The Influence Of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick On Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian,
2014
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
The Influence Of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick On Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian, Ryan Joseph Tesar
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
While many works exert an influence on Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, I argue in this thesis that Herman Melville's Moby-Dick stands above them all in importance. I examine some areas where Melville's influence on McCarthy's work can be most notably located. I argue that Melville's importance to McCarthy can be seen in the latter's use of several characters from Moby-Dick in his own novel. I also examine the parallels that arise when one examines the confluences between the two novels' structures, vocabularies, and settings. I also consider how Melville's violent aesthetics …
The Influence Of Literacy On The Lives Of Twentieth Century Southern Female Minority Figures,
2014
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
The Influence Of Literacy On The Lives Of Twentieth Century Southern Female Minority Figures, Laura Leighann Dicks
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
The American South has long been a region associated with myth and fantasy; in popular culture especially, the region is consistently tied to skewed notions of the antebellum South that include images of large plantation homes, women in hoop skirts, and magnolia trees that manifest in television and film representations such as Gone With the Wind (1939). Juxtaposed with these idealized, mythic images is the hillbilly trope, reinforced by radio shows such as Lum and Abner, and films such as Scatterbrain (1940). Out of this idea comes the southern illiteracy stereotype, which suggests that southerners are collectively unconcerned with education …
Facing The Wreck: Death, Optimism, And The Fragmented Form,
2014
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Facing The Wreck: Death, Optimism, And The Fragmented Form, Rachael Marie Schaffner
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Walter Benjamin described history as a winged angel who faces backwards, staring perpetually into the past as the violent winds of destiny carry him into the future (Illuminations). Despite a western, post-enlightenment myth of eternal progress, the wreckage of human contributions to history is clearly evident in our 21st-century understanding of anthropogenic impact on global ecology. In the context of these ecological crises (and the resulting political and economic questions), postmodern novels reveal a powerful ability to imagine different ways of living and interacting with the world. This thesis traces the relationship between fragmentation, death, and liminal experiences …
Salman Rushdie In The Postmodern Current: New Venues, New Values,
2014
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Salman Rushdie In The Postmodern Current: New Venues, New Values, Aya Akkawi
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
The aim of this study is to prove that Rushdie's recent novels are not postcolonial in the sense that they abandon the colonial/colonized binary, the embrace of hybridity, and the theme of undermining the coercion and domination of the colonial country assumed in postcolonial discourse. Instead, his recent fiction is labeled postmodern because it is filled with exuberant postmodern techniques such as historiographic metafiction, the hegemony of mode of productions, the postmodern fragmented self, and suspicions of grand narrative. Furthermore, I will argue that there is an association between Rushdie's postmodern narrative technique (his mixing of history and fantasy) and …
Still Circling The Sun,
2014
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Still Circling The Sun, Stefan Rafael Delagarza
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This work is a collection of traditional and experimental short stories that explore dynamic human relationships in a variety of settings: a bunker, a beach, and a family home, to name a few. Each character is on a journey to find deeper meaning in his or her life, and oftentimes, this means finding a path to forgiveness.
Reading Nostalgia, Anger, And The Home In Joyce Carol Oates’S Foxfire,
2014
Lakehead University
Reading Nostalgia, Anger, And The Home In Joyce Carol Oates’S Foxfire, Heather A. Hillsburg
Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies
This article draws from Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia to explore the intersections between violence, memory, and the home in Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire. Through reflective nostalgia, Maddy is able to link the abuse she and her friends endure to various iterations of the home. Reflective nostalgia also allows Maddy to draw connections between anger and the domestic realm, and to write the members of FOXFIRE back into dominant narratives that largely exclude their lived experiences. Ultimately, this paper argues that because nostalgia often centers on the home, it is ideally suited to foreground the untenable nature …
Navigating With Harriet Quimby,
2014
Marshall University
Navigating With Harriet Quimby, Rachael Peckham
English Faculty Research
My maternal grandmother Ruth never missed an episode of the game show Jeopardy! One night in 2008, while I was working on my dissertation about a long-forgotten aviatrix with whom my family and I share connections, Grandma Ruth called to tell me about a Jeopardy! clue she had just heard: "The first woman to fly across the English Channel." My grandmother was reserved and soft-spoken, but I imagine her slapping the armrests of the recliner, disturbing the outstretched cat at her side, and beating all three contestants to the buzzer: "Who is Harriet Quimby?"--the subject of my dissertation.
Kingsolver, Barbara, B. 1955 (Sc 2846),
2014
Western Kentucky University
Kingsolver, Barbara, B. 1955 (Sc 2846), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
Manuscript Collection Finding Aids
Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2846. Letter, 10 December 1996, of Barbara Kingsolver, Tucson, Arizona, to Gil Moody of Moody Books Inc., Johnson City, Tennessee. She expresses her support of independent bookstores and her willingness to sign books and bookplates for readers, but places high priority on reserving time for her writing and family life.
Read, Opie Percival, 1852-1939 (Sc 2844),
2014
Western Kentucky University
Read, Opie Percival, 1852-1939 (Sc 2844), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives
Manuscript Collection Finding Aids
Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2844. Letter, 16 May 1884, of journalist and humorist Opie P. Read, written from Little Rock, Arkansas, to an unnamed addressee. Read accepts an offer to exchange magazines (probably his Arkansas Traveler) for a publication called the Voice, congratulates the addressee on a story published in Chicago’s The Current, and acknowledges knowing his name although they have never met.
The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed,
2014
CUNY Graduate Center
The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …
Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel,
2014
CUNY Graduate Center
Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ("cruft"), which it uses to challenge its readers' abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it …
Rendering The Unthinkable: (Un)Knowable Animality, Compulsory Recovery, And Heterosexualized Trauma In The Hunger Games,
2014
CUNY Graduate Center
Rendering The Unthinkable: (Un)Knowable Animality, Compulsory Recovery, And Heterosexualized Trauma In The Hunger Games, Jennifer Polish
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Dystopian fiction is expected to reflect deeply on the interactions between identities, bodies, and state control. Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy is no exception. The disturbing trilogy situated animality, disability, and trauma (both of non-humans and of humans) as being firmly controlled by the power of the state (the Capitol). Through its portrayal of hunting and genetic manipulation, the trilogy constructed a state-created animality which refused definitive labeling and insisted upon facing animal subjectivity while simultaneously disregarding the needs and desires of those considered to be non-human. Similarly, the state held sway over both the creation and elimination of …
Committing To The Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments,
2014
CUNY Graduate Center
Committing To The Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments, Karinne Keithley Syers
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Committing to the Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments reads Ralph Waldo Emerson as a writer of assignments for living and working whose senses can be taken up across a wide array of creative and exploratory fields. Shifting between an interdisciplinary array of contexts ranging from philosophy and poetics to dance, performance, and somatic movement experiments, I join the practical sense of creative inquiry embodied in these fields to the abstract images of Emerson's assignments. I argue that Emerson's descriptions of intelligence and power, and so his approaches to navigating skepticism and loss, as well as the non-possessive sense of what "self" …
"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners,
2014
CUNY Graduate Center
"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners, Michael Seth Stewart
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
American poet John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self-styled poete maudit in the fifties; a protege of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized at state hospitals. Wieners lived on the "other side" of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Though …
The Over-Education Of The Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education And The Black Intellectual,
2014
CUNY Graduate Center
The Over-Education Of The Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education And The Black Intellectual, Archie Lavelle Porter
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation focuses on the academic novel - a literary genre which fictionalizes the lives of students and professors in institutions of higher education. In particular this project focuses on academic novels written by black writers and which address issues in black higher education. This dissertation has two concurrent objectives: 1) to examine the academic novel as a particular genre of literature, and to highlight some specific novels on black American identity within this genre, and 2) to illustrate the pedagogical value of academic fiction. Through the ancient practice of storytelling, academic novels link the travails of the individual student …
Philip Roth, Henry Roth And The History Of The Jews,
2014
Florida State University
Philip Roth, Henry Roth And The History Of The Jews, Timothy Parrish
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Philip Roth, Henry Roth and the History of the Jews" Timothy Parrish argues that while Roth's status as a Jewish American writer has been a pressing issue since his career began and that while in recent scholarship Roth's achievement as a US-American writer is stressed, the durability of Roth's work depends more on its implied submission to a Jewish tradition. From "The Conversion of the Jews" (1959) to Nemesis (2010), his characters challenge endlessly the ethical and moral constructs of their Jewish community to acknowledge the fact that they exist inside of it. One might choose any …
A Chant Of Dilation: Walt Whitman, Phrenology, And The Language Of The Mind,
2014
CUNY Graduate Center
A Chant Of Dilation: Walt Whitman, Phrenology, And The Language Of The Mind, Anton Borst
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
A Chant of Dilation analyzes Walt Whitman's poetic engagement with two very modern ideas: the materiality of the mind and the discursive nature of science. During the antebellum period these ideas found expression in the popular science of phrenology, the theory that the mind was divided into various faculties physically located in different parts of the brain. This theory would find a ready audience in Whitman, a poet preoccupied with the body, the soul, and their connection. The writings and publications of premier American phrenologists Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, surveyed in this project, rhetorically mediated emerging conceptions of the brain-embodied …
New Leviathan: How I Implemented The Aas’S Periodicals Database In My Traditional American Literature Survey Class, And Lived To Tell The Tale,
2014
Dordt College
New Leviathan: How I Implemented The Aas’S Periodicals Database In My Traditional American Literature Survey Class, And Lived To Tell The Tale, Joshua Matthews
Faculty Work Comprehensive List
This past summer, our small college’s library purchased a permanent subscription to the American Antiquarian Society’s new Historical Periodicals Collection (series 1-5). In northwest Iowa, where there is no such database for hundreds of miles, this purchase is a research boon for local scholars. The catch, though? I needed to implement the database thoroughly in the college’s only early American literature class, a traditional survey spanning 1492 to 1865. Beyond all of the topics, authors, and agendas that could be covered—and the typical dilemma between coverage and depth in a survey class—now I needed to incorporate the teaching of periodical …
Opening Remarks To Outing Lorraine At The Schomburg Center,
2014
CUNY Graduate Center
Opening Remarks To Outing Lorraine At The Schomburg Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz
Publications and Research
This article is an edit of the opening remarks for the event held on May 22nd, 2014 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as part of the In The Life Series supplying Black LGBT programming coordinated by Steven Fullwood. Outing Lorraine included panelists: Alexis DeVeaux, Joi Gresham, and Steven Fullwood and was moderated by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz. Opening remarks provide a biographical description of Lorraine Hansberry's life, prepare the audience for a conversation on the implications for "outing" a black iconic figure, details the purpose for use of primary and secondary sources when, and provides a bibliography for …
Redefining Blackness In The Age Of Whiteness: Mimicry, Ancestry, Gender Performance, And Self-Identity In Afro-Caribbean And Afro-American Literature,
2014
Seton Hall University
Redefining Blackness In The Age Of Whiteness: Mimicry, Ancestry, Gender Performance, And Self-Identity In Afro-Caribbean And Afro-American Literature, Brandon Marcell Erby
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
The elements associated with mimicry and colonialism are found in Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), as the novel reveals how colonized subjects use mimicry to survive their colonized spaces. Keeping in mind the ideologies of Homi Bhabha and Wumi Raji, the novel also suggests how a subject’s pre-existing condition before being colonized develops agency. Comparably, while Elizabeth Nunez’s novel illustrates how imitation is used by black and native Caribbeans, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1958) contextualize and exhibit W.E.B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness theory and the struggles that black Americans experience while mimicking …
