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American Literature Commons

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Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in American Literature

The Alleged Pragmatism Of T.S. Eliot, Gregory Brazeal Jan 2006

The Alleged Pragmatism Of T.S. Eliot, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Before gaining recognition as a poet, T.S. Eliot pursued a doctoral degree in philosophy. His dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley has been a source of longstanding critical dispute. Some read the dissertation as a defense of Bradley’s views, while others read it as a repudiation of Bradley in favor of a kind of American philosophical pragmatism. This essay considers whether the dissertation can be properly characterized as pragmatist, despite Eliot’s enthusiastic and repeated dismissals of William James’ philosophy of truth. Eliot comes closest to a Jamesian view of belief when he writes of the endless ways we can …


(Anti-)Lynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, And The Evolution Of African American Drama, Koritha Mitchell Jan 2006

(Anti-)Lynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, And The Evolution Of African American Drama, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

My initial articulation of the history of black-authored lynching plays and their tendency to avoid portraying physical violence.


American Zeitgeist: Spontaneity In The Work Of Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker And Jack Kerouac, Randall Snyder Jan 2006

American Zeitgeist: Spontaneity In The Work Of Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker And Jack Kerouac, Randall Snyder

Randall Snyder

During the decade following World War Two, a body of artistic work was created that clearly articulated for the first time, a distinctly American aesthetic, independent of European models. This is not to say that celebrated works like The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Appalachian Spring and Roy Harris’ Third Symphony are not recognized as American masterpieces; but their American characteristics are expressed through content, rather than form or methods of production. Fitzgerald and Hemingway all furthered their apprenticeship in Europe during the 1920s while Copland and Harris studied in Paris with Boulanger. It remained for the next generation …


William Bradford, Samuel Gorton, Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, John Cotton, Thomas Dudley, John Wilson, And The Bay Psalm Book, Michael Ditmore Dec 2005

William Bradford, Samuel Gorton, Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, John Cotton, Thomas Dudley, John Wilson, And The Bay Psalm Book, Michael Ditmore

Michael Ditmore

No abstract provided.


The Christian Recorder, Broken Families And Educated Nations: Julia Collins' Civil War Novel The Curse Of Caste, P. Gabrielle Foreman Dec 2005

The Christian Recorder, Broken Families And Educated Nations: Julia Collins' Civil War Novel The Curse Of Caste, P. Gabrielle Foreman

P. Gabrielle Foreman

This essay views Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865) through the racialized lens of Civil War’s promise and trauma. At first glance, the author’s narrative choices—her antebellum frame, her principal character’s racial indeterminacy and domestic concerns, even the overtly racialized advice she dispenses in the essays she publishes in the important Black paper, the Christian Recorder—seem distractingly distanced from the immediacy of the unfolding national conflict. Yet, readers can plot Collins’s story on the temporal and activist axes that she so explicitly engages by publishing in the Recorder, a paper that printed editorials …


The Thrill Of Being Here: A Letter From Fortin De Las Flores, Mexico, John D. Hazlett Dec 2005

The Thrill Of Being Here: A Letter From Fortin De Las Flores, Mexico, John D. Hazlett

John D Hazlett

"The Thrill of Being Here" is an epistolary meditative essay on the desire for, and difficulties of, penetration, considered as a goal of travel, intercultural communication, and understanding of the other. Writing from a small town situated in the uplands of Veracruz, Mexico, Hazlett considers the possibility that a series of acupuncture sessions might serve as a fine metaphor for his year living and working abroad.