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Articles 1 - 30 of 31
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Revisiting "Hapworth": The Catharsis Of Buddy Glass, Brian Mctague
Revisiting "Hapworth": The Catharsis Of Buddy Glass, Brian Mctague
Theses and Dissertations
J.D. Salinger's "Hapworth 16, 1924," his last published work, is notorious for the initial critical silence it received, as well as the subsequent general consensus that it was a text to revile if not avoid. This thesis proposes that while "Hapworth" is a difficult and perplexing piece, there is a good deal about it that deserves if not outright praise, then a close critical re-examination. Assuming the "author" of the story is not the seven-year-old version of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" suicide Seymour Glass, as the story purports, but his grieving younger brother Buddy, who has spent the years …
Shaken And Stirred: Tactile Imagery And Narrative Immediacy In J. D. Salinger's "Blue Melody," "A Girl I Knew," And "Just Before The War With The Eskimos", Angelica Bega-Hart
Shaken And Stirred: Tactile Imagery And Narrative Immediacy In J. D. Salinger's "Blue Melody," "A Girl I Knew," And "Just Before The War With The Eskimos", Angelica Bega-Hart
Theses and Dissertations
J.D. Salinger’s ‘A Girl I Knew,’ ‘Just Before the War with the Eskimos,’ and ‘Blue Melody,’ contain key thematic and narratological elements that contribute to the development of character through repeated reference to tactile imagery and through each character’s reaction to the sensations associated with tactile images. Salinger’s descriptions of tactile interaction allow readers to see his characters connected in ways that were increasingly difficult in the 1950’s, where widespread cultural changes contributed to increasing physical and emotional distancing. Critics have argued that “vision” is at the heart of many of Salinger’s characters’ struggles, since they “seek” a level of …
First Psalm: Poems And Paintings, Ashley Mae Christensen
First Psalm: Poems And Paintings, Ashley Mae Christensen
Theses and Dissertations
This collection of poems and paintings seeks to find the places where visual and written communication intersects, and the places where those two media diverge. The collection consists of poems and paintings juxtaposed, as if in conversation with one another throughout the pages. The collection treats each painting and poem as a separate attempt at prayer. As a reader turns the pages, similar questions are asked again and again, but in different settings and with different outcomes. This collection focuses on finding reconciliation between the oral culture of storytelling and the written culture of ideas, all within the context of …
The Unsuccessful Harvesting Of Figs From Thistles And Other Failures Of Idealized Masculinity In Ella D'Arcy's The Bishop's Dilemma, Elizabeth Watson Christianson
The Unsuccessful Harvesting Of Figs From Thistles And Other Failures Of Idealized Masculinity In Ella D'Arcy's The Bishop's Dilemma, Elizabeth Watson Christianson
Theses and Dissertations
Although confusion about the genre of New Woman Ella D'Arcy's only novella has resulted in a lack of scholarship, The Bishop's Dilemma can now be read as a social commentary that reaches beyond the New Woman subversion of the Victorian marriage plot, broadening the gender discussion at the fin-de-siècle. In this essay, I examine how D'Arcy uses Catholicism as a vehicle to create a unique space in the Catholic ritual of the confession that gives her reader privileged access to Victorian manhood. I argue that by placing her examination of masculinity in the context of the Catholic priesthood, D'Arcy renders …
The Realm Of The Real: Imitation And Authenticity In Edith Wharton's The Custom Of The Country, Brittany Brie Atkinson
The Realm Of The Real: Imitation And Authenticity In Edith Wharton's The Custom Of The Country, Brittany Brie Atkinson
Theses and Dissertations
Edith Wharton's 1913 novel The Custom of the Country reveals a national concern with defining and preserving authenticity in social and cultural life. A study of the novel through the lens of scholarship concerning the modernist obsession with "the real thing," including such seminal texts as Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, opens up a broad discussion of authenticity and imitation as defined by Wharton's characters. This paper challenges the traditional interpretations of the much-abused term. First, I outline a brief history of the study of authenticity …
Death Becomes Her: Theodicy In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Jack K. Mallard
Death Becomes Her: Theodicy In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Jack K. Mallard
Theses and Dissertations
A study of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, particularly "The Sound of Her Wings" and "The Kindly Ones: Part 13," demonstrates its theological richness. The Sandman's ability to participate in theodicy becomes clear by framing that study within a framework provided by Ernest Becker's ideas about the terror of death and Karen Armstrong's observations of the historical utility of negative theology and compassion. The analysis of the formal characteristics of The Sandman shows the range of aesthetic possibility inherent in the comics form. Lastly, the study makes apparent the continued readerly desire for engagement with questions about God, transcendence, …
The Conduit: A Creative Thesis, Rachelle Larsen
The Conduit: A Creative Thesis, Rachelle Larsen
