Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Relevance And Resiliency Of The Humanities, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Discussion has grown increasingly urgent among those involved in the humanities; threats to funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts are only the most highly visible indicators of what many call a “war on the humanities.” The issue is a familiar one. With everyone’s finances under increasing stress, there is mounting pressure to “cut back on nonessentials,” and among both educational institutions and the broader public community, the humanities seem easy targets for the cutters and the pruners. There’s a general sense that the humanities are not very useful when it comes …

“2889” Vs. “2890”, Arthur B. Evans

Global Language Studies Faculty publications

Abstract

This article offers a detailed comparison of Michel Verne’s 1889 short story “In the Year 2889” and Jules Verne’s 1891 recycled version of the same story, now called « La Journée d’un journaliste américain en 2890 » [The Day of an American Journalist in 2890]. In my analysis, I have also pointed out some of the alterations Michel made to his father’s version when later editing it for inclusion in the posthumous 1910 edition of Verne’s Hier et demain [Yesterday and Tomorrow], now retitled « Au XXIXe siècle : La Journée d’un journaliste américain en 2889 » [In the …

Foreword To D.W. Robertson, Jr., Uncollected Essays, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

During the late summer of 1992, I received a call from Darryl Gless, a professor of Renaissance literature at the University of North Carolina and my former student, asking me if it would be all right if he and other people looking after the literary remains of D. W. Robertson would send me a package of published and unpublished articles that Robertson had left behind upon his death in July of that year. Gless had been a friend of Dr. and Mrs. Robertson in Chapel Hill, visiting with them frequently while trying a bit to look after their well-being in …

Biopolitical Masochism In Marina Abramović’S The Artist Is Present, Jaime Brunton

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay analyzes The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović’s heavily mediatized 2010 performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, through the lenses of Freudian and Deleuzean concepts of masochism, specifically with respect to how the masochistic tendencies of this performance may be read in the current context of biopolitics. The essay seeks answers to questions of political import that many critical analyses of Abramović’s performance, which focus on details of the performer’s personal history, have not adequately addressed. Drawing on the documentary film Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) that follows Abramović through the conceptualization and enactment …

Somos Tierra Floreciendo: El Surgimiento De La Literatura Kichwa Como Herramienta Política Y Cultural, Kaia Heimer-Bumstead

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Este proyecto de estudio independiente examina el papel de la literatura escrita en la resistencia cultural y política de los pueblos kichwas de la sierra ecuatoriana. Analiza la manera en que la historia de colonización influye en la expresión cultural y lingüística de los pueblos originarios, en particular la fuerte tradición de oralidad y los niveles bajos de alfabetismo en la propia lengua que caracterizan a la actual producción cultural de la sociedad kichwa. Dentro de esto contexto, discute las implicaciones de adoptar y utilizar recursos y códigos occidentales, como la escritura alfabética, para preservar, fortalecer y revitalizar la lengua …

Reimagining African Authenticity Through Adichie's Imitation Motif, Ivette Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie …

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Jerry-Rigged Salvation, John Sivils

English Class Publications

This paper examines the anagogical meaning of certain objects in three of Flannery O'Connor's stories, and then proposes how those meanings nuance narrative themes.

Texto, Contexto Y Cultura En Los Comentarios Sobre Teología De La Liberación, Sara Heist

Senior Honors Theses

The critical dialogue sparked by Latin American liberation theology in the 1970s has involved diverse authors from various creeds and cultures. Although dozens of critics have offered an analysis of both Liberation Theology and its foundational text, Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation, the discussion has not reached consensus. Some critics, such as Ray Hundley, Ronald Nash, C. F. H. Henry, Harold O. J. Brown and Michael Novak, dismiss the movement as a hopeless entanglement of social goodwill, economic ignorance, and insidious Marxist philosophy. Others, among them the Catholic Magisterium, Michael Löwy, Juan Carlos Scannone, and João B. Chaves, …

Eng 200: A Heroine In Her Own Right: A Character Analysis Of Penelope In The Penelopiad, Ar’Meishia Burrow

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Eng 200: The Consciousness Of Reality Through Poetry, Jill Matthews

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Review: Ikuho Amano, Decadent Literature In Twentieth-Century Japan: Spectacles Of Idle Labor., James Shields

