Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"A Stranger In America": Queer Diasporic Writers And The American Politics Of Exclusion, Caitlin Stanfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the academic concept of queer diasporic studies is relatively new, the epistemic future of this interdisciplinary, intersectional, and inclusive field is already imperiled. Throughout recent years, bills seeking to expunge critical race and queer theory from not only the public education sector, but from the legally-defined “general public” as well, have been proposed by legislators throughout the United States. To combat this assault upon marginalized educators, scholars, and authors, one must first understand what is at stake; the rich site of contemporary, queer diasporic poetry provides one such example. By situating these poems within their complex cultural, political, and …

Beagle Music: The Liberating Power Of Poetic Constraint, Rachel Ouellette

Honors College

This creative project, an original poetry manuscript and disquisition, aims to explore and demonstrate the power of poetic constraint — self-imposed rules in poetry. I wrote the poems within the tradition of lyric poetry, and therefore they reflect my personal experiences and feelings. Many of the poems reflect an experience that is best described as limerence, the psychological term for an intense, lasting “crush.” As I distilled my feelings into poetry, I used both traditional methods of constraint, such as the sonnet and the ghazal, and innovative ones, such as selecture, my own variation on erasure. I found that constraint …

Critical Discourse Analysis: Sexual Violence In Maine Department Of Public Safety (Dps) "Crime In Maine" Reports, Emma V. Grous

Honors College

Sexual violence is incredibly prevalent in the state of Maine. These crimes, which disproportionately affect at-risk communities – women, children, people of color, and impoverished persons – are not accurately represented in legal discourses within Maine. Changes to how victims and survivors of sexual violence are represented and discussed in law enforcement reports and other materials are necessary in order to promote social change and justice for the survivors in our communities.

Critical Discourse Analysis has been used broadly since its conception and has even previously been used in understanding political and social implications of discourse in the United States. …

Otherworldly Ethics: Trouthe And The Fairy Mistress In The Lays Of Lanval, Graelent, Guingamor And Sir Launfal, Abigail Roberts

Honors College

While the nature of fictional fairies in medieval romance has been widely discussed and it has been acknowledged by many scholars that fairies typically offer some critique of the human courts in which they intervene, they have yet to be examined in relation to their ethical impact and conceptions of justice. In order to address this, this thesis performs a close reading of four Breton lays, Lanval, Graelent, Guingamor and Sir Launfal using a framework of medieval folklaw. The four fairies of these lays introduce to their respective poems a unique feminine ethic that critiques the enactment of trouthe practiced …

The Illustrations Of Jay Jackson: A Visual Analysis Of The Chicago Defender In The 20th Century, Ruth Lewandowski

Honors College

In 1905, Robert S. Abbott invested twenty-five cents in starting a weekly newspaper covering stories about and for Black Americans. It would end up being called The Chicago Defender and became one of the most prolific Black newspapers of the 20th century. The staff, throughout the years, would write papers that aided and defended the community's well-being. In the earlier days, it fueled the Great Migration and helped people escape their violent homes in the South. The Defender also exposed lynchings and attempts of it throughout the decades. By exposing the hate crimes of white supremacists, the Defender was communicating …

The Day The Day Fell Asleep, Christopher Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The poems of The Day the Day Fell Asleep were written across 2020-22 in Oxford, England, and Orono, Maine, in consultation with and under the advisement of the poet Jennifer Moxley. The primary themes of the collection are the language of dreams, and the language of reality, and the possibilities of meeting places between the two. This thesis is prefaced by an introduction, Statements Toward a Poetics, that draws on ideas from poets including May Sarton, Yves Bonnefoy, and Wallace Stevens, to begin outlining a poetic state of awareness that informs the concerns of many of the poems in the …

Orion's Eyes, Adam Ray Wagner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following manuscript is a thesis in poetry and poetics. The goal of the thesis was to generate poems which investigate perception and to develop a nascent sense of my own poetics. The manuscript is invested in the exploration of poetry’s sonic qualities as a primary constitutive force behind a poem’s meaning. Inspired by Zukofsky’s declaration that the highest order of poetry is music, the poems are rooted in the expressive capacity of the voice. The critical introduction draws attention to how that vocal expressivity functions in the poems as a meaning-making element. The poems included in Orion’s Eyes were …

Sisterhood And Survival: An Exploration Of Women's Relationships In Feminist Speculative Fiction, Madeleine Gernhard

Honors College

Writers have used the genre of feminist speculative fiction as a lens through which to view modern issues which effect women. Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Margaret Atwood’ Handmaid’s Tale, and Naomi Alderman’s The Power each explore dystopian or transitory dystopian societies in which women are pitted against one another for the sake of their survival. In reviewing the relationships which the women in these novels have to each other we stand to gain insights into the ways in which sisterhood influences change in these societies. Each of these works, while centering around different understandings of dystopian society, also prominently feature the …

Embodying Resilience In The Writing Center: A Study Of Tutor Training Handbooks And Videos Towards An Understanding Of The "Ideal" Tutoring Session, Katelyn Emily Parsons

