Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Sister Carrie---Theodore Dreiser, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1900, Elliot Gorn

Elliot Gorn

Facing the naturalistic, nonjudgmental rendering in Sister Carrie of the stresses of survival in Chicago and New York was seen by some as scandalous. Nonetheless, Theodore Dreiser’s first novel eventually became an American classic and has been published in countless editions. The Heritage edition (1937) includes illustrations by Reginald Marsh (1898– 1954), including one in which the main character, a country girl on a train bound for Chicago, is approached by a salesman whose mistress she will eventually become.

Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, And American Writing, 1890-1950, Francesca Sawaya

Francesca Sawaya

Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian "cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves.

Sawaya challenges our long-standing histories of modern professional work by elucidating the multiple ways domestic discourse framed professional culture. Modernist views of professionalism typically told a racialized story of a historical break between the primitive, feminine, and domestic work of the Victorian past and the modern, masculine, professional expertise of the …

The Difficult Art Of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, And The American Literary Market, Francesca Sawaya

Francesca Sawaya

The Difficult Art of Giving rethinks standard economic histories of the literary marketplace. Traditionally, American literary histories maintain that the post-Civil War period marked the transition from a system of elite patronage and genteel amateurism to what is described as the free literary market and an era of self-supporting professionalism. These histories assert that the market helped to democratize literary production and consumption, enabling writers to sustain themselves without the need for private sponsorship. By contrast, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates the continuing importance of patronage and the new significance of corporate-based philanthropy for cultural production in the United States in the …

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

Babacar Mbaye

No abstract provided.

‘Steady Stream … Mad Stuff … Half The Vowels Wrong …’: Water, Waste And Words In Beckett’S Plays, Katherine Weiss

Katherine Weiss

No abstract provided.

Virginia As A Response To Parental Influence, Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

In his 1807 poem, "Resolution and Independence," a poem that brings to mind Oliver Treadwell's artistic crisis in Virginia, William Wordsworth describes the precipice that he faces when trying to come to terms with the emotional extremes he must allow himself in creating the art he desires.

End Of Paragraph, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Symbolic Geography And Psychic Landscapes: A Conversation With Maya Angelou, Joanne M. Braxton

Joanne Braxton

No abstract provided.

Autobiography And African American Women’S Literature, Joanne M. Braxton

Joanne Braxton

No abstract provided.

Trouble No More, Anthony Grooms

Tony Grooms

Second Edition of Anthony Groom's award-winning collection of short stories, Trouble No More, set throughout the American South, presents stories that engage with history, politics, class, race, childhood, and life. They are the personal and public troubles of the African American middle class. These stories are about families, intact and estranged, about ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century. This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century. This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

Baddest Modernism: The Scales And Lines Of Inhuman Time, Charles M. Tung

Charles M. Tung

No abstract provided.

Newspaper Editors’ Attitudes Toward The Great Awakening, 1740-1748, Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith

No abstract provided.

Whitman, Walt. Franklin Evans, Or The Inebriate: A Tale Of The Times., Ed. Christopher Castiglia And Glenn Hendler [Review], Jon Miller

Jon Miller

No abstract provided.

"Father Walt": Frances Willard And Walt Whitman, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

No abstract provided.

Petroleum V. Nasby, Poet Of Democracy, And His "Psalm Of Gladness", Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Reprints David Ross Locke’s parodic letter-poem (written in the persona of “whiskey-addicted Copperhead” Petroleum V. Nasby), “A Psalm of Gladness—The Veto of the Civil Rights Bill, and other Matters, occasioning a Feeling of Thankfulness in the Minds of the Democracy,” and analyzes how the satire “associates Nasby’s style of ‘jubilation’ with the poetry of Walt Whitman,” showing how “the satire does not attack Whitman’s verse so much as it condemns it by association with the style of Nasby.”

"Dear Miss Ella": George L. Chase's Whitman-Inspired Love Letters, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Analyzes and reprints Minnesota minister Chase's 1872 courtship letters to Ella Wheeler, in which Chase, who knew Whitman, writes at length about Whitman and his work.

Supplying Salt And Light By Lorna Goodison, Pamela Herron

Pamela Herron

Review of Supplying Salt and Light by Lorna Goodison.

"Proof Of The Loop": Patterns Of Habitual Denial In Tim O'Brien's In The Lake Of The Woods And Don Delillo's Libra, Tim Engles

Tim Engles

No abstract provided.

White Male Nostalgia In Don Delillo's Underworld, Tim Engles

Tim Engles

No abstract provided.

"Not I!": Strategies Of Post-Millennial Confessionalistic Poetry, Charlotte J. Pence

Charlotte Pence

With the technological ability and pop-cultural fascination to record private moments and distribute them, poetry that reveals personal details and conflates the identity between speaker and author must feel the effects of what could be viewed as an over-saturation of the confessional—which was during the 1950s and 1960s with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath a political, rebellious act. It is far from that now. In this Kim Kardashian era, revealing sex tapes are used as marketing tools to launch careers whereas once they destroyed careers. Considering the hyper-confessional climate of our era and that “Confessional” is something of …

We Are Cowboys In The Boat Of Ra: Sonny Rollins And Ishmael Reed's Black Cowboy, Brian Flota

Brian Flota

No abstract provided.

"Always Something Of It Remains": Sexual Trauma In Ernest Hemingway’S For Whom The Bell Tolls, Natalie Carter

Natalie Carter

Following his completion of Tender is the Night in 1934, F. Scott Fitzgerald sent a copy of the manuscript to his friend, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway replied with a long, thoughtful letter detailing the reasons he both “liked it and didn’t like it” (SL 407). He instructed Fitzgerald: “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it” (408). The often-troubled friendship between these two masters of modernism has been the subject of a …

Kittens In The Oven: Race Relations, Traumatic Memory, And The Search For Identity In Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Natalie Carter

Natalie Carter

The search for an ever-elusive home is a thread that runs throughout much literature by authors who have immigrated to the United States. Dominican authors are particularly susceptible to this search for a home because “for many Dominicans, home is synonymous with political and/or economic repression and is all too often a point of departure on a journey of survival” (Bonilla 200). This “journey of survival” is a direct reference to the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The pain and trauma that Trujillo inflicted upon virtually everyone associated with the Dominican Republic …

“A Southern Expendable”: Cultural Patriarchy, Maternal Abandonment, And Narrativization In Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out Of Carolina, Natalie Carter

Natalie Carter

Bastard Out of Carolina is a remarkable text for many reasons: Allison’s unsentimental portrayal of profound poverty in the Old South; her unflinching depiction of incest; and the conclusion—devastating for character and reader alike—all contribute to the “flawless” nature of this novel. Perhaps most remarkable, though, is Allison’s ability to seamlessly weave a particularly Southern tradition of masculinity and violence into this heartbreaking tale of a daughter’s trauma and a mother’s abandonment. In this article, I will investigate Allison’s multifaceted portrayals of trauma in Bastard Out of Carolina, which—when combined with an analysis of social and economic traditions in the …

Examining Early And Recent Criticism Of The Waste Land: A Reassessment, Tyler E. Anderson Mr.

Tyler E Anderson

My thesis will closely examine recent trends in criticism of "The Waste Land," namely the ideological rebuttal against the New Critics proposed by recent historicists such as Lawrence Rainey. I will show that Rainey has unfairly characterized the so-called New Critics as supporting a reading of the poem that only sees it for a work of order and unity while in fact they acknowledged many organizational inconsistencies within the text. A central tenet of my thesis will be that ideological characterizations of earlier critics should never substitute actual close readings of the texts themselves. My findings will lead to broader …