Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Bibliography For The Study Of Text And Image In Modern European Culture, Natasha Grigorian

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Prose And Polarization: Environmental Literature And The Challenges To Constructive Discourse, Paige E. Costello

CMC Senior Theses

This work explores how authors employ literary modes to persuade readers towards one side or another of the environmental debate and whether the works promote constructive discourse on environmental issues. It uses two seminal works from each side of the environmental discourse, Silent Spring and The Population Bomb and The Ultimate Resource and The Skeptical Environmentalist, to analyze stylistic differences and similarities, to compare public reception, and to explain the increasing polarization of environmental discourse.

The Machine, The Victim, And The Third Thing: Navigating The Gender Spectrum In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake And The Year Of The Flood, Lindsay Mccoy Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Atwood's depiction of gender in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. In an interview from 1972, Margaret Atwood spoke on survival: "People see two alternatives. You can be part of the machine or you can be something that gets run over by it. And I think there has to be a third thing." I assert that Atwood depicts this "third thing" through her characters who navigate between the binaries of "masculine" and "feminine" in a third realm of gender. As the female characters—regardless of their passive or aggressive behavior—engage in a quest for agency, …

Harvesting The Seeds Of Early American Human And Nonhuman Animal Relationships In William Bartram's Travels, The Travel Diary Of Elizabeth House Trist, And Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, Leslie Blake Vives

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses ecofeminist and human-animal studies lenses to explore human animal and nonhuman animal relations in early America. Most ecocritical studies of American literature begin with nineteenth-century writers. This project, however, suggests that drawing on ecofeminist theories with a human-animal studies approach sheds light on eighteenth-century texts as well. Early American naturalist travel writing offers a site replete with human and nonhuman encounters. Specifically, naturalist William Bartram's travel journal features interactions with animals in the southern colonial American frontier. Amateur naturalist Elizabeth House Trist's travel diary includes interactions with frontier and domestic animals. Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, a conduct …

Frank And Gala, Heather M. Mcgrail

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through the gossip and rumors in a small town in Minnesota, the townspeople discuss and react to the Levison family's claimed perfection.

Wisteria And Other Stories, Michael Clayton

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

We are forever shaped by the worlds we live in. The following stories are musings on the importance of time and place and on the conflicts that arise for characters who are born into and who live with or rail against those forces. The stories are set in and around Laurel County, Georgia over a period of decades. They look at the people who are made there and the lessons they learn or fail to learn as they work to make their way there.

The Restinga, Valerie Harbolovic

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Restinga explores dysfunctional sexual relationships in the familiar context of a love triangle, but it is set in the exotic African landscape of pre-war colonial Angola in 1960, where the author spent her childhood. The Restinga evolved from a short story presented at a graduate fiction workshop led by Joseph and Amanda Boyden at the University of New Orleans’ Madrid campus in the summer of 2007.

Research for this project included:

• Many interviews with the author’s parents
• Compilation and review of family home movies made at the time
• Interview with Richard J. Houk, author of the article: “The Hotel …

Lines Of Communication: Uncovering War’S Reality Through Fictional Styles, Kelly Hoarty

English Student Scholarship

In looking at war literature, Word War I was a pivotal event in how many authors view the war and communicate its effects on society to their audiences. Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway are two novelists in the twentieth century, who wrote to portray the physical and psychological damage soldiers suffered in battle and upon returning home. All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque and The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway utilize different writing styles, but both effectively work within fiction to bridge the gap of understanding between the soldiers’ experiences and the civilians on the home front, …

Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch

Dissertations

Despite a high number of ticket sales, theater reviews, and innumerable letters and diary entries detailing trips to the theater, the stereotype that theater in nineteenth-century America was almost culturally invisible continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century drama, even though figures like Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights. Just as it did in American life, theater exhibits a strong presence in the literature of the time. Considering theater’s pervasiveness, this dissertation seeks to restore it to its proper place in our study of …

“A Moral Wilderness”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’S The Scarlet Letter, Lehtie Chalise Thomson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter portrays his understanding of Puritan doctrines and culture. He addresses sin and redemption through his primary characters Hester Prynne and the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, whose adultery has resulted in the birth of Pearl and Hester’s scarlet A. He demonstrates Hester’s refusal to publically accept her sin as such. He also outlines the physical demise and spiritual indecision of the minister as Dimmesdale struggles to live two opposing lives. I call attention to how Hawthorne takes his knowledge of the New England Puritans and alters the historical context to emphasize his Romantic views of sin …

Bat Species Diversity At An Urban-Rural Interface: Dominance By One Species In An Urban Area, Jason Philip Damm

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The growth of urban areas is known to affect different species of wildlife in varying ways. Many organisms have exhibited declines in abundance due to habitat loss, while overall species diversity decreases. Bats can serve as reliable indicators of habitat quality and level of anthropogenic disturbance. To investigate urbanization impacts on a Midwestern bat community, I analyzed nine years of mist-net captures from a study area on the edge of Indianapolis, Indiana, where the percentage of urbanized ground cover ranged from zero to 26%, within 1.3-km of a net site. I used Pearson correlation statistics to examine the effect of …

The Watchmaker Series, Christopher Michael Seelie

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Watchmaker Series celebrates and inquires into time as a biproduct of consciousness and practices the application of this notion in poetry. The series begins with the numeral poems, all of which relate directly to the theoretical and polemical aspects. Along the way, other poems with individual titles are interspersed to reflect or redirect the abstract considerations to more concrete subjects. Gradually, as the series progresses, the interacting and recurring associations meld theory and practice into a compositional whole.

