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The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’S “The Vanishing Half” And Her Intent On Revealing The Unseen In The Tradition Of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue 2022 Clemson University

The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’S “The Vanishing Half” And Her Intent On Revealing The Unseen In The Tradition Of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue

All Theses

Throughout the trajectory of passing literature, there have been varying projections of racial identity as it is intertwined with choice and power. Despite the many commonalities between the archetypal passing novel, the differences in the way that passing is demarcated in various novels is indicative of the racial climate out of which it came. This paper considers Britt Bennett’s 2020 novel, The Vanishing Half, as a socio-political artifact of an allegedly post-racial era. In considering Bennett’s novel as a reflection of post-raciality, a comparative study incorporating Nella Larsen’s Passing, Douglas Sirk’s Adaptation of Imitation of Life, and Danzy …


Hungry For More: American Food Writing And Globalization, Andrew Kleinke 2022 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Hungry For More: American Food Writing And Globalization, Andrew Kleinke

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation, Hungry for More: American Food Writing and Globalization, investigates several food-focused texts including novels, travelogues, culinary memoirs, and TV shows. I take an interdisciplinary approach by incorporating literary theory into the field of food studies to argue that food texts from the United States reveal a growing anxiety towards what, how, and where we eat. As I show, food writing plays a prominent role in shaping many Americans' interactions with the world. More specifically, I argue that globalization has changed, and continues to transform, access and attachments to food. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I examine …


Decolonizing Female Archetypes: Creating An Oppositional Consciousness In Contemporary Chicana And Iraqi Women’S Fiction, Semah Salih Hussein 2022 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Decolonizing Female Archetypes: Creating An Oppositional Consciousness In Contemporary Chicana And Iraqi Women’S Fiction, Semah Salih Hussein

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In dominant imperialist discourses, women, such as Iraqi women and Chicanas, have been marginalized in political, social and economic structures and have been manipulated to maintain imperialist exploitation and processes. They have been frozen within certain archetypal configurations. Iraqi women have been misrepresented as victims of their culture and traditions, and Chicanas have been represented in derogatory terms or excluded from mainstream hierarchies of representation. This study examines some counternarratives and oppositional subjectivities/ consciousnesses provided by Iraqi and Chicana women writers through their utilization of the legacy of a number of fictional and historical female figures. The primary texts analyzed …


American Fears: H.P. Lovecraft And The Paranoid Style, Bailey Marvel 2022 East Tennessee State University

American Fears: H.P. Lovecraft And The Paranoid Style, Bailey Marvel

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Why is H.P. Lovecraft still relevant? That is the one the questions put forward by this thesis. Lovecraft is known for his creation of Lovecraftian horror, also known as cosmic horror. However, his bigoted view on race and class muddies this legacy. What this thesis seeks to explore is how Lovecraft’s work demonstrates the fears and anxieties central to the America psyche. The paranoid style can be found in American discourse throughout history but it can also be found in the works of Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft was a prejudiced and paranoid man, and his prejudices and paranoia are a major …


A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White 2022 East Tennessee State University

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.


135th Street Branch: Librarianship And The Passing Fictions Of Regina Anderson Andrews And Nella Larsen, Caitlin Matheis 2022 University of Nebraska-Lincoln

135th Street Branch: Librarianship And The Passing Fictions Of Regina Anderson Andrews And Nella Larsen, Caitlin Matheis

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, I examine how two writer-librarians that worked in the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in the 1920's, Regina Anderson Andrews and Nella Larsen, grappled in their fiction writing with questions of classification, information, and knowledge that encompassed their daily work in the library. I begin by contextualizing the branch within the Harlem Renaissance and Arturo A. Schomburg's call for the preservation of Black history and literature at a time when the field of librarianship was being professionalized by implementing library schools and classification standards. I then provide readings of Andrews's one-act play …


She Speaks Her Truth: Black Female Self-Empowerment In African-American Centric Texts, Britt N. Seese 2022 Bowling Green State University

She Speaks Her Truth: Black Female Self-Empowerment In African-American Centric Texts, Britt N. Seese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

A Master's Portfolio that looks into African-American Women in African-American literature and theatrical works.


Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva 2022 University of Mary Washington

Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva

Student Research Submissions

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, share a place in the canon of American children’s literature as novels centered on female protagonists coming of age within an emblematic period in American history, respectively the duration and aftermath of the Civil War and the post-Homestead Act settlement of the Western frontier. Each text portrays the intertwined processes of girlhood and nationhood through the eyes of rebellious, gender-nonconforming protagonists, Jo and Laura, who each undergo an arc towards starting a traditional family and immersing themselves in normative national projects (respectively a philanthropic school for the poor, …


Where Epistemology And Metaphysics Touch In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Seth Vannatta 2022 Morgan State University

Where Epistemology And Metaphysics Touch In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Seth Vannatta

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In Lois Lowry’s dystopian young adult novel, The Giver, the veil of perception— the gap between appearance and reality— is woven into the community as a policy measure meant to establish Sameness—the effort to insure a world without conflict, inequality, difference, pain, or freedom of choice. But a question lingers in the premise of the novel’s community. Given that our options for bridging the gap amount to building a bridge of experience across it or digging a tunnel of existence under it, has the bridge been sabotaged to render perception spurious, or has the tunnel been blocked to alter reality …


Reading The Traumatic Moment: The Role Of Socioeconomic Systems In The Color Purple And The Bluest Eye, Andrea Doll 2022 Bellarmine University

Reading The Traumatic Moment: The Role Of Socioeconomic Systems In The Color Purple And The Bluest Eye, Andrea Doll

Undergraduate Theses

There are many points of sameness between Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Both novels occur in the mid-20th century and focus on protagonists within the same race, gender, and relative class. Of all the similarities between the texts, the most influential is the trauma, sexual and otherwise, shared between Pecola Breedlove and Celie. Most notably, both characters experience incestuous rape resulting in pregnancy shortly after their first menstruation. Despite their numerous shared events and attributes, what occurs after their sexual trauma differs drastically for each character. At the end of The Color Purple …


Six-Bullets Faith, Justin R. Lazor 2022 Cleveland State University

Six-Bullets Faith, Justin R. Lazor

ETD Archive

At a religious school of unspecified denomination—but definitely NOT Catholic—two women fall in love. One of them has a chainsaw, the other a gun. There’s also a horny parrot, a horny pastor and a senile mother, not to mention Lucifer, who is a bit of a teenage girl and a HUGE Billie Eilish fan. And the end of the Universe is coming, FYI, via the Big Rip, so there’s that too. And this play is also about addiction and withdrawal and recovery and the capacity or incapacity for love to overcome forces that can overwhelm the self.


Misticismo Y Arcadismo En El Villancico Novohispano. Manuel De Sumaya Y Sus Contemporáneos, Luciana Kube Tamayo 2022 Florida International University

Misticismo Y Arcadismo En El Villancico Novohispano. Manuel De Sumaya Y Sus Contemporáneos, Luciana Kube Tamayo

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

El siglo XVIII trajo consigo una evolución estilística vertiginosa en todas las artes. La plástica, la literatura y la música confluyen y sirven de soporte a un arte nuevo, el Rococó. La floración churrigueresca está intensamente presente, además de en lienzos y biombos, en el vocabulario de la lírica de la Nueva España; a la vez que se afianzan los modelos religiosos, por un lado, se asientan los modelos pastoriles por otro. En cuanto a la espiritualidad, los modelos se encuentran encajados en la miniatura poética y el ingenio dieciochesco, desbordante de naturaleza y fantasía. En el presente trabajo me …


‘The Female Marine’ And ‘Clotel’: An Analysis Of Female Crossdressing To Escape Coercive Labor Situations In 19th Century American Literature, Kaelyn Ireland 2022 Kennesaw State University

‘The Female Marine’ And ‘Clotel’: An Analysis Of Female Crossdressing To Escape Coercive Labor Situations In 19th Century American Literature, Kaelyn Ireland

