English Language and Literature Commons^™

Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski

Doctoral Dissertations

“Moral Margins: Slavery and Capitalism in American Northern Literature, 1837-1900,” focuses on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and literature, building on recent historical scholarship on the myriad ways slavery impacted the growth of American capitalism. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than in the nineteenth century, when slavery experienced its highest levels of economic and political influence. Scholars of capitalism and American slavery have tended to focus on the South, the obvious locus of slavery, but little attention is paid to the North, where this relationship is more veiled. I argue that Northern literature shows the ethical complexities of slavery-based …

Revisiting Digital Sampling Rhetorics With An Ethic Of Care, Jared Sterling Colton

English Faculty Publications

Rhetoric and composition studies have conceptualized and defined digital sampling as a method of composition in many ways and for various pedagogical purposes: from a means of free-play invention that is critical of more formalistic writing practices to a semiotic strategy rooted in African American rhetorical traditions designed to effect political change. The latter view is critical of the former in that the former does not account for student digital sampling projects that unquestioningly appropriate from other people and communities. This is a real pedagogical problem, but students can create unethical and hurtful digital sampling projects, no matter the assignment …

Shelley's Delusive Flames: Self And Poetry In The Major Works, Brent Steven Robida

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores Percy Shelley’s ethical commitments in several of his major works. Its primary claim is that Shelley’s poetry is involved in the regulation and education of desire. As a fundamentally antinomian poet, Shelley grapples time and again with how moral progress will be guided absent the regulatory influences of law and religion. My dissertation offers an answer to this central impasse affecting scholarship on the ethical world Shelley imagines and attempts to realize through poetry. It argues for a dialectical movement observable in Shelley’s work of the programmatic breakdown, rather than fulfillment, of hope. This study reconsiders the …

The Learning Analytics Readiness Instrument, Meghan Oster, Steven Lonn, Matthew D. Pistilli, Michael G. Brown

Matthew Pistilli

Life At The Meridian: The Subjectivity Of Ethics In The Works Of Albert Camus And Friedrich Nietzsche, Clancy E. Robledo

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

This paper endeavors to respond to the questions: can ethics can be unbound from its traditional rootedness in religious systems? If so, what contributions did Nietzsche make to liberate value from the shackles of Western morality? To what degree is Camus one of the “new philosophers” Nietzsche calls for in On the Genealogy of Morals?

In an attempt to demonstrate that ethics can and do exist vividly in the realm of the non-religious, this paper will begin by illustrating the metaphysical door Nietzsche opens through his use of aphorisms in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his investigation of the history …

Morality And Pleasure In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Sarah Bonney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In “Morality and Pleasure in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,” I examine how representations of pleasure in O’Brien’s novel indicate how the soldiers establish a new code of morality during their military service in Vietnam. Although civilians live with a binary understanding of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, the soldiers must commit immoral acts in order to serve honorably, thereby conflicting with this previous understanding. Western ideology asserts that pleasure accompanies moral behavior; because the soldiers perform violent acts, they must ascertain a new understanding of morality in order to continue to feel pleasure throughout and in spite of …

Proto-Postmodernism: Constructing Postmodern Ethics Through Cold War Literature And Theory, Rock Lamanna

Departmental Honors Projects

While postmodern theory and literature is typically viewed as either “anti-humanist” or a rejection of Humanism, this essay reconsiders these assumptions by exploring ethical questions in early postmodern novels and theory, referred to as “proto-postmodernism.” For proto-postmodernists such as Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut, Humanism—the ethical framework that asserts a centered “self” and a collective “metanarrative” of human progress—causes and legitimates violence, yet in their theories and literature, they promote the humanist value of dignity in their critiques of modern ethics and politics. To examine this hybrid stance toward Humanism, the first section situates …