Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Can We Really Make A Difference?, Michael Atten '12

2010 Spring Semester

Over the course of history, which type of person makes a bigger impact, an active manipulator fighting to stay alive or a passive observer floating along in the sea of life?

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, and Maus, by Art Spiegelman, answered this question differently. Billy Pilgrim, the main character of Slaughterhouse Five, was so passive and uncaring about his fate that he effectively came “unstuck” in time. Conversely, Vladek Spiegelman of Maus put up a fight at every opportunity and never willingly traveled along in life. However, neither character made a difference on the events of the Second World …

The Possibility Of Female Autonomy In The Awakening And “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Liana Nicklaus '10

2010 Spring Semester

Both The Awakening by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman present female main characters pursuing individual autonomy. At first, it would appear that both of these characters gain their freedom in the course of their respective stories. In The Awakening, Edna is able to escape from her husband into a new house, and pursue romantic interests with other men, and at the end of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the protagonist exclaims, “I’ve got out at last!” (Gilman 20). However, there are several elements in each piece which hint that liberation is not truly achievable. In actuality, societal …

Female Liberation In The Awakening And “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Kevin Chen '10

2010 Spring Semester

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” both initially published in 1899, present strikingly similar stories of the plight of women in society. Both texts adopt a markedly feminist bias, narrated from the point of view of a female protagonist who wrests with the restrictive conventions of a misogynistic society before finally breaking free through separation from the thinking world, via suicide in The Awakening and insanity in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Some would argue that the women themselves are flawed, through either mental instability or rampant libido, and thus the stories are skewed through the eyes …

Crane And Chopin: Ideas Of Transformation, Vijay Jayaram '11

2010 Spring Semester

Though Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening are largely considered unrelated novels, they share one major idea: that of the failure of transformation. This is depicted in the respective evolutions of Crane’s Henry Fleming and Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, each of whom suffers a loss of identity in their respective awakenings. This idea is borne not out of imagination, but rather, the experiences of the authors themselves. Crane created Fleming to satirize his post-war world, while Chopin invented Edna to do the same in her sexually repressive society. Through the unsuccessful evolutions of their protagonists, these …

Puppies, Pearls, And Corpses On The Road: F. Scott Fitzgerald’S Treatment Of Women In The Great Gatsby, Eleanor Cory '12

2010 Spring Semester

“…That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (21). These are the words of Daisy Buchanan, a woman around whom the entire novel seems to revolve. Her story is one of a woman who loses her first love and instead marries a man who proved unfaithful and angry. Knowing that the story was written as a critique of society at the time, one might expect Daisy to eventually empower herself to leave this situation and escape the stereotype of the weak woman. The actual story could not be more different. In his attempts …

Going No Place?: Foreground Nostalgia And Psychological Spaces In Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Sean Scanlan

Publications and Research

This essay argues that the power of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth comes not from Lily Bart's function as a mere symptom of historical and economic pressures, but from the complex narrative and psychological process by which she negotiates a sequence of homes and their repeated collapse. Informing this process is nostalgia, a feeling that frames Lily Bart's step-by-step fall from riches to rags. Reading Lily via cognitive and family systems approaches suggests that Lily's rootlessness is predicated on a subtle transformation from her reliance upon simple “background” (aesthetic and monetary) nostalgia to a more complex and overwhelming “foreground” …

The Hacker And The Hawker: Networked Identity In The Science Fiction And Blogging Of Cory Doctorow, Robert P. Fletcher

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Memories Cloaked In Magic: Memory And Identity In Tin Man, Anne Collins Smith

Faculty Publications

In Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995], J. P. Telotte argues that "through its long history, one that dates back to the very origins of film, this genre [science fiction] has focused its attention on the problematic nature of human being and the difficult task of being human." [1-2] The thesis of the book, he states, is "relatively simple—that the image of human artifice ... is the single most important one in the genre. [...] Through this image of artifice, our films have sought to reframe the human image …

" Lu-Li-Lunacy And Sorrow:" The Grotesque In John Irving's The World According To Garp, Nicole J. Homer

Theses

No abstract provided.

Divergent Worldviews In Ron Rash's "Serena", Brenda Dye Stephens

MA in English Theses

Ron Rash, through Serena, captures the often misunderstood complex nature of the Appalachian people in the early twentieth century and the effects of human centered environmental changes on this culture and natural landscape. The focus of this analysis involves viewing Serena through the lens of ecofeminism and introducing Rash's vision of the important interrelationship between landscape and culture, particularly in light of the historical outsider vision and its impact upon the people of Appalachia.

