Digital Commons Network^™

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring: Pioneering Environmental Policy Change, Katherine Hoffsetz

Sustainability Conference

Rachel Carson's groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, serves as a pivotal moment in the history of environmental advocacy. The book exposed the consequences of pesticide use on ecosystems and called for a reevaluation of human impact on the environment. This research project aims to comprehensively analyze the profound and enduring impact of Carson's work on environmental public policy. The research employs a literature review and analysis of legislation to trace the influence of Silent Spring on environmental advocacy in the government. A correlation is revealed between the release of Silent Spring and the enactment of key environmental …

Ahab's Soul: An Exploration Of The Hero Of "Moby-Dick", Jaedon Wilkinson

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Textual or Investigative

Where Epistemology And Metaphysics Touch In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Seth Vannatta

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In Lois Lowry’s dystopian young adult novel, The Giver, the veil of perception— the gap between appearance and reality— is woven into the community as a policy measure meant to establish Sameness—the effort to insure a world without conflict, inequality, difference, pain, or freedom of choice. But a question lingers in the premise of the novel’s community. Given that our options for bridging the gap amount to building a bridge of experience across it or digging a tunnel of existence under it, has the bridge been sabotaged to render perception spurious, or has the tunnel been blocked to alter reality …

‘The Female Marine’ And ‘Clotel’: An Analysis Of Female Crossdressing To Escape Coercive Labor Situations In 19th Century American Literature, Kaelyn Ireland

Symposium of Student Scholars

Although illegal in many U.S. cities, crossdressing was a point of fascination for Americans of the nineteenth century. Stories of real women passing as men to serve in the military—for example, Revolutionary War veteran Deborah Sampson—enchanted readers and inspired writers, such as that of The Female Marine. Ostensibly written by its heroine, but most likely written by Nathaniel Hill Wright, The Female Marine was a popular story about a young woman who was forced to become a sex worker and cross-dressed to escape her situation, then enlisted in the Navy where she served abroad the U.S.S. Constitution. At …

Charles Gibson And Indian Territory's Periodical Press, Tereza M. Szeghi

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

I argue that Charles Gibson (Creek writer and journalist) offers an important but woefully understudied voice of resistance to the changes imposed upon the tribes of Indian Territory around the turn of the 20th century (such as forced allotment of tribal lands, dissolution of tribal governments, and Oklahoma statehood). In his regular column, “Rifle Shots,” Gibson offered a dynamic space in which to process and comment upon these changes. More specifically, while Gibson was quite outspoken in his critiques of the ways in which U.S. policies threatened Creeks’ sovereignty, culture, and well-being, his column also frequently contained reworkings of traditional …

Did Ishmael Know The Raven?: Publisher Evert Duyckinck And The Connection Between Edgar Allan Poe And Herman Melville, Danny Wilson

Symposium of Student Scholars

Although Poe was a social introvert, he knew and was connected to other early American Romantic writers, including Herman Melville. Examining first editions of works by both authors in the Bentley Rare Book Museum at Kennesaw State University, I discovered a common link between them – the publisher and literary critic Evert Duyckinck. In this presentation, I will use evidence from the first editions and the Poe & Melville Archives at the New York Public Library to investigate the nature of the relationship between Poe, Duyckinck and Melville. I found that Duyckinck was Melville’s close friend, however, he was Poe’s …

Interracial Relations: History And Cultural Identity In The Invention Of Wings, Taylor Hopkins

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

The historical fiction novel The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd displays a notable relationship between feminist and racial ideals during the nineteenth century. The story is based on the historical figure, Sarah Grimké, an American abolitionist and advocate for women’s rights. Over the course of thirty-five years, the narration alternates between the two main characters: Sarah Grimké and Hetty Handful Grimké, a young slave on the Grimké plantation. The interactions between the two begin when Hetty is presented to Sarah as a personal waiting maid for Sarah’s eleventh birthday. As the story continues, the dynamics between the two …

Selection From A Corrected Typescript Of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Novel The Yearling, Sarah Virgina Dumitrascu

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

Project of Merit Winner

Digital Projects Showcase Exhibitor Award

With the recent advent of digital word processors, physical representations of editorial practices have largely disappeared while a misconception about writing as an instantaneous or single-draft process has emerged. Compounding this issue is the prominence of literary studies that emphasize the works of renowned authors as products, rather than processes. My digital textual editing project, “A Selection from a Corrected Manuscript of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel The Yearling”, seeks to transcribe the manuscript of Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Yearling, which is marked with typed and hand-written revisions. Utilizing TEI-XML encoding, my …

Graduate Session: Presentation 1 - A Master At Work In ‘The Purloined Letter", Valerie Davis

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

I explore how critics of Poe's "Purloined Letter," through their rigorous, compartmentalized, and focused examination, tend to miss the simple joy of reading it at face value as a detective story.

