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Politics, Authorship, And Philosophy: Teaching Margaret Cavendish’S The Blazing World In The Diverse Graduate Classroom, Martine Van Elk

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

This essay explores how Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World works differently when taught and read on its own and in combination with Cavendish’s other works. Focusing specifically on the graduate classroom, I examine and present strategies for teaching the book alongside works by other early modern women and for teaching it in a single-author course. While in isolation, The Blazing World allows for discussions that focus primarily on questions of gender, genre, class, and politics, read in tandem with Cavendish’s other works, in particular her philosophical writings, The Blazing World becomes a source for reflections on questions of creaturely identity, …

Teaching Margaret Cavendish’S Philosophy: Early Modern Women And The Question Of Biography, Peter West

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

In my contribution to this Concise Collection on Margaret Cavendish, I focus on teaching Cavendish’s work in the context of philosophy (and, more specifically, Early Modern Philosophy). I have three aims. First, to explain why teaching women from philosophy’s history is crucially important to the discipline. Second, to outline my own reflections on teaching Cavendish’s philosophy. Third, to defend a specific claim about the benefits of teaching Cavendish to philosophy students; namely, that introducing biographical detail alongside philosophical ideas enriches the learning experience.

Concise Collections: Teaching Margaret Cavendish, Part I, E Mariah Spencer

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

This is the introduction of Part I of the "Concise Collection on Teaching the Works of Margaret Cavendish."

Mythos And Meaning: Medieval Appropriations Of Mythological Types In The Consolation Of Philosophy And Later Western Literatures, Francis J. Hunter

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Often referred to as the last Roman and first medieval, Boethius, author of The Consolation of Philosophy, has been widely received as an unoriginal philosopher who sought to preserve Platonic thought as the Western Roman Empire fell. However, this essay features an investigation into the literary originality of Boethius who initiates a line of Christian and Platonic literatures to follow in the medieval European tradition. Boethius demonstrates himself to be a poet who makes great use of philosophy rather than as a philosopher writing poetry. Boethius’ poetic influence is felt most strongly in major aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy and …

Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …

Darkness Leaping Out Of Light: Anti-Metaphysics And The Paradoxical Negative Affix In Moby-Dick, Bryce N. Wallace

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

This paper argues that the varied philosophical beliefs that are present in the discourse of Moby-Dick’s characters are met with discursive resistance at the level of the novel’s form. Though a range of metaphysical arguments are posited by the characters as they explore the unknown, Melville’s use of negative linguistic constructions refutes the entire range of metaphysical beliefs by displaying the paradoxical and impossible nature of the primary subject that metaphysicians ponder—the unknown. I propose that in trying to comprehend “the unknown” humans unavoidably create something out of nothing then deem it unknowable and therefore fail to grant it …

Poetics Of Finitude: Time And Death In The Poetry Of R.M. Rilke And T.S. Eliot, Isabel James Greene

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Frankenstein’S Creature: Monstrous Chicken Or Grotesque Egg?, Alexandria B. Acero

Gettysburg College Headquarters

Some scholars believe that due to the negligence of Victor in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the creature became an attention-craving murderous monster. Other scholars believe that the unaffectionate and unnatural way Victor birthed the creature caused his monstrous form. The argument over “Nature versus Nurture” in relation to the creations is irrelevant, however. The creature is only pushed away by Victor due to his hideousness which stems from the environment in which the creature was born. Victor’s societal view on nature and its connection to womanly attributes creates a paradox of a loveless creation and an affection-craving creature within the novel.

Kurt Vonnegut, Modernity, And The Self: A Guide To The Good Life., Josh Simpson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What are people for? This is a question Kurt Vonnegut raises in his first novel, 1952’s Player Piano. Over five decades later, when he concludes a career with 2005’s A Man Without a Country, he is still asking, “What is life all about?” (66). These are the central questions for Vonnegut, and his novels, short stories, essays, interviews, correspondence, and commencement addresses offer a singular, life-long attempt at an answer. In this dissertation I offer a reading of Vonnegut not just as a writer concerned with philosophical questions, but rather, on a deeper, more personal level, as a …

Creating A Generalized Michigan School Constitution, Kurstin K. Frank

Honors Projects

Educational theories in the past have attempted to define, arrange, and design education to benefit society, institutions, and students of all ages. The conversations surrounding those educational theories, however, have consistently neglected to include those that the structures, policies, and purpose of education will benefit the most: the students. This research project was devised to include student voice within the conversations surrounding educational theories through the construction of a Generalized Michigan School Constitution. By delving into those theories of education, the researcher was able to dissect the five most common theories and beliefs within education to be able to decipher …

