Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Lines Of Communication: Uncovering War’S Reality Through Fictional Styles, Kelly Hoarty

English Student Scholarship

In looking at war literature, Word War I was a pivotal event in how many authors view the war and communicate its effects on society to their audiences. Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway are two novelists in the twentieth century, who wrote to portray the physical and psychological damage soldiers suffered in battle and upon returning home. All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque and The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway utilize different writing styles, but both effectively work within fiction to bridge the gap of understanding between the soldiers’ experiences and the civilians on the home front, …

Experiencing Literary Self-Consciousness In The Classroom, Dan Gleason

Modern World Fiction

This activity is a fun and even bizarre response to John Barth’s highly self-referential story “Lost in the Funhouse.” In that story, Barth comments extensively on the writing as it happens (as he makes it happen), alerting the reader to the conventions of fiction as he deploys them. The following activity brings such jarring commentary into the classroom by leading students to call out the conventions of the classroom as they happen; the activity makes students live the experience of interruptive meta-commentary and can thus lead to vibrant discussion on the commentary in the story, too.

Fairy Tale Stylization Project, Dan Gleason

Modern World Fiction

The Fairy Tale project is a group project that captures the key distinctions in literary style that we analyze in our Modern World Fiction class. In that class, we look at fiction through the lens of different stylistic flavors: maximalism, minimalism, ludic (playful) style, surrealism, and magical realism. The fairy tale project helps students look back on all these different styles, reflect on them, and note their key features and differences more clearly. In this project, groups of students will rewrite a fairy tale in all (five) literary styles. Each member of the group will rewrite the tale in one …

The Singularity Of Puppies, Michael Furlong

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The Singularity of Puppies is an unsettling short story set in 1978 in DeLand, Florida. The story concerns the relationship between eight-year-old Joey Brown and his puppy, Fredrick Brown. The story was originally published in The Fantastique Unfettered #3. The Singularity of Puppies is speculative fiction, and a tribute to Fredric Brown (1906-1972), a science fiction and mystery author.

Snowball, Robert Weaver

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Melville And Women In Specific Relation To "Bartleby, The Scrivener", Kaitlin Eckert

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Although there are no female characters in Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," there is a clear sense of femininity that breaks through the barriers Melville has created showing that there is no such thing as a man's world. Within the thesis background on the author is revealed that may lend insight in to reasoning behind the lack of women, as well as specific cases where femininity is present.

From Monsters To Victims: Vampires And Their Cultural Evolution From The Nineteenth To The Twenty-First Century, Caitlyn Orlomoski

Honors Scholar Theses

Vampires are the latest fad to appear on pop-culture’s radar, dominating literature, film, and television, but this is not the first time they have latched onto the public consciousness. These bloodsuckers have been a constant presence in literature and film since the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, arguably the most influential vampire text of all time. Even before Dracula, vampires permeated Eastern European folklore, supposedly terrorizing small rustic communities in the dark of the night and acting as scapegoats for almost anything the locals could neither change nor understand. Since that time, vampires have represented society’s fears …

Fulfillment Of Woman And Poet In Elizabeth Barrett Brown's Aurora Leigh, Beth Leonardo

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Skunk Hammock, Britton Cody Lumpkin

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Skunk Hammock: Poems, a poetry collection by Cody Lumpkin, explores the confluence of man-made objects with the natural world. Lumpkin’s subject matter varies widely. From poems derived from the detritus of popular culture like Spam and Mr. Snuffleupagus to poems where prairie dogs and egging houses are the focus, Lumpkin works to render material poetic that is typically not seen as poetic. A number of his poems concern themselves with the perception of animals. Influenced by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, David Bottoms, Robert Hayden, and Claudia Emerson, Lumpkin seeks to show animals not as mere symbolic vessels, but …

Towards A Theory Of Comic Book Adaptation, Colin Beineke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary adaptation studies/theories have tended to focus singularly on the movement from the novel/short story to film – largely ignoring mediums such as the theater, music, visual art, video games, and the comic book. Such a limited view of adaptation has led to an underdeveloped and misplaced understanding of the adaptation process, which has in turn culminated in a convoluted perception of the products of artistic adaptation. The necessity of combating the consequences of these limited outlooks – particularly in the field of comics studies – is as vital as the difficulties are manifold. In opposition to this current stream …

Mobilizing Sentiment: Popular American Women's Fiction Of The Great War; 1914-1922, Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines American women’s popular novels about the Great War published between 1914 and 1922, and offers a perspective that complicates our understanding of the American experience of WWI. Drawing on a historical framework that illuminates the subtleties of the nation’s the ever-shifting political stance in response to the European War, this study demonstrates how American response to the war was neither monolithic nor static. This study contributes to current efforts to recover women’s voices in the male-dominated terrain of war writing, and promotes the value of studying noncanonical texts. Rarely considered in scholarship of American war literature, women’s …

