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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori Jan 2023

"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori

Theses and Dissertations

Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the Whodunit. She is without a doubt one the most popular and best selling authors of all time. Christie’s work built upon the first examples of detective fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Christie’s embrace of the traditionally female spaces, her subversion of expectations, and her unlikely detectives set her apart from her predecessors with their focus on male intellect, patriarchal superiority, and absent female characters. Christie’s novels established recognizable patterns still used today in books, television and movies. This project examines the arc of detective fiction …


"The Personal Is The Political And The Political Is Personal:" Engendering Understanding Through Global Allegory In Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist And Exit West, Nicole Ordonez Jul 2022

"The Personal Is The Political And The Political Is Personal:" Engendering Understanding Through Global Allegory In Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist And Exit West, Nicole Ordonez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West by British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. In both novels, Hamid uses the representational literary device of allegory to present what I will frame as works of “global allegory,” or novels of global literature that present the world as one interconnected space rather than as one divided by borders and nations. In doing so, I will be situating my argument as a rebuttal of Frederic Jameson’s “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson draws a distinction between works of third world and first world literature along the lines of allegory. …


"Nothing ‘Personal’ To Lose": Alice Notley’S “I” And The Poetics Of Encounter In Disobedience, Christina T. Baulch Jan 2022

"Nothing ‘Personal’ To Lose": Alice Notley’S “I” And The Poetics Of Encounter In Disobedience, Christina T. Baulch

Theses and Dissertations

Though the lyric-I has often been perceived as an isolated ego, Alice Notley's "I" in her long poem Disobedience (2001) necessitates plurality through what I call a "poetics of encounter." In response to the 1978 Language poetry manifesto "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry," and to the larger well-rehearsed debate about vocal homogeneity and persona centrism in poetry, this paper argues that Notley's poetics of encounter brings the "I" of Disobedience into continual and complex conversation with material history, politics, and mass culture, thus situating it within, and not sequestered from, the world and its mediation.


Gloria Naylor’S Conversation With The Tempest, Kelly Mcavoy-Giarrusso Jan 2022

Gloria Naylor’S Conversation With The Tempest, Kelly Mcavoy-Giarrusso

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on how Gloria Naylor used Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest as inspiration for her character George, and how her evolution of the character reveals issues within the literary and academic community at the time of her writing. George fulfills Caliban’s limitations in that he has more power and autonomy than Caliban, but the tragedy of his death reveals that he has lost part of himself in order to gain that power. This idea that education and society can cause a loss of self is personal for Naylor, who encountered only white male authors in school and struggled …


The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez Dec 2021

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …


Imagining Wildernesses: Susan Howe’S Poetic Corrective, Samantha R. Walsh Jan 2020

Imagining Wildernesses: Susan Howe’S Poetic Corrective, Samantha R. Walsh

Theses and Dissertations

This work explores language poet Susan Howe’s conceptualization of the natural world in her 1989 poem, Thorow. Conceptualization of a distinct and pure wilderness, inherited from Puritan settlers, is traced through Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and located in Howe’s experience at Lake George in 1987. This thesis describes Howe’s efforts to decolonize and open up closed historical narratives. Howe’s careful deconstruction of normative linguistic structures exposes the restrictive nature of standard syntax and canonical narratives.


The Narrative Of Revolution: Socialism And The Masses 1911-1917, Stephen K. Walkiewicz May 2019

The Narrative Of Revolution: Socialism And The Masses 1911-1917, Stephen K. Walkiewicz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to situate The Masses magazine (1911-1917) within a specific discursive tradition of revolution, revealing a narrative pattern that is linked with discourse that began to emerge during and after the French Revolution. As the term “socialism” begins to resonate again within popular American political discourse (and as a potentially viable course of action rather than a curse for damnable offense), it is worthwhile to trace its significance within American history to better understand its aesthetic dimensions, its radical difference, and its way of devising problems and answers. In short, this thesis poses the question: what ideological structures …


Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau May 2018

Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau

Theses and Dissertations

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Things They Carried subvert dominating historical narratives by challenging the frameworks that construct them through introducing alternate narratives. By reframing the ethics of truth, they rupture central narrative space with marginal perspectives, rewriting History in service of their own truths.


Madison Washington’S Journey To Freedom: Protagonist Development In Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave, Hallie Rene Gleasman May 2018

Madison Washington’S Journey To Freedom: Protagonist Development In Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave, Hallie Rene Gleasman

Theses and Dissertations

This analysis of Frederick Douglass’ novella The Heroic Slave explores the manner by which said work of fiction employs, references, and reworks the formulaic conventions of the slave narrative. It additionally examines how The Heroic Slave promotes black revolutionary leadership and models respectful white support of emancipation.


Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky Oct 2017

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …


“Without Stopping To Write A Long Apology”: Spectacle, Anecdote, And Curated Identity In Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom, Anjelica La Furno May 2017

“Without Stopping To Write A Long Apology”: Spectacle, Anecdote, And Curated Identity In Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom, Anjelica La Furno

Theses and Dissertations

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom unapologetically challenges traditional nineteenth-century notions of race and gender by way of its treatment of spectacle, anecdotal use, and assertion of authorial choices that contradict the expectations of a white abolitionist audience. Its most challenging feature is what I will call Ellen’s “curated identity.”


The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola Dec 2016

The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola

Theses and Dissertations

A summation of the influences behind Milton's Natural Law theory as found in the works of Aristotle, Grotius, Hobbes, and Thomas Aquinas. The essay's intent is to uncover this important thread that runs through both Milton's Poetic Verse as well as his Polemic tracts.