Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Exposing Narrative Ideologies Of Victimhood In Emma Donaghue’S Room And Gillian Flynn’S Gone Girl, Meredith Jeffers

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Stories about abducted women and murdered wives are sadly common on cable and network news programs, from Nancy Grace to Dateline. These at the center of Emma Donaghue’s Room (2010) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). These contemporary novels manipulate the narrative conventions of popular true-crime stories to expose the

In the each chapter, I examine the interesting narrative perspectives of Room and Gone Girl to understand the ways that these novels deconstruct mass media narratives of violence to reveal ideas about gender. In Room, Donaghue dislocates the narration by narrating the novel not from the perspective of …

Exploring Colonial Identity And A Growing Ecoconsciousness On The Great Plains, Charles Hiebner

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is an exploration of my journey from an unapologetic industrial agriculturalist to a more environmentally sensitive citizen. I now recognize the inescapable relationship between colonialism and environmental issues surrounding water resources on the Great Plains and how these intertwined issues affect both the planet and its inhabitants. Specifically, I look at literature as both the catalyst and sustainer of my still-growing environmental and social consciousness. From important literary works encountered as a youth to the ecocriticism and explorations of social justice of the readings I engage in today, I examine how these literary choices have led me to …

(Re)Constructing The Hybrid: Negotiating Transcultural South Asian Women's Subjectivity, Zoya Haroon

English Honors Projects

My project explores the transcultural South Asian woman as postcolonial hybrid subject. I do so by comparing two novels by transnational South Asian feminist authors (Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee and Anita and Me by Meera Syal) and using ethnographic work to complement my literary analysis of hybridity with the lived experience of South Asian women at Macalester. I contextualize my project within postcolonial and women of color feminist theory. Ultimately, I seek to contribute to the existing literature on transcultural South Asian women’s subjectivity and to place their experience alongside that of other women of color.

Honors project in English …

Jess's Search For An Understanding Of Truth In Fred Chappell's Kirkman Tetralogy, Alex L. Blumenstock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Fred Chappell’s Kirkman tetralogy, narrator Jess Kirkman synthesizes a multiplicity of perspectives for understanding the nature of truth. Blurring the distinction between art and life, Jess's narrative structure mirrors the imaginative reconstruction of experience; the novels are largely non-chronological emotive interactions with and reflections of his most salient memories and imaginings. Synthesizing an impressive cacophony of voices, Jess's stories both describe and apply the wisdom and tales Jess acquires from and with his family members. Each story informs the prior and the next, and the rhizomatic interaction between language, narrative, and reader explores Jess's numerous identities and understandings as …

Multiplicity, Marianne Leslie Chan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This manuscript, Multiplicity, is a collection of poems that addresses the varying dimensions within human interactions and the multiple nature of the self. The speakers in these poems confront the “arbitrary constraints” and the categories that define our identities, as well as how these categories are almost always blurred by the complexities of the self and the differences between people. These categories include gender, sexuality, ethnicity, siblinghood, daughterhood, and religion. Two of these poems— “Really, It is All Arbitrary Constraint” and “Other Stories,” which appear in the second section—attempt to dismantle these constraints and/or categories by breaking from traditional poetic …

William Faulkner And Alcoholism : Distilling Facts And Fictions., Quintin Thomas Chipley 1956-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Opinions about alcoholism as a construct, and opinions about William Faulkner’s alcoholism as a fact, have varied. By considering carefully the role alcohol plays in human society, and by looking at these matters of concern through several different lens models, we can explain both why Faulkner was attracted abnormally to alcohol and why others around Faulkner have responded ambivalently to him, to his drinking and to his fiction. Faulkner’s alcoholism was rumored and denied during his life (1897-1962), evaded and contested after his death, and consistently affirmed after 1980. Attention to David Minter and Joseph Blotner, biographers, reveals much about …

Wandering, Idleness, And The Nineteenth-Century Tales Novel, 1836-1895, Molly C. O'Donnell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In "The Late-Victorian Romance Revival" (2008) Anna Vaninskaya questions if "one [can] even speak of the mixing or hybridization of genres in a particular work if the genres themselves had not yet been conclusively defined" (60). This question serves as a warning to genre studies scholars seeking to tease out new observations from history. This dissertation, however, seeks to do just that. Employing multiple theoretical approaches, my study of what I dub the tales novel finds links between diverse Victorian works. Bearing a resemblance to a collection of stories, with seemingly disparate narratives, the tales novels also demonstrate plot interdependence. …

Review Of Joyce Carol Oates's Jack Of Spades, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

A review of Joyce Carol Oates's novel Jack of Spades with an emphasis on her history of using pseudonyms and the mystery/thriller genres.

Reaching Reality: Realistic Portrayals Of Racism, Paige Evans

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

This paper argues that genre is essential to the accurate depiction of racism. By focusing on three landmark texts—Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Percival Everett’s Erasure—an overview of the most powerful genres in this discussion is given. The first, Realism, is defined by its determination to show physical reality. The next, Surrealism, is associated with cognitive reality. Poststructuralism, the last genre included, is described as using the cognitive effects of Surrealism to actively commentate and critique the physical realities of Realism. It is this interaction that marks Poststructuralism as the genre best suited …

The Binding Of Abraham: Inverting The Akedah In Fail-Safe And Wargames, Hunter B. Dukes

Journal of Religion & Film

This article draws upon Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death to trace how two exemplars of atomic bomb cinema reinterpret the Binding of Isaac (Akedah). Released during the twin peaks of Cold War tension, Fail-Safe (1964) and WarGames (1983) invert the Akedah of Genesis 22. In both films, an act of sacrificial patricide accompanies or replaces the sacrifice of an Isaac-like son. When viewed in the context of Cold War cultural politics—events such as Norman Morrison’s Abrahamic self-immolation and Kent State’s rejection of George Segal’s sacrificial memorial— the inverted Akedah emerges as …

Writing The Nation: A Concise Introduction To American Literature 1865 To Present, Amy Berke, Robert Bleil, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis

Textbooks

Writing the Nation: A Concise Guide to American Literature 1865 to Present is a text that surveys key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature.

ENGL 202

Gen Ms 31 Thomas Carper Papers Finding Aid, Megan Hendrix

Search the General Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Description:

This collection contains poems, writing logs and published works of poet Thomas Carper. Originally from Cornish, Maine, Carper is a Professor Emeritus who taught poetry and creative writing at USM from 1967 to 1997 and currently divides his time between Maine and France. The Papers include multiple drafts showing revisions of the poem along with the final version.

Date Range:

1982-2007

Size of Collection:

2 ft

"Not I!": Strategies Of Post-Millennial Confessionalistic Poetry, Charlotte J. Pence

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

With the technological ability and pop-cultural fascination to record private moments and distribute them, poetry that reveals personal details and conflates the identity between speaker and author must feel the effects of what could be viewed as an over-saturation of the confessional—which was during the 1950s and 1960s with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath a political, rebellious act. It is far from that now. In this Kim Kardashian era, revealing sex tapes are used as marketing tools to launch careers whereas once they destroyed careers. Considering the hyper-confessional climate of our era and that “Confessional” is something of …

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Other Voices

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century.

This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

The Melville-Hawthorne Friendship And Its Impact On Moby- Dick, Connie Townley

McNair Scholars Research Journal

As arguably one of the most famous literary works produced by any American writer (often deemed as the great American novel), Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick and its genetic history have been subjects of extensive scholarship over the last seventy years. Every aspect of Melville’s personal life, his considerable creative and personal hardships, as well as the influences which brought forth such an enigmatic and uniquely devised novel, have been all deeply explored and hotly debated. Melville's friendship and admiration of Nathaniel Hawthorne is widely believed among scholars to be a major influence and catalyst which fueled Melville's decision to depart …

“Strength Shed By A New And Terrible Vision:” The Organic Evolution Of The Blues And The Blues Aesthetic In Richard Wright’S 'Uncle Tom’S Children', Jeffrey J. Horvath

Student Publications

An exploration into the development of the "blues aesthetic" in the African-American literary tradition.

Writing The Nation: A Concise Introduction To American Literature 1865 To Present, Amy Berke, Robert Bleil, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis

English Open Textbooks

Writing the Nation: A Concise Guide to American Literature 1865 to Present is a text that surveys key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature.

Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.

Struggling Towards Salvation: Narrative Structure In James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain, Darren Spirk

Student Publications

This paper argues that John Grimes, the protagonist of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, represents the struggle inherent in the path towards salvation and holds the potential ability to break down the binaries that create this struggle. Of particular interest is a similarity in the narrative framing of John’s story with Jesus Christ's, as told in the four Gospels. The significance of both their symbolic power is dependent on a multitude of narrative viewpoints, in John’s case the tragic pasts offered of his aunt, father and mother in the novel’s medial section. Their stories inform the …

Scenes From The Gaijin Life, Ian M. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Scenes from the Gaijin Life contains eight interconnected stories about foreigners (gaijin in Japanese) living and working as English teachers in urban Japan. It recounts their daily lives and initial struggles, their jobs and their nights out, their formal conversations and their personal ones. The first five stories use a detached, neutral narration that forces readers to interpret sensory details on their own, while the latter three use an omniscient narration that helps readers understand the characters’ interactions with Japan. Though the eight scenes are all different, they’re connected by estrangement, longing, uncertainty, and the characters’ ever-present dissatisfaction with …

Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier

Theses and Dissertations

This project will attempt to provide an outline of some of the most salient constructions of present-day literary fiction, where those constructions might overlap or conflict, and how various contemporary authors and their works might usefully fit within those constructions. This project will argue that fiction-writers following postmodernism are presented with a unique problem of how to write fiction in a way that acknowledges the problems of using language as a primary meaning-making structure without falling down a linguistic rabbit hole where a text ceases to be about anything other than itself. Beginning with David Foster Wallace, this project will …