American Literature Commons^™

Faulkner, Freud, And The Holy Family: The Portrayal Of The Joseph Figure In Light In August, Richard Boland

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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"Not Gone Or Vanished Either:" William Faulker's Use Of Memory And Imagination, Kevin Daniel Gleason

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines the role that memory and imagination play in three of William Faulkner’s novels: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished. While most scholars perceive Faulkner’s characters as burdened, debilitated, and destroyed by the past, I argue that Faulkner presents a wide spectrum of engagement with the past which includes the potential for memory to serve as a tool of redemption and power. Henri Bergson’s notion of the fluidity of all time past, present, and future forms the center of Faulkner’s understanding of time, and in this paradigm, Faulkner’s characters are capable of creating and …

The Father Birth, Alissa Nutting

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative dissertation is a fabulist and satirical novel. The book follows the story of main character and narrator Earleen, an atypical and hyper-intelligent sixteen-year-old who continues to be traumatized by her sociopathic father even after he dies. A self-taught bookworm born in the early 1980s, her formative years were spent trapped inside her parents' rural methamphetamine cookhouse. When her parents blow up inside their house during a drug-manufacturing incident on the eve of Earleen's early adolescence, she finds herself in the arms of an affluent adoptive couple (Dennis Stark, a fertility specialist, and his homemaker wife Beverly) who have …

“Speaking With” The Ravine: Representation And Memory In Five Cultural Productions Of Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, Karl Germeck

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis examines the rich and layered intertextual relationship between five artistic representations of the razed neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, and its former residents. These works include Seattle-based photographer Don Normark’s 1999 photography collection Chávez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story; the full-length dramatic play Chavez Ravine, written and first performed by Los Angeles-based Chicano comedy troupe Culture Clash in 2003; Jordan Mechner’s 2004 short documentary film Chávez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story; Ry Cooder’s musical album Chávez Ravine: A Record by Ry Cooder; and lastly, high school history teacher Ken Aven’s 2006 debut …

“'You Done Cheat Mose Out O' De Job, Anyways; We All Knows Dat'”: Faith Healing In The Fiction Of Kate Chopin, Karen Kel Roop

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, the half-way mark of the century in which the country itself would be broken in two, Kate Chopin was destined to bear witness to the many divisions that have distinguished the United States. Especially noticeable in the post-Reconstruction period in which she wrote was the expanding chasm between the races. This dissertation argues that even Chopin's most seemingly orthodox Southern stories betray a quest for a theology capable of healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual ills omnipresent in the country and especially apparent in the post-Civil War South. The alternative to mainstream Protestantism …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Sew Speak! Needlework As The Voice Of Ideology Critique In The Scarlet Letter , "A New England Nun," And The Age Of Innocence, Laura L. Powell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the Nineteenth Century, needlework, and embroidery in particular, became a signifier of feminine identity. Needlework was such a significant part of women’s lives and so integral to the construction of femininity in nineteenth-century America that both pictoral and narrative art demonstrate numerous representations of women embroidering. The sheer volume of these representations in the Nineteenth Century suggests that the practice of embroidery provides a way of speaking for women—a representation of the voice of subjectivity silenced by patriarchal ideology. Because needlework serves as a signifier of ideal femininity, it provides uniquely fruitful and previously unexplored opportunities for investigating how …

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

A Montage In Its Leaves, Andrew S. Nicholson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation consists of a series of lyric poems preceded by an introduction to those poems. The introduction gives a background to the method of composition and historical precedents to the poems, connecting the lyric poems to the writing and thoughts of William Blake, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Creeley. The poems are presented in three parts, and cover a variety of subjects, frequently favoring the presentation of subjective experience over an imagined objectivity.

Nabokovilia: References To Vladimir Nabokov In British And American Literature And Culture, 1960-2009, Juan Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The dissertation examines allusions to the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov in the work of 147 contemporary cultural producers and – through this filter – the way in which allusion functions as symbolic capital in the field of cultural production. Critics have traditionally considered allusion a strictly localized phenomenon, but this approach – which draws upon the work of sociologists of literature such as Franco Moretti and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as the poetics of Gérard Genette – considers how a Nabokov allusion operates as an intra-authorial calling card, where Nabokov appears as an idealized, intransigent autonomous authorial figure in the …

Gatsby And Jazz: One Coin, Two Sides, Sally Van Der Graaff

2011 Awards for Excellence in Student Research & Creative Activity - Documents

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Toni Morrison's JAZZ both tell the story of the American 1920s, but from opposite points of view. Fitzgerald and Morrison offer two compelling narratives of the societal shift that took place in post-World War 1-era America, but although the accounts share the same general topic and historical era, it is otherwise difficult to reconcile the two American portraits that have been painted. It is as though the two authors are giving a description of the same coin, but one describes the front and the other describes the back. To the white population this …

Smith, Cornelia Stanley (Allen), B. 1839? (Sc 2437), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2437.  Letters from various magazine editors, literary agents and publishers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Rochester, New York and Augusta, Maine to Cornelia Stanley (Allen) Smith, who submitted prose and poetry under the pen name "Clio Stanley."

