English Language and Literature Commons^™

Teaching Texts Materially: The Ends Of Nella Larsen’S Passing, John K. Young

John K. Young

The author suggests that attending to the publishing history of Larsen’s novel and the resulting indeterminacy of its ending(s) offers a concrete example of a materially oriented pedagogy that can illuminate the racial politics behind textual production and its relation to particular historical and cultural moments. He suggests that such a pedagogy offers both another way of understanding the textual contingency emphasized in contemporary theory and a way of further opening up questions of textuality and meaning for students.

Telling God’S Sanction : Storytelling In The Narrative Journalism, Memoirs, And Creative Nonfiction Of Rick Bragg, Jennifer Nicole Sias

Jennifer N Sias

Self-described paid-storyteller and Pulitzer-Prize-winning-narrative-journalist, Rick Bragg has used the storytelling techniques he learned from his people to write two best-selling memoirs that redefine the boundaries of the genres of memoir and creative nonfiction. His speakerly texts combine the voices of the working class of the Alabama foothills of Appalachia, his own voice as a member of this culture, and his narrative journalistic voice. In his works, Bragg has managed not only to carve a place for the voice of the working class, but also to celebrate and preserve the oral culture, history, and beautiful language of his people, the working …

Angel Island Poetry: Reading And Writing Cultures, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Object of a darker chapter in American history, the Angel Island Poems (as they have become known) are a recently discovered body of over 135 poems, written primarily in Chinese. These were literally carved into the walls at the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese immigrants were detained, sometimes indefinitely, between approximately 1910-1940. This lesson demonstrates how history and culture can be integral to our understanding of poetry, even poetry that is deeply reflective and personal in nature; by requiring students to model and produce their own poetry, it also makes evident that writing poetry is a creative instinct and …

Negrocity: An Interview With Greg Tate, Camille Goodison

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Trans-Spatiality As The Horizon Of The Coming Community: Ethico-Ontology And Aesthetics In Asian Immigrant Literature, Dae-Joong Kim

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study centers on the potential scope and significance of trans-spatiality as a new literary concept. I employ the concept of trans-spatiality as a means of understanding Asian immigrants’ transnational experiences as represented by Asian immigrant writers in the Anglophone world. Trans-spatiality is a grounding term and methodological orientation, and its scope is relational and appositional. Thus, previous studies such as postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, diaspora studies, and globalization are related to trans-spatiality, but, in this dissertation, I strictly limit its use to an ethico-ontological and aesthetic understanding of Asian immigrant writers’ literary works. For this methodology, I explore and analyze …

Solitary Cypress, David L. Cooper

David L Cooper

published in the summer solstice issue of Muse Magazine.

Angel Island Poetry: Reading And Writing Cultures, Adam Kotlarczyk

Understanding Poetry

Object of a darker chapter in American history, the Angel Island Poems (as they have become known) are a recently discovered body of over 135 poems, written primarily in Chinese. These were literally carved into the walls at the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese immigrants were detained, sometimes indefinitely, between approximately 1910-1940.

This lesson demonstrates how history and culture can be integral to our understanding of poetry, even poetry that is deeply reflective and personal in nature; by requiring students to model and produce their own poetry, it also makes evident that writing poetry is a creative instinct and …

Traumatic And Healing Memory In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony And Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Ambata K. Kazi-Nance

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A comparative analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, with a focus on individual as well as collective memory work in historically marginalized indigenous and African-American communities, respectively. This represents a critical study of how the novels invoke progressive and redemptive models of remembering, as well as foreground the role of spiritual guides in the transformative process from trauma towards healing.

A Western Man Of Color: Richard Wright And The World, Guy J. Reynolds

Guy J Reynolds

Richard Wright had become by the mid 50s an analyst of what it means to be ‘of’ the West. He was by now a firmly-established émigré, and had become a French citizen in 1947. His journeys, in a way, had only just become: Europe was a stage or an inauguration into further mappings of the self and society. Those mappings took the extraordinary geo-political shifts of the mid-century as their subject. In the wake of the Second World War, severely damaged economically and in terms of sheer power, European nations were finally forced to give ground to the nationalist movements …

The Sacred Role Of Animal Beings In Iroquois Lore, Melissa J. Martinelli

English Theses

The act of storytelling provides a connection between the spiritual and physical spheres, and the Haudenosaunee people (more commonly recognized as Iroquois) utilize the oral narrative to convey the most sacred truths of their culture. In focusing primarily upon animals and animal beings, one can recognize the deep reverence traditional tribal members feel toward animals as certain legends seek to unite individuals with the spirits, personalities, and bodies of such creatures in narrative form. Too often animals are overlooked as “lesser” beings, yet in legends of the Iroquois they possess potent orenda (great power) that can help one achieve success …

Paradigms Of Style: A Study Of Zulfikar Ghose's Novels, Abu Ul Wafa Mansoor Ahmed Abbasi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study deals with Zulfikar Ghose's--an expatriate English language writer of Pakistani origin living in the USA--novels. In this study, I focus on, among other things, the writer's negotiation with style and socio-politically provocative subject matter. I study Ghose's novels in a "good old fashioned way" in which I analyze his work by exploring his achievement as an artist, both in terms of style and socio-political subject matter. The focus is, precisely, to highlight the writer's correspondence between language and reality.