Care Of The Self And The Will To Freedom: Michel Foucault, Critique And Ethics, Stephanie M. Batters

Senior Honors Projects

Care of the Self and the Will to Freedom

Stephanie Batters

Faculty Sponsor: Stephen Barber, English

What do subjectivity, power and ethics have in common? For French philosopher Michel Foucault, each of these concepts inherently resides within the others. His works, spanning from the mid-1950s to his death in 1984, offer a profound theoretical approach to the complex questions that obtain between the individual and society. Foucault’s works present careful and intricate theories about the relationships of the past with the present, the individual with society, and power with truth. Many of his writings explore how the individual is made …

City Of Slow Dissolve, John M. Chavez

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

City of Slow Dissolve examines identity, displacement, and construction of the self. Beginning with the persona’s root location of Colorado Springs, Colorado, moving to Detroit, Michigan and concluding with Las Cruces, New Mexico, the speaker of the included poems articulates the complexities of lived emotion (e.g., anxiety, anger, guilt, and eventual acceptance), of the critical evaluation of one’s surroundings, and of the fractures of the self as the result of elected displacement in the service of personal advancement. It is with this in mind that these poems avoid thematizing what it means to be a Latin@ living in the United …

Reasonable Conversions: Susanna Rowan's Mentoria And Conversion Narratives For Young Readers, Karen Roggenkamp

Faculty Publications

Though not well known, Rowson's Mentoria-a curious conglomeration of thematically-related pieces from multiple genres, including the essay, epistolary novel, conduct book, and fairy tale-offers particularly fertile ground for thinking about the nexus between eighteenth-century didactic books and earlier works for young readers.2 At the heart of Mentoria is a series of letters describing girls who yield, with dire and frequently deadly consequences, to the passionate pleas of male suitors.3 Fallen women populate Rowson's world, and scholars have traditionally read Mentoria within the familiar bounds of the eighteenth-century seduction novel.4 However, Rowson's creation transforms the older tradition of didactic, child-centered conversion …

Liberating The Zeitgeist: Using Metaphor & Emotion To Unlock The Transcendency Of The Short Story, Vincent Bish

General Student Scholarship

Barometers have often been likened to short stories—measuring momentary shifts in atmospheric pressure. Short Stories, like barometers are sensitive instruments, recording impressions about the stresses our world is under. What separates Short Stories though from their meteorological counterparts is that, what they measure is infinitely more elusive than the pressure air places on the Earth. What they measure are the prevailing spirits of a times—the Zeitgeist.

These four authors, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, and Crane, have, in their respective texts, created stories that not only measure this spirit but capture it. From a writer’s perspective, these authors imbedded the zeitgeist of …

Bad Girls And Biopolitics: Abortion, Popular Fiction, And Population Control, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

My Secret Life In Film: A Memoir, Kelly Grey Carlisle

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative dissertation is an original work in the genre of memoir, and consists of the first two sections of my book, My Secret Life in Film. I believe that my book speaks to contemporary experiences of childhood, violence, sexuality, and faith, and complicates conceptions of a ‘normal’ family. When I was three weeks old, my mother, who worked as a prostitute, was murdered near downtown Los Angeles. Her case remains unsolved, and I do not know my father. Her own parents were unwed. At first I lived with my maternal grandmother and the woman I believe to have been …

Cold War Playboys: Models Of Masculinity In The Literature Of Playboy, Taylor Joy Mitchell

Humanities & Communication - Daytona Beach

“Cold War Playboys: Models of Masculinity in the Literature of Playboy” emphasizes the literary voices that emerged in response to the Cold War’s redefinitions of space and sexuality and, thus, adds to the growing national discourse of Cold War literary and masculinity studies. I argue that the literature Playboy includes has always been a necessary feature to creating its masculinity model; however, that very literature often destabilizes the magazine’s grand narrative because it presents readers with alternative models of masculinity. To make that argument, I presume five things: 1) masculinity, like femininity, is a construct; 2) the mid-century masculinity crisis …

"Introduction" To Conjuring The Real: The Role Of Architecture In Eighteenth- And Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Rumiko Handa, James Potter

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Buildings give an immediate presence to the historical or fictional world, which otherwise is unknown or unfamiliar to the audience. The portrayal of a building’s concrete and specific substance makes the world come alive, although the building itself is a mere segment of the world that it represents. This book will trace the genealogy of this representational role of architecture, going back through the history of film and then further in literature, art, and theater, and identify its pedigree in the nineteenth century, where authors, artists, and stage managers used thorough depictions of buildings to effectively feed the audience’s historical …

