Digital Commons Network^™

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Crafting Of The Self In Private Letters And The Epistolary Novel: El Hilo Que Une, Un Verano En Bornos, Ifigenia, Querido Diego, Te Abraza Quiela, And Cartas Apócrifas, Angelica A. Nelson

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The inherent flexibility of the letter form or epistolary mode of writing frees the writer within the framework of salutations and closings to use vocabulary and language to create, to omit or to invert conventional constraints imposed on women by a patriarchal society. The letter begins as a blank page but becomes the space for writing one’s personal thoughts and emotions to the absent other in a communicative effort to minimize the separation.

This dissertation examines the female narrator in actual letters written during the Spanish emigration to the New World in the sixteenth century and four epistolary novels written …

The Hybridizing Nature Of Ancestor Presence In Morrison’S Sula, Mounica V. Kota Ms.

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

In her writings, Toni Morrison works towards a common goal of establishing a black literary canon, once that represents black characters as autonomous and nuanced human beings unable to be boxed into a one-dimensional narrative. Part of this overarching project appears to be creating a hybridizing narrative in which the cultural roots of various African-American communities are integrated with the social movements of the modern diaspora. One common theme between her novels is the inclusion of a specific ancestral figure, one that functions as some kind of pushing point or learning tool for the community within the story. In examining …

The Ideology Of Madness: The Rejected Artist Vs. The Capitalist Society In As I Lay Dying, Jared R. Mcswain

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

This article examines the character of Darl Bundren in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying from the position that he is an artist functioning in a society that ultimately rejects and condemns him through the vessel of ideological conceptions of madness. Topics explored include the ideology of madness, the ideological project of capitalism, queering as a weapon to support an ideology, essential characteristics of “the artist” type, and the consequences of perceived madness.

How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900’s to the mid1930’s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate …

Animals In Irish Literature And Culture Edited By Kathryn Kirkpatrick And Borbála Faragó, Geneviève Pigeon

The Goose

Review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó's Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Great Mirror Of Motherly Love: Maternal Fantasy, Mystic Mothers, And Reflected Selves In Modern And Contemporary Japanese Fiction, Jessica E. Legare

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Fantasy and mysticism often serve as key elements in escapist literature—constructing stories that move protagonists beyond the furthest reaches of the real, the familiar and the human. Yet, the otherworldly can also bring the protagonist within reach of the familiar if we consider the representations of mothering in the following Japanese narratives: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s “Longing for Mother” (1919), Izumi Kyōka’s “The Holy Man of Mount Kōya” (1900), Takahashi Takako’s “Doll Love” (1976), and Ono Masatsugu’s “Prayers from Nine Years Ago” (2014). Through their depictions based on supernatural and spiritual tropes, mystical-mother figures become metaphorical mirrors meant to reflect the protagonists’ …

Reading As A Resource: Exploring Reading Habits And Multicultural Awareness And Acceptance In Undergraduate Students, Megan E. Owens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Considerable research has been conducted examining the benefits of diversity on campus and diversity programming for undergraduate students. However, minimal research has been focused on connecting reading fiction as a potential resource for diversity programming. Diversity courses, racial awareness workshops, and service learning opportunities are all supported by research for their transformational influence on students’ attitudes and perceptions towards minority and underrepresented groups on campus. Emerging studies have established that reading narrative fiction can enhance readers’ empathic and multicultural attitudes, shift perspectives and outlooks, and enhance moral reasoning. Benefits such as these could be harnessed to cultivate a campus culture …

“I Must Tell The Whole World”: Septimus Smith As Virginia Woolf’S Legal Messenger, Riley H. Floyd

Indiana Law Journal

This Note explores the disjunctive moral gap between a civilian ethic of mutual responsibility and the laws of war that eschew that ethic. To illustrate that gap, this Note conducts a case study of Virginia Woolf’s rendering of shell shock in her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. The war put mass, mechanized killing at center stage, and international law permitted killing in war. But Woolf’s character study of Septimus Smith reveals that whether war-associated killing is “criminal” requires more than legal analysis. An extralegal approach is especially meaningful because it demonstrates the difficulty of processing and rationalizing global conflict that plays …

Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths And The Medicalization Of Madness In John Gower’S “Tale Of Iphis And Ianthe”, M W. Bychowski

Accessus

On the brink of the twenty-first century, Judith Butler argues in “Undiagnosing Gender” that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defines the psychiatric condition of “Gender Identity Disorder” (or “Gender Dysphoria”) in ways that control biological diversity and construct “transgender” as a marginalized identity. By turning the study of gender away from vulnerable individuals and towards the broader systems of power, Butler works to liberate bodies from the medical mechanisms managing difference and precluding potentially disruptive innovations in forms of life and embodiment by creating categories of gender and disability.

