American Literature Commons^™

In The Hands Of The Reader, Allie J. Kapus

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

“In the Hands of the Reader” is an analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” integrating the views of Michael Jay Lewis in his article “Contingency, Narrative, Fiction: Vogler, Brenkman, Poe.” “The Black Cat” is a narrative penned by a man reflecting on his life as he awaits his own death. As the narrator is mentally unstable and therefore unreliable, the reader is brought into the story to interpret the truth or falsehood of the narrator’s story. Lewis is accurate in his strong acknowledgment of the unreliability of the narrator, yet he fails to address in-depth the reason for …

The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow: An Ambiguous Ghost Tale, Elisa R. Jacobs

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

Abstract

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Booth Tarkington Materials., Booth Tarkington, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

This collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, and other materials relating to the life and work of Booth Tarkington. Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was a writer from Indiana, well known for his novels of life in the midwest. Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to him for The Magnificent Ambersons and for Alice Adams. He attended Purdue University and Princeton, where he was a well-known literary and social figure. In later life he divided his time between Indiana and his estate, Seawood, in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he became friends with neighbor Kenneth Roberts.

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Waldo Peirce Materials., Waldo Peirce, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The collection comprises letters, scrapbooks, and manuscript items by Waldo Peirce, an American painter, bohemian, and expatriate born in Bangor, Maine. Waldo Peirce (1884-1970) was born in Bangor, Maine, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover and Harvard University. He later studied at the Art Students League in New York City and at the Julian Academy in Paris. As an expatriate American, he drove ambulances for the French Army in World War I and led a bohemian life with notable companions such as Ernest Hemingway and John Reed. His later life was spent in Searsport, Maine, and Newburyport, Massachusetts, where …

Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating In Post-9/11 American War Literature, David Andrew Buchanan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A rhetorical approach to the fiction of war offers an appropriate vehicle by which one may encounter and interrogate such literature and the cultural metanarratives that exist therein. My project is a critical analysis—one that relies heavily upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method and his concepts of scapegoating, the comic corrective, and hierarchical psychosis—of three war novels published in 2012 (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, FOBBIT by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain). This analysis assumes a rhetorical screen in order to subvert and redirect the grand narratives the United States perpetuates in art …

Carol And John Steinbeck: Portrait Of A Marriage. By Susan Shillinglaw. Reno: U Of Nevada P, 2013. Xv + 312 Pp. $35., Christine S. Fagan

Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Racial And Cultural Anxieties In Poe's The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym, Alyssa M. Amaral

Undergraduate Review

This essay considers the cultural fears and anxieties that are portrayed in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Drawing upon Tsalal’s natural hesitancy for nature to intermingle with itself, in addition to the tragically brutal clashing of white and black cultures, Poe highlights 19th-century United States’ desire for segregation between North and South, while also depicting southern slave owners’ looming fear of slave uprisings.

Author’S Place, Digital Space: Mapping Tennessee Williams, 1938-1948, Carmi Acosta, Arthur Aguilera, Amanda Baschnagel, Clark Gillespie, Kathleen Hamilton, Sam Hansen, Ty Huff, Bryce Klinger, Janne Knight, Corina Monoran, Laurie Plummer, Brittany Reichel

College of Arts and Sciences Presentations

From 1938-­1948, twentieth-­century American author Tennessee Williams traveled the country with his portable typewriter and a battered suitcase. He wrote every day, and his writings reflect the places and people he encountered. Williams’s journey from obscurity to fame as a writer during this decade parallels the nation’s path from depression to postwar prosperity. The events of this time period remain scattered across Williams’s scholarship; however, our collaborative, interdisciplinary project takes advantage of new methods of investigation and dissemination to create a multimedia map that traces the writer’s movements. We use Google Earth to create placemarks that highlight Williams’s professional and …

The Global Dystopian: Twenty-First Century Globalization, Terrorism, And Urban Destruction, Ryan Frank Peters

