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Off The Road: Imperialism And Exploration In The American Road Movie, Andy Wright 2016 Pitzer College

Off The Road: Imperialism And Exploration In The American Road Movie, Andy Wright

Pitzer Senior Theses

This essay explores the imperialist nature of the American road movie as it is defined by the film’s era of release, specifically through the lens of how road movies abuse the lands that are travelled through. To accomplish this, my essay analyzes a classic road movie, Easy Rider, a more contemporary parody, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and the futuristic film, The Martian. All of these films treat everything that which is not the metropolitan traveller in a distinctly oppressive sense, and each time a new generation of filmmakers makes a road movie, it becomes …


Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey 2016 University of Kentucky

Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …


Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven 2016 University of Kentucky

Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct …


The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin 2016 University of Kentucky

The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin

Theses and Dissertations--English

While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a …


Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar 2016 University of Kentucky

Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar

Theses and Dissertations--English

While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …


The Reader's Complicity: Universality In Waiting For The Barbarians, The Laramie Project, And The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, Aubrey Kosa 2016 Christopher Newport University

The Reader's Complicity: Universality In Waiting For The Barbarians, The Laramie Project, And The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, Aubrey Kosa

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

No abstract provided.


Pecan Grove Review Volume 17, St. Mary's University 2016 St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review Volume 17, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.


Gay Habits Set Strait: Fan Culture And Authoritative Praxis In Ready Player One, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly 2016 Old Dominion University

Gay Habits Set Strait: Fan Culture And Authoritative Praxis In Ready Player One, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly

English Faculty Publications

(First Paragraph) Gwendolyn Morgan reminds us that medievalism and authority are complementary fictions.1 Recognizing that the "past with which we identify actually reflects our present needs," she examines the way that contemporary writers establish the authority of their works by adapting, if not explicitly fabricating medieval sources.2 The result, she argues, is a kind of "double practice of medievalism," one that invokes the authoritative power of the Middle Ages by appropriating the medieval appeal to auctoritee, which is to say the pretense of "citing real and invented classical authorities" to both disguise and justify authorial invention.3 Morgan …


Inspection, Alicia DeFonzo 2016 Old Dominion University

Inspection, Alicia Defonzo

English Faculty Publications

Endure an inspection with Alicia DeFonzo.


The Philosophy Of Ecology In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath, Stephanie A. Steinbrecher 2016 Scripps College

The Philosophy Of Ecology In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath, Stephanie A. Steinbrecher

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the possibilities for ecocritical study in fiction through John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. Major ecocritical interpretation has yet to gain much traction in novels; by focusing on human nature, this form’s “anthropocentric” posture seems itself to be antithetical to ecocritical efforts, which aim to unseat humans as the center of the moral universe. However, by analyzing The Grapes of Wrath’s formal, narratorial, and thematic valences, I argue that principles of social justice concurrently imply environmental justice in the philosophical currents of the text. Tenets of deep ecology and Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” …


Orbic Bards: Religious Liberalism And The Problems Of Representation In The Postbellum Works Of Walt Whitman And Herman Melville, Anthony Gus Cohen 2016 University of Texas at El Paso

Orbic Bards: Religious Liberalism And The Problems Of Representation In The Postbellum Works Of Walt Whitman And Herman Melville, Anthony Gus Cohen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In an attempt to reconcile the critical camps that attempt either to christianize or otherwise, "scripturize" nineteenth century literary texts with the converse, which attempts to paint them cynically as "infidel countertexts" this project seeks to find a middle ground. The works of Herman Melvile and Walt Whitman steeped in the increasingly liberal religious atmosphere of New York City following the Civil War, both strive to offer up an impressively accurate historical and poetical record, free from the problems of hearsay that nagged the deists and transcendentalists, and instead attempted to offer something that instead was nearer to reason, and …


Front Matter, Douglas Higbee 2016 USC Aiken

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.


Gender And Power In Waiting For Godot, Ryan Wright 2016 Reed College

Gender And Power In Waiting For Godot, Ryan Wright

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

No abstract provided.


Blind With Superstition, Cursed With Illusions: Masculinity And War In Bierce’S “Chickamauga”, Salina Patterson 2016 Middle Georgia State University

Blind With Superstition, Cursed With Illusions: Masculinity And War In Bierce’S “Chickamauga”, Salina Patterson

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

No abstract provided.


The Game Debate: Video Games As Innovative Storytelling, Melissa Somerdin 2016 University of Missouri, St. Louis

The Game Debate: Video Games As Innovative Storytelling, Melissa Somerdin

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

No abstract provided.


Back Matter, Douglas Higbee 2016 USC Aiken

Back 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 2016 USC Aiken

Contents, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.


James Joyce’S Gnomon Of Pain In “Grace” And “The Dead”, Bari K. Boyd 2016 Mount St. Mary's University

James Joyce’S Gnomon Of Pain In “Grace” And “The Dead”, Bari K. Boyd

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

No abstract provided.


The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 18 Fall 2016, 2016 University of South Carolina

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 18 Fall 2016

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

No abstract provided.


As If We Were Alive - Trauma Recovery In Toni Morrison's Beloved And The Bluest Eye, Eric D. McDonnell Jr 2016 The University of Akron

As If We Were Alive - Trauma Recovery In Toni Morrison's Beloved And The Bluest Eye, Eric D. Mcdonnell Jr

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Beloved each explore issues of traumatized individuals and the effects of this trauma on their lives and the lives of those around them. An oft-overlooked piece of Morrison's work, however, is her focus on recovery from trauma and the unique presentations of these possibilities through narrative. In these selected texts, the need for a community to act, engage, and remember the trauma of individuals and collectives shine through as the key ways to move twaords the hope of recovery from traumatic events.


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