English Language and Literature Commons^™

My Year With Digital Supremacists, Nick Baur

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Possessive Structures And Genitive Case: Spanish And English Compared, Elizabeth Kelsey

Honors Program Theses

Although possessive constructions are formed differently in Spanish as compared to English, most notably through the insertion of the preposition de as compared to the Saxon genitive ‘s, both languages require that possessive Ɵ-roles must be assigned and possessive Case must be checked when possessive constructions are formed. This research follows authors such as Picallo (1994), Antrim (2003), and Bernstein (2005) to propose that possessive Ɵ-roles and possessive Case are assigned and checked, respectively, by specific, separate functional projections, which are only generated in instances of a possessive relationship. Using the principles of minimalism, examples of Spanish and …

Hettie Jones And Bonnie Bremser: Complicating Feminist And Beat Master Narratives, Nancy Effinger Wilson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Beat master narrative suggests that all Beats ignored racism; the feminist wave model suggests that there was no feminist activism between the first and second wave of feminism and no attention to the intersection of race and gender prior to the third wave. Both models discount and in the process erase the efforts by Beat writers Bonnie Bremser and Hettie Jones who challenged racism and sexism before the more visible civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. Employing Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity to analyze the intercultural/interracial attitudes present in Bonnie Bremser’s Troia and Hettie Jones’ …

Peeta’S Virtue In The Hunger Games Trilogy, Gabriel Ertsgaard

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Latin virtus literally means “manliness” (vir = man) and, by extension, the positive qualities that a man should have. During the transition from Latin to French to English, “virtue” lost its gender specificity, but retained its reference to positive qualities. Thus, by the Enlightenment period, separate standards of virtue had emerged for women and men. Suzanne Collins disrupts this gendered virtue dichotomy in her Hunger Games trilogy. Peeta Mellark is a natural diplomat and peacemaker, a gentle soul who fits the feminine model of virtue better than the masculine model. Although Peeta engages in violence when necessary, he …

Kate O’Brien: Queer Hauntings In The Feminist Archive, Naoise Murphy

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The archive of Irish writer Kate O’Brien is a notable example of how queerness haunts the mainstream of feminist literary spaces. The 2019 Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) exhibition Kate O’Brien: Arrow to the Heart, which set out to restore this censored novelist’s place in the archive of twentieth-century Irish writing, provides a case study of these dynamics. Queer and feminist perspectives on the archive, with a focus on affect, hauntings and Sara Ahmed’s “queer use,” illuminate the conflicting epistemologies regulating the O’Brien archive. Reading this exhibition as an Irish queer, affective experience collides with entrenched structures of power …

Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Race Youth in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture argues for the centrality of black youth, both real and literary, to the trajectories of African American literature and its repudiation of white supremacy. Drawing on research into the rise of the adolescent and teenager as distinct social categories, I argue that age-based subjectivity should inform how we read race-based subjectivity. My first chapter explores how early twentieth-century black periodicals push back against white supremacist theories of human development in an explicit appeal to what I call “race youth,” the children and adolescents who would take up the mantle of racial uplift. …

Wisdom From The Collard Field: Exploring Agrarian Community In Twenty And Twenty-First Century American Literature, Robert M. Gorum

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation surveys agrarian literature written by American writers since World War II. It compares the Southern Agrarians of Vanderbilt University and New Agrarians such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Gene Logsdon to examine their understanding of place and home. I begin my inquiry with a personal frame story of time I have spent in and around the sustainable agriculture movement. Drawing on various forms of literature, including memoirs, cookbooks, novels, reportage, and other scholarship, I explore American ideals since World War II relating to the production and consumption of food.

I begin my opening chapter with a reassessment …

Criterion, Volume 39, 2021, Loyola Marymount University English Department

Criterion

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Maclay

Co-Editor-in-Chiefs: Christina Martinez, Alexandra Paradzick, & Comer Wadzeck

African American Celebrity Auto/Biographies, Anthony S. Foy

English Literature Faculty Works

Anthony Foy’s chapter asks how do we approach the overdetermined narrative of the African American celebrity as a modern variant of African American autobiography, rather than simply dismissing it for its lack or artistry, activism, or authenticity? Foy observes that (1) the Black celebrity narrative recounts the emergence, circulation, reception, and transformation of the star’s image while also registering the synedcochic function of the star’s racialized body; (2) it features the sites, activities, practices, and products of consumer culture in order to ratify the star’s status as exemplary consumer and alluring commodity; and (3) it commodifies authenticity by promising to …

Contending Discourses Of Black Autobiography: Respectability, Authenticity, And Masculinity, Anthony S. Foy

English Literature Faculty Works

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced …

Diasporic Longings, Bakirathi Mani

English Literature Faculty Works

Using diaspora as a framework for reading Asian American literature expands the geographical and temporal contours of what it means to be Asian American. Although late-twentieth-century US popular culture was marked by multicultural ideologies of American citizenship, “diaspora” captures another way of thinking about Asian Americans: as immigrants who are subject to multiple projects of nationalism, and who embody diverse forms of citizenship. Whereas writers like Bharati Mukherjee reproduce dominant ideologies of US exceptionalism and multicultural citizenship, for writers such as Meena Alexander, the production of diasporic locality ripples across generations, as she ties together South Asia with North America, …

Debilitating Publics: Reading Canlit's Investigations Into Psycho-Affective Pain And Social Change, Rebekah Ludolph

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The reception studies that comprise this dissertation take up contemporary depictions of psycho-affective pain from the field of Canadian literature that are embraced by prominent literary publics as an act of social responsibility. Each study contextualizes the publics that review these texts within the ongoing use of literary culture to justify the settler state’s land claim, nationally reparative reading practices, and trends in the therapeutic use of literature. Tracing the affective reactions documented within each text’s reception, this study finds that narratives that fail to locate the nation as a reparative project are susceptible to interpretive practices that pathologize, rather …

Writing A Fantasy Novel, Sarah Webb

Honors Projects

The goal of this Honors Project was to write and outline a manuscript for a fantasy novel. Worked into that goal was to create a unique magic system, a world, and a pantheon, which was accomplished through research of other fantasy worlds and other mythologies both fictional and historical. The story revolves around the central questions of identity (including the fluidity of gender and sexuality), concerns of future aspirations, and how education applies to those topics through facilitating conversation; these themes are not commonly discussed in mainstream fantasy. The current manuscript, which houses over 42,000 words, also includes a visual …

‘I Have Had My Vision:’ Visions And The Escape From Expectations In The House Of Mirth And To The Lighthouse, Madison Yardumian

Scripps Senior Theses

“I have had my vision,” Lily Briscoe declares in the triumphant culminating line of To the Lighthouse, indicating the fulfillment of her artistic vision on a project over ten years in the making. In her success, Lily Briscoe disproves those who have told her “women can’t write, women can’t paint” and actualizes her ability to create, all the while rejecting gendered and heteronormative expectations which prioritize heterosexual marriage over her artistic pursuits (Woolf, TL 86). Strikingly, this language of vision also recurs throughout The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, a text published 22 years after To the Lighthouse, …

Witnessing Difference: An Exploration Of Living In The Aftermath Of Trauma In Post-Holocaust America In Cynthia Ozick’S “Rosa”, Anastasia Kourotchkina

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the process of witnessing in Cynthia Ozick’s novella Rosa as a crucial part of living in the aftermath of Holocaust. By using Kelly Oliver’s concept of witnessing, I approach the process of witnessing trauma as the process of restoring subjectivity. As my analysis of Ozick’s Rosa shows, what prevents both Rosa and those around her to bear witness to trauma is the failure to imagine oneself as implicated in the traumas of the other. I conclude that the tendency to ignore the essential connection and dependence that exists between the Self and the other is enabled by …

Women And World War One: Perspectives On Women's Role In Wwi Literature, Rachel Michelle Brown

All Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the changing gender roles of British women who served as caretakers in World War One. Often overlooked for their contributions, the women who worked on the frontlines of the war defined the changing role of women during and after the war in several crucial ways: 1) the general expectations of women’s gender role, 2) how women perceived and acted in motherhood, and 3) how women constructed and maintained heterosexual, homosocial, and platonic relationships. Using a gender theory approach, this thesis analyzes two semi-autobiographical fictional texts, Evadne Price’s Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War, published in 1930, and …

Portrait Of Brother As A Tractor At The Equipment Sale, Samatha Leigh Futhey

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 67-68

Seneca Falls: Halloween Weekend 2016, Before The Election, Nancy Mccabe

Nelle (literary magazine)

p. 5

Early Cretaceous Swims Up To The Bar, Lesley Wheeler

Nelle (literary magazine)

p. 123

White Knight, Derrick Harriell

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 72