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Articles 1 - 20 of 20
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Writing Trauma In Iraq: Literary Representations Of War And Oppression In The Fiction Of Sinan Antoon, Zahraa Qasim Habeeb
Writing Trauma In Iraq: Literary Representations Of War And Oppression In The Fiction Of Sinan Antoon, Zahraa Qasim Habeeb
MSU Graduate Theses
The Iraqi war narrative reflects the traumatizing situation that omnipresence of war and three decades of oppression have caused to Iraqis' views of life. Writing about their traumatic experience is an essential way of giving voice to their wounds. The Iraqi American novelist Sinan Antoon is a "wounded storyteller" who is able to give words to the wounds of his homeland. His two novels, I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody and The Corpse Washer, address the physical and psychological trauma of wars and prolonged years of oppression in Iraq. Academic research and literary production about the effect of trauma presented in the …
The Muslim Mystique: The Use Of Rushdie’S Imaginary Homeland To Combat Prejudice Against Muslim Peoples Explored In Three Semi-Autobiographical Works Of Popular Fiction By Muslim Authors Of An American Immigrant Background, Lauren E. Nadolski
Selected Honors Theses
There is a largely unexplored trend in recent popular fiction that regards the semi-autobiographical work of authors of an immigrant or refugee background. These works seldom fall into the trap exposed by Said’s Orientalism, but instead present the author’s native country and culture through a lens similar what Salman Rushdie described as “imaginary homelands.” This thesis examines three primary texts that fit that description: The Kite Runner by Kahled Hosseni, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid, and Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye for their inclusion of the Islamic faith and their portrayal of America. The texts are analyzed and recommended …
Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz
Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz
Doctoral Dissertations
This project considers how socioeconomic impoverishment and society's failure to recognize working class women as valued subjects impinge upon a mother's ability to afford recognition to her daughter's selfhood. Situated within the larger North American literary tradition of fiction animated by flight in search of freedom, the texts here explored constitutes a subgenre that I term the “working class escape narrative.” Combining close readings of fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Sigrid Nunez with sociological research and psychoanalytic theory, I explore a relationship between mother and daughter characterized not by mirroring and bonding but rather the absence of intimacy …
The Search For Authentic Travel In Early Twentieth-Century British Magazines, Christina Bertrand Firebaugh
The Search For Authentic Travel In Early Twentieth-Century British Magazines, Christina Bertrand Firebaugh
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Edwardian travel writing between roughly 1905 and 1914 serves as a bridge between the closing of the long Victorian period, the beginnings of modernism, and the changes to come in the twentieth century. The search for authentic experience characterizes travel writing in the Edwardian era. Significant cultural, technological, and social changes caused Edwardians to examine their perceptions about possibilities for authentic engagement with other places and people in their travels. As a result, Edwardian travel writers explore various methods by which to engage authentically with other cultures. Drawing on literary theory, anthropology, and cultural studies, this dissertation examines a number …
The Imagined Southern Setting Of Cormac Mccarthy's The Road, John Emory Hooks
The Imagined Southern Setting Of Cormac Mccarthy's The Road, John Emory Hooks
Honors Theses
The Road by Cormac McCarthy hardly seems like a work of southern literature at a first glance. The novel is post-apocalyptic. A man and his son, neither of whom are ever named, trek south as they struggle to survive in a world darkened by ash-filled skies. The setting surrounding them is not recognizable as the southern US anymore. The cities are burnt and everything is covered with ash. If we rely on the geography portrayed by a work of literature to identify that literature as southern or not, then The Road cannot be classified as southern based solely on the …
Unlikely Heroes In Despair: Existentialist Narrators In The Novels Of Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, And Don Delillo, Courtney Mullis
Unlikely Heroes In Despair: Existentialist Narrators In The Novels Of Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, And Don Delillo, Courtney Mullis
Honors Theses
Existentialism is a field of philosophy concerned with questions about existence, death, God, and consciousness. It is "a doctrine that concentrates on the existence of the individual, who, being free and responsible, is held to be what he makes himself by the self-development of his essence through acts of the will" (OED Online). Writing by existentialist philosophers "often belongs more to literature than to philosophy" (Bigelow 173). Existentialist characters in literature are autonomous agents who tend to lack religious faith, constantly ask existentialist questions, and struggle with their own existence and relationship to the world around them. Additionally, existentialist characters …
"Keep Funding Or Else... It's Mustaches": Building A Community Of Literacy At Owl Creek, Ian Whitlow
"Keep Funding Or Else... It's Mustaches": Building A Community Of Literacy At Owl Creek, Ian Whitlow
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
The following research report on literacy practices presents an analysis of the data collected over the course of four months at Owl Creek middle school in Northwest Arkansas. Following a qualitative research protocol, I interacted with middle school students who participated in the Razorback Writers after-school literacy outreach program sponsored by the University of Arkansas. This report details the two major literacy practices encouraged in this after school program - the collective read-aloud sessions focusing on the graphic novel I Kill Giants, and the students' creation of their own graphic novels, which were developed in group workshops. In the following …
Intersectionality In Jane Eyre And Its Adaptations, Laurel Loh
Intersectionality In Jane Eyre And Its Adaptations, Laurel Loh
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
During the almost 170 years since Jane Eyre was published, there have been numerous adaptations in many different mediums and genres, such as plays, films, musicals, graphic novels, spin-off novels, and parodies. The novel has been read in many different critical traditions: liberal humanist, historicist, feminist, and postcolonial approaches dealing with topics such as the problem of female authorship and consciousness. In addition, it has been read in terms of an ideological struggle based on race, class, and gender; xenophobia and imperialism; female labor politics; and genre issues, to just name a few. As literary critics have explored numerous themes …
Julian Of Norwich: Voicing The Vernacular, Therese Elaine Novotny
Julian Of Norwich: Voicing The Vernacular, Therese Elaine Novotny
Dissertations (1934 -)
Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), the subject of my dissertation, was a Christian mystic whose writings, Revelation of Love and A Book of Showings, are the earliest surviving texts in the English language written by a woman. The question that has puzzled scholars is how could a woman of her time express her vision in such innovative and literary language? The reason scholars have puzzled over this for centuries is that women had been denied access to traditional education. Some scholars have answered this problem through close textual comparisons linking her text to those in the patristic tradition or through modern …
The Trauma Thesis: Medical And Literary Representations Of Psychological Trauma In The Twentieth Century, Sarah Louise Eilefson
The Trauma Thesis: Medical And Literary Representations Of Psychological Trauma In The Twentieth Century, Sarah Louise Eilefson
Dissertations
The historian Samuel Hynes has observed that World War I was not only the greatest military and political event of its time but also the greatest imaginative event. Soldiers and civilians struggled to comprehend the war’s devastation and the changes it produced while medical practitioners and artists examined the war as a site of extraordinary trauma. My project explores two of the many archives of trauma: the medical discourse through which trauma was defined; and representations of trauma in a variety of English language novels from the early and mid-twentieth century. I begin with a historical survey of the medical …
The Liquid Nature Of Self In Maxine Kingston's Autobiographical Story The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Jablonski
The Liquid Nature Of Self In Maxine Kingston's Autobiographical Story The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Jablonski
ETD Archive
This work examines the notion of self in the autobiographical narrative of Maxine Hong Kingston. Self-writing is constructing a discursive body, and Kingston presents the reader with a unique articulation of her identity. Conventional autobiographical narratives tend to define a self as an opposition to the other. In such texts the literary discourse is intended to secure the integrity of the self. This image of the self can be called conventional. While the conventional narrative self claims to demonstrate developmental stages of an individual that acquires his or her maturity by the end of the quest, the constantly changing self …
Sexualizing The Body Politic: Narrative The Female Body And The Gender Divide In Secret History, Eileen A. Horansky
Sexualizing The Body Politic: Narrative The Female Body And The Gender Divide In Secret History, Eileen A. Horansky
ETD Archive
