Modern Literature Commons^™

The Figure Of The Animal In Modern And Contemporary Poetry By Michael Malay, Brian Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Michael Malay's The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

This chapter draws attention to the lack of parks and nature recreation amenities during the 1920s and 1930s in predominantly African American city neighborhoods through Langston Hughes’s political poetry, specifically his blues-inflected ballad “Park Bench,” as well as “Chicago’s Black Belt” “Restrictive Covenants,” and “One Way Ticket.” Through the figure of the tramp/vagrant/bum, “Park Bench” voices a protest against inequality mapped into city space. Asserting that access to nature should be a fundamental condition of a democratic society, the poem situates the park bench as a charged site for public dialogue. The chapter argues that this poem and other Hughes …

Investigando La Creación De Un Canal De Noticias BilingüE En Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo: Un Estudio De La Representación LingüÍstica, Paige Farris Mcgill

World Languages and Cultures

The purpose of this research study is to determine if there is a desire or demand for a bilingual English-Spanish news outlet at Cal Poly. Spanish is considered the most relevant language because it is the second most frequently spoken language in the community. Results are based on analysis of data collected through an electronic survey and various interviews. Demographics of the university as well as the surrounding community are also factors to consider.

Mo Yan’S Radish: Between The Real And The Surreal, Xiaoyue Li, Xuefang Feng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article “Mo Yan’s Radish: Between the Real and the Surreal” Xiaoyue Li and Xuefang Feng argue that Radish, a novella written by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan skillfully combines realism with surrealism, the flexible swing between which is made possible by the choice of children’s perspective, and the effect is too significant to be ignored. Their analysis concludes that the transparent golden radish symbolizes humanity, the lack of which projects the protagonist’ sufferings, and that the surrealist description of the radish reveals the magic function of humanity in brightening up life in times of miseries.

Realistic Fantasy And Sub-Creation: A Narratological Approach To Evaluating Storyworld Construction By Using J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Dustin J. Ritchea

Augsburg Honors Review

This essay examines J.R.R. Tolkien's concept of "sub-creation' meaning both myth creation and the power to create artificial storyworlds, and how it predates contemporary narratology. The two approaches to narrative share similar thought processes. This essay examines how Tolkien's theory of fantasy was built on the same foundation as narratology and even helped create certain narrative dynamics before contemporary narratology defined the terms. Using elements of narrative dynamics and Tolkien's insights on art and imagination, as well as the creation of artificial worlds, I develop a set of criteria for story-world narrative to showcase Tolkien's techniques: 1) Space and temporality …

Literacy As Geographies Of Transnationalism And Mobility: Diasporic Experiences, Identities, And Knowledge Production, Cinthya M. Saavedra

Mexican American Studies Faculty Publications

In an increasingly mobile world, be it virtual or material, we have an incredible opportunity to conceptualize this mobility as a generator of knowledge production, giving us new ways to understand embodied literacies (Johnson & Vasudevan, 2012; Schmidt & Beucher, 2018) and ultimately reimagine our world. At some point in our lives, most of us have had to move or relocate, facing new ideas, people, and places/lands. These movimientos and migrations inevitably turn our worldview upside down, blurring our realities, a phenomenon Gloria Anzaldúa (2002, 2015) calls arrebatos (earth-shattering ruptures). Arrebatos are moments in our lives when we are catapulted …

African American Existential Heroes: Narrative Struggles For Authenticity, Michael Cotto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

African American Existential Heroes: Narrative Struggles for Authenticity argues for the development of existential authenticities and their impact on African American self-identity constructions in three African American literary classics:

Richard Wright’s The Outsider, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. For that purpose, the introduction puts forward the aforementioned topic; defines the major terms, authenticity, existentialism, and African Americanness; identifies the three texts to be studied; explicates its methodology; studies the anagnorisis of each text in relation to the existential crisis; accounts for the existential philosophers used, Martin …

Flower Unfurling: Buddhist Modernism And The Early Writing Of James Joyce, Erin Garrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the history of the references to Buddhism in Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s first and unpublished novel, through the author’s previous writing, his sources, and his context, in order to determine how—if at all—the tradition bore upon his earliest depiction of consciousness. Acknowledging that Joyce habitually revisited and refined earlier ideas and prose, it attends to previous essays, notebooks, book reviews, conversations, letters, epiphanies, poems, and autobiographical prose; to available material, bibliographical, and biographical evidence about the specific volumes and performances to which Joyce had access; to language and paratext—including advertisements, introductions, and appended essays—in those volumes; …

Through The Scholastic Looking Glass: The Pedagogical Potential Of Textual Deformation For Poetic Studies, Taylor Dietrich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the pedagogical usefulness of the antithetical reading model of textual deformation for the study of poetic works. No formal pedagogical plan exists for the education of students in poetic studies through textual deformance. This thesis does not go as far as structuring one in its entirety. Rather, it surveys the digital humanities landscape, showing a collective affinity within a number of textual studies approaches that advocate for textual deformance as useful for interrogating texts, and aligns the overlapping symmetries within those working methodologies with pedagogical imperatives like those embedded in Ryan Cordell’s Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy Laboratory—the intent being …

