Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Anarchism And The Dispossessed, Jennifer Thomson

Bucknell: Occupied

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, is joined by three students who discuss the idea of anarchism as presented in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. The group examines their preconceptions about anarchy as well as the language and social structures that support society on the planet Anarres.

‘Some Foods Are Considered Aphrodisiac Because They Resemble Sexual Organs’: On Isabel Allende’S Aphrodite, Anke Klitzing

Articles

At the age of 56, well into her second marriage and a grandmother herself, novelist Isabel Allende decided to find out whether aphrodisiacs are all they are made out to be. She wrote Aphrodite: The Love of Food and Food of Love after extensive research into erotic literature across some centuries and continents, and this foundation of age-old wisdom also means that the book, while published in 1998, remains a timeless source of inspiration and enjoyment.

Comics In Action: A Reflection Of The Dominant Narrative In World War Ii, Spencer Gutierrez

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

In this paper, I argue that the propagandized use of comic books during World War II promoted views among Americans which contributed to antipathy towards Americans of Japanese and German descent. More generally, the goal of the essay is to highlight the importance of comic books as a reflection of the times – they simultaneously influence and are influenced by society’s dominant ideas – and promote the further study of such material. I examine the text and art from three comic book covers dated from 1942-1943. An analysis of these selections suggests that comic books depicted Axis soldiers as savage …

Between The Living And The Dead, Laura Henriksen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout my studies at the Graduate Center, I have attempted to deepen my understanding of how some people, such as myself and my family, came to be white, and what that means, and how it can be undone. This question of whiteness has pushed me further back ontologically, or deeper down, to include how some people came to be human, and then even further, how some matter came to be living. In my thesis project I attempt to participate in dismantling one of the most fundamental binaries in binary thinking — the strict and uncomplicated division between the living and …

Sylvia Plath And "The Bigger Things": War, History, And Modernism At Midcentury, Reagan Lothes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sylvia Plath and “the bigger things” explores the ways in which Plath’s “confessionalism”—so often read as antithetical to T. S. Eliot’s notion of “impersonality”—constituted not a break from modernism but rather a negotiation of its transatlantic legacy. In doing so, it works against a long-standing critical tradition that has defined Plath, who was living in England as she composed her Ariel poems, as nonetheless a distinctly American poet and one focused uniquely—and, as some have claimed, even pathologically—on the self. An examination of Plath’s published work, including interviews, statements of poetics, journal entries, and letters, in the context of a …

Reverse The Curse: Colonialist Legacies Of The Magic Poem, Karen E. Lepri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the conceptual relationships between poetry, magic, and race and their effects on both intellectual and creative practices from modernism through the post-war era. In doing so, this study works cross-disciplinarily, tracing early anthropological and sociological characterizations of primitive religion in connection to early-to-mid-twentieth-century literary study and writing. In working across disciplines at this particularly fungible moment in the history of the academy, this dissertation attempts to understand how the concurrent colonial global context effects the production and organization of knowledge just prior to and during modernism. It ultimately seeks to de-colonize literary thinking about poetry by performing …

The Shape Of Knowledge: The Postwar American Poet's Library, With Diane Di Prima And Charles Olson, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On the shelves of any collection of books, or what we might deem “a library,” is material evidence that generates multiple vectors of meaning. After D. F. McKenzie's “sociology of the text,” our ability to read books requires that we not just know their contents, but understand the networks in which they are built, distributed, interpreted, and used. In this capacity, books are a prime way of answering a political and epistemological question: how does knowledge take material form? And how is this process politically shaped at different points in time, by the types of knowledge that are privileged, siloed, …

Geometry Of Night, Jenny Patton

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Multicultural Women Writers, Nashieli Marcano, Jennifer Jacobs

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

William Mardell Lynch Papers, 1939-2003, William Mardell Lynch

Center for Restoration Studies Archives, Manuscripts and Personal Papers Finding Aids

Finding aid for the William Mardell Lynch Papers, 1939-2003.

