English Language and Literature Commons^™

Nelle 6 (Complete Issue), Nelle Staff

Nelle

No abstract provided.

On The 50th Day Of War, My Grandmother Reminds Me, Nicole Yurcaba

Nelle

p. 19

My Sister And I Dug A Hole, Dorsey Craft

Nelle

pp. 26-27

Photo Of Mother With Walking Stick, Emma Thomas Jones

Nelle

pp. 45-46

Beans, Whitney Collins

Nelle

pp. 57-67

“I'M Kind Of A Big Deal In This Industry:” How Killing Eve’S Villanelle Subverts The Femme Fatale Archetype, Molly Kent

Honors Theses and Capstones

From the instant Catherine Tramell stepped on screen with shaven, glossy legs and a perfectly curled, bouncy, blonde bob, Basic Instinct (1992) became a cult classic, centered around the dangerous and seductive femme fatale who makes the movie tick. Nearly 25 years later, a new monstress steps on screen as a suited, quirky, slicked-back assassin with a penchant for curly-haired women and a destiny to reform the femme fatale trope: Villanelle of Killing Eve.

The co-lead and resident femme fatale of Killing Eve, Villanelle, subverts the traditional role of the femme fatale in a decentering of the patriarchy …

Something Soft And Sharp, Anju Sharma

Nelle

pp. 139-149

On Their Wings, Nicole Yurcaba

Nelle

p. 17

On My 35th Birthday During The Year Russia Invades Ukraine, Nicole Yurcaba

Nelle

p. 18

Week 35: Honeydew, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Nelle

pp. 28-29

Visualizing The Permanent Lie: An Examination Of Dystopian Literature Using Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’S Model, Anthony Mitchell

Master’s Theses

This thesis argues for the formation of an evolving canon of literature critical to continued resistance to totalitarianism, focusing primarily on the works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Ji Xianlin. In crafting the theoretical basis of my study, I rely primarily on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s concept of the “permanent lie” and its related concepts, “survive at any price” and “only material results matter” as formulated in his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago. In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the “permanent lie” is rooted in the creation of a virtual reality among individuals trapped in a totalitarian society, in which they must hold …

Revisiting History: Anti-Racialist Afrofuturism In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Brad C. Kelly

MSU Graduate Theses

Popular understanding of history is dominated by racial binaries that suggest the Black past and the white past are wholly antithetical to one another. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uncovers interconnections between Black and white Americans that complicate this understanding by having her characters travel to the antebellum period. By uncovering these interconnections, Butler is able to envision a future in which Black and white Americans are reunited through the recognition of their shared, yet vastly differing, sufferings under white supremacy. I have termed this idea anti-racialist Afrofuturism because Butler seeks to dismantle the social construct of race through her illumination …

Multilingual Experimental Literature And Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Erín Moure And Kathy Acker, Melissa Tanti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The impulse toward multilingual writing has arisen as a prominent trend in contemporary women’s writing. Criticism and notions of the literary have to respond to, among other things, the fact that "we live in a world where a significant portion of the population is at least partially bi or multilingual" (Camboni 34). To be responsive to the "increasing multilingualism of writers necessitates new strategies for reading the polyvocality of texts" (Eagleton and Friedman 3). This paper considers the ways multilingual writing creates, “small scale modes of listening” (Maguire xix) that tune the reader to languages, identities, and cultures under erasure. …

Teaching Dystopia In Dystopian Realities: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy And The Dystopian Novel After Covid-19, Emily Rose Lavrador

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project advocates for a trauma-informed approach when teaching dystopian literature, particularly those with plague or pandemic plots. To have a truly student-centered approach in the classroom, trauma-informed pedagogy is necessary for students not only to learn comfortably, but to actively be creative or retain information.

Dystopian literature is assigned and consumed at pervasive rates; this popularity calls for additional attention to its teaching. The survey data presented in this project shows that 68 of 100 students had been assigned one or more dystopian texts through school years 2020 onwards, and 72 additionally were seeking out the dystopian genre on …

"Concealing The Excess Of Her Pleasure": A Queer Reading Of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Josie Anne Blubaugh

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This queer reading of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey uses critical frameworks from queer theory, feminist theory, trans theory, and Black Romanticism to analyze female-female relationships between the characters in the novel as a product of the social norms, conventions, and discourses of Romantic-era Britain. By using literary analysis and close reading, I study the many ways in which Northanger Abbey can be read queerly, specifically where gender and sexuality intersect with race and ethnicity.

