Modern Literature Commons^™

The Influence Of Individualistic Ideas On American Mobility, Markus Magiera

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

In this paper I showcase the influence of individualistic thinking ranging back as far as Age of Enlightenment on the development of mobility in America since the eighteenth century. My goal is to identify the factors that shaped the evolution of travel. In order to do so I start by analyzing texts from the early nineteenth century, where travel by foot was the common thing. Next I focus on new means of mobility; first the bicycle, and later on the automobile. I aim to convince that modernity's main instigator was the change in thinking brought forth in the Age of …

Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses Of Gossip In Caribbean Literature, Ana B. Rodriguez Navas

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Chaucer called it "spiritual manslaughter"; Barthes and Benjamin deemed it dangerous linguistic nihilism. But gossip-long derided and dismissed by writers and intellectuals-is far from frivolous. In Idle Talk, Deadly Talk, Ana Rodríguez Navas reveals gossip to be an urgent, utilitarian, and deeply political practice-a means of staging the narrative tensions, and waging the narrative battles, that mark Caribbean politics and culture.

From the calypso singer's superficially innocent rhymes to the vicious slanders published in Trujillo-era gossip columns, words have been weapons, elevating one person or group at the expense of another. Revising the overly gendered existing critical frame, Rodríguez …

Course Syllabus (Fa18) Coli 110--World Literature I: "Worlds Of Absurdity And Nothingness", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

An approach to the question of absurdity through world literature and a few philosophical and critical texts with a view towards possible modes of resolution

Pathos, Fall 2018, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Sadie Jordan

“You Could See Rage”: Visual Testimony In Post-Genocide Guatemala, Lacey M. Schauwecker

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Since the Guatemalan genocide against Maya populations (1981-1983), domestic and international human rights groups have organized truth commissions, forensic exhumations, and legal cases. These efforts to secure justice have achieved minimal success, prompting a reconsideration of the relationship among narrative testimony, visual testimony, and institutional standards of truth. Engaging the ideas of visual studies scholar, Nicholas Mirzoeff, I argue for the political importance of testimony that is critical of such standards, including those enforced by human rights’ legal paradigm. Following Mirzoeff’s understandings of “visuality” and “countervisuality,” I analyze “visual testimony” as that which acknowledges the dynamic interplay between word and …

Book Review: Probing The Ethics Of Holocaust Culture, Nanar Khamo

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

"Uncle Curro": J.R.R. Tolkien's Spanish Connection (2018) By José Manuel Ferrández Bru, Wayne G. Hammond &. Christina Scull

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, of "Uncle Curro: J.R.R. Tolkien's Spanish Connection (2018) by José Manuel Ferrández Bru

Mapping Opposition In The Sonora- Arizona Borderlands: A Critical Recovery Of Federico Ronstadt’S Memoir Borderman, Diana Noreen Rivera

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

Federico Ronstadt’s Borderman, a memoir written between 1944 and 1954, recounts the businessman’s immigration to Tucson and his life in the Sonora- Arizona borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Paradigms of opposition that inform the recovery of early Mexican American memoir and autobiography—centering the life writings of elite, dispossessed Mexican Americans and Hispanic immigrant literature written in Spanish—have discouraged study of Ronstadt’s English-language, seemingly assimilationist memoir. In my critical recovery of Borderman, I argue that it should be read as part of the legacy of oppositional literature written by people of Mexican descent in the …

Tolkien And Alterity (2017) Ed. By Christopher Vaccaro And Yvette Kisor, Gergely Nagy

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by Gergely Nagy of Tolkien and Alterity (2017), edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor

Waging War On The Womb: Women’S Bodies As Nationalist Symbols And Strategic Victims Of Violence In Susan Abulhawa’S Mornings In Jenin, Noora Badwan

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Nationalism is a patriarchal construct that clearly delineates women’s roles in the social structure, and assigns female bodies specific roles in the nationalist, social, and political narratives, albeit passive ones; ironically, as integral to nationalism as women are, they are only ever pawns used by the state, never equal participants. They are often assigned the role of the mother figure who produces new citizens to populate the nation and who are expected to raise them to be “good citizens” and offer them up to the state as potential tools. The mother figure is a nationalist icon who is also often …

