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The Language Trap: U.S. Passing Fiction and its Paradox
dc.contributor.advisor | Fowler, Doreen | |
dc.contributor.author | Sugimori, Masami | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2010-03-18T04:41:12Z | |
dc.date.available | 2010-03-18T04:41:12Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2009-12-04 | |
dc.date.submitted | 2009 | |
dc.identifier.other | http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:10634 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1808/5979 | |
dc.description.abstract | Through exploration of William Faulkner's, James Weldon Johnson's and Nella Larsen's "passing novels," this dissertation points out that narrative representation of racial passing facilitates and compromises the authors' challenge to the white-dominant ideology of early-twentieth-century America. I reveal that, due to their inevitable dependence on language, these authors draw paradoxically on the white-dominant ideology that they aim to question, especially its system of binary racial categorization. While the "white" body of a "passing" character serves the novelists as a subversive force in white-supremacist society (which depends on the racial other to define "whiteness"), language, which is essentially ideological, traps the writers in racial binary and continually suggests that, while the character looks white, s/he is really black. Accordingly, the authors have to write under the constraints of the problem that American discourse of race must and, for the most part, does systematically suppress its own essential fictiveness. | |
dc.format.extent | 181 pages | |
dc.language.iso | EN | |
dc.publisher | University of Kansas | |
dc.rights | This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author. | |
dc.subject | American literature | |
dc.subject | Modern literature | |
dc.subject | Ethnic studies | |
dc.subject | Ideology | |
dc.subject | Johnson, James Weldon | |
dc.subject | Language and narrative | |
dc.subject | Larsen, Nella | |
dc.subject | Racial passing | |
dc.subject | Faulkner, William | |
dc.title | The Language Trap: U.S. Passing Fiction and its Paradox | |
dc.type | Dissertation | |
dc.contributor.cmtemember | Caminero-Santangelo, Marta | |
dc.thesis.degreeDiscipline | English | |
dc.thesis.degreeLevel | Ph.D. | |
kusw.oastatus | na | |
kusw.oapolicy | This item does not meet KU Open Access policy criteria. | |
kusw.bibid | 7078713 | |
dc.rights.accessrights | openAccess |
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Dissertations [4889]
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English Dissertations and Theses [449]