Modern Literature Commons^™

Arteletra: The Sixties In Latin America And The Politics Of Going Unnoticed, Jason A. Bartles

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

ArteletrA analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics—defined here as the potential to disagree—without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls “the politics of going unnoticed,” which he derives from …

Preface, Cristina Lombardi-Diop

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

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 this thesis for both teachers and students.

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 …

A British Health Seeker In Southern California: Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936), Molly Mcclain

History: Faculty Scholarship

In the late nineteenth-century, health tourists travelled the globe in search of relief for tuberculosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and other ailments for which the medical profession had no cure. Some sought the mountain air of the Swiss Alps while others headed to the French and Italian Riviera. A smaller, more eclectic group made their way to San Diego, an up-and-coming tourist destination that promised plenty of sunshine, fresh air, and a mild, dry climate thought to be well-suited to damaged lungs and aching joints. Among them was the best-selling British novelist Beatrice Harraden who wrote several books about Southern California, including …

An Archival Text Within A Text: Valeria Luiselli’S 'Lost Children Archive', Kayla J. Baur

Publications and Research

The novel Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is an extremely referential novel, so much so that she creates an archival text of her own to support her story and the ideas she is trying to convey to readers about the border crisis. She crafts this archival text, Elegies for Lost Children by Ella Composanto, as a guide for both the narrators and readers so that they may understand the titular lost children and train themselves to see the book from a political narrative. This peculiar decision to include a made-up literary source as the primary focus of her archive …

Pathos, Spring 2021, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Bret Steggell

Gothic Elements In J. K. Rowling’S Prisoner Of Azkaban, Kayla J. Baur

Publications and Research

Gothic fiction is a genre of literature that tells a story of terror or suspense, and does this by employing dark scenery, eerie narrative devices, and atmospheres of gloom and mystery. It is a genre that has been ever-evolving since its first true emergence in the eighteenth century, and a prime example of this evolution is the modern Harry Potter book series by J. K. Rowling which employs gothic elements into its otherwise predominantly fantasy-fiction genre. For the purpose of this paper, the focus lies on the third installment of the series,  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which …

“Around We Go”: The Apocalypse As Revolution And Revelation In David Mitchell’S Cloud Atlas, Emma G. Schilling

Student Publications

The tradition of global disasters in literature is long-standing and David Mitchell contributes to that discussion. For him, the possibility of political, social, and environmental collapse is imminent based on patterns he traced throughout human history. One common thread Mitchell weaves throughout his works is the presence and the relevance of the apocalyptic. In his best known work, Cloud Atlas, Mitchell explores the cyclical trends of humanity across time and space, including the recurrence of predacity, cruelty, and systematic oppression. Rather than being overwhelmed by a nihilistic reality, Mitchell centers Cloud Atlas around recurring figures of revolution, resisting and …

The Weight Of The Spring: "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" And The Fate Of The Prague Spring, Thea J. Toocheck

Student Publications

Two of the many watershed events Czechoslovakia experienced in the twentieth century were the 1968 Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion, which determined the course of the nation for the next twenty years. Czech author Milan Kundera experienced these events firsthand and recounted a narrative of the events in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Today, the novel remains an important work for its representation of the Spring and its philosophical discussion of the purpose of human life. Over the last fifty years, the Prague Spring has been represented by a variety of sources as a time …

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 these …

Spaces For Becomings? Heterotopic Fictions In Preciado’S Testo Yonqui, Caroline King

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This article examines the possibilities and limits of gender becomings in Paul Preciado’s book Testo yonqui (Testo Junkie). A genre-fluid “body-essay,” his text theorizes a departure from gender through contemporary medicine. Following Preciado in his self-administration of testosterone, the book labels today’s reality a “pharmacopornographic era,” a new iteration of Foucault’s biocapitalism. After designating Preciado’s self-generated transformations as becomings, I explore how the book’s heterotopic spaces––including its genre––facilitate Preciado’s forward-moving gender identity. A Foucauldian term, heterotopia has not yet been applied to Testo Junkie, however it offers insight into the book’s potential to motivate individuals to …

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 …

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 2021, …

Impossible Origins: Trauma Narrative And Cinematic Adaptation, Linda Belau

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

In this essay, I explore the cinematic adaptation and the representation of trauma, while I further consider the role and significance of the notion of the origin in both trauma and in cinematic adaptation. Through an initial consideration of the relationship between the theory of the impossible origin, particularly as it is articulated by Walter Benjamin, the essay goes on to analyze the significance and role of an impossible origin in the elemental form of adaptation. To this end, the essay considers the movement of adaptation from an autobiographical trauma memoir to a feature film, considering the success or failure …

The Importance Of Black Love In Romance Novels, University Marketing And Communications, Julie Moody-Freeman

DePaul Download

For Julie Moody-Freeman, reading Black romance novels isn’t a guilty pleasure - it’s an area of study. Moody-Freeman is the director of DePaul's Center for Black Diaspora and a faculty member in the African and Black Diaspora Studies Department. On this episode, she discusses the history and importance of Black love in romance novels, which inspires her work as the host of The Black Romance Podcast. She also reflects on her conversations with Black romance writers, editors and scholars and the importance of their oral histories.

Unsur Personifikasi Dalam Antologi Cerpen Peravai Kathaikal, Krishanan Jayanthy

Student Works (2020-2029)

Kajian ini mengkaji unsur personifikasi dalam antologi cerpen Peravai Kathaikal. Objektif utama kajian ini ialah untuk mengenalpasti unsur personifikasi yang wujud dalam antologi cerpen Peravai Kathaikal dari tahun 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 dan 2016. Selain daripada itu, pengkaji juga menghuraikan makna unsur personifikasi dalam antologi cerpen Peravai Kathaikal. Bagi mencapai objektif ini, unsur personifikasi yang terdapat dalam antologi cerpen Peravai Kathaikal dianalisis. Pengkaji telah menggunakan kaedah kualitatif untuk menjalankan kajian ini. Data utama kajian ini ialah 58 cerpen yang diperoleh daripada buku antologi cerpen Peravai Kathaikal dari tahun 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 dan 2016. Sebanyak 98 …

Objects Of Obsession: Interpreting Can Xue’S “The Ox”, Lucy Pappas

Undergraduate Research (Journal)

No abstract provided.