American Literature Commons^™

Introduction To Volume Eleven: Reading, Writing, And Teaching In The Whirlwind, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Cover Of Volume 11, Emily Chan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Recasting the Salem witchcraft trials in light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on historiography, this paper revisits the question of history by examining ways in which Tituba is dis/con-figured as the subject of American history in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Both stories of persecution revolve around the figure of Tituba, a slave from the Caribbean to whom the beginning of the witch trials is attributed, as the nodal point of different modes of representing the Salem history. The telos in Miller’s drama coincides with the subject-formation of Proctor as the legitimate …

Incorporating One’S Own Literary Criticism Into The Curriculum: The Teachable Essay Via John Updike’S Short Stories, Sue Norton

Books/Book Chapters

University students are approaching literary study at a time when social justice occupies centrality in public discourse, a time when racism, sexism, Eurocentrism, and Americentrism are commanding unprecedented levels of interest and analysis both inside the academy and out of it. If students in the literature classroom are encouraged to postpone ideologically driven readings, just initially, they will be better able to observe how fine literature achieves its artistry. They may then become more ardent, attentive readers who can interpret the world and the word with refined criticality.

Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …

Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue (1984) provides a fascinating critique of the ideologies inscribed into patriarchal language and evokes an extremely valuable linguistic and political awareness. This article will examine the liability of the ways the novel revolts against the patriarchal society via the introduction of a gynocentric linguistic intervention. I claim, Elgin’s novel showcases an invaluable instance of how it is possible for women to revolt against the pillars of patriarchy through manipulations at the gestalt and schematic level of language and most specifically, the bodily metaphoric quality of the English. This proposed transformation of the schematic and …

Two Trans-Atlantic Divorce Novels: In Camilla, Elizabeth Robins Counters Edith Wharton’S The Custom Of The Country, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This paper argues that Elizabeth Robins' reading of The Custom of the Country (recorded in her diary, 25 November 1913) impacted the way Robins drafted her very next novel, Camilla. Unlike Wharton’s Undine, whose careers with men might be characterized by the sequence of her last names (Spragg Moffatt, Marvell, de Chelles, Moffatt), Camilla undertakes one long reflective flashback on her early life with her ex-husband, Leroy Trenholme, as she crosses the Atlantic, east to west, having been proposed to by a deeply caring and comforting Englishman. This reliving of the unraveling of her marriage (especially the scene of …

Anonymity As A Bridge From Actress To Author: The Case Of Elizabeth Robins, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Any scholar working on the origins of the feminist journey of the actress turned writer Elizabeth Robins ought to be aware of her two earliest short works of fiction she wrote and published in The New Review under nearly perfect anonymity. This paper will profile these two earlier stories, published in 1894 even before her first novel, George Mandeville's Husband, attracted attention when it appeared under her perhaps thinly disguised pseudonym, C. E. Raimond.

Robins saw the potential and, yes, to her mind, the necessity, of establishing herself as a writer so that she could more securely support herself. …

Olympia, Wilderness, And Consumption In Laird Barron’S Old Leech Cycle, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

This book chapter considers the cosmic horror fiction of Laird Barron through a blended ecocritical/postcolonial lens, focusing on its representation of the Pacific Northwest and Olympia, Washington. Wilderness and consumption are both strongly represented concepts in Barron’s Old Leech Cycle of stories, aligning with colonial perceptions of the American West as a largely unpeopled space ripe for exploitation. The eldritch horrors of these tales align with well-established traditions in weird fiction, and they are also perfectly suited to locations historically identified with resource extraction.

