Literature in English, North America Commons^™

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …

Disrupters:Three Women Of Color Tell Their Stories, Dulce María Gray, Denise A. Harrison, Yuko Kurahashi

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

This essay is an amplified version of the presentation we made at the 7th Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues. Our aim is to story back into the world our first experiences and motivations for investing in suffrage and democratic activism. We are three American professors of disciplines in the humanities, who for decades have taught and lived across the United States and have traveled the world. Yuko Kurahashi’s essay tells the story of how Raichō Hiratsuka and Fusae Ichikawa, Japanese activists in their suffrage and peace movements, helped shape her personal and professional life. Denise Harrison talks about the first wave …

Remapping A Feminist Classroom: Talking Circles And The Space For Agency, Amy Dunham Strand Ph.D.

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Hannah & Nana: A Personal Memoir On Appalachian Intergenerational Trauma, Womanhood, & Family, Hannah Dunn

Honors Projects

I was deeply affected by the death of my beloved nana in 2018. After her death, my family asked me to be the storyteller for us. Thus, for my Honors Project at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), I decided to write a personal memoir on my family. This memoir explores how we fit into notions of womanhood and family in Appalachia, as well as studying the effects of intergenerational trauma on us. Qualitative research, in the form of the autoethnography, serves as the methodology for this project. In writing a creative memoir, I have transformed my personal to the academic.

A Leap Into Communion: Kierkegaard And Spiritual Practices In _To The Wonder_, Madeleine Hall

Honors Theses

The study of metaethics contains the question of where value comes from. Different theories of goodness encourage tracing goodness back to God, saying that goodness is that which is like God (the resemblance thesis) or that which perfects nature (the perfection thesis). Kierkegaard participates in these questions of goodness, and in Fear and Trembling concludes that the moral absolute of the akedah reveals a good, Divine mystery. Fear and Trembling is a work of Christian existentialism that encourages an internal faith that embraces mystery rather than attempting to conquer it. Rather than trying to understand exactly who God is, Kierkegaard …

Eng 150 Us Literature And Thought I Oer Syllabus, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

The Christian Right In Translation: Christian Conservative Discourse In Contemporary American Literature, Elizabeth Richardson Duke

English Theses and Dissertations

Religion in contemporary American politics and religion in contemporary American Literature: are they independent phenomena? Literary scholars have largely assumed so. Scholars have attended to nontraditional, liberal religion in postwar American literature, while overlooking how this literature represents and critiques the rise of the Christian Right. Since white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians allied with the Republican party in the late 1970s, Christian conservatives have transformed American politics. As the GOP’s most influential interest group, the Christian Right has set the terms for many of the last four decades’ most contentious and consequential debates. Historians, political scientists, and contemporary American writers …

Reading The Archival Remains Of Arturo Islas's La Mollie And The King Of Tears, Allison Fagan

Department of English - Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers Arturo Islas’s posthumously published novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996), arguing that an examination of its “archival remains”—its drafted and rejected material found in Islas’s archive—offers compelling evidence of the text’s anxious resistances to bodily, narrative, and cultural annihilation. Drawing on textual scholarship that prioritizes notions of texts as “fluid” or “in process” as well as on theories of queer and asycnhronous temporalities, I argue for a reading of the novel as haunted by its erasures and absences, and for a reading practice that more purposefully imagines the role of the body—of the author, …

Midwestern Magazine Modernism: Recovering Samuel Pessin And The Milwaukee Arts Monthly/Prairie, John K. Young

Faculty Submissions

This article recovers the history of Milwaukee modernist Samuel Pessin and his short-lived magazine, Milwaukee Arts Monthly, retitled as Prairie upon a move to Chicago (1922–23). Pessin’s magazine is of contemporary interest for the wide range of figures published in its pages, associated with modernist movements in Milwaukee, Chicago, and across Europe. This history should contribute to the ongoing reorientation of modernist studies away from its conventional geographical and cultural centers. This article is also the first account of Pessin, who has remained a mysterious and marginal figure.

Murder She Sang: How Contemporary Country Murder Ballads Alleviate Blame, Alyssa Hubbard

Honors College Theses

Murder ballads, or narrative songs centered on a murder and/or its aftermath, were historically used as a tool to emphasize a criminal’s guilt, cruelty, and inhumanity. Ballads centered on women in particular underlined the idea that women are naturally inclined to sin and easily corrupted, and because they were often written by men in an imitation of the woman’s voice, any regret or repentance within them is falsified or exaggerated, intended to warn other women away from committing similar transgressions.