Symposium of Student Scholars

Although illegal in many U.S. cities, crossdressing was a point of fascination for Americans of the nineteenth century. Stories of real women passing as men to serve in the military—for example, Revolutionary War veteran Deborah Sampson—enchanted readers and inspired writers, such as that of The Female Marine. Ostensibly written by its heroine, but most likely written by Nathaniel Hill Wright, The Female Marine was a popular story about a young woman who was forced to become a sex worker and cross-dressed to escape her situation, then enlisted in the Navy where she served abroad the U.S.S. Constitution. At …


Eudora Welty’S “Clytie”, The Mirror Stage, And The Grotesque, Samantha Miller 2022 Pepperdine University

Eudora Welty’S “Clytie”, The Mirror Stage, And The Grotesque, Samantha Miller

Global Tides

At first glance, Eudora Welty’s short stories seem to exist in paradox with the writer’s own intentions. Welty is well known for co-opting the “plots, settings, characters, image patterns, and vocabulary” of Gothic literature, yet upon being asked if she was a Gothic writer, she responded vehemently: “They better not call me that!”. What is a reader then to make of Welty’s short story “Clytie” which is saturated with homages to the imagery of the Gothic— the display of psychological breakdown of an isolated family trapped in a crumbling, memory-haunted mansion, centering on a trapped, unmarried woman who slowly realizes …


Disorientation Of Memory: Trauma, The 9/11 Novel, And Don Delillo’S Falling Man, Julia Walsh 2022 Skidmore College

Disorientation Of Memory: Trauma, The 9/11 Novel, And Don Delillo’S Falling Man, Julia Walsh

English Honors Theses

This paper explores the literary devices and motifs used to portray 9/11 trauma on the page as representation for survivors and depictions of trauma for non-survivors. The paper focuses specifically on Don DeLillo's Falling Man as the quintessential 9/11 novel to provide analysis on the larger genre. DeLillo is experimental in his form within the novel, using fragmentation and disorientation to explore the nuances of memory function during and after a traumatic event. These nuances of memory delve into complications of remembrance such as PTSD, memory impairment diseases, and the impact of media on memory.


Valiant Consequences, JohnJulius Lodato 2022 Gettysburg College

Valiant Consequences, Johnjulius Lodato

Student Publications

War and conflict are significant events that hold a reasonable possibility to alter countries and their cultural populations. These transforming effects can come in many forms, ranging from mental trauma to the abandonment or modification of culture and its ideals. In this illustration, perhaps no group has endured the same everlasting detrimental effects as the Native Americans and their underlying consequences stemming from World War 2. These detriments can be seen in the form of erratic drunken or violent behavior and forgotten traditions. On the contrary, these effects may have at one time been diminished and replaced by the gratitude …


The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer 2022 Southern Methodist University

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …


Amanda Gorman And Her Way With Poetry, Emma Corbin 2022 Germanna Community College

Amanda Gorman And Her Way With Poetry, Emma Corbin

Student Writing

Amanda Gorman promotes perseverance and togetherness throughout her poems: “Earthrise,” “The Hill We Climb,” and “The Miracle of Morning” to challenge the narrative of our nation’s history and make the world a better place for the generations to come.


Unended Middle Passage: The Exhausted Flesh Of A Resistant Enslaved Woman, Yipu Su 2022 Dartmouth College

Unended Middle Passage: The Exhausted Flesh Of A Resistant Enslaved Woman, Yipu Su

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The supine position that characterized the existence of the captive Africans on the slave ship, “The Brookes,” haunted the two female autobiographers of the two mid-nineteenth-century slave narratives/autobiographies this essay discusses. Both Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs voluntarily adopted the supine position as their status of living when resisting sexual violence in slavery, which nevertheless exhausted their flesh. This essay draws on Hortense Spillers’ theory of flesh/body antithesis and Saidiya V. Hartman’s theory of gender construction in slavery to discuss the nature of intended exhaustion. This essay examines to what extent was the strategy of intended exhaustion efficient for both …


Can I Use The Restroom?, Brenida Thompson 2022 University of North Florida

Can I Use The Restroom?, Brenida Thompson

Touring Lincolnville: A Celebration of Historic Black Business

No abstract provided.


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