Digital Commons Network^™

The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently …

Supporting Characters: Prosthesis And Aesthetic Technologies Of Disability In The Victorian Novel, Rebecca L. Mccann

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the production of physical disability and the function of prosthesis in nineteenth-century British fiction. My intervention in disability studies readings of Victorian literature attends to the prosthetic object and prosthetic body not only as the dual products of medicine and art, but also as catalytic elements of fiction and culture. I read reciprocal developments in medical technology and disabled characterization in the Victorian novel to demonstrate how the artistic translation of the prosthetic object effected a set of criteria for defining people through both bodies and things and, in so doing, revealed the ways in which the …

Collaborative Writing For Publication In Undergraduate Literature Seminars, Ellen Scheible

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Collaborative Writing for Publication in Undergraduate Literature Seminars

Memes As Means: Using Popular Culture To Enhance The Study Of Literature, Pamela Hartman, Jessica Berg, Hannah R. Fulton, Brandon Schuler

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Artistic response is the process by which readers create concrete representations of their transactions with a text through artistic means, including visual arts (e.g. drawing, sculpture, and painting), drama, and music. Research has shown that artistic response helps students form meaningful relationships with texts, as it is a tool that encourages students to enter, explore, make connections, and enjoy stories and characters. In this article we describe an artistic response strategy that we developed and implemented. Recognizing that today’s students often know and interact with the world through social media and memes, we draw on this cultural tool to leverage …

Re-Reading Alencar's Iracema Through Saer's Lens, Felicia Trievel

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Abstract:

The topic of European colonization is one that is discussed frequently throughout Latin American literature in a variety of different manners. Two books that discuss the colonization of different countries in extremely different ways are Iracema (1865) by José de Alencar and El entenado (1983) by Juan José Saer. The former examines the colonization of Brazil by Portuguese colonists, taking away much of the culture of the indigenous people previously inhabiting Brazil. El entenado examines the colonization of Argentina by the Spaniards. When one reads these two novels it is impossible not to compare the two due to the …

Flipping The Coin: Towards A Double-Faced Approach To Teaching Black Literature In Secondary English Classrooms, Vincent Ray Price

Theory and Practice in Teacher Education Publications and Other Works

Critiquing two approaches that English teachers use to teach Black, or African-American, literature in the secondary classroom—one that centralizes races and the other that ignores it—this article proposes a hybrid approach that combines both. This double-faced approach recognizes the culturally specific themes that give the text and the Black author their unique voice while also recognizing commonalities that bridge the text to others—despite the race of the authors. To demonstrate the feasibility of the double-faced approach, the article concludes with an examination of three texts through the lens of this “race both matters and doesn’t matter” perspective.

Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical …

Female Warriors: Judith, Grendel's Mother, And Gender In Anglo-Saxon England, Honor Lundt

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

L'Altérité Des Femmes Dans La Littérature Française Contemporaine, Loren Lee

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Insurgent Spectacles: Spring Awakening, Woyzeck, Mother Courage And The ‘New’ Broadway Spectacle, Noah Porter Soltau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the political and ideological work done by what I call "insurgent spectacles," which comprised a historical episode of American theater occurring primarily from 2006 to 2008. The spectacles had liberatory and redemptive potential not in spite of their identity as mass culture, but indeed precisely because of it. They functioned in a contested political and ideological space within the schema of mass culture. The insurgent spectacle is so-called because it superficially resembled other bits of Broadway fluff with its glitziness, over-production, and ham-fistedness that allow the audience to be intellectually disengaged. During this episode, it persisted (often …

Restoring The Harmony Of Humanity And Science, Simone Ilia Ms.

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Naked Afterward: A Novel, Adam Blair Prince

Doctoral Dissertations

A novel taking place in Jakarta, Indonesia that explores the tension between ideal and actual, between spiritual and carnal, between who we are and who we would like to be. An American named John Dawke takes a job operating surveillance equipment for an independent security company based in Jakarta that is supposedly involved in counter-terrorism. Dawke’s wife has recently died, and he suspects suicide. Thus, he is trying to get away, to recreate himself in a place where each action reverberates with consequences unintended and unknown.

Evoking Unity: Toward A Communal Phenomenology In Virginia Woolf And William Faulkner, Phillip Douglas Bandy

Masters Theses

Contemporary readings of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf typically situate these canonical authors within their historical contexts as exponents of the material conditions of modernity or as the literary precursors of postmodernism, as writers of indeterminacy and linguistic play. In this thesis, I argue for a mode of reading Woolf and Faulkner grounded not in history or language, but in consciousness as the irreducible basis of human experience. That is, by invoking the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, I claim that both authors attempted to engage more fully with not simply a historical moment called “modernity,” but a human reality characterized …

Beyond The Battlefield: Direct And Prosthetic Memory Of The American War In Viet Nam, Susan L. Eastman

Doctoral Dissertations

“Beyond the Battlefield: Direct and Prosthetic Memory of the American War in Viet Nam” examines shifts in American, Viet Namese, and Philippine memorial, literary, and cinematic remembrance of the war through the cultural lenses of later wars: the Gulf War (1990-1991) and the “War on Terror” that began in 2001. As opposed to earlier portrayals of the American War in Viet Nam (1964-1975), turn-to-the-twenty-first-century representations engage in an ever-broadening collected cultural memory—a compilation of multifaceted, sometimes competing, individual and group memories—of the war. “Beyond the Battlefield” begins with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) because it serves as the impetus for …