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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Consent In Conversation: Education Of Sexual Violence In Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Emily Benning
Consent In Conversation: Education Of Sexual Violence In Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Emily Benning
Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics
Maya Angelou’s memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is just one of many titles challenged and banned in public schools for “sexually explicit” content. On page 71 of her 281 page autobiography, Angelou discloses that she was raped at 8 years old by her mother’s boyfriend, and despite it being followed with scenes that emphasize the value of healing through literature, public attention has been directed to the (non-consensual) intercourse itself as a reason for censorship. As censorship efforts have expanded in the past two decades, challengers have continued to add more ban-worthy qualities to the list …
Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre
Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre
English Summer Fellows
This project involves the analysis of three novels — Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Toni Morrison’s Sula — featuring main characters who are forced to navigate realistic socio-economic environments rooted in racist, sexist, and classist systems of oppression in the United States of America. Through the process of completing close-readings of the novels, conducting extensive secondary research on historical contexts, and examining other scholarly criticisms and interpretations of these novels, I develop new insights into the main characters’ plights. To transfer this conceptual understanding into a more personal and empathetic …
The Harlem Renaissance's Hidden Figure, Jada A. Grice
The Harlem Renaissance's Hidden Figure, Jada A. Grice
English Summer Fellows
This project will seek to look at the Harlem Renaissance’s hidden figure, Jessie Fauset. Jessie Fauset was born to an A.M.E. minister and his wife as one of ten children in Camden County New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia. From there she got her college degree and began teaching all over the country. She has written four novels, There is Confusion, Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, and Comedy: American Style, all of which I have read this summer. Each novel focuses on the early twentieth century black family. I will be analyzing these novels under the four themes of passing, …
Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith
Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith
English Faculty Publications
Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …
Treasure Hunt Without A Map: Archival Research At The University Of Pennsylvania, Meghan Strong
Treasure Hunt Without A Map: Archival Research At The University Of Pennsylvania, Meghan Strong
English Independent Study Projects
Under the supervision of Meredith Goldsmith in the English Department, I spent this semester developing archival research projects for lower level students in the humanities. My project corresponded with the aims of the Council for Undergraduate Research, which works to develop undergraduate research skills throughout the disciplines. The Kislak Center is a nearby resource that has the potential to provide students with opportunities to develop crucial research skills while discovering little pieces of history that are hidden away in the archives. The final exercises presented here focus on the subjects of Walt Whitman, Marian Anderson, and Michel de Montaigne.