Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Beat Consumption: The Challenge To Consumerism In Beat Literature, Amien Essif

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Critics of the Beat generation, from their contemporaries to the present day, often contend that the Beats’ opposition to consumer culture was superficial. Writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs failed, according to these critics, to present a coherent and principled response to consumerism. This paper, however, argues that while in many ways the Beats continued to participate in consumer culture, they developed a distinct form of consumption—Beat consumption—which attempted to regain sovereignty for the Beat consumer. Through an analysis of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and On the Road as well as several of Ginsberg’s seminal works, …

“Man’S Country. Out Where The West Begins”: Women, The American Dream, And The West In Joan Didion’S Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Coleen Maidlow

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the feminist perspective in Didion’s collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Throughout the text, Didion looks closely at the West and the changing social climate which surrounds her. Her essays chronicle women struggling to find a balance between the domestic and independence promised by myth the West. I analyze how women are granted only limited participation within the American Dream because of the masculine power structures which dominate our society. As the values of the American Dream shift, the women that Didion depicts attempt to find identity and independence despite the restrictive forces around them.

Review Of 'Love, Wages, And Slavery: The Literature Of Servitude In The United States,' By Barbara Ryan, Carolyn R. Maibor

Carolyn R Maibor

No abstract provided.

From Future Homemaker Of America To The Lesbian Continuum: The Queering Of Mary Ann Singletone In Armistead Maupin's Tales, Sara Katherine White

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City is a turning point in homosexual literature in twentieth century America. This paper mainly examines the character of Mary Ann Singleton and the "queering" of her character. The writings of Michael Foucault, Judith Butlter, Adrienne Rich, Eve K. Sedgewich, and Simone de Beauvoir are vital in understanding how a straight woman journeys onto the lesbian continuum as a revolt against gender roles (defined by Butler and Beauvoir) and as a result of her friendship with Michael Tolliver. Michael's character provides a discourse (as defined by Foucault) on homosexuality and through this discourse, he provides …

Material Memory: Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two]”, And The Colophon: A Book Collector’S Quarterly, Matthew J. Lavin

Matthew J Lavin

No abstract provided.

Demystifying The Cowboy Through His Song: How Cowboy Poetry And Music Create A Common Language Between Multiple-Use Conservationists And Forever-Wild Preservationists To Meet The Goals Of Sustainable Agriculture, Kristin Y. Ladd, Roslynn Brain

English Faculty Publications

Though multiple-use conservationists (use the land for multiple purposes) and forever-wild preservationists (solely set aside land for non-human species) seem to be at odds, this article argues that key figures such as Gifford Pinchot and John Muir discredit this perceived discordance. As well, it probes into the unexplored arena of cowboy music gatherings as productive places for cooperation between the two groups. First, mystique of the cowboy is examined and unraveled through true stories of cowboy-environmentalist collaboration. The article addresses how cowboy poetry festivals function as entertainment and meeting places to support sustainable behavior through communitybased social marketing techniques.

Material Memory: Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two]”, And The Colophon: A Book Collector’S Quarterly, Matthew J. Lavin

Digital Initiatives & Special Collections

Willa Cather's 1931 essay "My First Novels [There Were Two]" is an often-cited statement on place in the author's literary oeuvre. In the essay, Cather distances herself from her first novel 'Alexander's Bridge' (1912) and its imitative, Jamesian motifs and setting. Her second novel 'O Pioneers!', she writes, was a kind of second "first" novel, one written "entirely for myself" and preoccupied with the story of "Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska." As Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Robert Thacker and Emmy Stark Zitter have argued, "My First Novels [There Were …

Teaching Texts Materially: The Ends Of Nella Larsen’S Passing, John K. Young

John K. Young

The author suggests that attending to the publishing history of Larsen’s novel and the resulting indeterminacy of its ending(s) offers a concrete example of a materially oriented pedagogy that can illuminate the racial politics behind textual production and its relation to particular historical and cultural moments. He suggests that such a pedagogy offers both another way of understanding the textual contingency emphasized in contemporary theory and a way of further opening up questions of textuality and meaning for students.

The Strongest Wind, Vinesh Kannan '15

2012 Fall Semester

The essence of the American Dream is that it promises those who embrace it a spirit of hope that they can become anything they wish, doctors, lawyers, mothers, volunteers, or even heroes. Just as these dreams are different, the way in which Americans embrace them is just diverse. When considering the conglomeration of identities in a society such as that of America, such differences can often be strange, unfamiliar, and even harsh from a new perspective. In her short story, “Rules of the Game,” Amy Tan, a writer of Asian descent herself, prompts her audience to ponder a new perspective, …

Explicating Poetry: Shakespeare's Sonnet 46, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

The term “explication” comes from a Latin participle of explico, which means to “unfold” or “disentangle.” The term is often applied to philosophy and to literature; in literature, it has become a procedure very important to New Criticism. In the process of explication, a reader forges a detailed analysis of the structural and figurative components within a work, focusing on ambiguities, multiple possibilities of interpretation, and interrelationships between various elements of the text. This lesson introduces students to explication through the reading of a complex poem, practice explicating it as a class, and reading a model explication about the poem. …

To Better Serve And Sustain The South: How Nineteenth Century Domestic Novelists Supported Southern Patriarchy Using The "Cult Of True Womanhood" And The Written Word, Daphne V. Wyse

History Theses

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American women were subjected to restrictive societal expectations, providing them with a well-defined identity and role within the male-dominated culture. For elite southern women, more so than their northern sisters, this identity became integral to southern patriarchy and tradition. As the United States succumbed to sectional tension and eventually civil war, elite white southerners found their way of life threatened as the delicate web of gender, race, and class relations that the Old South was based upon began to crumble. Despite their repressed status in southern society, most elite southern women chose to support …

Publications By G. Ross Roy, A Checklist, 1953-2011, Patrick G. Scott, Justin Mellette

Studies in Scottish Literature

This checklist details books and other separate publications, articles, and reviews, published through December 2011 by the Burns scholar G. Ross Roy (1924-2013), longtime professor of English at the University of South Carolina. The list encompasses his work not only on Burns and Scottish poetry, but in Canadian literature, comparative literature, and book history.

Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno

Department of English: Faculty Publications

External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of "topics" from a corpus of 3,346 works of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes. External factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics to measure the evidence …

Alexander Mclachlan: The "Robert Burns" Of Canada, Edward J. Cowan

Studies in Scottish Literature

Surveys the career of the Scottish-Canadian poet Alexander McLachlan (1820-1896), the "Robert Burns of Canada," examining both his political poems, which are shown to have continuing interest, and his often-sentimental emigrant poetry and poems about Scottish life.

Survival Of The Fictiveness: The Novel’S Anxieties Over Existence, Purpose, And Believability, Jesse Mank

English Theses

The novel is a problematic literary genre, for few agree on precisely how or why it rose to prominence, nor have there ever been any strict structural parameters established. Terry Eagleton calls it an “anti-genre” that “cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together” (1). And yet, perhaps because of its inability to be completely defined, the novel best represents modern thought and sensibility. The narrative form speaks to our embrace of individualism while its commodification seems so natural, perhaps even democratic, to a capitalist economy. A historical look at the novel’s inception reveals that the …

Harvard Cowboys: The Role Of Silas Weir Mitchell's Creative Works In Defining Western-Style American Masculinity, Becky De Oliveira

The Hilltop Review

There were probably few men better placed in the latter part of the nineteenth century to help other men create a persona of strength and vigor--based quite firmly, too, in the tradition of literature and writing--than Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), a physician who "achieved great success in popularizing the idea of a correlation between mental activity and nerve strain" (Will, 293).

Performing Poetry: Managing Tone, Pitch, Volume And Rate, Erin Micklo

Understanding Poetry

This lesson teaches students the importance of varying the tone, pitch, rate and volume of their voices when performing a poem. Emphasizing different words and varying the delivery will alter the meaning of the poem that the students are reading. This is in preparation for the Poet Laureate presentations, when they will read aloud their poet’s poem, reflecting their group’s interpretation of the poem.

Explicating Poetry: Shakespeare's Sonnet 46, Adam Kotlarczyk

Understanding Poetry

The term “explication” comes from a Latin participle of explico, which means to “unfold” or “disentangle.” The term is often applied to philosophy and to literature; in literature, it has become a procedure very important to New Criticism. In the process of explication, a reader forges a detailed analysis of the structural and figurative components within a work, focusing on ambiguities, multiple possibilities of interpretation, and interrelationships between various elements of the text.

This lesson introduces students to explication through the reading of a complex poem, practice explicating it as a class, and reading a model explication about the poem. …

Determining The Tone In A Poem, Erin Micklo

Understanding Poetry

This lesson instructs students how to do a close reading of a poem, using clues within the poem to determine the tone of the poem.

America In Verse: The Laureate Project, Leah Kind, Dan Gleason, Erin Micklo, Margaret T. Cain

Understanding Poetry

The purpose of this project is to allow students to use their (developing) skills of poetic explication and close reading, combined with research and analysis, to discover and establish a solid case for a poet they will nominate as the next American Poet Laureate. Working in groups of 3-4, students will identify a published, living American poet who has not yet been designated a laureate. The project demands a wide array of skills as the students research bibliographic information on the poet: read and analyze the poet’s body of work and select one central poem to represent that poet; amass …

Imitism: Learning Imagism Through Imitation, Nicole Trackman

Understanding Poetry

Students will learn the components of Imagism through works of William Carlos Williams and D.H. Lawrence. As authors, students will demonstrate their understanding of this poetic movement through an imitation of either Williams’ poem “This is just to Say” or Lawrence’s poem “Green”.

My Mark Twain: Old Man River, Amelia Tatum Grabowski

Student Publications

Flowing across his pages, the Mississippi River inextricably winds itself through Mark Twain’s canon. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that my image of Clemens, my Mark Twain, is as a personification of his beloved river. Twain draws his readers to the water’s edge, seduces readers to stare into his depths, and reflects the achievements and failings of humanity. Furthermore, like the Mississippi River, Twain embeds himself in the American psyche.

Alchemical Transformation And The Grief-Threshold In H.D.'S Helen In Egypt, Eliza C. Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In H.D's lyric epic, Helen in Egypt, Helen of Troy experiences a phenomenological transformation in the brazier of the heart, which burns both on the beach of her new home in Egypt and in the depths of her psychic life. I have envisioned a process by which Helen psychologically enters into the brazier's flames to begin an alchemical process, so that she might see the beauty of the earth emerge and understand the rhythmic significance of the heart's perception. I call the brazier's (or the heart's) place of alchemical transformation the grief-threshold, which balances Helen on the edge …

Found Ipod Poem 1.0, Found Ipod Poem 2.0, William Lamberts

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Palabras, A Home Body, Sandy Bot-Miller

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Pussy Willows, Right Temperature, Sandy Bot-Miller

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

October Blast, Musings, Elizabeth S. Wurdak

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Poetic License: The Past In Creative Writing, Mara Faulkner Osb, Cynthia N. Malone, Karen L. Erickson, Scott Richardson

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Short Story: "Young Soldier, The Taxi Driver", Sophia Geng

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Verse, Fall Migration, Elizabeth S. Wurdak

Headwaters

No abstract provided.