English Language and Literature Commons^™

Encompassing The Intolerable: Laughter, Memory, And Inscription In The Fiction Of John Mcgahern, John Keegan Malloy

Dissertations (1934 -)

Encompassing the Intolerable examines John McGahern's depiction of individual consciousness struggling with postcolonial Ireland's three dominant and interconnected institutions: nation, family, and the Catholic Church. While McGahern's work, especially the early fiction, is often considered unremittingly bleak, this study argues that his exposure of abuse, repression, and disillusionment within these institutions does not finally entail a pessimistic vision. Instead, through close readings emphasizing character and epiphany, I contend that his texts use the motifs of laughter, memory, and inscription to demonstrate how consciousness can accommodate intolerable realities such as violence and loss rather than becoming defined or controlled by them. …

Satori 2011, Winona State University

Satori Literary Magazine

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970.

Sara Suleri: A Study In The Idioms Of Dubiety And Migrancy In Boys Will Be Boys And Meatless Days, Rachel Tudor

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Three Poems, Daniele Pantano

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Two Poems, Jessica Beaufils

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Empathy: An Interview With Marianne Noble, Rebecca Lane, Jeffrey Zamostny

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

The Invisible Universe And Other Screenplays, Edward Howarth

Theses & Honors Papers

In the science fiction classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Roy Neary sacrifices everything, his job, his friends, his family, to pursue an answer that he believes will provide him with a new and better life. With nothing but hazy visions of alien spaceships, and a five note tune lingering in his memory, Roy is nevertheless willing to step outside of his emotional security and risk everything. Science fiction cinema is full of these characters, from Roy in Close Encounters, Truman in The Truman Show (1998), to Evan in The Butterfly Effect (2004), these are people not content …

Romanticism, Language, And The Vox Popul: A Sociolinguistic Analysis Of Wordsworth And Whitman, Jeff Everhart

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis analyzes the works of Wordsworth and Whitman, focusing on the manifestations of the poets’ language within a socio-cultural construct. The thesis highlights the ways in which the authors’ interactions with socio-cultural events, such as industrialization, impact the ways in which their parole interacts and at times conflicts with the underlying system of poetic tradition. Additionally, the study examines the ways in which Wordsworth and Whitman interact with two binary oppositions central to Romantic philosophy, the living or dead and the pastoral or industrial. The study found evidence to support an epistolary relationship between Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth, …

Samuel Johnson At Prayer, Elizabeth Kraft

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Samuel Johnson's life was punctuated by prayer. In this essay, I will examine Johnson's prayer practice in terms of both meaning and behavior. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language provides clear and succinct evidence in Johnson's own words of what he understood prayer and the act of praying to be. Of the two definitions of prayer and the seven definitions of to pray included in the Dictionary, the first in each category concerns religion and simply states that the noun and the verb are the same. According to Johnson the first meaning of to pray is "to make petitions to …

Poe's Mythologies: Transatlantic Nineteenth Century Hellenism As World Literature, David Greven

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ovid, Christians, And Celts In The Epilogue Of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

CHARLES FRAZIER HAS CAREFULLY SITUATED HIS NOVEL ABOUT AN American Civil War deserter within Greek and Latin classical literary traditions. Since its publication, Cold Mountain has all but universally been hailed as an “odyssey” by readers, critics, and scholars, in recognition of its structure as an adventure-laden homeward journey, with the end goal of reuniting two lovers; it is rich with Homeric allusions (even to the point of quotation) and typologies of both character and scene (Chitwood; McDermott, “Frazier Polymêtis.”; Vandiver). In the first chapter, the author further introduces two fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus (18), a thinker whose …

Review Of The Book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 19, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Mark Nolan and Cass Timberlane,” by Susan K. O’Brien

“Arrowsmith: The People Behind the Characters,” by Jan Peter Verhave, Van Raalte Institute, Hope College

“Sinclair Lewis’s Early Newspaper Career,” by Gary H. Mayer, Stephen F. Austin State University

Second Chances,” rev. of The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth by Barnaby Conrad, by Gary H. Mayer, Stephen F. Austin State University

“Habeas Corpus,” by Sinclair Lewis, part 6

Scout's Daughters : Race And Creative Development In Contemporary Adolescent Literature, Amanda Malloy

Honors Theses

At the heart of what Roberta S. Trites titles ―adolescent literature‖ – works written both for and about young adults—is a question of agency (Disturbing 7). In Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, Trites asserts that adolescent novels attempt to answer the question of young adults who wonder if they ―should or even can affect the world in which they live‖ (1). Trites‘ argument is based on the idea that the distinguishing characteristic of adolescent literature is its focus on ―the social forces‖ that …

Up Too Late: A Novel Excerpt, Peter Bayless

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Tyler Sexton is a male in his mid-twenties whose life seems to have ground to a halt before it truly began. Despite the opportunities afforded him by a successful college education and an upper-middle-class family background, Tyler's life since the death of his father from heart disease has become one dominated by malaise, living alone and working a dead-end job as a grocery store customer-service manager, clinging to the family members he has left. Now, with his mother suffering from a debilitating fight with cancer and his sisters either starting their own families or withdrawing even further into episodes of …

My Secret Life In Film: A Memoir, Kelly Grey Carlisle

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative dissertation is an original work in the genre of memoir, and consists of the first two sections of my book, My Secret Life in Film. I believe that my book speaks to contemporary experiences of childhood, violence, sexuality, and faith, and complicates conceptions of a ‘normal’ family. When I was three weeks old, my mother, who worked as a prostitute, was murdered near downtown Los Angeles. Her case remains unsolved, and I do not know my father. Her own parents were unwed. At first I lived with my maternal grandmother and the woman I believe to have been …

After The Rainbow, Rachel Hruza

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis contains a multi-genre collection featuring fiction and memoir. It explores characterization through relationships by focusing on the external and internal forces that influence a person’s connection to herself or another. Some pieces verge on the plane of magical realism while others are factually based. While most of this collection is serious in tone, the author hopes the reader will find joy in the small moments as well as the momentous.

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …

Women On The Ground: Bringing Theory And Activism Together Through Domestic Violence Narratives, Kacey J. Barrow

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis works toward bringing domestic violence activism and feminist theory together by refuting that these two approaches are necessarily in binary opposition. It is centered on changing the way we make sense of violence against women by addressing why the authors that include personal narrative in their writing should be help up as examples of theory. By analyzing literary domestic violence narratives, the author demonstrates that narrative is itself theory. In addition, this essay creates a third space where the author‘s own domestic violence narratives complement the literary narratives. The author shows how we can analyze victimized characters in …

"What's A Goin' On?" People And Place In The Fiction Of Edythe Squier Draper, 1924–1941, Aubrey R. Streit Krug

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay is devoted to looking back into the life and fiction of Edythe Squier Draper, a twentieth-century writer in Oswego, Kansas. Many of Draper’s stories are set in southeastern Kansas. Through them, we gain a sense of how she attempted—and at times failed—to perceive, articulate, and adapt to her place on the Great Plains. Draper claimed the identity of a rural woman writer by writing herself into narratives of colonial, agricultural settlement, and she both complicated and perpetuated stereotypes of class and race in her fiction. By examining her and her characters’ perspective on their place in the Great …