Theses and Dissertations
This is a high fantasy novel about Iníon Ríúil, a girl who discovers she has the ability to manipulate magic. Two weeks before Iní's seventeenth birthday, thieves attack their home and her grandmother is murdered. After her grandmother's death, Iní goes in search of the father she has never met and ends up joining the Magical Alliance, where she learns more about her unique skills. Iní is a full conduit, someone who possesses all four of the possible conduit abilities: shielding, absorption, transformation, and amplification. Because someone has been kidnapping other conduits, the Magical Alliance assigns guardians for her protection: …
More Than "Wisteria And Sunshine": The Garden As A Space Of Female Introspection And Identity In Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April And Vera, Katie Elizabeth Young
More Than "Wisteria And Sunshine": The Garden As A Space Of Female Introspection And Identity In Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April And Vera, Katie Elizabeth Young
Theses and Dissertations
Recent scholarly interest in Elizabeth von Arnim has related Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer to the New Woman and Female Aesthete movements, concluding that von Arnim does not align herself with any movement per se. Rather, in these early works, Elizabeth advocates and adamantly defends her right to time in her garden, which becomes her sanctuary for reading and thinking. Little critical attention has been paid to von Arnim's later works; however, many of the themes established in von Arnim's early works can be traced through her later novels. In The Enchanted April Lady Caroline retreats …
Cross-Cultural Ecotheology In The Poetry Of Li-Young Lee, Sienna Miquel Palmer Dittmer
Cross-Cultural Ecotheology In The Poetry Of Li-Young Lee, Sienna Miquel Palmer Dittmer
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the cross-cultural ecotheology of contemporary American poet Li-Young Lee by looking at the intersection of the human, the natural, and the sacred in his poetry. Close readings of Lee's poetic encounters with roses, persimmons, trees, wind, and light through the lens of Christianity and Daoism illustrate the way Lee is able to merge the Eastern concepts of interconnection and mutual harmony with Western ideas of sacredness and divinity. This discussion places Lee in direct conversation with modern and contemporary ecopoets who use the creative energy of language to express our moral and ethical responsibility to the world …
Redefining Self In The Midst Of "Things": Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Kristin Lowe
Redefining Self In The Midst Of "Things": Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Kristin Lowe
Theses and Dissertations
In this essay, I examine the role of material culture in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping (1980) to understand how the prominent presence of material culture introduces complex questions about the relationships among objects, reality, and the self. By recognizing objects' fluidity of meaning, Housekeeping offers its characters a way to see their individuality and conceptions of reality in a similar state of flux. Significantly, it is in the act of recognizing that the socially accepted uses of objects are not necessarily "natural" parts of existence, and, like elements of the natural world, the meanings and uses of these items are …
Things Are In People, People Are In Things: A Phenomenological Approach To H.D.'S Hermione And The Modernist Prosthetic Body, Alison Stone Roberg
Things Are In People, People Are In Things: A Phenomenological Approach To H.D.'S Hermione And The Modernist Prosthetic Body, Alison Stone Roberg
Theses and Dissertations
H.D.'s autobiographical novel HERmione is phenomenological in texture. It portrays both sides of a dynamic process: the individual "creates" the world by adjusting a "psychic lens," projecting a mental space in which objects can appear; yet at the same time, the world imposes itself on the sensing subject. The framework within which this dynamic process occurs is the body; as the novel portrays, the body is the site of juxtapositions and transformations as it comes into contact with the world. In this article, I discuss the ways in which H.D. explores the boundaries and intersections between the human body and …
The Ingenious Narrator Of Poe's Dupin Mysteries, Timothy Paul Wirkus
The Ingenious Narrator Of Poe's Dupin Mysteries, Timothy Paul Wirkus
Theses and Dissertations
Scholarship on Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin stories consistently focuses on the stories' influence on the genre of detective fiction. One of the foundational genre elements pioneered by Poe in these tales is the sidekick/narrator. Throughout detective fiction, the less-intelligent sidekick has become a standard fixture, a convenient trope in foregrounding the brilliant machinations of the detective's mind. The attention the literature gives to the narrator of the Dupin tales is almost universally in terms of the sidekick/narrator figure as a trope of detective fiction; in this way, it seems that Dupin's companion has come to be read in terms of …
Salinger And The Phases Of War, Johnson Elizabeth Downing
Salinger And The Phases Of War, Johnson Elizabeth Downing
Theses and Dissertations
