American Culture and Literature

This thesis studies the dengbêj tradition as a space of memory where alternative interpretations of the past and present, acoustic communication of different voices and female singing voices dwell in. This study initially argues that dengbêjs' kilams

In this essay, I'd like to refer to the problematic identity and pathetic situation of the protaganist Edison Banks. The text, although it doesn't seem to have so much in plot, has indeed numerous significant points when read between the lines. In fact, the title "Death of the Cool" is like a synopsis of the main plot of the text, which involves Edison's problems in his lonely world and the influences of these problems on his personality. Now, I will analyze significant points which reveal Edison's tribulations in his own psychological world. Edison's most important and outstanding problem is about his loneliness and growing age. He constantly compares himself to the younger men around him. Outer appereance is everything to him, he attributes the features such as youth, age and popularity for being "cool". He cannot bare getting old, losing his fame, and being considered as an "ordinary person".

In this paper, I am going to outline the general themes of "meaninglessness&purposelessness" that are dominant throughout the story. Those themes, though implicitly, constitute the mainstream of "Water From the Sun" with the help of conversations and descriptions of the characters. By scrutinizing the way characters behave, it will be easier to grasp how the themes are constructed.

The short story "Discovering Japan" by Bret Ellis Easton focuses on the problematic mind of a celebrity, which is shaped by his reluctant existence in the world of fame. As a consequence of such a life, Bryan Metro, the famous rock star begins to behave people in indifferent ways and he gradually loses his identity. Although fame gives a name and a particular attitude to Bryan, it doesn't offer him satisfaction. For this reason Bryan leads a dissatisfied kind of life and he looks for the ways of escaping from what he's into.

This essay is an attempt to draw a broad sketch of El Movimiento Chicano, or “The Chicano Movement” in the United States (ca. 1965–1975) through an analysis of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s poem “I am Joaquín” (1967) and its adaptation by Luis Miguel Valdez on the silver screen. As an outlet of Chicanos’ long-standing rancor at their subaltern status in political, economic, and social spheres in an Anglo-American dominated society, the political activism of El Movimiento prompted a cultural-nationalist stance which organized itself around the theme of a return to cultural origins, specifically to the indigenous origins of the Aztec civilization via the concept of mestizaje, or hybridity, and the rhetoric of Aztlán—the primordial homeland of the Aztecs that is assumed to be located somewhere in the vicinity of the vast region that Mexico ceded to the United States in 1848. The aim of the present essay is to examine and discuss how the social interpretation and the thematic layers of the poem are represented and modified in Valdez’s 16mm motion picture, which is assumedly the first film produced by, about, and for Chicanos. In retrospective terms, the present study concludes with the weaknesses and the strengths of the Chicano Movement as they are reinforced and dramatized by the two respective productions in their specific formulation of the Chicano sociohistorical perspective.

Taking its name from the Spanish verb correr, which means “to run” or “to flow,” the corridos are a special form of narrative folk songs within the age-old bulk of Mexican balladry tradition – especially, those of epic themes. Américo Paredes, one of the foremost scholars of the corridor proper, claims that the socio-historical conjunctures from the 1836 “incident” at Alamo to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo successively prepared the historical stage for the mid-19th century rise of “the heroic corrido of border conflict” in the border-zone, straddling between Mexico and the U.S. along the Río Grande. Thus, this peculiar corpus of balladry tradition has occupied an exceptional gravity in the socio-historical, cultural, and psychological spheres of Mexican-Americans, living as a so-called “ethnic minority” in their own patrimonial lands in the southwestern states of the U.S. since 1848. Following Paredes’s lead, the present overview focuses on a single corrido, titled “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez,” which has come to epitomize the longings of Mexican-Americans for democracy, equality, and full civil, cultural and territorial rights from the early 20th-century onward. The two central paradigms that the corrido genre offers are (1) the heroic border-man, defending his right with his pistol in his hand, as the paragon of “Mexican-American” ethnic identity, set against the political and cultural sway of Anglo-Americans and their vilifying stereotypes in print culture; and (2) the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a strictly topographical “buffer zone” where the cultural and de facto collusions between Anglo-Texans and Texas-Mexicans have occurred. While focusing on the eminence of these two paradigms, the present study contests the essentialist premise which has hitherto averred that the “clash of cultures” is the central paradigm that defines the border experience and identity. Because, with the ineluctable conjunctural and paradigmatic changes of grand proportions from the mid-1960s onward not only in the U.S., but throughout the entire globe, the border-zone phenomenon and the border-hero typology of the corrido proper needs to be revised afresh. The shift is an egalitarian call for cultural hybridity as proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). The present survey concludes with elaborations upon Anzaldúa’s perspective.

