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Speculative Constitutions In Ursula K. Le Guin’S Hainish Cycle And The Rights Of Nature, Ted Hamilton Jan 2023

Speculative Constitutions In Ursula K. Le Guin’S Hainish Cycle And The Rights Of Nature, Ted Hamilton

Faculty Journal Articles

This paper examines two speculative examinations of humanity as a unified species and agent of ecological change: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle and the rights of nature movement. Le Guin’s Cycle imagines the slow interplanetary reintegration of human polities against a backdrop of cultural and environmental difference. I read the novels of the Cycle as an allegory for the rights of nature movement, which seeks to synthesize traditional and modern knowledge in a legal solution to ecological crisis. Both discourses, I argue, productively imagine a new historical understanding of humanity’s place on Earth, but they provide a weak theory …


One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali Jan 2023

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …


The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer Apr 2022

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …


Affective Histories Of Southern Trauma: Shame, Healing, And Vulnerability In Us Southern Women’S Writing, 1975–2006, Faune Albert Jul 2020

Affective Histories Of Southern Trauma: Shame, Healing, And Vulnerability In Us Southern Women’S Writing, 1975–2006, Faune Albert

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the affective impacts of historical trauma around slavery and segregation in the US South, arguing for the importance of understanding US Southern history through the ways in which it has lived and continues to live in and on the bodies of Southerners marked by race and gender and class and within emotional life in the South. The texts in this study—Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), Dorothy Allison’s Trash (1988), Ellen Gilchrist’s Net of Jewels (1992), and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006)—engage the affective impacts of intergenerational and insidious trauma through portrayals of Southern women struggling to give voice …


Lost Voices: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, And The Nature Of History, Luke Hardin May 2020

Lost Voices: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, And The Nature Of History, Luke Hardin

Undergraduate Theses

The novels of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are nothing if not haunted. Though the authors themselves remain, in many ways, diametrically opposed, their works remain inextricably entangled due to the looming specter of history that hangs over their pages. Perhaps more-so than any other writers in the 20th Century, these two towering figures of American fiction took seriously the task of unpacking the migrainous burden of history. Read together, they offer differing perspectives on the nature of writing one's own past, and how this is informed by race and class. Specifically, Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded …


Dissecting The Man Of Steel: The Evolution Of Superman As A Reflection Of American Society, Marie Gould Apr 2020

Dissecting The Man Of Steel: The Evolution Of Superman As A Reflection Of American Society, Marie Gould

Undergraduate Theses

Since his debut during the Great Depression in 1938, Superman has become an American cultural icon. His symbol is not only known throughout the nation, but the world as well. Despite this, many consider Superman to be irrelevant and unrelatable to reality because he is written as an outrageously overpowered being with “boy scout” morals. However, he has not always been written this way. This research seeks to uncover the connections between Superman’s various narratives and the changing social and political ideas of American Society throughout history. Specifically, the objective of this study is to establish whether Superman has changed …


Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau May 2018

Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau

Theses and Dissertations

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Things They Carried subvert dominating historical narratives by challenging the frameworks that construct them through introducing alternate narratives. By reframing the ethics of truth, they rupture central narrative space with marginal perspectives, rewriting History in service of their own truths.


Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky Oct 2017

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …


Re-Calling The Past: Poetry As Preservation Of Black Female Histories, Rachel Miller-Haughton Jan 2017

Re-Calling The Past: Poetry As Preservation Of Black Female Histories, Rachel Miller-Haughton

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a …


Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman May 2012

Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman

Doctoral Dissertations

Gothic Modernism: Revising and Representing the Narratives of History and Romance analyzes the surprising frequency of the tones, tropes, language, and conventions of the classic Gothic that oppose the realist impulses of Modernism. In a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about The Great Gatsby, he explains that he “selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’” (Letters 551). This “stuff” constitutes the “subtler means” that Virginia Woolf wrote about when she observed that the conventions of the classic Gothic no longer evoked fear: “The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters …


Nobilitashungariae: List Of Historical Surnames Of The Hungarian Nobility, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek Jun 2011

Nobilitashungariae: List Of Historical Surnames Of The Hungarian Nobility, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven & Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven

nobilitashungariae: List of Historical Surnames of the Hungarian Nobility 2010- (ISSN 1923-9580 ©Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek Purdue University Press) is compiled by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek based on published historical genealogical sources. nobilitashungariae is archived in the Electronic Collection of Library and Archives Canada. A magyar történelmi nemesség családneveinek listája 2010- (ISSN 1923-9580 ©Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek & Purdue University Press) genealógiai munkák alapján van Tötösy de Zepetnek Steven által összeállítva. A könyv állománya az Electronic Collection of Library and Archives Canada digitális archívumjának.


Imagining Sri Lanka, Derick Kirishan Ariyam May 2010

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.