Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.

'Since No Expressions Do': Queer Tools For Studying Literature, Filipa G. Calado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how digital methods and tools for studying text engage with queer literature. I critique digital methods and tools by posing computation, where textual data is cleaned and structured for electronic processing, against the complexity of queer subjecthood and affects expressed in textual style, form, and voice. While tools like quantitative text analysis, for example, transform, and necessarily reduce, qualitative elements of gender and sexuality into numerical data such as word frequencies or concordances, I argue that this reduction opens up possibilities for interpreting the formal qualities of queer literature. Just as digital formats transform and manipulate text …

“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati

Theses and Dissertations

Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary …

Countering Dominant Narratives In Community: The Many Voices In Spoken Word Poetry, Natalie Raquel Acuña

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In this project I research the counternarratives within spoken word poetry by authors of color (i.e., Rafeef Ziadah, José Olivarez, and Denise Frohman) and how they resist the dominant narratives that are broadcast towards a larger audience. I analyze categories of counterstory through the following paired themes: immigration/citizenship, and joy/trauma. I delve into the heavy importance of community within my project in the realm of spoken word poetry. A lot of poetry is going against dominant narratives, community within this discourse gives a sense of belonging and relatability to the experience of the spoken word performers.

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

Disrupted Ambitions And Unmasked Identities: An Analysis Of Doubleness In Sylvia Plath’S The Bell Jar And Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man In Cold War America, Laura Anderson

English Language and Literature ETDs

This thesis conducts a literary analysis on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) with a primary investigation on the protagonists and their convergence of identity in Cold War America. One of the critical discourses evaluated throughout the project’s literary analysis includes the protagonists’ complications of doubleness. This essay argues that since these two texts sit between W.E.B DuBois’s “Double Consciousness” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1988 theory on intersectionality, these protagonists are forced to contend with an identity crossroads. Secondary to the context of this analysis is the use of “post-war” and “Cold War,”; neither are …

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines …

Engl 110: College Writing (Comedy, Satire, & Persuasion), Scott R. Kapuscinski

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus provides a themed approach to Freshman composition. Students are tasked with composing three essays in three distinct styles. Student engagement is high through the use of student-sourced primary sources (funny videos from YouTube, etc.) and the emphasis on thesis building and critical thinking.

Section 1: Comedy & the thesis-based essay

Section 2: Satire & writing to persuade

Section 3: Satire in Art & independent research

“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, David Mazella, Claude Willan, David Bishop, Elizabeth Stravoski, Walter Barta, Max James

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of women’s participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory became the …

Annual Faculty Research Symposium 2022, Oakwood University

Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Using Big Data To Facilitate A Lyrical Analysis Of Poetry And Rap, Remington Yve Giller

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

Poetry and rap are dissected using text mining techniques in order to determine overall trends in the words used by both. With this data, the way in which ideas and concepts are expressed can be compared and contrasted as a way of showing the legitimacy of rap as a form of literary expression. Other topics within the paper are: a background of the history of rap and the digital humanities, and an example of a close reading featuring a medieval poem and a rap by Eminem. This demonstrates how even in a traditional way of handling texts, both poetry and …

Emily Dickinson: 19th Century Poet In A 21st Century World, Stephanie Merrigan

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone will discuss what channels mediate public access to literary content in the case of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. The discussion continues with how this was a problem for Dickinson while she was alive due to her reclusiveness and unorthodox punctuation. The capstone then looks at the other aspects of this in the roles that editors, the merchandise now made with lines from Dickinson’s work, and digital technologies play in that circulation, but also how they have played a role in making Dickinson a pop culture icon in the 21^st century.

Hot Dog Vs. Christian Fundamentalism In 1920s America, Nicole Orchosky

Student Projects from the Archives

Hot Dog: the Regular Fellow’s Monthly was a satirical magazine published by the Merit Publishing Company in Cleveland, Ohio throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Editor Jack Dinsmore included crudely humorous short stories and poems, images of scantily clad women, and editorials and opinion pieces offering his own commentary on current events. In the case of the December 1921 issue, Dinsmore offers scathing criticism of religious Prohibition supporters, namely Billy Sunday and Reverend John Roach Straton. This paper examines how an opinionated independent publication representative of its anti-Prohibition readership reacted to the Temperance Movement and subsequent outspoken Fundamentalist Christian figureheads.

