Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Kentuckiana, And A Dash Of Cambodia: A Collection Of Short Stories, Brodie Lee Gress

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The following is a collection of five short stories set in regions familiar to me: “Dewberry Park,” “YouLead,” and “The Color Violet” in Indiana; “Mens Rea” in Kentucky; and “Tory Ride” in Cambodia. Gay identity plays a role in many of these stories, and other themes explored include family, region, socioeconomics, gender, mentality, and change. These stories are concerned with people on the brink, failing and surviving all the same. Some of them are intended to weigh, and some to satirize. I hope they all nick their readers.

Review Essay: Pop Formalist: Ned Balbo And The Perseids, George Guida

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity And The Liberation Of The American Housewife, Megan Behrent

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Taking Back Control: Memes, Trump, 4chan, Gamergate, And The Rise Of The Alt-Right, Cam Fediuk

Western Research Forum

Background

My thesis’s impetus is the rise of reactionary discourse on the internet, collectively known as the alt-right. As with the traditional right, the alt-right is anti-feminist, anti-immigration, and anti-political-correctness, but unlike its predecessor, is also anti-establishment, anti-religion, pro-Donald Trump, and thoroughly engaged with and immersed in the meme-based political discourse of digital media.

Hypothesis

I argue against the cyber-utopianism proposed by Douglass Rushkoff and other early internet theorists; I argue that, while the internet has made memes central to political discourse, the rise of laissez-faire social media platforms has not made the digital generation more enlightened, or tolerant, …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …

Intimate Fictions: The Rhetorical Strategies Of Obscene Violence In Four Novels, Steven Monk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Richard Wright, Marlon James, Cormac McCarthy and Ken Levine are each celebrated in their respective fields but notorious for their obscene depictions of violence. Contrary to trauma theorists’ claims that violence shatters language and cannot be spoken, these writers speak violence in its most disturbing forms: torn eyeballs, dead infants, forced fecal consumption and mechanized rape. I argue that obscene violence, much like obscene language, creates a space of intimacy in which transgressive, subversive and oppositional thoughts may be spoken. By alienating their texts from the larger reading public, these writers entice a smaller group of sympathetic readers to develop …

Ph: A Novel By Nancy Lord, Jennifer Schell

The Goose

Review of Nancy Lord's pH: A Novel

Anthropocene Blues By John Lane, Jessica S. Cory

The Goose

Review of John Lane's Anthropocene Blues

Shale Play: Poems And Photographs From The Fracking Fields By Julia Spicher Kasdorf And Steven Rubin, Kelly Shepherd

The Goose

Review of Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin's Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields

Critical Introduction: Responsibility And Representation & Introduction To All My Mother’S Lovers, Ilana Masad

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This critical component of the creative thesis All My Mother’s Lovers explores the question of fiction writers’ responsibility to themselves, their work, and their readers in the age of social media and easy access of readers to writers and vice versa. Using two examples of recent online controversies, this piece explores the varying ways in which readers respond to writers and writers to readers and rhetorically analyzes the responses of those in positions of power (writers, publishers) as well as the cultural contexts from within which they respond. It then draws conclusions as to the trajectory of these two controversies, …

Dramatizing The Void: Crime Fiction's Journey To Forgetting, Kylene N. Cave

Andrews Research Conference

Scholars often cite the transition from the golden age to the hardboiled tradition in the 1920s and 1930s as the most radical shift in crime fiction. By 1945, crime stories regularly exhibited destabilized language, increased interest in psychology of the mind, and a blatant rejection of conclusive endings as a means of exploring the unreliable nature of memory and eye-witness testimony. Whereas the crime fiction narratives preceding 1945 embodied a clear sense of logic and order, and established hermeneutics and signifying practices as the keys to unlocking the mysteries behind human behavior; post-45 crime fiction not only rejects these notions, …

John Gardner’S Grendel: The Importance Of Community In Making Moral Art, Catherine C. Cooper

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

John Gardner’s Grendel examines the ways in which humans make meaning out of their lives. By changing the original Beowulf monster into a creature who constantly questions the conflicting narratives set before him, Gardner encourages us to confront these tensions also. However, his emphasis on Grendel’s alienation helps us realize that community is essential to creating meaning. Most obviously, community creates relationships that foster a sense of moral obligation between its members, even in the face of the type of uncertainty felt by Grendel. Moreover, community cannot exist without dialogue, which perpetually stimulates the imagination to respond to the tensions …

“To Be Men, Not Destroyers”: Developing Dabrowskian Personalities In Ezra Pound’S The Cantos And Neil Gaiman’S American Gods, Michelle A. Nicholson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Kazimierz Dabrowski’s psychological theory of positive disintegration is a lesser known theory of personality development that offers an alternative critical perspective of literature. It provides a framework for the characterization of postmodern protagonists who move beyond heroic indoctrination to construct their own self-organized, autonomous identities. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos captures the speaker-poet’s extensive process of inner conflict, providing a unique opportunity to track the progress of the hero’s transformation into a personality, or a man. American Gods is a more fully realized portrayal of a character who undergoes the complete paradigmatic collapse of positive disintegration and deliberate self-derived self-revision …

Secret Selves: Surveillance And Twentieth-Century African American Literature, Kelsey Kiser

English Theses and Dissertations

Black writers, thinkers, and artists found themselves on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s watch list for radicalism and sedition as early as 1919. Secret Selves explores how twentieth-century African American writers, namely Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor responded to a surveillance state that monitored their lives and works for radicalism and sedition. By recrafting the African American künstlerroman—a genre that birthed the African American literary tradition—these writers embedded codes into their works that concealed personal details from Bureau agents and simultaneously articulated a new narrative: that to be black and to …

Fire To Vellum, Jessica L. Warren

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Oswic’s simple life changed the day his mother died from poison. After finding a strange cache of trinkets and books in the loft of the barn, he begins to question everything and everyone he has known, including reality. Forced from his land and his home, Oswic takes his plough horse, the few fragments of truth from his life, and leaves Hægelfirth in search of the one person he believes can tell him of his past, the storyteller. But, it won’t be his past he needs to worry about when he starts to slip in and out of reality; seeing the …

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

To Speak Ghosts And See Echoes: Longing In Lolita, Emily Aucompaugh

CURCE Annual Undergraduate Conference

Underneath the plot of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which focuses on the musings of a pedophile and murderer who attempts to “confess” actions and impulses of which he feels no guilt, a secondary motif emerges of a man motivated, guided, and consumed by longing, which he cannot assuage due his fixation of desire on a subject that does not exist. Longing embodies Humbert’s greatest joy and deepest pain, a feeling of anxiety and anticipation which eclipses the necessity of completion. Lolita invokes longing, the desire towards absent things, in two ways. Firstly, Nabokov alludes to a cornucopia of other poetic, …

The Narrative Of Revolution: Socialism And The Masses 1911-1917, Stephen K. Walkiewicz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to situate The Masses magazine (1911-1917) within a specific discursive tradition of revolution, revealing a narrative pattern that is linked with discourse that began to emerge during and after the French Revolution. As the term “socialism” begins to resonate again within popular American political discourse (and as a potentially viable course of action rather than a curse for damnable offense), it is worthwhile to trace its significance within American history to better understand its aesthetic dimensions, its radical difference, and its way of devising problems and answers. In short, this thesis poses the question: what ideological structures …

Paper: Investigating The Work Of William Styron: The Perpetuation Of The Fantastic Hegemonic Imagination, William Sikich

Womanist Ethics

William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner depicts a fictitious characterization of the historical Nat Turner. Styron, a white southerner, assumes Turner's perspective in order to tell a speculative story about his slave rebellion of 1831. Similarly, he tells the story of a fictional holocaust survivor in his novel, Sophie's Choice. The decision to take on these perspective evinces some arrogance on Styron's part, and the way in which he executes the narrative of each novel delivers their stories with varying levels of respect to their subjects: Styron's indirect telling of Sophie's story allows Styron some freedom to speculate, while …

“Flowing Along The Wall”: Anarcha-Feminist Bioethics And Resistance In Octavia E. Butler’S Dawn 2019., Theresa Mendez

Master's Theses

Science fiction (sf) texts conversant with the temporal play between past, present, and future push readers to imagine the extremes of human and environmental existence, interaction, and potential. Simultaneously, despite the sf genre’s tendency to traffic in extremes, these texts provoke readers to consider the ways in which these imagined worlds are grounded in history as well as in the contemporary social moment. As Donna Haraway has argued, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (306). This illusory boundary must continue to be traversed in order to consider how sf literatures, particularly those which imagine …