English Language and Literature Commons^™

Richard Brautigan : A Man In Search Of America, Elizabeth A. Howell

Honors Theses

Avant-garde writing tends to be an "iffy" thing these days, more a matter of cocktail chatter than execution. The resources for experiments seem used up, or ash John Barth put it, "exhausted" (Pinkser 75). Things and words increase in quantity but diminish in value and meaning, making the contemporary writer more and more unwilling to follow the old ways of arranging them. Though this is not a new predicament for an aspiring writer, it is one that seems threatening in an age of self-conscious art. Writers must look for new grammars and new semantics. Some writers turn this quest for …

Kate Chopin : A Different Look, Kimberly Ann Francis

Honors Theses

Kate Chopin? Who is she? This is a common resonse of many people who are not familiar with this outstanding woman writer of the late 1800's and early 1900's. In fact, this same question would more likely have gone unanswered then than today. For the most part, many of her contemporaries are prominently discussed and read today because they enjoyed popularity while they were alive. They not only established literary voges; in many cases they gave the public what it wanted to read. Such writers include Mark Twain and Stephen Crane as well as Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow. Kate …

Toni Morrison's Approach To Understanding, Joyce Dorris

Honors Theses

Toni Morrison tackles the problems for which she does not have resolutions. In order to make an impact on readers and achieve a meaningful understanding, Morrison manipulates readers' emotions. She says, "My writing expects, demands participatory reading. The reader supplies the emotions. Then we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to feel this experience" (Tate, 125). Morrison carefully positions her readers to see what her characters see and react as they would. Morrison feels if the readers can see the person experiencing the thing, they do not need an explanation. The illustration will …

Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Struggle For Poetic Vision, Kathryn M. Fessler

Honors Theses

In this study, I will trace the developmetn and history of Hopkins' struggle to realize and live by a vision of an immanent God, using as the gauge of his progress the poems, which are the celarest expressions of Hopkins' heart. I will illustrate the chronological progression of this vision in the poetry, and discuss specific poems in terms of their places in the history of Hopkins' life as a poet and a priest. I will also pay some degree of attention to linguistic innovations in the poetry, since these are manifestations of Hopkins' liberation from certain formal constraints made …

Alice Walker: An Interpretation Of Her Works, Niamh Walsh

Honors Theses

In summary, I feel as if Alice Walker has used her literature for far more than mere literary entertainment. I believe that she wrote with a very strong message for both blacks and women. To both minorities, of which she herself is proud to belong, she calls for acknowledgmetn of their attirubutes, their worth and their limitations: she calls for reclamation of the many positive attributes that have, for too long, been derided as insignificant: and she calls for a loud, joyous celebration of all the many defining aspects of womanhood and blackness. I see this evident in most, in …

[Introduction To] Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical And Critical Sourcebook, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

The beginnings of Caribbean literature lie hidden In the folklore of the plantation era and in the prim, condescending travelogues, the exotic novels, and the apparently naive slave narratives - often authored by Whites - that began to appear as early as the eighteenth century. Francis Williams, the classically educated Black poet of 18th century Jamaica, used conventional Augustan poetics to protest racism and assert the common humanity of mankind. The vision draws from Caribbean life. By the 19th century some black poets began to write of their own concerns and experiences, some writing in the local vernacular.

The essays …