Modern Literature Commons^™

Towards A Theory Of Comic Book Adaptation, Colin Beineke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary adaptation studies/theories have tended to focus singularly on the movement from the novel/short story to film – largely ignoring mediums such as the theater, music, visual art, video games, and the comic book.  Such a limited view of adaptation has led to an underdeveloped and misplaced understanding of the adaptation process, which has in turn culminated in a convoluted perception of the products of artistic adaptation.  The necessity of combating the consequences of these limited outlooks – particularly in the field of comics studies – is as vital as the difficulties are manifold. In opposition to this current stream …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

After The Fall: The Post-Apocalyptic Frontier In The Road And 28 Days Later, Jeffrey J. Lavigne

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Previous scholars have identified three scenes of the American frontier myth: the sea, the west, and space. This evolution of frontiers reflected key changes in the expression of America’s cultural identity. While Janice Hocker Rushing called space “the final frontier,” the prominent place in contemporary society held by zombies and other minions of the occult hint at the emergence of yet another scene of the American mythos: the post apocalypse. In contrast to previous frontiers, which are defined geographically, the post-apocalypse is much broader, for in the wake of a global cataclysm, everywhere is a potential frontier. This decentralization of …

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

Early Modern Evil Genius: Hyperconformity And Objectivity In Sixteenth And Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Christine Hoffmann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the response among early modern and postmodern audiences to the experience of information overload, and suggests that the most appealing response to living in a communications network that appears both systematic and random is to use a rhetoric of struggle that is ambiguous in the same way. >The reasons for this appeal are twofold: firstly, the rhetoric of struggle is a way to cope with the difficulty of situating oneself within a system of circulating information that operates according to its own arbitrary rules. Mimicking that arbitrariness is a way of finding aesthetic synchronicity between how one's …

Narratives Of Fear And Shame: Jewish Childhood In Soviet And Post-Soviet Life Writing, Rosa Kleinman, Marina Balina, Faculty Advisor

John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Pathos, Spring 2011, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Joel Eisenhower

Issue 15

“The Day Everything Became Nothing”: Finding Meaning In The Postapocalyptic, Joe Chellino

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Explored in this work are three texts: Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road; Douglas Coupland’s novel, Girlfriend in a Coma; and Robert Kirkman’s ongoing serialized comic book, The Walking Dead. After a discussion of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fictions and their ubiquity and popularity in contemporary culture, each work will be analyzed individually to explore each author’s message regarding postapocalyptic concerns. These three texts have been chosen as each represents a point along a loose continuum of high-to-low art. Primarily, this thesis will focus on how each author approaches systems of meaning-making and systems of understanding in postapocalyptic settings …

"Undone By Murmurs Of Love": Traumatic Legacies And The Struggle For Personal And Communal Identity Formation In Toni Morrison's Trilogy, Fida Yasin

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Implications of racial oppression on personal and collective African American identity formation in Toni Morrison’s trilogy are explored in this thesis. Morrison reconstructs African American history in her trilogy, but she also enacts a cultural healing through content and form. Impossible choices are made by characters in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise who are influenced by the racial trauma they experience and inherit. The legacies of oppression--traumatic memories, fragmentation, stereotypes and negative associations—distort the way these characters view themselves and one another. They are disoriented, isolated, and displaced. Characters recover from their past trauma— together—when they share their stories. …

Scout's Daughters : Race And Creative Development In Contemporary Adolescent Literature, Amanda Malloy

Honors Theses

At the heart of what Roberta S. Trites titles ―adolescent literature‖ – works written both for and about young adults—is a question of agency (Disturbing 7). In Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, Trites asserts that adolescent novels attempt to answer the question of young adults who wonder if they ―should or even can affect the world in which they live‖ (1). Trites‘ argument is based on the idea that the distinguishing characteristic of adolescent literature is its focus on ―the social forces‖ that …

Vladimir Tumanov's Books, Vladimir Tumanov

Research Day (Arts & Humanities, FIMS, and Education)

Information about the books on the poster is available here.

