Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Literature (27)
- American Literature (9)
- Gender (6)
- British and Irish Literature (5)
- Modern Literature (5)
-
- Short stories (5)
- Gender Studies (4)
- Language Arts (4)
- Masculinity (4)
- Masculinity in literature (4)
- American -- History and criticism (3)
- Creative writing (3)
- Identity (3)
- Jean (3)
- Poetry (3)
- Rhetoric (3)
- Science fiction (3)
- Shakespeare (3)
- Trauma (3)
- Violence (3)
- William (3)
- 1564-1616 (2)
- 1882-1941 (2)
- African American Studies (2)
- American -- 21st century (2)
- American History (2)
- American fiction -- African American authors -- History and criticism (2)
- American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism (2)
- Apocalyptic literature (2)
- Bakhtin (2)
Articles 91 - 108 of 108
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Genre And Gender In Charles Bukowski's Notes Of A Dirty Old Man, Kallisto J. Vimr
Genre And Gender In Charles Bukowski's Notes Of A Dirty Old Man, Kallisto J. Vimr
ETD Archive
Charles Bukowski's notes of a dirty old man is a genre-blurring, gender-blending "start" to the perpetual "work-in-progress" that constitutes his oeuvre. Bukowski's genre heterogeneity provides a literal shape-shifting that allows the Bukowski-character to experiment with his a fluid, indeterminate subjectivity, helping unravel the tight myth that binds him as a "dirty old man." Examining one of the vignettes in the book, the column recounting Bukowski meeting Neal Cassady, showcases Bukowski's engagement with autobiography and creative nonfiction in order to respond to constructions of verisimilitude this is inextricably linked to other organized constructions Bukowski must work in--or out from--namely the hierarchy …
Young Ghosts, Michael Aeneas Crifasi
Young Ghosts, Michael Aeneas Crifasi
ETD Archive
Young Ghosts is a post-apocalyptic horror novel written in the style of literary fiction. The story is broken into three acts, the first of which constitutes the following thesis. A critical introduction, describing the influences, aesthetic, and future designs of the work, precede the creative portion. This narrative plays out in the third week of a world-altering epidemic and is set in the modern day. At the center of the epidemic is a disease, unknown in origin, which kills only children. The Piper is the name given to the mysterious epidemic, noting its similarity to the minstrel/child abductor of fairy …
Rare Bird And Other Stories, Lisa J. Sharon
Rare Bird And Other Stories, Lisa J. Sharon
ETD Archive
This collection of short stories and one novella use voice and setting to explore individual characters dealing with internal conflict, or relationships between characters who are engaged in conflict with each other. Each story is intended to be a "portrait" with varying degrees of detail and nuance. For the most part, the "antagonists" in these stories are not another person so much as they are circumstances in which the main character finds herself and which creates a need to confront and perhaps change her situation. Characters either take decisive action, escape into delusion, or merely cope with things as they …
The Power Of Society In The Red Badge Of Courage, Hmoud Alotaibi
The Power Of Society In The Red Badge Of Courage, Hmoud Alotaibi
ETD Archive
Stephen Crane's work the Red badge of courage has often been cited by literary critics as an example of the author's philosophy. The main debate around this philosophy often surrounds the question of Crane's naturalism. Critics not only argue over the individual beliefs that make up Crane's supposedly naturalistic philosophy, but many also argue simply over whether or not he is a naturalist. In this thesis, we step away from the back-and-forth argument that deals only with Crane's fitment into the general label of "naturalist." Rather, we look at aspects that connect Crane to traditional understandings of naturalism - such …
The Soldier's Perspective In A Rumor Of War, Kyla Haime
The Soldier's Perspective In A Rumor Of War, Kyla Haime
ETD Archive
Tim O'Brien and Michael Herr, two very famous Vietnam War writers, seem to have gotten war narrative theorists to conclude that Vietnam War Literature cannot be cohesive since the war itself is fragmented. Philip Caputo's memoir, A Rumor of War, seems to have taken these components of war and has carefully sewn them together to provide his reader's with a cohesive, truthful, and compelling war narrative. In O'Brien's narrative, The Things They Carried, facts are given and then called into question, making the reader wonder if any of it is true. In his narrative, Dispatches, Herr makes the reader piece …
On The Brink Of The Waters Of Life And Truth, We Are Miserably Dying: Ralph Waldo Emerson As A Predecessor To Deconstruction And Postmodernism, Michael A. Deery
On The Brink Of The Waters Of Life And Truth, We Are Miserably Dying: Ralph Waldo Emerson As A Predecessor To Deconstruction And Postmodernism, Michael A. Deery
ETD Archive