Polybius, Katelin Branham

Best Integrated Writing

This story brought me back to my video-game days—the roll of the joystick in my twelve-year-old palm, the smell of adolescent sweat, and the dizzying belief the game was out to get me. Now I’m wondering if that might have been true. Branham’s story delves deep into its main character’s consciousness to extract complicated questions about competition and friendship, the relationship between humans and technology, and the chilling question of what it means to be alive. Branham trusts her readers to keep up and crack the codes of the story, and what we’re rewarded with is both a wild fantasy …

Self As Religion In Noviolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names, Lauren Randall

Best Integrated Writing

In this essay, Lauren shows how a breakdown in the belief in the Christian God in NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names leads to the protagonist’s renewal of faith in herself. As the world around her implodes and modern-day Zimbabwe collapses under the political regime of Robert Mugabe (who is never named in the novel but whose baleful influence is nevertheless assumed), “Bulawayo juxtaposes human endurance and the absence of a helpful god to achieve commentary on Darling’s fortitude and resilience.” The essay presents several original insights and offers a sensitive and highly nuanced picture of the divided colonial …

Self-Destructive Educationin Tsitsi Dangarembga’S Nervous Conditions, Sarah Miller

Best Integrated Writing

In this essay, Sarah examines Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions, set during the colonial period in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She argues that the novel portrays education in an ambivalent light: while it serves as a vehicle of liberation and progress for the black Rhodesian characters, it also reveals to them the injustices of colonial occupation. The essay uses excellent textual examples and good support from secondary sources to convincingly advance this thesis. I believe that Sarah makes us rethink the function of education in a critical light; when viewed in the African colonial context, education becomes a tool for …

Best Integrated Writing 2018 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

Intolerancia En Tiempos De Crisis: Hacia Una Literatura Transgresora En El Sitio De Los Sitios De Juan Goytisolo, Oscar Ivan Useche

Modern Languages Faculty Publications

Este artículo propone entender la novela de Goytisolo como una respuesta cultural a la crisis de los modelos de racionalidad occidental. Se estudian las dinámicas de descomposición social de la globalización y la aparición dentro de este contexto de figuras marginales que buscan recuperar su capacidad transgresora mediante la reconquista del cuerpo y la apropiación del espacio urbano. Al trasladar al plano textual el memoricidio y la limpieza étnica como expresiones negativas de la modernidad, Goytisolo problematiza el papel del lector, del autor y de la novela como elementos esenciales en la representación literaria de la realidad.

This paper proposes …

Will To Remember: Counter-Archives In The Work Of Alvarez, Danticat, And Díaz, Megan Elizabeth Feifer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues the essays, fiction, non-fiction, and non-profit work of authors Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz produce counter-narratives that when assembled, create a counter-archive of the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship and its lasting effects. To support this claim, I analyze the various genres and medias they employ throughout the late 20^thand early 21^st centuries as redressing not only the “official” state history of the dictatorship, but also the overarching construction of history with a capital “H”. Through a close reading of form and the thematic concerns present in their work, I demonstrate how they …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism And The Posthumous By Erin E. Edwards, A. Irene Mangoutas

The Goose

Review of Erin E. Edwards' The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous.

Paulo Coelho: Transnational Literature, Popular Culture, And Postmodernism, Anna Pavlova Murta

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With over 350 million books sold worldwide in more than 80 languages, Paulo Coelho is an international literary phenomenon that moves “beyond culture of origin” (Damrosch 199) and inhabits the “world literary space” (Pascale 281). Would his novels, therefore, stand as materialization of Goethe’s humanist cosmopolitan vision upon the coinage of the term world literature? Many cultural scholars would argue to the contrary. This dissertation aims at exploring Coelho narratives and their popularity and controversial reception by contextualizing them within the contemporary scholarship on World Literature and within the global cultural economy.

An underlying assumption of this Cultural Studies approach …

Empoword: A Student-Centered Anthology & Handbook For College Writers, Shane Abrams

PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources

EmpoWord is a reader and rhetoric that champions the possibilities of student writing. The textbook uses actual student writing to exemplify effective writing strategies, celebrating dedicated college writing students to encourage and instruct their successors: the students in your class.

Through both creative and traditional activities, readers are encouraged to explore a variety of rhetorical situations to become more critical agents of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in all facets of their lives. Straightforward and readable instruction sections introduce key vocabulary, concepts, and strategies. Three culminating assignments (Descriptive Personal Narrative; Text-Wrestling Analysis; Persuasive Research Essay) give students a chance to …