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Queering Masturbation In Lorde's Life And Writing, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng Sep 2014

Queering Masturbation In Lorde's Life And Writing, Eric Sipyinyu Njeng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Queering Masturbation in Lorde's Life and Writing" Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde's life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby going beyond mere theory and positing her body as a space of complex sexual passions. When Judith Butler speaks of gender as performative rather than embodied, Lorde theorizes and foregrounds this in her works and self and celebrates a sexual matrix that ranges from heterosexuality to homosexuality to auto-sexuality. Lorde places masturbation between the binary …


New Work About Reading Poetry: A Book Review Article On Stafford's And Bohn's Work, Martyna Markowska Sep 2014

New Work About Reading Poetry: A Book Review Article On Stafford's And Bohn's Work, Martyna Markowska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Postmodernist Poetics And Narratology: A Review Article About Mchale's Scholarship, Biwu Shang Sep 2014

Postmodernist Poetics And Narratology: A Review Article About Mchale's Scholarship, Biwu Shang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article About New Work By Ashcroft, Mendis, Mcgonegal, Mukerjee And Carrera Suárez, Durán Almarza, Menéndez Tarrazo, Alejandra Moreno Sep 2014

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article About New Work By Ashcroft, Mendis, Mcgonegal, Mukerjee And Carrera Suárez, Durán Almarza, Menéndez Tarrazo, Alejandra Moreno

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Review Article About U.S. Comparative Literature Journals Published In 2013, Miaomiao Wang Sep 2014

Review Article About U.S. Comparative Literature Journals Published In 2013, Miaomiao Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


The Un-Exceptional Bomb: Settler Nuclearism, Feminism, And Atomic Tourism In New Mexico, Eileen Clare Shaughnessy Jul 2014

The Un-Exceptional Bomb: Settler Nuclearism, Feminism, And Atomic Tourism In New Mexico, Eileen Clare Shaughnessy

American Studies ETDs

New Mexico's atomic tourism acts to render the atomic bomb simultaneously so exceptional that it is viewed as the pinnacle of Western intelligence, and yet also so un-exceptional that it is banal, as typified by kitschy atomic souvenirs. A primary way in which New Mexico's atomic tourist sites accomplish this paradoxical narrative is through gendered and racialized discourses in exhibits, gift shops, and on-site narratives. The racialized trope of the "vanishing Native" functions in these spaces to shore up the colonialist progress narrative in which white Western science and Manifest Destiny inevitably result in the creation of the "exceptional" bomb …


Got Lost Behind The Scenes: Underexposed Television Producers In Magazines, Jordan King Jul 2014

Got Lost Behind The Scenes: Underexposed Television Producers In Magazines, Jordan King

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Award-winning television shows are popularly depicted through digital media and magazine coverage. However, the strenuous efforts of TV producers are hidden behind the publicity of celebrities and plotlines of the show. Using Eugene Shaw's agenda-setting theory and Robert Entman's framing theory as a basis, the author created a case study analyzing how the producers of Lost and Game of Thrones are portrayed in magazines. The research shows that reporters tend to perpetuate the anonymity of these producers, which in effect, leads an audience to deem them as unimportant.


The Arena And Stadium Experience: The Individual, The Venue And The Culture Industry, Anthony Paul Sparacino Jun 2014

The Arena And Stadium Experience: The Individual, The Venue And The Culture Industry, Anthony Paul Sparacino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores arenas and stadia, specifically Madison Square Garden and Citi Field in New York City, through the prism of Theodor Adorno's conception of the culture industry, the notion that cultural artifacts are consciously created in order to reify the values of the existing social system, especially those of elites. Rather than focusing solely on media culture, this essay proposes that understandings of mass culture can be enhanced by focusing on the context of the consumption of mass-cultural artifacts, namely the development of a conception of place within the mind of the consumer, who has an active role in …


Introduction To History, Memory, And The Making Of Character In Roth’S Fiction, Victoria Aarons, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales Jun 2014

