Graduation Year
2018
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
English
Major Professor
Gary L. Lemons, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Ylce Irizarry, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Quynh Nhu Le, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D.
Keywords
autocritography, feminism, identity, multicultural, womanism
Abstract
Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds is an autocritographical journey that places a group of U.S. literary texts into critically conscious dialogue with the “text” of my life. As a white, American, middle-class, cishetero, able-bodied man, I historicize, contextualize, analyze, and deconstruct the process by which my ten years of graduate academic studies at the University of South Florida fostered my ongoing awakening to critical consciousness—the personal and political evolution Paolo Freire terms “conscientization.” I present the analytical insights I realized about landmark feminist and womanist texts I encountered during my graduate studies that resonate with the prominent literary works and events from my youth. By identifying personal contexts and identity-aware frameworks for how I read these influential texts in my past, I give concrete examples of how hegemonic systems of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability operate within such writing. I also demonstrate how utilizing feminist and womanist theoretical lenses allows a scholar to re-vision and recover problematic texts. Across all my autocritographical travels, I imagine my own life experiences, as well as the positionality of my selected texts’ protagonists, in terms of the archetype of the shaman—a liminal, border-crossing person who walks between worlds to function in the capacity as a messenger, intermediary, and balance-bringing healer.
Scholar Commons Citation
Neumeister, Scott, "Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization" (2018). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/7553
