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Female Beauty in Young Adult Literature: Male gaze in Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap and John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines
Title
Female Beauty in Young Adult Literature: Male gaze in Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap and John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines.
Creator
Council, Nicole, Bradford, Adam C., Florida Atlantic University, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Department of English
Abstract/Description
Standards of female beauty have long been a source of debate within Western society. Determining who dictates these standards of beauty and how these standards inform individual value seemingly become more and more determined by the individuals themselves, yet there remains a high value placed on white, thin and cisgender females. This standard, although increasingly challenged remains the default for beauty in our society and within our literary culture. This thesis works to expose two...
Show moreStandards of female beauty have long been a source of debate within Western society. Determining who dictates these standards of beauty and how these standards inform individual value seemingly become more and more determined by the individuals themselves, yet there remains a high value placed on white, thin and cisgender females. This standard, although increasingly challenged remains the default for beauty in our society and within our literary culture. This thesis works to expose two modern Young Adult texts, John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines and Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap, for the ways in which they continue to reinforce these standards of beauty in women. While presenting challenges to these stereotypes, the standards set out in these texts ultimately portray women as defined and controlled by men.
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Date Issued
2018
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00005967
Subject Headings
Young adult literature, Feminine beauty (Aesthetics) in literature, Gaze
Format
Document (PDF)
Naples: The mother city
Title
Naples: The mother city.
Creator
Giannini, Natalia Rita., Florida Atlantic University, Tamburri, Anthony J., Brennan, Teresa
Abstract/Description
Suspended in the corporeality of the baroque, with its emphasis on cycles and simultaneity, rather than linearity, Naples epitomizes the mother space that has been objectified and appropriated by male subjectivity and its alienating rationality, as articulated by the homogenizing discourse of psychoanalysis. This paradigmatic metropolis which actualizes its ancient Greek signification as a "mother-city"---Naples was originally named after the Homeric siren, Parthenope, and associated...
Show moreSuspended in the corporeality of the baroque, with its emphasis on cycles and simultaneity, rather than linearity, Naples epitomizes the mother space that has been objectified and appropriated by male subjectivity and its alienating rationality, as articulated by the homogenizing discourse of psychoanalysis. This paradigmatic metropolis which actualizes its ancient Greek signification as a "mother-city"---Naples was originally named after the Homeric siren, Parthenope, and associated throughout history with various feminine incarnations (the Cumaean sibyl, the Madonna)---asserts a form of reason that transcends the imposition of the Lacanian signification of the phallus and its dichotomizing paradigm of subjectivity. In Anna Maria Ortese's Il mare non bagna Napoli (1953), the phallus is revealed as a void, which subverts not only the "enlightened" knowledge of the phallus, but the debasing obliteration of the feminine as the "unsayable." In Naples, the mother signifies through the negativity, nothingness, and absence emblematic of the womb. Literally "debellied" by the modernizing impetus of a unified Italy after the cholera epidemic of 1884, Parthenope embodies a feminine grotesque aesthetic, as articulated by Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover (1992), in which the preeminence of bodily processes effects a critical interruption of Naples's transition to the "Enlightenment." The womb rejects the univocality of the phallus and arguably signifies through nourishment, which, unlike the libido, affirms a subject that emerges out of a counter-paradigmatic continuity with the mother, who can simultaneously be and endow others with being. The mother prevents the subject from imposing an artificial self-sufficiency, as evinced in Jean-Paul Sartre's Spaesamento: Napoli e Capri (2000), where the protagonist debases the maternal nourishment prevalent in Naples in order to empty it of its life-giving power. In turn, by affirming a dialectic that emerges out of the maternal body, Naples bypasses the civilizatory claims of repression and its dualistic mechanization of the psyche in terms of the conscious and the unconscious, and thereby fulfills the all-encompassing realm of the fantastical, which, as in Ortese's Il Monaciello di Napoli (1940), attains its validity through a paradoxically creative and destructive maternal reason that is both a sign of excess and containment.
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Date Issued
2003
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/12024
Subject Headings
Sex symbolism, Naples (Italy)--In literature, Psychoanalysis and literature, Femininity in literature
Format
Document (PDF)
domestic Sybil: Feminist concerns in P. L. Travers's "Mary Poppins" and "Mary Poppins Comes Back"
Title
The domestic Sybil: Feminist concerns in P. L. Travers's "Mary Poppins" and "Mary Poppins Comes Back".
Creator
Revtai, Donna M., Florida Atlantic University, Collins, Robert A.
Abstract/Description
Certain elements in P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins (1934) and Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935) depict concerns that feminist critics deem important, such as mother figures, females as artists, women who exert power or lack it, female self-concepts, matrilineal connections and mother/child relationships. Travers sometimes treats these subjects ambiguously or ambivalently, but her attention to them indicates a riveting interest at the time. Her creative process whereby she projected childhood...
Show moreCertain elements in P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins (1934) and Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935) depict concerns that feminist critics deem important, such as mother figures, females as artists, women who exert power or lack it, female self-concepts, matrilineal connections and mother/child relationships. Travers sometimes treats these subjects ambiguously or ambivalently, but her attention to them indicates a riveting interest at the time. Her creative process whereby she projected childhood fantasies onto her ideal nanny, Mary Poppins, with whom she identified herself and others, relates to a feminine psychology. Travers's cyclic and web-like plots may link her to feminist aesthetics as currently being explored.
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Date Issued
1997
PURL
http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/15512
Subject Headings
Travers, P L--(Pamela L),--1906---Criticism and interpretation, Travers, P L--(Pamela L),--1906---Mary Poppins, Domestics in literature, Femininity in literature
Format
Document (PDF)