Literature in English, North America Commons^™

The Rise And Legitimization Of The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey

English Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Collection Of Swedish-American Children’S Literature, Katie Hanson

Swenson Center Faculty Research Stipend Reports

For five days I examined resources related to children’s literature held in the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center collection. Initially, I proposed that I would examine anything having to do with children's literature. I ended up looking at lots of immigration stories as well as the holdings in the children's collection.

The Taboo Of Experience, Brian Glaser

English Faculty Articles and Research

A lyric essay discussing Henry James and cosmopolitanism
from the perspective of a scholar
visiting a German university.

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

The Man In The Field: Thoreau’S "Concern To Be Observed", Don Boivin

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

Interim Report, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), January 2016, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

In the third six months of work on "Image Analysis for Archival Discovery," the project team has made progress toward the goals outlined in our report from June 2015. As we reported in June 2015, we realized that our original plan to analyze 7 million pages from Chronicling America was overly ambitious for the grant period, and we revised our goal to complete a thorough case study of our methodology and code for all newspaper images in Chronicling America from the period 1836-1840. Activities undertaken, toward this and other grant goals, from June 2015–December 2015:

• Publication of the article, "Developing …

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A Tightrope Over An Abyss: Humanity And The Lords Of Life, Timothy Francis Urban

The Graduate Review

The American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson is a precursor to the thought of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's writings have often admitted to the profound influence Emerson had on the latter's own philosophy. Both thinkers shared common ground in viewing philosophy and language as an active process, always in a state of becoming, where the subject is the sole creator of meaning. This paper argues that Emerson and Nietzsche recognized the liberating quality of language in the creation of one's subjectivity. Emerson and Nietzsche dismissed notions of objective knowledge by looking at how language is arbitrary, and, as such, …

The Invisible Hand Of The Lyric: Emily Dickinson’S Hypermediated Manuscripts And The Debate Over Genre, Dominique Zino

Publications and Research

Between the mid-1990s and the present, a poetics of digitization emerged around Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, performed primarily by the members of the Emily Dickinson Editorial Collective. Translating Dickinson’s work across archival sources, scanned images, typographic transcripts, and coding languages has offered Dickinson’s editors an escape from the determinism that accompanied the age of print and an opportunity to highlight the continuum along which the poet composed her body of work. Through multimodal, interactive exhibits, electronic editors of the Dickinson corpus often seek to demonstrate that no one medium is sufficient to represent the range of meaning implied in Dickinson’s body …

Excerpt From: Won, A Novel, Jenna Ellenbogen

Honors Undergraduate Theses

High school is bad enough with cliques, coursework, and the impending threat of college – now some old evil is coming to Solomon Starek High School (SSH for short). It’s up to transfer student Ella, older than time and unthinkably powerful, to stop it. Ella’s certainly up to the task, but the world’s changed since the last time she was in it. Society has merged magic with science, and Ella’s not sure she’s up for that. Can her new classmates help her stop what’s coming, or will they fall short? This excerpt tracks Ella’s first days at school, and sets …

The Transatlantic Village: The Rise And Fall Of The Epistolary Friendship Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick And Mary Russell Mitford, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In June 1830, the American novelist and short-story writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick used the imminent London publication of her novel Clarence as a pretext for initiating a correspondence with the British author Mary Russell Mitford. In her first letter to Mitford, Sedgwick addressed her as “My dear Miss Mitford,” a violation of epistolary decorum in a letter to someone to whom she had not been introduced (FOMRM, 155).¹ As Sedgwick protested, however, “I cannot employ the formal address of a stranger towards one who has inspired the vivid feeling of intimate acquaintance, a deep and affectionate interest in …

Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero

Theses and Dissertations--English

Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing …

The Edith Wherry Muckleston Collection, University Of Oregon Library, James Karman

Jeffers Studies

Novelist Edith Wherry Muckleston (1876–1961) and Una Jeffers met in 1907 at a sorority event at the University of California, Berkeley. Edith describes their meeting and the friendship that ensued in a 1929 memoir titled “A Poet’s Wife — Una Jeffers.” The memoir is included among Edith’s papers at the University of Oregon, along with ten letters to her from Una, one from Robinson, and a draft of a letter from Edith to Robinson. These documents are published here for the first time, along with a biographical introduction.

