American Literature Commons^™

Y = Mx + B(Eauty), Chris Dollard

Honors Projects

A collection of twenty poems that are thematically concerned with family dynamics and history, childhood, relationships, addiction and rehabilitation, wanderlust, mortality, and the concepts of ugliness and beauty. These motifs and themes are framed by a speaker who is coming of age in contemporary America. While largely informed by the free verse narrative, this collection attempts to form a synthesis of contemporary American poetic styles.

Genre, Database, And The Anatomy Of The Digital Archive, Elizabeth J. Vincelette

English Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to define shared characteristics of literary digital archives, specifically to explore how conceptual and structural qualities of such archives express generic qualities. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars resort to metaphors, and this study offers the metaphor of anatomy as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. The definition of the anatomy genre draws from Northrop Frye's in Anatomy of Criticism, in which Frye describes how anatomies are characterized by proliferating lists, the mixing of prose and non-prose forms, and self-reflexivity--under the guise of knowledge …

Review: Also Known As Harper, Jennifer Green

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the middle grade novel "Also Known as Harper," by Ann Haywood Leal.

Car Trouble And Other Stories, Adam R. Charpentier

Honors Projects

A collection of four short stories which examine the connection between awareness and emotional, psychological, and geographical identity. "Car Trouble" is a first person narrative of a hit & run accident and the events that follow. "Ten More Minutes" follows the recollections of a narrator detailing his admittance into and release from a mental hospital. The protagonist of "Islander" recounts his investigations of his lodgings on Tinian, an island far removed from his past life. "Little Black Dress" chronicles the impact the protagonist's lifestyle choices make on his marriage.

Davis, Anne Pence, 1901-1982 (Sc 2213), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2213. Letter, 15 December 1975, from Anne Pence Davis to Dorothy Edwards Townsend responding to her request for biographical material, probably for inclusion in Kentucky in American Letters, vol. III, 1913-1975. Includes two news clippings about Davis' novel The Top Hand of Lone Tree Ranch.

Mass-Marketing "Beauty": How A Feminist Heroine Became An Insipid Disney Princess, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

Originally published in Beyond Adaptation. Ed. Phyllis Frus & Christy A. Williams. McFarland, 2010

Mass-Marketing "Beauty": How a Feminist Heroine Became an Insipid Disney Princess by Marc DiPaolo

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Review Of: Owning Up: Privacy, Property, And Belonging In U.S. Women's Life Writing. By Katherine Adams., Laura Laffrado

English Faculty and Staff Publications

In Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing, Katherine Adams sets out to explore “the consequences of imagining human existence in terms of two antagonistic and simultaneous conditions—we are owned, we are not owned— and of incessantly rehearsing the drama of passage between them” (p. 203). Adams is particularly concerned with “how such representations, and the fantasy they project of self-(non)-possession—that is, of self-possession without self-alienation—intersect with questions about democratic freedom and nationhood” (p. 203). Locating her discussion in the culturally unstable period of 1840–90, Adams moves from the antebellum context of romantic nationalism to the …

Crabtree, Julie Anne, B. 1988 (Fa 483), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid and full text (click on "Additional Files" below) for Folklife Archives Project 483. Folklore material classified by genre. Information collected by Julie Anne Crabtree related to folklore genres for a folk studies class at Western Kentucky University.

Waggener, Tom (Fa 491), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 491. Taped interviews conducted by Tom Waggener about the "Giles House." Includes transcriptions, photographs, and typescripts.

Johnston, Annie Fellows, 1863-1931 (Sc 2163), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and full text of letters (click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2163. Letters of Annie Fellows Johnston to Ruth Clement in Tokyo, Japan. Johnston responds to Clement's praise of "The Little Colonel" and her gift of a Japanese book, and sends Clement a copy of her story "The Three Weavers."

Watkins, Dianne (Winkler), B. 1941 (Sc 2141), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2141. Oral interviews done with Appalachian writer Verna Mae Slone in which she discusses her life, her family, and her writing. Slone was a dollmaker, quilter, and quintessential storyteller.

Mama's Boy, Jamie T. Berger

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

"Mama's Boy" is a book of fiction and nonfiction by Jamie Berger. It deals with mothers and sons and feminism and pornography and poker and love and New York and San Francisco and Western Massachusetts.

(Un)Natural Bodies, Endangered Species, And Embodied Others In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake, Marcy Galbreath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The developing knowledge of life sciences is at the crux of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as she examines human promise gone awry in a near-future dystopia. This thesis examines aspects of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminism in the novel's scientific, cultural, and environmental projections. Through the trope of extinction, Atwood's text foregrounds the effects of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to the natural world, and engenders an analysis of human identity through its biological and cultural aspects. Extinction thus serves as a metaphor for both human development and human excesses, redefining the idea of human within the context of …

Cultural Reclamations In Helena Viramontes’ “The Moths”, Ashley Denney

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Structures Of Urban Poverty In Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue, Reginald B. Dyck

Reginald B Dyck

No abstract provided.

Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives, Najwa Heather Al-Tabaa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis interrogates the postmodern view of popular culture as being banal and questions Theodore Adorno's view of postmodern consumer culture as ultimately anti- human(istic). My re-reading of postmodern popular culture finds that there is potential for meaningful human interaction through popular culture. My re-reading asserts that popular culture is capable of being a vehicle for solidarity. In my analysis I locate a postmodern paradigm shift in which human solidarity becomes a necessary consideration and focus of postmodern narratives and art forms. I term this shift "post-postmodernism" which is marked by a focus on solidarity.1 While the shift to the …

Bedtime Stories : How To Hope And Cope With The American Dream, Sabrina Jones

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

A multi-genre work combining New Journalism and literary analysis. The narrator (played by ―Girl in the bedtime stories) presents a critical essay exploring destabilized truths and dangers in an American dream that turns modern man into a machine. The goal is to show how the dream has evolved from the original Puritan dream set out by early American settlers/writers to the Postmodern vision of success (or failure) we read about today and what kind of effect this dream has on the average scholar. The thesis is broken up by reflections on her learning imbedded in dialogue with her always opinionated …

Metaphysics And The Charge Of Misanthropy : Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “Circles” As A Cipher For Understanding The Connection Between Robinson Jeffers And Herman Melville, Hunter Stark

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Herman Melville’s and Robinson Jeffers’s metaphysical thoughts reflect Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of looking towards Nature for discovery; all three writers’ observations of Nature influence how they see humanity’s place in existence. Both Melville and Jeffers observe Nature decentralizing humanity, which distinguishes their views from Emerson’s. Where Jeffers’s verse sternly voices this message, openly criticizing the anthropocentric viewpoint, Melville utilizes humor, subtly confronting the anthropocentric proponent and downplaying humanity’s power. Jeffers garners the label of misanthrope, whereas Melville’s metaphysical realm in Moby-Dick largely escapes this charge with the masking quality of his humor. Comparing both writers’ texts to an Emersonian …

Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough To Tell, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

When Ellen Douglas started writing, she drew inspiration from the way William Faulkner and other southern writers whom she admired, like Eudora Welty, depicted southern places. Douglas planted all of her fiction firmly in the region of Mississippi that she knew best; her Homochitto is modeled of Natchez, where she was born, and her Philippi on Greenville, where she lived with her husband and their children. But Douglas reacted against the gothic and mythic elements in Faulkner's work and used as her first literary models the great nineteenth-century realists: Dostoevsky, Flaubert, James, and Tolstoy. She admired Eudora Welty, but found …

The Obama Effect On American Discourse About Racial Identity: Dreams From My Father (And Mother), Barack Obama's Search For Self, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Joseph Curl reported that the Obama organization "would not answer when asked why the biracial candidate calls himself black," replying only that the question didn't "seem especially topical." Biracial ancestry and racial identity are still sensitive subjects in the United States, not suitable for sound bites. But they are perfect topics for the introspective musings of an autobiography, and Barack Obama must have thought he had answered this question in depth in Dreams from My Father (1995). In his introduction, Obama hesitates to use the term "autobiography" because it connotes, he says, "a certain closure"; …