Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Arts and Humanities Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore Dec 2018

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore

Master's Theses

This thesis examines Fred Chappell’s virtually overlooked collection of poetry Family Gathering (2000), and how the poems operate within the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the poems illuminate both the southern grotesque and Roland Barthes’s theory of photography’s Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum. I address Family Gathering as a family photo album full of still shots, snapshots, and even selfies, which illumines how Chappell’s use of the grotesque in this collection derives more from its original association with visual arts rather than only depicting the grotesque typically associated with characteristics deemed explicitly shocking or terrifying. I argue that …


Neoliberalism In Contemporary Literature: The Nuclear Family’S Decimation In Jonathan Franzen’S The Corrections, Jillianne Larson Dec 2018

Neoliberalism In Contemporary Literature: The Nuclear Family’S Decimation In Jonathan Franzen’S The Corrections, Jillianne Larson

Honors Theses

Within any text, there is often evidence of the author’s own life along with cultural reflections. A specific example of this occurrence is Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections (2001). Since the novel was written in the early twenty-first century, it is an immediate reflection of post-millennial society, specifically the rise of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was introduced to America as an economic venture; however, the policy’s impact can be frequently seen in relation to the nuclear family. As the idea gained popularity during the 1980s, neoliberalism began seeping into family units by way of one’s career and one’s home. This invasion has …


T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy, Jessica Cloud May 2018

T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy, Jessica Cloud

Master's Theses

While pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard, T.S. Eliot put a year into deep study of the Yoga Sutras with renowned scholar James Haughton Woods. Yoga, defined in the Sutras as the practice of stopping “the fluctuations of the mind-stuff” (Patañjali 8), provides the possibility of hope and equanimity in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), which depicts a world seemingly devoid of meaning. Not only can the influence of the Yoga Sutras be seen in the poetic form, style, and voice of The Waste Land and in the explanatory notes to the poem provided by Eliot, but classical yoga …


Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno May 2018

Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno

Honors Theses

Proto-feminist novels have garnered great critical attention in recent decades, largely owing to the reclamation efforts of feminist scholars from the 1960s onwards. These feminist scholars have remarked the fin-de-siècle emergence of a recurring narrative archetype: the unabashed New Woman, whose exploits in what were traditionally male-dominated spheres distinguished her from the domesticated matrons and sentimental bachelorettes of past literary paradigms. While the New Woman is now a commonplace among feminist critics, the following thesis uniquely interprets this feministic archetype in conjunction with the concurrent movement of American literary naturalism—a genre that proffers a deterministic worldview and is often regarded …