Modern Literature Commons^™

The Perspective Of Place And Landscape, Dylan Langschwager

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

The topic of Subjective vs. Objective has a broad connotation across a multitude of different works that can be viewed as abstract due to it's broad, but rooted nature within this work.

Society's Perpetuation Of Oppression, Julianne Hewitt

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

The American dream was idealistically envisioned for all members of a society until some members decided to make it unachievable for select groups. It became unachievable through means of oppressing to maintain control and have no competition in regards to achievement. Oppression of various groups of individuals begins internally on a psychological level. It becomes external when the masses of society all hold a racial or gender discriminatory view and make decisions based upon that. Groups that were deemed restricted have to deal with barriers within social mobility and formal legalities such as laws specifically geared towards them. Major groups …

A Genealogy Of Self-Development In Modern America: Influences Of The American Dream, Kelsey M. Binder

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article offers a hypothetical conversation between various authors and creators who have embarked on progressive self-development journeys under the influence of a shared society that intermittently embraces and rejects the structures of the American Dream. While examining the instinctive human motives that cause the radical decision to actualize one’s life, this paper attempts to bridge the psychology of the desire for personal growth to our influential cultural landscape. It explores and analyzes the self-development journeys of individuals such as William Least Heat-Moon and Chris McCandless, as well as the recent message of self-development found in a cinematic pop culture …

Tourism And Nationalism In America, Derick J. Knox

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

Travel has been regarded as not only a vacation but also a learning experience and for many Americans a process of familiarizing oneself with the history of their country. Technological advancements introduced means of mobility that allowed people to indulge in America’s culture and history. The 20th Century was a turbulent era accompanied by industrialization and an increase in nationalism. Tourist marketing had strategically mapped routes to showcase the highest points in American culture while ignoring some controversial narratives. Once travel became mediated by tourism in the 20th century it lost some elements of freedom and adventure, instead becoming the …

If He Can Do It, Why Can’T I?: Women’S Struggles Into Early Automobility, Emily Schlegel

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Automobility And The Future Of Transport, Lukas Koch

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article explores the history of automobility as ideology, its effect on individuals and its possible future. In the USA in the early 20th century the automobile served to solve the crisis of individualism, created by Taylorism and the rise of the scientific method. To the people of the time the car was associated with freedom and individuality. Freedom through the automobile however was and would never be universally accessible. Furthermore examining the real life consequences of increasing mobility reveals unforeseen effects, mainly pollution, traffic and fragmentation of society. This paper proposes adoption of programs favoring sustainable modes of transportation …

The New Hearth: The Creation Of A Mobile Space, James C. Mangum

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

The New Hearth: The creation of a Mobile Space

Mangum, James. Kutztown University, (4 December 2018).

This analysis offers an insightful look into an aspect of travel and modernity that has gone seemingly unnoticed in the culture of American Mobility. As a social product space is created to serve the function of something integral in society. Working individuals need offices for example, students need schools, and citizens need residences. These are created spaces of society that intersect the realities of life, and an automobile is how we get to and from these spaces. Modernity has allowed us to stretch the …

Immortal Melancholia: A Psychoanalytical Study Of Byronic Heroes, Kathryn Frazell

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This culminating project examines Byronic heroes using psychoanalytic theory across four case studies in media, including classic literature, theater, film, and television. The Byronic hero is a literary archetype inspired by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Typical characteristics include angst, arrogance, cunning intelligence, criminality, desire, passion, dominance, and otherness. The characters I have chosen to study include Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre (1847), the Phantom from the 2004 film The Phantom of the Opera, James Bond from the 2012 film Skyfall, and Damon Salvatore from the hit television series The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017). Through examining the …

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore

Master's Theses

This thesis examines Fred Chappell’s virtually overlooked collection of poetry Family Gathering (2000), and how the poems operate within the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the poems illuminate both the southern grotesque and Roland Barthes’s theory of photography’s Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum. I address Family Gathering as a family photo album full of still shots, snapshots, and even selfies, which illumines how Chappell’s use of the grotesque in this collection derives more from its original association with visual arts rather than only depicting the grotesque typically associated with characteristics deemed explicitly shocking or terrifying. I argue that …

The Persistence Of The Past Into The Future: Indigenous Futurism And Future Slave Narratives As Transformative Resistance In Nnedi Okorafor's The Book Of Phoenix, Ellen Eubanks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, a number of authors have written science fiction works that express the concerns and experiences of marginalized people groups, including those in postcolonial societies, Indigenous/First Nations peoples, and other racial minorities. These works provide counter narratives to that of much canonical science fiction, which developed from narrative forms that often explicitly and implicitly supported colonial ideologies, and still often includes these ideologies today. This thesis analyzes the way The Book of Phoenix (2015) by the NigerianAmerican speculative fiction author Nnedi Okorafor uses a combination of the forms of Indigenous futurism and what Isiah Lavender terms meta-slavery narratives …

