Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Literature in English, North America Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

3,787 Full-Text Articles 2,973 Authors 3,991,069 Downloads 228 Institutions

All Articles in Literature in English, North America

Faceted Search

3,787 full-text articles. Page 1 of 114.

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner 2024 Whittier College

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …


Standing On The Front Porch Of To Kill A Mockingbird, Anna McLain 2024 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Standing On The Front Porch Of To Kill A Mockingbird, Anna Mclain

Honors Theses

This thesis is an examination of the front porch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. After providing background on the practical functions of the front porch in the South, I argue that this space serves as a synthesis between perception and reality in Lee’s novel. My thesis is divided into three sections that each explore different characters on the front porch: Boo Radley, Southern women, and Scout. Analyzing specific scenes with these characters on the front porch, I consider how the space exposes various tensions in the novel and highlights Lee’s larger themes.


Censorship Of Lgbtq+ Books: Causes And Consequences, Merrick Glass 2024 Bowling Green State University

Censorship Of Lgbtq+ Books: Causes And Consequences, Merrick Glass

Honors Projects

Censorship in the United States of America has accelerated over the past four years. LGBTQ+ books are specifically being targeted and banned within high school classrooms. Banned books are nothing new--court cases today are influenced by Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) plurality decision on censorship. Students and professionals alike have power in their rights and voices. In the framework of bell hooks, the classroom can be perceived as a site of resistance in order to take power back into students' hands. Without a diversity of books, students will lack cognitive development and community.


“A New Era Of Black Thought”: Revisiting Gil Scott-Heron And The Hbcu Protest Novel, Magana J. Kabugi 2024 Fisk University

“A New Era Of Black Thought”: Revisiting Gil Scott-Heron And The Hbcu Protest Novel, Magana J. Kabugi

The Vermont Connection

In 1972, spoken-word artist and poet Gil Scott-Heron published his second novel, controversially titled The Nigger Factory. As the student arm of the Civil Rights Movement started to shift its intellectual concerns from integration to questions of Black Power and self-determination, Scott-Heron’s novel burst onto the literary scene like a stick of dynamite. Literary critics and newspapers didn’t quite know what to make of the novel, which focused on a student government president and a fringe opposition group both vying for control over a student protest at a fictional historically Black college. Raw, direct, and full of rage, the book …


Trauma Is A Wound: Demonstrating The Use Of Character Analysis To Practice Clinical Analysis, Madisyn Beare 2024 Bowling Green State University

Trauma Is A Wound: Demonstrating The Use Of Character Analysis To Practice Clinical Analysis, Madisyn Beare

Honors Projects

Evidence-based treatments of trauma require clinicians to base their treatments on the client’s specific and individual needs, experiences, cognitions, and place in recovery. Essentially, each new client is a new and unique case, and the practice of understanding how trauma may affect an individual only comes from clinical exposure.Literature provides the public with somewhat of an aid in these circumstances: fictional characters are not real people, and therefore can undergo limitless character analyses. Analyzing a fictional character allows clinicians the ability to practice their exploration of various behavioral indicators of mental health concerns while honoring the ethical code of non-maleficence, …


Tolkien, Augustinian Theodicy, And 'Lovecraftian' Evil, Perry Neil Harrison 2024 Fort Hays State University

Tolkien, Augustinian Theodicy, And 'Lovecraftian' Evil, Perry Neil Harrison

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

A number of scholars have commented upon Augustine of Hippo’s influence upon J.R.R. Tolkien’s portrayal of evil in his legendarium. However, in his seminal work J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey pushes back against this perception, noting that there are some forms of evil in the legendarium that do not adhere to the Augustine’s belief that evil is merely a “twisting” of good. This article argues that Ungoliant is one such exception to the Augustinian paradigm because of the uncertainty regarding her origins.This uncertainty complicates the Augustinian view of evil that permeates the legendarium and instead echoes …


Wallpaper Yellow, Jasmine Aust 2024 Kennesaw State University

Wallpaper Yellow, Jasmine Aust

FUSION

The short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a significant piece of American literature published in 1892. This submission intends to capture its essence musically by adapting the prevailing themes of its narrative into song. Through the use of dynamics, delivery, and diction, the song conveys the evolution of Gilman’s piece. The composition includes deliberate tonal shifts and lyrical choices to reflect the story's progression and the protagonist's descent into madness. Selective adaptation was employed, consciously omitting certain narrative elements while prioritizing key thematic events. The musical piece intends to accurately represent core themes and properly adapt …


H.D. And Women's Self-Image, Kristen Clay 2024 Germanna Community College

H.D. And Women's Self-Image, Kristen Clay

Student Writing

This paper analyzes three works, “Thetis,” “Triplex,” and “Eurydice,” by modernist poet H.D. for the purpose of understanding how high-profile women characters can be used to explore the overarching similarities in female identity. This line of connection is found through the subject of each poem being figures from Greek mythology - Thetis, Helen, and Eurydice - and the themes in each poem being some variation of the formation of identity under male influence. In “Thetis,” the subject defines herself as a mother, and her role is shaped by the existence of her son, Achilles. In “Triplex,” Helen appeals to the …


Denise Levertov And Changing For God’S Presence, Jeremiah Veldhuyzen 2024 Germanna Community College

Denise Levertov And Changing For God’S Presence, Jeremiah Veldhuyzen

Student Writing

This paper is about the struggles experienced as a person of faith and how to react to those struggles.


Appealing To Truancy: How Mary Oliver Escapes Americana, John Wise 2024 Germanna Community College

Appealing To Truancy: How Mary Oliver Escapes Americana, John Wise

Student Writing

How the work of Mary Oliver disagrees with the American Cultural way of thinking.


Adrienne Rich: Examining Change Through Individual Introspection, Alexandra Miller 2024 Germanna Community College

Adrienne Rich: Examining Change Through Individual Introspection, Alexandra Miller

Student Writing

Adrienne Rich, well known for writing about her sexual identity and feminist activism, has written poetry throughout her changing lifetime. Her unique path through life has led readers to analyze development across her works. Individual introspection can be the source of this evolution in her poetry, allowing many of her readers to relate. Adrienne Rich’s poems, “Origins of History and Consciousness”, “Diving into the Wreck”, and “Splittings” bring to light self-reflection and how we navigate change through introspection.


Textual Variants In Eudora Welty’S "A Piece Of News”, Brooke Derrington, Abby Choe 2024 Pepperdine University

Textual Variants In Eudora Welty’S "A Piece Of News”, Brooke Derrington, Abby Choe

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Eudora Welty’s “A Piece of News” presents the question, how does one achieve self-actualization? For the protagonist Ruby Fisher, the answer is language, although that answer is not clear in the original 1937 published version of the story. That story’s focal point is Ruby’s tumultuous and complicated relationship with her husband, Clyde. In contrast, the revised 1941 version from Welty’s collection A Curtain of Green shifts the focus from Ruby’s abusive marriage to her interiority. The subsequent increase in word count, shifts in narration, and emphasis on Ruby claiming her name when she reads it in a newspaper elevates the …


The Ecology Of American Noir, Katrina Younes 2024 Western University

The Ecology Of American Noir, Katrina Younes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In The Ecology of American Noir, I investigate the relationship between the conventions of noir fiction and film and its sub-types in relation to environmental crises. Specifically, I address questions that not only allow us to (re)read early hardboiled literature and neo-noir films, but that also help us identify a new sub-genre of noir and develop an ecocritical methodology: I call this contemporary sub-genre and methodology “eco-noir.” I trace the development of strategies of mapping urban blight and environmental deterioration in classic hardboiled fiction of the 1940s, neo-noir films of the 1970s, and eco-noir texts of the post millennial …


New Coyote Stories: “Ooljéé”, 2024 Cal Poly Humboldt

New Coyote Stories: “Ooljéé”

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

No abstract provided.