In contrast, contemporary murder ballads, such as those sung by country music artists like Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, and The …

Fear And Loathing In The Technological City, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

This presentation brings together three interpreters of the city—Jacques Ellul, Hunter S. Thompson, and John of the Apocalypse—to reflect on the future of our technological society. It contrasts rejections of the city, found in Ellul’s The Meaning of the City (1970) and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), with an affirmation of the technological city found in the Apocalypse of John.

Feminist Modernist Dance, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the first of two special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies dedicated to feminist modernist dance (the second will be Summer, 2022). We have wrestled in our joint editorial work here, as well as in our own work, over the disjunctions embodied in these three terms conjoined. Though feminist scholars have been doing important work in modernist studies for half a century, the term modernism remains mired in gatekeeping canon formations that center white male artists, primarily writers, with few exceptions. The continued need to specify “feminist modernism” signals an exasperating truism that modernism persists in its reliable male-orientation. …

Strained Differentiation: Negotiating Grief With Maternal Foundations In Laird Hunt’S Neverhome, Heidie L. Raine

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

The intertwinement of mother-daughter psyches throughout the early developmental process bonds maternal and filial parties up unto differentiation, at which point the child comes to understand her status as an individual and her mother’s status as a separate entity. However, when trauma is introduced midway through the differentiation process, this psychological phenomenon may be hindered, stunting the advanced personal development of the daughter. Abandoned by loss, she may subconsciously fall victim to repressive defenses, insufficient socialization, and destructive behaviors.

In his 2016 novel Neverhome, Laird Hunt explores these psychological factors through a traumatized and unreliable female protagonist situated in …

The Legacy Book In America, 1664–1792, Roxanne Harde, Lindsay Yakimyshyn

Zea E-Books Collection

Legacy books in colonial America were instruments for the transmission of cultural values between generations: the dying mother (usually) instructing and advising children on the path to salvation and heavenly reunions. They were a popular and influential form of women’s discourse that distilled the ideologies of the religious establishment into practical and emotional lessons for lay persons, especially the young.

This collection draws together legacy texts written by colonial American women and girls: five mother’s legacy books and two legacies by children, organized here chronologically. These legacies were writ­ten in anticipation of dying, making awareness of death central to the …

Phantasms Of Hope: The Utopian Function Of Fantasy Literature, Alexander C. Morgan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Fantasy literature has long been considered an inherently conservative genre. However, Ernst Bloch’s Marxist theory of a utopian anticipatory consciousness and his concept of nonsynchronism recognize a progressive, utopian function within the archetypes and allegories of fairy tales, a precursor to modern fantasy. Bloch argues that archetypes are not static entities and can be repurposed to critique the world contemporary to a text’s production. Even archetypes produced under a past mode of production, like those used in fantasy, can therefore be anticipatory and utopian. By extending Bloch’s utopian function to include fantasy and integrating his philosophy with the historical-materialist hermeneutic …

Warrioress In White: A Semiotic Analysis Of America's Joan Of Arc In The Women Of The Copper Country, Akasha Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

Mary Doria Russell’s The Women of the Copper Country is a fictionalized historical account of the 1913 mining strike in the Keweenaw Peninsula. Significantly in this strike, a great deal of leadership was focused in the Union’s Women’s Auxiliary. In particular, one woman formed the backbone of the local movement. Known by her community as Big Annie, Anna Klobuchar Clements was the heart of the 1913 strike. Memories of her bravery linger today in the form of recorded testimonies by elderly community members, immortalization in plaques and songs, and Russell’s popular novel. Today she is remembered not as herself, not …

Babylon Is Fallen, Is Fallen: Southern Morality In Go Set A Watchman, Anna G. Dowling

Senior Theses

A crucial theme throughout Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee is the struggle between individual morality and collective consciousness, as exemplified by black and white relations in the American South. In this thesis, I explore the biblical concept of a “watchman” as referenced in the novel’s title and what conclusions can be drawn from delving into the literary and biblical contexts of this allusion. I utilize this as a framework to explore how and why the characters of Watchman exist in such fragmented, defensive states as opposed to their Mockingbird counterparts, and what these differences imply regarding the importance …

Resonances: An Examination Of Republication Through Four Case Studies, F S. Nakhaie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Republication, with or without textual changes, keeps a work in circulation. This protects the work from destruction but also affects how we receive it, because publication is always a socializing act. Despite its consequences for works and their reception, republication has not yet been theorized in textual studies. My dissertation addresses this research gap by employing the term resonance to discuss the relationships—between versions, contexts, and ideas—that develop out of republication. I explore republication at its extremes with four case studies of works that underwent major changes in republication. The first chapter examines Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray …

Book Review: Understanding Alice Walker, Cindy E. Garcia-Rivas

South Carolina Libraries

Cindy Garcia-Rivas reviews Understanding Alice Walker, written by Thadious M. Davis.

