English Language and Literature Commons^™

To Txt, Or Not To Txt: Shkspr.Mobi And Academia, Bella Victoria Smith, Ed Nagelhout

McNair Poster Presentations

This essay combats elitist academic attitudes assuming that all online content is not reputable and that online com­munication, specifically txtspk, defiles English. By exploring the tenants of open source and open access, particularly the benefits of free redistribution, online editions of Shakespeare’s plays prove to promote intellectual excellence and trans­parency, benefitting academics most. Similarly, the belief that txtspk is destroying the English language is a myth because modernizing and shortening words exist in all languages, including the first printed editions of Shakespeare’s canon. Finally, this essay addresses future concerns for online editions such as the copyright barriers over intellectual and …

Reading Austen's Lady Susan As Tory Secret History, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Civilization Is Going To Pieces: Crime, Morality, And Their Role In The Great Gatsby, Kathryn F. Machcinski

ETD Archive

Historically the 1920s contained growing tensions among the generations, classes and races. To hear that it is turbulent is not new. This becomes part of the frame for the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby. The other part, which this thesis treats, is that of the moral and legal crime taking place within the novel itself. Beginning with the real-life Hall-Mills murder case, the thesis enumerates and details many, often overlooked, moral and legal crimes by every character within the book. Through this is it my intention to elucidate the potentiality of F. Scott Fitzgerald to portray a culture in crisis. …

Passive And Active Masculinities In Disney's Fairy Tale Films, Grace Dugar

ETD Archive

Disney fairy tale films are not as patriarchal and empowering of men as they have long been assumed to be. Laura Mulvey's cinematic theory of the gaze and more recent revisions of her theory inform this analysis of the portrayal of males and females in Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. This study reveals that many representations of males in these films actually portray masculinity as an object of female agency. Over time, Disney's representations of masculinity have become more supportive of male agency and individuality, but this development has been inconsistent …

Invoking The Incubus: Mary Shelly's Use Of The Demon-Lover Tradition In Frankenstein, Christopher M. Lamphear

ETD Archive

The image and behavior of Shelley's infamous creature is similar to that of the mythical Incubus demon. By presenting Victor's hideous progeny as a reproduction of the Incubus myth, Shelley seems to provide her nineteenth-century reader with the image of demons, who for many, already haunted their nightmares. Shelley would likely have been familiar with the Incubus myth. Her fascination with her dead mother led her to the artist Henry Fuseli, whose painting "The Nightmare" depicts the Incubus Demon. Shelley wrote during a time in which medical scholars such as Dr. Bond and Dr. Waller explored a malady that they …

Romance And Identity In Flight Club, Jacob Wiker

ETD Archive

Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club has been the subject of much critical contention over the years. Typical analyses of the novel revolve around its existential or nihilist comedy, homoerotic elements, or commentary on consumer culture. However, no critics to date have studied Fight Club's romantic elements, despite indications by the author that the novel is, in fact, intended to be a romance. This study reimagines and interprets Fight Club, the novel, as a work with romantic elements essential to the structure of the narrative itself. Additionally, it studies the complex interplay of Palahniuk's romantic elements with questions of gender identity …

Examining The Tribal "Other" In American Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Alicia M. Pavelecky Alicia M.

ETD Archive

Most post-apocalyptic novels feature situations in which protagonists and antagonists are extremely polarized. In this relationship, many antagonists are treated as the "other," this practice, according to Edward Said, is used by one group to establish dominance over another. This thesis strives to examine the relationship between the protagonist and its tribal "other" in two works of American post-apocalyptic fiction, and suggests that this dichotomous relationship corresponds to key concerns in American political culture at the time of each work's publication. David Brin's 1985 novel The Postman uses the "other" as a way to reinforce core American values, such as …

Liminal Identity In Willa Cather's "The Professor's House", Alexandra D. Debiase

ETD Archive

Willa Cather develops the Professor and Tom Outland's identities in the novel The Professor's House through the lenses of domesticity, masculinity, and memory. For the Professor and Tom Outland, these identities are liminal and influenced by the landscape and space around them. Although both liminal, these identities are ultimately different, as the Professor's liminality seems to artificially have an affect on Tom as the novel reads on. Through defining the two main characters in the novel as liminal, Cather makes a comment on a modern shift in the concept of identity, suggesting that as time goes on and values change, …

Emerging Imagery: The Great Famine In Nineteenth Century Irish Lit, Barbara A. Pitrone

ETD Archive

The critical debate surrounding the Great Famine in Irish Literature centers on the notion of a perceived silence. While some scholars claim that there is a literary void in Irish Literature following this cataclysmic event, others wonder whether language is even capable of describing the extreme physical, emotional, and psychological suffering that is inflicted upon the victims when such tragedies occur. Centuries of imperialism and colonialism had created a class divide so wide and an Irish economy so fragile that when a calamity such as famine occurred, it was the poverty-stricken, predominately Irish-Catholic peasantry that suffered most. Poor and illiterate, …

No Ordinary Pilgrim: Margery Kempe And Her Quest For Validation, Authority, And Unique Identity, Alice A. Barfoot

ETD Archive

Movement in literature is a technique used by authors to uncover richer and deeper meaning which cannot be expressed in mere words. Margery Kempe autobiographer, employed movement both literally and figuratively through her pilgrimages to establish her identity as saintly, exceptional, and authoritative. Margery's overarching desire to create this persona for herself is examined through her life's writing, The Book of Margery Kempe. Her Book is studied dually in this thesis, as a treatise on the use of both physical movement and written movement, called the movement/writing model, to understand a woman who possessed extraordinary insight in how to employ …

The Trope Of Domesticity: Neo-Slave Narrative Satire On Patriarchy And Black Masculinity, Darrell E. Coleman

ETD Archive

The tradition of African-American satire developed from within the African village, provided a creative model of uncensored rhetorical criticism from within the limited discursive terrains of antebellum slavery to well into today's African-American artists' often satiric descriptions of contemporary society. Evolved from the nineteenth centuries first-person slave narrative, the impulse of the neo-slave narrative is two fold: (1) cultural (re) appropriation of the dominant mythology, to correct the plantation pastoral, which had really been out there since 1870 to the 20th century (e.g., Gone with the Wind and The Song of the South), thus to recapture the image of the …

The Synthesis Of Anglo-Saxon And Christian Traditions In The Old English Judith, Sarah E. Eakin

ETD Archive

The Anglo-Saxons were a people who took great pride in their heritage and culture. However, they faced various challenges in preserving the pagan traditions of their Nordic ancestors while being heavily influenced by Christianity. Many Anglo-Saxon texts demonstrate these cultural challenges, but the Book of Judith, found in the Nowell-Codex, attempts to unify the two conflicting cultures by uniting Anglo-Saxon and Christians traditions in a distinctly Old English format. The Old English adaptation of the Latin Vulgate Judith text portrays the actions of the heroine in light of Christianity while incorporating deeply-rooted Anglo-Saxon traditions. Judith is the unifying figure within …

Art Spiegelman's Maus As A Heteroglossic Text, Dane H. Minich

ETD Archive

According to philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, the modernist novel is the best literary form to exploit heteroglossia, or the coexistence of two or more voices within a text. It incorporates the speeches of the author, narrators, and characters, as well as languages that are indicative of social status, employment, epochs, and so on. In this essay, heteroglossia is applied to Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus to demonstrate that the comics medium is also a prime candidate for heteroglossic exploitation. Voice and dialect are examined in the first portion of the essay, including generational differences between the characters' language, the presence and …

Othering, Mirroring, And Identity In John Edgar Wideman's Brothers And Keepers, James E. Walker

ETD Archive

Jacques Lacan's notion of the mirror stage of human development, formulated from the theories of Sigmund Freud, lies at the core of psychoanalytic theory. Fundamental components of the mirror stage include the concepts of Otherness and Identity. This examination proffers a critical reading of John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, through a psychoanalytic matrix and contemporary constructions of Othering, Mirroring, and Identity. To that end, this examination traces the evolution of the ways subsequent scholars have understood, applied, and expanded Lacan's classical mirror stage, and its components. Nancy VanDerHeide transforms the solitary, individual, experience of Lacan's mirror stage into a …

Liberating The Sexed Body: Oscar Wilde Erodes Victorian Conventions As A New World Is Created In The Importance Of Being Earnest, Amber M. Wulu

ETD Archive

This essay examines the way in which Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest challenges Victorian conventionalist definition of sexuality in terms of gender. Wilde leads the charge against the structure of the heterosexual matrix byexamining the extent to which gender regulates a person's identity, perception and future. It is imperative to apply alternate analysis on gay/queer theory to Wilde's work to show how the artist was one of the first to introduce audiences to the notion that gender is in actuality a construct. Several aspects of Wilde's literary career are ignored and critics do not recognize nor understand …

The Objectification Of Women In Cane, Claudia M. Davis

ETD Archive

This thesis examines Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) from a feminist perspective. Using Laura Mulvey's film theory of the "male gaze", it repurposes it and uses the theory from a literary standpoint. Throughout this thesis, many different aspects are examined including the character interaction within the stories, the use of the narrative "I" and its overarching implications, audience participation with regard to voyeurism and Toomer's paradoxical stance on the objectification of women. Toomer writes about the women in Cane in a sexually explicit fashion, but does so in order to draw attention to the gaze and criticize it. As the vignettes …

Interpretations Of Fear And Anxiety In Gothic-Postmodern Fiction: An Analysis Of The Secret History By Donna Tartt, Stacey A. Litzler

ETD Archive

The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt is a novel that explores the conditions of detachment and anomie that are represented by a group of six students at an eastern private college. This tale of murder and concealment -- combined with a lack of remorse and redemption -- is far from the traditional, coming-of-age school novel. I argue that The Secret History participates in the gothic-postmodern literary genre, even though it bears the trappings of other genres. Reading this novel through a gothic-postmodern lens reveals that this work is an exaggeration -- by way of the charged gothic atmosphere -- …

Virginia: A Sermon Preached At White-Chappel. Type Facsimile Edition., William Symonds

British Virginia

British Virginia is a series of peer-reviewed, open-access editions of original documents related to the colony. British Virginia publications illustrate both the enduring ideological discourse of English settlement in and around the James River, and the unique historical artifacts that record the area's modern colonization. Editions derive from original sources and original research on them. The first two publications in the series, by Professor Joshua Eckhardt (VCU English), are each documentary (or, in other words, single-witness) editions of the Virginia Historical Society's copy of a printed sermon preached by William Symonds to the Virginia Company of London in April, 1609 …

The Cyborg Griffin: A Speculative Fiction Literary Journal, Hollins University

Cyborg Griffin: a Speculative Fiction Literary Journal

Notes:

copyrighted

Hollins Student Publication

Scope: short stories, artwork, poetry, essays, and comics

Paper copies shelved in University Archives.

A Call To Action: Conflict And Change In Three Major African Novels, Kate St. Ives

The Corinthian

A Grain of Wheat, The Sun By Night, and Nervous Conditions are each set in a time period and country in Africa in which tremendous changes are taking place. These changes come in many forms such as clashes between different belief systems, the development of new governments, and the changing roles of women.