The culture and natural environment of the Appalachian people are revealed through the gazes of the characters. Through the fictional viewpoints in Serena,Rash creates a …

Dickinson And Smith: Years Apart But Not So Different, Nicole Day

English

Even though there were sixteen years separating them, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson had much in common. They both use death as a theme to explore and mock life. Their small poems have a lot to say about life and death.

Sources Of Fear In American Society: Representations In Short Horror Fiction, 1950s-Present, Mona Moin Syed

Theses Digitization Project

This study examines the ways in which short American horror fiction has always revolved around fundamental fears of mortality, and how these fears have shifted across the span of three specific timeframes. Using a historical lens, this study also explores what the specific nature of mortality fears, as reflected in particular instances of short horror fiction, historically reveal about contemporaneous cultural attitudes toward end of life issues, loss, doubt, and grief. This study also traces how the perceptions of mortality have dynamically changed in American society from 1950s to present times in accordance with powerful historical events, varying cultural contexts, …

Kittens In The Oven: Race Relations, Traumatic Memory, And The Search For Identity In Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Natalie Carter

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The search for an ever-elusive home is a thread that runs throughout much literature by authors who have immigrated to the United States. Dominican authors are particularly susceptible to this search for a home because “for many Dominicans, home is synonymous with political and/or economic repression and is all too often a point of departure on a journey of survival” (Bonilla 200). This “journey of survival” is a direct reference to the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The pain and trauma that Trujillo inflicted upon virtually everyone associated with the Dominican Republic …

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives, Najwa Heather Al-Tabaa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis interrogates the postmodern view of popular culture as being banal and questions Theodore Adorno's view of postmodern consumer culture as ultimately anti- human(istic). My re-reading of postmodern popular culture finds that there is potential for meaningful human interaction through popular culture. My re-reading asserts that popular culture is capable of being a vehicle for solidarity. In my analysis I locate a postmodern paradigm shift in which human solidarity becomes a necessary consideration and focus of postmodern narratives and art forms. I term this shift "post-postmodernism" which is marked by a focus on solidarity.1 While the shift to the …

Calvinism And Military Justice In American Literature, Nadia Hamilton Morales

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper explores judicial process in the military as revealed in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny and Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. The purpose of my project was to conduct an in depth study of Essentialism in military justice that is indicative of a culturally specific form of information management, as revealed in these texts. Essentialism is a form of information management that relies upon classification qualified through intuitive knowledge and superficial signification. This signification is used to certify the existence of self-contained states that function as a metaphorical metonymy for multiple unknowns. Moreover, …

Lights And Shadows - 2010, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

William Plomer, Transnational Modernism And The Hogarth Press, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

William Plomer (1903–73), a self-described Anglo-Afro-Asian novelist, poet, editor and librettist, spent only the early years of his lengthy career as a Hogarth Press author but still ranks as one of the Woolfs’ most prolific writers, with a total of nine titles issued during his seven years with the Press. Like Katherine Mansfield, Plomer made his mark with Hogarth before signing with a more established firm, but the depth and breadth of Plomer’s career with the Woolfs is significantly greater: his five volumes of fiction presented Hogarth’s readers with groundbreaking portraits of South African, Japanese and (British) working class cultures. …

“Murdering An Aunt Or Two”: Textual Practice And Narrative Form In Virginia Woolf’S Metropolitan Market, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

As evidence for the multiple connections between the commercial and intellectual freedoms provided by the Hogarth Press for its co-owner and leading author, consider a diary entry from September 1925:

How my hand writing goes down hill! Another sacrifice to the Hogarth Press. Yet what I owe the Hogarth Press is barely paid by the whole of my handwriting…I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors. Yesterday I heard from Harcourt Brace that Mrs. D & C.R. are selling 148 & 73 weekly--Isn’t that a surprising rate …

"The Thought Of What America": Ezra Pound’S Strange Optimism, John Gery

English Faculty Publications

Through a reconsideration of Ezra Pound’s early poem "Cantico del Sole" (1918), an apparently satiric look at American culture in the early twentieth century, this essay argues how the poem, in fact, expresses some of the tenets of Pound’s more radical hopes for American culture, both in his unorthodox critiques of the 1930s in ABC of Reading, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and Guide to Kulchur and, more significantly, in his epic poem, The Cantos. The essay contends that, despite Pound’s controversial economic and political views in his prose (positions which contributed to his arrest for treason in 1945), …