Sophocles' Antigone: The Tragedy Of The Separation Of Greece's Competing Social Institutions, Austin Tate

Quest

Critical Essay

Research in progress for HUMA 1301: Introduction to Humanities I

Faculty Mentors: Carolyn Perry, Ph.D. and Rich DeRouen

The following essay by Austin Tate began in response to an assignment in the Introduction to Humanities course taught by Prof. DeRouen. The assignment asked students to analyze the influence of contending value systems—those of the oikos and those of the polis—as they reveal themselves in selected scenes from the Sophoclean play Antigone. A secondary objective of the task was to interrogate the attempts of Antigone and Creon—the central characters of the play—to navigate the mix of personal …

Transforming Yourself Through English, Travis Bonwell, Joscelyn Bradbury, Christina Hudson, Jenna Sotin

2022 Symposium

The purpose of this project is redesigning Patterson Hall’s English and Philosophy billboard to inspire students to join the department. English and Philosophy are important, interdisciplinary skills that can transcend into various careers. By creating a thought-provoking billboard, we hope to inspire current and future undergraduates to choose an English or Philosophy Major.

One of the biggest obstacles these programs face is overcoming the preconceived notions surrounding them. By informing students of the countless interdisciplinary skills these programs teach, as well as detailing alumni/famous figures who do not immediately induce thoughts of English or philosophy, we can pull students from …

"Proud Flesh And Blood": Phineas Fletcher, Gabriel Daniel, And Seventeenth-Century Theories Of Embodiment, Micaela Elanor Simeone

Honors Projects

The human body was a site of discovery and redefinition in early modern Europe. This project traces the gradual arc from the mid-seventeenth century towards Cartesian notions of the body in the later part of the century through two fictions: Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650)’s The Purple Island (1633) and Gabriel Daniel (1649-1728)’s Voyage du Monde de Descartes (1690). This project views these two largely-overlooked texts as important literary works that represent the seventeenth century’s transformative debates about and explorations of the human body. I argue that Fletcher employs a dissective mode that embraces mind-body harmony while framing the human as both …

The Christian Right In Translation: Christian Conservative Discourse In Contemporary American Literature, Elizabeth Richardson Duke

English Theses and Dissertations

Religion in contemporary American politics and religion in contemporary American Literature: are they independent phenomena? Literary scholars have largely assumed so. Scholars have attended to nontraditional, liberal religion in postwar American literature, while overlooking how this literature represents and critiques the rise of the Christian Right. Since white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians allied with the Republican party in the late 1970s, Christian conservatives have transformed American politics. As the GOP’s most influential interest group, the Christian Right has set the terms for many of the last four decades’ most contentious and consequential debates. Historians, political scientists, and contemporary American writers …

The Philosophy Of Mindfulness As A Mode Of Being, Mara Headrick

Quest

Philosophical Essay

Research in progress for PHIL 1301: Introduction to Philosophy

Faculty Mentor: John Macready, Ph.D.

The following essay represents student research produced in an Introduction to Philosophy course at Collin College. Introduction to Philosophy introduces students to metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical theories through critical readings of primary philosophical texts from ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Students practice textual and conceptual analysis of primary sources and learn methods for analyzing and evaluating arguments. As a final project, students compose a final research essay from their reading and research that develops a theory of reality, a theory of knowledge, and describes …

Realization: A Short Story Collection For An Existentially Confused World, Payton Nguyen

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The following project is the beginnings of my formal exploration into the existential and spiritual natures of our world, via story. Postmodernism has brought the importance of subjectivity to the forefront of academia, but it has also brought nihilism and secularism. If God is dead, what purpose is there to go on? If subjectivity is unavoidable and possibly at the foundation of existence, what does that mean for truth?

Some intellectuals have tried to fill these existential holes with new philosophical inquiries such as existentialism, absurdism, and effective altruism. Some intellectuals accuse postmodernism of destroying morality, advocating we return back …

Empathy, Animals, And Deadly Vices, Kathie Jenni

Animal Studies Journal

In Deadly Vices, Gabriele Taylor provides a secular analysis of vices which in Christian theology were thought to bring death to the soul: sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. She argues that these vices are appropriately singled out and grouped together in that ‘they are destructive of the self and prevent its flourishing’. Using a related approach, I offer a secular analysis of gluttony and cowardice, examining their roles in common failures to empathise with animals. I argue that these vices constitute serious moral failings, for they enable continuing complicity in animal abuse and undermine integrity. While Taylor …

"Wake Up In Moloch:" Modernity, "Howl," And The Beats' Spiritual Quest, Felix Freeland

English Honors Theses

This capstone seeks to shed light on the spiritual nature of the Beat Generation's philosophy, using Ginsberg's poem "Howl" as a primary text. By first comparing Beat spirituality to the transcendental poetry of Whitman and then comparing their belief to Kierkegaard's idea of Faith, I demonstrate that Beat spirituality is a reaction to and protest against the ethics of secular, American Modernity.

