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Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

What Does Young South Asia Want? Can Chetan Bhagat, Mohsin Hamid, And Arundhati Roy Tell Us?, John C. Hawley

English

Chetan Bhagat, Mohsin Hamid, and Arundhati Roy join the ranks of south Asian novelists who also write political essays. They address various factions in society, but share a common disgust with institutional corruption and political maneuvering, and manipulation of the powerless. While attacking defensive posturing and aggressive venality, they argue for a nation that finds its strength in pluralism and that embraces the poor.

Harry Potter And The Meaning Of Death, Harrison D. Brown

Student Publications

The paper reviews how J.K. Rowling is able to examine death in the Harry Potter book series. In the first part of the text the author touches on the deaths of Harry's parents and the scarring that Harry receives from that, as well as an examination of how the deaths of others, from close friends to acquaintances, have affected Harry, specifically pertaining to his personal responsibility for them and also his grieving process. The paper also goes into how Voldemort's inability to feel love, paired with his fear of dying, have pushed his quest for immortality (using Horcruxes). Harry's mastery …

Adapting Dracula: The Afterlives Of Stoker's Memes In Nosferatu (1922) And Dracula (1979), Ian Duncan Mcarthur

Theses and Dissertations

Dracula is a narrative that has risen above its own origins, having been translated and adapted across mediums it has inundated culture with vampires. However, with each adaptation the narrative and characters adapt into something new. This study is interested in the mechanism behind this evolution and argues that memes and, and their interpretations, are largely responsible for these shifts across adaptations. Three memes, in particular, tend to be adapted in films of Dracula. They include Dracula's appearance, Mina's empowerment, and the nature of the bite that they share. This analysis covers how these memes functioned in Stoker's original …

Public Records, Private Texts: Richard Carlile's Publication Of The Age Of Reason And The Birth Of Public Domain, Andrew S. Doub

Theses and Dissertations

Between 1818 and 1824, radical printer and publisher Richard Carlile made a determined effort to disseminate copies of Thomas Paine's banned text The Age of Reason in England. Despite strict censorship laws and harsh legal penalties used to curtail previous publishers of this title, Carlile employed a number of creative techniques that kept Paine's deistic writings in print and in circulation during the Regency period. These included republishing public domain court documents when he was charged with seditious libel and reading The Age of Reason in its entirety into testimony during his trial, making it part of the public record. …

Sentence-Level Construction Methods: Skills Taught Are Skills Used, Susan Allsop Shelton

Theses and Dissertations

The findings of this study predict that students who utilize five specific sentence constructions on timed single-draft writing compositions will have higher holistic scores than students who do not utilize the specific constructions. Students in the treatment group who were taught to use the five constructions through thorough and consistent instruction in a semester length first year writing course showed statistically significant gains, 4.698 points on a 0-18 scale, based on comparison of pre-test and post-test writing samples. The findings suggest that specific style instruction at the sentence level should be part of the first year writing course curriculum, and …

"Goin' To Hell In A Handbasket": The Yeatsian Apocalypse And No Country For Old Men, Connor Race Davis

Theses and Dissertations

On its surface, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men appears to be a thoroughly grim and even fatalistic novel, but read in conjunction with W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"—a work with which the novel has a number of intertextual connection—it becomes clear that there is a distinct optimism at the heart of the novel. Approaching McCarthy's novel as an intertext with Yeats' poem illuminates an apparent critique of eschatological panic present in No Country for Old Men, provided mainly through Sheriff Bell's reflections on the state of society.

On Variety: The Avant-Garde Between Pornography And Narrative, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

This article analyzes Bette Gordon’s first feature film Variety (1983), reassessing how experimental novelist Kathy Acker’s contributions to the screenplay awkwardly positioned the film within contemporary cultural debates over pornography and the future of avant-garde filmmaking. While centered on an erotic thriller narrative concerning a woman’s entrée into the scuzzy world of New York City porno theaters, Gordon and Acker also take up in the film a series of three related representational problems for the 1980s: feminist approaches to pornography, narrative in an avant-garde tradition, and the role of speech and writing in film.

The Spartan Tablet, Spring/Summer 2017, San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature

The Spartan Tablet (Department of English and Comparative Literature)

No abstract provided.

From The Golden Infection, Laura Goldstein

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

"History Real Or Feigned": Tolkien, Scott, And Poetry's Place In Fashioning History, Kaleigh Jean Spooner

Theses and Dissertations

Most critics of The Lord of the Rings correlate Tolkien's work to ancient texts, like Beowulf, the Elder Edda, and medieval romances. While the connection between these traditional materials and Tolkien is valid, it neglects a key feature of Tolkien's work and one of the author's desires, which was to fashion a sort of history that felt as real as any other old story. Moreover, it glosses over the rather obvious point that Tolkien is writing a novel, or at any rate a long work of prose fiction that owes a good deal to the novel tradition. …

Contribute A Verse: An Introduction To First-Year Composition (All Rights Reserved), Tanya Long Bennett, Donna Gessell, Diana Edelman-Young

English Open Textbooks

This textbook is not an open textbook. Affordable Learning Georgia has a special agreement with the University of North Georgia Press to make this text free to download for a limited time. Remixes and mass redistribution are not allowed in this agreement.

Author's Description:

In response to the Affordable Learning Georgia initiative, Dr. Tanya Bennett and ten colleagues from the University of North Georgia have written Contribute a Verse: A Guide to First Year Composition. This peer reviewed textbook, published by the University of North Georgia Press, combines a composition rhetoric manual with grammar and documentation instruction and resources, components …

Lily, By Michael Thomas Ford. Reviewed By Emilee J. Howland-Davis., Emilee J. Howland-Davis

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.

Truly Jewish: Diasporic Identity And “Chosen Glory” In “Monte Sant’Angelo”, Sara Heist

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

In her memoir Unorthodox, Deborah Feldman observes, “A Jew can never be a goy... even if they try to become one. They may dress like one, speak like one, live like one, but Jewishness is something that can never be erased” (96). Her intriguing observation parallels the major themes of Arthur Miller’s short story “Monte Sant’Angelo,” which explores Jewish identity. The modern psychological constructs of diasporic identity, “chosen glory,” and “chosen trauma,” developed after the short story was written, help to interpret the psychological drama unfolding in the little village of Monte Sant’Angelo. Bernstein, a diasporic Ashkenazi Jew, …

The Essay Genome Project, Patrick Madden

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project utilized computational analysis to evaluate essays. Through stylometry, the study of writing style, the team studied essayists’ work to delineate writerly heritage, to identify potential authorship, and to recognize trends and answer questions about literary genre. From our analysis, we were able to identify preliminary points of demarcation among essayists due to style, time period, location, and subgenre. The primary subgenre which we examined over the course of the project was the “lyric essay,” a recently popular form which has uncertain characteristics we wanted to elucidate. As we examined essays classified as “lyric” we were able to corroborate …

Dorothy Wordsworth’S Travel Writings: A Digital Critical Edition, Nicholas Mason

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Thanks to the MEG award we received in 2014-15, my colleague Paul Westover and I have been able to mentor six outstanding BYU students in archival research and scholarly editing and have made significant progress toward the publication of a major new critical edition of the works of the nineteenth-century poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth.

The Critically Annotated Collected Works Of Elisa Von Der Recke And Women’S Articles In Vienna’S “Die Neue Freie Presse:” A Digital Companion To Red Vienna, White Socialism And The Blues: Ann Tizia Leitich’S America, Michelle James, Rob Mcfarland

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Without funding there would be no Sophie project, which is why the first item in this report on the Sophie activities during 2015 must be an expression of our gratitude to both the ORCA office and to the College of Humanities, on behalf of the faculty members involved, and particularly, on behalf of the many students whose lives have been enriched in numerous ways by their Sophie work. We are aware of the many projects vying for your attention and funding, and are particularly grateful for the support you have given this project over the years. Your grants have enriched …

Victorian Short Fiction Project, Leslee Thorne-Murphy

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Our project was to prepare a digital collection of short stories, The Victorian Short Fiction Project (VSFP), for a scholarly review process. The VSFP is a digital anthology of Victorian-era short stories compiled and edited by students in undergraduate Victorian literature classes here at BYU. Leslee Thorne-Murphy designed the project to expand students’ knowledge of the Victorian-era short story, an under-studied genre in the field of Victorian literature, and to give them experience in the fields of scholarly editing and the digital humanities. Students would conduct research in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections library to find short fiction to …

Zora Neale Hurston: Scientist, Folklorist, Storyteller, Mary Catherine Russell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper examines the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston and her contribution to American literature in the 20th Century. While previous critical analysis of Hurston’s work has focused primarily on her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, this paper examines Hurston’s career by taking a holistic approach to the body of her literary works. Hurston’s early career as an anthropologist is shown to provide a foundation for her later interest in folklore. In turn, her connection and participation in the Harlem Renaissance gave Hurston’s writing a nuanced and individualized style as part of the American modernist …

Echoes Of Leibniz In Pope’S Essay On Man: Criticism And Cultural Shift In The Eighteenth Century, Sierra Billingslea

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper is an examination of the intellectual relationship between Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This relationship was accentuated by Crousaz, a Swiss critic, who accused Pope of plagiarizing Leibniz’s misguided philosophy due to the evidence of Leibniz’s Principle of the Best, Principle of Sufficient Reason, and Principle of Continuity found within An Essay on Man. This paper argues that both Leibniz and Popes’ philosophies do not reflect a direct relationship but instead share the spirit of Augustan thought as well as a similar classical upbringing. Crousaz and other critics who criticized …