The Phenomenology Of It All, Justin M. Campbell

2019 Symposium

Who is consumed when we read? Does the reader consume the text or does it consume us? This essay explores the complex and possibly parasitic relationship between reader and text. This unique exchange of knowledge and ideas between reader and texts during this relationship is the phenomenology of reading. During this, the text is transformed via the consciousness of the reader from a passive, inanimate object to an active living breathing immortal entity that transcends both space and time. In doing so, the unhuman text becomes an active consumer of the human reader in the same way the reader believes …

“The Names Of Sickness”: Emily Dickinson, Diagnostic Reading, And Articulating Disability, Vivian Delchamps Wolf

English and Creative Writing | Faculty Scholarship

Emily Dickinson’s “There is a Languor of the Life” hints at her knowledge 1  about diagnostic and surgical approaches to bodymind pain during her time. Although the poem can be read as a metaphorical portrayal of spiritual suffering, it also demonstrates Dickinson’s familiarity with contemporary medical innovations as well as her skillful use of simile to poetically depict complex bodily states. For example, the poem describes a “languor” that envelops consciousness with a “Drowsiness” that “diffuses – / a Dimness like a Fog,” evoking literal sensations one might feel while under the influence of anesthesia.2 The poem goes on to …

Spiteful Houses, Sweet Homes: Analyzing Denver's Traumatic Space In Beloved, Tyler Dick

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis aims to explore and evaluate the traumatic space of Denver in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Currently, a lack of critical discourse exists to link together Denver, trauma, and theories of spatiality. This thesis evaluates three types of trauma that inform and develop Denver's traumatic space: direct, indirect, and insidious trauma. Paired with spatial theories, the origins of Denver's trauma are mapped throughout the various places of the novel. The result of this analysis reveals a complex and layered traumatic space, with lasting ramifications on Denver's sense of safety, identity, and stability in a post-slavery United States.

Wallaceward The American Literature Survey Course Takes Its Way, Ralph Clare

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Finding a comfortable fit for David Foster Wallace's work in the American literature survey is a challenge that raises a host of questions regarding Wallace and American literature itself. Wallace criticism has tended to situate his oeuvre in relation to postmodernism in general and, more specifically, to postmodern metafiction. This is an important critical task, to be sure. Like many, I have taught Wallace's stories, essays, and novels in an array of courses, including twentieth-century American literature, postmodernist literature, and the single author course, all formats in which I had a luxurious amount of time to get students acquainted with …

“My Books Will Be Read By Millions Of People!”: The Laguardia Community College Octavia E. Butler Project On Wikipedia.”, Ximena Gallardo C., Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

[This book chapter (“My Books Will Be Read By Millions of People!”: The LaGuardia Community College Octavia E. Butler Wikipedia Project.”) originally appeared in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia Butler, edited by Tarshia Stanley, published by the Modern Language Association of America." Pages 45-51. ISBN: 9781603294157]

In this essay, we examine the innovative community college classroom project that resulted in the first installment of Wikipedia Project Octavia E. Butler: the crafting of thorough, rigorously researched, well-written Wikipedia entries for Butler’s works by teams of undergraduate students.

The first part of the essay focuses on our design of a …

Human Monsters: Examining The Relationship Between The Posthuman Gothic And Gender In American Gothic Fiction, Alexandra Rivera

Scripps Senior Theses

According to Michael Sean Bolton, the posthuman Gothic involves a fear of internal monsters that won't destroy humanity apocalyptically, but will instead redefine what it means to be human overall. These internal monsters reflect societal anxieties about the "other" gaining power and overtaking the current groups in power. The posthuman Gothic shows psychological horrors and transformations. Traditionally this genre has been used to theorize postmodern media and literary work by focusing on cyborgs and transhumanist medical advancements. However, the internal and psychological nature of posthumanism is fascinating and can more clearly manifest in a different Gothic setting, 1800s American Gothic …

[Review Of The Book Looking For Lorraine: The Radiant And Radical Life Of Lorraine Hansberry, By I. Perry], Kaa Vonia Hinton

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Chicago, Illinois, native, Lorraine Hansberry wrote the highly acclaimed A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first play produced on Broadway by a Black woman. The play's title is inspired by one of poet Langston Hughes's poems, "Harlem," and focuses on a Black American family with dreams of buying a home in a white neighborhood in segregated Chicago. A Raisin in the Sun is taught widely in high schools and colleges in America, and most of us who are aware of Hansberry know about the critical success of her play, but do we know much more than that about …

"'[A] Wholly New And Original Poetic Genius': Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson, And Literary Immortality", Harrison Dietzman

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Beyond Higginson's personal friendship with Dickinson, his literary criticism—much of which Dickinson may have read in The Atlantic Monthly—and his editing of her poems weave a narrative about the United States' poetry to which Dickinson is the logical conclusion. Higginson relentlessly attacked Whitman, (who he perceived to be a degenerate, self-promoting charlatan), and used his literary criticism to extol characteristics, personal and poetic, that carved out a place for Dickinson, or a poet like her, in the American literary tradition. Higginson's criticism persistently seeks to answer one question: in America, what is a poetic genius? Judging by Higginson's decades-long …

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.