English Language and Literature Commons^™

Our Greatest Want: An Examination Of The Rhetorical Tendencies Employed By African American Female Abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), Lauren Deborah Nye

English

You are standing at the doorway of a church in Philadelphia. Looking in, you see a mass of heads, all turned toward the podium, waiting for someone to get behind that podium. Then you see her. She is an attractive African American with “a fair figure, long, lustrous hair, and facial features pleasant to behold” (Logan 49). You overhear one person comment that she looks like “a bronze muse” (Logan 31). A reporter will later write that she has “a strong face, with a shadowed glow upon it, indicative of thoughtful fervor, and of a nature most femininely sensitive, but …

Confronting Environmental And Social Crises: Octavia E. Butler’S Critique Of The Spiritual Roots Of Environmental Injustice In Her Parable Novels, Melissa Vargas

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

We are living in the midst of environmental and social crises. This fact was not lost on late African-American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, whose 1993 Parable of the Sower and 1998 Nebula Award-winning Parable of the Talents depict and critique the current environmental and social crises in the United States. Speaking of Sower in an interview with Essence magazine, Butler says that all she “did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters” (“Brave New Worlds” 164). In another interview with Randall Kenan, Butler describes environmental …

Becoming A Boy: Disability & Masculinity In Rodman Philbrick’S Freak The Mighty, Courtney Cohen

Honors Capstone Projects - All

My Capstone thesis is a discussion of the various representations of disability in Rodman Philbrick’s children’s book and the film it was made into. In analyzing the characters, relationships between the characters and vernacular used within the text, I came to the conclusion that certain parts of the book, including the inclusion of not one, but two characters with impairments as main characters, serve to engage the book in a complex discourse with various concepts of disability and masculinity.

In order to place Philbrick’s text within a larger discourse of disability studies, I analyze it with regard to theories of …

African American Whiteness In Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, Tim Engles

Tim Engles

No abstract provided.

Indigenous Ways Of Knowing Capitalism In Simon Ortiz's Fight Back, Reginald B. Dyck

Reginald B Dyck

No abstract provided.

Theodicy From The Inside: Viewing The Problem Of Evil Through Shoah Survivor Narratives, Sabrina Kaye Jurey

MA in English Theses

We can know the facts and details of the Shoah from history books and official records, but if we go no further than this, we cannot get the full picture. To truly glimpse what happened in the camps, we must turn to the accounts of survivors, of those who experienced and lived those facts and details. To truly look the Shoah in the face, we must look into the faces of these survivors.

It is for this reason, then, that when I began to dig deeper into theodicy studies, I turned simultaneously to Shoah survival narratives. Those who have suffered …

Jean Toomer And Carl Van Vechten: Identity, Exploitation, And The Harlem Renaissance, Phil Shaw

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jean Toomer's Cane is considered one of the literary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance, though the many of his philosophical ideas which inspired it are dismissed. Inversely, Carl Van Vechten's influence as an advocate and patron of African American art is foundational though his Nigger Heaven is dismissed. However, there are commonalities in each authors identity positioning and subsequent exploitation of the black Harlem Renaissance ethos. Further, their utilization of Gurdjieffian principles of objectivity and primitivist images of blacks links and explains, in part, how their identities contributed to the ideas expressed in the novels.

Pecan Grove Review Volume 11, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Race, Politics, And Public Housekeeping: Contending Forces In Pauline Hopkins’S Boston, Betsey Klimasmith

Trotter Review

For Pauline Hopkins, the decision to present readers with a fictional yet faithful portrayal of urban African-American life centered in Boston, which at that time was the capital of African-American advancement, was political. In her introduction to Contending Forces (1900), she writes: “Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs—religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation. No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with …