Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

Denethor’S Descent Into Hell, Craig Boyd

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

One character in Tolkien’s Legendarium stands out as one of the more morally sad and complicated individuals: Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. Although he tries to defend the kingdom he cares for, his own significant moral weaknesses subvert even the best of his intentions. His despair, provoked by the death of his favorite son—and the apparent death of his other son—sends him into a spiral of self-destructive harm from which there is no return. What accounts for this are three factors. First, his self-imposed isolation from others cuts him off from the necessary fellowship that could sustain his character; his …

Infernal Landscape In Jacob’S Ladder (1990) In Light Of Carl G. Jung’S Theory Of Individuation, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Carl G. Jung’s conception of the human psyche as an inner realm that gives access to profound, numinous experiences inspired many artists and popular culture authors to portray heaven and hell as symbolic expressions of the opposite forces within the human psyche rather than cosmological or supernatural regions. In my paper, I will concentrate on how the Hollywood film Jacob’s Ladder (1990) directed by Adrian Lyne, by portraying the main character’s descent into a deathbed vision depicted as hellish reality, reflects Jung’s theory of individuation, a process of self-realization that aims at reconciling various elements of the psyche and achieving …

The Underworld As The Heroine’S Journey Home: Marvel, Xena, And Mythic Reimaginings, Valerie Estelle Frankel

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Hell is traditionally a place of torment, where the young heroine, like Persephone or Eurydice, is kidnapped by the patriarchy, leaving others to rescue her. The last few decades, however, have offered a model closer to Sumerian Inanna, in which the heroine is enlightened by hell or even conquers it. Angela, Queen of Hel: Journey to the Funderworld by Marguerite Bennett (2016) gives its heroine this path. Winning back her beloved, Angela, sister of Thor and Loki, becomes queen of the underworld but then prefers to bring Sera back to earth in a flip on Eurydice. The Xena episode “Fallen …

Feasting At The Threshold: Transubstantiation, Queer Desire, And Homonationalism In Diane Duane’S The Tale Of The Five, Taylor Driggers

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Diane Duane’s ongoing pulp fantasy series The Tale of the Five (1979- ) is set in a world marked by constant bodily transgressions and surprises, where a human and dragon can occupy the same body and become lovers and a one-night stand can bring one face-to-face with God. This essay will argue that Duane’s series articulates eroticism in a manner comparable to Linn Marie Tonstad’s (2016) queer re-visioning of transubstantiation and bodily and spiritual transformation through the Eucharist. Acts of eating and drinking serve to highlight how characters’ pansexual, polyamorous relations with each other and the love of the Goddess …

Hell On His Mind: Dean Winchester’S Journey To Hell And Back, Anna Caterino

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Season three of Supernatural (2005-2020) closes with a shot of Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) in Hell. The place has no discernible features and resembles neither the long waiting line nor the gothic castle of later seasons. The few elements that do characterize it, however, make it look like a brain, the labyrinth of ropes reminiscent of neurons. This association introduces Hell as a place that exists first and foremost in Dean’s dead. The lack of establishing shots and the abstract terms used to discuss Hell, damnation, and Dean’s experience further support this claim, working in its favor. After all, the …

The Righteousness Of The Damned In Jeffrey Konvitz’S The Sentinel, Raymond G. Falgui

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

The paper will examine the nature of the damned in Jeffrey Konvitz’s 1970s pulp horror novel The Sentinel by using a framework utilized by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, wherein damnation involves a species of spiritual blindness that masquerades as righteousness and shields the damned (for a time) from an awareness of their ultimate condition. Specifically, the paper will provide a character analysis of the co-protagonist Michael, arguably one of Konvitz’s more complex literary creations, and the role he plays in briefly elevating a generic genre-contrived plot into the realm of true spiritual horror. While making such a …

Welcome And Announcements, Mythsoc Stewards

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Welcome and Announcements

Join us for a screening of the Welcome and Announcements video, and have a cup of coffee before we get started!

Resistance Narratives: Storytelling Of Transnational Insurgencies In 1960-70s Us And Mexico, Tania Libertad Balderas

English Language and Literature ETDs

Resistance Narratives: Storytelling of Transnational Insurgencies in 1960-70s US and Mexico emphasizes how the narratives from the Mexican Insurgency, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the leftist faction of the Chicana/o Movement in the 1960s and 1970s articulate intersecting notions of resistance, liberation, and transnational solidarity. The comparative analysis of the testimonial novel Las mujeres del alba (2019) by Chihuahuan novelist Carlos Montemayor, the autobiographies Lakota Woman (1991) and Ohitika Woman (1993) by Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta writer and AIM militant Mary Brave Bird (formerly Crow Dog), and the memoirs and plays by the San Diego-based group Teatro de las Chicanas, collected …

