Modern Literature Commons^™

"A Mind Of Metal And Wheels": Agrarian Ruralism In Joss Whedon's Firefly And J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Christopher Hines

English (MA) Theses

Both Joss Whedon's Firefly and J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings present settings that are just as much influenced by the environments in which they occur as they are by the characters who act within those environments. For J.R.R. Tolkien, it was his lived experience of having grown up in a changing England that influenced his depiction of the world, while Joss Whedon's Firefly revisits and readapts the American mythos of the Western and the cowboy and re-appropriates it to science fiction, placing the action in the far future and in space ...

The Case Of The Dream Maker: Perec, Pontalis, And Dream Writing, Aubrey Gabel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article considers Georges Perec’s La Boutique obscure as a literary experiment in dream writing, by putting it in dialogue with French Freudianism, notably the clinical papers of J.-B. Pontalis, Perec’s long-time psychoanalyst. Pontalis describes a patient type, the "dream maker,” who provokes an extreme case of counter-transference and requires new methods in dream therapy. Pontalis, like many of Perec’s literary critics, was suspicious of the authenticity of Perec's dream journal and denied it both therapeutic and literary status. This article reinserts La Boutique obscure into Perec’s literary program. Through a discussion of the ...

Re-Reading Alencar's Iracema Through Saer's Lens, Felicia Trievel

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Abstract:

The topic of European colonization is one that is discussed frequently throughout Latin American literature in a variety of different manners. Two books that discuss the colonization of different countries in extremely different ways are Iracema (1865) by José de Alencar and El entenado (1983) by Juan José Saer. The former examines the colonization of Brazil by Portuguese colonists, taking away much of the culture of the indigenous people previously inhabiting Brazil. El entenado examines the colonization of Argentina by the Spaniards. When one reads these two novels it is impossible not to compare the two due to the ...

Final Master's Portfolio, Jonathan Correa

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Jonathan G. Correa's Master's Portfolio

Remaking Divinity In Aldous Huxley’S Brave New World, Sebastian Vignone

Master's Theses

Humanity is an experience. Shaped through both individual and collective encounters, we understand the self and the world around us as an amalgamation of interactions over the course of our lives. Arguably, one of the most common experiential archetypes is religion, and more specifically the relationship one has with a divine being as it has been framed by a religious institution. While the United States does not have an official religion, there is a host of people who refer to the U.S. as a “Christian nation,” and it is therefore irresponsible to elide the panoply of inequities that run ...

Flipping The Castle: Evolution Of Gothic Spaces In The Domestic Sphere, Kate Lucas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

"Flipping the Castle" explores topics of domesticity in Gothic literature over the course of three centuries. The Gothic is a genre with roots in 18th century British literature, but more broadly, it can be described as horror that has a social function, and it is the birthplace of some of the most successful narratives in horror fiction. The aspects of the Gothic this research is concerned with is its themes of unchecked masculine aggression versus repressed femininity, its ability to adapt over time, and its preoccupation with setting, specifically the home, whether that be a medieval castle, a haunted house ...

Reframing The Pedagogical Underpinnings Of To Kill A Mockingbird: Queering A High School Text, Hovsep Hovannesian

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Given the current climate for social and political change in relation to identity and being, traditional high school texts like To Kill A Mockingbird are being rejected as degrading, out of touch, and even regressive and are being taken off the pedagogical shelf. This article pushes back on this outlook by suggesting that a more critical approach to such texts can make them not only useful but enlightening for the high school population asked to read them. Specifically, by proposing that high school pedagogy apply the foundations and frameworks of critical, identity-focused theories, like queer theory, to traditional high school ...

Andalucía En Capas: Reconciling Andalusian Identity With Spanish And European Influence, Barham R. T. Nardo

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The southernmost autonomous community within Spain, Andalucía maintains a tradition of cultural pluralism and multi-layered social influence. Throughout Andalusia’s long and complex history, countless civilizations have contributed to the rich cultural uniqueness which persists today. Though an autonomous community under Spanish national jurisdiction, Andalusia and its people have diverged from the rest of Spain in cultural, historical, and linguistic experiences, establishing a unique identity in Andalusia. In the modern day, these layers of identities, Andalusian, Spanish, and European, compete to define the people of this region.

With Inviolable Voice, We Melt Into Each Other With Phrases: The Construction And Deconstruction Of Heteroglossia In T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land And Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Alexa Kelly

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This essay analyzes the ways in which T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf simultaneously construct and deconstruct linguistic environments that embody Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. In The Waste Land and The Waves, Eliot and Woolf construct elements of Bakhtin's novel before dismantling those same elements through the formation of linguistic imbalance. Both authors generate heteroglossia by incorporating numerous speech types and speech genres into their texts through variations of idiolect, sociolect, and literary allusion. These speech types then dialogize each other within the texts. However, the works then diverge from heteroglossia through an imbalance of the centrifugal ...

Béâtrice Picon-Vallin. Le Théâtre Du Soleil: The First Fifty-Five Years. Translated By Judith G. Miller. Routledge, 2021., Deborah Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Béâtrice Picon-Vallin. Le Théâtre du Soleil: The First Fifty-five Years. Translated by Judith G. Miller. Routledge, 2021. xi + 453 pp.

Final Master's Portfolio, Alyssa Zuber

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This MA explores the body's response to trauma, social media's impact on modern young women, the Women's Health Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and how the memoir can be used as a tool to explore radical honesty.

Alfred Corn, Translator. The Duino Elegies, By Rainer Maria Rilke. Norton, 2021., Jeremy Glazier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Alfred Corn, translator. The Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Norton, 2021. 112 pp.

Gender Roles Reviewed Through Shakespeare's Twelfth Night With 21st Century Applications, Hannah Lewis

Scholar Week 2016 - present

This thesis focuses on a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night which aims to address negative gender stereotypes that are still in existence today. Through Shakespeare’s use of character representation and language, he creates a story that confronts the issue of gender stereotypes in the Elizabethan age. However, much is to be said about how gender roles in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is applicable to the 21^st century. In this thesis, gender roles in both the Elizabethan age and the 21^st century are explored in depth to provide examples of gender stereotypes. Thus, the study of ...

Poetry Beyond The Page: A Case For Spoken Word Poetry In Florida's Secondary Classrooms, Sarah Matherly

Senior Honors Theses

Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards, Florida’s most recent K-12 educational standards to promote literacy, lack the rising art of Spoken Word Poetry. However, Florida’s Department of Education should integrate Spoken Word into Florida’s Secondary curriculum. Spoken Word Poetry, by its definition, holds researched benefits that align with the B.E.S.T. Standard’s poetry recommendations and literacy-centered goals. In light of such benefits, Florida’s Department of Education should consider various Spoken Word poets and poems to include in Florida’s Secondary Curriculum, as well as explore the resources and integration methods included in ...

Impact Of Online Learning On International Students’ English Language Concerns, Jiayi Du, Yiwei (Scarlett) Sun

Arts & Sciences Student Symposium

With the onset of COVID-19, U.S. universities have been forced to move many, even all, courses online. At the University of Richmond, many of our international students faced visa restrictions due to COVID and were required to stay in their countries. As a result, the majority of our international students must attend their classes remotely. International students may find language to be a challenge during online learning. The purpose of our study is to learn more about how, if at all, online classes have an impact on international students’ English language concerns.

Hear, O Númenor!: The Covenantal Relationship Of The Dúnedain With Ilúvatar, Caryn L. Cooper, Kevin S. Whetter

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien deliberately left most of his Middle-earth cultures without any form of organized religion. However, the Dúnedain culture, which descends from Númenorean and Edain culture, is exceptional in this regard, characterized as monotheists with a religion dedicated to Eru Ilúvatar and marked, through both cultural and narrative similarities, as sharing a special relationship with him that echoes the covenantal relationship of Biblical Israel with God. These parallels are particularly visible in shared motifs of the Akallabêth and Exodus, the invocation of Ilúvatar in oaths, the Númenorean pilgrimage festivals, and the designation of the Meneltarma and Halifirien as sacred mountains in ...

Martha E. Sánchez. A Translational Turn: Latinx Literature Into The Mainstream. U Of Pittsburg P, 2018., Belen Rodríguez Mourelo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Martha E. Sánchez. A Translational Turn: Latinx Literature into the Mainstream. U of Pittsburg P, 2018. xiv +178 pp.

Prostitutes, Temporary Wives, And Motrebs: A Comparative Study Of Sex Work In Iranian Film And Fiction From The Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) To The Islamic Revolution (1979), Maryam Zehtabi Sabeti Moqaddam

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation titled “Prostitutes, Temporary Wives, and Motrebs: A Comparative Study of Sex Work in Iranian Film and Fiction from Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) to the Islamic Revolution (1979)” brings together the web of images and narratives in sociocultural and historical texts and films that create and maintain the identity of sex workers as articles of mass consumption and sustain dominant practices and policies. By studying how these women, their body, and their sexuality are perceived, shown, and regulated in art and literature—which are ciphers of the society at large—my research exposes the tightly knit relationship between patriarchy, capitalism ...

American Absurdity: Reconciling Conceptions Of The Absurd In European And American Literature, Benjamin Spencer

Senior Theses

This thesis aims to examine the development of the concept of the absurd in literature across different time periods and cultural contexts. The absurd, as defined by Camus, is the gap between humanity’s desire to understand the world and the impossibility of doing so.

However, the ways in which the absurd is recognized as an aspect of existence depends heavily on the sociological contexts in which an individual lives. By analyzing the works of absurdist authors, filmmakers, and artists across time, we can track the development of these absurdist conceptions in both Europe and American literary movements.

Looking at ...

Andrew Hodgson. The Post-War Experimental Novel: British And French Fiction, 1945-75. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020., Kathryn Van Wert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Andrew Hodgson. The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. xi + 208 pp.