Introduction To History, Memory, And The Making Of Character In Roth’S Fiction, Victoria Aarons, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Akedah, The Holocaust, And The Limits Of The Law In Roth's "Eli, The Fanatic", Aimee L. Pozorski Jun 2014

Akedah, The Holocaust, And The Limits Of The Law In Roth's "Eli, The Fanatic", Aimee L. Pozorski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Akedah, the Holocaust, and the Limits of the Law in Roth's 'Eli, the Fanatic'" Aimee L. Pozorski argues that Philip Roth's 1957 short story dramatizes the tension between the law on the one hand and the philosophy of ethics, on the other hand with the story's protagonist ultimately choosing ethics as evidenced by his identification with a displaced Hasidic Jew near the story's end. In reading the story through the inter-textual references to the Genesis story of the Akedah, Pozorski discusses the limits of the law in the face of vulnerable children and within the context of …


The Perils Of Desire In Roth's Early Fiction, Victoria Aarons Jun 2014

The Perils Of Desire In Roth's Early Fiction, Victoria Aarons

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Perils of Desire in Roth's Early Fiction" Victoria Aarons posits that Philip Roth's first collection of stories Goodbye, Columbus is the prototype for a host of characters who emerge throughout his oeuvre: characters who are engaged as the inveterate Nathan Zuckerman insists, in "an exchange of existences" abandoning willingly "the artificial fiction" of an inherent, essential self." From the stories in Goodbye, Columbus to the "final" novels comprising the Nemesis tetralogy, Roth's characters perform a spectacle of selves engaged in the making of character. The making of character in Roth's fiction appears in two ways: 1) …


Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, And "Professional Competition With Death", Debra Shostak Jun 2014

Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, And "Professional Competition With Death", Debra Shostak

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Graveyards, Narrative Desire, and 'Professional Competition with Death'" Debra Shostak analyzes Philip Roth's 1954 short story "The Day It Snowed" and surveys a range of his books. Shostak offers a reading of Sabbath's Theater and Everyman to explore Roth's fictional forms and his conception of storytelling, elucidates how the traumatic knowledge of death at graveside initiates the psychoanalytic process of repression, repetition, remembering, and telling, and uncovers several motifs or formal strategies that appear when Roth deploys cemetery scenes: the linear plotting toward death is often embraced within circular narrative structures; the voice of the mother, …


Reverse Anti-Semitism In The Fiction Of Bellow And Roth, Jay L. Halio Jun 2014

Reverse Anti-Semitism In The Fiction Of Bellow And Roth, Jay L. Halio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reverse Anti-Semitism in the Fiction of Bellow and Roth" Jay L. Halio discusses anti-Semitism in Philip Roth's fiction that what might be called reverse anti-Semitism: the active reaction by Jews who are subjected to anti-Semitism. This aspect of Roth's work is not often discussed: it is not the same as philo-Semitism, which takes a different form entirely. Since Roth was an admirer of Saul Bellow, Halio begins by considering reverse anti-Semitism in Bellow's early novel The Victim. In the novel the protagonist, Asa Leventhal, is accused by a character named Allbee of costing him his job …


Roth’S Humorous Art Of Ghost Writing, Paule Levy Jun 2014

Roth’S Humorous Art Of Ghost Writing, Paule Levy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Humorous Art of Ghost Writing" Paule Lévy analyses Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, the last novel featuring Nathan Zuckerman, in which Roth reassesses his favorite alter ego's itinerary while exploring the troubled relation between writing and aging. Lévy considers Exit Ghost as an ironic sequel to The Ghost Writer and posits that in the light of Derrida's theories of writing and "hauntology" the central motifs of ghosts and "spectrality" in the novel are a means for Roth to reflect anew on the ambiguous relation between autobiography and fiction. Lévy asks whether Exit Ghost should be …


Jewish History, Us-American Fictions, And "Soul-Battering" In Roth's "Conversion Of The Jews", Sandor Goodhart Jun 2014

