English Language and Literature Commons^™

Motherhood, Vulnerability And Resistance In The Elysium Testament By Mary O’Donnell, María Elena Jaime De Pablos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999) narrates the story of Nina, an accomplished grotto restorer, but a neglectful wife and mother according to the Irish patriarchal symbolic order –the “register of regulatory ideality” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 18). Estranged from her husband, Neil, she sends him a series of letters, her “testament,” where some of the most significant aspects of her life are exposed. Readers discover that Nina’s and Neil’s marriage begins to crumble after the birth of their second child, Roland, to whom Nina attributes a frightening dual nature, which she tries to control through physical and psychological …

Sex Between Women And Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies, Antonia Navarro-Tejero

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, "Sex Between Women and Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies," Antonia Navarro-Tejero examines the lesbian experience, using two heterosexual voices representing the lesbian abject: Shobha Dé’s popular bestseller novel Strange Obsession (1992) and Karan Razdan’s Bollywood film Girlfriend (2004), as they espouse the dominant ideology of heteronormativity, rendering homosexuality as a western illness that taints the Indian culture. First, the author provides an overview of the history of lesbian desire in India, and how it is rendered by Hindu nationalists. Then, following the postulates of Michel Foucault, she analyzes both cultural texts with respect to how same-sex desire is …

Memory In T/Rubble: Tackling (Nuclear) Ruins, Marilena Parlati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The 1945 bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have recently started to recede back in the memory of Western culture. 9/11 and the age of global warfare which we are in have averted our gazes away from that past, in our tremulous expectations of the next traumatic event. In the twentieth century, poets like Tony Harrison have tackled this delicate topic, while Japanese culture has in many ways been forced and willing to reconsider its own agendas and sense of identity from those ‘ground zeroes’ onwards. In both A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the …

Trauma, Ethics, And The Body At War In Brittain, Borden And Bagnold, Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold,” Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo discusses how the autobiographical accounts of the conflict by Vera Brittain, Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, inspired by their experiences as voluntary nurses in the front, deconstruct the meanings of femininity, masculinity and patriotism, contesting the official rhetoric of passivity that defined the role of women in World War I. Their extreme engagement with the precariousness and vulnerability of others elicits an empathic response that can be interpreted through Judith Butler (2004; 2009), Emmanuel Lévinas (1969) and Alan Badiou’s (1993) ethics of …

Subverting Transnormativity: Rage And Resilience In Kim Fu’S For Today I Am A Boy, Andrea Ruthven

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyzes the affective politics of rage and resilience in the novel For Today I Am a Boy (2014) by Kim Fu. The novel explores the dis-identification (Muñoz 1999) of gender identity through the protagonist, focusing on the rage, sadness, fear, and secrecy that function as the glue holding the body together, but that also work to constrain the process of self-identification. The novel is not the celebration of self-realization, nor is it the lamentation of a traumatized protagonist. Instead, the narrative pays attention to the various ways in which non-binary, or non-normative gender identities are marginalized, and to …

Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sarah Kane’s Blasted has been analyzed from various perspectives that address the layers of destruction it exposes. From the questioning of its title and meaning, to the unravelling of the protagonists’ abusive relationship, the analyses have emphasized the depiction of vulnerability as the defining human trait that Jean Ganteau observes in contemporary British literature. However, a key aspect has been overlooked in the critical response to the play: for Kane vulnerability does not equal helplessness, but rather stands in opposition to it. Hence, this article concentrates on how Blasted formulates a new understanding of vulnerability that fits Judith Butler’s later …

Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In Life After Life (2013), British writer Kate Atkinson returns to the rewriting of History as her-story that characterized her early fiction. The protagonist’s lifespan overlaps with the major historical events of the twentieth century, allowing the writer to explore how those affected the individual lives of women and, at the same time, problematizing history, memory, and the past. Above all, Life After Life highlights the deep vulnerability of women to systemic gender violence, although it also emphasizes women’s resilience. The purpose of this paper is to examine Atkinson’s peculiar rendering of resilience, which interestingly she locates in the body, …

It's Not A Mansion This House, But It's Our Own: Memory, Childhood And Domestic Space In John Mcgahern's Memoir, Emily Smith

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

A Place Apart, In Its Own Time: The Irish Pub As Portrayed In John Mcgahern's Short Stories, Aoife Carrigy

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Carceral Dreams: Punishment In Contemporary Utopian Fiction, Amandine Faucheux

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the representation of legal violence—punishment—is an essential definitional axis to utopian literature. Utopian scholarship tends to position the political or economic system that a text imagines as the key determinant of that text’s identity as a Utopia, a dystopia, or an anti-Utopia. I propose instead that the propensity of the imaginary society to inflict violence in a legal or official context defines its utopian or dystopian quality. Through an analysis of twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone utopian novels and stories by George Orwell, Octavia E. Butler, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Adam Roberts, and Kelley Eskridge, …

Debut, Philip L. Levin

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

Frankenstein And Weston, Ransom And Van Helsing: Common Characters In The Works Of Terence Fisher And C.S. Lewis, Connor Salter

Making Literature Conference

No abstract provided.

The Tongue-Tied Imagination [Table Of Contents], Tobias Warner

Literature

Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism.

Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development.

Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages …

The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She illuminates how playwrights both satirized and perpetuated the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite.

Exterranean [Table Of Contents], Phillip John Usher

Literature

“For anyone who might be suffering from Anthropocene fatigue, this is a book to jolt you from your slumbers. What happens to the globe when we shift attention from the outward projection of emissions to extraction ? The Earth we thought we knew, and were already mourning, takes on a stunning new critical light.”—Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University

Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By bringing a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, into conversation with the contemporary work of Bruno Latour, …

Cs The Day: The Trading Card Game, Wendi Sierra

English Faculty/Staff Publications

In many ways, Cs the Day: The Card Game is an ode both to academia, which is imperfect but can at times be wonderful, and to my personal passion and research interest, which has helped me to find a place within this profession. It is also, as is discussed in more detail below, an extension of an existing game, and as such embodies many of the same goals and principles of that game. Thus, designing Cs the Day: The Card Game required careful attention to how the mechanics and narrative reflect both the profession and the original game. There are …

Interim Performance Report, Lg‐71‐16‐0152‐16, Extending Intelligent Computational Image Analysis For Archival Discovery, March 2019, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, John O'Brien

CDRH Grant Reports

The primary goal of "Extending Intelligent Computational Image Analysis for Archival Discovery" is to investigate the use of image analysis as a methodology for content identification, description, and information retrieval in digital libraries and other digitized collections. Building on work started under a National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, our IMLS project seeks to 1) analyze and verify our previously developed image analysis approach and extend it so that it is newspaper agnostic, type agnostic, and language agnostic; 2) scale and revise the intelligent image analysis approach and determine the ideal balance between precision and …

The Pedagogies Of Sex Trafficking Postcolonial Fiction: Consent, Agency, And Neoliberalism In Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street, M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

Amnesty International’s 2015-16 push for the decriminalization of sex work sparked yet another international debate on sex trafficking, with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), together with a long list of celebrities and iconic feminists such as Gloria Steinem, claiming that such measure will only worsen sex trafficking, among other problems, and myriad pro-sex work feminists vouch-ing exactly the opposite.1 This dispute is by no means new-as of 2018, it remains at an impasse-but, interestingly, while sociologists and women’s studies scholars have been discussing sex trafficking issues for decades now, and despite its intimate relation to postcolonialism and globalization, …

Encountering Robert Burns: An Oral History, G. Ross Roy, Andrea L'Hommedieu

Selected Essays on Robert Burns by G. Ross Roy

This chapter of reminiscences has been edited chiefly from Andrea L’Hommedieu’s series of interviews, “G. Ross Roy Oral History Interview #1 [- #5]," (January 27-February 9, 2012). Some passages in the opening section are drawn from Ross Roy’s posthumously-published essay, “W. Ormiston Roy as Remembered by His Grandson,” Robert Burns Lives!, ed. Frank R. Shaw, no. 174 (May 23, 2013). The next to last paragraph comes from his introduction for Robert Burns, An Exhibition (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, 1971), p. 2. The final paragraph was written for the series, “What Burns means to me,” Robert Burns Lives!, …

The Effect Of The Oxford Movement On The Family And Eucharistic Symbolism In Victorian Literature, Elizabeth Vukovics

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.