French language as a space of social and artistic freedom: a tool allowing them not only to investigate but also to transcend the trauma of exile, the abandonment of their maternal tongues and familiar cultural surroundings for which they cannot cease longing. My selection of texts comprises Kristeva's novel Possessions (1996) and its most recent sequel, Meurtre a Byzance (2004), as well as Djebar's novels L'amour, la fantasia (1985), Vaste est la prison (1995), and La disparition de la langue francaise (2003). It also includes Kristeva's and Djebar's respective collections of essays, Etrangers a nous-memes (1988), L'avenir d'une revolte (1998) and Ces voix qui m'assiegent (1999). The main lines of my research are dedicated to the complex problematic of identity formation in the context of our postco (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michele Vialet PhD (Committee Chair); Sanford Ames PhD (Committee Member); Therese Migraine George PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Romance Literature