English Language and Literature Commons^™

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader, Michael Elliott, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader gathers together leading scholars of American literature to address the questions of methodology that have invigorated and divided their field: the rise of interdisciplinarity and the wealth of theoretical methods now available to the critic of American literature. Their engagement with these issues takes a unique form in this book: Each scholar has chosen a methodologically innovative essay, which he or she then introduces, explaining why it is both exemplary in its approach and central to the issues that most engage American literary scholarship today. The book includes both an introduction to the controversial …

Southern Gothic Fiction And New Naturalism: Toward A Reading Of New Naturalism, Jeremy Kevin Locke

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersections of American naturalism and the Southern Gothic by seeking to demonstrate how William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West revise key elements of fin-de-siècle naturalist fiction in a manner that enables them to create a new naturalism that they use to shed light upon the tendency of the sociocultural narratives that give meaning to the traditional conception of the Southern community to entrap characters within predetermined identities. Of particular interest are these texts’ revisions of the figures of the naturalist …

Writing The Nation: A Concise Introduction To American Literature 1865 To Present, Amy Berke, Robert Bleil, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis

Textbooks

Writing the Nation: A Concise Guide to American Literature 1865 to Present is a text that surveys key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature.

ENGL 202

Connecting Literature And History: Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby Museum Project, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Despite mixed reviews at the time of its 1925 publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has come to be one of the most widely taught American books and has become a popular candidate for the title of the “Great American Novel.” Uniquely intertwining social history, biography, and literature, the text challenges readers to understand the culture and history of the Jazz Age and to see its interrelationship with the lives and motivations of the characters, as well as with the author himself. This project encourages students to engage and work closely with one of the historical elements that influenced …

Hawthorne’S “The Minister’S Black Veil”: Group Activities And Interpretations, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Although the better-known The Scarlet Letter (1850) still draws more attention from many high school English teachers, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s darkly enigmatic short story “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) touches on similar themes and provides readers with diverse avenues for exploration, discussion, and analysis. Containing dramatic, psychological, and moral elements, in addition to its literary ones, it is a complex text that can confound teachers and students alike with its range of interpretations and ambiguity. This lesson allows students in small groups to choose and focus on one interpretive element. It also accommodates different learning styles, offering both creative and analytical …

Writing The Nation, Amy Berke, Robert R. Bleil, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis

OER Main

A concise introduction to American Literature from 1865 to present. The book is broken into chapters based on time period and writing style from Late Romanticism to recent post-modernism.

"Proof Of The Loop": Patterns Of Habitual Denial In Tim O'Brien's In The Lake Of The Woods And Don Delillo's Libra, Tim Engles

Tim Engles

No abstract provided.

White Male Nostalgia In Don Delillo's Underworld, Tim Engles

Tim Engles

No abstract provided.

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 …

"Proof Of The Loop": Patterns Of Habitual Denial In Tim O'Brien's In The Lake Of The Woods And Don Delillo's Libra, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

White Male Nostalgia In Don Delillo's Underworld, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank

Theses and Dissertations--English

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …

The American Dime Museum: Bodily Spectacle And Social Midways In Turn-Of-The-Century American Literature And Culture, James C. Fairfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

The freak played a significant role in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century entertainment, but its significance extended beyond such venues as sideshows and minstrel shows. This dissertation examines the freak as an avatar emblematic of several issues, such as class and race, traditionally focused on in studies of Turn-of-the Century American literature and culture.

Disability and freakishness are explored as central to late-nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Americans’ identity. Freakishness is applied to a series of ways in which Americans in this period constructed their identity, including race, gender, and socioeconomic class, showing the dual role that the freak played for many …

Fake Empire, Dennis Wilfredo Gonzalez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This a collection of short stories based in my experience as a Peruvian American Writer