American Studies
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Doctoral Students
Donna Bailey
Anne Sexton: The Confessional Aesthetic
My thesis offers a re-examination of Anne Sexton’s poetry and its relationship to the mode of confession. I work closely with a selection of early poems as well as a range of manuscript materials housed at the Harry Ransom Centre. I employ a genetic methodological approach to these works as to demonstrate how Sexton’s poetry offers a performance of the confessional mode rather than an honest confession. The project in turn positions Sexton as a self-conscious poet who writes with an equally self-reflexive awareness of genre. As a result The Confessional Aesthetic looks toward establishing a definition of Sexton’s poetry more suitable and mindful to its methods of performance.
Nicola Brindley
Writing Complexity: The American Novel and Systems Theory
My thesis will explore the representation of social and biological systems within the American novel, with a particular focus upon the difficulties faced in giving a realistic account of scientific complexity. Despite the interdisciplinary nature of recent complexity science, there has until now been virtually no sustained application of systems theory to literary studies. My work will develop Tom LeClair's concept of the `systems novel' in the light of recent theory emerging from the Santa Fe Institute, arguing that today (and at other historical moments of rapidly increasing social complexity) novelists display a particular form of systems-aware realism.
Cat Burton-Cartledge
Studying for a PhD in American Studies
I am examining contemporary African American literature and its position within the cultural marketplace, with specific focus on 'post-black' or 'post-soul' writing. For post-black authors (Percival Everett and Colson Whitehead, for example), race intersects with other aspects, like class, gender, sexuality and disability, and disrupts 'traditional' expectations of what African American writing should be. My research is informed in part by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and as such will pay particular attention to the way in which people active within the field of the post-black utilise certain strategies in order to position themselves, and the post-black, within the wider field of literary and cultural production.
Katie McGettigan
Research Project: Appropriations of the Literary Marketplace in the Works of Herman Melville
My research will examine the ways in which the mechanisms of production, distribution and consumption within the nineteenth-century literary marketplace influenced the later works of Herman Melville. Melville is usually considered to have become increasingly antagonistic towards the literary industry throughout his career as a writer. However, I hope to establish that Melville’s responses to the marketplace were not entirely hostile. Rather, he engaged with the publishing industry on an aesthetic level by appropriating its systems into his later fiction, suggesting that the marketplace could engender as well as inhibit authorial creativity. In this study, I plan to combine textual analysis with work on bibliography and the History of the Book in order to construct an interdisciplinary approach to Melville’s works.
Mary Molloy
My thesis (Single White and Southern: Female Singleness in the Nineteenth Century American South, 1830-1880) explores the shifting roles and identities of elite, slaveholding women in the antebellum South, through the Civil War and into the Reconstruction period. It tracks the experience of single women – broadly defined as late-married, never-married, widowed, divorced or abandoned – in connection to the central themes of ‘agency’ and ‘constraint’. The project is divided into five chapters: The Construction of Self-Identity, Family, Work, Friendship and Property, and Legal Rights. Each chapter highlights the relationship between social, political, economic and demographic changes and seeks to understand how these affected single women’s lives in the American South.
Hannah Merry
I am looking at the emerging area of work on neurological syndromes and the ways that novelists, film makers and American TV series use these within their work, concentrating on texts featuring representations of multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder (DID) as it has become known. I am particularly interested in representations of gender, and in particular the idea that gender itself, in a performative, queer theory sense, could be viewed as a syndrome. I will be drawing on syndrome criticism, trauma theory, queer theory and gender theory.
Leslie Powner
Les’ proposed title for his research thesis is; Bandidos, Buccaneers, Ballads, and the Border. He is exploring the connections between the historical narrative of the rise of the U.S. - Mexico border and the cultural representations of that narrative. The forms of cultural representation he is examining include popular media and literature, as well as public artifacts such as memorials, museums, and festivals. His concern is to demonstrate how the cultural memory maintained by popular culture feeds into contemporary political attitudes.
Sue Tyrrell
Tennessee Williams’ “Plastic Theatre”: An Examination of Contradiction.
This thesis grew out of an initial fascination with Williams’ staging of his plays, in particular his predilection for sets that are both obscured and revealed. After reading the work of David Savran, I felt that the early acclamation of Williams as a ‘realistic’ dramatist somehow missed the point. Like Savran and other post-90s critics I felt that the late plays, which were ignored by Williams’ contemporary critics, deserved serious attention. However, it was only when I made the link between Savran’s cultural perspective and the work of post-Hegelian philosophers such as W.E.B. DuBois and, more recently, Malcolm Bull, that I identified the significance of contradiction in Williams’ work; work that both re?defines his notion of ‘plasticity’ and helps us to understand the problematic later plays.