Resistant Female Cyborgs In Brazil, M. Elizabeth Ginway

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

In her oft-cited “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway conceptualizes the cyborg as a feminist possibility, emphasizing the need for a self-created, self-engendered female (150). In How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles examines the development of cybernetic theory from the 1940s to the present, linking its history to portrayals of cyborgs and artificial intelligence in science fiction. I argue that the combination of change and tradition embodied by Brazilian cyborgs must be understood within the history and paradigms of Latin American culture and its ambivalent attitudes towards modernity. To understand Brazil’s female cyborgs, I apply Bolívar Echeverría’s concept of …

Translation And Translanguaging Pedagogies In Intercomprehension And Multilingual Teaching, Cedric Joseph Oliva, Clorinda Donato, Francesca Ricciardelli

Modern Languages Faculty Journal Articles

Since 2007, California State University, Long Beach has developed and offered courses that highlight students’ pre-existing linguistic repertoires in English and in the Romance languages. These courses are unique in that they build upon a multilingual base for the acquisition of new languages through the method of intercomprehension. As an approach that moves among languages, Intercomprehension places learners in conditions that are conducive to translanguaging and translation. This paper discusses the role of translation and translanguaging in Intercomprehension as a pedagogical approach in these courses. Since our students are constantly moving between English and one or more Romance language(s), they …

Filial Descent: The African Roots Of Postcolonial Literature In Italy, Cristina Lombardi-Diop

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The essay concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen of Flowers and Pearls). It argues that these works give expression to an African diasporic urban generation that is changing the literary legacy of the Horn of Africa. The co-presence of multiple genres, with orality appearing as a strong influence on their written narrative forms, places these novels within the larger formation of a black African literary tradition. By looking at …

The Absurd: Postwar Reception And Wartime Echoes At Yale French Studies, Julia Elsky

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Linguistic Politeness In The Chinese Language And Culture, Horng-Yi Lee

Modern Languages

This paper aims to explore the cultural foundations of polite speech and analyze its usage and practice in modern Chinese. A language mirrors the culture it is associated with. Grounded in the Chinese tradition and the teachings of Confucianism, the emphasis on rites, propriety and humility led to the development of polite language from the early imperial time. Because of the absence of related syntactic features, Chinese linguistic politeness is predominantly manifested on the lexical level. A rich array of decorous terms and expressions has been evolved accordingly to express courtesy or respect either verbally or in formal writing. In …

“What Do I Think Of Glory?”: On Middlemarch By George Eliot, Beverley Park Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?”1 This is the famous reply Emily Dickinson wrote to her bookish cousins in 1873 after her first reading of George Eliot’s novel. Dickinson’s sentiments were also my own when I completed my first reading of Middlemarch (1871–1872), about thirty-five years ago. Middlemarch is the book that made me realize literature could be more than a source of entertainment, that it could be Art with a capital A. Here was a text with fascinating and seemingly limitless possibilities for interpretation that would continue to reward scrutiny. Of course, …

Zephyrus, Western Kentucky University

Student Creative Writing

The fine arts magazine of Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green.

Writing Strategies To Develop Literacy Skills For Spanish Heritage Language Learners, Clara Burgo

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Heritage language learners (HLLs) need to be exposed to different genres of academic texts (Chevalier, 2004; Correa, 2016) and instructors need to find resources to maximize HLLs’ learning experiences. There are multiple gains in improving HLLs’ writing to create an awareness of the power of the HL through the use of authentic resources with a meaningful goal. Since HLLs should be able to distinguish between registers and genres (Chevalier, 2004), writing chronicles is an effective way to master their communicative competence (Fuentes, 2018). Finally, HLLs’ writing is assessed holistically through rubrics moving from a focus on content to language.

Finding Tender Roots: Affiliation, Disability, And Racial Melancholia In Monique Truong’S Bitter In The Mouth, Amanda Ong

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Early on in Bitter in the Mouth, we learn that the protagonist, Linda Linh-Dao Nguyen Hammerick, has auditory-gustatory synesthesia—that is, nearly every word she hears evokes a specific taste. Hammerick, for example, tastes like Dr. Pepper and Linda tastes like mint. There are many articles that analyze Linda’s synesthesia but few articles approach the text through the lens of disability studies. In this article, I employ feminist disability studies and diaspora studies to argue that Linda's identity as a disabled transracial adoptee allow her to seek out additional forms of affiliation and kinship. By constructing an alternative family tree …

Young Girl's Novel, Idil Hafizoglu

Children's Literature (MA) Theses

A novel called Young Girl's Novel written by Idil Hafizoglu.

Salaysay, Saysay, Salukoy: Tungo Sa Dalumat Ng Alamat, Christian Jil R. Benitez

Filipino Faculty Publications

Dinadalumat sa kasalukuyan ang alamat bilang bagay na nagpapasaysay ng panahon nang may kritikal na pagsasalalay sa ekolohiya. Sa pagtalunton sa ilang pag-iisip na kanluranin hinggil sa mito, isinasalin ito bilang "alamat," na pinasasaysayan bilang masidhing sandali ng pagsasalaysay, na parating nakikitaon sa kabagayan. Itinutulak ang ekolohikong ugnayan ng alamat at sangkabagayan sa pagpapahalaga sa mga ito bilang ang nagsasalaysay at nagpapasaysay para sa isa''t isa. Sa ganang ito, nilalansag ng alamat ang mga karaniwang pag-uuri ng panahon bilang "banal" at "dahay," para sa halip magtaya sa isang pagdalumat ng panahon, sa metonimikong "kasalukuyan" na parating maalamat, at samakatwid, parating …