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 1836-1907 (Sc 164), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 164. “Love’s Calendar,” handwritten poem by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The Atlantic Monthly, of which Aldrich would later become editor, published the poem under the title “Snow” in its March 1866 issue.

Reasonable Conversions: Susanna Rowan's Mentoria And Conversion Narratives For Young Readers, Karen Roggenkamp

Faculty Publications

Though not well known, Rowson's Mentoria-a curious conglomeration of thematically-related pieces from multiple genres, including the essay, epistolary novel, conduct book, and fairy tale-offers particularly fertile ground for thinking about the nexus between eighteenth-century didactic books and earlier works for young readers.2 At the heart of Mentoria is a series of letters describing girls who yield, with dire and frequently deadly consequences, to the passionate pleas of male suitors.3 Fallen women populate Rowson's world, and scholars have traditionally read Mentoria within the familiar bounds of the eighteenth-century seduction novel.4 However, Rowson's creation transforms the older tradition of didactic, child-centered conversion …

Ovid, Christians, And Celts In The Epilogue Of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

CHARLES FRAZIER HAS CAREFULLY SITUATED HIS NOVEL ABOUT AN American Civil War deserter within Greek and Latin classical literary traditions. Since its publication, Cold Mountain has all but universally been hailed as an “odyssey” by readers, critics, and scholars, in recognition of its structure as an adventure-laden homeward journey, with the end goal of reuniting two lovers; it is rich with Homeric allusions (even to the point of quotation) and typologies of both character and scene (Chitwood; McDermott, “Frazier Polymêtis.”; Vandiver). In the first chapter, the author further introduces two fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus (18), a thinker whose …

"What's A Goin' On?" People And Place In The Fiction Of Edythe Squier Draper, 1924–1941, Aubrey R. Streit Krug

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay is devoted to looking back into the life and fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, a twentieth-century writer in Oswego, Kansas. Many of Draper’s stories are set in southeastern Kansas. Through them, we gain a sense of how she attempted—and at times failed—to perceive, articulate, and adapt to her place on the Great Plains. Draper claimed the identity of a rural woman writer by writing herself into narratives of colonial, agricultural settlement, and she both complicated and perpetuated stereotypes of class and race in her fiction. By examining her and her characters’ perspective on their place in the Great …

Word~River Literary Review (2011), John Quinn, Gary Pullman, Susan Nyikos, Steven Kunert, Denise M. Rogers, Bruce Wyse, Victoria Large, Kate Sweeney, Jeremy Beatson, Blase Drexler, Thea Cervone, Victor Hawk, Andrew Madigan, Ross Talarico, Akin Taiwo, Dianna Calareso, Jeffrey Arnett, Gail Radley, Gene Washington, Laurie Duesing, Brian R. Young, Anne Stark, I.M. Chapman, Natalie Ivnik Mount, Rebecca Leah Păpucaru, Katy E. Whittingham, Judy Shearer, Alex M. Frankel, Nina Schneider, Rosann Kozlowski, Norah Bowman-Broz, Maggie Wheeler, Jade Hidle, Susan Howard, Eddie Malone

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Our premier issue was published in Spring 2009. We are always looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published.

We define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching under part-time contracts during the summer or …

"Undone By Murmurs Of Love": Traumatic Legacies And The Struggle For Personal And Communal Identity Formation In Toni Morrison's Trilogy, Fida Yasin

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Implications of racial oppression on personal and collective African American identity formation in Toni Morrison’s trilogy are explored in this thesis. Morrison reconstructs African American history in her trilogy, but she also enacts a cultural healing through content and form. Impossible choices are made by characters in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise who are influenced by the racial trauma they experience and inherit. The legacies of oppression--traumatic memories, fragmentation, stereotypes and negative associations—distort the way these characters view themselves and one another. They are disoriented, isolated, and displaced. Characters recover from their past trauma— together—when they share their stories. …

Besson, Luc (1959- ), Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

Originally published in Encyclopedia of Religion and Film. Ed: Eric Mazur. ABC-CLIO, 2011

"Besson, Luc (1959- )" by Marc DiPaolo

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Leone, Sergio (1929-1989), Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

Originally published in Encyclopedia of Religion and Film. Ed: Eric Mazur. ABC-CLIO, 2011

Leone, Sergio (1929-1989) by Marc DiPaolo

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share