Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Approaches To The Land, Joseph Linscott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Approaches to the Land is a collection of interrelated stories centered on a small Maine mill town. These stories have several recurrent narrators who are in many phases of moving – some come while others leave, etc. These stories have an immense interest in the identification of loss and hope, and this in turn plays heavily on the identities of the characters embodying the stories. As a whole, these stories capture the only way this author knew how to document his hometown.

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 …

Walden, The Humanities, And The Classroom As Public Space, Kristen Case

Maine Policy Review

Kristen Case describes the kinds of practices that take place in humanities classrooms and shows how these practices are connected to the possibilities of our broader social life. She argues for the humanities classroom as a compromised, belea­guered, fragile, and ephemeral, but nonetheless vital space of actual freedom and suggests that the question of who gets to access this space is one that should be of concern to all of us.

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. …

Transformation Of Realism: Narrator’S Function And The Blending Of Dialogue And Stream Of Consciousness In To The Lighthouse And Between The Acts, Alyssa M. Mccluskey

Honors College

This Honors thesis analyzes two narrative works by Virginia Woolf: her seventh novel, To the Lighthouse, and her final novel, Between the Acts. My analysis consists of two major components: I look at Woolf’s post-impressionist poetics and I examine, by way of a critical approach based on narrative theory, the construction of these poetics. Throughout, my interest is that of showing the transformation of classic realist representation of reality in these two novels. This transformation, I argue, is very subtly constructed through the narrator’s function, and the blending of dialogue and stream of consciousness.

Occupy Horror: An Analysis Of Gothic Motifs And Malefic Technological Prostheses In Contemporary American Horror Films, Alexis L. Priestley

Honors College

My project explores the genre of Western contemporary horror films, with a focus on the way technological communication devices—the telephone, internet-connected computer, and the television—are given a life of their own and rendered maleficent. By staging the anxieties and ambivalences we as a society feel towards our technological prostheses alongside classic Victorian Gothic motifs, the films I analyze force us to confront ancient tensions through a 21st Century lens.

La Langue Est Gardienne’: French Language And Identity In Franco-American Literature, Susan Pinette

Franco-American Centre Franco-Américain Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Of The Week: Gothic Histories, Deborah D. Rogers

English Faculty Scholarship

Here be monsters, Deborah D. Rogers writes, and they're fun.

The Ecology Of Peer Tutoring: Perspectives Of Student Staff In One High School Writing Center, Cynthia Dean

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In high school writing centers that employ students as tutors, staff members can face challenges as they transition into a tutorial role. The purpose of this study was to document the challenges high school writing tutors may encounter as they transition from and between their roles as students and peer tutors. Two conceptual frames, performance theory and social ecology, guided this study. The former framed analysis of peer tutors’ performance in the writing center while social ecology disclosed how the acquisition of identity in one context affects a peer tutor’s activity in others. This qualitative study used a case study …

Fragments Of A Broken Poetics, Jennifer Moxley

English Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The History Of Jemmy And Jenny Jessamy Ed. By John Richetti (Review), Deborah D. Rogers

English Faculty Scholarship

Mr. Richetti has street cred. He makes another major contribution to the study of women writers with his edition of Haywood’s The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (originally published in three volumes in 1753). Besides Garland’s 1974 facsimile, this marks the first modern edition—and the only edited, fully annotated version—of Haywood’s last novel.

The New Foundling Hospital For Wit, Ed. By Donald W. Nichol (Review)., Deborah D. Rogers

English Faculty Scholarship

The New Foundling Hospital for Wit ran to six parts or volumes from 1768 to 1773. By turns clever, scurrilous, and bawdy, this collection was wildly popular in its own day, but has long been overlooked if not forgotten. Now, however, Mr. Nichol’s scholarly three-volume set makes the full run of this important collection of British satire widely accessible.

Language In Utopian Societies: A Study Of Works By Le Guin, Atwood, And Lowry, Laura Katherine Latinski

Honors College

No abstract provided.

Writing For The Rising Generation: British Fiction For Young People 1672–1839 By Sylvia Kasey Marks (Review), Deborah D. Rogers

English Faculty Scholarship

Restoration and eighteenth-century juvenile fiction has been neglected if not derided. The only children’s literature from this period that most of us are familiar with was written by a handful of authors (known primarily for their other fiction), such as Bunyan,Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, and Sarah Fielding. Throw in Goody Two-Shoes and Mother Goose, and call it good.

Clara-An Elsewhere, Travis G. Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Clara an elsewhere seeks to convey to a reader the immediate and sensory rich experience of walking down Main Street in Clara, ME one fine summer morning and encountering the lives of two characters, Aaron and Katy even as their lives encounter each other. The work follows a concept in astrophysics, the elsewhere-a time and space outside of the now, past the known future and as yet unseen by the known past- and applies it to a literary context. The effect upon a reader being that he or she is not reading a story that has occurred or will occur …

Betweenness Unveiled: Poetry As A Connective Force, Wilson Clement

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent history, literary criticism attempted to maintain absolute standards by which the quality of literature was to be judged. The literary community's partial submission to attacks on this position has made it possible for its members to recognize that these rigid standards can never be universally accepted. We argue that they must therefore accept, as legitimate modes of critique, both Seamus Heaney's claim that it is the duty of poetry to redress wrongs of whatever type and his unspoken claim that this redress is done by poetry's working for opposing realities. The work for these often contradictory realities, says …

Matched Pairs: Gender And Intertextual Dialogue In Eighteenth-Century Fiction By Joseph F. Bartolomeo (Review), Deborah D. Rogers

English Faculty Scholarship

At first glance, this book, which is admittedly influenced by Ann Messenger’s His and Hers (1986), may conjure up images of monogrammed towels or jammies. Mr. Bartolomeo’s comparative approach across gender lines is, however, no gimmick. Rather, it is in the same spirit as his previous book, A New Species of Criticism, which argues that dialogue among and between authors and critics reflects inconsistencies that constantly remake the novel.

The Manufacturers Of Literature: Writing And The Literary Marketplace In Eighteenth-Century England By George Justice (Review), Deborah D. Rogers

English Faculty Scholarship

Times have changed. In the mid 1980s, when I wrote my biography of John Almon, a study of the reflexive effect of politics on eighteenth-century booksellers and the literature that they published, there was only a handful of books on eighteenth-century print culture, and online research in the area was practically nonexistent. The basic resources were Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1945– 1951), which ends at 1700, and H. R. Plomer and E. R. Dix’s Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers (1932), which covers 1726–1775. Electronic library catalogues were in their infancy; Elisabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980), …

Jack Kerouac : L’Écriture Et L’Identité Franco-Américaine, Susan Pinette

Franco-American Centre Franco-Américain Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Warriors Of The Working-Day" Class In Shakespeare's Second Historical Trilogy, Richard Brooke Morrill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Shakespeare's historical plays, we find the traditional and politically "top-heavy" historic events of monarchs, aristocrats and patriarchs, of national and international politics and of wars, civil and foreign. This is the type of practice that E.P. Thompson was challenging when he coined the polemic phrase "history from below." It is necessary, Thompson says, to rethink historiography as a means of creating national identity because of its inherent lack of sociopolitical objectivity, particularly with respect to class. "It is one of the peculiarities of the English," he writes, "that the history of the 'common people' has always been something other …