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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
E. B. White’S Environmental Web, Lynn Overholt Wake
E. B. White’S Environmental Web, Lynn Overholt Wake
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
E. B. White called Walden his favorite book and found in it “an invitation to life’s dance.” To read White ecocritically is to accept a similar invitation to broaden our environmental imagination. Although one or two of his essays are often anthologized as nature writing, critics have not read White environmentally. While emphasizing White’s three books for children, this dissertation reads across genre lines to examine his lifelong work. Drawing on Laurence Buell’s prismatic term, the study explores how White’s engagement with the natural world contributes to the renewal of our collective environmental imagination. Examining White’s affinity for animals, evident …
An Objective Aural-Relative In Middlemarch, Peter J. Capuano
An Objective Aural-Relative In Middlemarch, Peter J. Capuano
Department of English: Faculty Publications
This article attempts to show that the grammar of perspective governing pictorial realism is less applicable to music because music exists in a place beyond language and because it requires fewer symbolic, re-presentational forms; it is closer to the essence of the thing itself. In “Notes on Form in Art” (1868), George Eliot writes that “boundary or outline and visual appearance are modes of Form which in music and poetry can only have a metaphorical presence.” George Eliot’s “battle ground of conflicting metaphors” then ceases to pose so much of a problem in the aural world of Middlemarch since conflicting …
Review Of Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders By Ronald J. Zboray And Mary Saracino Zboray, Melissa J. Homestead
Review Of Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders By Ronald J. Zboray And Mary Saracino Zboray, Melissa J. Homestead
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Using letters written and diaries kept by 931 New Englanders living during the antebellum era, Ronald and Mary Zboray beneficially unsettle a number of grand narratives about readers and reading in the nineteenth-century United States. Since the influential work of theorist Rolf Engelsing, the turn from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century has been understood as the transition point from intensive reading and rereading of a select group of texts (such as the Bible) to extensive reading of many texts without rereading. Literary historians under the sway of Michel Foucault who have sought to chart the “rise of …
Democratic Relationships: An Institutional Way Of Life With/In The Writing Center, Katie Hupp Stahlnecker
Democratic Relationships: An Institutional Way Of Life With/In The Writing Center, Katie Hupp Stahlnecker
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
In this dissertation, I build upon the notion that for writing centers to thrive in the twenty-first century, they must reposition themselves not as marginal but as central to alliance building within the institution (Brannon and North). I tell the story of establishing one writing center’s mission that thrives on building democratic relationships within the institution and dissolving traditional academic hierarchies. At the core of our mission is the dialogical exchange that allows for student writers to be heard. The true work of establishing and preserving the integrity of the open forum we have created for student writers involves making …
Writing And Circulating Modern America: Journalism And The American Novelist, 1872-1938, Derek John Driedger
Writing And Circulating Modern America: Journalism And The American Novelist, 1872-1938, Derek John Driedger
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
My research began with the question, "How did former journalists depict aspects of the newspaper environment in late-nineteenth, early-twentieth-century fiction?" A historical reading of journalism and fiction places the emphasis on what historical moments or trends these writers documented, and how they presented their worldview. To present findings on how a journalism career proved beneficial for a novelist, I examine arguments debating the shared space between fact and fiction when writers tried to raise their readers' cultural awareness. My study pays particular attention to newspapers such as the New York Herald, the New York World, and the Atchison [Kansas] Globe. …
Review Of Willa Cather And Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing The Real World, Edited By Janis P. Stout, Melissa J. Homestead
Review Of Willa Cather And Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing The Real World, Edited By Janis P. Stout, Melissa J. Homestead
Department of English: Faculty Publications
In her essay "The Novel Démeublé," American novelist Willa Cather famously protested against the "over-furnished" modern novel, in which "material objects and their vivid presentation" have overtaken artistic vision and skill. In response, she advocates "throw[ing] all of the furniture out of the [novel's] window," leaving behind "the room bare as the stage of a Greek theatre.". In the introduction to this collection of essays and in many of the essays themselves, editor Janis Stout and the essays' authors refer to and rebut Cather's famous artistic manifesto through analyses of material objects in her fiction. Stout's introduction frames the collection …
Review Of Back To Nature: The Green And The Real In The Late Renaissance, By Robert N. Watson, Elizabeth Spiller
Review Of Back To Nature: The Green And The Real In The Late Renaissance, By Robert N. Watson, Elizabeth Spiller
Department of English: Faculty Publications
Robert Watsons Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance identifies the Renaissance as the moment of an "absolutely fundamental change in its consensual interpretation of reality" (41). Fear that material reality obscures true knowledge ("things getting in the way of the Word") gave way to concern that words and other forms of human perception were key impediments to truth or knowledge ("words getting in the way of Things") (41). This decentering of medieval religious epistemology made itself felt across the arts and sciences of late Renaissance culture and brought with it a compensatory need to …
Literature In The Arid Zone, Thomas Lynch
Literature In The Arid Zone, Thomas Lynch
Department of English: Faculty Publications
This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggest fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches.