Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Witness, Justice, And The Silent Confessional, Kortney Sebben

Great Plains Graduate Review

Stories depicting injustice are inherently complicated by the limitations of language. Jacques Derrida’s “Circonfession” uses deconstructionist theory to describe the flawed nature of the confession in that proximity becomes problematic: those who experience are unable to authentically deliver the truth of that experience. Language also becomes an imperfect channel through which to deliver the truth; the truth lies in both a person’s ability to bring meaning to individual experience, but also, in an audience’s ability to interpret that experience; however, both sides of the conversation are challenged through an imperfect channel of communication. Therefore, silence of human behavior may very …

The Fall Of The House Of Usher, And The Rise Of The Civil War, Richard E. Campbell Ii

2022 Symposium

Poe may have died before the Civil War began, but he was close to the politics of his time. He was also an astute observer of people. His writings often explore deep aspects of the human condition. Using his in depth understanding of people and his close proximity and personal interest it would make sense that he could see how the wheels were turning. In the end it is possible that Poe would predict and hide clues of his observations within this writings, specifically The Fall of the House of Usher.

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines …

Review Of: Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Small Histories During World War Ii, Letter Writing, And Family History Methodology—Suzanne Kesler Rumsey, G.C. Waldrep

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Suzanne Kesler Rumsey’s Blessed Are the Peacemakers is, on the surface, the reconstructed story of the author’s paternal grandparents during World War II. The saga of Benjamin and Miriam Kesler, members of the Dunkard Brethren Church in northern Indiana, in and out of the Civilian Public Service (CPS), is one that will be familiar to most readers of twentieth-century North American Anabaptist history: a young husband called into CPS service as a conscientious objector, the young wife he left behind. What makes it richer is the trove of letters back and forth between the young couple that the author has …

Review Of: Vignettes 2020: Anabaptist Women Writers—Sheila Petre And Gabriella Showalter, J.P. Miller

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Vignettes, compiled and edited by Sheila Petre and Gabriella Showalter, is a fascinating text. It is a book that was written by, and is intended for, Anabaptist women writers. The book is a collection of articles that profile around 400 Anabaptist women writers from more than 15 countries. The book provides many resources for aspiring writers; it recommends books on writing, such as The Elements of Style, and contains a directory of all the women profiled in this book. [First paragraph.]

Symposium Review: The Right Church: From A Seeker To A Finder—Peter Hoover, Sheila Petre, Osiah Horst

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

[...] Across 264 compelling pages of earnest semi-autobiographical work, Hoover sketches a poignant picture of many disintegrating organizations among which move small vibrant flames of living hope. He tells the story of a young man seeking for answers about Christianity, and the religious entities within it. He intersperses his narrative with glorious scripture passages and hymns, and includes wisdom borrowed from his uninhibited correspondence with the leaders of many different Anabaptist groups. The main character is part of “only a small group—a very small and shrinking group—of Old Order Mennonites trying to keep the ‘songs of Zion’ alive with all …

Engl 110: College Writing (Comedy, Satire, & Persuasion), Scott R. Kapuscinski

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus provides a themed approach to Freshman composition. Students are tasked with composing three essays in three distinct styles. Student engagement is high through the use of student-sourced primary sources (funny videos from YouTube, etc.) and the emphasis on thesis building and critical thinking.

Section 1: Comedy & the thesis-based essay

Section 2: Satire & writing to persuade

Section 3: Satire in Art & independent research

"The Personal Is The Political And The Political Is Personal:" Engendering Understanding Through Global Allegory In Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist And Exit West, Nicole Ordonez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West by British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. In both novels, Hamid uses the representational literary device of allegory to present what I will frame as works of “global allegory,” or novels of global literature that present the world as one interconnected space rather than as one divided by borders and nations. In doing so, I will be situating my argument as a rebuttal of Frederic Jameson’s “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson draws a distinction between works of third world and first world literature along the lines of allegory. …

Queer Horror, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

Master's Portfolio, Jennifer Cousino

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

I was a teacher at a high school in the Cabrini-Green complex in Chicago in the 1990s when the buildings were starting to be emptied. I saw firsthand the beginnings of the removal of nearly 15,000 people from their homes when the first building came down in 1995, three years after the first Candyman film. I wrote this academic paper as part of a graduate seminar with Dr. Piya Pal-Lapinski - Victorian Monsters: Fiction and Film 1837 to 2021 at Bowling Green State University in the United States. My paper examines the 2021 film and the sociopolitical and historical context …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

“We Talk, I Believe, All Day Long”: Forms Of Communication In Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre, Kara Vacalopoulos

Student Theses

Jane Eyre is a successful coming of age narrative where the title character’s development can be tracked through the way she communicates with other people. Dialogue and conversations constantly change as Jane herself changes and grows. This paper analyzes the different modes of communication that Jane experiences with the characters in the novel. As she gets older, Jane establishes her voice and seeks out a perfect conversational partner – someone who she could bear her soul to and have meaningful conversations with. This paper argues Rochester as Jane’s perfect conversational partner, even if he is not a perfect person. In …

Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

The Appalachian Nostos: Pastoralism And Returning Home In Appalachian Poetry, Henry David Thoreau Kilbourne

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, David Mazella, Claude Willan, David Bishop, Elizabeth Stravoski, Walter Barta, Max James

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of women’s participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory became the …

“The Un/Touchables:” Quest For Citizenship In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things And Indra Sinha’S Animal’S People, Mahreen Shahzadi

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper argues that Ammu and Velutha, in The God of Small Things and Animal in Animal’s People are not seen as productive citizens of the nation because of their marginalization, which results in their status as second-class citizens. However, Ammu, Velutha, and Animal resist second-class status by challenging the heteropatriarchal nation, rejecting its limited definition of gender, caste, sexuality, and citizenship.

Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, Courtney Mullis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and proposes a new subgenre of American literature, Cultural Trauma Fiction, that has arisen since the late 20^th century in response to numerous large-scale traumatic events and their representation in the media. Cultural trauma occurs when a shocking, shared event fractures collective identity and initiates a discursive process to understand what took place, why it happened, and how the affected culture can heal. Cultural traumas differ from individual trauma because cultural traumas affect a culture, rather than an individual, and because they are mediated; many members of the culture experience the trauma of these events secondhand …

Finding Their Chrysanthemum: Linguistic Representation In Children's Literature, Marielena Zajac

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Children in America today struggle with finding themselves in the books they read due to societal expectations. From an early age, children are dictated on the correct way to speak and write in “American,” which can leave children and their home languages feeling unseen and dismissed. To help further the conversation and promotion of linguistic diversity in American society, this capstone analyzes dialectal representation in children’s books, with a heavy focus on attitudinal linguistic principles rather than prescriptive mechanics. The secondary research explores current literature and resources that discuss literacy acquisition in adolescents, trends in dialects in America, and childhood …