Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Beagle Music: The Liberating Power Of Poetic Constraint, Rachel Ouellette

Honors College

This creative project, an original poetry manuscript and disquisition, aims to explore and demonstrate the power of poetic constraint — self-imposed rules in poetry. I wrote the poems within the tradition of lyric poetry, and therefore they reflect my personal experiences and feelings. Many of the poems reflect an experience that is best described as limerence, the psychological term for an intense, lasting “crush.” As I distilled my feelings into poetry, I used both traditional methods of constraint, such as the sonnet and the ghazal, and innovative ones, such as selecture, my own variation on erasure. I found that constraint …

Critical Discourse Analysis: Sexual Violence In Maine Department Of Public Safety (Dps) "Crime In Maine" Reports, Emma V. Grous

Honors College

Sexual violence is incredibly prevalent in the state of Maine. These crimes, which disproportionately affect at-risk communities – women, children, people of color, and impoverished persons – are not accurately represented in legal discourses within Maine. Changes to how victims and survivors of sexual violence are represented and discussed in law enforcement reports and other materials are necessary in order to promote social change and justice for the survivors in our communities.

Critical Discourse Analysis has been used broadly since its conception and has even previously been used in understanding political and social implications of discourse in the United States. …

Otherworldly Ethics: Trouthe And The Fairy Mistress In The Lays Of Lanval, Graelent, Guingamor And Sir Launfal, Abigail Roberts

Honors College

While the nature of fictional fairies in medieval romance has been widely discussed and it has been acknowledged by many scholars that fairies typically offer some critique of the human courts in which they intervene, they have yet to be examined in relation to their ethical impact and conceptions of justice. In order to address this, this thesis performs a close reading of four Breton lays, Lanval, Graelent, Guingamor and Sir Launfal using a framework of medieval folklaw. The four fairies of these lays introduce to their respective poems a unique feminine ethic that critiques the enactment of trouthe practiced …

The Illustrations Of Jay Jackson: A Visual Analysis Of The Chicago Defender In The 20th Century, Ruth Lewandowski

Honors College

In 1905, Robert S. Abbott invested twenty-five cents in starting a weekly newspaper covering stories about and for Black Americans. It would end up being called The Chicago Defender and became one of the most prolific Black newspapers of the 20th century. The staff, throughout the years, would write papers that aided and defended the community's well-being. In the earlier days, it fueled the Great Migration and helped people escape their violent homes in the South. The Defender also exposed lynchings and attempts of it throughout the decades. By exposing the hate crimes of white supremacists, the Defender was communicating …

Sisterhood And Survival: An Exploration Of Women's Relationships In Feminist Speculative Fiction, Madeleine Gernhard

Honors College

Writers have used the genre of feminist speculative fiction as a lens through which to view modern issues which effect women. Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Margaret Atwood’ Handmaid’s Tale, and Naomi Alderman’s The Power each explore dystopian or transitory dystopian societies in which women are pitted against one another for the sake of their survival. In reviewing the relationships which the women in these novels have to each other we stand to gain insights into the ways in which sisterhood influences change in these societies. Each of these works, while centering around different understandings of dystopian society, also prominently feature the …

College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences_Eng 381 Frontiers Of The Land And Mind_Covid Related Course Activities, Laura Cowan

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Emails and attachment from Laura Cowan, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Maine to the Provost Office describing the assignment for her class ENG 381: Frontiers of the Land and the Mind during the 2020 Spring Semester. Several of the students featured the COVID-19 pandemic in their oral presentations.

Exploring The Marginalized Voice: Queering Form In Contemporary Short Fiction, Madalyn M. Jackson

Honors College

Feminist and queer narrative theory calls into question the systemic way of thinking about categorizations such as genre conventions, form, and length. The short story subverts all of these, flipping common love plots or hero arcs, denying readers whole pictures, and privileging plot over character development. Through the application of feminist and queer narrative theory, this study evaluates Lambda Literary Awardwinning texts from authors Chinelo Okparanta, Krystal Smith, and Carmen Maria Machado on how the function, form, and common conventions of the short story are subversive in nature and lend themselves to the functions, forms, and conventions of the queer …

Madonna, Monster And Other Stories: Surrealist Short Fiction, Katherine Skvorak

Honors College

Surrealist literature has a long history of excluding female writers from the conversation, and as a result, women surrealists often wrote to critique the male/female binary and examine the oppressive forces denying their work. Madonna, Monster and Other Stories acts as a continuation of the female surrealist legacy and a further exploration and critique of invisible authorities that govern societal standards, create belief systems, and control logic and reason. Using methods created by the surrealist movement, such as the Exquisite Corpse exercise, image collaging, and automatic writing, these stories embrace the unconscious, the dreamlike, and the uncanny to break down …

College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences_Phi 104: Existentialism And Literature (Sp20)_Blackboard Notebook Project, Kirsten Jacobson

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Assignments for the course PHI 104: Existentialism and Literature (SP20), taught by Kirsten Jacobson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Philosophy Department, University of Maine. Professor Jacobson has students use Blackboard due to make notebook entries in response to the COVID-19 and remote learning.

The Personal Is Poetic: A Case For Poetry Therapy, Kimberly Crowley

Honors College

“The Personal is Poetic: A Case for Poetry Therapy” explores and deconstructs the history, models, and therapeutic qualities of poetry therapy through an autoethnographic lens of loss and growth. Inspired by the passing of my mother and my foray into poetry as a form of therapeutic expression, I dive into the existing literature on therapeutic usages of poetry and illustrate its connections to my writing and personal experiences. I include narrative accounts of my experiences of grief, growth, and coming of age, as well as samples of my poetry chosen to illustrate principles, model components, and poetic devices related to …

A Glimpse Of Whimsy: Short Children's Stories, Emma Hutchinson

Honors College

No abstract provided.

Review Of "French Genealogy Of The Beat Generation", Susan Pinette

Franco-American Centre Franco-Américain Faculty Scholarship

Review of Véronique Lane's "French Genealogy of the Beat Generation"

The Hum Of Distant Novas, Emily Jane Lewis

Honors College

The Hum of Distant Novas is a science fiction story about a woman in need of a community. It builds on the medieval frame narrative tradition and existing works of speculative fiction to create a world in which storytelling is a very grounding, very human part of the day. The protagonist, Jo Wake, books passage aboard a spaceship captained by Tempest Lane in order to reunite with her younger brother across the galaxy. The crew and passengers of Fascination tell each other stories to entertain, to react, to speculate, to hurt, and––most vitally––to feel together as they travel through the …

To Speak In The Cave, Stephen Thomas Krichels

Honors College

The aim of To Speak In The Cave is to provide some insight regarding how the Chinese government allows its citizens to voice their opinions, while simultaneously alienating the audience from existing bias.

To this end the narrative avoids any Chinese characteristics that are not fundamental to China’s treatment of its citizens as it pertains to their public voice. All names are Western, as are job titles and any cultural aspects of the narrative world that are not related to the allegory being created throughout the story.

The protagonist of the story, Jerg, is a dissociated and down on his …

Review Of Hassan Melehy, "Kerouac: Language, Poetics, And Territory", Susan Pinette

Franco-American Centre Franco-Américain Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Party: A Play In One Act, Derrek Schrader

Honors College

The writing and directing of a full-length play entitled The Party began as a novel about a woman throwing a party, and it morphed into an abstract piece of literature that comments on and highlights the effects of depression. It was adapted for the stage, and through the adaptation, it explored the symbolic and aesthetic elements of depression that the novel was physically unable to explore. In addition, it examined the desperation and daunting nature of depression through the use of character, depicting its effects in an unsettling way.

Through the directing of this play, the words became tangible. Multiple …

Illiteracy As Immanent: The (Re)Writing Of Rhetoric's Nature, Michael Kennedy

Honors College

Literacy is often thought of as a skill-set, that is, an ability to read and write in the dominant language of one’s socio-historical milieu. Illiteracy, on the other hand, is often thought of as a lack – an absence of a necessary skill-set that influences how well one can work and communicate (via reading and writing) within their dominant language and their society. In other words, illiteracy seems to have been defined by its relationship to the definition of literacy, that is, as a “negative-literacy” or a “not-literacy” that creates a lacuna of meaning when attempting to define illiteracy as …

Spring 2017 New Writing Series, The University Of Maine College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

Please see Program description

Reconstructed, Ashley Brackett

Honors College

Reconstructed takes the opposite approach to the typical cancer narrative. Instead of witnessing the diagnosis and subsequent decline of a character, the reader is presented with a woman seeking to rebuild herself. She begins her journey fearing that her physical changes have altered her identity. She feels distanced from her everyday life and the things she once enjoyed, as if she's merely playing the part of what she used to be. As she begins to heal from this traumatic period in her life, she must face the reality of the situation and redefine what it means to be herself.

The …

The Sapphire Mirror, Renée Levasseur

Honors College

Morgan Molloy is the worst student at Graybridge Academy, a school for the children of the rich and famous. She doesn't do her work, talks in class, and is a professional troublemaker; she's Queen Bee, and knows it. Nothing can ruin this high in life.

Until her friend goes missing.

Morgan's world is turned upside down by the aftermath of her party; things only get stranger when she receives a letter from her father, a man she has never met. After this revelation, Morgan starts to see the world a little differently - that maybe the strange disappearances of the …

“Persuading The Secret”: In Search Of Maine’S Hermits, Taylor Cunningham

Honors College

I have been working on this project for nearly three years now. The journey feels like a long one—with various roads, some yet to be traveled, detours, and dead ends. Largely, it has been a process of trial and error, as I learned to navigate the boundless, at times overwhelming, depths of research—within archives, old newspapers, photographs, poems, fiction, informal conversations and formal interviews—hoping to make some sense of what hermit characters mean to the state of Maine.

I found almost immediately that inconsistencies and gaps plagued—as I’m sure they do in any sort of oral history project—my attempts at …

The New Writing Series, Fall 2015, University Of Maine Honors College

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

The New Writing Series brings innovative and adventurous contemporary writing to the University of Maine's flagship campus in Orono on selected thursdays at 4:30 pm.

The New Writing Series, Spring 2016, The University Of Maine Honors College

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

In its thirty-fourth consecutive semester of programming, the New Writing Series will host six readings featuring four poets (John Keene, Prageeta Sharma, Divya Victor, and John Yau) and two fiction writers (Emily Fridlund and Joanna Walsh).

These writers are all highly active across the full spectrum of literary activity. They are editors, publishers, and anthologists; translators and tale-tellers; art-makers and trail-blazing scholars.

The New Writing Series brings innovative and adventurous contemporary writing to the University of Maine's flagship campus in Orono on selected Thursdays at 4:30pm.

Where Are Victims' Voices?: Rethinking Sexual Violence Policy, Melissa Carrigan

Honors College

Youth based programs focus on preventing young people from participating in

socially undesirable behavior. Consent education through healthy relationship education can be a way to reduce sexual violence and produce a cultural change in how we address victims’ needs. Implementing such education would require a national policy change.

Simply changing the policy, however, would not directly lead to a desired aspect of cultural change all on its own as evidenced by other policy change failures to encourage sexual violence victims to report their victimization. People do not report the violence committed against themselves out of a fear that they will …

Coming To, Kate E. Spies

Honors College

Coming to aims to explore the power of voice and personal narrative in engaging with experiences different from one’s own. The project was triggered by personal analysis and exploration within the genre of personal nonfiction; looking at the way that texts within this field engage with and draw us closer to different cultures, communities, and experiences through authorial presence and strong narrative voice. Coming to attempts to embody these characteristics within a creative piece. It focuses on my experience with a fellow honors student, Daniella Runyambo. Daniella is a student originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The …

Ideologies Of Empire: Perpetuating Imperial Culture Through Definitive British Literature Of The Congo, Shelby Lynne Hartin

Honors College

The Congo reform campaign in Britain was the largest humanitarian movement in British Imperial politics during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The texts used in this analysis emerged from the conflict and attempted to make sense of the atrocities committed against the people of the Congo Free State.

This analysis examines the impact of imperial ideology on the subjects of empire. It uses the texts of three authors, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and E.D. Morel, analyzing the literary underpinnings of imperial culture. It utilizes theoretical frameworks through which this literature can be understood and considers three manifestations of …

Fan-Funded Film: How Audience Participation Is Shaping The Future Of Motion Pictures, Renee E. Moody

Honors College

A look at intellectual property rights in the Internet Age. Fan-Funded Film examines the omnipresent issue of piracy and the financial strategy of crowdfunding. Both have existed in film for decades, but have increased dramatically in recent years. Through the use of several theories and real life examples, I explore the problem of piracy's popularity and how audience participation through crowdfunding could be the answer.

Imperial Impulses: The Influence Of War And Death On The Writings Of Rudyard Kipling, Dylan J. Sirois

Honors College

This historical inquiry will focus on Rudyard Kipling's life, his works, and their relationship to British Imperialism. More specifically it will demonstrate how Kipling's attitude changed after World War One through his works. To understand Kipling and his place in the British Empire it is essential to understand the framework of imperialism at the time. Once an understanding of imperialism is formed it is possible to get to know Kipling and the world he grew into. The circumstances of Kipling's upbringing were undoubtably what drove him into his passion for empire, while his later experiences were what drove him to …

"Consuming Beauty: The Urban Garden As Ambiguous Utopia", Naomi M. Jacobs

English Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Nameless, Inscrutable, Unearthly: An Examination Of Obsession In Moby Dick, Sarah K. Lingo

Honors College

In this project, I examine the operation of the sublime and the unconscious in Moby Dick. In the sublime, I locate the source of Ahab’s obsession with, and Ishmael’s interest in, Moby Dick. Through sublime experiences, these characters confront the limits of human understanding. Ishmael accepts this limitation, but Ahab rejects it, choosing to pursue Moby Dick in an effort to reassert order in an entropic universe. He blames his loss of control on the whale, which becomes his objet petit a: that object, according to Lacan, that distracts the obsessive from the true source of his anxiety. …