English Language and Literature Commons^™

Short Story: "Celery's Dream", Sophia Geng

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Seeing (The Other) Through A Terministic Screen Of Spirituality: Emotional Integrity As A Strategy For Facilitating Identification, Jarron Benjamin Slater

Theses and Dissertations

Although philosopher Robert Solomon and rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote in isolation from one another, they discuss similar concepts and ideas. Since its introduction in Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, identification has always been important to rhetorical theory, and recent studies in emotion, such as Solomon's, provide new insight into modes of identification—that human beings can identify with one another on an emotional level. This paper places Solomon and Burke in conversation with one another, arguing that both terministic screens and emotions are ways of seeing, acting, engaging, and judging. Hence, terministic screens and emotions affect ethos, or character, both …

Traumatized Voices: The Transformation Of Personal Trauma Into Public Writing During The Romantic Era, Karalyne S. Lowery

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Beginning as early as the 1790s and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, it is possible to trace in British literature a distinctive line of fascination among authors with what we now understand to be trauma and its profound effects on the lives and behaviors of it victims/survivors. With today’s neurological proof of the changes that take place in the brains of traumatized individuals, it stands to reason that these changes have taken place in every century, not just the century in which we have had the technology to view it or the vocabulary to describe it. This means that psychological …

'I Am Rooted, But I Flow': Virginia Woolf And 20th Century Thought, Emily Lauren Hanna

Scripps Senior Theses

My thesis is about Virginia Woolf’s novels, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse. I examine these novels in relation to the theories of Henri Bergson, William James, and Sigmund Freud, and the groundwork of Modernism. I relate Woolf's use of water imagery and stream of consciousness technique to Bergson’s theory of “la durée,” or psychological, subjective time, James’ “stream of consciousness” theory in psychology, and Freud’s theory of the “oceanic” feeling of religious experience.

Tragedy And Transcendence: Tracing Tragedy From Early Modernity To Present, William J. Giancola '12

College Honors Program

This thesis will examine six “tragedies” spanning the Renaissance and Modern epochs and attempt to trace the narrative of tragic consciousness as this consciousness expands to include new forms, symbols, and modes of expression. Additionally, this thesis will attempt to parse the kind of relationship tragedy has with transcendence and seek to understand – and ultimately judge – whether each of the texts examined herein is properly “tragic” as opposed to ironic, pessimistic, nihilistic, merely cynical, or merely existential.

Lost In Space No Longer: The Visionary Union Of 'The Wire', Brett Dupré

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In its serial space, David Simon’s The Wire season two relates the seemingly “disconnected” union men, foreign sex worker women, and African-American drug traders and crosses constructed boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and geography to evoke the possibility of a transnational working class. The Wire’s serialized narrative trespasses the limitations of money and numbers games and of individual characters to build, scene by scene, what Roderick Ferguson calls in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique “the location for new and emergent identifications and social relations” (108).

“All This Was My Life”: Constructing Textual Self-Identity In Diaries, Christie M. Jeansonne

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The ordering and control of experience through fictive selves, constructed in consideration of an audience of the self and others, is part of the diary’s identity-building and meaning-making function. This thesis analyzes the process by which the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Janet Schaw construct multiple textual identities and conceptualize their public and private selves. The projection of these multiple selves in the diary text serve to justify the private individual experience as extraordinary and worth telling, as well as to connect with a public community experience, relating the self to a greater socio-cultural context.

Traumatic And Healing Memory In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony And Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Ambata K. Kazi-Nance

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A comparative analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, with a focus on individual as well as collective memory work in historically marginalized indigenous and African-American communities, respectively. This represents a critical study of how the novels invoke progressive and redemptive models of remembering, as well as foreground the role of spiritual guides in the transformative process from trauma towards healing.

Individual Spirituality And The Canterbury Tales: An Analysis Of The Philosophical Connection Between The Tale Of Melibee And The Parson’S Tale As It Operates Within The Narrative Framework, Chelsea R. Martin

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

An analysis of both the placement and the philosophical connections between The Tale of Melibee and The Parson’s Tale suggests that a highly individual spiritual philosophy is being presented within The Canterbury Tales. This philosophy is exemplified via an analysis of both the role of The Tale of Melibee within the work, and the manner in which it is historically developed. The highest form of individual spirituality is revealed within The Tale of Melibee, through the spiritual developments occurring within the character Melibeus and his wife Prudence. This development serves to unify the exemplified extremes of satire and spirituality …

The Persistence Of Vengeance From Early Modern England To Postmodern New York, Dominic M. Sevieri

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

As a passing glance at the popular texts of any given period reveals, the subject of vengeance is nearly inescapable; on billboards, websites, and year end lists, revenge represents a curious constant even amid disparate media. This study explores the cultural commonalities that align revenge texts of the English Renaissance and exploitation films of late 20th century America. As in-depth inquiry reveals, numerous ideas and narrative tropes popularized during the Early Modern period are pushed to their logical extremes in these films. The central factor that aligns London during the Renaissance and New York at the cusp of the 1990s …

May 16, 2012: William Saroyan International Prize For Writing, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Developing A Picture Book Collaboratively With Children, Jenny Torgerson

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This children's story is designed to give children some ideas about what change is about and the possible positive consequences, and hopefully provide a jumping off point for discussion about change.

Exploring Literature For Children Of Incarcerated Parents, Tara Di Gerlando

Graduate Student Independent Studies

Investigates the educational need for children's literature that conveys the theme of a child coping with a physical separation from their parent. Includes an original children's story by the author based on a real life story of a son and mother who were separated for almost twenty years due to incarceration.

"I Enter Into Its Burning": Yvonne Vera's Beautiful Cauldron Of Violence, John C. Hawley

English

Commentators inevitably remark upon Yvonne Vera's prose and upon its startling application to the violent episodes she recounts. Some find it inappropriate, self-conscious, more suited to poetry than to prose. Others (and sometimes the same folks) describe it as by far her strongest suit, wherein descriptive powers overtake narration and plot becomes inevitably amorphous - but lovely. In this essay I wish to analyze why this conflicted response would not have concerned the author and why, in fact, she would have sought to discomfort the reader while bringing pleasure. Many writers before Vera have struggled over the applicability of art …

Quantitative Patterns Of Stylistic Influence In The Evolution Of Literature, James M. Hughes, Nicholas J. Foti, David C. Krakauer, Daniel N. Rockmore

Dartmouth Scholarship

Literature is a form of expression whose temporal structure, both in content and style, provides a historical record of the evolution of culture. In this work we take on a quantitative analysis of literary style and conduct the first large-scale temporal stylometric study of literature by using the vast holdings in the Project Gutenberg Digital Library corpus. We find temporal stylistic localization among authors through the analysis of the similarity structure in feature vectors derived from content-free word usage, nonhomogeneous decay rates of stylistic influence, and an accelerating rate of decay of influence among modern authors. Within a given time …

May 13, 2012: Dailykos Notes Convening Of Medieval Congress, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

The Stage Is The Court And All The Players Merely Copies: Shakespeare's Antony And Cleopatra As Propaganda, Ginnye Cubel

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In 1603 the world as England knew it changed. After forty-five years Elizabeth I, Queen of England, and last surviving Tudor was dead and James VI of Scotland was ascending the throne. Despite several differences between the new king and the old queen, there were similarities in their patronage of the arts. Enthralled by theatrical performances, one of James' first acts as king was to offer royal patronage to William Shakespeare's theatre company and give them the title, The King's Men. But it is likely that James' love of the theatre wasn't his only reason for patronizing Shakespeare's theatre troupe. …

Modernist Women In Three Acts: The Stage For Political Protest, Jennifer B. Redmond

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In this essay, I will draw upon Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand Sh011stories, "Bliss" (1918), "The Woman at the Store" (1912), "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais" (1918), George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), and Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One 's Own (1929), to defend Jeffreys's idea that "lesbianism" was, in many cases, nothing more than a bond of friendship between two women - a private experience that took on a different meaning in the public eye.

Additionally, I wish to support Gubar's notion that gender norms frequently existed secondarily to the importance of women gaining more …

The Vegetarian Question, Mary Elizabeth Sekela

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

I wasn't raised in a vegetarian household. As a matter of fact, I have spent the majority of my life on a horse and cattle farm in central Kentucky. As a child, the process of raising our cattle for slaughter didn't strike me as a disgusting or unholy activity-my parents participated, after all, and they didn't seem to be adversely affected. Even when I became aware that some of the animals I had seen wandering the fields were slaughtered just down the road from our kitchen table, it never bothered me beyond an initial instant of discomfort. It wasn't until …

May 11, 2012: Gws Event—5/17 In Center For Humanities, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.