Literature in English, North America Commons^™

The Fall Of The House Of Usher, And The Rise Of The Civil War, Richard E. Campbell Ii

2022 Symposium

Poe may have died before the Civil War began, but he was close to the politics of his time. He was also an astute observer of people. His writings often explore deep aspects of the human condition. Using his in depth understanding of people and his close proximity and personal interest it would make sense that he could see how the wheels were turning. In the end it is possible that Poe would predict and hide clues of his observations within this writings, specifically The Fall of the House of Usher.

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines ...

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central ...

Review Of: Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Small Histories During World War Ii, Letter Writing, And Family History Methodology—Suzanne Kesler Rumsey, G.C. Waldrep

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Suzanne Kesler Rumsey’s Blessed Are the Peacemakers is, on the surface, the reconstructed story of the author’s paternal grandparents during World War II. The saga of Benjamin and Miriam Kesler, members of the Dunkard Brethren Church in northern Indiana, in and out of the Civilian Public Service (CPS), is one that will be familiar to most readers of twentieth-century North American Anabaptist history: a young husband called into CPS service as a conscientious objector, the young wife he left behind. What makes it richer is the trove of letters back and forth between the young couple that the ...

Review Of: Vignettes 2020: Anabaptist Women Writers—Sheila Petre And Gabriella Showalter, J.P. Miller

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Vignettes, compiled and edited by Sheila Petre and Gabriella Showalter, is a fascinating text. It is a book that was written by, and is intended for, Anabaptist women writers. The book is a collection of articles that profile around 400 Anabaptist women writers from more than 15 countries. The book provides many resources for aspiring writers; it recommends books on writing, such as The Elements of Style, and contains a directory of all the women profiled in this book. [First paragraph.]

Symposium Review: The Right Church: From A Seeker To A Finder—Peter Hoover, Sheila Petre, Osiah Horst

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

[...] Across 264 compelling pages of earnest semi-autobiographical work, Hoover sketches a poignant picture of many disintegrating organizations among which move small vibrant flames of living hope. He tells the story of a young man seeking for answers about Christianity, and the religious entities within it. He intersperses his narrative with glorious scripture passages and hymns, and includes wisdom borrowed from his uninhibited correspondence with the leaders of many different Anabaptist groups. The main character is part of “only a small group—a very small and shrinking group—of Old Order Mennonites trying to keep the ‘songs of Zion’ alive with ...

Engl 110: College Writing (Comedy, Satire, & Persuasion), Scott R. Kapuscinski

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus provides a themed approach to Freshman composition. Students are tasked with composing three essays in three distinct styles. Student engagement is high through the use of student-sourced primary sources (funny videos from YouTube, etc.) and the emphasis on thesis building and critical thinking.

Section 1: Comedy & the thesis-based essay

Section 2: Satire & writing to persuade

Section 3: Satire in Art & independent research

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture trivializes sexual ...

Master's Portfolio, Jennifer Cousino

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

I was a teacher at a high school in the Cabrini-Green complex in Chicago in the 1990s when the buildings were starting to be emptied. I saw firsthand the beginnings of the removal of nearly 15,000 people from their homes when the first building came down in 1995, three years after the first Candyman film. I wrote this academic paper as part of a graduate seminar with Dr. Piya Pal-Lapinski - Victorian Monsters: Fiction and Film 1837 to 2021 at Bowling Green State University in the United States. My paper examines the 2021 film and the sociopolitical and historical context ...

The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard

Doctoral Dissertations

The Burdens of Responsibility traces the emergence of moral responsibility as both a concept and problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, philosophy, domestic manuals, newspaper archives – I show how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Although ethicists today take this distinction for granted, it was an emergent and problematic space in the nineteenth-century United States, brought into being by historical forces, including the rise of market capitalism, abolition, changing women’s roles, and increasing concern ...

Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and ...

The Appalachian Nostos: Pastoralism And Returning Home In Appalachian Poetry, Henry David Thoreau Kilbourne

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, David Mazella, Claude Willan, David Bishop, Elizabeth Stravoski, Walter Barta, Max James

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of women’s participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory ...

