Feasting At The Threshold: Transubstantiation, Queer Desire, And Homonationalism In Diane Duane’S The Tale Of The Five, Taylor Driggers

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Diane Duane’s ongoing pulp fantasy series The Tale of the Five (1979- ) is set in a world marked by constant bodily transgressions and surprises, where a human and dragon can occupy the same body and become lovers and a one-night stand can bring one face-to-face with God. This essay will argue that Duane’s series articulates eroticism in a manner comparable to Linn Marie Tonstad’s (2016) queer re-visioning of transubstantiation and bodily and spiritual transformation through the Eucharist. Acts of eating and drinking serve to highlight how characters’ pansexual, polyamorous relations with each other and the love of the Goddess …

The Underworld As The Heroine’S Journey Home: Marvel, Xena, And Mythic Reimaginings, Valerie Estelle Frankel

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Hell is traditionally a place of torment, where the young heroine, like Persephone or Eurydice, is kidnapped by the patriarchy, leaving others to rescue her. The last few decades, however, have offered a model closer to Sumerian Inanna, in which the heroine is enlightened by hell or even conquers it. Angela, Queen of Hel: Journey to the Funderworld by Marguerite Bennett (2016) gives its heroine this path. Winning back her beloved, Angela, sister of Thor and Loki, becomes queen of the underworld but then prefers to bring Sera back to earth in a flip on Eurydice. The Xena episode “Fallen …

Infernal Landscape In Jacob’S Ladder (1990) In Light Of Carl G. Jung’S Theory Of Individuation, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Carl G. Jung’s conception of the human psyche as an inner realm that gives access to profound, numinous experiences inspired many artists and popular culture authors to portray heaven and hell as symbolic expressions of the opposite forces within the human psyche rather than cosmological or supernatural regions. In my paper, I will concentrate on how the Hollywood film Jacob’s Ladder (1990) directed by Adrian Lyne, by portraying the main character’s descent into a deathbed vision depicted as hellish reality, reflects Jung’s theory of individuation, a process of self-realization that aims at reconciling various elements of the psyche and achieving …

Hell On His Mind: Dean Winchester’S Journey To Hell And Back, Anna Caterino

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Season three of Supernatural (2005-2020) closes with a shot of Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) in Hell. The place has no discernible features and resembles neither the long waiting line nor the gothic castle of later seasons. The few elements that do characterize it, however, make it look like a brain, the labyrinth of ropes reminiscent of neurons. This association introduces Hell as a place that exists first and foremost in Dean’s dead. The lack of establishing shots and the abstract terms used to discuss Hell, damnation, and Dean’s experience further support this claim, working in its favor. After all, the …

The Righteousness Of The Damned In Jeffrey Konvitz’S The Sentinel, Raymond G. Falgui

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

The paper will examine the nature of the damned in Jeffrey Konvitz’s 1970s pulp horror novel The Sentinel by using a framework utilized by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, wherein damnation involves a species of spiritual blindness that masquerades as righteousness and shields the damned (for a time) from an awareness of their ultimate condition. Specifically, the paper will provide a character analysis of the co-protagonist Michael, arguably one of Konvitz’s more complex literary creations, and the role he plays in briefly elevating a generic genre-contrived plot into the realm of true spiritual horror. While making such a …

Welcome And Announcements, Mythsoc Stewards

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Welcome and Announcements

Join us for a screening of the Welcome and Announcements video, and have a cup of coffee before we get started!

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Vs. The Hours (2002): How Does The Patriarchy Infringe On The Autonomy Of Marginalized Characters?, Mary E. Belton

2023 Symposium

Fans of Virginia Woolf know that her literature, such as A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway, cover feminist themes. In adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s work, the same feminist themes are present. For example, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, based on three women whose lives are connected through Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, carries similar feminist themes. In the 2002 adaptation of The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry, the relationships between men and women in the film illustrate how the patriarchy operates socially.

To those who don’t know Virginia Woolf’s work well or are unaware of how …

Weather In Middle-Earth Or Tolkien: The Weather-Master?, Jonas Mertens

Journal of Tolkien Research

Abstract

This article attempts to shed light on the use of weather in general and meteorological expressions in The Lord of the Rings, as J. R. R. Tolkien is well known to be a writer for whom the environment and natural world is closely intertwined with his storytelling. Both a manual count and a count which a digital text analysis tool were combined to find the frequency of previously selected weather terms. In total, more than 2,000 references were found in the books, with the words ‘sun’, ‘wind’ and ‘cold’ being the most abundant. Meteorological expressions are frequently encountered in …

Perspective, Invention, And Metatheater In Renaissance Literature, William Roudabush

English Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation challenges the misconception of post-Reformation England as iconophobic. On the contrary, it argues that early modern English poets and playwrights adapt Continental theories and techniques from painting, translating them into their own poetic and dramatic forms. It explores how allusions to contemporary perspectival images serve as governing metaphors and structural devices for the works in which they appear. Particularly in the genre of the Elizabethan epyllion and in works by Shakespeare, it suggests that texts are designed to be read “perspectively,” to borrow Shakespeare’s coinage, so that they are open to ambiguity and multiplicity, and capable of being …