Building Eden, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Ralph Deigh is the most famous vernacular American architect you've never heard of. After a military career spanning two wars and struggles with homelessness and PTSD, he is invited to design an entirely new rural community for the 21st century. Twin disasters (fire and flood) in Dare County, West Virginia, set up the circumstances for him to join with Rosemary Mueller and the wealthy Ohio-based Mueller Foundation and a mysterious group of local Dare County residents led by Adam Sennett, County Clerk of Dare County. Together, they design and build the new town of Eden, West Virginia.

The whole story …

Early Guaraní Printing: Nieremberg’S De La Diferencia And The Global Dissemination Of Seventeenth-Century Spanish Asceticism, D. Scott Hendrickson

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines both how and why the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s (1595–1658) once famous treatise De la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno (1640) came to be translated and printed in the Paraguay reductions in 1705, the significance it holds in the transmission of Iberian asceticism to the American missions and how Juan Yaparí and other Guaraní craftsmen participated in its printing and enhanced its illustration. It situates the Guaraní imprint within the context of early modern mission practices and the book-trade of Counter-Reformation Europe, and seeks to show how—in what some scholars consider to be a collaborative …

Ecofeminism And Cultural Ecology: A Framework Of Connections And Intersections For Reading Margret Atwood’S “Habitation”, “The City Planners”, “Morning In The Burned House”, “February”, And “Night Poem”, Maha M. Munib Abdelmotaleb

English Language and Literature

Cultural ecology and Ecofeminism are two concepts that intersect with each other. Both concepts define and reinforce each other. It could be claimed that, Ecofeminism is one manifestation of cultural ecology since the former tackles issues about feminism’s relationship with nature including nature domination and the duality of nature which find their echoes in cultural ecology as well. The whole idea of the earth’s subjugation and male domination as well as the male/ female duality of nature in general find resonance in feminist resistance to patriarchal domination which develop under the umbrella of Ecofeminism to be part of the struggle …

Review Of Lost And Wanted, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Hombres En Movimiento: Masculinidades Españolas En Los Exilios Y Emigraciones, 1939–1999, Iker González-Allende

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Hombres en movimiento: Masculinidades españolas en los exilios y emigraciones, 1939–1999, de Iker González-Allende, es el primer estudio detallado de cómo el exilio y la emigración influyen en la masculinidad de los hombres españoles, tanto heterosexuales como homosexuales, que se ven obligados a abandonar su país. En el libro, González-Allende analiza la literatura producida por escritores españoles que desde 1939 hasta finales del siglo XX han experimentado el exilio o la emigración, cubriendo tres momentos históricos: el largo exilio republicano como consecuencia de la Guerra Civil Española (1936–1939), la emigración a Europa durante la década de 1960 debido a …

The Fall Of Gondolin (2018) By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Christopher Tolkien, Douglas Charles Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by Douglas Charles Kane of The Fall of Gondolin (2018) by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

2018 Common Book Selection: The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

Common Book Program

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and …

Neil Gaiman's American Gods: A Postmodern Epic For America, Susan Gorman

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

American Gods presents a postmodern view on America and its people and engages with the epic genre both in terms of form and content. This engagement with epic does not present a coherent view of the nation, as other epics do, but instead highlights multidimensionality and irony, demonstrating potential new ways in which the epic can remain important to literary work. Evaluates Gaiman’s use of formal elements of epic such as the use of the national past and national tradition as well as content components such as the presentation of the epic storyteller and the epic hero as it evaluates …

Paul Edwin Zimmer’S Alliterative Style: A Metrical Legacy Of J.R.R. Tolkien And Poul Anderson, Dennis Wilson Wise

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Considers J.R.R. Tolkien as one of the founders of the 20^th-century alliterative revival, an informal also including C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden, and Poul Anderson. The work of Paul Edwin Zimmer, a writer best known for his sword-and-sorcery Dark Border novels, constitutes one of the surprising reaches of the modern alliterative revival into contemporary speculative fiction. Analyzes Zimmer’s long narrative historical poem “Logan,” prose fiction, and other works in technical terms and as art.

Index To The Journal Of Tolkien Research Volumes 1-5, Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Index to The Journal of Tolkien Research Volumes 1-5