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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford
Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford
Masters Theses
Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new …
The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin
The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin
Munn Scholars Awards
Aria Da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1919 play, has thus far been largely ignored in literary criticism. This essay, through a historical survey of Millay’s previous critical reception followed by a close reading of Aria Da Capo, attempts to explain and then bridge this gap in academic scholarship. A postmodernist reading of the play will then illustrate why Millay’s work still confounds scholars today and how Aria Da Capo specifically continues to be relevant more than 100 years after it was first produced.
Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman
Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman
Theses and Dissertations
Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …
Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson
Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …
The Gendering Of Death Personifications In Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol From Baudelaire To Barnes, Amanda Mcnally
The Gendering Of Death Personifications In Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol From Baudelaire To Barnes, Amanda Mcnally
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The time of modernity, defined here as 1850-1940, contributed to massive changes in the representation of the feminine in literature. Societal paradigm shifts due to industrialism, advances in science, psychology, and a newfound push for gender equality brought transformation to the Western World. As a result of this, male frustrations revived the ancient trope of the femme fatale, but the modern woman—already hungry for agency, tired of maligned representation in heinous portrayals of skeletons, sirens, and beasts—saw a symbol begging for redemption rather than the intended insult. Women of the nineteenth century infused texture to a two-dimensional accusation that argued …
The Bird That Flew Backwards, Robin Gow
The Bird That Flew Backwards, Robin Gow
English Honors Papers
The Bird that Flew Backwards examines women poets from literary Modernism in the 1910s and Beat culture in the 1950s. Analyzing these eras in tandem reveals contrasting historical constructions of American womanhood and how sociocultural trends influenced how the “poetess” constructed herself and her work and illustrates the retrograde nature of women’s rights in the 1950s. Through close reading, digital mapping, and historical background, The Bird that Flew Backwards establishes a new critical perspective by linking the more well-known Modernists with lesser-known women in 1910s Greenwich Village Bohemia. This linkage between eras branches off to explore themes of formation of …