Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Reid, Amy

Area of Concentration

Humanities

Abstract

This thesis examines literary and filmic representations of Louisiana in an effort to explore the implications of the position that Louisiana occupies the national American imagination, as well as how masculine identities are constructed in relation to Louisiana’s cultural and physical environment. In order to understand how Louisiana is represented across literature and popular culture in recent history, I analyze three novels, a film, and a television show, all of which were created between the 1960s and the present. Chapter One explores black masculinity and methods of resistance in the context of rural Jim Crow Louisiana in Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men (1983) and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). Chapter Two examines representations of white hegemonic masculinity in rural southern Louisiana and New Orleans in The Big Easy (1986) and the HBO series True Detective (2012). Chapter Three discusses the carnivalesque representation of 1960s New Orleans and how such an atmosphere facilitates the subversion of hegemonic masculinity in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). My analysis of these narratives that take place in the same region of southern Louisiana reveals that due to the area’s distinct history and cultural traditions, Louisiana is a battleground where the myth of hegemonic masculinity embodied by white, heterosexual southern male characters is reappropriated, reinforced, rejected, and redefined.

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