Between his pivotal essays "Nature" in 1836 and "The Poet" in 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson's increasingly negative and distrustful view of language can best be described as a precursor to deconstruction and postmodernism. Contemporary critics are too quick to dismiss a deconstructionist Emerson. There is evidence within his major essays that Emerson's understanding of language not only leads him to public and private displays of pessimism, but also to feelings of internal solipsism, agnosticism, and epistemological anxiety. Emerson demanded that mankind should utilize nature and aesthetics to experience the sublime and an immediate and original relationship with God. Yet, Emerson's …
Of Earth And Sky: Lev Tolstoy As Poet And Prophet, Alan Cliffe
Of Earth And Sky: Lev Tolstoy As Poet And Prophet, Alan Cliffe
ETD Archive
In this study I consider Lev Tolstoy's life and thought by reference to their national and historical context. My purposes here, of course, have to do with understanding that context as well as with understanding Tolstoy. In Chapter II, I consider and try to evoke the nineteenth-century Russian landscape to which Tolstoy was born. Also in Chapter II, I introduce, for comparative purposes, a figure from a generation of Russians later than Tolstoy's, a man very different from Tolstoy who nonetheless admired him greatly. I am referring to the man who became known as Lenin. I extend and expand the …
Subverting Blackface And The Epistemology Of American Identity In John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs, Amy Rosby
Subverting Blackface And The Epistemology Of American Identity In John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs, Amy Rosby
ETD Archive
John Berryman has been criticized for his employment of white performance of blackface minstrelsy's conventions and dialect in 77 Dream Songs because of the complex history of this tradition of blackface's problematic performance of racial fantasy and because of Berryman's designation as a white, confessional poet. However, when one observes the history of this tradition of minstrelsy, its initial reception, its "transcodification" into the white American racial ideology, and subsequent scholarly analyses of its implications, it is evident that Berryman creates an anti-model of minstrelsy which consequently becomes a minstrelsy of "whiteness." Through this anti-model, which shifts the public gaze …
An Analysis Of "The Real," As Reflected In Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, Beverly Rose Joyce
An Analysis Of "The Real," As Reflected In Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, Beverly Rose Joyce
ETD Archive
Heart of Darkness, as a framed narrative, questions perception and authenticity. It is difficult to discern Marlow's individual voice, for it is buried within a layering of narration. Critics ascribe the words of the text to Marlow, claiming he is the one who, in Achebe's words, dehumanizes Africans. Yet, the quotation marks suggest otherwise. Perception is relevant to an analysis of Heart of Darkness, for it is unclear whose point of view constructs the text, that of Kurtz, Marlow, or the frame narrator. Since the narrative is likely composed of multiple perspectives, it is difficult to determine whose reality it …
Sarah Kane's Cruelty: Subversive Performance And Gender, Rebecca L. Dluback
Sarah Kane's Cruelty: Subversive Performance And Gender, Rebecca L. Dluback
ETD Archive
Sarah Kane uses cruelty in her plays Blasted and Cleansed to shock the audience out of their indifference, which will then allow Kane to subvert gender norms, through performed acts on stage, and the heterosexual patriarchal authority that creates the Other in society. Kane uses the theories of Antonin Artaud and Judith Butler to create a new style that melds these two theories while bringing a fresh take to the theater. Kane was twenty-three when her first play, Blasted, opened at the Royal Court Theater Upstairs on January 12, 1995. It was met with hostility by the critics when it …
Old Beginnings: The Re-Inscription Of Masculine Domination At The New Millennium In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake, Lacie M. Semenovich
Old Beginnings: The Re-Inscription Of Masculine Domination At The New Millennium In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake, Lacie M. Semenovich
ETD Archive
This essay analyzes the role of masculine domination in the twenty-first century as portrayed in Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel of speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake. I argue that Atwood's uncharacteristic choice of male primary characters highlights the masculine/feminine and the human/nature binaries in order to critique the destructiveness of a continued masculine domination of nature and the feminine. I utilize Donna Haraway's theory of speculative fiction as an alternative space in which we can begin to explore new relationships with nature to critique Atwood's novel. In my first chapter, I posit that Atwood utilizes Judeo-Christian allusions to situate the novel …
Sex, Gender, And Androgyny In Virginia Woolf's Mock-Biographies "Friendships Gallery" And Orlando, Sarah Hastings
Sex, Gender, And Androgyny In Virginia Woolf's Mock-Biographies "Friendships Gallery" And Orlando, Sarah Hastings
ETD Archive