Undergraduate Session Iii: Presentation 1 - Disrupting The System: How Harriet Beecher Stowe Used Uncle Tom's Cabin To Challenge Calvinistic Ideals Of Christianity, Michelle P. Lominac

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

Analyzing Harriet Beecher Stowe's methods of challenging traditional Calvinistic beliefs in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The Forest, The Trees, The Bark, The Pith: An Intensive Look At The Circulation Rates Of Primary Texts In Ten Major Literature Areas At The University Of Oregon Libraries, Jeff D. Staiger

Charleston Library Conference

This poster looks at the circulation rate for literary primary texts, which constitute a unique area of collecting in academic libraries: while they do not in most cases meet immediate research needs, it is assumed that libraries ought to acquire them, for reasons including future research needs, preservation of the cultural record, and the ability of members of the intellectual community to stay current, those these remain primarily tacit. The circulation trends of contemporary literary works in ten areas of literature (English, American, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin American, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian) over the past twenty years at the …

"I Am My Father's Daughter": Inheriting Environmental Attitudes In Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, Courtney Green

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

The worlds of young adult dystopian fiction exude anxiety – anxiety about romantic love, family, freedom, politics, and, in many ways, the present state of the environment as our future. But where do children learn their attitudes regarding the natural world? And how do the children of narratives such as young adult dystopian fiction go about fixing the problems they see in the natural world as a result of the attitudes they were raised with? Do they even go about fixing anything at all? By looking closely at parental relationships and attitudes regarding nature in two of the most popular …

Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish": A Definitive Mid-Twentieth Century Poem., Teddy Duncan

Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence

No abstract provided.

Dramatizing The Void: Crime Fiction's Journey To Forgetting, Kylene N. Cave

Andrews Research Conference

Scholars often cite the transition from the golden age to the hardboiled tradition in the 1920s and 1930s as the most radical shift in crime fiction. By 1945, crime stories regularly exhibited destabilized language, increased interest in psychology of the mind, and a blatant rejection of conclusive endings as a means of exploring the unreliable nature of memory and eye-witness testimony. Whereas the crime fiction narratives preceding 1945 embodied a clear sense of logic and order, and established hermeneutics and signifying practices as the keys to unlocking the mysteries behind human behavior; post-45 crime fiction not only rejects these notions, …

A Pilgrim’S Progress For The Digital, Post-Human(Ist) Age?: Social And Religious Allegory In Russell Banks’S Lost Memory Of Skin, David J. Buehrer Dr.

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

In Lost Memory of Skin (2011), his twelfth novel, Russell Banks continues his exploration of the dark underbelly of American society—in this instance, the moral wilderness of a group of convicted sex offenders exiled to living beneath a concrete causeway in the south Florida city of Calusa, a fictionalized Miami. Banks, who has long been “our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male” (Schulman 8), focuses in Lost on a twenty-two-year-old parolee referred to throughout only as “The Kid.” While guilty and duly convicted of propositioning an underage girl online for sex, The Kid is still presented in …

Transnational Abolitionist Rhetoric To End Modern Slavery, Laura Barrio-Vilar

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

In his 1998 autobiography, Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American, Jean-Robert Cadet denounces the horrors of modern child slavery as he narrates his life journey. Emotionally, physically, and sexually abused under the restavek system, Cadet migrates with his “masters” to the United States, where he pursues a formal education, joins the army, and acquires a middle-class status.

Today, Cadet has his own organization, dedicated to ending child slavery in Haiti through education and advocacy. In this presentation, I analyze how Cadet adopts conventional genre characteristics of slave narratives and U.S. migration literature in order to enter the …

Slave Rebellion, Fugitive Literature, And The Force Of Law, Jeffrey Hole

First-Year Honors Program Research Seminars

From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the revolt aboard the ship Amistad in 1839, from Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831 to the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—on land and on sea, in U.S. territory and international spaces—slaves and abolitionist allies resisted the legal doctrines and martial enforcement of the slave system. In this presentation, we will explore how nineteenth-century literature imagined and depicted slave rebellion, particularly in the decade before the Civil War and in the aftermath of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. A component of the Great Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act strengthened a set …

A Critique Of Puritan Values And Social Restrictions, Laura Guebert

Scholars Week

This paper outlines and discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter through the lens of feminist and social critiques. It attempts to draw attention to the fates of both male and females characters in the story according to their personality and status. Therefore, by examining the complex treatment and relationships between the four principle characters of The Scarlet Letter and their author, Hawthorne’s use of a feminist critique can be understood as a wider criticism of Puritan and, by extension, mid-nineteenth century social and moral restrictions and expectations.

"One Accord Of Sympathy": The Relationship Between Narrator, Reader, And Puritans, Brianna E. Taylor

Scholars Week

Ambiguous narration in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter creates a reader that is simultaneously an insider privy to uncertain narrative report and an outsider sympathetic to Hester’s ignominy. While current reader response criticism explores narrative techniques of ambiguity and sympathy in isolation, this paper analyzes how these techniques are used in conjunction to establish a relationship between narrator and reader. The narrator’s role as storyteller and gossip, accepting explanations of a rational contemporary audience and superstitious Puritans, both defies Puritan inflexibility and creates intimacy that includes readers in this community. At the same time, a sympathetic relationship with Hester distances …

Session 4: James Merrill: Life And Archive, Joel Minor, Langdon Hammer, Justin Reed

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

2:45 p.m. — Session 4: James Merrill: Life and Archive

An introduction to James Merrill resources in Washington University Special Collections.

