Literature in English, North America Commons^™

To Reach The Unreachable Stars: Reexamining The Shared Arthurian Vision Of C. S. Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy And Raymond Chandler's Marlowe Novels, Hollis Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although Raymond Chandler and C. S. Lewis seem to be a rather strange pairing, the ways in which they both borrow from Arthurian literature and use the myth to speak to their cultural moment are strikingly similar. Following T. S. Eliot’s use of the Grail quest in The Waste Land (which set a standard for the use of such material in Modern literature), these authors use Arthurian elements as a means of exposing hidden connections between the fragments of the literary past and the present within Chandler’s Marlowe novels and Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Both men present Western identity as …

No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings On The Jetsons, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015).

Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past …

The Case Of Limbo: The Search For Identity In Sylvia Plath’S Short Fiction And The Bell Jar, Kristin Lyons

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Though Sylvia Plath’s poems and novel undergo frequent scholarly research, her short fiction is often overlooked. Plath’s journals influenced her short fiction writing, and her stories reflected Plath’s lived experiences. Plath’s short fiction, like her other works, explore themes of identity and detachment. Each of her protagonists exist in a personal limbo, and they strive to find their identities and to fit the roles in which they occupy. This thesis focuses on “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” stories from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and additional research from scholarly journals and biographies, with comparisons to identity struggles …

Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

In her classic 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry explores the impacts of generations of violence, exploitation, and discrimination on an African American family in Chicago’s Southside. Throughout the play, a family house plant comes to symbolize the matriarch's hopes for her children, and her ability to nourish the plant reflects on her ability to fulfil her own modest dreams and provide for the dreams of her progeny. Similarly, we see plants fulfilling the same role in another tale of American racial injustice, namely Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, an illustrated personal account of the artist’s experience …

Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, And Maternal Power In The Novels Of Toni Morrison, Jonathan Garren

South Carolina Libraries

Jonathan Garren reviews Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison by Geneva Cobb Moore.

Choke, Brooksie Harrington

English Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Spiritual Activism And Political Solidarity In So Far From God And Mother Tongue: Two Views By Two Authors, Jean Paul Russo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM AND POLITICAL SOLIDARITY IN SO FAR FROM GOD AND MOTHER TONGUE: TWO VIEWS BY TWO AUTHORS

by

Jean Paul Russo

Florida International University, 2020

Miami, Florida

Professor Anne Castro, Major Professor

This thesis focuses on the intersection between spirituality and political action in the works of two Latinx authors, Demetria Martinez and Ana Castillo. Building on Gloria Anzaldua’s theories of trauma, narrative, and what she terms ‘conocimiento,’ I contend that the novels So Far From God, and Mother Tongue, present an alternative approach to political action that is derived from a common experience of suffering and trauma as …

Walt Hunter. Forms Of A World: Contemporary Poetry And The Making Of Globalization. Fordham Up, 2019., Jeremy Glazier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Walt Hunter Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization. Fordham UP, 2019. 190 pp.

A Sailor's Intimacy: Homosocial Labor In Nineteenth-Century Oceanic Narratives By Dana And Melville, Adrian R. Salgado

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the male sailor community in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and how they are portrayed in terms of homosociality and intimacy. The presence of a homosocial community on board a sailing vessel provided a means of forming a group of men that cultivated relationships and communications through the production of labor with one another. Both Melville and Dana engaged readers in the workings of a sailor’s life and how those interactions on board a ship with fellow sailors formed a premise for the evaluation of maritime labor in nineteenth-century oceanic …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Crafting Girlhoods, Elissa E. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crafting Girlhoods emphasizes nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American girls' agency and creativity within the prescribed limits of educational crafts—including sewing and periodical-making. My first section shows how girls use psychological means to resist the cultural and gendered imperatives of sewing and tidiness, while my second section shows how girls resisted the censorship and harassment that the newspaper and periodical forms allowed by creating intimate communities in the pages of their periodicals that could help them negotiate these difficulties. In both cases, I will show how the craft forms themselves were their own antidote to the constricting force …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Going Slumming In Mexico: Rereading Primitivism In Katherine Anne Porter’S Flowering Judas And Other Stories, Annika M. Schadewaldt

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in-Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in Mexico crucially shaped her artistic vision, there is less agreement on the specificities of her image of …

The Rise Of Totalitarianism, Colonial Mimicry, And Gender And Sexuality In The Twentieth Century English Literature, Shahin Hossain

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Shahin Hossain provides an alternative reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable.

