American Studies Commons^™

Trust-Based Learning And Its Importance In Intercultural Education, Clemens Seyfried

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Trust-Based Learning and Its Importance in Intercultural Education" Clemens Seyfried introduces the concept of "trust-based learning," an approach he developed for learning in an intercultural world and applied in primary and secondary education. The objective of the concept is the raising of opportunities students with (im)migrant background in education. Seyfried presents an overview of the educational situation of (im)migrants and ethnic minorities in the European Union with special focus on Austria, followed by a description of the said concept of trust-based learning including the results of a statistical survey conducted in Austria. The focus of the concept …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article About New Work By Ashcroft, Mendis, Mcgonegal, Mukerjee And Carrera Suárez, Durán Almarza, Menéndez Tarrazo, Alejandra Moreno

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Time, Photography, And Optical Technology In Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Tetyana Lyaskovets

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Time, Photography, and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory" Tetyana Lyaskovets discusses how Vladimir Nabokov narrates time in his autobiography by invoking photography and optical instruments. Photography and optical technology function in Speak, Memory as metaphors and probe the limits of chronological time. Nabokov portrays time as personal and reversible time that collapses the past and the present and allows one to glimpse the future. Because this temporal collapse is not possible physically but, as Nabokov believes, can be achieved through one's will, he engages optical technologies which provide a spatial form for his project to …

Review Article About U.S. Comparative Literature Journals Published In 2013, Miaomiao Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Queering Masturbation In Lorde's Life And Writing, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Queering Masturbation in Lorde's Life and Writing" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde's life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby going beyond mere theory and positing her body as a space of complex sexual passions. When Judith Butler speaks of gender as performative rather than embodied, Lorde theorizes and foregrounds this in her works and self and celebrates a sexual matrix that ranges from heterosexuality to homosexuality to auto-sexuality. Lorde places masturbation between the binary …

Motherhood And Sexuality In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Amanda Kane Rooks

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Motherhood and Sexuality in Flaubert's Madame Bovary" Amanda Kane Rooks examines the narration of relationships in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary between Emma's role as mother and her sexuality. Rooks argues that this narrative relationship provides a space where the association between the oppressions of motherhood and women's sexuality can be better understood. Further, Rooks posits that Flaubert's narrative condemns the nineteenth-century Western predilection for constructing a relationship of mutual exclusivity between motherhood and sexuality, while it exposes socially sanctioned performances of motherhood and sexuality as allied, perverse manifestations of the same repressive ideological system.

Postmodernist Poetics And Narratology: A Review Article About Mchale's Scholarship, Biwu Shang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Applying Early Existential Critiques To Contemporary Themes In American Culture, Erik S. Berquist, Derek J. Skillings

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Charles Taylor, Carl Elliot, Alexis De Tocqueville, and Lionel Trilling have presented and critically analyzed a number of ideals that animate currents in contemporary American Culture, which include authenticity, sincerity, pluralism, subjectivism, and self-actualization, but these ideals do not harmoniously coexist; rather, they inevitably conflict. These notions have been realized in a way that is unique in their current understandings. Though there is the appearance of some homogeneity amongst these themes, they inevitably clash and contain internal tensions. The philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche respond to many of the ideas that underlie these modern notions. Though differing in degrees, these critiques …

Robber Barons And Humbuggers: The Rise Of Philanthropic Museums In Nineteenth-Century New York, Meaghan O'Connor

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

New York City's most recognizable museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History came to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century thanks to the support of wealthy benefactors. At the same time, social reformers, mostly Protestant and middle or upper-class, were combating the vice and poverty that they saw in the diversifying city with a moralizing rhetoric of character building. This paper will show that these two movements, the rise of Philanthropic Museums and the Social Reform movement were connected and that the large temple-like museums that thrive to this day …

Lessons In Liminal Space: Borders As Pedagogical Tools In No Country For Old Men, Steven Norton

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

As scholars continue to explore the territories created by burgeoning interdisciplinarity and ever-growing global networks, the concept of borders become a topic of increased theoretical and pedagogical discussion. Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, set at the Texas-Mexico border, provides an opportunity to explore the liminal nature of borders and their role in identity formation. The novel allows us to embrace the fluidity of borders and see, as Gayatri Spivak argues, that “we are made by the forces moving about the world” (3), rather than divided by them. Throughout No Country for Old Men, McCarthy posits that borders …

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.

Using Analogues To Simulate Intensity, Trajectory, And Dynamical Changes In Alberta Clippers With Global Climate Change, Jamie L. Ward

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alberta Clippers are extratropical cyclones that form in the lee of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and traverse through the Great Plains and Midwest regions of the United States. With the imminent threat of global climate change and its effects on regional teleconnection patterns like El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), properties of Alberta Clipper could be altered as a result of changing atmospheric circulation patterns. Since the Great Plains and Midwest regions both support a large portion of the national population and agricultural activity, the effects of global climate change on Alberta Clippers could affect these areas in a variety of ways. …

Hotel Bukovyna, Rebecca Ann Bosshart

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This collection of short stories and first chapter of a novella take place in the historical area of Bukovyna, the beech tree land, partly located in Chernivetska region, western Ukraine. On the edge of it, or under it, or traveling to and from it, in contemporary time. I've been occupied with "the outsider," represented here, and where the seven stories reside, by the giant grande dame tourist hotel on Main Street, across from Shevchenko Park, in Chernivtsi, the region's city center. The occupants: the outsider looking in and around. Outsiders looking at other outsiders. An outsider being welcomed in. Most …

Going Anywhere: Stories, David Armstrong

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Growing up in a rural, Appalachian town, I recognized that tight-lipped doggedness was a mark of strength. As a writer, I became intrigued by how I might portray people whose defining attributes were silence, how essentially to give voice to voicelessness. The answer for me was to begin exploring place as an origin of inner expression. The stories in Going Anywhere track people moving through the landscape, their journeys, often destinationless, traversing the space between life's dark realities and the fantastic leaps of faith we all make to survive. A father seeks out a way to deal with the unexpected …

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 …

Framing Identity: Repudiating The Ideal In Chicana Literature, Michael A. Flores

All NMU Master's Theses

In the 1960s Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez penned his now canonical, epic poem “I Am Joaquin.” The poem chronicles the historic oppression of a transnational, Mexican people as well as revolutionary acts of their forefathers in resisting tyranny. Coinciding with a series of renewed, sociopolitical campaigns, collectively known as the Chicano Movement, Gonzales’ poem uses vivid imagery to present an idealized representation of Chicanos and encouraged his reader to engage in revolutionary action. Though the poem encourages strong leadership, upward mobility, and political engagement the representations of women in his text are misogynistic and limiting.

His presentation of the “black-shawled …

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 …

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, 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 …

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 …