Though queer readings of this novel have been done in the past, my own analysis focuses on female-female relationships and takes race into consideration when I …

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores how the three umbrella models of disability (medical, functional, and social) are shown in several disabled characters from three novels published after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum. Through the utilization of literary analysis from a cultural studies perspective, this project shows that the models of disability, despite the various flaws in their respective designs, prove to be useful lenses to see disability through, both in these novels and in real life, …

Fascism In Sci-Fi: "Mobilizing Passions" In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Alton C. Ayers

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis responds to criticism of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) as a “fascist” novel by further investigating the claim through a close reading of the novel that applies political theory scholarship on fascism. Chapters I and II introduce the novel along with its general reception and controversy. These chapters consider the accusations of “fascism” given to the novel while at the same time understanding that a clear, exact definition of “fascism” has long been grappled with by scholars since the rise of the regimes in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Chapters III and IV apply political theory to …

Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault

MSU Graduate Theses

This creative thesis includes thirteen flash nonfiction pieces and one fiction short story exploring emotions and experiences that have changed who I am today. These writings are personal experiences or are inspired by personal experience. These creative works interrogate deeply transformative events and situations, such as familial relationships, trauma, poverty, living in the Midwest, patriarchy, and the beauty in existing. In the thesis’s critical introduction, I examine how my flash nonfiction pieces employ Milan Kundera’s theory of the appeal of play and Charles Baxter’s concept defamiliarization. I analyze how the succinct form of the flash essay allows my nonfiction writing …

Introduction: Critical Animal Studies In An Age Of Extinction, Eva Kasprzycka, Chloë Taylor, Kelly Struthers Montford

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2023 12(2): Introduction: Critical Animal Studies in an Age of Extinction

It’S About Us: Extinction, Contradiction, And The Mourning Of Modernity In David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, Alex Ventimilla

Animal Studies Journal

Despite their worldwide viewership, popular eco-documentary treatments of biodiversity loss and the ecological grief they evoke have received scarce attention from critics. Addressing this gap in scholarship, this article posits that understanding the grief and mourning affected by these cultural texts requires attention to the numerous contradictions inherent to the form. More concretely, this paper argues that a thorough exploration of the contradictory nature of the eco-documentary, as a media genre that is imbricated in the modernity whose impact on the natural world it critiques, renders the genre into a critical junction at which to interrogate the cultural meanings of …

N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, And The American Imagination: Medieval Myth In 19th- And 20th- Century Children’S Literature, Alyssa Kowalick

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This thesis attempts to elucidate how the illustrated images and text of the medieval myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood were translated from an English national epic to an American classic and used, I argue, to construct a new American identity. My analysis looks at both the written word and illustrated images in Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as The Boy’s King Arthur written by Sidney Lanier and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, and Robin Hood written by Paul Creswick and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. …

Mrs. Blackbird And The Visiting Chair, Taylor Barnhart

MSU Graduate Theses

The following thesis is a middle grade novel exploring the events of one summer in the lives of two siblings, Susannah and Sawyer. The siblings are grieving the recent death of their mother and, at the same time, attempting to navigate the emotional withdrawal of their father. During the summer, the siblings get to know their eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Blackbird, who communicates with the spirit of her dead husband through an old armchair which is rumored to have magical powers. The novel deals primarily with the theme of grief and its pervasive nature in people’s lives. The story looks at …

Blood And Oil: How Vampiric Literature Bolsters Big Oil’S Power, Sarah Marie Demond

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the relationship between blood and oil, that is, the multitude of ways in which the petromodernity industries harvests and threatens vitality. The introduction of this thesis is concerned tracking how petromodernity is a byproduct, offspring, or extension of colonialism. In this way, petromodernity can be thought about as “petro-colonialism.” Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” informs the argument that the way thay petro-colonialism came to be and also maintains itself is by utilizing the “killer story.” This thesis also employs autorheoretical techniques informed by Lauren Fournier to show how petro-colonialism or “oiliness” sticks to its …

Old Invisible Presence: Nonhuman Intelligence And Artificial Nature In A Coast Of Trees By A. R. Ammons And S*Perm**K*T By Harryette Mullen, Miles Jochem

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Monstrous Oil: Theorizing Petromodernity's Monsters, Madalynn Lee Madigar

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Petroleum, a primary global energy resource, serves as a foundation of our contemporary society. However, the pervasive influence of oil as substance, commodity, and industry in our petromodern lives often goes unrecognized. In the present moment of biogeocultural crisis surrounding fossil fuels, recognizing and understanding our multifaceted engagements with petroleum is critical. This thesis contributes to the growing field of Petrocultural Studies by considering the conceptualization of petroleum through the associated tropes and figure of the monster. Through the petromonstrous, a term that encapsulates the massive scale, haunting effects, and human-other entanglements of petroleum, cultural attitudes and anxieties about oil …