English Language and Literature Commons^™

Writing Trauma In Iraq: Literary Representations Of War And Oppression In The Fiction Of Sinan Antoon, Zahraa Qasim Habeeb

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The Iraqi war narrative reflects the traumatizing situation that omnipresence of war and three decades of oppression have caused to Iraqis' views of life. Writing about their traumatic experience is an essential way of giving voice to their wounds. The Iraqi American novelist Sinan Antoon is a "wounded storyteller" who is able to give words to the wounds of his homeland. His two novels, I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody and The Corpse Washer, address the physical and psychological trauma of wars and prolonged years of oppression in Iraq. Academic research and literary production about the effect of trauma presented in the …

At Home In Exile: Ezra Pound And The Poetics Of Banishment, Andy Kay Trevathan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ezra Pound is one of the most important poets, critics, and writers of the 20th century. Through his literary efforts, and his work on behalf of many other writers, Pound changed the way we read and write poetry today. His cultivation and support of other writers and poets like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, etc. created the basis for what we refer to as Imagism, Modernism, and other important literary movements of the early 20th century. Pound’s use of fragmentation, pastiche, and bricolage laid the foundation for post-modern writers of the latter half of the 20th century, …

“Struck With Her Tongue”: Speech, Gender, And Power In King Lear, Kate Downey Hickey

Masters Theses

My thesis addresses the supposed sexism in William Shakespeare’s King Lear through an examination of the power of speech in the play. Employing a variety of scholarship, I argue that Cordelia exerts power both through prudent speech and in her silence, adhering to Renaissance expectations for women but also defying the unreasonable behavior of her father. I explore how Cordelia’s values are recognized by and through other characters, especially Lear’s Fool. While Cordelia is often viewed as the opposite of her sisters Goneril and Regan, I provide a reading of the play that treats all three sisters as complex characters …

"Persephone's Contemporary Dilemma: Consent, Sexuality, And "Female Empowerment." [2015], Cassandra Elizabeth Cerjanic

Master's Theses

Greek mythology never strays very far from Western imagination. Though every few years literature involving the infamous Gods tapers off into the back of our collective minds, a resurgence soon follows. The late Romantic literary movement (as popularized by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and John Keats) depended heavily upon Greco- Roman mythology to help illustrate characters that existed somewhere between the shadow of imagination and the truth of humanity. Perhaps in an attempt to harken back to Romanticism, contemporary poetry has once again given life to the Greek Gods. Mythological characters can be seen throughout the works of modern …

The Fictionality Of Topic Modeling: Machine Reading Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Series, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay describes how using unsupervised topic modeling (specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling algorithm in MALLET) on relatively small corpuses can help scholars of literature circumvent the limitations of some existing theories of the novel. Using an example drawn from work on Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, it argues that unsupervised topic modeling's counter-factual and retrospective reconstruction of the topics out of which a given set of novels have been created allows for a denaturalizing and unfamiliar (though crucially not “objective” or “unbiased”) view. In other words, topic models are fictions, and scholars of literature should consider …

John Milton’S Orphic Dependency, Magenta S. Reynolds

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The 17th-century poet John Milton invokes Ovid’s Orpheus as a source of strength and security in overcoming barriers of instability and insecurity, ultimately enabling Milton to claim his own authority as both a prophesizing poet and a bounds-breaking seeker of Classical knowledge. It is my argument that Milton’s dependency on Orpheus has been overlooked, and that it is only through an Orphic foundation that Milton is able to reach beyond artistic creativity, into higher registers of inspiration.

Milton repeatedly invokes the Orpheus in both his prose and poetry, including: Paradise Lost, Ad Patrem, Lycidas, and various sonnets and elegies. These …

A Supplication For The Beggars: The Arguments Of Simon Fish And The Cultural Relevance Of His Writing In Sixteenth Century England, Charlotte Mcfaddin

Student Research

No abstract provided.

The Broadsheet- Issue 14, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• English Career Night
• Nordic Noir
• Windy and Cold New England Shore
• Alice Sebold Interview/Reading
• Writers House Informal Writing Sessions

What A Dream Was Here: An Ontological Approach To Love And Magic In Shakespeare’S A Midsummer Night’S Dream, Brittany May Rebarchik

Theses and Dissertations

This paper takes Heidegger’s notion of world disclosure and uses it for extended thematic analyses of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In contrast to the majority of Shakespeare critics who treat Shakespeare’s use of magic as an epistemological issue, I argue that the main action of the play develops through an inherent contradiction between the magical and non-magical ontological states of the characters and the love that results. Borrowing from German philosopher Martin Heidegger, I demonstrate magic’s role as a catalyst in giving certain kinds of love a “shift of existence.” I show that the characters come more fully into being, …

Re: Publics: Woman Of Color Feminist Rhetorical Process Shaping Safe Spaces For A Rehumanizing Discourse, Eloisa E. Moreno

