Modern Literature Commons^™

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates ...

Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, And Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021., Irene Gammel, Jason Wang

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021. xiii + 171 pp.

Review: The Anarchivist: History, Memory, And Archives, Greg Mcnamara

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

Book Review: The Anarchivist: History, Memory, and Archives. By Geof Huth (New York: AC Books, 2020. 145 pp.). Reviewed by Greg McNamara.

The Appalachian Nostos: Pastoralism And Returning Home In Appalachian Poetry, Henry David Thoreau Kilbourne

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mette Leonard Høeg, Editor. Literary Theories Of Uncertainty. Bloomsbury, 2021., Samantha Lepak

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Mette Leonard Høeg, editor. Literary Theories of Uncertainty. Bloomsbury, 2021. xi + 295 pp.

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their ...

Stephen Ross, Editor. Modernism, Theory, And Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022., Anne Cunningham

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Stephen Ross, editor. Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 239 pp

Jim T. Reed. Genesis: The Making Of Literary Works From Homer To Christa Wolf. Camden House, 2020., Chiedozie M. Uhuegbu

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jim T. Reed. Genesis: The Making of Literary Works from Homer to Christa Wolf. Camden House, 2020. 301 pp.

Tres Visiones Rizomáticas En La Identidad Caribeña: Chamoiseau, Miller E Indiana, Marilyn Rivera-Olivieri

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Texaco (1992) del martiniqués Patrick Chamoiseau, Augustown (2016) del jamaiquino Kei Miller y La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) de Rita Indiana crean novelas filosóficas con una dimensión caribeña que conversan con teóricos como Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant y Aimée Césaire en la construcción de teorías de identidad caribeña enfocadas en sus respectivos países. Todas ellas pueden ser consideradas novelas fundacionales, que buscan crear una nueva identidad nacional caribeña, una identidad forjada a raíz del poscolonialismo y el capitalismo y el prejuicio racial. Éstas novelas afirman y resaltan la sociedad caribeña con una identidad plural e histórica que afirman la pertenencia ...

Nationless States And Stateless Beings: The Politics Of Identity And Citizenship In Claudio Mir’S Mondongo Scam And Cheech Marin’S Born In East L.A., Rebecca A. Barnes

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

In the colloquial sense of the term, the word citizen refers to an individual who belongs to a nation, either by birthright or by naturalization. Therefore, citizenship denotes a political and a social belonging, an ideological home, and, in most cases, a strong foundation for the development of one’s personal identity. However, since nations are inherently artificial structures, made only tangible in the present day by a few centuries of recorded history, a philosophical approach to the term citizen complicates this definition. Based off critics including Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Fernando Ortiz, and Jacques Derrida, this essay seeks to ...

Mephistopheles' Atopy, Allotry, Lottery. On Textual Proliferations In Goethe's Faust I And Ii, Pasqual Solass

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Combining a careful reading of selected passages from Goethe’s Faust I and II and of marginal but nevertheless revealing lines on maybe the actual protagonist of the “Tragödie”, Mephistopheles, this paper aims to present aspects of what one could call Goethe’s vision of a modern devil. Taking departure from etymological considerations on the root of “diabolus”, i.e. diabállein, meaning to cast apart, to scatter, but also to accuse, as well as from different beliefs of German “Aberglaube” (superstition), it will become clear that one if not the major feature of Goethe’s Mephistopheles-figure is movement, not just ...

Jacqueline Vansant. Austria Made In Hollywood. Camden House, 2019., Jason Doerre

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jacqueline Vansant. Austria Made in Hollywood. Camden House, 2019. 196 pp.

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism ...

Amanda Gorman And Her Way With Poetry, Emma Corbin

Student Writing

Amanda Gorman promotes perseverance and togetherness throughout her poems: “Earthrise,” “The Hill We Climb,” and “The Miracle of Morning” to challenge the narrative of our nation’s history and make the world a better place for the generations to come.

Margaret Atwood: Amplifying The Voices Of Abused Women, Kimberly Hood

Student Writing

Margaret Atwood addresses the oppressive societal rules placed on women in her poetry. The stories of the abused are often left out of the mainstream. Her works of poetry and prose bring these silenced voices from the background and amplify them for the world to hear.

Círdan The Shipwright: Tolkien’S Bodhisattva Who Brings Us To The Other Shore, Douglas Charles Kane

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

Tolkien wrote that Círdan the Shipwright “saw further and deeper than any other in Middle-earth” despite being a minor, incidental character in both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. The important role that Círdan plays in Tolkien’s secondary universe can be understood by looking at him as a bodhisattva in a Buddhist tradition. Círdan’s role throughout the Three Ages of Middle-earth chronicled by Tolkien was to come to the aid of others, to reduce their suffering, and particularly to help facilitate their sailing to the “Blessed Lands” in the West (which can be seen as a ...

Ghosts’ Stories: Addictive Behaviors And Complicated Grief In George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, Jc Leishman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

When experiencing the natural motions of the grieving process, some individuals encounter an inability to pass this process by a phenomenon known as complicated grief. To deal with the cyclical trauma this causes, the human mind seeks to engage in addictive behaviors (both substantive and behavioral) that work to artificially and momentarily circumvent grief. This process, as it appears in George Saunders' experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, reveals a depth of commentary on human attachments and grieving processes through the lives and narratives of ghosts found in the bardo.

Entropic Interactionist Theory: Reading Social Constructionism Through Thermodynamics And Samuel Beckett, Brie Barron

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay aims to explain the breakdown of social constructs through the concept of Entropic Interactionist Theory. EIT argues that it is the nature of creations to be vulnerable to the same forces as their creator, and that social constructions (like identity, for example) are subject to the very same physical forces that give rise to humanity’s creative impulse. At its core, EIT is informed by social constructionism and Nietzschean sociological theory, but it names the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy as the driving force behind societal disintegration. The complication with this theory is that ...

Faceless Man And Infinite God: Till We Have Faces A Subversion Of Greek Anthropocentrism, Hunter Hogsed

Senior Honors Theses

C. S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces directly subverts the Greek anthropocentric view of both God and man. The Greek myths of Hesiod-Homer and platonic philosophy hold to a view of man being morally superior to the gods. The character of Orual in Till We Have Faces represents Greek anthropocentrism. Orual opens the story accusing the gods of stealing her beloved sister Psyche but, through an encounter with the madness of the divine, sees herself as the true destroyer of her sister’s face. The illusion of her own moral superiority crumbles away as she sees how her ...