No Place Like Home: Fiction Of Scandinavian Women And The American Prairie, Rebecca Frances Crockett

Masters Theses

This thesis examines various fictional depictions of Scandinavian pioneer women and their struggle to adapt to the American prairie. It looks specifically at three novels: Johan Bojer’s The Emigrants, O.E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!. All three novels depict Scandinavian immigrant groups who settle in the Great Plains area during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The thesis looks in detail at the numerous ways in which each author’s female characters adapt or fail to adapt to the landscape, exploring the possible reasons for these successes and failures. It argues that …

Paradox Of The Abject: Postcolonial Subjectivity In Jamaica Kincaid’S The Autobiography Of My Mother And Cristina García’S Dreaming In Cuban, Allison Nicole Harris

Masters Theses

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines abjection as the seductive and destructive remainder of the process of entering the symbolic space of the father and leaving the pre-symbolic space of the mother, resulting in a desire to return to the jouissance of the pre-symbolic space. In this project, I read Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother as an attempt to link Xuela’s psychic abjection with the postcolonial identity. Xuela exists on the boundaries of the colonial dichotomy, embracing the space of the abject because she is haunted by her dead mother. She cannot return to her mother, …

And Then, He Folds His Patterned Rug: Repressive Reality And The Eternal Soul In Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Cook

Masters Theses

While Vladimir Nabokov has deservedly earned fame as a stylist of the strange, most critics who study his novels approach his absurd and beautiful characters as little more than fractured victims of a wholly subjective reality. Compounding the misunderstanding is the tired debate over whether or not Lolita is literary, pornographic, or some cruel game of cat-and-mouse in which Nabokov seizes control of his readers' sense of morality. However, critics who read Nabokov as nothing more than a manipulative stylist neglect to realize that his characters suffer such absurd distortions of spirit and mind because their environment--the "average" reality of …

Broken Passages And Broken Promises: Reconstructing The Komagata Maru And Air India Cases, Alia Rehana Somani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation examines two events in Canada’s past that have played formative roles in the debate about the place of the South Asian diaspora within the Canadian nation. The first is the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which 352 British subjects of South Asian origin aboard a Japanese ship – the Komagata Maru – were denied entry into Canada and forced to return to India. The second is the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, an event that claimed the lives of almost 300 Canadian citizens, most of South Asian origin, who were traveling from Canada to India. My …

El Choteo En Cien Botellas En Una Pared Y Raining Backwards: El Gracioso Disfraz De Las Circunstancias Trágicas Durante La Revolución Cubana Y El Período Especial, Kristin Nicole Lisenby

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to explore the idea that the combination of tragedy and humor in Cuban and Cuban-American literature is a form of “choteo” or “no tomar nada en serio,” which demonstrates a coping strategy used by Cubans during hard times. In the case of Ena Lucía Portela's Cien botellas en una pared, and Roberto Fernandez's Raining Backwards, I believe that the two authors use his and her own personal insight into a Cuban's life during the Cuban Revolution of the 60's and the Special Period of the 90's, and that those personal experiences are reflected throughout the novels …

It’S My Body: The Biomedical Ethics Of Cell And Organ Harvest, Christina Perri

Common Reading Essay Contest Winners

First Place

La Langue Est Gardienne’: French Language And Identity In Franco-American Literature, Susan Pinette

Franco-American Centre Franco-Américain Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Grandfather Poem, David L. Cooper

David L Cooper

A poem about the Black Migration

Mediated Processes In Writing For Publication: Perspectives Of Chinese Science Postdoctoral Researchers In America, Mimi Li

English Faculty Research

Sociocultural theory provides an explanatory framework for understanding human activity in the community of practice. This paper aims to address science researchers’ scholarly writing for publication processes from a sociocultural perspective. The author conducts a study via in-depth reflective interviews with three Chinese science postdoctoral researchers in America in an attempt to find their specific mediated actions and dynamic processes in writing for publication. In light of Engeström’s (1987, 1999) activity system, this paper, drawing on the interview data, explores the four mediating factors: objects/goals, artifacts, community, and roles, which afford and constrain the goings-on in the researchers’ writing for …

“To Say Nothing”: Variations On The Theme Of Silence In Selected Works By Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, Sandra Cisneros, And María Luisa Bombal, Hannah M. Frantz

Student Publications

This paper explores the various ways in which Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s La Respuesta, Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek,” and María Luisa Bombal’s “The Tree” address the theme of silence. It interrogates how the female characters in each of these works are silenced as well as their responses to that oppression. Meaning is subjective, so writing is a safe outlet for the oppressed. These works each identify an oppressor, either a husband or the male dominated church, as well as an oppressed individual, who is the female lead. In La Respuesta, the Catholic church, and specifically …

Carribean Folk: Engendering The Color Politics Of Claude Mckay's Banana Botttom (1933), Charmaine Dacosta

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Með Lögum Skal Land Vort Byggja: ‘With Law Shall The Land Be Built.’ Law-Speaking And Identity In The Medieval Norse Atlantic, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Gwyn Jones famously posited the notion of a cogent Norse identity as manifested by common language, culture, and mythology; further, as he clarified in his landmark work A History of the Vikings, law and the practice of law in local and national assemblies was a fundamental component of such a unifying cultural characteristic: "…for the Scandinavian peoples in general, their respect for law, their insistence upon its public and democratic exercise at the Thing, and its validity for all free men, together with their evolution of a primitive and exportable jury system, is one of the distinctive features of their …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 13, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

Bibliography For The Study Of Text And Image In Modern European Culture, Natasha Grigorian

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Bibliography Of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing In English, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.