Theses and Dissertations

The discourse of women of color feminists over the last thirty years follows what I refer to as woman of color feminist rhetorical process in three recursive phases: location, deliberation, and restoration. The process is a significant contribution to rhetorical theory in the form of woman of color consciousness. This way of knowing considers complex identities at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual identity. The woman of color feminist rhetorician asks us to view self, community, and our notions of love as political constructs. By doing so, we are able to move beyond identity politics and build new …

Mack Thomas: The Total Beat, James B. Welton

Theses and Dissertations

Mack Thomas enjoyed both an audience seat and a role in the Beat Generation. He lives the life that fits one of his mottos, “if at first you don’t succeed, quit”. Thomas was the author of two autobiographical novels Gumbo and The Total Beast, a jazz and literature columnist for Grove Press in the 1950s and 1960s. Thomas was also a jazz musician worthy to share the stage with Miles Davis, inventor, and entrepreneur among numerous other interests. His friendship with William S. Burroughs was forged by their Texas ties while they were neighbors living in Paris, France and offered …

The Lawrentian Woman: Monsters In The Margins Of 20th-Century British Literature, Dusty A. Brice

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite his own conservative values, D.H. Lawrence writes sexually liberated female characters. The most subversive female characters in Lawrence’s oeuvre are the Brangwens of The Rainbow. The Brangwens are prototypical models of a form of femininity that connects women to Nature while distancing them from society; his women are cast as monsters, but are strengthened from their link with Nature. They represent what I am calling the Lawrentian-Woman.

The Lawrentian-Woman has proven influential for contemporary British authors. I examine the Lawrentian-Woman’s adoption by later writers and her evolution from modernist frame to postmodern appropriation. First, I look at the …

Evidences Of Critical Thinking In The Writing Of First-Year College Students, Shannon Bryn Soper

Theses and Dissertations

A healthy civil society depends on citizens who have mature critical thinking skills and a willingness to entertain opposing points of view. The development of critical thinking in young adults has long been studied, but there has been little agreement on what the attributes of critical thinking are and how to reliably assess them. While many studies have attempted to assess the critical thinking abilities of college students, none have yet measured critical thinking through using the Critical Thinking Analytic Rubric (CTAR) to assess first-year college students' writing. This study used a modified version of the CTAR rubric to investigate …

Innocent Until Proven Guilty: Shakespeare's Use Of Source Material In Three Plays, Alexandria C. Mcqueen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In my thesis, I discuss and analyze William Shakespeare’s utilization and adaptation of source texts within three of his dramas: Henry IV, Part I, a history; Twelfth Night, a comedy; and Julius Caesar, a tragedy. By comparing Shakespeare’s adaption of sources to the contemporary United Kingdom intellectual property policies, it becomes possible for me to determine whether Shakespeare’s extensive and popular dramas would violate modern copyright law.

The first chapter, “Printing and Writing in the Early Modern Period,” discusses the development of proprietary interests among the Elizabethan people. I break down the individual components of the printing process in …

Tobacco And Tar Babies: The Trickster As A Cultural Hero In Winnebago And African American Myth, Catherine Squibb

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the trickster character through the lens of his role as a cultural hero. The two characters that I chose to examine are from North American myth, specifically Winnebago Hare and Brer Rabbit. These two characters represent the duality of the trickster while simultaneously embodying the lauded abilities of the hero. Through their actions these two characters shape culture through the very action of disrupting societal norms.

To The Contrary, Beth Daniell

Faculty Articles

Author of one of the most important volumes on literacy and spiritual practice finds that four key insights have guided her work, all of them consonant with AEPL members’ practices.

"[B]Reaking Down The Walls, And Crying To The Mountains"--Isaiah 22:5: Dystopia And Ethics Of The Catcher In The Rye, Megan Marie Toone

Theses and Dissertations

Reading The Catcher in the Rye as dystopian fiction requires critical responsibility to evaluate the ethicality of the protagonist's sense of others and self, to assess the moral nature of the novel's dystopian world, and to evaluate the protagonist's agency or capacity to change his world or himself. The novel presents a multifaceted dystopia existing on multiple planes in the social dogma, the reality of the presented world, and Holden's mind before and after his paradigm shift. The dystopian aspects present in the novel highlight basic ideological systems as well as agency and action within the structure. The dystopian elements …

“I Take--No Less Than Skies”: Emily Dickinson And Nineteenth-Century Meteorology, Kjerstin Evans Ballard

Theses and Dissertations

Emily Dickinson's poetry functions where scientific attention to the physical world and abstract theorizing about the ineffable intersect. Critics who emphasize the poet's dedication to the scientific often take for granted how deeply the uncertainty that underlies all of Dickinson's poetry opposes scientific discussion of the day. Meteorology is an exceptional nineteenth-century science because it takes as its subject complex systems which are inexplicable in Newtonian terms. As such, meteorology can articulate the ways that Dickinson bridges the divide between the unknown and the known, particularly as she relates to the interplay of nature and culture, the role of careful …

Carrying On Like A Madman: Insanity And Responsibility In Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Tasting And Testing Books: Good Housekeeping’S Literary Canon For The 1920s And 1930s, Amy Blair

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.