Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Redefining The Gothic: How The Works Of Carson Mccullers, Tennessee Williams & Flannery O'Connor Retained Gothic Roots And Shaped The Southern Gothic, Sarah N. Koehler

All Student Theses and Dissertations

My aim in this thesis is to explore the commonalities between Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor, particularly in terms of three main themes: isolation, the pervasion of American normalcy and gender roles. While each of these authors clearly inserts some autobiographical information into his or her characters, the real commonalities between the fictional characters can be found in their inability to fit into a traditional society; the characters in all three authors’ works are outcasts, pushed to the fringes of their communities or their families because of who they are. Sometimes these characters’ desire to be different is …

The Cultural Consciousness Of John Updike: Rhetorical Spaces As Representations Of Americana Through The “Rabbit” Series, Michael Bonifacio

All Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a scholarly examination of John Updike’s first two novels of the Rabbit saga: Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux. The discussion is centered on the cultural artifacts and geographic spaces that populate the novels and how they are a reflection of popular cultural and contemporary sociological, economic, and political climates. These items are also closely considered with respect to their rhetorical significance and how Updike makes use of rhetorical spaces to influence his readers. What may seem like ordinary places are, through Updike’s writing, imbued with rhetorical significance that sheds light on his contemporary culture and that of …

Boats Against The Current: The American Dream As Death Denial In F. Scott Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby And Arthur Miller’S Death Of A Salesman, Patrice Comeau

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

And Then, He Folds His Patterned Rug: Repressive Reality And The Eternal Soul In Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Cook

Masters Theses

While Vladimir Nabokov has deservedly earned fame as a stylist of the strange, most critics who study his novels approach his absurd and beautiful characters as little more than fractured victims of a wholly subjective reality. Compounding the misunderstanding is the tired debate over whether or not Lolita is literary, pornographic, or some cruel game of cat-and-mouse in which Nabokov seizes control of his readers' sense of morality. However, critics who read Nabokov as nothing more than a manipulative stylist neglect to realize that his characters suffer such absurd distortions of spirit and mind because their environment--the "average" reality of …

Timeline Of Creating The Original Performance Work, A Scotch Verdict, Cynthia Goatley, Rebecca Burkhardt

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

We first conceived the idea of writing a hybrid piece containing elements of opera and musical theatre in 1998. The musical, as we now call it, is based on Lillian Faderman’s Scotch Verdict, which revolves around the true story of Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods who ran a boarding school for girls in 1810 Edinburgh, Scotland. The accusation of one of their students, Jane Cumming, illegitimate grandchild of wealthy and powerful Dame Cumming Gordon, brought ruin upon the school and the schoolmistresses. Jane Cumming had accused the schoolmistresses of committing “unnatural acts” together. This tale told to Dame Gordon …

On Edge, A Gift Passed On, Willard Marwitz

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

A Hobby, Daylight Saving Time, Sandy Bot-Miller

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

The Love Song Of J. Lender Truetown, Steven W. Thomas

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Short Story: "The Honest Village", Sophia Geng

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

On The Move: Games And Gaming Figures In Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature, Douglas Anthony Guerra

Dissertations (1 year embargo)

In this dissertation, I analyze the way that gameplay, considered broadly, both facilitated and informed representations of agency in the nineteenth century. In effect, games were archives of possibility made procedurally discrete, rendering modes of action and agency legible in ways that are suggested, although differently engaged, in their somewhat less ephemeral cousins: books. Understanding that both games and books emerged from within similar fields of cultural production and often marketed themselves to the same audiences, I argue that taking a technical and materially historical approach to games helps us to explore major literary works of the period to startlingly …

The Cyborg Griffin: A Speculative Fiction Literary Journal, Hollins University

Cyborg Griffin: a Speculative Fiction Literary Journal

Notes:

copyrighted

Hollins Student Publication

Scope: short stories, artwork, poetry, essays, and comics

Paper copies shelved in University Archives.

Reintegrating Human And Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology In Rachel Carson And Barbara Kingsolver, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Rachel Carson and Barbara Kingsolver were both trained as scientists and may be expected to embrace the rationalist, mechanical view of nature as something separate from, and perhaps even inferior to, the world of humans. Yet these two women both promoted a more complex approach to modernism's scientific paradigm in which nature is not merely a separate entity for dispassionate study but also an integral part of the human community. Both women display in their rhetorical choices a keen understanding of the language of community and interconnection, and their language and writing styles constantly promote the reintegration of humans and …

Wounded Women, Varied Voice, Kathryn Johnston

Undergraduate Review

Daphne du Maurier and Sylvia Plath both use voice as a tool in their respective pieces, “La Sainte-Vierge” and “Lesbos.” Through the implementation of varied voices, these women convey female interiors. Du Maurier’s use of a third-person narrative voice in her short story “La Sainte-Vierge” allows her to comment on the lives of the main characters through the eyes of an outsider. Du Maurier’s outsider reveals a naïve and delusional housewife, unhealthy in her denial within a failing relationship. Contrasting with du Maurier’s Marie is Plath’s first-person voice of a scorned, dissatisfied housewife in her poem, “Lesbos.” Plath’s use of …

The Assertion Of Identity: Storytelling And Testimony In The Works Of Edwidge Danticat, Michael R. Kurban

Honors Theses

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat evokes the Haitian tradition of storytelling in many of her novels and short story collections. A tradition formulated by vodou religion and the amalgamation of African cultures, storytelling acts to entertain, educate and enlighten the people of Haiti. Additionally, her novels are often written in the context of traumatic events in Haitian history. While Danticat's works have been studied with focus on their depiction of storytelling and of trauma, little has been done on the restorative power that storytelling provides. In this thesis, I seek to examine the potential for Danticat's characters and works to create …

The Shamanic Archetype In Robinson Jeffers Poetry, Steven B. Herrmann

Jeffers Studies

This essay pays homage to Robinson Jeffers’s totemic presence as a shaman-poet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the essay’s author was born in 1956. It views shamanism as a symbolic process of transformation that takes place at an emotional, instinctive, and spiritual level; as a method of ecstasy found throughout Jeffers’ poetry and prose from beginning to end of his career. The shamanic archetype takes on concrete form through Jeffers’ ritual enactments of his dreams, spirit visitations, visions, and shamanistic voices that sound to him from Native influences. Science gave Jeffers a vision to behold the world’s spiritual traditions from a vista …

"What's That Noise?": Paying Attention To Perception, Excess, And Meta-Art In David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, Christopher Mccarthy

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In his graphic novel Asterios Polyp David Mazzucchelli is concerned with the nature of human perception. He highlights the limitations of perception through his title character's struggle to find a new way to filter information from the world around him. Mazzucchelli reminds us that no matter which method a person uses to look at the world there will always be excess details that he or she will ignore or simply not notice due to perceptual blind spots. I argue that, while Asterios gains a new method for perceiving the world, his true victory is in his acknowledgement that all perceptions …

Sacrificio, Violencia Y Nación En Lituma En Los Andes De Mario Vargas Llosa, Cesar Valverde

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.