Other Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Depictions Of Fear In Lev Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches And Stephen Crane's The Red Badge Of Courage, Ralph Willard Schusler Jr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to examine and compare two iconoclastic works dealing with war as experienced by combatants. So much of modern war fiction takes this perspective that one is hard pressed to imagine a time when such was not the case; the watershed was marked in the above named works by the aforementioned writers, which, and who, were first in putting readers inside the heads of common soldiers facing mortal danger. These pioneering authors opened the door to modernist writing about boundary situations involving existential threat, as well as the psychological reactions they evoke – especially fear. …

Listening/Reading For Disremembered Voices: Additive Archival Representation And The Zong Massacre Of 1781, Jorge E. Cartaya

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis grapples with questions surrounding representation, mourning, and responsibility in relation to two literary representations of the ZONG massacre of 1781. These texts are M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! and Fred D’Aguiar’s FEEDING THE GHOSTS. The only extant archival document—a record of the insurance dispute which ensued as a consequence of the massacre—does not represent the drowned as victims, nor can it represent the magnitude of the atrocity. As such, this thesis posits that the archival gaps or silences from which the captives’ voices are missing become spaces of possibility for additive representation. This thesis also examines the role voice …

Surplus Rebellion, Human Capital, And The Ends Of Study In Chile, 2011, D. Bret Leraul

Faculty Journal Articles

This article traces a dual representational crisis, at once mimetic and political, coursing through Chile’s 2011 movement and its post-Transition conjuncture. It aims to reconfigure the archive of 2011 in order to release its radical potential from the obfuscating solutions offered by the alliance of its dominant academic and journalistic reception and Chile’s elitist, liberal democracy, and to understand why in 2016 –five years since 2011 and a decade since the outbreak of student unrest– Chilean people continue to defy the state.Through a close reading of an anonymous pamphlet defending the violent, masked protestors known as encapuchados, I argue …

1616. Shakespeare And Tang Xianzu's China, Shiamin Kwa

East Asian Languages and Cultures Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Role Of George Henry Lewes In George Eliot’S Career: A Reconsideration, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article examines the “protection” and “encouragement” George Henry Lewes provided to Eliot throughout her fiction-writing career. According to biographers, Lewes showed his selfless devotion to Eliot by encouraging her to begin and continue writing fiction; by fostering the mystery of her authorship; by managing her finances; by negotiating her publishing contracts; by managing her schedule; by hosting a salon to promote her books; and by staying close by her side for twenty-four years until death parted them. By reconsidering each element of Lewes’s devotion separately, Rilett challenges the prevailing construction of the Eliot–Lewes relationship as the ideal partnership of …

Where The Epic Meets The Novel: The Double Narrative Of Sordello And Robert Browning’S Historical Theory Of Poetry, Laura Clarke

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Gift Of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, And Dostoevsky, By Alina Wyman, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

There are certain writers that literary scholars of all times will study again and again, and there are certain literary works that are too important to be examined only once. Reading Dostoevsky is always an “excruciatingly visceral experience” not only for us, the readers, but also for scholars like Max Scheler and Mikhail Bakhtin (p. 230). Alina Wyman’s book makes a major contribution to this experience.

Wyman’s argument is both original and elegantly simple: for Bakhtin and Scheler the concept of loving empathy is fundamental in both their respective models of being and in the particular structure of their careers. …

Comfort Food, Acquired Taste, And Fusion Cuisine: A Migrant Journey, Giovanna Bellesia

Italian Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay looks at food through the lens of immigration by analyzing the work of migrant writers in Italy. Comfort food, acquired taste and fusion cuisine are used to illustrate different stages of the migration process. Migrant writers have often used food as a metaphor to describe their longing for their homeland, for an idealized time and place when they felt safe, secure in their identity. Cooking and eating, sharing and learning culinary traditions foster integration and develop acquired tastes in the destination culture. The result is a sense of belonging, but also the formation of a split identity and …

The Hemispheric Muse. A Conversation With Antonio Barrenechea, Giorgio Mariani, Antonio Barrenechea

English, Linguistics, and Communication (Legacy)

Antonio Barrenechea is an Associate Professor at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was hired to design a teaching curriculum in the Literatures of the Americas in 2005. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from Yale University and is the author of various essays on both North and South American literature, and, most recently of America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies, his first book, published last year by the University of New Mexico Press. Professor Barrenechea, who is currently spending the year as a resident fellow at the Institut Américain Universitaire in Aix-en-Provence, France, …

