Literature in English, North America Commons^™

A Call For Planetary Kinship: The Development Of New Forms Of Subjectivity In Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, Jennifer Kinne

Masters Theses

This thesis joins a vibrant conversation on the importance of storytelling in an age of climate change through an analysis of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, a strange and prophetic novel whose environments and characters are confronted with significant ecological devastation and transformation. It explores the ways in which VanderMeer opens liminal spaces between the human and nonhuman through his usage of the New Weird genre, uncanny and abcanny imagery, and monstrous characters.

In my first chapter, I will explore the emerging world of New Weird fiction and argue that this genre is uniquely suited to addressing climate change, namely because of …

From Pedagogical To The Practical: A Study Linked By Japanese Themes, Kennedy Lomont

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio consists of three essays linked by Japanese themes and also includes a practical project. These papers delve into the subjects of Japenese incarceration, magical girl anime, and Noh theater. My practical portion contains the materials that I have created and refined for job search purposes.

Confessions Of Crooks: An Analysis Of How Art Influences Society's View On Antiheroes And Redemption Through An Original Short Story Collection, Connor Thomas Wilkerson

Undergraduate Theses

The twenty-first century has successfully bred the notion that everyone who commits a morally reprehensible action is themselves a morally reprehensible individual with absolutely no redeeming factors. This notion, however, simply isn’t accurate as it is shown in not only some of the most popular media of the age but also some of the most famous crimes of the age that people who commit heinous actions aren’t always entirely heinous. With this thesis, I plan to make an argument that condemns judgement on the morality of individuals without knowing their full stories. Specifically, I plan to write a short story …

God In Harlem: Religious Symbolism In "Sonny's Blues", Katherine Bechter

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Textual or Investigative

Visualizing Literary Narratives With A Graph-Centered Approach., Meg Ermer

Campus Research Month

The art of storytelling is multifaceted and nonlinear, involving multiple characters, themes, and symbols while often jumping between the present and past. While media forms such as novels can encapsulate these complexities, it is often difficult to visualize a narrative in an easy-to-understand format. Our contribution is a graph-based system to let users organize and visualize those narratives. Events and characters are represented as nodes and their relationships are represented as edges. Neo4J is used as a database management system to store the graph and to run queries on it, and Streamlit and Pyvis are used to represent the database …

Ahab's Soul: An Exploration Of The Hero Of "Moby-Dick", Jaedon Wilkinson

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Textual or Investigative

Disrupted Ambitions And Unmasked Identities: An Analysis Of Doubleness In Sylvia Plath’S The Bell Jar And Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man In Cold War America, Laura Anderson

English Language and Literature ETDs

This thesis conducts a literary analysis on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) with a primary investigation on the protagonists and their convergence of identity in Cold War America. One of the critical discourses evaluated throughout the project’s literary analysis includes the protagonists’ complications of doubleness. This essay argues that since these two texts sit between W.E.B DuBois’s “Double Consciousness” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1988 theory on intersectionality, these protagonists are forced to contend with an identity crossroads. Secondary to the context of this analysis is the use of “post-war” and “Cold War,”; neither are …

Something “Transcendentally Stimulating”: Resistance And Antidote To Empiricist British Culture In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’S Sherlock Holmes, Crissy Preston, Crissy M. Preston

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

Sherlock Holmes is a name synonymous with detective and perhaps more familiar to households than his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His lasting impact as a literary figure is indisputable, but the curiosity surrounding the reasons for his longevity in popularity remain an enigma to many scholars and critics. In my thesis, I will discuss some of the reasons Holmes relates to readers from various time periods, age groups, and nationalities for more than a century. The first section of this project will establish the empiricist culture surrounding the decadent late 1800s, which compose the setting for most of Doyle’s …

Banned Or Grand?: Why Graphic Novels Maus And Persepolis Belong In The Classroom, Lauren Volk

Munn Scholars Awards

My capstone essay, “Banned or Grand?: Why Graphic Novels Maus and Persepolis Belong in The Classroom,” seeks to research both the objections to oft-banned memoir graphic novels being incorporated in the secondary school curriculum and the reasons why these graphic novels should not only be incorporated into the curriculum, but also why they assist students in developing necessary skills, such as higher-level critical thinking, a deeper understanding of complicated historical events, and the analysis of form and structure in literature, rather than just content. To enhance my research, I connected my main points to the pedagogical theory of learning transfer.

