Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Hole In The Head: A Play, Accompanied By A Conspectus Of Knowledge, Both Repressed And Researched, That Directly Influenced The Playwright In Her Development Of A New Work, Margaret Hunter Cook

Honors Scholar Theses

"Hole in the Head" is a play about a woman who wakes up. Maude wakes up in the first act, and in every subsequent scene she undergoes some form of physical or emotional awakening as characters walk in and out of her front door."Hole in the Head" is accompanied by an introduction that attempts to understand the interplay between creativity and academia through an analysis of theatre, feminist and queer theory, and science.

The Completeness: Novel, Samuel Royce Harr

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The concept of completeness is a state of having all the parts that one needs to be whole--or, of being complete. What that is depends on what the person needs--a wife, a friend, a lover, a friend, art, a trade, a religion, a God. Each of these others fits into the individual character, like a piece that fits an empty space in a jigsaw puzzle. Without it, that empty space becomes a nothingness that is all too real--one becomes aware of the appearance and substance of nothing. What does a person do without that sense of completeness? Do they look ...

Now Was Then, Then Is Now: The Paradoxical World Of Fahrenheit 451, Michael R. Labrie

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

In the following essay, through the analysis and interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451, I will create a juxtaposition of the world that we live in today and compare it to the eerily similar version known as Elm City, in which Bradbury creates a dark representation of 21st century America. This essay will carefully analyze and interpret themes, symbols, and futuristic inventions in which Bradbury claims he was, “Trying to prevent futures,” as well as bring everyday uses and patterns of today’s society to light, revealing the prescient and prophetic text in which the novel encompasses

Meaningful Meaninglessness: Albert Camus' Presentation Of Absurdism As A Foundation For Goodness, Maria K. Genovese

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

In 1957, Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature. By that time he had written such magnificently important works such as Caligula (1938), The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947), The Rebel (1951), and The Fall (1956). Camus was a proponent of Absurdism, a philosophy that realizes the workings of the world are inherently meaningless and indifferent to the human struggle to create meaning. Absurdism, however, is not a nihilistic philosophy. In The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, and Caligula, Camus offers a foundation of optimism and morality.

Imagining Sri Lanka, Derick Kirishan Ariyam

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Analyzes the works of three Sri Lankan expatriates, the writers, Shyam Selvadurai and Michael Ondaatje, and the artist, M.I.A., giving particular attention to Selvadurai's Funny Boy and Ondaatje's Running in the Family, Anil's Ghost, and The Cinnamon Peeler. Though all three have been charged as "inauthentic" due to their dislocated positions, uncovers the various productive and complicated ways Sri Lanka has been configured by those outside its shores.

Burning Down The Trailer Park, Timothy Owen Davis

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This is a collection of short stories, all of which are set in High Point, NC.

Faith And Field: Christianity, The Environment, And Five Contemporary American Poets, Heather M. Hoover

Doctoral Dissertations

Many poets write about the earth or even about God using the language of nature. And many poets and contemporary authors concern themselves with the state of the environment. However, the poetry of Wendell Berry, James Still, Li-Young Lee, Mary Oliver, and Charles Wright seems to engage different kinds of questions about how humans creatively respond to the earth. Collectively, their responses seem influenced by their connections with Christianity rather than any specific ecological agenda. In all of their poetry lies a sensibility about how humans should interact with the earth. All five of the poets seem to acknowledge humanity ...

Too Much Horse: Fiction, Nonfiction, Prose Poetry, Andrew Otis Haschemeyer

Doctoral Dissertations

A collection of fiction, nonfiction, and prose poetry that explores imagination through different shapes in form, content, and genre. Includes award winning nonfiction, “The Storekeeper,” and award winning fiction, “The Fantôme of Fatma.”

Invisible Mink, Jessie L Janeshek

Doctoral Dissertations

Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Sarah Piatt render the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere” ironically Unheimliche while simultaneously conveying it as the “home sweet home” the sentimental tradition prescribes it should be. These American women poets turn the domestic milieu into, as Paula Bennett phrases it, “the gothic mise en scene par excellence…the displacements, doublings, and anxieties characterizing gothic experience are the direct consequence of domestic ideology’s impact on the lives and psyches of ordinary bourgeois women (121-122).”

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath continue to represent the Unheimliche home in their poetry through the middle of the twentieth ...

From Main-Travelled Roads To Route 66: Transitions In Prairie Naturalism, Michelle Nicole Munkres

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

To best represent a people of a specific spatial and historical context, literary texts must necessarily demonstrate a vested interest and familiarity of a region and its inhabitants’ common experiences. In examining one particular aspect of regional naturalism in American literature, this study explores the basic tenets of Prairie Naturalism as defined by three major authors: Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, and John Steinbeck. The short stories in Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891) establish the foundation of Prairie Naturalism with meticulous attention to daily lives on the plains and with political strategies to improve the lives of the oppressed. Willa ...

