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 ...

Final Master's Portfolio, Jonathan Correa

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Jonathan G. Correa's Master's Portfolio

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 ...

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 ...

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.

A Paper From A Ph.D. Dissertation Entitled: Poetics Of Paranoia In Selected Novels By Kurt Vonnegut And Thomas Pynchon, Inas Abdul-Munem Qadoos, Prof. Shaké Ashjian Ashjian

Midad AL-Adab Refereed Quarterly Journal

Paranoia defines a culture, particularly the American. Since WWII (1939-45), it became an inevitable thought structure in the USA community. Most of the postmodern American novelists’ interest in paranoia is due to its relevance to everyday life anxieties and horrors. Since WWII, an extraordinary number of writers have used expressions of paranoia to present the influence of postwar technologies, social organisations, and communication systems on human beings. Writers as different as Ralph Ellison, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo have depicted individuals nervous about the ways large organisations ...

Scarlett Baron. The Birth Of Intertextuality: The Riddle Of Creativity. Routledge, 2020., Mariaenrica Giannuzzi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Scarlett Baron. The Birth of Intertextuality: The Riddle of Creativity. Routledge, 2020. 381 pp.

Great Lakes, Great Books Diverse Texts, Lynette Marten Suckow

Michigan Reading Journal

Book reviews of juvenile and teen literature with themes of cultural diversity.

Observación Participante De Clases Virtuales Bilingües En K-2 Durante Covid-19, Jennifer Quint

World Languages and Cultures

The Covid-19 pandemic is shifting education from the classroom to a virtual setting, forcing educational institutions to collaboratively innovate a new structure for virtual learning. The world’s current state of reliance on technology came so suddenly that teachers, students, and families have no choice but to learn as they go. This research analyzes how an elementary dual- immersion bilingual program adapts to new-found challenges such as technical difficulties, variances in at home support, and student independence. Furthermore, students enrolled in a dual-immersion bilingual program face additional challenges to provide students a language immersive environment. From August 2020 to March ...

Analola Santana. Freak Performances: Dissidence In Latin American Theater. U Of Michigan P, 2018., Stephanie R. Orozco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Analola Santana. Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American Theater. U of Michigan P, 2018. 266 pp.