World, Worlds, Worlding: A Review Of Pheng Cheah's What Is A World? On Postcolonial Literature As World Literature, Chris Hall

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Review of Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Presents an overview of Cheah's argument regarding normativity and temporality in worlds and worlding, a summary of chapters, and an assessment of the book's contribution to philosophy, world literature, and postcolonial studies.

Kinesthetically Speaking: Human And Animal Communication In British Literature Of The Long Eighteenth Century, Dana Jolene Laitinen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While scholars have studied talking animals in British children’s literature of the long eighteenth century, little attention has been given to cross-species conversations. Thus, my research starts with the following questions: what does it mean when humans talk to animals in literary texts? What do representations of interspecific communication in eighteenth-century British literature accomplish? Interspecific communication in the literary works of this study may be understood in the context of the philosophy of sensibility’s debt to French Renaissance humanist Michel de Montaigne, particularly his arguments about animal semiosis in An Apology for Raymond Sebond. I argue that interspecific conversations challenge …

Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I articulate a hermeneutics for reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal text Nature through drawing on the insights of the contemporary philosopher Sebastian Rödl. Particularly, the performative, literary characteristics of Rödl’s quite conceptual work resonate with the poetic strategies that Emerson employs in Nature. In the section on the work of Rödl, I make the performative aspects of his philosophy explicit through a close reading of the way self-consciousness happens in his texts through the language he employs. Rödl refers to his elucidation of self-consciousness as idealism. In the section on Emerson, I show how Emerson’s project …

Engl 110 College Writing (Higher Education), Erika Figel

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus is an adapted version of Professor Figel's 110 course at Queens College. The College Writing course is centered around the ideas of higher education and the philosophies behind it. All links to material required are included.

Engl 130 Writing About Literature, Erika Figel

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus was designed to create a ZTC/OER course for introductory literature course for college freshman.

Letter Blocks, Lukas Graham Hemmer

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A collection of prose and poetry exploring language as a material object.

“Enough Of Thought, Philosopher!”: Emily Brontë’S Interrogations Of Death, Katherine Marie Alexander

English Language and Literature ETDs

The year 1847 marked the appearance of Wuthering Heights on the literary scene. Writing under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë soon became known as the “Sphynx (sic) of Literature” following the publication of the culminating masterpiece of her literary career. Although she was not a trained philosopher, her drawings, poems, letters, devoirs, and only novel offer an organic approach to philosophical matters, particularly in her engagements with the meanings of time and space and her interrogations of death.

Surrounded by the pervasive presence of death from her earliest years and beyond, Brontë moved to rigorous interrogations of the …

Where Literature And Philosophy Meet And Diverge, Clare C. Hagan

Undergraduate Theses

Many writers and philosophers have asked “What is art?” or “What is philosophy?” but it is difficult to encounter a text where these questions are set beside each other. Many works of philosophy appear very literary in form and content, just as there are many literary works that are very philosophical in nature. This essay examines the intersection of literature and philosophy, using Kant’s Critique of Judgement as a way into analyzing Plato’s Phaedo, as an example of literary philosophy; and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as an example of philosophical literature. The first section deals with literature and philosophy as texts, looking …

Owen Barfield: Philosophy, Poetry, And Theology. Michael Vincent Di Fuccia, Tiffany Brooke Martin

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

No abstract provided.

J.M. Coetzee’S Hall Of Mirrors: Elizabeth Costello And The Animal-Poet, Alec Ciferno

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Imaginative Geographies: Visualising The Poetics Of History And Space, Clive Barstow

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.

Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends …

Of Levinas And Shakespeare: "To See Another Thus", Sandor Goodhart, Moshe Gold, Kent Lehnhof

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Scholars have used Levinas as a lens through which to view many authors and texts, fields of endeavor, and works of art. Yet no book-length work or dedicated volume has brought this thoughtful lens to bear in a sustained discussion of the works of Shakespeare. It should not surprise anyone that Levinas identified his own thinking as Shakespearean. "The play’s the thing" for both, or put differently, the observation of intersubjectivity is. What may surprise and indeed delight all learned readers is to consider what we might yet gain from considering each in light of the other.

Comprising leading scholars …