Transcorporeal Habitus: Adapting Sociological Embodiment To The Self-Conscious Anthropocene, Trevor Bleick

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The knowledge that humans have become a geological force necessitates a reimagining of what it means to be human. This thesis explores the ways in which bodies (both human and nonhuman) are represented within the self-conscious Anthropocene. This tripartite analysis, synthesized in the term ‘transcorporeal habitus,’ presents a framework through which we can better understand the ways bodies are entangled within a greater ecosystem. By drawing on the works of scholars in the fields of sociology, ecocriticism, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) this thesis provides the groundwork for reimaging humanness in a period of immense change. Pierre Bourdieu and Stacy …

Appropriated Voices: William Blake’S “The Little Black Boy” And British Antislavery Poetry, Brett J. Mattson

All NMU Master's Theses

British antislavery poetry in the late 1700s is well characterized by the first stanza of William Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy” when his black speaker says “o! my soul is white; … But I am black as if bereav’d of light” (2-4). These statements that seem to exclude each other exemplify the discussions and arguments that antislavery poets had been publishing and would continue to deliberate after “The Little Black Boy” was printed in 1789. Other poets, while appropriating the voices of enslaved people or Africans, as Blake does in “The Little Black Boy,” often emphasize differences between their …

Remix The Manuscript: Transcription Tools Dataset 2.0, Michelle Warren, Arielle Feuerstein

Other Faculty Materials

The document posted here is an annotated dataset of digital tools for transcribing handwritten manuscripts. Release 2.0 was created in 2022-23 by Arielle Feuerstein as part of the ongoing project "Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments.” The file attached here contains the dataset as completed on June 28, 2023 along with credits for prior contributors.

Twenty-First Century Receptions Of Tolkien (2022), Edited By Will Sherwood, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Kristine Larsen, of Twenty-first Century Receptions of Tolkien (2022), edited by Will Sherwood

(Special Section) The Hymn As Protest Song In England And Its Empire, 1819–1919, Oskar Cox Jensen

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Hymns played a role in envoicing the politics of protest in England long before their integration in the established Church – and do so to this day. Yet it was nineteenth-century radical movements that embraced the hymn as in many ways the ideal musical form. From the bloody field of Peterloo to the secularising South Place Society, from the mass meetings of Chartists to the top-down productions of the Fabian socialists, the century resounded with this increasingly familiar music.

Many writers laid claim to the rhetoric of the hymn to advance causes from abolitionism to solidarity with Poles exiled to …

Tolkien And Diversity (2023), Edited By Will Sherwood, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Kristine Larsen, of Tolkien and Diversity (2023) edited by Will Sherwood

Review Of Figurations Of The Feminine, By Siobhán Mcilvanney, Tonya J. Moutray

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Siobhán McIlvanney's Figurations of the Feminine, by Tonya J. Moutray

Review Of Sapphic Crossings, By Ula Lukszo Klein, Ziona K. Kocher

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Ula Lukszo Klein’s Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Ziona Kocher.

Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince And Saidiya Hartman, Carolina Hinojosa

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This chapter utilizes Hartman’s methodology of retrieval to create a map1 in StoryMap JS2 (“the map” or “this map”) that analyzes multiple geographic spaces in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The map is an archive or a witness to some of the geographical spaces Mary Prince lived (and was sold) as an enslaved woman seeking freedom and the places in which Saidiya Hartman has conducted research or visited in Ghana as a “free” woman. Layering the past over present creates a …

Along And Against The Grain: Close Reading The History Of Mary Prince, Kristina Huang

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Due to the highly mediated conditions of its production, The History of Mary Prince presents a challenge to New Critical methods of reading that are frequently taught in undergraduate literature classrooms. Without questioning the British abolitionists’ textual representation of Prince’s experiences, readers unfamiliar with the historical conditions for slave narratives may attribute the publication’s sentimentalism and representations of violence as direct expressions of Prince. This essay mobilizes close reading towards contrary ends: I throw the editor’s (Thomas Pringle’s) paratextual material, particularly the Preface, under scrutiny by close reading its insistence on transparency and symmetry between the first-person narrative and Prince …

Mary Prince’S Undisciplining Lessons: Counter-Narrative And Testimonio In The History, Kerry Sinanan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay discusses teaching The History of Mary Prince at a Hispanic Serving Institution via Ethnic Studies praxis. It develops Nicole Aljoe’s definition of Prince’s narrative as counter-story and testimonio and explores the undisciplining effects of reading Prince’s history as relevant to the lives of Borderlands students. To understand the multiple meanings of “undisciplining’ this essay draws on the theory of Sylvia Wynter and shows how Prince’s testimonio offers an alternative to Western epistemologies via communal resistance and resurgence. Several pedagogic tools are explored for teaching Prince in this way.