Turning to the brink of the 15 …

Classical-Christian Friendship Operating In Western Literature: Oral Traditions To The Apex Of Print Culture, Marc G. Levasseur

Ph.D. Dissertations (Open Access)

The classical-Christian model of friendship has operated for many centuries from oral traditions and through the age of print. However, technological developments in communication and media rearrange mindscapes. Consequently, values, or, those things that give meaning, can change, such as perceptions of friendship. If one accepts that communication is vital to human relationships, the paradigm for the classical-Christian friendship should operate according to the new vocabulary of expanding communication and media possibilities. This work examines literature and philosophical thought within their historical contexts in order to gauge the operation of the classical-Christian friendship model from the beginning of Western literature …

A Philosophy Of Rebellion: Anarchism In Literature And Film, Menna Eldawi Zein

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to outline the philosophy and purpose of anarchism through an interdisciplinary approach that involves literature and film. The main argument is that anarchism, apart from the moral connotations that have accrued to the term, maintains the idea of the inherent natural balance or equilibrium among cosmic powers. This idea grounds the theory of anarchism in the political sphere and helps us understand how anarchism can be applied to the sphere of culture. By considering both theory and practice in the anarchist tradition, the thesis proposes to redefine anarchism through an interdisciplinary approach that examines the philosophical history …

Embodied Narratives In Video Games: The Stories We Write As We Play, Patrick John Harrington Sichter

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This article explores the nature of narrative in video games, and how it can be applied to the contemporary classroom to help teach literature and composition. Specifically, it is concerned with the idea of embodiment in video games. First proposed by theorist James Gee, embodiment is a word describing the phenomenon wherein a player inhabits the character that s/he plays. This article takes the idea of embodiment a step further, by introducing the idea of the embodied narrative, the idea that players do not only embody their characters, but those characters’ stories as well, and are composing unique, personal …

Buddhism's Worldly Other: Secular Subjects Of Tibetan Learning, Dominique Townsend

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies

By analyzing the writings of select Tibetan authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article reflects on the prestige attached to secular (but not anti-religious) knowledge, and the ambivalence prominent thinkers expressed around the proper relationship between worldly and religious learning. Tibetan lay and religious leaders have long been steeped in a classical Indic system of categorizing knowledge, known in Sanskrit as pañcavidyāsthāna and in Tibetan as rikné nga (Tib. rig gnas lnga). Sakya Paṇḍita first established the importance of these fields of knowledge in Tibet during the thirteenth century. Later intellectual figures such as the Fifth Dalai Lama …

Kinky Criticism: Bdsm Principles Applied To Literature, Maria J. Dominguez

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis proposes a new school of literary analysis: Kinky Criticism. This critical theory will examine the presence in literature of themes related to BDSM, an acronym referring to bondage/discipline, domination/submission, and sadism/masochism. My purpose in examining this power exchange and sadomasochism in literature is threefold. Firstly, I aim to reveal the presence of kinky themes in not only a range of literary works, but also leave the reader aware of kink present in everyday human interactions. Secondly, through this application to literature, Kinky Criticism sheds new light on the techniques of characterization and adds complexity to the dynamics between …

After All This Time: A Study Of The Appeal Of Young Adult Fiction Series Among Young Readers, Sarah Jessica Martin

Senior Theses

What is it about young adult fiction that is so addictive? Why do teenagers return to the same characters and situations over and over again in series fiction? This study explores the significance of young adult fiction series with a scientific approach, through the surveying of teenagers on the aspects of those series that are so meaningful to them. Through this study, a greater understanding of the way readers interact with literature is achieved.

The research portion of this study is largely inspired by Reading the Romance by Janice Radway^[1], an investigation that explores the attraction of romance …

Exploring The Connections Between Literary Places, Literary Texts, And Tourist Performance, Alana Nicole Seaman

All Dissertations

Books and travel are inseparable. From inspiring destination choices to offering vacationers a diversion during their journeys, books and other literature have long been a part of the travel experience. In many cases, thousands of tourists trek to places of literary importance in order to participate in literature-inspired activities such as wading in the serene waters of Walden Pond (Mass. State Parks, 2015), jump frogs in the real Calaveras County (Calaveras County, 2015), and go fly-fishing in the actual river from A River Runs Through It (Hepworth, 1992). However, in many cases these tourist “performances” also appear to be reliant …

Ideology Of Literature Studies In High School Colloquiums In Neoliberal China, Jiayin Pan

Culminating Projects in Social Responsibility

This study focuses on exploring the ideological influences in literature studies in neoliberal China. The exploration of ideological impacts will be discussed through looking at the theoretical discourse and empirical discourse. The theoretical discourse which will be developed in this study based on the theory of ideology and the theory of neoliberalism. There will be many other theoretical themes discussed in study, but all of them are going to serve the discourse about ideology and neoliberalism. The discourse about the theory of ideology and theory of neoliberalism intends to provide the background and theoretical framework for the empirical discourse. The …

