Recalling The Georgic: Land, Labor, And Literature In American Ecological Consciousness,
2020
West Virginia University
Recalling The Georgic: Land, Labor, And Literature In American Ecological Consciousness, Sam Horrocks
Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)
This dissertation argues that environmentalism and the environmental humanities are limited by an overinvestment in the discursive mode of pastoral, which provides the ecological logic of industrial urbanization by viewing the environment from the perspective of a leisured and alienated spectator. The pastoral mode enables environmental injustice by separating the realms of ecology and economy through a conventional elision of issues of labor and economics, rendering environmentalism unable to effect change within the spheres most important to ameliorating the pollution crisis. The pastoral mode thus frustrates the overarching goal of ecocriticism and environmentalism: we seek an ontological reunion of nature …
Review Of When Novels Were Books. By Jordan Alexander Stein.,
2020
University of Louisville
Review Of When Novels Were Books. By Jordan Alexander Stein., Mark A. Mattes
Faculty and Staff Scholarship
But novels ARE books, you might be thinking. Jordan Stein points out that this is true, but not in the way that many of us have thought to be the case. Twentieth- and twenty-first century literary history, Stein argues, has too often failed to deliver a programmatic discussion of the media history of genre. Attention to changes and continuities in the early Anglophone novel’s artifactual status within an evolving, transatlantic media ecology, supplements, and in some cases rethinks, critical understandings of the development of novelistic form. Stein’s method is axiomatic for those working at the intersection of form and format: …
Vulnerability, Trauma, And Testimony In American Women’S Literature: A Long History,
2020
Northern Illinois University
Vulnerability, Trauma, And Testimony In American Women’S Literature: A Long History, Jennifer L. Fife
Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations
This study examines the effects of vulnerability and trauma in American women’s literature across the intersections of genre, race, and time. In this dissertation I have applied a feminist long history approach to examine women’s literature from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries together inspired by Mary Beard’s theory that compartmentalizing women’s history ignores long-range patterns and contributions. I have assembled the beginnings of a canon of women’s trauma literature that allows women writers to form a multi-century discourse community wherein trauma and recovery may occur. This analysis applies twentieth century medical research about trauma and recovery, particularly that of Judith …
Issues Of Modernity In Russian And U.S. Southern Discourse: Literary And Cinematic Crosscurrents,
2020
Northern Illinois University
Issues Of Modernity In Russian And U.S. Southern Discourse: Literary And Cinematic Crosscurrents, Zachary John Killebrew
Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations
This dissertation traces formulations of modernity, national and regional identity, and economy in the literature and film of Russia and the U.S. South from serfdom to the Second World War. Studying serf and slave narratives, Russian Realist and Southern Renaissance novels such as The Brothers Karamazov (1879), Demons (1872), The Sound and the Fury (1929), Tobacco Road (1932), and Wise Blood (1952), and American and Soviet films such as Volga, Volga (1938) and Cabin in the Sky (1943), this examination locates within Russo-Southern discourses a shared interest in striking out against Western or Northern epistemologies to assert a “peripheral” modernity …
Telling Stories, Healing Cultures: Feminist Healing Narratives By Contemporary American Women Of Color,
2020
Northern Illinois University
Telling Stories, Healing Cultures: Feminist Healing Narratives By Contemporary American Women Of Color, Lindsay Marie Vreeland
Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations
Due to their experiences of oppression as a result of intersecting identities, women of Color are the most disenfranchised by Eurocentric patriarchal accounts and typically most in need of healing. As I explore in my research, works by women writers of Color—such as Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls, Sandra Cisneros’s Have You Seen Marie?, jia qing wilson-yang’s Small Beauty, and Toni Morrison’s Home and Paradise—gathered in this dissertation intentionally question and revise white settler versions of history that devalue people of Color; however, they also revise familiar stories and cultural traditions in their own communities. Doing so both empowers and enables …
"There Is Nothing Else Like It": The Innovative Personality Of Lowney Turner Handy,
2020
Eastern Illinois University
"There Is Nothing Else Like It": The Innovative Personality Of Lowney Turner Handy, Nathan Crews
Masters Theses
No abstract provided.
Whitewashing Who We Worship: Amelioration And Cultural Imperatives In Neil Gaiman’S American Gods,
2020
Georgia Southern University
Whitewashing Who We Worship: Amelioration And Cultural Imperatives In Neil Gaiman’S American Gods, Samantha Bauer
College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations
Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods creates a penetrating and sharp commentary on the state of essentially, every aspect of contemporary American society by populating it with myths that arrives on American shores over countless generations. From the characters to the settings, Gaiman utilizes the often-overlooked fact that myths can be found in every aspect of life. In many ways, Gaiman is building, or perhaps evolving, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies to discuss the unique nature of contemporary myths and how ancient myths still play a role in our society. I contend that in …
Race, American Enlightenment, And The End Times,
2020
University of Louisville
Race, American Enlightenment, And The End Times, Mark A. Mattes
Faculty and Staff Scholarship
This chapter examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visions of apocalypse regarding the future of black lives in the American body politic. It begins with readings of Jefferson’s fear of a black planet in Notes on the State of Virginia and Crèvecoeur’s depictions of racial terror in Letters from an American Farmer. The chapter then investigates the writing of an African American herald of the end times, Christopher MacPherson. The chapter reads the apocalyptic jeremiad of MacPherson’s pamphlet, Christ’s Millennium (1811), as a reparative response to the suppression of black voices and the annihilation of black lives.
Cuba Journals Volume I - Transcription,
2019
Georgia College
Cuba Journals Volume I - Transcription, Laura Swarner
Undergraduate Theses
The document is a transcribed version of volume I of the digital copy of the Cuba Journals which can be found online at the New York Public Library Archives. The Cuba Journals were written by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne during her time abroad in Cuba recovering from illness.
Where Was I Going? What Was The Point? Archetypes, Frame, And Social Transgressions In Ovid And Twain,
2019
Andrews University
Where Was I Going? What Was The Point? Archetypes, Frame, And Social Transgressions In Ovid And Twain, Jessica Bates
Honors Theses
The sound of a narrator telling a story can be difficult to depict in written prose, and yet both Ovid and Twain capture the effect of an old man telling a story; Ovid through Nestor's Story in The Metamorphoses and Twain in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." They both use this framework to discuss the theme of social transgressions. I maintain that both Twain and Ovid use a variation on the wise-mentor archetype as a frame to discuss, through the use of satire, social transgressions which neither of their narrators condemn. I aim to explore Ovid and Twain's …
American And Iraqi Prose Fiction Of The Iraq War: Traumas Of The Self, Traumas Of The Nation,
2019
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
American And Iraqi Prose Fiction Of The Iraq War: Traumas Of The Self, Traumas Of The Nation, Ghyath Manhel Alkinani
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
War is so omnipresent in our contemporary world that the story of war is too important to be left to fiction writers to frame and give meaning for. This dissertation provides an analysis of two dominant patterns in contemporary Iraqi and American prose fictional representations of the Iraq War: the individualistic trauma hero narrative and the nationalistic, collective narrative. I argue that the trauma hero myth that dominates American representations of the Iraq War psychologizes and de-politicizes war experience alienating the victim of trauma by decontextualizing their experience and negating the Other. On the other hand, the sweeping nationalistic narrative …
The Anonymous Web In Adichie’S Americanah,
2019
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
The Anonymous Web In Adichie’S Americanah, Michelle Jude Gibeault
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Adichie’s Americanah is a novel that elevates anonymous blogging into black cultural performance. The novel follows a young Nigerian, Ifemelu, who arrives in the United States on a student visa and depicts her stressful confrontation with racism in post-slavery America. Through beginning a blog, Ifemelu voices her experiences as a black woman and immigrant in ways that renew the concerns of James Baldwin, an author whom she studies closely. Like Baldwin, her style blends humor and techniques of persuasion that trace to traditional oral folklore. Ifemelu’s success rests partly on Adichie’s construction of her as a character of good ethos, …
"The Weak Are Meat, And The Strong Do Eat"; Representations Of The Slaughterhouse In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Literature,
2019
University of South Florida
"The Weak Are Meat, And The Strong Do Eat"; Representations Of The Slaughterhouse In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Literature, Stephanie Lance
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation explores how literary representations of the slaughterhouse predict the trajectory of human greed that is fueled by capitalist economic practices that shape environmental policies. I argue that literature brings attention to what is generally hidden from public view: the way humans and animals are erased in the production of food, which includes the inhumane treatment of humans and other animals in the slaughterhouse. The literature in this dissertation provides an avenue through which we can investigate the entangled oppression of humans and other animals in an effort to challenge perceptions that reduce animals, and marginalized humans, to objects. …
Photographic (Over) Exposures In The Nuclear Age In Joyce Carol Oates’S You Must Remember This,
2019
Tel Aviv University, Israel
Photographic (Over) Exposures In The Nuclear Age In Joyce Carol Oates’S You Must Remember This, Sonia Weiner
Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies
Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, You Must Remember This, examines themes of memory, time, and nostalgia through verbal descriptions of iconic and fictional photographs (such as Rocky Marciano, Holocaust Victims, Atomic Mushroom Clouds, Rita Hayworth). An analysis of the photographic imagery in the novel reveals discrepancies between surface appearances and embedded social and cultural ideological contexts within the work. Photographs are shown to undermine the overt conformity and conservatism of postwar America by exposing its underlying uncertainties and tensions. These tensions are explored through the perspective of a rebellious adolescent female, whose struggles highlight Oates’s critique of power, violence, and postwar …
H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Works, Critical Perspectives And Interviews On His Influence, Edited By Leverett Butts,
2019
Fort Hays State University
H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Works, Critical Perspectives And Interviews On His Influence, Edited By Leverett Butts, Perry Neil Harrison
Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature
No abstract provided.
Akron Poetry Catalog And Reader September 2019,
2019
University of Akron Main Campus
Akron Poetry Catalog And Reader September 2019, University Of Akron Press
University of Akron Press Publications
In our mobile-sized poetry catalog and reader, you can read poems from new books by Oliver de la Paz, Joshua Harmon, Brittany Cavallaro, Krystal Languell, Tyler Mills, Caryl Pagel, Emily Rosko, Emilia Phillips, Aimée Baker, Anne Barngrover, Matthew Guenette, Leslie Harrison, Sandra Simonds, Philip Metres, and Jennifer Moore.
The Personal Is Historical: Slavery, Black Power And Resistance In Octavia Butler’S Kindred,
2019
CUNY New York City College of Technology
The Personal Is Historical: Slavery, Black Power And Resistance In Octavia Butler’S Kindred, Megan Behrent
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
The Influence Of The Law In American Literature And Culture,
2019
Coastal Carolina University
The Influence Of The Law In American Literature And Culture, Emily Johnson, Steven Hamelman
Honors Theses
This piece explores the relationship between law and its influence within American literature and the overall culture. Themes of discrimination, corruption, greed, advocacy, and incriminating evidence, present in the analyzed texts and films, greatly plays into the American public’s perception of their judicial system. Is it truly the law influencing American literature and culture, or is it the sentiments of the masses influencing the legal field itself? This work aims at analyzing this question, while also making a point to explain what American citizens can do with such influence and knowledge.
The Suffering Joker And The Cruel Joke: Nabokov's And Bellow's Dark Laughter,
2019
Gulf University for Science & Technology
The Suffering Joker And The Cruel Joke: Nabokov's And Bellow's Dark Laughter, Gerald David Naughton, Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article interrogates the interrelationship between cruelty, suffering, and laughter in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, positing an affective reading of how bodies that suffer come to produce laughter as a confounding, unexpected, and at times inappropriate readerly affect. Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark and Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King both explore suffering as a form of excessive somatic cruelty inflicted on protagonists who, in experiencing such punishment, engender a strange, troubling, and potentially transformative form of laughter. In order to bring together a discussion of the body, suffering, cruelty, and laughter in Nabokov and Bellow, the essay …
Contemporary Stories Of Female Development And The Outer Limits Of Maternal Sexuality In Susan Choi’S My Education And Amy Sohn’S Prospect Park West,
2019
CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College
Contemporary Stories Of Female Development And The Outer Limits Of Maternal Sexuality In Susan Choi’S My Education And Amy Sohn’S Prospect Park West, Christa Baiada
Publications and Research
While liberal sexuality has been integrated into contemporary discursive understandings of female possibilities, barriers remain to representing mothers as sexual beings. This essay explores maternal representations in Choi’s My Education (2013) and Sohn’s Prospect Park West (2009) that challenge cultural ideals of good motherhood and invite scrutiny of normative paths and goals of female development. These 21st-century American novels confront and even embrace active maternal sexuality but retreat at the boundary of the maternal/sexual breast to allow protagonists in contemporary alterations of female stories of development to achieve maturity through acceptance of the ideal of good motherhood .Each …