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines two distinct datasets (handbooks and videos) to explore whether writing tutors embody their training. This research project was grounded in Bruffee’s (1984; 1995) work with collaboration and its link to conversation (both verbal and nonverbal communicative acts) to analyze the peer-to-peer relationships that are observable in writing center tutorials. Research on collaboration and conversation provided a useful framework for qualitatively coding six (6) tutor training handbooks and sixteen (16) tutor training videos. In taking up Thompson’s (2009) and Olinger’s (2014; 2020) calls for further research on writers’ embodied understandings of language, the video component of this research …

Construing Prestige: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study Of Eight Historically Gendered Occupations, Benjamin Flint Markey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While research in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies has focused on collocation and its role in representing gender, little study has been given to how these representations change across registers. Collocations are responsive to register variation and studying their change across registers reveals how gender norms are perpetuated uniquely by different registers. This study investigates whether collocates comprised of historically-gendered occupations represent gendered dimensions of labor and addresses how those representations change across different registers of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (CoCA). This thesis begins with a brief discussion of corpus linguistics before detailing the role of corpus analysis in the …

Terrell (Carroll F.) Papers, 1949-2001, Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University Of Maine

Finding Aids

Carroll Franklin Terrell was born in 1917 in Richmond, Maine. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College in 1940, Terrell entered the Army and served in World War II from 1941-1945, attaining the rank of captain. He began teaching at the University of Maine in 1948 and earned his master's degree from the University in 1950. He later earned a Ph.D. from New York University.

Carroll Terrell was an internationally recognized scholar on the poetry of Ezra Pound and served as president of the Ezra Pound Society. He was editor of the Man/Woman and poet series, founder and editor …

Book Reviews, Sean Cox, Eileen Hagerman, George Kotlik, Thomas Peace, Hannah Schmidt, Eric Toups

Maine History

Reviews of the following books: Historic Acadia National Park, The Stories Behind One of America's Great Treasures by Catherine Schmitt; Without Benefit of Insects: The Story of Edith M. Patch of the University of Maine by Elizabeth Gibbs; French and Indian Wars in Maine by Michael Dekker; Wabanaki Homeland and the New State of Maine: The 1820 Journal and Plans of Survey of Joseph Treat edited by Micah Pawling; The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright by Ann M. Little; Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War by Lisa Books

College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences_Eng 381 Frontiers Of The Land And Mind_Covid Related Course Activities, Laura Cowan

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Emails and attachment from Laura Cowan, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Maine to the Provost Office describing the assignment for her class ENG 381: Frontiers of the Land and the Mind during the 2020 Spring Semester. Several of the students featured the COVID-19 pandemic in their oral presentations.

Exploring The Marginalized Voice: Queering Form In Contemporary Short Fiction, Madalyn M. Jackson

Honors College

Feminist and queer narrative theory calls into question the systemic way of thinking about categorizations such as genre conventions, form, and length. The short story subverts all of these, flipping common love plots or hero arcs, denying readers whole pictures, and privileging plot over character development. Through the application of feminist and queer narrative theory, this study evaluates Lambda Literary Awardwinning texts from authors Chinelo Okparanta, Krystal Smith, and Carmen Maria Machado on how the function, form, and common conventions of the short story are subversive in nature and lend themselves to the functions, forms, and conventions of the queer …

Madonna, Monster And Other Stories: Surrealist Short Fiction, Katherine Skvorak

Honors College

Surrealist literature has a long history of excluding female writers from the conversation, and as a result, women surrealists often wrote to critique the male/female binary and examine the oppressive forces denying their work. Madonna, Monster and Other Stories acts as a continuation of the female surrealist legacy and a further exploration and critique of invisible authorities that govern societal standards, create belief systems, and control logic and reason. Using methods created by the surrealist movement, such as the Exquisite Corpse exercise, image collaging, and automatic writing, these stories embrace the unconscious, the dreamlike, and the uncanny to break down …

College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences_Phi 104: Existentialism And Literature (Sp20)_Blackboard Notebook Project, Kirsten Jacobson

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Assignments for the course PHI 104: Existentialism and Literature (SP20), taught by Kirsten Jacobson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Philosophy Department, University of Maine. Professor Jacobson has students use Blackboard due to make notebook entries in response to the COVID-19 and remote learning.

The Personal Is Poetic: A Case For Poetry Therapy, Kimberly Crowley

Honors College

“The Personal is Poetic: A Case for Poetry Therapy” explores and deconstructs the history, models, and therapeutic qualities of poetry therapy through an autoethnographic lens of loss and growth. Inspired by the passing of my mother and my foray into poetry as a form of therapeutic expression, I dive into the existing literature on therapeutic usages of poetry and illustrate its connections to my writing and personal experiences. I include narrative accounts of my experiences of grief, growth, and coming of age, as well as samples of my poetry chosen to illustrate principles, model components, and poetic devices related to …

A Glimpse Of Whimsy: Short Children's Stories, Emma Hutchinson

Honors College

No abstract provided.