“I, Too, Am An Occupied Territory”: Border Crossings And Personal Sovereignty In Three Novels By Dominican American Women, Leia M. Lynn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Border crossing(s) and personal sovereignty are intimately and complexly connected in novels by and about Dominican American women. Through readings of In the Name of Salomé by Julia Alvarez, Dominicana by Angie Cruz, and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, I argue that patriarchal forms of authority remove female autonomy by trespassing on personal boundaries, and that the renegotiation of that power is achieved through formations of community, especially with other women, through nonheteronormative relationships that are present inside and extend outside the text. The interplay of patriarchal authority, violence, and alienation on the four protagonists is examined at length, …

Fugitive Knowledge And Body Autonomy In The Folklore And Literature Of Zora Neale Hurston And Gloria Naylor, Renée M. Vincent

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Amidst battles for Covid-19 vaccine mandates and accessibility, media coverage of judicial proceedings stemming from state-sanctioned racialized violence, and the exacerbation of gendered workplace/space inequality via a new virtual reality, the year 2021 marks yet another conflict over the legality of abortion in the United States, with conservative Supreme Court justices aiming to walk back the legalization of a woman’s constitutional right to terminate pregnancy as per Roe v. Wade. Through an exploration of the historical record in conjunction with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, signifiers of what Marilyn Motz calls “fugitive …

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Contesting Imagined Communities: Minor Feelings, Opacity, And Spectrality In Ling Ma’S Severance, Christine Marks

Publications and Research

This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the example of Ling Ma’s dystopian pandemic novel Severance (2018). Emphasizing fiction’s capacity for symbolic intervention in a pandemic era, I argue that the text undermines tropes of nation-building through strategic employment of minor feelings, opacity, and spectral liminality. My analysis focuses on the Chinese American protagonist’s conflicted relationship with imagined communities forged in the conventional “outbreak narrative” (Wald) as her unhomely positionality places her at odds with unifying ideological responses to the catastrophic upheaval of the pandemic. At the intersection of pandemic and diasporic literature, Ma’s novel constitutes a …

Joanne Kyger And “The Kook Strain” In Olson: A Reading, Patrick James Dunagan

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

Jerome Rothenberg's "that dada strain" at once hilarious grandiose epic lyric historical and ever adventurous charts the highs discovered in his reading of the dada era. In like occurrence this writing seeks to poke around in the occult cupboards of Olson's mystical leanings. Looking not only at his work and assorted readings/engagements but delving also into the works of various others (Joanne Kyger, Jack Hirschman, Paul Blackburn, Gerrit Lansing, David Meltzer, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, Robin Blaser et al) who fell in alongside as well as after his work's star-eyed haul. Loquaciously gifted as a talker, how much (if …

Toward An Archaeology Of Manuscripts, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The title of Rachael Scarborough King’s edited collection of essays, After Print, refers at once to Peter Stallybrass’s insight that printing is a provocation of manuscript, as well as to what the study of manuscripts looks like when we move away from stadial and supersessionist print culture paradigms of authorship and publication and instead embrace archival methods and interpretive approaches that center on concepts of media interrelation in early modern manuscript cultures, such as Margaret Ezell’s concept of social authorship.The essays in King’s collection, including an epilogue by Ezell herself, bear the fruits of such intermedial and transmedial approaches, bringing …

In Search Of A Homeland: Jewish-American Women Writers And Their Struggle With Cultural Alienation, Alisa K. Burris

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the lives and fictional works of five Jewish-American women writers of the twentieth century within the complex context of cultural alienation. Authors Anzia Yezierska, Dorothy Parker, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and Marge Piercy are each featured in separate chapters that examine how personal experiences of estrangement weave through and influence their texts. As a result of this dissertation’s scrutiny, meaningful connections emerge between these diverse Jewish women authors and the transformation of painful struggles into profound journeys to seek belonging. Through their works’ literal and figurative pilgrimages to reach an ultimate homeland, all five writers creatively illustrate …

Contents, Douglas Higbee

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.

Beasts And Bestiality, Deities And Deification: Boethius’ The Consolation Of Philosophy In Milton's Comus, Bret Van Den Brink

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

No abstract provided.

Milton’S Cardinal Directions Symbolism In Paradise Lost, Micah Gill

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

No abstract provided.