A study of the phases of war present in Salinger's stories - "The Hang of It," "Personal Notes of an Infantryman," "Soft Boiled Sergeant," "Last Day of the Last Furlough," "Once a Week Won't Kill You," A Boy in France," "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," "The Stranger," "A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist at All," "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "A Girl I Knew," "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," and "For Esme - With Love and Squalor." The role of war in each of these stories follows a cycle that reflects Salinger's own war experience, as well as the …
Speaking Subjects: Beckett’S Not I, Rushdie’S The Satanic Verses, And Coetzee’S Foe, Jake Khoury
Speaking Subjects: Beckett’S Not I, Rushdie’S The Satanic Verses, And Coetzee’S Foe, Jake Khoury
Theses and Dissertations
In repositioning Beckett’s Not I in relation to Rushdie and Coetzee, I show that The Satanic Verses and Foe suggest approaches to language similar to Beckett’s play, insofar as each text interrogates the ability of the marginalized speaking subject to maintain control of his or her voice, finding that the speaking subject’s voice is constantly infused with the voices of others. Additionally, I demonstrate Beckett’s relevance to the postcolonial environment and delineate convergences and divergences in how Rushdie and Coetzee formulate the voices, bodies, and identities of marginalized and postcolonial speaking subjects.
Judging The Rational And The Dead: Ann Radcliffe And Feminist Theology, Garland Beasley
Judging The Rational And The Dead: Ann Radcliffe And Feminist Theology, Garland Beasley
Theses and Dissertations
“Judging the Rational and the Dead: Ann Radcliffe and Feminist Theology” argues Radcliffe’s first three novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), and The Romance of the Forest (1791), show a progression of feminist theology informed by the late eighteenth-century British religious movement of Rational Dissent. The thesis attempts to complicate and extend Radcliffe scholarship by moving away from fractured critical discourses and into more cohesive readings of Radcliffe that include feminist and theological interpretations of her work. Of particular interest to the project are Radcliffe’s views on the circumscribed nature of women’s existence within …
Rethinking Success: A Person-Based Approach To Service Learning, Ryan Cales
Rethinking Success: A Person-Based Approach To Service Learning, Ryan Cales
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the nature of service learning projects that are structured to make interventions in rhetorical spheres and seek to achieve social change on a smaller scale rather striving for grander, or even systemic, change. In structuring community projects that include inherently limited interventions and equally limited goals, I argue that such projects should be open to immediate adjustments within themselves –to abandon any particular form or goal—to satisfy the immediate needs of the individuals served. I draw upon my work with a reintegration program for ex-offenders in Richmond, Virginia called Working with Conviction to help demonstrate that service …
Signifying Ruins: The Wreck And Rebirth Of Modernity, Language, And Representation, Audrey Farley
Signifying Ruins: The Wreck And Rebirth Of Modernity, Language, And Representation, Audrey Farley
Theses and Dissertations
This study explores formal and thematic representations of ruins in twentieth century literary texts, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” Analyzing these texts and concepts of ruins in the theoretical work of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Julia Kristeva, I argue that ruins underscore the arbitrariness—and, thus, the fragility—of symbolic systems of signification. Ruins, by virtue of their fragmentation, invite nostalgic projections of totality only to betray totality as an illusion. Thus, the imagination of wholeness that the ruin incites allows—only to disallow—meaning. Modernity and …
The Rhetoric Of Second Chance: The Invention Of Ethos For An Ex-Offender, Modu Fofana-Kamara
The Rhetoric Of Second Chance: The Invention Of Ethos For An Ex-Offender, Modu Fofana-Kamara
Theses and Dissertations
For many, literacy is reading and writing- a critical tool for ethos construction. But for a marginalized group of ex-offenders, former prison inmates, who were not accustomed to reading and writing as an agent for character invention, the ability to employ literacy and to construct ethos was a challenging and almost unsuccessful attempt. I discuss in this thesis a community-writing project I designed as a graduate student and my partnership with Boaz & Ruth, a local faith-based non-profit organization working with ex-offenders. Through the collaboration I facilitated writing skills workshop, which objective was to have the ex-offenders to write personal …
“That I Should Always Listen To My Body And Love It”: Finding The Mind-Body Connection In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Slave Texts, Emily Stuart Watkins
“That I Should Always Listen To My Body And Love It”: Finding The Mind-Body Connection In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Slave Texts, Emily Stuart Watkins
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the presence of the movement theories of Irmgard Bartenieff, Peggy Hackney, and Rudolf Von Laban in the following texts: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Linda Brent (1861), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). The terms and phrases of movement theory will be introduced to the contemporary critical discussion already surrounding the texts, both furthering and challenging existing arguments.