The present article explores the articulation of the trauma of exile in Dominican-American writer Julia Álvarez’s debut novel, How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). In reverse chronology the loosely autobiographical novel presents a Latino immigrant family from Santo Domingo in their tragicomic quest of Americanization, or assimilation. Revolving around the issue of the loss of cultural heritage and familial legacy during this arduous process of acculturation, the text becomes a recollection of the Garcias to save more than three decades’ of memories from oblivion. According to
James Holte, the ethnic immigrant bildungs narrative traditionally presents the transformation of the individual in four phases: (1) the childhood spent in the homeland, (2) the voyage taken from the mother country to the new world, (3) the experiences in the educational realm followed by those of the working life, (4) the final success of the individual in the adopted country and psychic contentment. However, Álvarez deviates from this scheme to present her reader a peculiar coming-of-age tale. Such literary effort is projected through the protagonist, Yolanda, in her quest to negotiate with her dual identity via the theme of language acquisition and the loss of her accent. Emphasizing the role of language as the driving force in the complex process of subject formation, the present article offers a close reading of the selected passages from the novel to arrive at the conclusion that Gloria Anzaldúa’s notions of mestizaje (hybridity) and ‘border-dweller’ account for Yolanda’s dual identity.

Since the 1980s, the literary and theoretical output of American women writers of Latin-American heritage has offered an alternative reading of feminist literary tradition. Sandra Cisneros is probably one of the foremost figures within the American context of “Border Literature” and “Borders Studies” proper. This article firstly outlines the parameters, theorems and prominent figures of Border Studies, and then examines Cisneros’ short story “Woman Hollering Creek” which deconstructs the dualistic mode of thinking in terms of first world vs. third world dichotomy, and defies various thematic and structural borders. The story is also a parody of the Mexican popular genres of telenovella (soap opera) and fotonovella (photo novel), and offers a new form of identity formation through the female protagonist’s quest for finding her own voice and subjectivity outside the prescribed gender roles attuned to the patriarchal discourse proposed in the aforementioned popular genres. Hence, this article offers a close reading of the story’s narrative strategies on a linguistic and semantic level as they inform its thematic concerns.

Bu çalışma, yapıbozucu bir okuma yöntemiyle, Sandra Cisneros’un ilk eseri olan Mango Sokağı’ndaki Ev (1984) romanında ele aldığı iki kadın arketipini inceler: 1) Kirletilmiş hain Malinche ve 2) Kutsal Bakire Guadalupe. Latin Amerika, Meksika ve sınırın kuzeyindeki uzantısı Chicano toplumlarındaki kadının rolü ve kimliğinin, tarih boyunca kutuplaşmış bir karşıtlık üzerinden kurgulanmasına yol açan bu iki arketipi sil baştan yeniden yazan Cisneros, ataerkil söyleme özgü cinsel kısıtlamaların karşısına alternatif bir değerler dizisi çıkartır. Romanın odağında, Meksika kökenli Amerikalı bir kız çocuğunun basmakalıp iyi/kötü kadın tipolojisini aşmak adına çıktığı bilinçlenme yolculuğu vardır. Yolculuk, romanın başlığını teşkil eden “ev” ve “sokak” kilit öğelerinin ilkinde başlar. Süreç, özel alandan kamusal alanı işaret eden mahalleye taşındığında ise artık bilinçlenmiş olan anlatıcı, dünyasını ikili zıtlıklardan arınmış bir bakış açısıyla anlamlandıracaktır. Çalışmanın ilk aşamasında, sözü geçen arketiplerin Aztek kültürüne uzanan köklerine dair folklorik ve tarihi bulgular üstüne kurulu arka planından bahsedilmektedir. Bu bilgiler ışığında romandan seçilen bölümlerin yakın okuması yapılacaktır. Sonuç olarak, kutuplaşmış bir karşıtlık olarak kurgulanan bu iki arketipin özüne inildiğinde, barındırdıkları zıtlıkların esasında iç içe geçerek muğlâklaştığı bir sınır-diyarını işaret ettiği vurgulanmaktadır. Karşıtlıklar üstünden devamlılığını sürdürebilen ataerkil machismo söylemine meydan okuyacak bu yeni ‘temas’ alanı, bağımsız Chicana kadınının yaratıcı gücünü ve cinsel kimliğini keşfetmesi adına yeni bir ifade biçimine dönüşecektir.

The preset study deals with Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya’s New Mexican trilogy which is comprised of the author’s acclaimed debut novel Bless Me Ultima (1972), followed by Heart of Aztlán (1976) and Tortuga (1979). Renowned as the “father” of Chicano novel, Anaya has garnered such an honorary status in the world of belles-lettres during the heyday of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement (ca 1965-1975), a period of intense strife for American citizens of Mexican lineage, demanding socio-economic equality and cultural recognition in the United States. Anaya’s fiction is laden with a Jungian mythic perspective, catered by his Mexican roots that date back to the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica; the longstanding tradition of U.S-Southwestern folklore and ancient legends of the region; and the aspects of Magical Realism imbued with the art of oral storytelling established in Latin American literary heritage. In an interview Anaya claims that Chicano literature reflects the mythos of the people, and the writings speak to the underlying philosophical assumptions which form the particular worldview of a culture. Here, Anaya is not only referring to the formal aspects of the written word, but rather to an artist’s ideological stance which should be guided by culture, history, language, native mythology. With that in mind, Bless Me, Ultima depicts a seven year old Chicano boy growing up in New Mexico in the early 1940s who is guided by an old shamanic curandera (female healer) named Ultima. This visionary sage changes the boy’s life by introducing the boy into to the esoterica of nature and the enigmatic world of tribal ritual and the occult that stretch back to the mythical epochs of the ancient peoples of the region prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the New World. Heart of Aztlán follows another Chicano boy’s journey with his family’s move from the rural setting, previously presented in Bless Me Ultima to an urban one to highlight the working-class issues which Chicano laborers face. In his autobiographical novel Tortuga, Anaya examines the emotional development and recovery of another Chicano boy who is encased in a full body cast at a hospital for paralyzed children. In all of these novels, which follow the traditional formula of a bildungsroman, the author presents the central importance of a young male protagonist; the importance of archetypal characters such as seers, mentors, and shamanic figures; the use of cultural symbols related to Chicano culture all joined by the geographical setting of U.S. Southwest in general. The present study concludes with the view that in the midst of the turbulent 1960s and against the industrial and technological ways of an Anglo-American dominated worldview, Rudolfo Anaya presented an alternative humanizing praxis based on indigenous philosophies, a nostalgic respect for the land, and a spiritual optimism in the harmonious unity of all creatures.

Between 1820 and 1860, African Americans produced thousands of autobiographical texts, detailing the atrocities of the co-called institution of slavery experienced particularly in the deep South. With the ultimate political goal of the abolition of slavery, this new authentic genre came to be known as the 'Slave Narrative,' providing the humanistic arguments for the white Abolitionists, while displaying at large the intellectual prowess and artistry of the people of African lineage, shared indeed by all sentient beings. With a three-staged formulaic pattern, the slave narrative commences with the childhood of the narrator, detailing the gruesome experiences of the narrator both as an eyewitness to and also as the victim of slavery; moving next to the narrator's inconceivable escape from bondage towards the free-states in the north; and ultimately, concluding with the narrator's participating in and dedication to the Abolitionist Movement. To create the deepest impact in the hearts and minds of the American people, the creators of slave narratives must therefore have striking rhetorical powers and oratory skills to address the public in a series of Abolitionist conventions; and an excellent craftsmanship in the written language both to transmit the message and also to be included in American belles letters. Amongst the innumerable producers of such texts, one name stands out both as a superior writer and a historical person of monumental importance: Frederick Douglass. The present study examines the first edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), to argue that Douglass's written text has been influenced and imbued with the vernacular tradition of 'Black' sermon, both in terms of content and form. Hence, the present study begins with providing the ample characteristics of the African American sermon tradition to draw out its parallelism with Douglass's written text with the requisite selected scenes and a stylistic analysis of the text. With its grave political message against American establishment during the turbulent times of slavery, the text was obviously intended to be published to reach its most extensive audience. On ...

Richard Wright has been considered as one of the founding fathers of African American novel together with his contemporaries, viz. Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Wright wrote in a period when the influence of the deterministic philosophies of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx ran deep. Mostly classified as a black Naturalist text and a representative of the protest tradition in black literature, Wright's Native Son (1940) is the gruesome tale of a twenty-year-old African American boy, Bigger Thomas, growing up fatherless, impoverished, uneducated, and apolitical during the great depression. Bigger is, above all, enraged with the Jim Crow rules conditioning his segregated life in Chicago's Black Belt ghetto. Trying to structure a sense of self-appreciation with the white supremacist social structures surrounding him, the protagonist is doomed from the onset to a dreadful fate within the narrow confinements of his milieu. Divided into three major sections (Fear, Flight, Fate), the novel opens with a typical day in the life of Bigger, delineating his personal profile until his horrific murder of Mary Dalton, the daughter of his new wealthy white employer. Next, his evasion tactics from the authorities and the chain of events leading to his capture are narrated within a 48-hour time frame. The last section of the book spends about a month in the juridical system of American legal structure, during which Bigger is tried in a mock trial and executed in the end. Native Son was later criticized especially by Wright's fellow writers, Baldwin and Ellison, for being too harsh, and the picture of the American black man was too negative to worsen race relations. As a representative of "resistance literature" in Barbara Harlow's terms, the present study analyses the shortcomings of the text in terms of its novelistic artistry, sacrificed for the overtly political message of the author who was a communist when he wrote the novel. Wright thus scrutinizes Bigger's case and the role of society in it from a myopic Marxist point of view in favor of committing to the criteria of the Naturalist voice in literature, where the position of the writer vis-à-vis his subject matter ...

Deeply engraved within the socio-cultural imagination and political landscape of the American mind is the "Post-9/11 Era," which has been denominated so since the attacks on the Twin Towers of New York City in September 11 th , 2001. The period has marked by an increased sense of distrust towards all non-Americans residing in the United States; an intensified government effort to cope with domestic security and tight border politics; and a more belligerent approach in foreign policy overseas. Mexican-American, or Chicano, cinema is the accumulation of all filmmaking practices that initially came forth out of the essentialist or cultural-nationalist consciousness of the Chicano Movement of the 1970s. The adaptation of Rudolfo Gonzales's quasi epic poem Yo Soy Juaquin (1965) by director Luis Valdez is hailed to be the prototype of this newly emerging cultural production. Historically speaking, since the silent epoch of Hollywood, there have been significantly fewer representations of autonomous Latin American women in mainstream films. Similarly, the predominantly male occupied arena of Chicano cinema has also excluded such Latinas as speaking subjects or powerful agents to execute their will outside the norms of patriarchical culture and family structure. Since the 1970s then the only Latinas to be admitted on screen have been portrayed by Chicano filmmakers as the backbone of the family structure, either as self-sacrificing mothers, grandmothers or loyal daughters and sisters with no personal, professional, or sexual autonomy outside the normative rules of their strictly Catholic worldview. With this in mind, this study turns its focus on a pair of acclaimed and independent movies, Real Women Have Curves (2002) directed by Patricia Cardoso, and María Full of Grace (2004) directed by Joshua Marston, both of which highlight two respective young Latinas in their quests for autonomy and agency within the context trespassing symbolic and literal borders. Throughout Real Women ...