Reactions To Gulf War I And Gulf War Ii In American And Iraqi Cinema And Theatre: The Quest For A Global Utopia, Tajaddin Salahaddin Noori

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many American and Iraqi cultural reactions to Gulf War I and Gulf War II, including the texts selected for this story, expressed the dystopian consequences of these wars. However, this study focuses on exploring the utopian dimensions of the selected texts and investigates how these texts attempt to reconcile both sides of the conflict and produce visions toward a global utopia. Significantly, this study represents the visions toward a global utopia as a series of visions toward oneness. That is, oneness of human beings over otherness, oneness of different nation states under one global community, and oneness of cultural productions’ …

Colonialism And Globalism In Two Contemporary Southern Appalachian Novels - Serena (2008) By Ron Rash, And Flight Behavior (2012) By Barbara Kingsolver, Jasmyn Herrell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this essay, I investigate how the historic and current economic structures operating in Appalachia from the 1920s to the 2010s are represented in two contemporary Southern Appalachian novels – Serena (2008) by Ron Rash and Flight Behavior (2012) by Barbara Kingsolver. Through the lens of postcolonial theory, I show how Serena represents Appalachia as functioning under the colonial model outlined by Robert Blauner and Helen Mathews Lewis in 1978. Then, still under the theory of postcolonialism, I explore how Kingsolver’s work depicts regional identity in response to a post-colonial environment and the ever-expanding global economy.

The Enduring Hold Of The Bible On Modern Literature: Exploring The Fall Narrative As A Conceptual Metaphor For American Literature In John Steinbeck’S East Of Eden, Lauren Stotsky

Undergraduate Honors Theses

There is no greater work of literature, perhaps, than the Bible. The Bible has shaped and influenced more literature, art, and culture than any other work in our time. The effects of the Bible’s words are still woven into modern literature today, illustrating that the Bible’s themes, allegories, parables, fables, metaphors, and characters are things that we humans are unable to depart far from even many decades later. One of the very first stories in the Bible, found at the beginning in Genesis, tells of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve’s depiction as the first kind of our species and …

Ai And The Other, Rosetta Dudley

Student Writing

Literary analysis in MLA format of 3 poems: "Conversation," "Cuba, 1962," and "Disregard" by Ai Ogawa which each address Othered speakers and characters. Links made to Emily Dickinson's writing and being Othered as a woman and non believer in a Puritan society. Overall theme: transcendence of circumstances as Other with the use of apostrophe and conceit.

The Figure Of The Animal In Modern And Contemporary Poetry By Michael Malay, Brian Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Michael Malay's The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

The Others (2001) By Alejandro Amenábar In The Light Of Valentinian Thought, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article offers a Valentinian interpretation of the Hollywood film The Others (2001). A particular attention is paid to the ways in which cinematic motifs and narrative elements of the film draw on myths, ideas and symbolic imagery present in Valentinian works, especially in the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3) and the Gospel of Philip (NHC II, 3). In the course of the heuristic analysis, the paper argues that although the film employs Valentinian ideas, it depicts different understanding of the world. This issue is addressed in the last part of the article by situating the film within broader …

Leading The Soul: Use Of Rhetoric In Horace’S Odes, Kelly Freestone

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Portraiture And The Convergence Of Social Classes In Bleak House, Heather Twele

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Losing The West: A Critical Analysis Of Crane’S “The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky", Kaylee Weatherspoon

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Roald Dahl And The Construction Of Childhood: Writing The Child As Other, Madeline Spivey

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

“If I Cannot Inspire Love, I Will Cause Fear”: Reading The Creature’S Development Through Godwin’S Educational Theory In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Mikaela Huang

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Ship Of Fools: Hieronymus Bosch In Response To Sebastian Brant, Ella Parker

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.