Modern Literature Commons^™

Spring 2022, The Gist

The Gist

No abstract provided.

Second Age, Middle Age, Norbert Schürer

Journal of Tolkien Research

The recent releases of the volume The Fall of Númenor and the series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power raise the question: What is the significance of the Second Age of Tolkien’s legendarium? This article suggests that Tolkien conceived of the Second Age as parallel to the Middle Ages in our world, which were the focus of his academic career in his studies of Old and Middle English language and literature. As various frameworks and overviews for the legendarium demonstrate, Tolkien thought of the Second Age, like the Middle Ages, as uniquely looking backwards and forwards …

Twitter As Limited Digital Rhetorical Forum – The Reproductive Rights Discourse Online, Jacob L. Longini

Comparative Woman

Rhetorical discourse has long been characterized by patriarchal systems, and this reality has persisted in online spaces. How might today’s scholar dissect and better understand the nature of online communities, specifically those that engage in women’s rights discourses? I argue that using Thomas Farrell’s notion of “rhetorical forum”, James P. Zappen’s outline for digital rhetorical theory, and Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s feminist understanding of rhetorical practice, one can account for the current state of such discourses on Twitter. The patriarchal flaws that Foss and Griffin identify in traditional rhetoric can shed light on the negative aspects of …

Race In J. R. R. Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings And In Katherine Addison’S The Goblin Emperor, Robin A. Reid Dr.

Journal of Tolkien Research

Recent scholarship on how Tolkien's Orcs influenced popular fantasy agrees upon the spread of racist clichés and stereotypes. Dieter Petzold, in "'Oo, Those Awful Orcs!': Tolkien's Villains as Protagonists in Recent Fantasy Novels," analyzes how four novels attempt but fail to present orcs as focal and sympathetic characters. In Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young argues that the influence Tolkien's Orcs had on fantasy literature, film, and games is that of structural racism in which "race [is] the conventional framework around which difference is built " (35). She acknowledges that critical reading of Tolkien's works can "provide background …

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Modern Languages and Literatures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

The Enigma Of Goldberry: Tolkien’S Narrative Braiding Of Genre- And Symbol-Related Vocabularies In The Withywindle River-Daughter, Derek Simon

Journal of Tolkien Research

The enigma of Goldberry continues to stimulate diverse readings of her narrative in the Withywindle Cottage episode. The root contention of this article is that Goldberry’s enigma is textured through Tolkien’s complex narrative braiding of multiple genre- and symbol-specific vocabularies woven together throughout her episode. The effort to interpret the enigma of Goldberry needs to be grounded in the philological, lexical, and thematic signifiers circulating in her storyline. These mythopoeic signifiers are variously conveyed by the genre- and symbol-related vocabularies influencing her enigma in the narrative. Where much of the critical commentary has justifiably considered a single strand of source …

Sustaining Ireland, Body And Soul: A Woman Leader's Story Of The Cooperative Movement, Elizabeth Summerfield

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This article tells the story of the Cooperative Movement in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the perspective of one of its woman leaders. It does so in order to distil lessons for the contemporary thought leadership of sustainability from a period before the term was coined. It does so with the warrant of Albert Einstein:

The distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Its evidence base is historical literature, but its argument and analysis draw on recent research in leadership studies, neuroscience and theology.

The Benefits Of Using Inclusive Literature In Kindergarten Through Fifth Grade Classrooms, Guidelines For Selecting Inclusive Texts, And Resources To Help Teachers, Librarians, And Community Members Use Inclusive Children’S Books, Erin Lynch

Honors Projects

This project outlines the great importance of inclusive children’s literature and the benefits of implementing high-quality, inclusive picture books within elementary school classrooms. Additionally, the project provides suggested guidelines for selecting inclusive literature as well as copious examples of high-quality picture books within a variety of subject matter categories. In addition to a thorough paper, this project contains a large online resource referred to as the “Virtual Library” that utilizes technology and graphic design to simulate a real library full of inclusive literature.

Book Review: Everything Sad Is Untrue, Sharon Kerestes

Education Insights: Journal of Research and Practice

A review of the book “Everything Sad is Untrue (A True Story)," by Daniel Nayeri, is presented.

Documents And The Malady Of Truth, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article discusses documents, knowledge, and truth through a conceptual examination and through an examination of Flaubert's 19th century novel Madame Bovary. It argues that the main characters of Madame Bovary deceive themselves by believing that the contents of the fictional and medical texts they read convey truth. In contrast, the article argues that modern knowledge is constituted by documentary evidence operating in knowledge networks and processes where the result of such operations is what can be claimed to be true about the world through such processes. The representational malady that Madame and Doctor Bovary suffer in the novel was …

Traducciones Para El Colegio De La Facultad De Ingeniería (Ceng) Del Inglés Al Español / College Of Engineering Translations, Xenai Camacho-Beas

World Languages and Cultures

This project seeks to show how I managed to translate texts from English to Spanish through the process of learning the concept of translation. It specifically seeks to demonstrate how to accurately translate a notion or message from one language to another without creating misunderstandings or errors. This project includes documents from the College of Engineering at Cal Poly, that I translated from English to Spanish in the hopes that members of the Hispanic community will be able to access them and learn more about the various study options the College of Engineering offers. We live in a very diverse …

How A Book Changed A Nation [2022], Teodora Buzea

Master's Theses

“We don’t believe in vampires.”