See http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/merrill-life-archive

Session 3: Digital Merrill, Shannon Davis, Annelise Duerden, Heidi Lim, Joe Loewenstein, Timothy Materer

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

1:15 p.m. — Session 3: Digital Merrill

• Shannon Davis, digital library services manager, WU: The James Merrill Digital Archive: Process and Product
• Annelise Duerden, PhD candidate in English, WU — “Admit It Arguably A priori Admittedly I have failed”: Re-vision in the Merrill Archive
• Heidi Lim, PhD candidate in English, WU — To Tag or Not to Tag: The Digital Markup Process as a Form of Reading
• Timothy Materer, professor emeritus, University of Missouri — The Poem as a Netscape

Session 2: Remembering Jimmy, Stephen Yenser, Randy Bean, Judith Moffett, Rachel Hadas

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

10:30 a.m. — Session 2: Remembering Jimmy

• Stephen Yenser, distinguished professor of English, UCLA — Reading an essay about his friendship with Merrill
• Randy Bean, board member, James Merrill House Committee — Presenting on the history and initiatives of the James Merrill House
• Judith Moffett, adjunct professor emerita of English, University of Pennsylvania — Mixed Messages, an excerpt from "Unlikely Friends: A Memoir"
• Rachel Hadas, professor of English, Rutgers University — (via prerecorded video) reading an excerpt from "The Book of Ephraim," reading her poem, "Threshold and Mirror: the Biography," and recollecting her friendship with Merrill

Session 1: "Eyes Raised In Ecstasy": The Analog Merrill, Thomas Brennan, Tamara Taylor, Steven Meyer

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

9:00 a.m. — Session 1: “Eyes Raised in Ecstasy”: The Analog Merrill

• Thomas Brennan, associate professor, Saint Joseph’s University — Ecstasy Edited? Merrill’s “Days of 1971”
• Tamara Taylor, lecturer, WU — “Thinking Light” Between Spaces: Reflective Metaphor
• Steven Meyer, associate professor, WU — Eye’s Mind: The Poetry of the World

Keynote Address: "The Biographical Container", Langdon Hammer

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

Keynote address: “The Biographical Container” by Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf). Watch the video of the address here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BquCAmR6ANI.

Welcome Remarks, Jeffrey Trzeciak

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

Welcome remarks by University Librarian Jeffrey Trzeciak

Another Country: When Your Nation Doesn’T Consider You To Be A Citizen, William B. Daniels Ii

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

I plan to show how the characters in Another Country uncover the inherently racist and homophobic requirements for citizenship in a nation. The novel Another Country by African American author James Baldwin (1924-1987) exposes the fallible nature of hetero-normative and racial ideals that narrowly define a model citizen of a nation-state. The queer interracial relationships in the novel, particularly between the main character Rufus and his lover Eric, transgress the boundaries of nation, race, and sexuality, thus revealing the illusionary nature of categorizations that are defined and applied by nation-state apparatuses in order to discriminate and maintain uniformity. In addition …

From Pants To Pearls: Rodgers And Hammerstein’S Affect On Post Wwii Women, Alison Dees

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

An Allegorical Reading Of Cormac Mccarthy's Outer Dark, Renee Williams

Undergraduate Research Conference

Though Cormac McCarthy deals with aspects of religion in each of his works, Outer Dark stands apart as a complete theodicy presented through complex allegory. Through his casting of the novel's characters as analogues for Christ, humanity, and Satan, McCarthy comments on the nature and consequences of the cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. McCarthy constructs his theodicy with the incorporation of Nietzschean philosophy and a deistic perspective.

A William Faulkner Remembrance, Randall Kenan, Phillip M. Weinstein

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference

A day-long program marking the fiftieth anniversary of William Faulkner’s death:

• 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Marathon reading of The Reivers at Rowan Oak (917 Old Taylor Road)
• 4:15-5:45 p.m. Keynote lectures by author Randall Kenan and biographer Phillip M. Weinstein at Lafayette County Courthouse (1 Courthouse Square). Program for young readers at Square Books Jr. (111 Courthouse Square).
• 6:00-7:00 p.m. Book signings by Kenan and Weinstein at Off Square Books (129 Courthouse Square)
• 8:00-10:00 p.m. Screening of The Reivers (1969 adaptation, starring Steve McQueen) at Lyric Theater (1006 Van Buren Avenue)

Historicizing The Present In 9/11 Fiction, Todd Kuchta

Re-visioning Terrorism

Reconfiguring the debate on the historical efficacy of postmodern fiction, novels inspired by 9/11 seek to view the present itself as history. McEwan’s Saturday, DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist attempt to move beyond the view of history-as-text. Rather than evoking “the presence of the past,” they present characters trying to situate themselves in a new historical reality. Žižek’s account of Lacan illuminates DeLillo’s attempt to historicize the present, while McEwan gestures toward Foucault’s view of the present as exit. Only Hamid engages the historical potential of the present.