Asking For A Letter Of Recommendation In Spanish And English: A Pilot Study Of Face Strategies, Laura Callahan

Modern Languages & Literature

Linguistic politeness plays an important role in the opinions people form of one another, especially when an individual has little other knowledge of an interlocutor, as is often the case in relationships between professors and students. Positive face refers to the desire to be liked and appreciated; negative face refers to the desire to be unimpeded. Positive and negative face are often characterized as corresponding to the dichotomies of involvement vs. independence, intimacy vs. distance, and solidarity vs. deference. An action or utterance that goes against one’s need for appreciation, in the case of positive face, or need for autonomy, …

"Emptiness About The Heart Of Life": A Reformed Approach To Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway And Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Mary Dengler

Pro Rege

Dr. Mary Dengler presented this paper at the Calvinism for the 21st Century Conference, at Dordt College, April 2010.

Hello And Goodbye?, Brian G. Kennelly

World Languages and Cultures

Opening remarks on the panel, "Why Can’t We Teach What We’re Trained to Teach? Program Consolidation, Elimination, Realignment” at the Modern Language Association Convention on 6 January 2011.

Transatlantic Fuentes: Between ‘The Two Shores’ Of Pluriculturality And Glossocentrism, Alberto Ribas-Casasayas

Modern Languages & Literature

The cultural program that Jerónimo de Aguilar pronounces at the end of Carlos Fuentes's short story “The Two Shores” appears to be inconsistent with the fundamentals of democratic liberalism and multiculturalism upon which they are ostensibly based. Furthermore, cultural visions like those in “The Two Shores” lend signifying imagery and empower cultural institutions, the media, and political authorities to exert symbolic violence upon minorities, thereby negating the multiculturalism that such visions claim to be promoting. El programa cultural que Jerónimo de Aguilar pronuncia al final del cuento “Las dos orillas” de Carlos Fuentes parece inconsistente con los fundamentos del liberalismo …

Science Fiction And Lyric Poetry, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This piece explores connections between science fiction and lyric poetry.

From Larva To Butterfly: Sophia In Ding Ling’S Miss Sophia’S Diary And Coco In Wei Hui’S Shanghai Baby, Xiaoqing Liu

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Sophia and Coco are two characters in Ding Ling's Miss Sophia's Diary (1928/1995) and Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby (1999), respectively. Like a larva, Sophia, who enters society in the early twentieth century, is weak and immobile. Coco, who lives at the end of the twentieth century, is like a butterfly leading an outlandish lifestyle. The differences between Sophia and Coco reflect the achievement of official feminism, which liberated Chinese women from traditional patriarchal control in the social sense. However, gender issues for women remain unresolved. To fight against traditional patriarchy and especially challenge gender oppression in official feminism, both Sophia …

Introduction: A Tale Of Our Own Times, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick and the American Novel of Manners

In his preface to his novel of manners Home as Found (1838), James Fenimore Cooper repeats what were already commonplaces about American society as the subject matter for fiction. Lamenting "that no attempt to delineate ordinary American life, either on the stage or in the pages of a novel, has been rewarded with successful he admits Home as Found is another such attempt but professes he has "scarcely a hope of success. It would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the way of a Roman de …

Universal Identities And Local Realities: Young Poland's (Mis)Readings Of Synge, John A. Merchant

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The problems Young Poland experienced in understanding the work of John Millington Synge were informed by precisely the same kind of behaviors that Daniel Corkery described in his argument for a truly native Irish national literature in the 1930s. Overcome by a strong sense of self, Poles were not fully able to appreciate the complexities and nuances of Synge's work and by extension, the Irish-Ireland movement. In the end, then, Young Poland was incapable of really understanding the Irish, and so the best they could do was to associate with them. As a result, Poles may have been able to …

Kindred And A Canticle For Leibowitz As Palimpsestic Novels, Sue Vander Hook

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis is an investigation of a possible new categorization under the speculative fiction umbrella—a genre called palimpsestic novels. Palimpsestic novels are characterized by layers of time in the past, the present, and sometimes the future. In a fantastical setting, often with nonscientific time travel, the layers illuminate and provide contemporary significance to eras of history that have either become blurred or forgotten through time. The formation of a palimpsestic genre will provide an appropriate categorization for some speculative fiction novels that currently are nebulous mixtures of several genres, have no genre classification at all, or would better fit in …