Dissertations

The new millennium has witnessed a staggering outpouring of literature, film and art which depict dystopian and post-apocalyptic societies. These stories have come in the form of massively popular films like the Matrix and Hunger Games trilogies; Emmy-winning television adaptations such as The Walking Dead; and Pulitzer Prize-winning novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-nominated Never Let Me Go. In the last five years, a wave of critically-lauded video games – The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, and Dishonored come immediately to mind—have depicted dystopian worlds while reaching mass audiences. Combined, The Last of Us and …

Middle Eastern-American Literature: A Contemporary Turn In Emerson Studies, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Yeah You Write: Authenticity And Authority In Katrina Literature, Terri Coleman

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

The Shadow Of The Hyperobject In Thomas Pynchon's V. And Gravity's Rainbow, Trevor Martinson

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

The Lyric And The Lathe: Dreams Of Perfect Poetic Efficiency, 1800-1917, Steven A. Nathaniel

Masters Theses

This study examines patterns of efficiency in the poetry and theory of William Wordsworth, Hilda Doolittle, and other figures from the Modernist and Romantic periods. I begin by defining perfect efficiency as occurring when energy transforms, without loss, inside a closed energy system, and I offer perpetual motion machines as hypothetical examples of this impossible state. I then demonstrate the process of efficiency in William Wordsworth's poetry, which begins with circumlocutory poetic cycles but contracts into terse repetitions. Since technical efficiency is calculated by the formula output/input, poetry's subjectivity makes poetic efficiency difficult to measure. However, I suggest that repetitions …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

Edna The Oblivious Oppressor: An Intersectional Analysis Of Privilege And Its Lack Thereof In The Awakening, Jessica L. Rosenthal

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …

El Paso Odyessy, Tafari Amin Nugent

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El Paso Odyssey not only attempts to give an accurate reflection of everyday American life within a particular timeframe but, also attempts to give characters the ability to speak for themselves. The audience must judge and interpret the authenticity and accuracy of the language throughout the text and if the veracity of the dialogue rings true, the narrative story has succeeded on some level.

Narrating Rewilding: Shifting Images Of Wilderness In American Literature, Aaron Andrew Cloyd

Theses and Dissertations--English

Narrating Rewilding analyzes interactions between imaginative writings and environmental histories to ask how novels and creative nonfiction contribute to conversations of wilderness rewilding. I identify aspects of rewilding in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge within a context of William Cronon’s and James Feldman’s works of environmental history, and I argue that the selected imaginative works offer alternative ramifications of rewilding by questioning Cronon’s and Feldman’s anthropocentric basis.

While Cronon and Feldman argue that a rewilding wilderness expresses interconnections between human history and expressions of nature, and that a return of …

Attitudes Toward Mental Illness And Mental Health In The Literature Classroom, Melissa B. Guadron

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purpose of this study was to observe undergraduate students’ attitudes toward mental illness and mental health in the literature classroom. This was an observational, inductive study of Jeffrey Berman’s literature course, featuring books written by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This setting was chosen because of Berman’s unique pedagogy, which encourages self-disclosure and psychoanalytic readings. Three questionnaires and three introspective reader response diaries were collected from fifteen participants; text analyses were performed on diaries. Research inquiries questioned a participant’s interactions with the books: How did participants respond to the portrayals of characters with mental illness or mental health …

Ten Klicks South Of Whiskey : A Play In Three Acts, Ryan Jeffrey Smithson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Ten Klicks South of Whiskey is a stage performance in three acts, consisting mostly of monologues from soldiers of various backgrounds. It follows the trials of 4th platoon, Delta Troop, 463rd Cavalry Squadron, a fictional unit that achieves a near-mythic reputation of heroism and invulnerability in Iraq. As the monologues begin to reveal, however, not every tale about the 463rd can be substantiated. The audience is first challenged to search for truth and then to understand that truth is not the ultimate--or even the desired--goal of war stories.