The central notion that contemporary poetry is not a machine made of words but rather, like the watch that gives itself …

Strike Out Across The Shoreless Ocean, Julia Claire Paajanen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

What happens between a reader and a poem is none of my business. The world has always been yours; find your own way.

(1) Every choice is correct.

(2) Everything is true.

(3) What is anything, unless so far as it is enjoyed?

All you have to do is see the course, and when you see it, go.

Fairy Tale Stylization Project, Dan Gleason

Modern World Fiction

The Fairy Tale project is a group project that captures the key distinctions in literary style that we analyze in our Modern World Fiction class. In that class, we look at fiction through the lens of different stylistic flavors: maximalism, minimalism, ludic (playful) style, surrealism, and magical realism. The fairy tale project helps students look back on all these different styles, reflect on them, and note their key features and differences more clearly. In this project, groups of students will rewrite a fairy tale in all (five) literary styles. Each member of the group will rewrite the tale in one …

Experiencing Literary Self-Consciousness In The Classroom, Dan Gleason

Modern World Fiction

This activity is a fun and even bizarre response to John Barth’s highly self-referential story “Lost in the Funhouse.” In that story, Barth comments extensively on the writing as it happens (as he makes it happen), alerting the reader to the conventions of fiction as he deploys them. The following activity brings such jarring commentary into the classroom by leading students to call out the conventions of the classroom as they happen; the activity makes students live the experience of interruptive meta-commentary and can thus lead to vibrant discussion on the commentary in the story, too.

Kurt Vonnegut's Early Novels: Searching For Meaning In A Meaningless World, Matthew Praxmarer

All Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates three novels by Kurt Vonnegut: The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and the philosophical stance which informs these works. The Sirens of Titan represents Vonnegut’s cosmology as well as his first attempts to propose one purpose for human life not based on any absolute knowledge. Cat’s Cradle proposes a provisional, ever-changing belief system in the religion of Bokonon, a religion which also speaks to Vonnegut’s humanism. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater satirizes the discourses of the free enterprise system through protagonist Eliot as he struggles to use his wealth …

Party Line: Allen Ginsberg And Political Expression In Death & Fame, Todd Ide

The Hilltop Review

Mention the name Allen Ginsberg and it is hard to resist the urge to drift back into the psychedelic-colored world of the 1960s where free love, drugs and the Beat Poets influenced the literary landscape. Ginsberg came into his own as part of the Beat generation. It was during this time that he helped give voice to the “youthful, dissatisfied, rebellious” energy “that would soon coalesce into the” political “culture and practices of the New Left” (Lee 365). The publication of Howl, not only expressed the feelings of a generation but also became, according to literary critics, one of the …

Reading 9/11 Through The Holocaust In Philip Roth’S The Plot Against America And Art Spiegelman’S In The Shadow Of No Towers, Stella Setka

Re-visioning Terrorism

This essay argues that Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of New Towers open up new spaces for reading the trauma of 9/11 not simply as the tragic story of a single day in 2001, but as a traumatic event that shares referents with other catastrophes in history, most notably the Holocaust. Further, the author demonstrates that these works are more concerned with the politicization of 9/11 than they are with the terrorist attacks themselves.

Nationalism, Alterity, And Cognitive Studies In Mohsin Hamid, Laila Halaby, And Jess Walte, Aaron Derosa

Re-visioning Terrorism

This essay explores the metaphoric construction of the terrorist Other in 9/11 scholarship and literature. While academics demand an ethical engagement with Arab and Muslim Americans, they unwittingly reify a binary distinction of Other-Same that triangulates terrorist identity through ordinary Arabs and Muslims. Looking at Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land and Walter’s The Zero, I suggest an alternative metaphor for terrorism not as a regional or religious population, but as an internal impulse that dwells within us all. Doing so more ethically and productively aligns terrorism with the threat to global security in the post-9/11 era.

The Singularity Of Puppies, Michael Furlong

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The Singularity of Puppies is an unsettling short story set in 1978 in DeLand, Florida. The story concerns the relationship between eight-year-old Joey Brown and his puppy, Fredrick Brown. The story was originally published in The Fantastique Unfettered #3. The Singularity of Puppies is speculative fiction, and a tribute to Fredric Brown (1906-1972), a science fiction and mystery author.