This is an examination of sex, gender, and androgyny in Virginia Woolf́⁰₉s ́⁰₋Friendships Gallerý⁰₊ and Orlando. These texts, written twenty years apart, highlight Woolf́⁰₉s development as a feminist who seeks to obliterate the assumed sex and gender binary. She accomplishes this through a mock biography format. Her first attempt highlights the androgynous nature of the main character Violet, whereas in Orlando her message of the constrictive nature of an assumed link between sex and gender is far more emphatically proven though the utilization of the titular character undergoing a biological sex change that ultimately leaves his/her gender unaffected
Destruction In Search Of Hope: Baudrillard, Simulation, And Chuck Palahniuk's Choke, Kurt D. Fawver
Destruction In Search Of Hope: Baudrillard, Simulation, And Chuck Palahniuk's Choke, Kurt D. Fawver
ETD Archive
Chuck Palahniuk's Choke is a text that perfectly constructs a world of simulation as theorized by Jean Baudrillard. However, rather than reveling in meaningless, if entertaining, hyperreality as Baudrillard does, the text attempts to find escape from the endless barrage of mediated images and information inherent in such a simulatory existence. It advocates an evolution (or de-evolution, as the case may be) of communication and signification, a willful ignorance of sorts, that will allow images to be reconnected with meaning and signifiers to be reunited with concrete corresponding signifieds. Following a line of postmodern literature begun by Pynchon and Delillo …
Pop-Culture Artifacts, Ellyn M. Stepanek
Pop-Culture Artifacts, Ellyn M. Stepanek
ETD Archive
In dealing with literary work such as Neil Gaiman's, fiction that both inhabits and defies conventions of genre and medium and thus easy definition, it is clear that an examination of such work benefits from as eclectic a style as Gaiman's own approach to story-telling. While this essay attempts no summary of the author's entire literary corpus, an analysis of the underlying influences of the novel American Gods is necessary to map the details of its territory. A survey of the convergence of the various genres and allusions within this one text, and the ways in which Gaiman measures Old …
Simulation In Dave Eggers's Memoir, Judit Slager
Simulation In Dave Eggers's Memoir, Judit Slager
ETD Archive
The genre of the American memoir has been altered through the centuries since Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. By the twentieth century one of the strongest influential elements has become the simulation of reality. In a memoir as much as an autobiographer reveals about society, also social demands or cultural transactions influence the author as he writes. Modern society has replaced reality and meaning with symbols and signs. With other words simulation seems to be a part of social demand. As Jean Baudrillard explains it our perception is entangled in prepackaged media perspectives. When Dave Eggers writes his autobiography he attempts to …
Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales And Rescue In Sandra Cisneros's The House On Mango Street, Christina Marie Frank
Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales And Rescue In Sandra Cisneros's The House On Mango Street, Christina Marie Frank
ETD Archive
Within The House on Mango Street, Cisneros weaves several subtle literary allusions, mostly from fairy tales, into many of her vignettes. These subtle allusions help Cisneros create a portrait of expected feminine roles, mostly women as victims, within the patriarchal community, which, when juxtaposed with Esperanza's ideals for herself and her inner strength and drive, help distinguish her as different from those around her. Because she is different and stronger than the other women in her community, Esperanza will be able to reject the other female role models presented by both the women in her community and the women in …
Candida: Shaw's Presentation Of The Roman Catholic "Other", Kenneth Rademaker
Candida: Shaw's Presentation Of The Roman Catholic "Other", Kenneth Rademaker
ETD Archive
In 1876, George Bernard Shaw arrived in London, in many ways just another of the Irish immigrants who were coming to England in the wake of famine. Shaw had not in mind just making a living he wanted to be the literary giant he would indeed become. Of Anglo-Irish descent at a time when little distinction was made between the Anglo and Celtic Irish, Shaw felt it necessary to distinguish himself from the latter sort of immigrants, whose Roman Catholicism was a cause for alarm in a Britain that had been Protestant for three centuries. Shaw would do so with …
Violence And Vigilantism In Modern Irish Literature, Janet Carmichael
Violence And Vigilantism In Modern Irish Literature, Janet Carmichael
ETD Archive
Many authors of modern Irish literary works challenge the rhetoric used to justify the continuation of conflict in Northern Ireland. One effective method used to accomplish this challenge is the dramatic depiction of violence. The depictions are notable in that they are designed to fall outside of, run counter to, or exceed the normative frameworks perpetuated by the dominant ideologies. They are formulated to promote social change by attacking the foundational fallacies used to validate the structural hegemony. Eoin McNamee and Kate O'Riordan use graphic depictions of violence and human destruction in their novels to expose some of the fallacies …