Cultivating Our Garden, Daniela Chavez

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Candide by Voltaire promotes social reform in areas dealing with injustice and corrupt power–especially in religious organizations. One biographical book, one master of arts thesis, and two literary criticism essays were read to further expand the reader’s understanding of Candide. The impact religious organizations had on Voltaire and on European societies, their insincerity, and the abuse of their power sparked a fervent desire in Voltaire to criticize such institutions in order to reinvigorate the rights and freedoms of citizens and eliminate the abuses that societies continued to bear. The last phrase in the novel reflects Voltaire’s call to speak …

Song Reconsidered: Words And Music, Music And Poetry, Lawrence Kramer

Art History and Music Faculty Publications

This revised version of an essay first published in 1984 sustains the impetus of the original to upend the traditional understanding of song, in particular of art song, as a harmonious fusion of words and music. Song in general, and art songs or Lieder in particular with their generically mandated dependence on preexisting poetic texts, produces a much wider range of text-music relationships than mere fusion, many of them riddled with tension, cross-purposes, and even outright antagonism. Among song genres, the Lied stands out historically for giving prominence to the diversity of these relationships, starting in the early nineteenth century. …

Voltaire The Feminist, Esdras Castaneda

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Voltaire was not the common Enlightened philosopher. No, he was one of the great ones. And especially critical in the fight for social justice and equality for women. Voltaire did not write about women. Typically, women were seen as weak, fragile, had pale skin, and were very thin. But Voltaire wrote about them in the exact opposite way. They were as strong, resilient, and brave as any man. And they were buxom, plump, and provocative. Voltaire purposefully writes this way to switch the gender roles; to show that women could be anything a man could be. That they could be …

Poesía Amorosa De Una Erudita Del Xvii: Traducción Y Creación En El Pastor Fido De Isabel Correa, Almudena Vidorreta

Publications and Research

Este trabajo pretende insertar en el contexto humanista de su tiempo la escritura poética de Isabel Rebeca Correa, erudita portuguesa del siglo XVII que residió en Ámsterdam. Aunque no se conserva buena parte de su obra, podemos conocer el estilo de la autora a través de su traducción al español de El pastor Fido, tragicomedia pastoril de Guarini. Se incluye por primera vez una transcripción completa y modernizada de los fragmentos de dicha versión que, según la traductora, proceden de su propia inventiva. Por medio de esta amplificación de la obra del italiano, Isabel Correa legitima y justifica su …

The Composing, Editing, And Publication Of Willa Cather’S Obscure Destinies Stories, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In 1998, Willa Cather’s 1932 short story collection Obscure Destinies appeared as the fourth volume of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition (WCSE). As the editors would explain in an essay reflecting on the “The Issue of Authority in a Scholarly Edition,” Cather “habitually sought to exert her authority over the full process governing the preparation and presentation of her novels: from drafting and revising the text to shaping the physical appearance of the published books.” In line with that sense of Cather’s authority, the WCSE chose and continues to choose the first edition of each work as published in book …

Yet More Cather-Knopf Correspondence, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Some years ago many of us were excited by the discovery of a cache of Willa Cather’s correspondence with publisher Alfred A. Knopf that had been in the hands of Peter Prescott, one of the succession of would-be biographers of Knopf. He died before he completed it. These letters are now held in the Barbara Dobkin Collection in New York City. Before these materials came to light, researchers, including the editors of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, had relied on a strange and fragmentary “memoir” Knopf wrote of his relationship with Cather based on his correspondence files with her, and …

George Eliot In Romantic Biofiction, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon is the first complete biofiction of the woman enduringly known by her masculine pen name, George Eliot. It tells the story of a precocious provincial English girl who challenges the conventions of her middleclass upbringing as she pursues a writing career in Victorian London, moves in with an alreadymarried man, becomes one of the greatest living British novelists, and then marries John Cross, a man twenty years her junior whom she’d long called “nephew.” Whether or not Eliot’s brief marriage to Cross constituted a “happy ending” depends on how you interpret the harrowing incident that took …

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …

“Indigenismo And Futurism In Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui And The Peruvian Avant-Garde.”, Giovanna Montenegro

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Abstract: This essay explores the encounter between Latin American indige- nismo and avant-garde movements such as Futurism through an analysis of avant-garde literary magazines and Peruvian avant-garde poetry with Futurist tendencies. The first section begins with the Amauta magazine (1926–30), edited by the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), who promoted an indigenous agenda while also censuring and applauding Futurism. The second section briefly investigates the Chilean literary journal Nguillatún (1924), whose founding manifesto toyed with Futurist principles while simultaneously turning to Chile’s indigenous culture. In addition, I analyse Gamaliel Churata’s Boletín Titikaka (1926–29), which promoted linguistic experimentation with indigenous …