American Studies Commons^™

Iktomi: A Character Traits Analysis Of A Dakota Culture Myth, Marianne Sue Kastner

Dissertations and Theses

This qualitative study comparing three separate English-language versions of a single Dakota cultural myth "Iktomi" presents a novel systematic approach for analyzing Native American folk tales to understand how stories function as tools of transmission of cultural information and knowledge. The method involved coding character traits according to type with regard to representation, ability, or attribute to ascertain patterns among the codes and elucidate character roles and relationships, reorganizing the coded traits into paired polarized correspondences to clarify relationships among traits, and assessing pronoun use and documenter effect pointing to gender-specific character activity. Findings revealed an encoded framework illuminating how …

Rice, Cale Young, 1872-1943 (Sc 2646), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2646. Letter of Cale Young Rice, 29 December 1919, disputing a poor review of his poetry by literary critic William Braithwaite and complaining of similar criticism by others. The letter may have been directed to the Boston Evening Transcript, where Braithwaite was literary editor. Includes a note of 22 December 1919 asking that the letter be printed.

Aa Ms 06 Home Is Where I Make It - Oral History Collection Finding Aid, Marieke Van Der Steenhoven

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

This oral history project was directed by Dr. Maureen Elgersman Lee, of USM, and Rachel Talbot Ross. The interviews were conducted by local high school students. The Collection includes transcripts, photographs and audiotapes from the two phases of the project, which documented African American life in the Greater Portland and Lewiston-Auburn areas.

Date Range:

2001-2003

Size of Collection:

1 ft.

Curriculum Design For An Integrated Language Arts Class At The High School Level Utilizing A Multi-Genre American Studies Approach, Susan K. Biddulph

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Curriculum integration and multi-genre approaches to education are acknowledged to be beneficial to both student learning styles and skill development; however, due to time and budget constraints, many teachers do not implen1ent these approaches. This language arts curriculum utilizes a theme-centered approach that smoothly integrates many subject areas and encourages skill development while adhering to the Utah Common Core Curriculum and incorporating multiple lean1ing styles. The theme of the curriculum is gender role expectations throughout history. While the units primarily rely on primary texts, they also incorporate numerous secondary texts in multiple subject areas and require both formal and informal …

Table Of Contents

The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard & Pulp Studies

Prefatory Remarks, by Mark E. Hall

The Writer’s Style: Sound and Syntax in Howard’s Sentences, by David C. Smith

I ’n’ I A-Liberate Zimbabwe: Motifs of Africa and Freedom in Howard’s "The Grisly Horror," by Patrick R. Burger

Robert E. Howard and the Lone Scouts, by Rob Roehm

"Sword Woman," review by Charles Hoffman

"Solomon Kane and the Castle of the Devil," review by Charles Gramlich

"John Carter of Weird Worlds," review by Charles Gramlich

"Reflections on Le Fanu," review by Charles Gramlich

Living A Parallel Life: Memoirs And Research Of A Transnational Korean Adoptee, Mary C. Robinson

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

This thesis project consists of two parts: a memoir of my experience as a Korean adoptee, and a research paper examining how transracial, transnational adoption affects identity development in Korean adoptees. The memoir, as a first person narrative, gives voice to the research as one example of the findings. The majority of research on Korean adoptees has focused on levels of adjustment within a short time frame after adoptees’ placement in their adoptive homes. While the overwhelming majority of the prior research has declared positive and overall satisfactory adjustment for most adoptees, serious flaws exist in the methodologies that do …

New Forms Of Contemporary Aesthetics: A Review Article Of New Works By Camerotti And Quaranta, Marina Mantini

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Evans's The Turducken And Chekhov's The Seagull, Brian R. Johnson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Evans's The Turducken and Chekhov's The Seagull" Brian R. Johnson approaches The Turducken as a travesty of The Seagull, examining six iconic scenes from The Seagull, in order to explore the satirical effect of the altered scenes. In December of 2008, Bedlam Theatre of Minneapolis presented The Turducken, "a holiday dinner theater spectacular inspired by Anton Chekhov's The Seagull." Playwright Josef Evans takes Chekhov's 1895 work and turns the classic piece into a musical and farcical satire. The plot of The Turducken follows the plot of The Seagull, and some scenes …

Barthelme's "Paraguay," The Postmodern, And Neocolonialism, Daniel Chaskes

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Barthelme's 'Paraguay,' the Postmodern, and Neocolonialism," Daniel Chaskes explores the analytic opportunities afforded by conjoining globalizing critical approaches with a story by an author who has often been circumscribed by the postmodern rubric. Donald Barthelme's "Paraguay," written the summer after Nelson Rockefeller's fact-finding mission to South America in 1969, provides a chance to consider modes of anti-colonial critique in Barthelme's work. It also offers examples of a more self-reflective criticism aimed at the U.S. counterculture and the indeterminacies of postmodernism. Chaskes reads "Paraguay" with the aim of understanding Barthelme's hemispheric interest and he investigates the multiple cultural …

Intercultural Approaches To Cities And Spaces In Literature, Film, And New Media: A Review Of New Work By Manzanas And Benito And López-Varela And Neţ, Ana María Martín Castillejos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Evoking A Memory Of The Future In Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Doro Wiese