Terror, Performance And Post 9/11 Literature, Elise Christine Silva
Terror, Performance And Post 9/11 Literature, Elise Christine Silva
Theses and Dissertations
This project explores 9/11 as a performative act that is re-represented in post 9/11 fiction. Although many scholars have engaged spectacle theory to understand the event, this project asserts that performance theory gives a more dynamic and ethical reading of post 9/11 literatures like Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The aforementioned post 9/11 texts showcase narrative performances and also give formal performances for an audience of readers. Theatricality in these texts promotes dialogue and healing through interactive communication.
Gesamtkunstwerk And Other Trifles: Poems, Derk A. Olthof
Gesamtkunstwerk And Other Trifles: Poems, Derk A. Olthof
Theses and Dissertations
In all their various categories, the arts serve as the dominant subject matter of Gesamtkunstwerk and Other Trifles. The title itself begins with a German word-meld—gesamt (total) + kunstwerk (work of art). Thus a primary aim of these poems is to bring as many elements of art together as possible and to use their various forms (self-portraits, nocturnes, odes, etc.) as metaphorical frameworks that inform abstractions such as regret ("How to Draw Regret"), psychological disorders ("Insomnia Nocturnes") and confusion in how one should feel about living realities as opposed to inanimate objects ("Dead Starling"). Most of the poems …
Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, And The Rhetoric Of Aesthetics, Meridith Reed
Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, And The Rhetoric Of Aesthetics, Meridith Reed
Theses and Dissertations
Kenneth Burke and John Dewey each published books on aesthetics in the 1930s. These texts present parallel conceptions of aesthetics as holding a distinctly rhetorical role in society. My project is to line up these theories, focusing particularly on two key terms in each theory: Burke's eloquence and Dewey's expression. Together, these two terms explain what constitutes an aesthetic experience and explain how an aesthetic experience can open up individuals in a society to a variety of perspectives and identifications. As individuals are allowed to inhabit the experiences of others through their interactions with art, they are poised to …
Reviving The Latent Content Of Alchemy In William Shakespeare's Othello, Sarita Clara Rich
Reviving The Latent Content Of Alchemy In William Shakespeare's Othello, Sarita Clara Rich
Theses and Dissertations
While many of Shakespeare's alchemical allusions are noted for their language of positive regeneration and healing, the playwright's departures from these conventional uses of alchemy deserve further attention. This essay presents an examination of inversions in the redemptive alchemical paradigm of Othello, a play whose connections to alchemy are not announced by obvious references to gold making, the philosopher's stone, or other key terms relating to the discourse of the opus that a modern audience is likely to recognize. I argue that in Othello, alchemical allusions are more subtly deployed in the language that describes Othello and Desdemona's …
Between The Camera And The Gun: The Problem Of Epistemic Violence In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Katherine Ann Rich
Between The Camera And The Gun: The Problem Of Epistemic Violence In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Katherine Ann Rich
Theses and Dissertations
Since the 75th anniversary of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in 2003, a growing number of journalists and historians writing about the disaster have incorporated Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as part of the official historical record of the hurricane. These writers often border on depicting Their Eyes as the authentic experience of black migrant workers impacted by the hurricane and subsequent flood. Within the novel itself, however, Hurston theorizes on the potential epistemic violence that occurs when a piece of evidence—a photograph, fallen body, or verbal artifact—is used to judge a person. Without a person's …
Signifyin' Black Power: Soul On Ice And The Subversion Of Normative Whiteness, James David Fife
Signifyin' Black Power: Soul On Ice And The Subversion Of Normative Whiteness, James David Fife
Theses and Dissertations
