Modern Literature Commons^™

Fifty Shades Of Fucked Up: On The Use And Abuse Of A Sexual Subculture To Sell Books, Viviane Panagiotis Linos

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In Fifty Shades of Grey, James masterfully utilizes a first person narrative to ease readers into unfamiliar sexual territory. However, while introducing relatively accurate terminology to enlighten her readers on BDSM practices, James further perpetuates the pseudo-acceptance of such sexual deviance by relying on mainstream, vanilla, or non- BDSM practitioning audience members to insert their own normative framework into the narrative (Weiss, 2006, p. 114). This literary approach allows readers to unknowingly utilize these fictional texts as an educational tool to understand BDSM. Fifty Shades of Grey utilized as a pedagogical tool is counterproductive to an accurate understanding of BDSM. …

Openings, 2015, Trinity Christian College

Openings

Literary Arts:  5 - Windowsill by Adam Krestan / 6 - In Silence I Sit by Jaclyn Feddes / 8 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Breaking Up by Anna Phillips / 11 - Night Bus by John Terpstra / 16 - Maybe Then (Explicit Catharsis) by B. S. Wegner / 18 - The Sacrament of Building Tree Forts by Bill Boerman-Cornell / 20 - Hearts In His Hands by Faith Lorenz / 26 - Chrysalis by Esther Sullivan / 27 - Least Weasel (Mustela nivalis) by Jeff Tigchelaar / 29 - Zombie by Kylla Pate / …

Children And Young People's Emotional Literacy In A Networked World, Donell Holloway

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

After nearly 15 years of research into the risk and harm of the internet for children and young people, research attention is beginning to turn towards investigating the social and emotional skills children and young people need to successfully engage in the digital world. This turn, from a protectionist-only approach to a more nuanced research agenda, examines the positive and negative implications of minors’ internet use, including all the protective factors children need to engage effectively and safely online. This change in research agenda will go some way towards helping children develop the skills they need to participate and navigate …

Exemplarity And Its Discontents In Michael Drayton's Englands Heroical Epistles, Andrew Fleck

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Obstacles To And Solutions Of Female Characters' Speech: Beatrice In Dante's Vita Nuova And Purgatorio And Susan In J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Tamara Savage

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the speaking and silencing of two female characters, Beatrice from Dante’s Vita Nuova and Purgatorio and Susan from J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. The texts are viewed through postcolonial and feminist lenses to show the problems with male characters speaking for female characters and the obstacles the female characters face when attempting to speak. Dante’s solution to this problem is to transform Beatrice from a silent and demure woman into a character who issues commands with a powerful voice. Coetzee’s solution is instead to refuse to provide a solution, since no one but Susan can speak for …

Mental [In]Stability: Isolation And Hallucination In The Horror Genre, Catherine Marshall Krafthefer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" and The Shining by Stephen King. Mental [in]stability is defined and then used to describe how the protagonist in these stories moves from a place of realism, to a world where they no longer understand their reality. This idea of mental [in]stability is also demonstrated in the three short stories I have written.

In Poe's "The Black Cat," his narrator tells the tale of how he lost his mental [in]stability. By moving away from his realistic world, the narrator lost his ability to reason as his mental …

Ekphrasis And Avant-Garde Prose Of 1920s Spain, Brian M. Cole

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation analyzes the prose works of the “Nova Novorum,” a fiction series created and published by José Ortega y Gasset between 1926 and 1929. This collection included six works by four authors, five of which will be discussed in this dissertation. Pedro Salinas’ Víspera del gozo (1926) inaugurated the series. Benjamín Jarnés published two works: El profesor inútil (1926) and Paula y Paulita (1929). Antonio Espina is also responsible for two works: Pájaro pinto (1927) and Luna de copas (1929).

The dissertation is divided into five sections. The first chapter introduces the topic of avant-garde prose during the 1920s …

Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank

Theses and Dissertations--English

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …

Branded Cowboy, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

“Here is a moving story of a transgender man whose roots reach deeply into the dust of West Texas. He must choose between the woman he loves and the life he has made on his family’s ranch as a cowboy. I was impressed with how the writer chose to tell this story, with grace and nuance and heart." – Roxane Gay

The Germ Theory Of Dystopias: Fears Of Human Nature In 1984 And Brave New World, Clea D. Harris

Scripps Senior Theses

This project is an exploration of 20^th century dystopian literature through the lens of germ theory. This scientific principle, which emerged in the late 19^th century, asserts that microorganisms pervade the world; these invisible and omnipresent germs cause specific diseases which are often life threatening. Additionally, germ theory states that vaccines and antiseptics can prevent some of these afflictions and that antibiotics can treat others. This concept of a pervasive, invisible, infection-causing other is not just a biological principle, though; in this paper, I argue that one can interpret it as an ideological framework for understanding human existence …

Pathos, Winter 2015, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Brook Horn

Volume 9 No.2

Philosophy's Rarified Air: On Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Review Of Tu Casa Es Mi Casa, By Nylsa Martínez Morón, Traci Roberts-Camps

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

The Pura Belpré Award And The Portrayal Of Disability, Zoe Houser

Honors Program Theses

The Pura Belpré Award is one of the lesser known literary awards. Because other literary awards have been around longer and received a large amount of attention, there has been much research done over the other literary awards, including how the award books portray disabled characters within their pages. However, there is a lack of research about the portrayal of disability in books that have been awarded or honored by the Pura Belpré Award.

This paper will address the question of how many Pura Belpré Award winning books include prominent characters with disabilities and if they are portrayed positively or …

Sing Me A Song Of Sorrow: Analzying The Internal Dynamics Of Howl And Its Place As A Modern Epic, Anthony Hosey

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Span 202: Intermediate Spanish Ii (Focus On Literature & Culture)—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Kelly Kingsbury Brunetto

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

During Spring 2015 I undertook a curricular revision of UNL's fourth-semester Spanish course (SPAN202) with the objective of improving the materials to help the course better achieve its stated goal of moving students "away from knowledge about the language and expertise in using isolated skills into a practical and fluid use of the language in which [they] synthesize [their] isolated skills." As it existed at the time, in theory SPAN202 focuses on synthesis and helping students negotiate higher levels of discourse, but in practice it tended to get bogged down in a comprehensive grammar review. In reality, some grammar topics …

[Introduction To] Red Star Tales: A Century Of Russian And Soviet Science Of Fiction, Yvonne H. Howell

Bookshelf

For over a century, most of the science fiction produced by the world’s largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection aims to change that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit.

A scientist keeps a severed head alive, and the head lives to tell the tale… An explorer experiences life on the moon, in a story written six decades before the first moon landing... Electrical appliances respond to human anxieties and threaten to crash the electrical grid… Archaeologists discover strange powers emanating from a Central Asian excavation site… A teleporting …

The Editorial Double Vision Of Maxwell Perkins: How The Editor Of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, And Wolfe Plied His Craft, Rachel F. Van Hart

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day …

From This Dark Place To The Other: Violence And Connection In The Poetry Of Brian Turner, Alan R. Swirsky

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Brian Turner is a poet and American soldier who served in Iraq at the start of the 21^st century. His poetry is about his experiences as a soldier interacting with the Iraqi people, his time in America following the war, PTSD, and the endless violence in the war zone. As a comparatively recent entry into the genre of War Poetry, his work pays homage to the writers who preceded him, like Wilfred Owen and Bruce Weigl, while also referencing Middle Eastern poets typically outside the scope of American literature. Through Turner’s recurring themes and motifs, connections are established between …