An Examination Of The Life And Work Of Gustav Hasford, Matthew Samuel Ross

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket has remained in the national consciousness twenty years after its release, the author of its source material, Gustav Hasford, has not. Few people know or remember that the Oscar-nominated film was not an original work but was adapted by Hasford, Kubrick, and Dispatches author Michael Herr from Hasford's 1979 novel The Short-Timers. Fewer people remember that following the well-reviewed The Short-Timers Hasford published a sequel, The Phantom Blooper, as well as one final novel A Gypsy Good Time, a frenetic parody of detective fiction. To say that Gustav Hasford is primarily ...

William Sidney Porter (O. Henry), Christy Allen

Christy Allen

No abstract provided.

Moral Absolutism In Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Jennifer Rodgers

English Master’s Theses

The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, explores several complex and trans-historic topics, many of which relate to the playwright's experiences during the McCarthy era. Miller asks his audience to value independent and personal truths, which he defines as more morally right and good than social truths. This is because, in the playwright's mind, social truths are often manipulated and exploited to gain a desired personal result regardless of how they affect other's lives. In order to illuminate this point, he repeatedly plays with the concepts of truth and lies, confession and accusation, as well as public and private ...

Hues, Tresses, And Dresses: Examining The Relation Of Body Image, Hair, And Clothes To Female Identity In Their Eyes Were Watching God And I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Alisha Priolo Castaneda

Masters Theses

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings convey powerful relations between body image, hair, and clothes. Because a proper understanding of the theory of womanism provides a basis for comprehending the African American female's relation to herself and the world around her, a working definition and description of the term and its general significance to African American critical theory is provided in chapter two. The third chapter focuses on the general topic of body image in relation to black female identity and includes a more specific ...

Anxiety De La Historia: Understanding The Roots Of Spanglish In The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Kelsey A. Shanesy

English Honors Projects

In exploring Junot Díaz’s use of Spanglish, I propose that Díaz is driven by the anxiety of history—a phenomenon similar to the anxiety of influence, as articulated by Harold Bloom, but which focuses on the role of the Latino minority in this postmodern moment. I compare Díaz’s texts to Piri Thomas’s autobiography Down These Mean Streets, one of the original texts to utilize Spanglish, and Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, a satirical novel about minority culture. Díaz’s vision of a future, Spanglish-speaking America is revealed to be the ultimate outcome of the anxiety of history ...

Compte Rendu: Laurence Mall, 'Émile' Ou Les Figures De La Fiction, Servanne Woodward

Servanne Woodward

No abstract provided.

Female Liberation In The Awakening And “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Kevin Chen '10

2010 Spring Semester

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” both initially published in 1899, present strikingly similar stories of the plight of women in society. Both texts adopt a markedly feminist bias, narrated from the point of view of a female protagonist who wrests with the restrictive conventions of a misogynistic society before finally breaking free through separation from the thinking world, via suicide in The Awakening and insanity in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Some would argue that the women themselves are flawed, through either mental instability or rampant libido, and thus the stories are skewed through ...

Crane And Chopin: Ideas Of Transformation, Vijay Jayaram '11

2010 Spring Semester

Though Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening are largely considered unrelated novels, they share one major idea: that of the failure of transformation. This is depicted in the respective evolutions of Crane’s Henry Fleming and Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, each of whom suffers a loss of identity in their respective awakenings. This idea is borne not out of imagination, but rather, the experiences of the authors themselves. Crane created Fleming to satirize his post-war world, while Chopin invented Edna to do the same in her sexually repressive society. Through the unsuccessful evolutions ...

The Possibility Of Female Autonomy In The Awakening And “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Liana Nicklaus '10

2010 Spring Semester

Both The Awakening by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman present female main characters pursuing individual autonomy. At first, it would appear that both of these characters gain their freedom in the course of their respective stories. In The Awakening, Edna is able to escape from her husband into a new house, and pursue romantic interests with other men, and at the end of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the protagonist exclaims, “I’ve got out at last!” (Gilman 20). However, there are several elements in each piece which hint that liberation is not truly achievable. In actuality ...

Can We Really Make A Difference?, Michael Atten '12

2010 Spring Semester

Over the course of history, which type of person makes a bigger impact, an active manipulator fighting to stay alive or a passive observer floating along in the sea of life?

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, and Maus, by Art Spiegelman, answered this question differently. Billy Pilgrim, the main character of Slaughterhouse Five, was so passive and uncaring about his fate that he effectively came “unstuck” in time. Conversely, Vladek Spiegelman of Maus put up a fight at every opportunity and never willingly traveled along in life. However, neither character made a difference on the events of the Second World ...