Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Old Invisible Presence: Nonhuman Intelligence And Artificial Nature In A Coast Of Trees By A. R. Ammons And S*Perm**K*T By Harryette Mullen, Miles Jochem

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Boston Discusses The Massacre, Jean C. O'Connor

The Montana English Journal

Teachers may use this chapter from The Remarkable Cause: A Novel of James Lovell and the Crucible of the Revolution as a short story for grades 7 – 12., to explore themes of interpersonal conflict, conflict resolution, and the value of law.

The chapter “Boston Discusses the Massacre” is taken from The Remarkable Cause: A Novel of James Lovell and the Crucible of the Revolution (Knox Press, 2020), and used with permission. James Lovell, teacher at the Boston Latin School, discusses the pivotal events of March 5, 1770. As the conflicts that become the American Revolution begin a group of …

Lifeglows Through The Anthropocene: Development Of The Radical Imagination And Response-Ability Within Superhero Comics, Reed G. Puc

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Scholars such as Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Clark, and Timothy Morton emphasize the importance of and challenge within the task of representing the power, scope, and scale of climate change in art and literature. These interrogations often emphasize the failures of extant works to animate their viewers towards action in a time of environmental crisis, but struggle to find any work that meets their expectations. This ‘game-over’ attitude, I argue, is the direct result of the cruel optimism present in the current scholarship’s attachment to ‘traditional’ forms of art and literature. By interrogating the conclusions Ghosh reaches about the novel’s function …

Gendered Melancholy In Lolita: Reading Into Humbert Humbert’S Dolorous Haze, Joseph D. Brookbank

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper argues that in Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert uses the subject-position of the great male melancholic in order to, at the discursive level, (re)perform violent acts of appropriation against Dolly’s body, subjectivity and representation. Humbert attempts to translate the loss and waste which he brings about into perverse sorts of gain; these gains relate to processes such as catharsis, compensation, redemption, regeneration, a sense of exceptionality, and aesthetic/erotic/artistic enjoyment. The project has an introduction and two sections. The introduction demonstrates how Humbert enters into the male melancholic subject-position in order to perform his sorrow in a way that …

The Environmental Imaginations Of Moby-Dick: Technology And Vulnerability In Human/More-Than-Human Relationships, Jensen A. Lillquist

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the human and the more-than-human is a problem of massive proportions, as we live in an age of climate change, mass-extinction, over-population, and resource depletion. Evaluating how we have arrived where we are and re-thinking the issues at play as we move forward is crucial for future adaptation of human/more-than-human relationships; this is the primary goal of my analysis of the environmental imaginations of Moby-Dick.

I argue that the four primary environmental imaginations—the providential, the utilitarian, the Romantic, and the ecological—that have influenced United States culture since European settlement are represented by Herman …

A Reflection On A Dhc Senior Project: "Silvie Danger", Breann Watterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This is a reflection about an Honors College Research Project. The project was a work of historical fiction concerning the coming-of-age of a young woman in mid-nineteenth-century New England.

A Generation Of Katnisses: The New Power Of Female Protagonists In Young Adult Dystopian Literature, Mckenzie K. Watterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Considering emerging heroines in young adult dystopian fiction, this project first examines them in a literary review. Using feminist ethics of care as a baseline, the review considers their unique worlds, agency, and motivation

Satirical Perspectives: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, Mariah Johnson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This paper proposes a cross-cultural examination of the societal satire of the countries of America and Soviet Russia by way of comparison of two satiric novels. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt satirizes the business values of capitalist America and the materialism perceived in an economic system based on the mass production and mass consumption of goods. Yurii Olesha’s Envy uses Babbitt in intertextual conversation to perform a similar critique of the Soviet Russian society and values of the same time period. Satiric theory provides a framework for understanding and relaying how each novel performs its parody of the respective society, while historical …

What Do You Think I Am?: On Perceiving Unintelligibility In The Nonbinary Gender Experience, James Warwood

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What does it mean to be “retired from gender,” and what role does such an identity play in daily life? Engaging with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, this project attempts to elucidate the experience of nonbinary – that is, external to the male/female gender binary – gendered individuals, and the ultimate unintelligibility of that experience. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to perception allows for an exploration of the social norms and regulations that determine how gender is defined in Western culture; combined with Butler’s significant work on gender and its performativity, phenomenology proves a useful tool for revealing the …

Toward An Ontology Of Exhaustion: On The Affective Structures Of Masculinity In The American Oilfield, John W. Jepsen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What is the significance of the oil encounter in the lives of men living and working in the modern oilfields of the United States? Engaging with both literary examples of the lives of men in the Interior West and the personal experiences and reflections of the author, this essay seeks to examine the connections between ideology and place as it works to shape the identity and affect of men in America's oilfields, ultimately ending in them identifying with the very resources their activities seek to exploit and exhaust. Utilizing Theodore Adorno's Minima Moralia as its moral touchstone, this essay works …

Melville's Mardi And The Book Of Mormon, Giordano Lahaderne

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

While Melville’s Mardi has long remained a puzzle to both readers and critics, scholars agree that his third novel marked a significant turning point in his writing career. It is with Mardi that Meville realized the novel as a form suited to grapple the various philosophical and religious questions he would famously explore in his following book, Moby Dick. Although scholars have already pinpointed many various sources for Mardi, this thesis examines the heretofore overlooked connections between Melville’s third book and the esoteric volume of American scripture, the Book of Mormon.

The first chapter of this thesis examines …

Jp's Thesis, Jp Kemmick

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Unexpected Zeus, Adam Lambert

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Bioscience-Industrial Complex, Radical Materialist Aesthetics, And Interspecies Political Ecologies: The Unforeseen Posthuman Future In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein And Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy, Sarah Sydney Lane

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project traces how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, science fiction novels from the Romantic and contemporary literary periods respectively, contest the problematic relationships between subjecthood, science, ecological health, and patriarchal, capitalist societies by crafting radical materialist alternatives to such a system and its dualistic and destructive interpersonal/interspecies relations. Through the theoretical framework of ecofeminism that recognizes the conceptual linkages between women and nature in Western systems of thought, as well as psychoanalytical feminist critiques of the masculinization of scientific epistemology, this project examines the developmental and ontological overlaps between literary “masculine” and “scientific” subjects socialized under …