Literature in English, North America Commons^™

A Desolate Splendor By John Jantunen, Jeremy Luke Hill

The Goose

Review of John Jantunen's A Desolate Splendor.

Crow Never Dies By Larry Frolick, Kelly Shepherd

The Goose

Review of Larry Frolick's Crow Never Dies.

The Duende Of Tetherball By Tim Bowling, Gillian Harding-Russell

The Goose

Review of Tim Bowling's The Duende of Tetherball.

Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” From Pontiac’S War To Attawapiskat By Margery Fee, Cheryl Lousley

The Goose

Review of Margery Fee's Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat.

Towards A Prairie Atonement By Trevor Herriot, Gillian Harding-Russell

The Goose

Review of Trevor Herriot's Towards a Prairie Atonement.

Hill By Jean Giono, Jody L. Ballah

The Goose

A review of Jean Giono's Hill.

Arnold Whitridge: Scholar And Veteran Of Two Armies And Two Wars, Keith J. Muchowski

Publications and Research

This is an invited blog post written for Roads to the Great War, a site dedicated to the study of the First World War edited by historian Mike Hanlon. The article discusses the life and career of Arnold Whitridge, a soldier, scholar and grandson of British poet Matthew Arnold.

This is the url:

http://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2017/01/arnold-whitridge-scholar-and-veteran-of.html

Review Of Joyce Carol Oates's Soul At The White Heat, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

A review of Joyce Carol Oates's anthology Soul at the White Heat considering the author's prolific nature, approach to criticism and inspiration for the writing life.

Celestial Timepiece: Randy Souther Interviewed By Caroline Marquette And Tanya Tromble-Giraud, Randy Souther

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

An interview with the creator of the website Celestial Timepiece discussing Joyce Carol Oates's literary career and the web project documenting that career.

The interview was the basis for a chapter in the Joyce Carol Oates volume of the Cahiers de L’Herne—a French monographic series dedicated to the critical appraisal of world-renowned authors, and providing texts, letters, testimonies, and photographs as well as scholarly work by specialists in the subject. The aim of the series is to offer in-depth reference books on major authors and thus to contribute to a better understanding of the authors and their work in …

Seeing The God Of New Mexico: Mary Austin's Starry Adventure And The Optic Of Enchantment, Olivia Jayne Mann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines 20th century American writer Mary Austin's last novel, Starry Adventure (1931), a work unjustly ignored by most Austin scholars, yet touted by the photographer Ansel Adams (in a letter to Austin) as "the greatest thing I have ever read." This thesis will be particularly concerned with the concept of vision in the novel and the connections between Austin's fiction and the New Mexican modernism/primitivism movement in the visual arts. I explore what I call Austin's "optic of enchantment," a visual experience of divinity that is uniquely tied to the New Mexican landscape. I break down this optic …

Catholic Literary Theory: The Conditional Existentialism Of Four Protagonists And Their Creators, Jacob Patrick Pride

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to Catholic literary theory, the novelist, like the Divine Mystery to a certain extent, creates her characters freely and free with the possibility and probability that they may speak against their creator and even finally rebel. This dissertation reflects upon the relative infiniteness of four literary authors - Flannery O'Connor, Mary McCarthy, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy. In the three novels and one imaginative memoir considered in particular, these authors create their existentialist protagonists, who in their turn reflect the conditional existentialism of their creators. This dissertation, thus, seeks to resurrect, with modern sensibilities, the pre-renaissance and renaissance commonplace …

Tears Of A Clown: Reexamination Of Disabled Narrators In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury And As I Lay Dying, Alexandra Rose Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that Darl Bundren of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Benjy Compson of The Sound and the Fury exhibit certain similarities, suggesting that, in relation to Donald M. Kartiganer's model from the introduction of The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels, they would be paired together better than his initial couplings. This argument proposes to discuss why Darl Bundren is the reincarnated version of Benjy Compson in terms of their internal discourses, narratorial skills, and disability within each novel. As both characters could easily be labeled "disabled," this endeavor will also speculate …

Planet Superman: An Ecocritical Analysis Of The Man Of Steel From 1938-2017, Justin Hart Crary

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Planet Superman is a critical examination of the DC comic book superhero Superman as analyzed through an ecocritical lens. The primary argument is that, within the world of DC Comics, Superman is single-handedly capable of ending all of the Earth’s various ecological crises using his very existence as a solar battery or using his superhuman power to become a totalitarian despot that enforces the law through superior firepower. I calculate Superman’s greatest feat of energy output to prove how much solar energy is actively dormant within the Man of Steel. Using the several “versions” of Superman throughout his 79 year …

Raciocultural Union And "Fraternity Of Feeling": Ishmael's Redemption In Moby-Dick, Emily Butler-Probst

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The process of redemption, or the complete transformation of an individual’s life that enables him to avoid personal destruction is precisely what Ishmael experiences as he embraces cultural pluralism over the course of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Ishmael first begins Moby-Dick as a character who embraces isolation and abstract pondering in a manner that is similar to the obsessive, isolated madness of Captain Ahab. He is saved from the “madness” of absolutism by Queequeg, a South Pacific harpooner, in a process which not only expresses the nineteenth-century perception that cultural Others were less afflicted by madness, but also invokes a message …

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect And Animals In Nineteenth-Century Literature And Culture, Keridiana Chez

Publications and Research

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Keridiana W. Chez is the first monograph located at the intersection of animal and affect studies to examine how gender is produced via the regulation of interspecies relationships. Looking specifically at the development of the human-dog relationship, Chez argues that the bourgeoisie fostered connections with canine companions in order to mediate and regulate gender dynamics in the family. As Chez shows, the aim of these new practices was not to use animals as surrogates to fill emotional vacancies but rather to incorporate them as “emotional prostheses.”

Chez …

The Creation Of Space For Engaged Reading And Creative Interpretation In The Collected Works Of Wallace Stevens, Lauren Cannavino

ETD Archive

Wallace Stevens presents a creative space in his poems, opening the role of the reader and inviting active participation. This defies ready interpretation and instead encourages creative reading and interpretive freedom. Wallace Stevens chooses to write from a removed space that allows him to invite the reader in as the original observer. Stevens directly observes and his words, through his stance, create a level of active involvement for the reader. This highlights a focus on nature, nostalgia, removal and his place in between reverie and action. This position builds the body of his poems through much more than simple imagery.

I Hate It, But I Can't Stop: The Romanticization Of Intimate Partner Abuse In Young Adult Retellings Of Wuthering Heights, Brianna R. Zgodinski

ETD Archive

In recent years, there has been a trend in young adult adaptations of Wuthering Heights to amend the plot so that Catherine Earnshaw chooses to have a romantic relationship with Heathcliff, when in Bronte’s novel she decides against it. In the following study, I trace the factors that contribute to Catherine’s rejection of Heathcliff as a romantic partner in the original text. Many critics have argued that her motives are primarily Machiavellian since she chooses a suitor with more wealth and familial connections than Heathcliff. These are indeed factors; however, by engaging with contemporary research on adolescent development, I show …

I Need A Prince To Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning "Happily Ever After" In Gloria Naylor's Women Of Brewster Place, Anita August

English Faculty Publications

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 23

I Need a Prince to Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning ‘Happily Ever After’ in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

Living Lawn Ornaments: Middle Class Status Anxiety In George Saunders’S 
“The Semplica Girl Diaries”, Joseph M. Gorman

The Graduate Review

This paper offers an analysis of writer George Saunders’s satirical short story “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” I argue that by situating the story in the historic context of the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, Saunders’s story not only examines middle class status anxiety, but also acts as a reflective lens for the upper class readers of the story’s original publisher: The New Yorker. I first provide a brief discussion of the economic situation faced by middle class America between 2008 and 2013. I then provide an analysis of the fears of middle class American citizens by examining the …

Assimilation And The Impossibility Of Transculturation: Reading Herland As A Captivity Narrative, Rachel-Beth Gagnon

The Graduate Review

Although the structure of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel, Herland, mimics that of a captivity narrative, there has been no scholarship that analyzes how the work fits into this tradition. This paper addresses how the themes of the captivity narrative shift under the weight of Gilman’s scientific and social preoccupations as an early twentieth-century writer, as well as the novel’s position within the genre of utopian fiction. Despite the captivity narrative’s ability to provide ground for cultural and social exchange through the process of transculturation, Gilman’s evolutionary theories and the utopian genre’s anxieties about miscegenation prevent any transmission of culture. …