“The Un/Touchables:” Quest For Citizenship In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things And Indra Sinha’S Animal’S People, Mahreen Shahzadi

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper argues that Ammu and Velutha, in The God of Small Things and Animal in Animal’s People are not seen as productive citizens of the nation because of their marginalization, which results in their status as second-class citizens. However, Ammu, Velutha, and Animal resist second-class status by challenging the heteropatriarchal nation, rejecting its limited definition of gender, caste, sexuality, and citizenship.

Challenging White Fragility Through Black Feminist Political Poetry, Langley Leverett

Honors Theses

Due to overwhelming patriarchal hegemonies that women – white women, rich women, young women, and cis women – continue to uphold, feminism struggles to serve all women justly. To combat this negligence in feminism’s fourth-wave movement, I will use this thesis to highlight ways that Black feminist poets have not only shaped feminist theory through their own contributions, but also have prolonged and saved the livelihood of both gender and racial equality. With a strong emphasis on Intersectional Feminism, I will explore the ways in which women can be united against tokenistic power, beginning with the inspiration from three voices: Gwendolyn ...

Finding Their Chrysanthemum: Linguistic Representation In Children's Literature, Marielena Zajac

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Children in America today struggle with finding themselves in the books they read due to societal expectations. From an early age, children are dictated on the correct way to speak and write in “American,” which can leave children and their home languages feeling unseen and dismissed. To help further the conversation and promotion of linguistic diversity in American society, this capstone analyzes dialectal representation in children’s books, with a heavy focus on attitudinal linguistic principles rather than prescriptive mechanics. The secondary research explores current literature and resources that discuss literacy acquisition in adolescents, trends in dialects in America, and ...

“Strumpet,” “Huswife,” “Whore”: Centering Othello’S Bianca, Phoebe Merten

English (MA) Theses

Is Bianca a sex worker? What meanings change if she is or isn’t? Not enough artistic or critical attention has been paid the character. It seems likely that the initial lack of attention stemmed from Bianca’s status as a purported sex worker, as though this makes her somehow categorically different from the other women in the play, or inherently less interesting. There has in the past decade or so been a marked increase in scholarship on sex work, but this too largely skims over Bianca, likely because of the ambiguity surrounding her profession.

In my introduction I go ...

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

A Pandemic Of Greed And A Disease Of Poverty In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque Of The Red Death", Benjamin Herrick

Master's Theses

The breakers tripped. Again. The breakers, a mandatory halt to trading on the floor of the stock exchange in response to the S&P falling more than 7% from the previous close. This was instituted after the Crash of 1987 to calm the markets before trading is allowed to resume. They are supposed to mitigate a drastic crash. They have only ever triggered once before, in 1997. Not for the tech bubble. Not even in the crash of 2008. All trading stops for fifteen minutes when the Level One breaker trips. If it drops further in the same day, the Level Two breaker trips. Fortunately, a Level Two breaker has never tripped. However, this was the fourth time the Level One breakers tripped since the beginning of March alone. Clients panic was palpable. What little money some of them had was quickly evaporating.

The drive home felt almost apocalyptic; the streets barren. State and local governments mandated shutdowns, so aside from police cars aggressively patrolling the streets, the drive was more reminiscent of a drive home at 3AM after a night shift than a bright and sunny afternoon. What would normally be a quick stop to the grocery store to pick up a few staples became an excursion that lasted several hours with no guarantee you would come home with what you needed. The shelves in ...

Authors As Figures, Functions, And Persons: Theories On Intention, Tyler M. Preston

Honors Theses

My honors thesis is an exercise in which I approach a singular work with three different theories on authorial intent and analyze how the author figure exists along with the work through the lens of each theory. After providing background for the discourse on authorial intention, I explore the theories of Michel Foucault, Alexander Nehamas, and Reed Way Dasenbrock and then demonstrate what each theory looks like in practice by applying each theory to Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior. I consider how the different theories fit together, where they differ, and how practical they are as standards ...