This study emphasizes the methodology of linguistic resistance in Eldridge Cleaver's best-known work, Soul on Ice. Through a process of signification, Cleaver works to redefine key words and concepts that form a web of racialist and racist thinking called normative whiteness. By emptying key terms, like those of "life," "liberty," and "property," Cleaver's text attempts to offer a new, less biased foundation on which a more inclusive and pluralistic American narrative can be written, a move that both makes his rhetoric significantly different from that of many contemporary resistance writers and positions him as an important link in a …
"It's What You Do That Defines You": Batman As Moral Philosopher, Vilja Olivia Johnson
"It's What You Do That Defines You": Batman As Moral Philosopher, Vilja Olivia Johnson
Theses and Dissertations
In 2008, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight became the most commercially successful comic book adaptation to date. His film, which highlights the humanity and fallibility of Batman, builds on a long character history while also functioning as an individual work. Nolan's depiction of Batman, which follows a long progression towards postmodernism in graphic novel versions of the character, is just one of multiple filmic superhero representations in recent years to depict a darker side of the "superhero" mythos. These films highlight the humanity and fallibility of these heroic figures and place their actions under scrutiny. In Nolan's two Batman films, …
The "Crafting" Of Austen: Handicraft, Arts And Crafts, And The Reception Of Austen During The Victorian Period, Natalie Quinn
The "Crafting" Of Austen: Handicraft, Arts And Crafts, And The Reception Of Austen During The Victorian Period, Natalie Quinn
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis addresses the significant but often overlooked relationship between Jane Austen's works and the body of criticism about them and the two major craft movements of the nineteenth century: the Handicraft Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement. The connections occur at two important moments during that century—first, at the moment of Austen's career during the Regency/Romantic period, and second, at the Victorian moment of the years surrounding the 1869 publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir about Austen. In both of these moments, critics and reviewers repeatedly respond to Austen's life and works by using craft-related diction. This diction …
Letting Go And The Silence That Remains: The Effects Of Translating Point-Of-View From Text To Film In The Remains Of The Day And Never Let Me Go, Jennifer L. Price
Letting Go And The Silence That Remains: The Effects Of Translating Point-Of-View From Text To Film In The Remains Of The Day And Never Let Me Go, Jennifer L. Price
Theses and Dissertations
Kazuo Ishiguro's novels The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go exhibit many of the same characteristics as his other works. Out of all of those works, however, only these two novels have been adapted to film as of yet. Because of Ishiguro's reliance on first-person narration and point-of-view his novels are particularly more problematic to adapt to screen. This phenomenon is partially due to the audio-visually dependent medium of film and the camera lens' limitations when it comes to exhibiting character interiority. Therefore, the effect of the translation to screen for both of these films is a …
Constructing The Christian: Agency And Emulation In Old English Poetry, Jennifer Ross
Constructing The Christian: Agency And Emulation In Old English Poetry, Jennifer Ross
Theses and Dissertations
Old English religious verse - born out of a productive fusion between pre-existing Germanic ideals and Christian value-systems brought to England at the end of the sixth century - grapples energetically with the question of how people ought to live morally upright lives pleasing to God. In Beowulf, Judith, Juliana, and The Dream of the Rood, a model for the believer/God relationship is constructed from a common pattern of the Germanic thane/lord relationship, but, like garments cut from the same cloth by different tailors, each poem crafts its subject differently. Still, each is constructed around a …
"Play Your Fan": Exploring Hand Props And Gender On The Restoration Stage Through The Country Wife, The Man Of Mode, The Rover, And The Way Of The World, Jarred Wiehe
Theses and Dissertations
The full irony and wit of Restoration comedies relies not only on what characters communicate to each other, but also on what they communicate to the audience, both verbally and physically.