Jewish History, Us-American Fictions, And "Soul-Battering" In Roth's "Conversion Of The Jews", Sandor Goodhart

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Jewish History, US-American Fictions, and 'Soul-Battering' in Roth's 'Conversion of the Jews'" Sandor Goodhart discusses Philip Roth's story in which an innocent question raised in a Hebrew school discussion in the early 1950s gets wildly out of control. It leads the student into a screaming fight with his Rabbi, which propels the child into a confrontation with his mother, which in turn leads to a second violent confrontation with the Rabbi (who ends up slapping the child), and the episode culminates in a rooftop exchange over the synagogue where the boy’s thought of escape is suddenly converted …


European Literary Tradition In Roth's Kepesh Trilogy, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales Jun 2014

European Literary Tradition In Roth's Kepesh Trilogy, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

in his article "European Literary Tradition in Roth's Kepesh Trilogy" Gustavo Sánchez-Canales discusses the significance of European literature in Philip Roth's novels. Sánchez-Canales analyses the influence of Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose" and Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" on Roth's The Breast and in Roth's The Professor of Desire of Anton Chekhov's tales and Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and The Castle. Further, Sánchez-Canales elaborates on the impact of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and W.B. Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" on Roth's The Dying Animal.


Roth's Contribution To The Narrativization Of Illness, Miriam Jaffe-Foger Jun 2014

Roth's Contribution To The Narrativization Of Illness, Miriam Jaffe-Foger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Contribution to the Narrativization of Illness" Miriam Jaffe-Foger argues that Philipp Roth's fiction represents him as an empath, a writer who prescribes for modern medicine a dose of humanity in listening to the pain of others. Using Roth's The Anatomy Lesson, The Dying Animal, and Exit Ghost as primary source material in combination with theories from medical anthropology, Jaffe-Foger suggests that Roth is an inspiration for the field of narrative medicine. Jaffe-Foger examines the art in organizing narratives to tell these stories. Jaffe-Foger also argues against misogynist views of Roth as he represents woman's …


Philip Roth, Henry Roth And The History Of The Jews, Timothy Parrish Jun 2014

Philip Roth, Henry Roth And The History Of The Jews, Timothy Parrish

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Philip Roth, Henry Roth and the History of the Jews" Timothy Parrish argues that while Roth's status as a Jewish American writer has been a pressing issue since his career began and that while in recent scholarship Roth's achievement as a US-American writer is stressed, the durability of Roth's work depends more on its implied submission to a Jewish tradition. From "The Conversion of the Jews" (1959) to Nemesis (2010), his characters challenge endlessly the ethical and moral constructs of their Jewish community to acknowledge the fact that they exist inside of it. One might choose any …


Roth's Fiction From Nemesis To Nemesis, Emily Budick Jun 2014

Roth's Fiction From Nemesis To Nemesis, Emily Budick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Roth's Fiction from Nemesis to Nemesis" Emily Budick discusses Philip Roth's novel Nemesis as the culminating work of a career in which one nemesis or another has afflicted almost all of the author's protagonists. During the bulk of Roth's career, the hero's nemesis was generally, as in the ordinary, literary usage of the term, the protagonist's enemy, whether Judge Wapter in The Ghost Writer or the alter-Roth in The Counterlife. In Nemesis Roth restores the word nemesis to its classical meaning: Nemesis, as the goddess of revenge and cosmic balance. The nemesis in Roth's novel, therefore, …


Literary Adaptations Of James In Roth's, Ozick's, And Franzen's Work, John Carlos Rowe Jun 2014