The Library Of Appalachian Preaching: A Digital-Humanities Project At Marshall University, Robert H. Ellison, Larry Sheret

English Faculty Research

This article provides an overview of the sermons in the Special Collections Department at Marshall and a description of the Library of Appalachian Preaching, a project that will make these materials universally discoverable and accessible online. In addition to the sermons themselves, the Library will include biographical sketches of each preacher featured in the project and a robust User Guide, a Google sheet which users can search, sort, and download to help make their research as efficient and productive as possible

Aspects Of Character: Quantitative Evidence And Fictional People, Jonathan Cheng

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Aspects of Character” uses quantitative evidence to trace new timelines in the literary history of characterization. The guiding premise of this work is that digital libraries and mathematical perspectives can shed new light on the practices used to configure fictional people. Using texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this dissertation analyzes how different aspects of characters have transformed throughout history, coordinating quantitative experiments with the critical perspectives of literary scholars. This project begins by analyzing the characterization used in works of fiction that were reviewed by prestigious publications. This first experiment pushes back on a historical truism about “well-crafted” …

Front Matter, Toyon Literary Magazine

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

Blend It Like Beckett: Samuel Beckett And Experimental Contemporary Creative Writing, Sam Nicole Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Samuel Beckett penned novels, short stories, poetry, stage plays, radio plays, and scripts—and he did each in a way that blended genre, challenged the norms of creative writing, and surprised audiences around the globe. His experimental approach to creative writing included the use of absurdism, genre-hybridization, and ergodicism, which led to Beckett fundamentally changing the approach to creative writing. His aesthetics have trickled down through the years and can be seen in contemporary works, including Aimee Bender’s short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves[1]. By examining these works …

Taking Back Control: Memes, Trump, 4chan, Gamergate, And The Rise Of The Alt-Right, Cam Fediuk

Western Research Forum

Background

My thesis’s impetus is the rise of reactionary discourse on the internet, collectively known as the alt-right. As with the traditional right, the alt-right is anti-feminist, anti-immigration, and anti-political-correctness, but unlike its predecessor, is also anti-establishment, anti-religion, pro-Donald Trump, and thoroughly engaged with and immersed in the meme-based political discourse of digital media.

Hypothesis

I argue against the cyber-utopianism proposed by Douglass Rushkoff and other early internet theorists; I argue that, while the internet has made memes central to political discourse, the rise of laissez-faire social media platforms has not made the digital generation more enlightened, or tolerant, …

Interim Performance Report, Lg‐71‐16‐0152‐16, Extending Intelligent Computational Image Analysis For Archival Discovery, March 2019, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, John O'Brien

CDRH Grant Reports

The primary goal of "Extending Intelligent Computational Image Analysis for Archival Discovery" is to investigate the use of image analysis as a methodology for content identification, description, and information retrieval in digital libraries and other digitized collections. Building on work started under a National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, our IMLS project seeks to 1) analyze and verify our previously developed image analysis approach and extend it so that it is newspaper agnostic, type agnostic, and language agnostic; 2) scale and revise the intelligent image analysis approach and determine the ideal balance between precision and …

“My Books Will Be Read By Millions Of People!”: The Laguardia Community College Octavia E. Butler Project On Wikipedia.”, Ximena Gallardo C., Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

[This book chapter (“My Books Will Be Read By Millions of People!”: The LaGuardia Community College Octavia E. Butler Wikipedia Project.”) originally appeared in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia Butler, edited by Tarshia Stanley, published by the Modern Language Association of America." Pages 45-51. ISBN: 9781603294157]

In this essay, we examine the innovative community college classroom project that resulted in the first installment of Wikipedia Project Octavia E. Butler: the crafting of thorough, rigorously researched, well-written Wikipedia entries for Butler’s works by teams of undergraduate students.