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Evoking a Memory of the Future in Foer's Everything is Illuminated" Doro Wiese discusses Jonathan Safran Foer's novel. In the text a photograph plays a decisive role: the image of two young people drives the Jewish American Jonathan to visit the Ukraine. The photograph is presumably of Jonathan's grandfather Safran and a woman named Augustine who saved Safran's life during a nazi raid of his village: the photograph becomes an ekphrasis, a description of a visual work of art in another medium which transforms the generic characteristics of written and photographic representations. According to Anselm …

Egypt's Police State In The Work Of Idris And Mahfouz, David F. Dimeo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Egypt's Police State in the Work of Idris and Mahfouz" David F. DiMeo examines how two leading twentieth-century authors of politically committed fiction addressed an angry generation's confrontations with former members of the oppressive state police apparatus. Yusuf Idris's The Black Policeman (1962) and Najib Mahfouz's al-Karnak (1974) remain particularly relevant as today's Egyptian activists confront the vestiges of the former regime's security forces. Using Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnival as a paradigm for analysis, DiMeo examines how both texts present sharp contrasts between hollow quests for public revenge through purges and a genuine overturning of …

Metaphor Translation As A Tool Of Intercultural Understanding, Ipshita Chanda

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Metaphor Translation as a Tool of Intercultural Understanding" Ipshita Chanda takes up specific cases of metaphor translation as a methodological exercise towards understanding intercultural exchange. Chanda's study is based on a semiotic and linguistic understanding of metaphor as a signifying and cognitive device. When a metaphor is translated from one linguistic-literary field into another, the process of translation itself yields some specific operational steps for studying inter- and cross-cultural relations. Here, translation is not proposed as a framework but as practical method: the translation of metaphor becomes an exercise in strategy for the pedagogy of …

Aesthetics In Gao's Soul Mountain, Mabel Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Aesthetics in Gao's Soul Mountain" Mabel Lee analyses Nobel Laureate 2000 Xingjian Gao's aesthetics. Transnational conglomerates today control the book industry from publishing house to bookshop and through aggressive market strategies they exert considerable influence on readers. Nonetheless, there are writers who refuse to capitulate to market demands and seek only to actualize their aesthetic ideas in the creation of literary texts. One such writer is Gao, author of the novel Soul Mountain. Lee posits that Gao's aesthetics is founded on the close interrogation of both Chinese and European models and practices and explores specific …

Nostalgia In Oral Histories Of Israeli Women, Yael Zilberman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Nostalgia in Oral Histories of Israeli Women" Yael Zilberman explores the narration of nostalgia of elderly women about the city of Be'er Sheva. In their narration, the subjects of the study create textual and spatial practices which are engendered and create analogies between the city, their maturing/ed bodies, and by-gone youth. Further, the grief owing to the perceived condition of the city intensifies the idealized description of the city and the longing for its past. Zilberman's study brakes new ground in that the study of urban experience within folklore is a lesser explored field as the urban …

Victims Of The City In Novels Of Zola And Dostoevsky, Marta L. Wilkinson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Victims of the City in Novels of Zola and Dostoevsky" Marta Wilkinson argues that urbanity in its nineteenth-century setting functioned as the culpable agent in criminal behavior found in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and in several of Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. Wilkinson an analysis of the novels based on Merlin Coverly's concept of psychogeography which supports the extension of the cityscape as an integral part of the novels' characters. Further, Wilkinson illustrates how in Zola's and Dostoevsky's novels the city reigns triumphant as characters fall victim to disease, drink, or are left with desperate choices: in Dostoevsky's novel …

An Undergraduate Seminar On Irish Musical Culture In Ireland And The Irish Diaspora In America, Including The Influence Of Irish Music On Appalachian Folk Music Culture, Frieda Eakins

Masters Theses

The following project establishes a concise, yet multifaceted design for a seminar on Irish musical culture. While it was initially developed as a course for its author to teach in the undergraduate, on-ground classroom, this project provides a framework adaptable enough for use by other instructors and/or for additional music seminars. This project is unique in its two-fold purpose in that the design and resources are directed to assist the instructor with streamlining course curriculum preparation, while the course content specific to the project when utilized offers students in the undergraduate college classroom a better understanding of Irish musical culture …

Witch Hazel Advent, The Story Of An Ozark Poet, Sarah Moore Chyrchel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this Master's thesis project was to document the life of my maternal step-grandfather, John Ross Rule, in a visually compelling manner. Using equipment provided by the Lemke Department of Journalism at the University of Arkansas, I shot and edited a half hour long documentary film comprised of interviews and footage of John at his home near Winslow, Arkansas. John is a talented poet, and segments of his poetry are woven throughout the film.

The inspiration for this project is deeply rooted in place: the remote farmstead in the Boston Mountains of northwestern Arkansas that my grandparents called …

Contemporary Us-American Satire And Consumerism (Crews, Coupland, Palahniuk), J.C. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Contemporary US-American Satire and Consumerism (Crews, Coupland, Palahniuk)" J.C. Lee focuses on contemporary satire's potential (or lack thereof) for change, reform, or rebellion through an investigation of works by Harry Crews, Douglas Coupland, and Chuck Palahniuk, all of which target consumerism. The said writers employ satire not to initiate rebellion or cultural change, but to reflect the problematic role of institutions in modern life and, in turn, the potential, even hope, for personal growth. Lee's analysis of texts by Crews, Coupland, and Palahniuk is intended to question satire's potential as a form of cultural critique and institutional …

Memory, Identity, And Narration: A Book Review Of New Work By Assmann And Conrad And Tilmans, Vree, And Winter, Simona Mitroiu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.