The Texture Of Everyday Life: Carceral Realism And Abolitionist Speculation, Shea Hennum

English Theses and Dissertations

Exploring the ways in which prisons shape the subjectivity of free-world thinkers, and the ways that subjectivity is expressed in literary texts, this dissertation develops the concept of carceral realism: a cognitive and literary mode that represents prisons and police as the only possible response to social disorder. As this dissertation illustrates, this form of consciousness is experienced as racial paranoia, and it is expressed literary texts, which reflect and help to reify it. Through this process of cultural reification, carceral realism increasingly insists on itself as the only possible mode of thinking. As I argue, however, carceral realism actually …

Adam Binder Series (White Trash Warlock, Trailer Park Trickster, & Deadbeat Druid) By David R. Slayton, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

Book review of the Adam Binder Series by David R. Slayton. Book review by Phillip Fitzsimmons.

Finding The Why: Trauma's Origins And Effects In Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Hope Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the effects of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, on its readers and the public discourse surrounding the central issue of systemic racism and incest. The central focus of the analysis is trauma in the novel: how Morrison captures that trauma in writing, how the reader encounters and interprets that trauma, and the effects of that trauma on the narrative and the reader. To construct this argument, I apply the lenses of reader response criticism, psychoanalysis, and trauma studies to the novel.

Morrison expressed concern that readers would miss the crucial message of why the …

Transcorporeal Habitus: Adapting Sociological Embodiment To The Self-Conscious Anthropocene, Trevor Bleick

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The knowledge that humans have become a geological force necessitates a reimagining of what it means to be human. This thesis explores the ways in which bodies (both human and nonhuman) are represented within the self-conscious Anthropocene. This tripartite analysis, synthesized in the term ‘transcorporeal habitus,’ presents a framework through which we can better understand the ways bodies are entangled within a greater ecosystem. By drawing on the works of scholars in the fields of sociology, ecocriticism, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) this thesis provides the groundwork for reimaging humanness in a period of immense change. Pierre Bourdieu and Stacy …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

The Impact Of Slavery And Colonialism On The Black Consciousness: Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, The Confessions Of Nat Turner, And Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Mariam Badawi

Theses and Dissertations

According to the German author, essayist, and empirical psychologist Karl Philipp Moritz, to be able to analyze someone psychologically, we have to be able to analyze ourselves as one would know oneself better than one would know anyone else. Therefore, he proposed the study of autobiographies to be able to delve into a writer's "innermost soul"; through their knowledge of themselves" (qtd. in Schlumbohm 32). Moreover, "the psychological effect that the ideology of white supremacy and European imperialism, in the form of slavery and colonialism, has had on Africa and her people has never been fully addressed and understood" (Nobles …

“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson

Criticism

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

Trees And Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, And The Logan Elm, Mark Alan Mattes

Criticism

Settler accounts of the Cayuga Native American Soyeghtowa (Logan), such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, interpret his famous mourning speech, “Logan’s Lament,” as the words of a melancholic, noble savage and vanishing Indian. This essay decolonizes settler accounts of Logan’s words and deeds such as Jefferson’s book by considering Indigenous relationships to a once-living memorial on Shawnee land in central Ohio, the Logan Elm, which nineteenth-century settlers apocryphally identified as the site of Logan’s speech. Drawing on scholarly work on Indigenous writing and historical media by Native American and settler intellectuals, as well as local …

The Politics & Poetics Of Audience Creation In Contemporary Epistolary Memoir, Sarah M. Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy as works of life writing that leverage the epistolary form to engage their direct maternal addressees and audiences beyond them in revision and reconstruction of identity. Secondary audiences are considered in light of Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics,” and the social affordances of the epistolary form and self-constructive affordances of life writing are analyzed in tandem as a hybrid epistolary memoir form. Specifically, this project explores how the epistolary memoir form affords Vuong and Laymon opportunities for the process of personal, relational, and communal identity construction, …

Cultic Studies Cultivate Libertory Language, Todd Heckathorn

University Honors Theses

Coercive abuse at its most extreme manifests in cultic groups. These groups abuse their members using the same tactics that a domestic abuser or totalitarian government would to make their victims completely dependent on and subservient to them. Cultic studies investigate these tactics to define cults, coercive control, thought reform, indoctrination, and group psychological abuse behaviors. This fairly recent area of study has significant overlap with abolition feminist studies, which compare interpersonal and systemic abuse to liberate oppressed Americans, such as Black and Indigenous people, queer and disabled people, and women. This thesis combines cultic studies and abolition feminist studies …

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …