Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Tolkien As A Literary Artist (2021) By Thomas Kullmann And Dirk Siepmann, John R. Holmes

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by John R. Holmes of Tolkien as a Literary Artist: Exploring Rhetoric, Language and Style in "The Lord of the Rings" (2021) by Thomas Kullman and Dirk Siepmann

A Sense Of Tales Untold: Exploring The Edges Of Tolkien's Literary Canvas (2021) By Peter Grybauskas, Dennis Wilson Wise

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by Dennis Wilson Wise of A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien's Literary Canvas (2021) by Peter Grybauskas

Adapting Tolkien (2021), Edited By Will Sherwood, Douglas C. Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by Douglas C. Kane of Adapting Tolkien (2021), edited by Will Sherwood

Sweet Fooling: Ethical Humor In King Lear And Levinas, Kent R. Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"In recent years, scholars have increasingly put the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1623) in dialogue with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995)... The majority of these Shakespearean references are to Hamlet and Macbeth, but contemporary critics working in the vein of Levinas have tended to favor King Lear. No Shakespearean play has been subjected to Levinasian analysis more fully or more frequently.⁵ This critical proclivity is not unwarranted, for Shakespeare's tragic play and Levinas's ethical writings tell the same basic story: that of the egoist who heedlessly pursues his own interests until he is until he …

Tolkien, Cline, And The Quest For A Silmaril, Tom Ue, James Munday

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

J. R. R. Tolkien has had a significant influence on American writer Ernest Cline. In Ready Player One (2011), the character Ogden Morrow invites Wade and his friends to his mansion, which is modelled after Rivendell from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (2001- 03). Cline goes further in his sequel Ready Player Two (2021) by staging a part of Wade’s virtual quest on Arda I, the First Age of Middle Earth. In this paper, we focus on this episode and, in so doing, argue for Cline’s insights into how we approach fantasy. First, we attend to the …

Who’S His Daddy? Approaches To Merlin’S Father In Children’S And Ya Media, Michael Torregosa

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In the 1130s, Geoffrey of Monmouth originated the character of Merlin, setting him upon the world stage as a wonder-working youth fathered (in the tradition of Greek and Latin authors of the past) by a daemon. However, later writers of the Middle Ages, beginning with Robert de Boron, reconceived Merlin within a more Christianized world, altering his heritage and transforming his sire into a demon from Hell. This shift from benign daemon to malevolent demon has impacted the representation of the wizard of Camelot for centuries. Contemporary fiction for the page as well as for the screen has adopted and …

"Shivering Trees": Horror Monstrosity In Selected Stories From Tolkien’S The Silmarillion, Elise Mckenna

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien used conventions of horror within the setting of Arda. To begin with, the entire world, which is monstrous, is in upheaval with mountains being raised and valley being delved, lanterns of light created, and huge beings walking the land. Then, these landscapes are torn down, the lights are smashed and go out, and new creatures of horror prowl the world. The differences between the portrayals of monstrosity on a grand scale border the grotesque and the sublime. Monstrous beings, Valar and Maiar, command the elements of earth, air, fire, water. They have pre-ordained roles that …

The Story, The Narrator And The Reader: Mediated Horror In C.S. Lewis’S Narniad, William Thompson

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In her introduction to Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture, Jessica R. McCort defines horror for children and young adults as a hybrid genre, one having its roots in both the gothic and the nineteenth-century fairy tale. She explains that the exploration of dark forces in children’s books is often not limited to those tropes traditionally associated with the horror genre for adults: “Think of the books that are considered children’s classics. The best of them contain dark forces of one kind or another, as well as internal battles between the light and the dark: …

Environmental Horror And Restoration: Tolkien And Today, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Caitlin Rottler

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

J.R.R. Tolkien never forgot the felling of a willow tree that had overlooked the mill-pool in Sarehole, nor how his former climbing companion had been left to rot in the grass. His horror at that small environmental violence bleeds through his works, from poems like “From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames” (1913) to the Party Tree in The Hobbit (1937) to a letter to The Daily Telegraph in 1972 when he decried the modern “torture and murder of trees.” This presentation will draw on the excellent foundations laid by Dinah Hazell, as well as the father-son pair of …

Nature And Horror In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Julia Bowers

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Tolkien incorporates horror in his legendarium through the twisting of the natural world in order to signal upcoming dangers to his characters. This creates a dichotomy between the idyllic natural world that represents good in his works and the twisted natural world that has been tampered with by evil. Most of the focus on Tolkien’s portrayal of nature looks at the conflict between nature and technology; the natural world of Middle-earth is portrayed as more complex than merely all nature being good. His natural settings take on an eerie tone to convey a sense of horror to the reader as …

Charles Williams' P'O- L'U - The Cthulhu Connection, Eric Rauscher

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

This presentation delineates the connections between horrific elements in the work of H.P. Lovecraft and the situation of P’o-L’u from Charles Williams.

Delight In Horror’: Charles Williams And Russell Kirk On Hell And The Supernatural, Camilo Peralta

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Charles Williams has always been one of the more overlooked members of the Inklings, and the continued neglect of his poetry and “supernatural thrillers” suggests that he is not likely to experience a dramatic increase in popularity anytime soon. Similarly, Russell Kirk is an American historian who will always be better known for writing The Conservative Mind in 1953 than for any of the dozens of short stories and novels he wrote, many of which deal with ghostly or supernatural themes. In fact, Kirk acknowledged Williams to be an important influence on his fiction; this influence is perhaps most evident …

White Shadows, Black Riders And Restless Wights: Undead Horror Monsters In The Fantasy Worlds Of J.R.R. Tolkien And George R.R. Martin, Franz Klug

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

The proposed essay aims at comparing J.R.R. Tolkien’s Nazgûl and barrow-wights with the white walkers (also known as “the Others”) and wights from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. To begin with, the folkloric/mythological templates for these sub-created monsters would be scrutinized. The introductory ascription of source material would be followed by an analysis of these creatures as horror monsters and gothic elements within the fantasy worlds of Tolkien and Martin. This analysis would also be linked to addressing the question of how the gothic/horror genre influenced the fantasy worlds of both authors, and as in …

Adoring The Head Of Alcasan: Posthuman Horror And Anticipatory Corpse In Lewis’S That Hideous Strength, Mark Brians

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

At the pinnacle of Lewis’ That Hideous Strength (2003) is the reanimation of the decapitated head of Francois Alcasan. The sheer biological persistence that is afforded to it by the biosynthetic technics of medicinal artifice, allows the head to be possessed by “macrobes”— maleficent spiritual beings imprisoned within the circle of the moon. The goal of this reanimation project is purportedly “the conquest of death […] to bring out of that cocoon of organic life […] the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick …

The Overlooked Vampire: Might Macdonald’S Lilith Be Repopularized?, A. J. Prufrock

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Lilith (1895) is George MacDonald’s premier work of symbolic fiction. W.H. Auden asserts that Lilith is “equal, if not superior, to the best of Poe." A cursory reading of the novel reveals much in Narnia can be traced directly to passages. Why has MacDonald’s Lilith received so little commentary and why is it picked up and then put down by even avid readers of fantasy? Universalist theology and chauvinism have been blamed, but literary style is unarguably the main stumbling block. C.S. Lewis, who says of MacDonald, “I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not …

Tolkien As A Folk Horror Author, Monica Sanz

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Folk Horror, although being identified as a cinematographic genre quite recently, sinks its roots in an undeniable tradition of English writers who used English rural landscapes, ancient beliefs and culturally differentiated communities as humus for their prose and poetry. From the literary tradition of the 8th Century on, creatures and beliefs belonging to dark times have left their mark on our literature, traditions and folklore. Tolkien, as a philologist, was well aware of the hints and bits of these almost unknown legends and creatures left in our language, in the form of loose words, etymologies and fragmentary texts. In this …

Books Within Books In Fantasy And Science Fiction: “You Are The Dreamer And The Dream”, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

This chapter discusses books that exist only within works of science fiction and fantasy—what the “List of Fictional Books” on Wikipedia calls a “fictional book” and what Claire Fallon calls “invented books” in her article for the Huffpost website, “Fictional Books Within Books We Wish Were Real.”

The David Oberhelman Collection Of Science Fiction, Fantasy, And Tolkieniana At Oklahoma State University, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

In September 2020 I drove to the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Stillwater campus to see “The David Oberhelman J. R. R. Tolkien Collection” exhibit, on display on the Edmon Low Library’s second-floor mezzanine in the Lisa and Mark Snell Gallery.

Exploring Shakespearean Influence On Executive Leadership In Finance: A Qualitative Narrative Inquiry, Erik Decicco

All Theses And Dissertations

This qualitative narrative inquiry sought to investigate perceptions of executive leaders in finance about how Shakespeare can influence leadership performance. It employed a conceptual framework in dramaturgical analyses (Goffman, 1959) and a theoretical framework in reflective leadership (Schon, 1983). Separate semi-structured interviews were conducted with five participants to gather data, which was coded in vivo. Codes were then analyzed and sorted into themes. The study was driven by two major research questions and a sub-question: The two major research questions and sub-question guiding this study were as follows: (1) What are perceptions of executive leaders in the financial industry about …

Japanese-English Translation: Katayama Hiroko—Jesus And Simon Peter (June 1953), Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Translation of 「イエスとペトロ」、片山廣子著、昭和２８年６月

Source: Aozora Bunko (a digital archive of public-domain Japanese-language works)

General website: https://www.aozora.gr.jp

Current text: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001346/files/50159_41222.html