“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …

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

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Queering The Aftermath: Rethinking The Queer In Postcolonial And The (Post)Colonial In Queer, Robert Larue

English Dissertations

“Queering the Aftermath: Rethinking the Queer in Postcolonial and the (Post)colonial in Queer,” argues the necessity for a sustained dialogue between the fields of postcolonial studies and queer studies. The paucity of analysis of queerness within postcolonial discourse, along with dearth of analysis of systems of colonialism which undergird much of queer studies impedes both discourses’ aims for challenging the systems of normativity upon which Western hegemony is built. With a focus on sub-Saharan African queer narratives, this work finds that, contrary to common perception, queerness in Africa operates in a myriad of forms that are unrecognized in U.S. notions …

Masks And Performance As Representations Of Gender Oppression And Repression In Edith Wharton’S The House Of Mirth And Nella Larsen’S Passing, Carrie A. Wilson

SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen’s literature focus on metaphorically representing gender oppression and repression as masked social performances that result in death being the ultimate release from the drama. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth depicts the heroine Lily Bart who, in the public social realm, attempts to mask herself as a disturbingly superficial character. Wharton’s masquerade imagery demonstrates the extent to which Lily socially capitalizes her beauty. Lily fixates on "clearness" and "lucidity" in events leading up to her death, which shows how dying releases her from the dishonest social masquerade (260). Nella Larsen’s heroine Irene Redfield similarly uses …

Coming To Know About Sacrifice Zones And Eco-Activism: Teaching And Learning About Climate Change, Alexandra Panos, James Damico

Teacher Education Faculty Publications

This paper shares curricular tools to engage in inquiry around issues related to environmental justice for upper elementary and middle grades students. Focusing on developing background knowledge and critical reading practices, the unit offers approaches to fiction and non-fiction online sources that promote an inquiry stance based in empathy and exploration. In addition to developing critical stances and questions to explore sacrifice zones and eco-activism, this paper shares many resources (texts and scaffolded tools) for praxical application in classrooms.

Common Sense, Contracts, And Law And Literature: Why Lawyers Should Read Henry James, Lenora Ledwon

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Program, Sunlit Festival, 2016, Studio@620, St. Petersburg Arts Alliance, Keep St. Pete Lit, Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, St. Petersburg Library System, Friends Of The Johnson, St. Petersburg Shakespeare Festival, Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum, Peter Gallagher, The Palladium, Kristy Anderson

Program Collection

Literature represents a moment in time. It is an exploration of our history, an expression of our experiences and of the life that surrounds us. It is a discussion of who we are, how we got that way and what choices we can make to shape our future. Literary and other arts & cultural circles intersect during the second annual SunLit Festival, a springtime celebration of the written word. More than 40 events in 24 venues over 10 days, SunLit 2016 brings together various literary organizations and arts disciplnes to celebrate literacy, literature, reading, and writing for days of intoxicating …

Socialism And Fantasy: China Miéville’S Fables Of Race And Class, Christopher Kendrick

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Locked In: Melancholia In The Modern American Prison Literature Of R. Dwayne Betts And Jarvis Jay Masters, Johnna Scrabis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the theme of melancholia in the writing of currently and formerly incarcerated African American men during the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Melancholia, with its rich history in literature from ancient times to the present, is discernable in the works of many people with prison experience. In their writing, melancholia is expressed primarily as a loss and as a disconnection with time, as well as an empowering creative force. The work of Jarvis Jay Masters and R. Dwayne Betts reflects the paradox of melancholia: just as it shows the depressive element of the condition, …

Negotiating Gender And Sexuality In Contemporary Turkey, Jaspal Kaur Singh, Mary Lou O'Neil

Books

Turkey is often visualized as a modern nation-state having a perfect balance of Eastern and Western cultural mores and traditions within dominant ideological constructions and representations, but on closer inspection, one can detect conflicts and contradictions within various texts—particularly in regards to depictions of gender and sexual identity. Upon its foundation as a nation, Turkey embarked on a state-centered, elite-driven path toward modernization and Westernization while also seeking to produce a monolithic culture. At the time, it was widely believed that Turkey could not rank among modern,

Western countries without the emancipation of women. As a result of the founding …

Cultural Criticisms Within Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Holly Rose Litwin

ETD Archive

To understand fully Thomas Hardy’s cultural criticisms within his 1891 novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, one must look simultaneously at the full range of these cultural criticisms. The novel is a scathing condemnation of capitalism, Victorian beliefs about women, church doctrine, the shortcomings of the educational and judicial systems, and the destructive forces that industrialization and mechanization bring to the natural world in rural agrarian England. Within the past twenty years, scholars have explicated this text in ever-more specific, detailed, and narrow areas of focus, often coming up with fascinating and meticulously researched individual topics. However, I believe that …