Unthinkable Conditions: Affect And Environment In Romanticism And Speculative Fiction, Amelia Z. Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unthinkable Conditions bridges two literary periods and two theoretical modes in order to illustrate important parallels between historical periods and the writers who attempted to approach the changing environmental conditions of their respective eras. Each chapter names and theorizes a unique form of feeling which then serves as a framework for eco-affective analysis, drawing from existing studies in the environmental humanities and in studies of affect in order to construct a hybrid theoretical model which more fully accounts for the work of the writer treated in each chapter. The central claim of this dissertation is that vital affective innovations accompany …

Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages with literary trauma theory and rape studies by investigating how scholars through the 1990s theorized the relationship among trauma, narration, and silence, and how the #MeToo movement causes us to rethink these views. Attending to the specific silence generated in the wake of sexual violation reveals how power structures influence the act of telling, challenging the idea that trauma is untellable. I argue that literary trauma theory needs to push beyond its foundation in biomedical models of trauma—in which the (in)ability to recall or articulate traumatic events is rooted in neurology—to examine the ways traumatic narratives are …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

A Teacher's Guide In Creating Linguistic Diverse Classroom: Code-Meshing And Translingual Practice In First-Year Composition, Yvonne Liu

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis and portfolio are inspired by the recent code-meshing pedagogy movement to promote linguistic justice in the composition classroom along with the author’s personal journey in English learning. The traditional, monolingual practice in the composition classroom often isolates international students who have multilingual abilities above the rest of the students. The idea that there is only one correct use of English—standard English—assumes that one type of English is better than others. However, most native speakers cannot explain the rules and mechanism of standard English, which leaves international students often feeling frustrated and lowers their confidence in English writing and …

Almost Speechless: Representations Of Womanhood And Female Voices In Turn­-Of-­The-Century American Novels, Carmen Sylvia Smith

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this dissertation, I close read four turn-­of-­the-­century American novels by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and Willa Cather to analyze how the voices and silences of fictional women characters work to disrupt cultural ideals about womanhood. Examining which aspects of the characters’ identities are expressed in direct dialogue and which traits are conveyed to the reader through narrative devices reveals how cultural ideals about womanhood restrict women’s self-­expressive autonomy and work to exclude female voices from the public sphere.

Chapter One examines Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) and how erotic rivals Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom compete to …

Tracey Budworth Master's Portfolio, Tracey Budworth

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains examples of my work in association with familiarizing myself with the subaltern and working to incorporate the concept of the "other" into my teaching.

Te Bombardeo, Darilys Matos-Acevedo

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

The Power Of An Unreliable Narrator And The Distortion Of Fear In Nella Larsen’S Passing, Sonia Comstock

Anthós

This article studies Nella Larsen’s Passing through the unreliable narration of the novel’s key character, Irene. It goes on to explore her relationships and her judgements, which expose the twisted nature of her psychology and demonstrate that Irene is driven by fear and resentment. Irene hates the act of wanting and constantly crushes her husband’s aspirations, yet deeply desires the other focal character of the novel, Clare. She lies to herself about her tense, racially fraught relationship with her husband, as well as her repressed homosexual attraction towards Clare. These lies, combined with her deep-seated fear and hatred of desire …

“The Seal Set On Our Nationhood”: Canadian Literary Responses To The South African War (1899-1902), Alicia C. Robinet

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation seeks to modify the widely held view that the Great War (1914-18) was the defining military event in Canadian identity by turning to Canadian literary responses to the nation’s participation in early post-Confederation overseas combats: Garibaldi’s expedition against Rome, to which a regiment of French-Canadian Papal Zouaves went in support of Pope Pius IX (1868-70); the Nile Expedition (1884-85); and the Boer or South African War (1899-1902). In exploring these literary responses, the dissertation demonstrates that the construction of a national identity was articulated through overseas military engagement long before Canada’s collective reflections on Vimy, Passchendaele, and the …

English 162w: Writing About Literature And Place, Farrah J. Goff

Open Educational Resources

Haunted spaces are occupied spaces, inhabited by some force or trace of the past. In this course we will explore the various ways in which authors have employed hauntings to understand our relation to place and to the past, to issues of time, memory, knowledge, culture, history, and mortality. How do ghosts function both as objects to fear and as historical subjects with ethical and political potential? Why does literature insist on keeping the dead (and the Gothic) alive? In focusing our course on haunted spaces we will consider the text itself as a haunted site, asking questions about how …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …