American Literature Commons^™

Reading After The End Of The World, Christina Thyssen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Reading after the End of the World is an investigation into challenges to our critical registers brought on by the increasingly visible effects of climate change and the era of the anthropocene. Its concerns are with how these realities can be seen as transformative of our notions of "reading" and with a literature that seems to anticipate such a moment of disarticulation. The project is organized around close readings of novels by Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman and it traces in these texts what I refer to as a "positive nihilism," which serves as a …

Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Historicization Of Antebellum Landscapes And Character In "A New-England Tale" And "Hope Leslie", Lisa D. Grant

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis investigates Catharine Maria Sedgwick's situating of New England religion, political issues, and social class structures in A New-England Tale (1822) and Hope Leslie or Early Times in Massachusetts (1827). A New-England Tale models the convergence of morality, religion, education and politics in nineteenth-century America in order to awaken a sense of national pride, and in doing so places a priority on political independence and education. Hope Leslie models morality and traces the correlation of religion and politics as they served to promote Puritan civic responsibility in seventeenth-century New England, and in doing so places a priority on moral …

Platonic Conception : Post War Experience In "The Great Gatsby" And "Farewell To Arms", Frederick D. Floss

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

"Platonic Conception" explores the relationship that authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had with World War I through their respective novels "The Great Gatsby" and "A Farewell to Arms." The thesis's author examines how the cultural impact of the war can be felt in five facets of both novels: the formative influences of the writers, their experiences with the War itself, their use of setting, their treatment of female characters, and how they render the War's influence in a post-war world. Comparing the ways these two books treat the war leads Floss to argue that cultural impact of the …

Fordism & Modernist Forms : The Transformation Of Work And Style, William Jeffrey Casto

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Fordism and Modernist Forms argues that Fordism is an American manifestation of a global tendency towards concentration and rationalization that we know as "monopoly capitalism." Fordism, as part of the historical transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, reshapes and reorganizes the structures of modern life - accentuating repetitive habits and efficient behavior, replacing craftsmanship with deskilled labor, and integrating consumer culture into identity formation. These socio-economic transformations obfuscate the actually existing structures that produce their uneven societies and the monotonies of modern, everyday "life" and, therefore, create an artistic crisis of representation as the individual increasingly relies on the prisms …

Cold War Pulp: Gender And Fiction In The Age Of Liberation, James Lewis Hood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The early decades of the twentieth century saw incredible changes in both literacy and general publishing. Once literature had been the domain of the elite, but now it was the daily pleasure of compeople. The changes in American culture in the middle of the century, combined with this revolution in publishing and literacy, combined to produce texts frequently referred to as pulp-fiction, works easily and cheaply produced for a mass-market. This market actively catered to diverse interests, perhaps most significantly the sexually alienated. Works of gay and feminist pulp fiction served to show alienated gay men and women, as well …

Uneven Ground: Figurations Of The Rural Modern In The U.S. South, 1890-1945, Benjamin S. Child

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

New modernist studies has opened wide the discussion about what modernism means, when it begins, and, compellingly for the purposes of this project, where it occurs. Exploring intersections between modernization, modernism, labor, and segregation in the agricultural South, this dissertation demonstrates how the effects of nascent industrialization, emergent technologies, and "modern" thought are animated by figures and spaces associated with--or performing--versions of rurality. The project is divided into three major sections. In the first, I suggest that the contradictions of African American life in the post-Reconstruction world are parsed in the period's literature through the presence of a veiled georgic …

Relocating The Cowboy: American Privilege In "All The Pretty Horses", Maia Y. Rodriguez

Global Tides

American novelist Cormac McCarthy published the first installment of his Border Trilogy, a novel entitled All The Pretty Horses, only a decade before the turn of the 21st century. Within a few months, essays by Alan Cheuse and Vereen M. Bell would set the tone for scholarship on McCarthy's work for the decade to follow. However, in 2012 Jordan Savage revolutionized the conversation on the concept of "border" within the Border Trilogy, identifying it as an ideological myth. This paper will further Savage’s analysis using Jacques Derrida’s Deconstructionist theory in order to analyze the binaries created by the border …

The Power Of Multiplying: Reproductive Control In American Culture, 1850-1930, Virginia B. Engholm

Theses and Dissertations--English

Prior to the advent of modern birth control beginning in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of pregnancy, post-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adult years. The average birth rate per woman in 1800 was just over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to just under than three and a half. The question that this dissertation explores is what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge in the wake of this demographic shift. What’s at stake in a woman’s decision to reproduce, for herself, her family, her nation? How do women, and society, control birth?

In …

The Divided Reception Of The Help, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The reception of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two other novels about race relations by southern white writers: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Like Gone With the Wind, The Help has been a pop culture phenomenon— prominent in bookstores and box offices, and the “darling of book clubs everywhere.” In January 2012 when I asked students in my Women in Modern Literature class what was the best book they had recently read by a woman, most named either The Help or The Hunger …

Terror, Hospitality And The Gift Of Death In Morrison’S Beloved, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

The “us versus them” narrative still pre-dominates the analysis of terrorism in the West, which invariably associates “them” with terrorism. Toni Morrison’s hauntingly memorable novel – Beloved – provides a radically different and historically grounded view of terror and terrorism in the West. The novel not only releases us from the “us versus them” paradigm by demonstrating America’s intimacy with terror, it also enables us to examine terror and terrorism from the perspective of a gendered and ethnic subject who subverts the easy categorization of “us” and “them” or civilized and terrorist. Following Jacques Derrida’s contemplations on death and terror, …

Physicians, Patients, And Poets, Mary Ball Markow

Honors Theses

I examined the works of William Carlos Williams, Peter Pereira, Rafael Campo, Tory Dent, Lucia Perillo, and John Rybicki to gain a better understanding of the field of medicine. I selected these authors based upon their varied experiences with illness, disease, and loss. Their prose and poetry illuminate the nature of medicine and provide insight into human nature as well. The thesis has been edited for the SMBHC Thesis Repository to protect the copyright interests of some authors and publishers. The table of contents has been edited to reflect the changes.

Gravity In A Jar: A Poetic History Of The People, Places, And Events Of Detroit, Morgan Mccomb

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I explore the history of the city of Detroit in order to better understand the factors that have led to Detroit's current state. The research materials I have used are standard history books as well as newspaper articles, journals, and published interviews with former and current Detroit residents. I have incorporated this research into the construction of both a strict research element as well as poetry in order to present varying accounts of the city of Detroit beginning in the early 20th century and continuing into the present-day. I have found that the history of Detroit has …

Magical Me: Self-Insertion Fanfiction As Literary Critique, Melody Strmel

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the traditions of textual interaction that impact the forms of reading engaged in with fanfiction. This thesis continues by exploring how self-insertion fanfiction functions as a medium through which authors express their reading of the text primary through the emotional impact of the text through wish fulfillment, and the interaction of their cultural moment and the text. Furthermore, it argues that self-insertion fanfiction is a mode of literary critique in which the author acknowledges the effect of a mediated world on their perception of self and reality. Through this recognition of a constructed self, the author rejects …

Modern(Izing) Burial In Interwar American Literature, Victoria Marie Bryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims to study literary representations of interwar American deathways as reflections of modernity. The study of burial in United States history tends to focus on mid- to late-nineteenth century movements that distance the dead from the living. This dissertation argues that these practices left Americans ill-equipped to process the influx of death from the conflict areas of World War I, keen to allow the further development of the funeral industry during the interwar period, and anxious about the certain rise in death tolls that would result from World War II. Interwar literature, therefore, exhibits a difficulty in meaning-making …

Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Subversive Storytelling From The Bunchgrass Edge Of The World, Elizabeth P. Tyson

Scripps Senior Theses

Annie Proulx’s three Wyoming short story collections, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is, tell regional stories that push against the myths surrounding the American West. Elements of Naturalism in her work reverse the paradigm of man’s dominance over the frontier. The cyclical nature of time in her stories shows the unfulfilling nature of nostalgia. She uses folk storytelling techniques to take an insider’s perspective and to utilize the subversive nature of dark humor.

Faulkner's Feeble Few: The Mentally Impaired Citizens Of Yoknapatawpha, Matthew Brent Foxen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores Faulkner's use of mental impairments and illnesses, by analyzing closely three of his characters. With chapters focusing on Benjy Compson, Tommy, and Darl Bundren, this work investigates the literal, aesthetic, and figurative purposes that each man serves in his respective novel. It identifies commonalities and differences among these and other mentally impaired or ill characters.

Front Matter, Tom Mack Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.

The Blithedale Romance: Sympathy, Industry, And The Poet, Matthew Chelf

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

No abstract provided.

Understanding Death In Brown And Poe: Backgrounds And Continuities, Anthony Cunder

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

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.