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Criterion: A Journal For Literary Criticism, Criterion: A Journal For Literary Criticism

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Criterion: A Journal For Literary Criticism

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

As the editor of an academic annual, I have the pleasure of interacting with scholars from across the United States and the world. While most of these interactions take place via e-mail, I feel as if I get to know RAE's contributors, in addition to their work, as I take a manuscript from submission to publication. Of course, some interactions are more personal than others. This was particularly true of my email exchanges with Adrianne Wadewitz, who died in a rock-climbing accident during the production of this volume. I am pleased to include her excellent essay on the ways eighteenth-century …

Anglican Church Policy, Eighteenth Century Conflict, And The American Episcopate: Book Review, Christopher J. Fauske

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Perhaps the most charming aspect of Kenneth Elliott's Anglican Church Policy, Eighteenth Century Conflict, and the American Episcopate is its author's propensity to take at face value the statements made in the voluminous correspondence, the many pam - phlets, and the occasional published sermons on the subject of whether a resident bishop would help secure the Church of England in the North American colonies and whether such an outcome was in any case desirable.

David Hume: The Philosopher As Historian: Book Review, Richard Kleer

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Judging a book by its cover would give especially misleading results in this case. From its title, readers might expect a general introduction to Hume's scholarly work. Instead, they will get an account mainly of Hume the historian. The volume was originally commissioned as part of "a series of short books by historians writing about their favourite historians" (5). First published by Avon (in Britain) and St. Martin's (in the United States), it is now reprinted by Penguin and Yale. The rerelease may have a lot to do with the apparent popularity (judging by the many reviews, at least) of …

Finding Unifying Texts: Make Lemonade And The Book Thief As Tools Of Differentiated Instruction For English Language Learners, Dane Spencer

The Utah English Journal

Standing in front of a high school classroom with deeply variant levels of English proficiency is a daunting experience for almost any teacher. Last year, as I looked out over my sophomore class of students, I saw five students raised in the United States (including three second-generation Americans) mingled with five international, English language learner (ELL) students. Three of the international students hailed from China, while the other two were from Vietnam. A few months into the year, the equation became even more complex as another non-international student joined the class, along with another international student from war-torn Ukraine (the …

President's Message: Language, Limits & Literacy, Kim Irvine

The Utah English Journal

I cried in my silent classroom when her picture came up on my role. Her sparkling eyes, clear and full of promise, stared out at me from a darling, dimpled smile ringed by shining blonde curls. In her sixth grade year, this angelic-looking student was in a car accident-caused by a drunk driver. She was badly hurt with her face and head taking most of the damage. I sat numbly listening as they explained my new student's situation. The accident was horrific. She had been thrown from the car through the back window. She lost an ear. We were told …

Vergilian Allusions In The Novels Of Willa Cather, Nathaniel Wagner

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This work aims to explore the nature of Vergilian allusion in the novels of Willa Cather - how the author implicated classical language in her own texts as well as the purpose and efficacy of such allusions. By surveying traces of Vergilian passages and rhetorical techniques such as ecphrasis and anacolouthon across three of the writer's major novels, My Antonia, The Professor's House and Shadows on the Rock, this study reveals an important and persistent aspect of Cather's artistic program. The author intentionally and regularly uses Vergilian language and figures to lend a sense of grandeur to the small, individual …

Stand-Up Comedy And Self-Deprecating Humor, Amelia M. Bell

UROP Posters

Stand-up comedy has been around for centuries, making people laugh for generations. Through the years the forms and techniques stand-up comedians use have shifted back and forth. Self-deprecation humor is one of these forms of humor, where the comedian pokes fun at his or herself, and it has recently become more incredibly popular in today’s society. Stand-up comedians like Louis C.K. have risen to newfound popularity by using self-deprecating humor almost completely in their sets. This paper attempts to answer the question of why audiences respond so positively to stand-up comedians who use self-deprecating humor. It does so by arguing …

Male Development In Young Adult Novels: Mapping The Intersections Between Masculinity, Fatal Illness, Male Queerness, And Brotherhood, Ruth Nelson

Departmental Honors Projects

Since 2000, Young Adult (YA) literature has grown exponentially. The subgenres of cancer novels (teen “sick-lit”) and LGBTQ fiction, in particular, have experienced a recent surge in popularity. The novels in these subgenres that feature young men as the affected characters (diagnosed with cancer and/or identifying as gay or queer) are particularly interesting because of the threats that these experiences pose to heteronormative masculinity. Because this fiction is directed at an impressionable audience in the process of forming their identities, the novels’ representations of gender could have a strong influence over readers’ gender identity development. Researchers have begun exploring the …

Paradoxical Agency: The Ethics Of Women's Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Rome, Catherine Riley Godbold

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I address the problems of ethics and agency for women’s speech in Shakepseare’s Roman plays—Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus—and the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Regardless of their rhetorical skill, virtue, or agency, it seems that the Roman women in these works are doomed to fail: either their lives become unlivable or they lose the people most important to them. This prompts the project’s initiating question: why do Shakespeare’s Roman women speak if their words have no long-term effect? For these characters, rhetorical success in Shakespeare’s Rome is dependent upon a particular …

Virginia As A Response To Parental Influence, Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Publications

In his 1807 poem, "Resolution and Independence," a poem that brings to mind Oliver Treadwell's artistic crisis in Virginia, William Wordsworth describes the precipice that he faces when trying to come to terms with the emotional extremes he must allow himself in creating the art he desires.

Tropes Of Blood, Body And The Ground Of The Law: Becoming, Being And Beyond Wife On The Early Modern Stage, Emily Faye Murray

Theses and Dissertations

This project focuses on the representation of women on the early modern stage in three exemplary texts: the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, and two city comedies, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. Whether playing the role of adulterous wife, performing the role socially striving wife, or resisting the role of laboring wife, these female characters were on stage not only for entertainment, but also for examination and scrutiny by an early modern audience. Playwrights used characterizations of women and wives and their relationships to the economy as vehicles through …

Though My Gross Blood Be Stain'd: Bleeding Bodies And Power Dynamics In Shakespeare's The Tragedy Of Coriolanus And The Rape Of Lucrece, Lindsey Katherine Dee Wedow

Master's Theses

Early modern literature is replete with references to blood. These references appear in the contexts of class and gender distinction, medical information, religious significance, and more. Upon looking into the Galenic model of medicine utilized in early modern England, it becomes clear that blood, while one of the four humors of the body, held a place of special significance amongst the rest. Thus in reading the works of Shakespeare we are able to see how he often handles blood as a substance that holds special qualities and as such plays an important role in human lives. This paper examines two …

The Trauma Thesis: Medical And Literary Representations Of Psychological Trauma In The Twentieth Century, Sarah Louise Eilefson

Dissertations

The historian Samuel Hynes has observed that World War I was not only the greatest military and political event of its time but also the greatest imaginative event. Soldiers and civilians struggled to comprehend the war’s devastation and the changes it produced while medical practitioners and artists examined the war as a site of extraordinary trauma. My project explores two of the many archives of trauma: the medical discourse through which trauma was defined; and representations of trauma in a variety of English language novels from the early and mid-twentieth century. I begin with a historical survey of the medical …

Public Relations: Diaspora, Media, And The State(S) Of American Literature, Nathan Allen Jung

Dissertations

Like any good public relations campaign, this dissertation aims to offer a persuasive interpretation of certain key facts. The facts, as I see them, are as follows: first, a great number of contemporary novels and poems explore the personal and social consequences of diasporic migration. Second, these texts, along with their print and electronic paratexts, share a pervasive interest in media. And third, these works are rarely read in conversation with one another, despite their mutual concern for migration and media. Owing to this last point in particular, scholarship has failed to fully address the broader media theories developed in …

The Modernist Novel In Its Contemporaneity, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Through the writings of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen, this chapter considers the temporality of the now, the modernist novel in its contemporaneity, to show how the ambient environment of daily life takes shape in, and shapes, the modernist novel.

White Woods And Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen Rewrites A Streetcar Named Desire, Verna Foster

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The film's reviewers almost invariably commented on the parallels with Streetcar, many noting, too, that Cate Blanchett, who plays the title character, Jasmine, had also successfully played Blanche Dubois in Liv Ullmann's 2009 production of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.2 But for all the similarities in character types and plot structure and for all the allusions to specific lines in Streetcar, the themes of Blue Jasmine are very different from those of Williams's play because the story that Allen tells also channels the fall of Bernie Madoff and his wife, Ruth. The flashbacks are a filmic equivalent …

Tactical Encounters:Material Rhetoric And The Politics Of Tactical Media, Anthony Michael Stagliano

Theses and Dissertations

Tactical Encounters: Material Rhetoric and the Politics of Tactical Media articulates the concept of material rhetorical tactics, discrete rhetorical moves effecting political and social change, however ephemeral. I argue that material rhetorical tactics do not necessarily originate or conclude with a human subject, and that to understand this, we must reorient our conceptions of rhetorical action, agency, and, ultimately, its relationship to the demos, to include actions, actors, agents, and events that are not, in themselves, human. I build on recent work in rhetorical theory that has conceptualized the function and nature of rhetoric as involving agents human and nonhuman, …

Creating The Self: Women Artists In Twentieth-Century Fiction, Bethany Dailey Tisdale

Theses and Dissertations

In novels of artistic development (or künstlerromane) by women in the early twentieth-century, becoming an artist is intimately tied to becoming recognized as an individual. It would appear that an era of rapid change and expanding opportunities for women would result in affirmative narratives of women’s artistry, but studying texts by Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell shows that stringent gender roles can still keep women from realizing artist success.

In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart ruins her prospects on the marriage market by striving for freedom and aesthetic pleasure. Those desires cannot be reconciled …