English Language and Literature Commons^™

Concourse, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Grand, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Notation After “The Reality Effect”: Remaking Reference With Roland Barthes And Sheila Heti, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

In “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes reveals notation’s ideological function within the realist novel; a decade later in Preparation of the Novel, Barthes reconsiders notation as the practice by which the writer provisionally makes literary meaning. Barthes’s revision of his claims for the reality effect helps us see how an emerging genre—the novel of commission—pulls referential, preparatory materials into the novel in order to reimagine the sociality and institutionality of the writing process.

Theorizing Audience And Spectatorial Agency, Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

This chapter analyses Georgian audiences and spectatorial agency through several lenses: psychoanalytic film theory, theories of the public sphere and of mass publicity, and media studies of cultural convergence. The first section reads Georgian theatre’s heterogeneous playbills as a syntactical rendering of the audience, the imaginary community of the nation in process of negotiation. The second section shows theatrical paratexts blurring the boundary between theatre and coffee house, creating a theatrical public sphere in which the audience exercises daily public agency in saving or damning the play. The third section highlights the mingling of vulnerability and charisma in the celebrity …

Review Of "The Textual Condition Of Nineteenth-Century Literature" By J. M. Guy And I. Small, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Emily Dickinson’S Teenage Fanclub, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay explores the 1882 publication of “Success is counted sweetest” in the Amateur Journal, a newspaper edited by eighteen-year-old Albert E. Barker of Judsonia, Arkansas. The Amateur Journal was part of a fad that swept the United States after the Civil War, when thousands of teenage boys began publishing their own newspapers on diminutive printing presses. At its height in the 1880s, amateur journalism linked boys across the country into tightly knit virtual communities with their own distribution methods, literary conventions, social customs, and vernaculars. Barker likely reprinted “Success is counted sweetest” from the anonymous anthology A Masque of …

The Perils Of Authorship: Literary Property And Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Lara Langer Cohen, M. L. Mcgill

English Literature Faculty Works

This chapter examines the perils associated with American authorship during the early nineteenth century, with particular reference to issue of intellectual property and copyright. It begins with an analysis of the impact of intellectual property rights on publishing and the culture of reprinting, along with the influence of copyright on the American novel. It then considers the problem concerning the definition of “American authorship” and how the unstable nature of American authorship subjected writers who wished to promote it to charges of fraudulence. It also explores the question of originality among writers before concluding with a discussion of the radical …

“And You Are——?”: Faulkner’S Mysteries Of Race And Identity, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Giving Power To The Powerless: Elizabeth Gaskell's Presentation Of Women In An Age Of Change, Charis Tobias

Honors Projects

Elizabeth Gaskell takes advantage of the aura of change and ascribes a new vocabulary to Victorian womanhood, one that allows women to be active members of society as well as mothers. The topsy-turvy nature of Victorian society allowed for such changes to be instituted, and Gaskell challenges the female stereotypes of the day. Gaskell’s heroines must struggle with their preconceived, powerless notions of womanhood and the expectations placed upon them by society. This struggle often begins when patriarchal structures fail them and they are left to their own devices. Unlike in other Victorian novels, when women do become powerful, they …

The Conceptual Worlds Of Milton And Goethe, Jonathan Clayton

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Veteran Literacy: A Case For Veteran Identity Theory In Composition And Literature, Devin Whitaker

Anthós

In this paper I will outline a selection of texts to demonstrate the diverse literacies brought to higher learning institutions by veterans and discuss many of the challenges veterans face when translating these literacies to an in-class instructional setting. I will also identify social disconnections when interpreting the veteran experience through a deficit-based model and offer a preliminary, veteran-centric mode of re-interpretation. By drawing on some key experiences as a Hospital Corpsman having served with the Marine Corps Infantry, I will also attempt to construct a preliminary model for studying the experience of Post 9/11 veterans from an experienced, asset-based …

[Introduction To] The Cambridge Companion To Paradise Lost, Louis Schwartz

Bookshelf

This Companion presents fifteen short, accessible essays exploring the most important topics and themes in John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost. The essays invite readers to begin their own independent exploration of the poem by equipping them with useful background knowledge, introducing them to key passages, and acquainting them with the current state of critical debates. Chapters are arranged to mirror the way the poem itself unfolds, offering exactly what readers need as they approach each movement of its grand design. Essays in Part I introduce the characters who frame the poem's story and set its plot and theological dynamics …

The Mechanical Aspirations Of Written Things In Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Maxwell Harrison Cohn

Honors Papers

Of the many devices and doodads Laurence Sterne describes in Tristram Shandy (1759-67), the most surprising remains the machinery of Tristram Shandy itself. I use Sterne's frequent descriptions of Tristram Shandy as a machine to question how texts behave as (faulty and outdated) technologies in this eighteenth-century text. I look at Agostino Ramelli's book wheel--a sixteenth century device which allows its user to quickly cross-reference various texts--to illustrate the latent challenges in Sterne's book-machine metaphor. My essay suggests that Sterne's various registers of literary allusion signal moments in which the book realizes its potential, but also its limitations, as a …

Hearing Beyond The Veil: Benjy Compson And The Acousmatic Experience, Adam Hirsch

Honors Papers

The purpose of this project is to examine the perceptive systems and listening practices of Benjy Compson, the first narrator in William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," through the lens of acousmatic theory. I will consider Faulkner 's writing and Pierre Schaeffer's theories of sound as critical analogs for one another, in that our engagement with acousmatics opens channels of investigation into sound and aurality in the Benjy section that wouldn't be available otherwise, and vice versa. My main goal is to prove that 1) Benjy's consciousness; 2) Faulkner's structuring of the first section of the novel; and 3) …

Meaningful Play: Exploring The Possibilities Of The Novel In Don Delillo's White Noise, Steven Quam

Honors Papers

This paper explores the use of sub-genre in Don DeLillo's White Noise as a tool of meaning creation. The paper starts by examining previous approaches to the novel, which engaged with more explicitly political readings, and argues that these readings to not offer the contemporary reader much traction in thinking about White Noise. By providing an extensive account of how sub-genre is used in the novel's three sections, the paper concludes that White Noise can offer a notion of political perspective, in the absence of offering political prescriptions.

“Of The Woman First Of All”: Walt Whitman And Women's Literary History, Vivian Delchamps

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman's role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation.

Flying In Place: Black Superheroes And Their Origin Stories, Kolton Harris

English Honors Papers

In recent years, the black superhero has received more attention from scholars. With this surge of interest, comes a wealth of uncharted territory. My paper examined the origin stories of black superheroes, some of which have not yet been critically analyzed. The basis for my analysis is the overwhelming repetition of an urban black narrative that serves as the template for black superhero origin stories. It has proven to be narratively restricting and highly dependent on stereotypes.

Throughout this paper, I offer close readings of black superheroes that are informed by criticism of black masculinity. While the superhero narrative is …

Elegy Without Consolation, Matthew Buckley Smith

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 133

Things In The Vicinity, Eamon Grennan

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 76

"Well, Shaniqua’S Taking Her Time", Benjamin Grossberg

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 78-80