Social Madness In Beat Generation Writing, Megan Reynolds

The Expositor: A Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities

No abstract provided.

Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek, Jason W. Ellis

Publications and Research

Literary and cultural critics call science fiction the premiere story form of modernity because it relates the adventures of educated men and women who use science and technology to reshape the material world and build new, hopefully better societies. As such, it is no surprise that many authors working in this popular genre explore how educated men and women might use science and technology to reshape the physical body and build new, hopefully better versions of humanity itself. Yet, lingering even in the most optimistic imaginings of a posthuman future is the doubt that these transformations will be evenly distributed …

What Do You Think I Am?: On Perceiving Unintelligibility In The Nonbinary Gender Experience, James Warwood

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What does it mean to be “retired from gender,” and what role does such an identity play in daily life? Engaging with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, this project attempts to elucidate the experience of nonbinary – that is, external to the male/female gender binary – gendered individuals, and the ultimate unintelligibility of that experience. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to perception allows for an exploration of the social norms and regulations that determine how gender is defined in Western culture; combined with Butler’s significant work on gender and its performativity, phenomenology proves a useful tool for revealing the …

Toward An Ontology Of Exhaustion: On The Affective Structures Of Masculinity In The American Oilfield, John W. Jepsen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What is the significance of the oil encounter in the lives of men living and working in the modern oilfields of the United States? Engaging with both literary examples of the lives of men in the Interior West and the personal experiences and reflections of the author, this essay seeks to examine the connections between ideology and place as it works to shape the identity and affect of men in America's oilfields, ultimately ending in them identifying with the very resources their activities seek to exploit and exhaust. Utilizing Theodore Adorno's Minima Moralia as its moral touchstone, this essay works …

Children Once, Not Forever: Harper Lee’S Go Set A Watchman And Growing Up, Allen Mendenhall

Indiana Law Journal

The narratives of Jean Louise in To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman are as consistent as lived experience, which is marked by disruption and contingency, ambiguity and rupture, fragmentation and complexity. Only the careless would have accepted Jean Louise and Atticus as one-dimensional, self-contained figures unspoiled by the mores, customs, and vocabularies of their white discursive community. Such a sanitized view of Jean Louise and Atticus erases and rewrites rather than represents history in its disturbing, enlightening variety and complexity. Jean Louise and Atticus are not stock character types; their thoughts and behaviors are irreducible and inexhaustible.

An Awakened Woman With A Room Of Her Own, Erica Garcia

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

In the early 1900’s, women were obviously being oppressed considering they lacked the right to vote, to an education, and to freedom. Through bold women who spoke out against the said oppression, women were able to work together to fight for equality. By digging deeper into the literature of the time period, the point of view of an oppressed woman is more easily seen and can therefore be better understood. Women among Woolf and Chopin, for example, Carrie Chapman Catt helped move along the passing of the 19th Amendment with assistance from the NAWSA. Once women got the ball rolling …

Overcoming More Than Physical Borders: The Challenges Gender Creates For Hispanic Immigrants, Guadalupe Esquivel

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

An analysis of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain and Sandra Cisneros's “Woman Hollering Creek” shows the measures that Mexican women take to find their identity after immigrating. Facing discrimination on the basis of both race and gender, this task is more difficult for females than for their male counterparts. It is a challenge that continues for many women today as they balance two worlds and are expected to fully carry the roles of both. This is a focus on the main characters of the above texts, Americá Rincón and Cleofilas, respectively, as well as personal essays written by first …

The Self Is A Moving Target: The Neuroscience Of Siri Hustvedt's Artists, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.