English Language and Literature Commons^™

Cripping Modernism: An Introduction, Maren Linett

Department of English Faculty Publications

This introduction briefly introduces literary disability studies and crip methodology. After informing readers about a few key concepts of disability studies and giving some examples of modernist writers’ use of disability metaphors, it raises questions about how disability inflects modernist themes and modernist form. It then offers synopses of the nine articles in the special issue, articles that treat a range of authors from the early to mid-twentieth century. The essays engage with literary theory, various early twentieth-century historical contexts, and issues of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and class.

Under The Sign Of Suicide, Theodore Emmanuel Prassinos

Wayne State University Dissertations

“Under the Sign of Suicide,” examines modernist writers’ intense and sustained preoccupation with and representations of suicide. Beyond numerous essays on the topic, we also find many fictional characters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov and Kirilov both taken by gunshot, Stavrogin and Smerdyakov both by hanging. We also find Franz Kafka’s George Bendemann who takes his life by drowning, and Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith by impaling, Her character, Rhoda, dies off a cliff. In American literature, we find Edna Pontellier, Quentin Compson, Clare Kendry, Semour Glass, Teddy McArdle, Willy Loman, Tod Clifton, and on and on. This list is surely …

Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Road Trippin:’ Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives and Petrocultures from On The Road to The Road" examines late-twentieth century U.S. road narratives in an effort to trace the development of American petrocultures geographically and culturally in the decades after World War II. The highway stories that gain popularity throughout the era trace not simply how Americans utilize oil, but how the postwar American oil ethos in literature, film, and music acts upon and shapes human interiority and vice versa. Roads and highways frame my critique because they are at once networks of commerce transportation and producers of a unique, romantic …

Defending The Bodice Ripper, Dora Abigail Gardner

Online Theses and Dissertations

Romance novels have always occupied a strange state of limbo in the literary world. Decried by feminists, critics, and by the general populace, what could a whole genre of books have done to be so disparaged, arguably more than any other genre? Books written by women, for women, about women should be hailed as revolutionary in a historically male dominated publishing industry; from a more cynical point of view, an industry that pumps out hundreds of books and brings in millions of dollars every year is surely doing something right and deserves more than a cursory look. Yet they can’t …

The Chivalrous And Feminist King: How The Arthurian Legends Chronicled The Formation Of Two Gender Identities, Gary Andrew Pickle

Online Theses and Dissertations

Literature is often a product of its time, though some works can be said to be more indicative of the time period they came from than others. This thesis inspects Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, not only as products of their time but also as works that illuminate the formation of gender identity within their respective time periods. Malory’s unique experience as an acting knight throughout the fifteenth century influenced his version of the existing legends of Arthur and his court injecting then-current chivalric ideals into the text. Bradley worked to write …

The Environmental Imaginations Of Moby-Dick: Technology And Vulnerability In Human/More-Than-Human Relationships, Jensen A. Lillquist

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the human and the more-than-human is a problem of massive proportions, as we live in an age of climate change, mass-extinction, over-population, and resource depletion. Evaluating how we have arrived where we are and re-thinking the issues at play as we move forward is crucial for future adaptation of human/more-than-human relationships; this is the primary goal of my analysis of the environmental imaginations of Moby-Dick.

I argue that the four primary environmental imaginations—the providential, the utilitarian, the Romantic, and the ecological—that have influenced United States culture since European settlement are represented by Herman …

Gendered Melancholy In Lolita: Reading Into Humbert Humbert’S Dolorous Haze, Joseph D. Brookbank

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper argues that in Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert uses the subject-position of the great male melancholic in order to, at the discursive level, (re)perform violent acts of appropriation against Dolly’s body, subjectivity and representation. Humbert attempts to translate the loss and waste which he brings about into perverse sorts of gain; these gains relate to processes such as catharsis, compensation, redemption, regeneration, a sense of exceptionality, and aesthetic/erotic/artistic enjoyment. The project has an introduction and two sections. The introduction demonstrates how Humbert enters into the male melancholic subject-position in order to perform his sorrow in a way that …

“Out Of The Mother . . . And Home To The Mother”: Essays On Medieval Literature And Climate Crisis, Rachel Kuhr Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Using Eye Tracking To Measure How People View Infrared And Visible Astronomical Images, Abigail Vo

Summer Community of Scholars Posters (RCEU and HCR Combined Programs)

No abstract provided.

Ohio Women Writers Inspire In Ya: A Study Of Three Authors, Their Most Recent Young Adult Texts, And Their Paths To Publication, Genevieve Wadge

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this project, I will explore the world of YA literature and publishing with a focus on three female authors, Dr. Julie Drew, Rachele Alpine, and Colleen Clayton, and will use their most recently published young adult literature books to further reinforce my research. I will focus on how those texts fit into or go against the current canon of YAL, what common themes these stories touch on, how an adolescent reader might relate to the story and the characters, and other nuances of the texts.

“A Secret Place Above The Trees”: Keatsian Imagination In Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby, Kate Lisowski

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Borrowing Time: The Classical Tradition In The Poetic Thoeries Of T. S. Eliot And Ezra Pound, Nicholas Odom

Honors Undergraduate Theses

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are two of the most prominent figures of Anglo-American modernist poetry, both having played central roles in the development of a distinct poetic style and atmosphere in the early 20^th century by means of their publishing and editing the work of other poets as well as publishing their own poetry. However, Eliot and Pound have an interest in the classical world that is not clearly shared with the majority of other modernist poets, and this interest distinguishes the sense of "modernism" that Eliot and Pound promoted from that of other major modernists like …

Testimony, Objectivism, And Poetic Form In Charles Reznikoff’S Holocaust, Rachel E. Trnka

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This essay examines the gradual development of Charles Reznikoff’s testimony form Holocaust poetry, which ultimately rejected the traditional lyric forms of his earlier works in favor of a stark, Objectivist poetry that culminated in Holocaust (1975)—a poem based on the transcripts from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. The WWI poems from Reznikoff’s first volume Rhythms (1918) underscore the importance of music to his early elegies in contrast to the blunt, impersonal testimonies in Holocaust. In Rhythms, Reznikoff employs traditional conventions ironically to convey war’s unpoetic reality while the poetic speakers in Going To and Fro and Walking Up …

The Mockery Of Things: Material Culture And Domestic Ideology In The Detective Fiction Of Anna Katharine Green, Claire Meldrum

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The Mockery of Things: Material Culture and Domestic Ideology in the Detective Fiction of Anna Katharine Green examines how a popular genre author like Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935) uses objects to articulate middle-class identity and social constructions in late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America. During that era, the home as both a physical space and an ideological signifier was a central tenet in American middle-class identity. Focusing on domestically situated objects – clothing, household furnishings and domestic architecture – this dissertation considers how such items, which have tended to be read in support of domestic identity, instead function within the context …

Always Coming Home: Author's Expanded Edition, By Ursula K. Le Guin, Edited By Brian Attebery. Reviewed By David Bratman., David Bratman

Mythprint Book Reviews

Mythprint is the quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local discussion groups.

One Of Me Is Missing, By Laramie K. Sasseville. Reviewed By David Emerson., David Emerson

Mythprint Book Reviews

Mythprint is the quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local discussion groups.

Topic-Comment Sentence Structure In Written English, Hongmei Wu

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigates the topic-comment sentence structure in written English. It finds that English makes use of both the subject-predicate structure syntactically and the topic-comment structure pragmatically. The results of this study challenge the typological claim that English sentence structures are subject-prominent which mainly follows the subject-predicate structure (Li & Thompson, 1976). Via the investigation, this study proposes that English sentence structures exhibit the properties of subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages. As is believed that the topic-comment structure in English is represented differently from that in the topic-prominent languages, this study investigates the constructions in English writing to explore the appearances …

"The Hazards Of Being Free": Thinking About Not Thinking In Infinite Jest, Josh Cunningham

Dissertations and Theses

This paper is about self-consciousness and how it figures in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Because Infinite Jest is such a large novel (1079 pages, including the indispensable footnotes), it serves, like other large novels before it, as a kind of encyclopedia of contemporary culture. The novel, in large part, treats self-consciousness—a distinctly human phenomenon, one which certainly accounts for our dominance as a species—as a problem (on both an individual and collective level) that needs to be overcome. This is because, as it turns out, self consciousness, when it becomes epidemic, is as much a boon as it …

"Beyond Consolation": Or Strangeness, Estrangement, And Strange-Ing In The Elegy For The Black Body, 1955-Present, Naomie Jean-Pierre

Dissertations and Theses

The Elegy for the Black Body examines the mid-twentieth to early-twenty-first-century poetic justice crafted by African American poets to eulogize individual African Americans whose deaths were the result of racial and political violence. In the age of lynching, mass shooting, and police brutality, I argue that an African American poetic tradition persists that, while not entirely beholden to the ancient elegy, is its distant relative, along with the English and American Elegy. I argue further that while the contemporary American elegy has undergone for the last six decades intensive study, from the notable studies done by Peter Sack’s in The …

The Hydra Of Modern Literature, Genevieve Sharp

Dissertations and Theses

Modernist Literature