'The Frank Exchange': A Historical Drama Novella, Ariel Finkle

Senior Honors Projects

I am an avid fan of historical fiction books such as The Royal Diaries. But given the recent popularity of more adult royal drama series like The Great, as well as impostor true crime shows like Inventing Anna, on this project I set out to create a historical fiction drama of my own. While searching for a real-life figure to base my story on, I happened to see a quick footnote at the bottom of an article on Catherine the Great that intrigued me. At the turn of the 18th century, an ordinary young Polish woman named Eva Frank managed …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 21, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin

Munn Scholars Awards

Aria Da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1919 play, has thus far been largely ignored in literary criticism. This essay, through a historical survey of Millay’s previous critical reception followed by a close reading of Aria Da Capo, attempts to explain and then bridge this gap in academic scholarship. A postmodernist reading of the play will then illustrate why Millay’s work still confounds scholars today and how Aria Da Capo specifically continues to be relevant more than 100 years after it was first produced.

Sherwood Anderson And The Industrial Corruption Of Midwestern Individualism, Hudson Rice

Senior Honors Theses

Sherwood Anderson’s literary Midwest reflects many of the idealistic characteristics resulting from the region’s frontier, agrarian origin. The most prominent of these characteristics is the region’s emphasis on and appreciation of human particularity. His novels Winesburg, Ohio and Poor White document the region’s unique relationship with individual particularity and how this particularity clashed with a new industrial lifestyle. The two novels reflect the Midwest’s unique understanding of individuality and offer an explanation for why the region’s response to an industrial cultural overhaul was so damaging for the Midwest’s identity, as the traditional identity was supplanted by an industrial one.

Discovering Dune: Essays On Frank Herbert’S Epic Saga., Edited By Dominic J. Nardi And N. Trevor Brierly, G. Connor Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

G. Connor Salter reviews Discovering Dune: Essays on Frank Herbert’s Epic Saga, edited by Dominic J. Nardi and N. Trevor Brierly, considering its new contributions to studies of Frank Herbert's work. Essays included fit into four categories (Politics and Power, History and Religion, Biology and Ecology, and Philosophy, Choice and Ethics) and range from Herbert's use of ecology in Dune to how game theory may help explain certain characters' apparent ability to see the future. Discovering Dune also includes an appendix which contains the only up-to-date bibliography of Herbert's work (primary and secondary sources).

Primitive Mythology (The Masks Of God, Volume 1) By Joseph Campbell, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

Book review of Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume 1) by Joseph Campbell, reviewed by Phillip Fitzsimmons.

Masculine Desire And Feminine Imitation: Contextualizing Heterosexual Relationships In Sister Carrie, Jennifer L. White

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

Theodore Dreiser is generally considered one of the greatest American naturalist authors across the genre. His depiction of life is gritty and harsh, his characters at the mercy of their natural impulses and their unforgiving environment. However, there is also a sentimental element to Dreiser’s work, especially in his portrayal of romantic relationships. In the face of unrelenting adversity, there is a glimmer of possibility in the longing for meaningful human connection, if only under different circumstances. While Dreiser’s naturalistic approach suggests that such relationships can never be truly fulfilling due to either the innate frailty of the participants or …

Beloved & The Erotics Of Temporal Mutilation, Ruba Habli

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

'Snatched and yanked' the readers begin a journey in Beloved’s extravagant and meandering narrative—a narrative filled with repetitions and returns that mutilate time beyond recognition. This paper aims to map time in Beloved, to understand its narrative insurgence, and feel the foreign terrains it leaves the reader in. I depend on Peter Brooks’ essay “Freud’s Masterplot” to contextualize the patterns of repetitions and returns that mutilate time in the text through a psychoanalytic understanding. Crucial to the psychoanalytic understanding of the narrative is the comprehension of narrative desire, precisely how the death instinct can be at work in the narrative. …

Timothy Yu, Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing In The United States, Canada, And Australia, Rei Magosaki

English Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Timothy Yu'sDiasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Higher Law And Lincoln's Antislavery Constitutionalism: What It Means To Say The Civil War Was Fought Over Slavery, Joel A. Rogers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The US Civil War was fought over slavery. But what do we really mean when we say that? This paper examines that question, first by exploring the idea of “higher law,” which gained tremendous traction in American society starting around 1850. Proponents of the idea claimed that laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act are immoral; that the immorality of such laws is self-evident, and that such immoral laws should be resisted—sometimes even with violence. Meanwhile, opponents of the idea of higher law were not necessarily in favor of slavery, but they opposed the use of extra-Constitutional means to bring …

Speculative Constitutions In Ursula K. Le Guin’S Hainish Cycle And The Rights Of Nature, Ted Hamilton

Faculty Journal Articles

This paper examines two speculative examinations of humanity as a unified species and agent of ecological change: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle and the rights of nature movement. Le Guin’s Cycle imagines the slow interplanetary reintegration of human polities against a backdrop of cultural and environmental difference. I read the novels of the Cycle as an allegory for the rights of nature movement, which seeks to synthesize traditional and modern knowledge in a legal solution to ecological crisis. Both discourses, I argue, productively imagine a new historical understanding of humanity’s place on Earth, but they provide a weak theory …