The present study focuses on the selected poetry of the Harlem Renaissance period to assert that although the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was an intense arena of socio-cultural upheavals, ideological controversies, and artistic divisions within the African-American intelligentsia, the period has quintessentially been distinguished as the fertile grounds for the culmination of contemporary African-American arts, literature and music. By referring to seminal intellectuals and poets of the period, be they in favor of their own unique folkloric roots and literary idiosyncrasies that root back in Africa, or of the white mainstream practices, long-embedded in the Western canon, the present study seeks to analyze the prolific influence of this equivocal phenomenon in African-American history. In order to trace such line of argument, the study initially foregrounds the key cultural terms of double-consciousness, the veil image, and the talented-tenth concept devised by the renowned intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, and poet Paul Dunbar's image of the mask; and then discusses these concepts through a reading of a selection of poems produced in that era. The selection of poems encompasses a variety of artists to analyze the two opposing attitudes of African-American stance in creating art. While one camp, holds firmly on the African heritage and roots to structure a unique and authentic "Black" identity separate from Western tradition; the other camp believes in the "Art for Art's Sake" motto, to exclude politics and ideologies from their artistic craft.

In the light of trauma studies, the present study examines three distinct contemporary texts of Chicana writing, which utilize folkloric, mythological, spiritual, oral and performance rituals to heal wounded female bodies and traumatic identities of rupture. The common denominator in these texts is the recurrent female prototype who is maimed psychologically and/or somatically due to the trauma caused by their liminal identity on the literal and metaphorical terrain that lies between Mexico and the United States of America, through an ongoing history of colonization, racism, sexism and cultural genocide. In the end though, these texts offer transformative attempts of curing the diseased individual, who initially remembers, and then reconstructs and finally works through her traumatic experiences, to create an invigorating perspective of healing, both at the individual and societal levels. By examining Ana Castillo's So Far From God (1993), Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street (1983), the present study offers a history of the folkloric, oral and written strategies and recipes of remedies which these writers utilize as an act of liberating the female agency from her traumatic state, eventually offering alternative means towards wholeness. The transformative act of healing then becomes indistinguishable from a new refiguration of the borders that separate the hitherto normative paradigms of race, gender, history, language, body, and even the textual genre itself, seeking an answer to the vexing question: To what extend does the individual have the agency of narrating and acting his or her will to reimagine liberatory tactics so as to transform the haunting memories into a liberatory vision of healing?

Sleeping and dreaming are very important part of human life. According to Sigmund Freud human dreams are created by unconscious mind and the thoughts which are suppressed daily may come up during this state. Furthermore desires, wishes or fears can be occurred during the state of one's sleep. As in dreams, the trace of unconscious also can be viewed in the art, particularly in Surrealism. Surrealism was influenced by theories of Freud and according to the Surrealists unconsciousness was the way to reach the imagination. Because they were inspired by the Freud's ideas, images and symbols that they used in their art can be read by Freudian context.

Jacques Lacan is one of the interesting French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist of 20th century. According to Jacques Lacan reflection in the mirror is something through which an infant creates the “I” or ego in the mirror stage. The infant’s self, before this phase, isn’t divided however after this, it is divided to “I” and “Ideal I”, illusionary image in the mirror. The infant in this way goes from the Real (before the mirror stage) to the Imaginary (in the mirror stage) and then to the Symbolic (after mirror stage). Adults use mirrors as a prove of their existence and throughout “Ideal I” they try to complete themselves which will lead to their ideal future. On the contrary vampires don’t have a reflection in the mirror. According to
Slavok Zizek vampires don’t need to prove their existence because they step back from the Symbolic to the Real. This is why they behave as an infant only driven by his or her needs. In addition, compared to humans, the vampires can’t achieve the Symbolic and that’s why they
act as they want and can transform their shapes.

Sovyet Edebiyatında “Köy Nesri”, Rus Beşeri Ansiklopedik Sözlüğü’ne («Российский гуманитарный энциклопедический словарь») göre geniş anlamda 1960-1980’li yılları kapsayan, 20. yüzyılın köy hayatının dramatik gelişimini inceleyen, ve rus geleneğini, insan ahlakını, din konuları, insan ile doğa arasındaki bağı konu alan nesir şeklinde yazılan eserleri kapsayan dönemdir. Ancak en önemli eserlerin bulunduğu dönem daha önce belirtilen dönem olsa da, öncesinde de kolhoz («колхоз», kollektif tarımcılık) yaşamını konu alan eserler de bulunmaktadır. “Köy Nesri” yazarların amaçları, 1920-1950’li yıllarda Sovyet perspektifinden gösterilen köy yaşamını, köyde yaşamışların gözünden ve gerçekleri olduğu gibi göstermektedir.