Recent studies of eighteenth-century women writers have focused on the role of women as developers and proponents of the secret history. The secret history, recently defined by scholars such as Rebecca Bullard, Melinda Alliker Rabb, Ros Ballaster, Marta Kvande, and Rachel Carnell, among others, occupies space within several genres, including political satire and historiography. The genre's secretive nature and reliance on gossip and anecdotal evidence creates a new space for women writers that allows them to enter political discourse and offer a distinctly gendered social commentary. As public became private and private became secret, secret historians sought to expose the …
James And Shakespeare: Unification Through Mapping, Christina Wagner
James And Shakespeare: Unification Through Mapping, Christina Wagner
ETD Archive
The art of exploration became an important aspect of theater in early modern England. Exploration is typically done through the utilization of a map. The map scene in Lear provides a focal point to peer into the political ventures of King James I. As a proponent for peace, James both unified and divided his kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland through the use of cartography as a way to show the aspirations of a king. Lear, in dividing his kingdom between his three daughters, shows Shakespeare's careful strategic planning of the division of a kingdom and what that means in …
The Hill Fire And Other Stories, Michael Ervin Putnam
The Hill Fire And Other Stories, Michael Ervin Putnam
ETD Archive
The following stories contained here are the culmination of two year's work in the realm of the short story. In that time, I have further honed my writing voice and shaped these works in a way where they work in conjunction with each other as well as on their own. An over-arching theme I have in the work is a character (in these instances, specifically a man) who is unsatisfied with his current position in life but unwilling to put forth much effort to make a significant change. In some instances, that change is then forced upon the character by …
Legacy Of Shame: A Psychoanalytic History Of Trauma In The Bluest Eye, Martina Louise Hayes
Legacy Of Shame: A Psychoanalytic History Of Trauma In The Bluest Eye, Martina Louise Hayes
ETD Archive
The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s troubling short novel which focuses on the lives of a traumatized and disempowered African-American family and the community in which they live. The book openly discusses a variety of social taboos carried out by various members of a Black community in Lorain, Ohio. The most disturbing being the rape of a young Black girl, resulting in pregnancy by her father. Through the omniscient narration of a teenage girl, readers are thrown into the lives and thoughts of the adults and children within this community as they attempt to deal with these extraordinary situations as …
Fake Empire, Dennis Wilfredo Gonzalez
Fake Empire, Dennis Wilfredo Gonzalez
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
This a collection of short stories based in my experience as a Peruvian American Writer
A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon
A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon
Theses and Dissertations--English
Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public …
The Wisdom In Folly: An Examination Of William Shakespeare's Fools In Twelfth Night And King Lear, Siri M. Brudevold
The Wisdom In Folly: An Examination Of William Shakespeare's Fools In Twelfth Night And King Lear, Siri M. Brudevold
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis explores the complexities to be found in the characters of Lear's Fool from King Lear and Feste from Twelfth Night. It begins with an investigation of the history behind the taxonomy of fools that William Shakespeare created in his works. The rest of the thesis is devoted to examining the many facets of the two aforementioned fools, with the goal of discovering just how important and influential they are to their respective plots and to the world of literature. Finally, there is a brief coda that explores the other striking similarities that the two plays have in …
"Dollars Damn Me": Editorial Politics And Herman Melville's Periodical Fiction, Timothy R. Morris
"Dollars Damn Me": Editorial Politics And Herman Melville's Periodical Fiction, Timothy R. Morris
Theses and Dissertations
To illustrate Melville’s navigation of editorial politics in the periodical marketplace, this study analyzes two stories Melville published in Putnam’s in order to reconstruct the particular historical, editorial, social, and political contexts of these writings. The first text examined in this study is “Bartleby,” published in Putnam’s in November and December of 1853. This reading recovers overtures of sociability and indexes formal appropriations of established popular genres in order to develop an interpretive framework. Throughout this analysis, an examination of the narrator’s ideological bearings in relation to the unsystematic implementation of these ideologies in American public life sets forth a …
Expanding The Literary Enterprise: How We Experience The Texts Of The Advanced Placement English Literature And Composition Curriculum, Molly Ostrow
Honors Theses
How we read the texts of the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition curriculum.