Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Cultural Geo-Tagging The Big 7, Kenton Rambsy

English Datasets

Over the course of several decades, anthology editors shaped the landscape of literature by repeatedly publishing stories by a core group of writers: Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker. This dataset offers a general overview of structural features as well as information about settings and characters referenced in select stories by these writers. Metadata about the following stories are included in this dataset: Charles Chesnutt: Po Sandy, The Goophered Grapevine, The Passing of Grandison, The Sheriff's Children, The Wife of His Youth Zora Neale Hurston: Drenched in Light, Sweat, …

Motherhood And The Periodical Press: The Myth And The Medium, Susan A. Malcom

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this study, I utilize close readings of the periodically published works of three women writers – Kate Chopin, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Elia Peattie –through the lenses of historical/biographical, affective, and biosocial theories. Examining these works against the backdrop of America’s mythologized mother exposes the social ubiquity of the myth and the realities of motherhood nineteenth-century women experienced.

Chapter one examines the mythological nature of American motherhood as it evolved from a politically and socially nuanced Republican Mother and the role of American periodicals as a medium of perpetuating that myth. Historically, American motherhood was an extended function …

The Influence Of The Law In American Literature And Culture, Emily Johnson, Steven Hamelman

Honors Theses

This piece explores the relationship between law and its influence within American literature and the overall culture. Themes of discrimination, corruption, greed, advocacy, and incriminating evidence, present in the analyzed texts and films, greatly plays into the American public’s perception of their judicial system. Is it truly the law influencing American literature and culture, or is it the sentiments of the masses influencing the legal field itself? This work aims at analyzing this question, while also making a point to explain what American citizens can do with such influence and knowledge.

Fir-Flower Petals On A Wet Black Bough: Constructing New Poetry Through Asian Aesthetics In Early Modernist Poets, Matthew Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Critics often credit Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement for the development of American poetics. Pound’s interest in international arts and minimalist aesthetics of cross-cultural poetry gained the attention of prominent writers throughout Modernist and Post-Modern periods. From writers like Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein to later poets like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, image and precise language has shaped American literature. Few critics have praised Eastern cultures or the Imagist poets who adopted an East-Western form of poetics: Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Studying traditional Eastern painting and short-form poetry and interactions with personal connections to the East, …

A Certain Age, Anne Babson

Westview

The body churns out its red butter every Twenty-eight days but spends the whole cow to do it. The skin still glows a little, but blood vessels ruddy As the spaceship face fissures, approaching warp speed.

Vanishing Leaves: A Study Of Walt Whitman Through Location-Based Mobile Technologies, Jesse A. Merandy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Vanishing Leaves is a location-based mobile experience (LBME), which employs mobile devices equipped with GPS and high-speed wireless internet capabilities to take users to Brooklyn Heights to learn about the poet Walt Whitman and his connection to the neighborhood where he lived, worked, and published the first edition of his masterwork Leaves of Grass. Through this active first-person immersive learning experience, Vanishing Leaves embraces experimental scholarly methods that extend outside the classroom and off the page in order to engage learners and invite them to create meaningful, personal connections to writers and their literary works.

The following white paper …

Re-Thinking The Weird (In The) West: Multi-Ethnic Literatures And The Southwest, Jana M. Koehler

English Language and Literature ETDs

My dissertation examines the genre of weird fiction, specifically texts that engage the concept of the Weird West. While authors such as Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft are often seen as the founders of this genre, I argue that ethnic and women writers, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lucha Corpi, and others, explore the hidden histories of the West and Southwest in ways that incite a rethinking of the weird. Most importantly, I seek to demonstrate how the weird is not only a literary genre but a literary aesthetic and methodology that women and …

The Phenomenology Of It All, Justin M. Campbell

2019 Symposium

Who is consumed when we read? Does the reader consume the text or does it consume us? This essay explores the complex and possibly parasitic relationship between reader and text. This unique exchange of knowledge and ideas between reader and texts during this relationship is the phenomenology of reading. During this, the text is transformed via the consciousness of the reader from a passive, inanimate object to an active living breathing immortal entity that transcends both space and time. In doing so, the unhuman text becomes an active consumer of the human reader in the same way the reader believes …

Stories Of Life And Other Such Happenings, Lynette R. Ellis

ETD Archive

Stories of Life and Other Such Happenings is a combination of three short stories, Breasts Before Brunch, Two Pink Lines, and Tooneressie. Breasts Before Brunch is a comedic romance telling a story of a young lady attempting to find love even despite a crazy family. When her flamboyant cousin insinuates herself into Natalie’s date with her new boyfriend, Natalie’s imagination of what she would like to do to her cousin runs wild. When her cousin decides to show Greg her new boobs, the situation goes from bad to worse for Natalie. Alternatively, Two Pink Lines tells a very different type …

“Beyond The Gilded Cage”: Staged Performances And The Reconstruction Of Gender Identity In Mrs. Dalloway And The Great Gatsby, Anthony F. Pinzone

ETD Archive

Although scholars have examined Mrs. Dalloway extensively in terms of gender performance, few critics of The Great Gatsby have explored Gatsby’s masculinity through gender studies. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I argue that Mrs. Dalloway and Gatsby represent both actors and directors rehearsing a new gendered identity of the twentieth century. Through their roles as staged performers, I emphasize how seemingly minute tasks connect to larger social and political stakes of memory, celebrity status, and reappraisals of gender identity. I further assert that while both Mrs. Dalloway and Nick Carraway experience revelations and heightened imagination through death, neither …

Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Road Trippin:’ Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives and Petrocultures from On The Road to The Road" examines late-twentieth century U.S. road narratives in an effort to trace the development of American petrocultures geographically and culturally in the decades after World War II. The highway stories that gain popularity throughout the era trace not simply how Americans utilize oil, but how the postwar American oil ethos in literature, film, and music acts upon and shapes human interiority and vice versa. Roads and highways frame my critique because they are at once networks of commerce transportation and producers of a unique, romantic …