Review Of "French Genealogy Of The Beat Generation", Susan Pinette

Franco-American Centre Franco-Américain Faculty Scholarship

Review of Véronique Lane's "French Genealogy of the Beat Generation"

Book Reviews, Matthel Costello, Sean Cox, Laura Cowan, Dale Potts

Maine History

Reviews of the following books: Unearthed: Storied Artifacts and Remarkable Predecessors of the Saint Joseph’s College Campus by Steven L. Bridge; Creating Acadia National Park: The Biography of George Bucknam Dorr by Ronald H. Epp; The Human Shore: Seacoasts in Historyby John R. Gillis; Orion on the Dunes: A Biography of Henry Beston by Daniel G. Payne.

Choking Hazards, Tessa Hathaway

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following manuscript is a creative writing thesis in poetry. The goal of the thesis was to expand my abilities as a poet and find a cohesion in my work. I wanted to utilize some skills gain in a fiction workshop and apply them to poetry, as well as gain influences in various fields of expertise through the other courses I’ve been taking in the English department. Essays for a poetics class, novels for an American literature class, and short stories for a fiction workshop gave me a base from which to work from and draw inspiration. Not only was …

Discourses On Fantasy: A Narrative Allegory, Reuben Dendinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project, though officially designated by the English Department as a creative thesis, is really a hybrid work that combines creative writing with literary criticism. The work is structured as a "dream vision," a literary genre popular in the Middle Ages in which a narrator receives some form of instruction or wisdom through an allegorical dream. Examples include The Pearl, The Romance of the Rose, and Chaucer's House of Fame. In this thesis, the allegorical space of the dream vision provides a platform for a series of essays structured as dialogues. These dialogues explore the aesthetics and …

The Hum Of Distant Novas, Emily Jane Lewis

Honors College

The Hum of Distant Novas is a science fiction story about a woman in need of a community. It builds on the medieval frame narrative tradition and existing works of speculative fiction to create a world in which storytelling is a very grounding, very human part of the day. The protagonist, Jo Wake, books passage aboard a spaceship captained by Tempest Lane in order to reunite with her younger brother across the galaxy. The crew and passengers of Fascination tell each other stories to entertain, to react, to speculate, to hurt, and––most vitally––to feel together as they travel through the …

To Speak In The Cave, Stephen Thomas Krichels

Honors College

The aim of To Speak In The Cave is to provide some insight regarding how the Chinese government allows its citizens to voice their opinions, while simultaneously alienating the audience from existing bias.

To this end the narrative avoids any Chinese characteristics that are not fundamental to China’s treatment of its citizens as it pertains to their public voice. All names are Western, as are job titles and any cultural aspects of the narrative world that are not related to the allegory being created throughout the story.

The protagonist of the story, Jerg, is a dissociated and down on his …

Hankins (John Erskine) Records, 1944-1994, Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University Of Maine

Finding Aids

John Hankins was born in 1905. He earned his B.A. in 1924 from the University of South Carolina, his M.A. in 1925 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1929. He came to the University of Maine in 1956 as Head of the English Department. Hankins retired in 1970. He was Professor Emeritus in 1970.

Collection includes biographical information from the faculty index,correspondence, dramatic pieces, poems, and short stories (including some written by Hankin), articles, and speeches, newspaper clippings on a range of subjects, conference material, and various items regarding events Hankin attended celebrating William Shakespeare's birth.

Maine Literature 101: A Course For High School Seniors, Courtney Hawkes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In various schools across the state of Maine are teachers devoting their classroom time to exploring the rich history of Maine. At the high school level, many schools now offer at least an elective course in “Maine Studies” and Maine state standards require that local history is covered to a certain extent in high school history. Missing from these courses, however, is a study of Maine’s literature. Literature puts a realistic face to the events of history in a way that helps students see through the eyes of the people from that time period. Literature reveals internal emotions and conflicts …

Review Of Hassan Melehy, "Kerouac: Language, Poetics, And Territory", Susan Pinette

Franco-American Centre Franco-Américain Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Party: A Play In One Act, Derrek Schrader

Honors College

The writing and directing of a full-length play entitled The Party began as a novel about a woman throwing a party, and it morphed into an abstract piece of literature that comments on and highlights the effects of depression. It was adapted for the stage, and through the adaptation, it explored the symbolic and aesthetic elements of depression that the novel was physically unable to explore. In addition, it examined the desperation and daunting nature of depression through the use of character, depicting its effects in an unsettling way.

Through the directing of this play, the words became tangible. Multiple …

Illiteracy As Immanent: The (Re)Writing Of Rhetoric's Nature, Michael Kennedy

Honors College

Literacy is often thought of as a skill-set, that is, an ability to read and write in the dominant language of one’s socio-historical milieu. Illiteracy, on the other hand, is often thought of as a lack – an absence of a necessary skill-set that influences how well one can work and communicate (via reading and writing) within their dominant language and their society. In other words, illiteracy seems to have been defined by its relationship to the definition of literacy, that is, as a “negative-literacy” or a “not-literacy” that creates a lacuna of meaning when attempting to define illiteracy as …

Spring 2017 New Writing Series, The University Of Maine College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

Please see Program description