Modern Literature Commons^™

Dirt Theory And Material Ecocriticism, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

This essay speaks for dirty aesthetics. Although aesthetic landscapes readily inspire environmental thinking, a case can be made for grappling with the truly local dirty matter right at hand. Dirt, soil, earth, and dust surround us at all scales: we find them on our shoes, bodies, and computer screens, in fields and forests, and floating in the air. They are the stuff of geological structures, of the rocky Earth itself, and are mobile like our bodies.

Material Ecocriticism: Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, And Other Matter, Dana Phillips, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Chunks of walls and flooring crash in mangled heaps as an enormous orange crane smashes apart the science building. Fueled in part by energy funds, Trinity University is updating its campus. Several hundred feet away, purple martins swoop down to feed squawking chicks nestled in white plastic gourds dangling from an angular metallic pole. In the university's community garden, ripe tomatoes are going to waste. Beyond the demolition site, a grackle lands on the neatly mown grass, where he puffs up and struts while other grackles watch him.

Faust’S Mountains: An Ecocritical Reading Of Goethe’S Tragedy And Science, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Ecocriticism's environmental perspective views human beings, bodies, and culture as participants in ecological interactions and exchanges with the rest of the energetic and material world, including both biotic and abiotic forms. This ecocritical essay assesses how Goethe portrays Faust's mountain experiences in both part I and part II (1808, 1832) of the tragedy as engagements with physical matter rather than with spiritual inspiration. Indeed, by using ecocriticism to study Goethe's science as the context for the play, we see that Faust's many mountains are more than a setting; they actively destabilize his — and our — assumptions about “passive matter” …

Horizons, Volume 27, 2012, Sacred Heart University

Vistas (Horizons)

No abstract provided.

The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her first novel in 1822 and her last in 1857. Her productivity slackened in the 1850S, as aging weakened her eyesight and arthritis made it difficult to write clearly. However, from 1822 through the 1840s, she published multiple works of prose fiction (tales, sketches, novellas, or novels) nearly every year. Despite this extraordinary record of productivity, Sedgwick regularly appears in literary history as the author of a single work, Hope Leslie (I827), her historical novel about relations between the Puritans and the native inhabitants of New England. A few other women authors before and contemporary with …

Juan De Arguijo Y Las Pasiones, Olympia Gonzalez

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Re-Drawing The Borders Of Vision; Or, The Art Of Picturesque Travel, Jason N. Goldsmith

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Jason N. Golsmith's contribution to: Wordsworth Summer Conference, Richard. Gravil, and Wordsworth Conference Foundation. Grasmere, 2012: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference. Penrith, CA: HEB Humanities E-Books, 2012.

Integration Of Literature Into An Online Creative Writing Classroom, Steve Russel Linstrom

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The study of Literature was once the cornerstone of a creative writer's training, but lost significance when creative writing workshops became the pedagogical vehicle of choice. Online instruction provides technological and logistical advantages that bring the study of literature back to the forefront of creative writing instructional theory. A presentation of an upper level, literature focused, online creative writing course illustrates how creative writing and the study of great writers can be effectively integrated in an online environment.

Pathos, Winter 2012, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Joel Eisenhower

Issue 17

Lola Ridge : Poet And Renegade Modernist, Anna Hueppauff

Theses : Honours

This thesis examines the poetry of Lola Ridge as a form of alternative Modernism. Poet, editor, anarchist, Lola Ridge is largely an unknown identity in Modernist discourses. Primarily recognised as a social justice poet, her work has been viewed through a traditional Modernist lens and excluded to the periphery as ‘sentimental’. This thesis argues that Ridge personally and professionally exceeds these categories. She modelled a practice of engagement in her personal life by actively participating in rallies and protests against injustice, and living in poverty in solidarity with the poor, giving her work an authenticity worth investigating. Her poetry provides …

"Una Conversacion Con Borges": Notas A Una Entrevista De Jose Donoso, Maria Laura Bocaz-Leiva

Modern Languages & Literatures Articles

En dos de los cuadernos de trabajo de Jose Donoso contenidos en el archivo de la Universidad de Iowa se encuentra un conjunto de anotaciones autografas en las que se hace evidente que el escritor no se encontraba trabajando en uno de sus proyectos literarios, sino en una entrevista a Jorge Luis Borges. Tras el hallazgo en el ano 2007 trate por diversos medios de encontrar la version publicada de este texto, ya que la importancia del entrevistado asi como la precaria situacion en la que se encontraba Donoso para entonces --sin trabajo, con poco dinero, apenas en los inicios …

Cold War Legacies In Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The editorial methods developed during the Cold War professionalized scholarly editing and appealed to new ideas about the relationship between American academics and the government by aligning with the supposedly value-neutral goals and methods of the behavioral sciences, much to the discomfort of many humanists. Some of the implicit assumptions underlying midcentury editorial methods persist in digital editing, and may risk positioning digital editions as marginalized scholarship within the digital era, just as print scholarly editions became widely considered second-rate scholarship in the twentieth century.