When Language Fails: A Critical Analysis Essay Of Kathryn Stockett’S The Help:, Evan McCreary 2024 Columbia College Chicago

When Language Fails: A Critical Analysis Essay Of Kathryn Stockett’S The Help:, Evan Mccreary

Black Album Mixtape

A critical analysis essay of Kathryn Stockett's New York Times Bestselling book, The Help, and it's subsequent film adaptation, and how in recent years, particularly following the murder of George Floyd, the story has been used as a classroom tool for teaching students about racism and its effects. Written by a Black student in a primarily white school community, this essay was written as an antithesis to the ideology that the book and movie exceed their intended intentions of being a beneficial teaching tool to youth.


Book Review: Ruin And Resilience: Southern Literature And The Environment, Kevin J. Reagan 2024 Georgia Southern University

Book Review: Ruin And Resilience: Southern Literature And The Environment, Kevin J. Reagan

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.


'Since No Expressions Do': Queer Tools For Studying Literature, Filipa G. Calado 2024 The Graduate Center, City University of New York

'Since No Expressions Do': Queer Tools For Studying Literature, Filipa G. Calado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how digital methods and tools for studying text engage with queer literature. I critique digital methods and tools by posing computation, where textual data is cleaned and structured for electronic processing, against the complexity of queer subjecthood and affects expressed in textual style, form, and voice. While tools like quantitative text analysis, for example, transform, and necessarily reduce, qualitative elements of gender and sexuality into numerical data such as word frequencies or concordances, I argue that this reduction opens up possibilities for interpreting the formal qualities of queer literature. Just as digital formats transform and manipulate text …


“This Wonderful Machine”: How Should We Teach Humanities Texts Like Gulliver’S Travels In The Time Of Chatgpt?, Richard J. Haslam 2024 Saint Joseph's University

“This Wonderful Machine”: How Should We Teach Humanities Texts Like Gulliver’S Travels In The Time Of Chatgpt?, Richard J. Haslam

Critical Humanities

The quoted phrase in the essay title comes from a passage in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels in which a Grand Academy of Lagado professor demonstrates a “wonderful Machine” that can generate scores of books “without the least Assistance from Genius or Study.” The essay explore the challenge for teaching classic humanities texts like Gulliver that the (perhaps not so) “wonderful Machine” called ChatGPT poses. Student Owen Terry’s Chronicle essay (May 12, 2023) identifies two crucial aspects of that challenge: “We don’t fully lean into AI and teach how to best use it, and we don’t fully prohibit it to keep …


Detroit Poet Laureate: A Local And National Necessity, Rosemary O'Meara 2024 Wayne State University

Detroit Poet Laureate: A Local And National Necessity, Rosemary O'Meara

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

From 1981–2020, Detroit officials appointed a city-recognized poet laureate. Though the position has been vacant since the 2020 death of Naomi Long Madgett, this essay advocates for reinstatement of a Detroit poet laureate to help spotlight important Detroit artists and to ensure that the words and ideas of Detroiters are sustained and celebrated. A poet laureate would continue to uniquely serve Detroit to help preserve its complex history and contribute to a literary canon specific to the city.


Madness As Response To Inherent Cultural Conflicts In Anglophone Fiction From 1700 To 2020, Anna Klambauer 2024 University of Graz

Madness As Response To Inherent Cultural Conflicts In Anglophone Fiction From 1700 To 2020, Anna Klambauer

Comparative Woman

Madness in literature has a long and colourful history. While its representation varies significantly in different literary periods, madness is nonetheless a consistent theme responding to inherent conflicts of civilisation. Thus, in the eighteenth-century novel, madness is subdued and forced to express itself in the language of rationality, while in the nineteenth century the theme becomes increasingly subversive. In the form of the madwoman trope (Gilbert and Gubar 1979), madness is simultaneously a reaction to restrictive patriarchal norms, and a frame in which the gender conflicts of the time can be safely and effectively played out. In the twentieth century, …


Digital Commons powered by bepress