The first part of the essay focuses on our design of a …

Afterlives Of Indigenous Archives, Ivy Schweitzer, Gordon Henry Jr

Dartmouth Scholarship

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of …

Adoption Of Open Educational Resources In California Colleges And Universities, Ruth Guthrie, Katherine Harris, Peter Krapp

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

The California Open Educational Resources Council (CAOERC) was formed in 2014 to find solutions to reduce the cost of college textbooks without impacting quality. Comprised of faculty from California's three public higher education systems, the CAOERC conducted a field study of 16 faculty using OER materials to discover practical knowledge about the challenges of adopting OER textbooks. The quality of the OER textbooks received positive reviews. The faculty also reported being more engaged with their teaching. The faculty felt that availability of OER support materials was a challenge to implementing OER. The following article presents the results of the CAOERC's …

Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed …

Modern American Cover Art: The Great Gatsby Through Time, Jessica Harrell

Senior Theses

Book jackets and cover art are, more than anything, an advertising tool used to attract consumers, promote book sales, and establish company identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a staple in the canon of American literature whose cover art has drastically transformed in the ninety years since its original publication. This thesis traces these changes over time, focusing specifically on publishing history, art history, American culture, and thematic interpretations. In doing so, I found that the most substantial influences on these covers were publishing house identity, design trends, and available artistic techniques. Ultimately, The Great Gatsby’s cover …

Representing Wilderness In The Shaping Of America's National Parks: Aesthetics, Boundaries, And Cultures In The Works Of James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, And Their Artistic Contemporaries, Alana Jajko

Master’s Theses

This project studies the works of James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, and their artistic contemporaries in relation to the shaping of America’s national parks and what it means for the parks and their attending wilderness to be symbolic of the nation. It seeks to reveal the national parks as artistic representations of a constructed wilderness, while also emphasizing the physical experience of the natural world as a means of supplementing our subjective views. Through the lenses of aesthetics, boundaries, and cultures, I narrow my study to focus on three distinct perspectives by which we can understand the national parks and …

Living Lore: B. A. Botkin, Folklore, And The State, Kirby Little

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital project explores government surveillance and political action through folklore. The project focuses on the unpublished essay of folklorist Benjamin Botkin titled “Progress: Negroes and Everybody, From Folk Tale to Science Fiction.” Botkin was a prominent academic in his field, and created the theoretical approach to folklore he termed “applied folklore.” Botkin’s approach to folklore gained considerable attention, both positive and negative, due to his unique emphasis on the present time and the ever-changing nature of folklore, and his politicization of folklore as a method for uniting working class citizens. For decades, Botkin was under clandestine surveillance by the …

Celestial Timepiece: Randy Souther Interviewed By Caroline Marquette And Tanya Tromble-Giraud, Randy Souther

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

An interview with the creator of the website Celestial Timepiece discussing Joyce Carol Oates's literary career and the web project documenting that career.

The interview was the basis for a chapter in the Joyce Carol Oates volume of the Cahiers de L’Herne—a French monographic series dedicated to the critical appraisal of world-renowned authors, and providing texts, letters, testimonies, and photographs as well as scholarly work by specialists in the subject. The aim of the series is to offer in-depth reference books on major authors and thus to contribute to a better understanding of the authors and their work in …

White Paper, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), October 2016, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

With its Office of Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery (Aida) team set out to further develop image analysis as a methodology for the identification and retrieval of items of relevance within digitized collections of historic materials.1 Specifically, we sought to identify poetic content within historic newspapers, using Chronicling America's newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) as our test case. The project activities we undertook—both those completed and those in process—support this goal and align well with the activities proposed in our original funding application and as approved by NEH. To achieve our goal of creating an image processing-based system …

Final Report, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), October 2016, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

With its Office of Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery (Aida) team set out to further develop image analysis as a methodology for the identification and retrieval of items of relevance within digitized collections of historic materials. Specifically, we sought to identify poetic content within historic newspapers, using Chronicling America's newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) as our test case. The project activities we undertook—both those completed and those in process—support this goal and align well with the activities proposed in our original funding application and as approved by NEH. To achieve our goal of creating an image processing-based system …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …