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Grace: A Reflection On The Novels Of Marilynne Robinson, Elayne Apol Heynen 2019 Dordt University

Grace: A Reflection On The Novels Of Marilynne Robinson, Elayne Apol Heynen

Pro Rege

Editor's Note: Elayne Apol Heynen wrote this paper for a Kuyper Scholars Seminar to precede the Prodigal Love of God Conference, held at Dordt, April 2019, and co-sponsored by the Lilly Fellowship Program as a regional conference.


Anxieties Of Incorporation: U.S. Territorialization And The Western Imaginary From The Louisiana Purchase To Moby-Dick, Diana Meckley 2019 CUNY Graduate Center

Anxieties Of Incorporation: U.S. Territorialization And The Western Imaginary From The Louisiana Purchase To Moby-Dick, Diana Meckley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anxieties of Incorporation: U.S. Territorialization and the Western Imaginary from the Louisiana Purchase to Moby-Dick investigates the impact of territorial expansion on authorial constructions of the continental west during the first half of the nineteenth century. As both a geophysical reality or an imagined space, the west functions as a site in which American writers negotiated their ambivalence over the promises and perils of continental aggrandizement and global imperialism. This project examines representative texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Parkman, Susan Shelby Magoffin, and Herman Melville. In so doing, this dissertation traces how the western imaginaries these Anglo-American authors fashioned …


Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown 2019 CUNY Graduate Center

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …


Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry's Jurisdiction And The Transformation Of Equal Rights, Talia Shalev 2019 CUNY Graduate Center

Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry's Jurisdiction And The Transformation Of Equal Rights, Talia Shalev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Across various academic fields and from a range of political orientations, scholars note that a pervasive rights discourse shapes the imaginable horizons of identity, politics, and social life in the United States. Many critiques of rights since the 1970s highlight a particular conundrum of this rights culture: existing rights law and ubiquitous rights invocations fail to guarantee equal conditions for thriving across racialized and gendered axes of identity. Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry’s Jurisdiction and the Transformation of Equal Rights emphasizes and complicates elements of these critiques by reading poetry of the 1970s and 1980s in relation to shifting rights …


Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova 2019 CUNY Graduate Center

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …


To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe 2019 CUNY Graduate Center

To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this project, I am arguing for a particularly American visual poetics that dwells in the state of suspension implied by attention, quivering between wonder and contemplation, immobility and unfixity as it seeks to reveal, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his 1945 The Phenomenology of Perception, the world which is “always ‘already there’ before reflection begins — as an inalienable presence.”[1] Grounded in visual theory, the project pairs poets and artists, searching not for similitude, but rather examining resemblance, difference, and most important, relation. Susan Howe, one of my guides for this project, writes that, “immense perspectives …


Strangers In The Village: James Baldwin, Teju Cole, And Glenn Ligon, Monika Gehlawat 2019 University of Southern Mississippi

Strangers In The Village: James Baldwin, Teju Cole, And Glenn Ligon, Monika Gehlawat

Faculty Publications

This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms …


The Meaning In The Music: Music And The Prose Of Chopin, Joyce, Baldwin And Egan, Colin Perry 2019 Lesley University

The Meaning In The Music: Music And The Prose Of Chopin, Joyce, Baldwin And Egan, Colin Perry

Senior Theses

Kate Chopin, James Joyce, James Baldwin, and Jennifer Egan are collectively gifted in the art of prose, yet each author also experiments with music in their literary works. An analysis of Chopin's The Awakening, Joyce's "The Dead," Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," and Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad reveals a trend of authors utilizing music to enrich their texts and convey major themes.


Such News Of The Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, Thomas S. Edwards, Elizabeth A. DeWolfe 2019 Thomas College

Such News Of The Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, Thomas S. Edwards, Elizabeth A. Dewolfe

History Faculty Books

This pathbreaking collection, which contains 19 essays from scholars in a variety of fields, illuminates the work of two centuries of American women nature writers. Some discuss traditional nature writers such as Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Austin, Gene Stratton Porter, and Annie Dillard. Others examine the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Anzaldua, and Leslie Marmon Silko, writers not often associated with this genre. Essays on germinal texts such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas's The Everglades: River of Grass stand alongside examinations of market bulletins and women's gardens, showing how the rich diversity of women's nature writing has shaped and expanded …


Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet 2019 Purdue University

Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …


Beyond Postsouthern: The Return Of The Rural In Twenty-First Century Southern Literature, Jeremy Ryan Gibbs 2019 University of Southern Mississippi

Beyond Postsouthern: The Return Of The Rural In Twenty-First Century Southern Literature, Jeremy Ryan Gibbs

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how twenty-first century southern literature employs rurality as a means of critiquing the dominant neoliberal impulse of an increasingly urban-attuned society. In times of transition, southern literature has traditionally turned to representations of rurality in order to understand, navigate, or resist change; rapid globalization has influenced contemporary writers to return to the rural in their fiction in order to expose manifestations of the urban/rural hierarchy and offer alternatives to a prevailing urban consciousness. This study’s Introduction discusses ways in which pastoral and anti-pastoral literary modes have framed rurality in southern fiction, specifically through depictions of the plantation …


Outline: John Cotton, Gods Promise To His Plantations (1630/P. 1634), Jonathan Beecher Field 2019 Clemson University

Outline: John Cotton, Gods Promise To His Plantations (1630/P. 1634), Jonathan Beecher Field

Publications

No abstract provided.


John Cotton: “Gods Promise To His Plantation” (1630), Jonathan Beecher Field 2019 Clemson University

John Cotton: “Gods Promise To His Plantation” (1630), Jonathan Beecher Field

Publications

No abstract provided.


Crossing Boundaries, Drawing Anew : Exploring The Treatment Of American Indian Land With A Penobscot Lens Through The Life And Traditions Of The Red Man By Joseph Nicolar, Andrea Guerrero 2019 University at Albany, State University of New York

Crossing Boundaries, Drawing Anew : Exploring The Treatment Of American Indian Land With A Penobscot Lens Through The Life And Traditions Of The Red Man By Joseph Nicolar, Andrea Guerrero

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The relationship between the Wabanaki and the land informs their creation myths, their cultural expertise, and individual and communal identity. The connection is so integral to their identity that when privatization of property usurps their connections to the land, an entire


Sex And Death On The Western Emigrant Trail: The Biology Of Three American Tragedies, Debra E. L. Martin 2019 University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Sex And Death On The Western Emigrant Trail: The Biology Of Three American Tragedies, Debra E. L. Martin

Anthropology Faculty Research

This book offers a different look at how to think about the starvation and death that hounded emigrants attempting to get to California and Oregon in the early years of nineteenth-century US expansion. Specifically, the Donner party and two lesser-known Mormon handcart groups are scrutinized for what the patterns of age at death by sex can reveal. In the subtitle The Biology of Three American Tragedies, “biology” here means solely demographic data on sex and age at death. These are really the only biological variables examined, so the title Sex and Death on the Western Emigrant Trail is more accurate …


A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley 2019 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From Frank Kermode to Norman Cohn to John Hall, scholars agree that apocalypse historically has represented times of radical change to social and political systems as older orders are wiped away and replaced by a realignment of respective norms. This paradigm is predicated upon an understanding of apocalypse that emphasizes the rebuilding of communities after catastrophe has occurred. However, in the last half-century, narratives that emphasize the destruction of human civilization without this restorative component have begun to overshadow the more historically popular post-apocalyptic models that were particularly abundant during the early days of the Cold War. In light of …


Guest Editor's Introduction, Angela Jill Cooley 2019 Minnesota State University, Mankato

Guest Editor's Introduction, Angela Jill Cooley

The Southern Quarterly

Guest Editor's Introduction to the special issue on Foodways in the South.


Table Of Contents, 2019 The University of Southern Mississippi

Table Of Contents

The Southern Quarterly

Table of Contents for the special issue on Foodways in the South


The Sad Kitchen And Song Of Neon: Two Novellas, John Paul King 2019 Western Kentucky University

The Sad Kitchen And Song Of Neon: Two Novellas, John Paul King

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The Sad Kitchen, a work of magical realism, tells the story of a saintly woman named Helen. She opens an underground kitchen where people who feel guilty can come to be comforted and nurtured in the middle of the night. The story is, at its heart, a reflection on forgiveness. Song of Neon, also of the magical realist genre, is an existential work about a nurse named Avery and her husband, an owl house maker, named Saul. Their town, Milliard, is under a trance. Avery and Saul struggle with their respective identities in the quiet, vacuum the town has become.


Re-Visioning Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man For A Class Of Urban Immigrant Youth, Camille Goodison 2019 CUNY New York City College of Technology

Re-Visioning Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man For A Class Of Urban Immigrant Youth, Camille Goodison

Publications and Research

In this essay, I will explore Ralph Ellison’s 1952 classic novel, Invisible Man, as a text that has contemporary and relatable themes for a modern-day classroom of mostly urban youth. This essay is also a personal journey into how Ellison’s inventive approaches to form helped create a work that lends itself to contemporary reimagining. It asks the question, can Ellison’s interest in creating a living Afro-American literary tradition rooted in the lore of the ‘peasant’ or common folk have contemporary applications? How does Ellison’s belief that everyday folk expression has value hold up for today’s readers? I try to …


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