The Shamanic Archetype In Robinson Jeffers Poetry, Steven B. Herrmann

Jeffers Studies

This essay pays homage to Robinson Jeffers’s totemic presence as a shaman-poet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the essay’s author was born in 1956. It views shamanism as a symbolic process of transformation that takes place at an emotional, instinctive, and spiritual level; as a method of ecstasy found throughout Jeffers’ poetry and prose from beginning to end of his career. The shamanic archetype takes on concrete form through Jeffers’ ritual enactments of his dreams, spirit visitations, visions, and shamanistic voices that sound to him from Native influences. Science gave Jeffers a vision to behold the world’s spiritual traditions from a vista …

The Influence Of Nietzsche And Schopenhauer On Hermann Hesse, Kathryn Punsly

CMC Senior Theses

In my first chapter, I will discuss the mark of Cain at greater length and introduce the idea of daemon. In the second chapter, I will discuss how it functions as part of Nietzschean active nihilism. Finally, in the third chapter, I will explore the problem of somberness and the problem of fanaticism, and see how Hesse tries to resolve these two problems.

Robinson Jeffers,W.B. Yeats, And Ecoprophecy, Deborah Fleming

Jeffers Studies

W. B. Yeats and Robinson Jeffers shared a vision of modernity which rejected contemporary values in favor of tradition. Both emphasized permanence in times of fragmentation and featured dramatic landscapes and cultural myth. Included among Modernist poets in spite of early Romantic influence and his commitment to formalist verse, Yeats fixed his gaze on the past, establishing the poetic terms of decolonization and interconnectedness of culture, place, and nature. Excluded from the circle of Modernist poets, Jeffers’s voiced what we call today ecocentrism—the earth or natural world rather than the human mind being the center of things. Jeffers’s ecoprophecy stems …

Aemilia Lanyer's Use Of The Garden In Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, Anna Brovold

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Aemilia Lanyer used her collection of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to redefine the way that women should look at themselves in the eyes of God. She began her collection with poems dedicated to women that she had deemed virtuous and worthy of individual attention. Her dedicatees were then presented to her readers as the true Disciples of Christ; an honor due to women because of their empathy for Christ's situation. Lanyer rewrote the biblical Passion story in order to include a feminized version of Christ, the rightful female Disciples of Christ and an additional trial presented to Pontius Pilate …

"I Could Kill You Quite Easily, Bella, Simply By Accident": Violence And Romance In Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" Saga, Samantha Amber Oakley

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga is an exemplification of rape culture due to its valorization of romantic relationships that are psychologically abusive, violent, and ultimately destructive. In my analysis, I use a postmodern feminist framework to examine the four main books in the series: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. Specifically, focusing on how the female protagonist, Bella Swan, is portrayed, I interrogate the interactions with her two love interests, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black. I found that the romantic developments between Bella, Edward, and Jacob are depicted as violent and dangerous affairs that echo non-physically …

"What's That Noise?": Paying Attention To Perception, Excess, And Meta-Art In David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, Christopher Mccarthy

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In his graphic novel Asterios Polyp David Mazzucchelli is concerned with the nature of human perception. He highlights the limitations of perception through his title character's struggle to find a new way to filter information from the world around him. Mazzucchelli reminds us that no matter which method a person uses to look at the world there will always be excess details that he or she will ignore or simply not notice due to perceptual blind spots. I argue that, while Asterios gains a new method for perceiving the world, his true victory is in his acknowledgement that all perceptions …

Openings, 2012, Trinity Christian College

Openings

Visual Arts: Drawing - Reflecting by Kaitlyn VanDellen - 3 / Graphic Design - Ubuntu by Karlie Monsma - 7 Manifest Destiny by Melissa Peterson - 15 / Painting - Sunset by Alissa VanderWilt - 6 / Photography - Clementine Blues by Anna Flier - Cover / Fotosharp by Melissa Conrad - 6 / Backflip by Brittany Rucin - 1O / Color Blind by Katherine Stachula - 11 / Foggy by Sarah Jasperse - 12-13 / Sleeping Roommate by Steve Martinez - 19 / If You Build It by They Will Come by Brady Davidson - 20-21 / Tattoo by …

Contriving History : Making Dead Time In Select Works Of William Faulkner, Anthony Joseph Delgado

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The protagonists of three of William Faulkner's major novels, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Go Down, Moses each suffer from a compromised self that originates out of a past that contains excised elements. This revised history, which redacts past sins of rape, murder, and racial mixing, serves as a foundation for the present, passed down to the Faulknerian protagonists, Quentin, Jason, and Isaac, along lines of paternal inheritance. The three novels each suggest that when an idea of the self in the present is founded upon a past that has been rewritten, a shattering occurs when that …