Duplicities Of Power: Amiri Baraka’S And Lorenzo Thomas’S Responses To September 11, John Gery

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Modelos Masculinos Y Violencia En Sanctuary Y Crónica De Una Muerte Anunciada, Cesar Valverde

Scholarship

This essay analyzes how two novels, William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, present masculine models that juxtapose power and violence during times of social crisis. Both novels present violent masculinities that overcome peaceful masculinities, in conflicts that result in murders and rapes; but rather than acuse the individuals responsible for the violent acts, the texts point out the social mechanisms that inexorably move the authors of the crimes. In both works we also see violence against women and resulting public deaths of men wrongly accused, which happen due to an inability to adapt to …

Dishonest Abe Scholarship: The Lincoln Biography Plagiarism Scandal, Robert Bray, Michael Burlingame

Scholarship

'Dishonest Abe Scholarship' is a narrative/analytical account of the controversy surrounding charges of plagiarism in Stephen B. Oates' biography of Abraham Lincoln, 'With Malice Toward None.' It is written by (and of course from the point of view of) two of the scholars who first made the case against Oates, Robert Bray and Michael Burlingame.

‘The Stones I Shaped Endure’: Dickinsonian Pastiche In A.S. Byatt’S Possession, Robert Bray

Scholarship

This is a previously unpublished meditation on A. S. Byatt's use of Emily Dickinson-like pastiche poetry in the novel 'Possession.'

Don Harron, Andre Narbonne

English Publications

No abstract provided.

"I Had Never Before ... Heard Of Him At All": William Gilmore Simms, The Elusive William North, And A Lost Simms Novel About American Authorship, Patrick G. Scott

Faculty Publications

Examines a review by the antebellum Southern novelist William Gilmore Simms of a new book by the English writer William North (1825-1854), North's posthumous novel The Slave of the Lamp (1855), discusses possible reasons for Simms's hostility to North such as North's links to the New York Bohemians and his anti-professionalism, and explores what the review reveals about a now-lost Simms novel, with the same title, that gave a different perspective on mid-19th century changes in the conditions and profession of authorship in America.

Reassessing Whitman's Hegelian Affinities, Brian Glaser

English Faculty Articles and Research

This article explores Walt Whitman's Hegelian beliefs.

Joy Home, Jeffrey C. Henebury

English Honors Projects

Meet Edgar Jones, the fast-talking, woman-wooing septuagenarian with a penchant for sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. But when a resident at his nursing home nearly dies under suspicious circumstances, Edgar’s the only one asking the tough questions. Who pushed Frank, the depressed resident with a secret, over the edge? What’s Maria, the brunette who likes to water her plants with gin, hiding? When is Edgar’s daughter coming to visit? And why the hell isn’t there anything better on TV? Noir meets nursing home as Edgar struggles to find some answers—and to keep those answers from slipping away.

The Power Of Words: The Use Of Language In Ethan Frome, Heather Faye Spear

Masters Theses

Edith Wharton's novel, Ethan Frome, has been sharply criticized for its tragic ending, yet Wharton's compelling storytelling which depicts universal conditions of mankind accomplishes something powerful through its narrative: it defends language. The complicated relationship between the three main characters, Zeena, Ethan, and Mattie is rooted in their utilization of language. Using a combination of close reading for textual analysis and identifying a communicative style for each character, this thesis asserts that how the characters in this novel utilize language contests the meaninglessness and relativity supported by deconstructionists. Wharton clearly illustrates Zeena's linguistic power over both Ethan and Mattie, and …

Whence Comes Black Art?: The Construction And Application Of “Black Motivation”, Derrell Acon

Lawrence University Honors Projects

George Schuyler, in his tragically misguided 1926 essay for The Nation magazine, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” suggests that the only difference between Blacks and Whites is the color of skin, and that both races experience the same social, psychological and educational forces in America. He blatantly disregards American racism and inequality, and in his attempt to put forth his advocacy of color-blindness he merely projects and perpetuates the most racist of ideals within our country. Schuyler views the concept of Black Art very narrowly and insists on the impossibility of such an idea because of the supposed Americanness of the art. …

Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0534-3 299 pages, bibliography, index. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents a framework of comparative literature based on a contextual (systemic and empirical) approach for the study of culture and literature and applies the framework in audience studies, film and literature, women's literature, translation studies, new media and scholarship in the humanities and in the analyses of English, French, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and English-Canadian modern, contemporary, and ethnic minority texts. Copyright release to the author in 2006.