I didn’t bother to turn away from the TV to look at my parents. On screen, a crew of young men were interviewing an old woman. She spoke only Romanian, and a too-perfect female voice spoke for her in English. I could see the confident fear in her expression as she exclaimed that vampires were indeed real and that she was always scared of them. She wasn’t alone. All of Transylvania were aware of the existence of vampires. Truly, these young men— ghost hunters and cryptologists—were right to come here to this haunted nation. The …

To The Lighthouse Or To Mrs. Ramsay? A Study Of Materialization Through The Symbolism Of The Lighthouse In Virginia Woolf’S To The Lighthouse, Virginia Moscetti

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this paper, I argue that the “lighthouse” in Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse operates as a symbol for Mrs. Ramsay’s “self-hood” and for Mr. Ramsay’s obscure desire for sanctuary and domesticity in Mrs. Ramsay. Through this symbolism I further contend that Woolf renders the ambiguous processes associated with self-hood and desire materially legible and, in doing so, demonstrates how metaphor and symbolism reconstitute our material world into representation. Moreover, I argue that we can conceptualize the lighthouse symbolism revolving around and centered in Mrs. Ramsay in terms of T.J. Clark’s “dual figure”; a figure with two symbolic connotations …

Happy Objects And Bloom Spaces: Investigating The Potential Of Rupi Kaur's Poetry, Miguel Vega

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In response to the movement of what is considered and labeled as “Instagram poetry,” poet and critic Rebecca Watts argues that to consider “artless” poetry as “poetry” we are denigrating the artform. This project centers around Watts’ claim that “the reader is dead” due to their encounter with such poetry. This project acts as a conversation that seeks to understand why certain forms of art are considered a “threat” to those who engage with them, as well as to their respective fields. Using affect theory (specifically the theory of the happy object) we can begin to understand why we gravitate …

Las Ciudades Del Deseo: Las Políticas De Género, Sexualidad Y Espacio Urbano En El Caribe Hispano, Elena Valdez

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Las ciudades del deseo explores the representations of gender, sexuality, and urban space in contemporary narratives from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. By examining a corpus of novels published since 2000, this book shows how the changes in urban landscape create a new image of the city that destroys traditional gender roles and produces different discourses on sexuality. At moments of crisis in political agendas that took place between 1990 and 2000, queer subjects became spokespeople outlining new national projects on each island, while claiming space in the national imaginary. The nation is no longer built on blood …

History In The Margins: Epigraphs And Negative Space In Robin Hobb’S Assassin’S Apprentice, Matthew Oliver

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice demonstrates a significant effect of epic fantasy’s conventions for creating the history of a fictional world. By prefacing each chapter with an epigraph from an official in-world historical text before giving a first-person personal narrative, the novel blurs the boundaries between text and paratext, public and private, official history and personal myth-making. This structure raises questions about what is central and marginal in history, suggesting the extent to which historical narrative is constructed in the imagination by taking the facts surrounding a central event from which the historian is absent—a process much like negative space drawing …

Potentiality, Resistance And Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben On Melville’S Bartleby, Yanjun Wang, Yaping Wang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The idea of potentiality runs through Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. In his analysis of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, Agamben thoroughly interprets potentiality and bare life through Bartleby’s “I prefer not to”. Agamben believes that Bartleby’s inoperativeness is the highest form of resistance, which exists as pure potentiality against the power apparatuses in modern society. Agamben considers Bartleby’s inoperativeness as the exact way to redeem bare life in modern society, where the state of exception already becomes normality. This article starts with Agamben’s reading of Bartley, focuses on potentiality, resistance and bare life to analyze the pure and thorough way …

The Rainbow Read-In: A Place To Build Community, Elizabeth Johnson

Kansas LGBTQ+ Leadership Symposium

The UMKC University Libraries held the second Rainbow Read-In (RRI) virtually in June 2022. Readers presented either their own works if they identify as LGBTQIA+ or works written by LGBTQIA+ authors. Nine participants presented and sixty people attended. Our first Rainbow Read-In included ten presenters and forty attendees in 2021.

The goal of this presentation is to share how we created a safe space to showcase works from within the queer community. The objectives of this program are to discuss the origins of the RRI, the formation of the committee, lessons learned, short- and long-term goals, potential areas for improvement, …

La Ciencia Ficción En América Latina. Crítica. Teoría. Historia. Silvia G. Kurlat Ares Y Ezequiel De Rosso Eds. Nueva York: Peter Lang, 2021. 396 Pp., Dale Knickerbocker

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

NA (book review)