Literary Adaptations Of James In Roth's, Ozick's, And Franzen's Work, John Carlos Rowe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Adaptations of James in Roth's, Ozick's, and Franzen's Work" John Carlos Rowe posits that Henry James continues to exert a powerful influence on contemporary writers. Given the dramatic social, economic, and political changes from modern to postmodern eras, his continuing influence requires explanation. Rowe considers three US-American novelists—Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Jonathan Franzen—who are influenced by James and presents an interpretation of James's continuing impact. Despite James's reputation as a cosmopolitan modern who influenced global literature in significant ways, US-American writers attempt to "Americanize" him. Their effort expresses the problem of contemporary US-American literary practice …


Bibliography For The Study Of Phillip Roth's Works, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales, Victoria Aarons Jun 2014

Bibliography For The Study Of Phillip Roth's Works, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales, Victoria Aarons

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Whovians And Directioners: Challenging The Fangirl Identity, Brianna Vancant May 2014

Whovians And Directioners: Challenging The Fangirl Identity, Brianna Vancant

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Using notions from fan blogs and fan theory, this project analyzes the inconsistencies surrounding the phenomenon of so-called fangirls in the Doctor Who and One Direction worlds. The term fangirl is usually defined as an irrational adolescent female who is only a fan of very specific types of entertainment because of factors that are perceived by other fans as superficial and irrelevant. In contemporary music and television fandom, these fangirls are often criticized and policed by other fans, many times disregarded as not ‘true’ fans. The project studies this distorted perception and how it leads to misconceptions about the wider …


The Queer Blogger: Interrogating The Commodification Of Identities, Anne Lacy May 2014

The Queer Blogger: Interrogating The Commodification Of Identities, Anne Lacy

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Using Queer blogs found throughout American blogging networks, while drawing upon Marxism, Michel Foucault’s notions of confession and coming out, and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, this project is a materialist analysis that unveils how Queer identities are being consumed and commodified. In contemporary American society a phenomenon is occurring online: Queer blogs are acting as a platform where subjectivities are attempting to resist hegemonic notions of identity while they are simultaneously being incorporated into a capitalistic agenda of subject formation. This project ultimately calls upon an act of resistance, as these Queer blogs are in fact a negotiable space for …


"Women In The House Y'All:" She Should Run, Post-Feminism, And Women's Representation In Politics, Amy Gooch May 2014

"Women In The House Y'All:" She Should Run, Post-Feminism, And Women's Representation In Politics, Amy Gooch

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project investigates “She Should Run,” a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of women in public leadership by attempting to eliminate barriers to success. The project argues “She Should Run” addresses the lack of women’s representation in government, but does so by mobilizing problematic essentialist rhetoric and post-feminist constructions. Drawing on second wave feminist scholarship, this rhetorical analysis examines the cultural conditions that mediate women’s role in politics as well as their willingness to participate. This project claims that the organization ultimately reestablishes existing essentialist notions of women’s identities and uses post-feminist rhetoric to delegitimize the aims of …


A Divine Inequality: Contextualizing Gender And Authority In Contemporary Mormon Feminism, Taylee Robinson Pardi May 2014

A Divine Inequality: Contextualizing Gender And Authority In Contemporary Mormon Feminism, Taylee Robinson Pardi

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project traces the decline of authority for Mormon women coupled with the rise of defined gender roles within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in order to contextualize contemporary Mormon feminism. Using a radical feminist analysis, this project will explore how contemporary Mormon women relate to their early Mormon sisters and the ways in which the culture and doctrine of Mormonism often converge, lending itself to a unique feminist perspective. This project argues that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as currently practiced, is not just inherently patriarchal, but un-egalitarian, and that contemporary …


Reused Refuse: Freeganism And The Shifting Hegemonies Of Consumption And Waste, Jamie Corliss May 2014

Reused Refuse: Freeganism And The Shifting Hegemonies Of Consumption And Waste, Jamie Corliss

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Freeganism is a counter-culture practice, lifestyle, and philosophy that resists the waste and exploitation inherent to capitalism. By examining freegan practices and philosophies, specifically dumpster diving, this project reveals how these actions help make apparent and shift dominant ideologies about waste and consumption by re-injecting value into wasted items. The project argues that the waste that freegans live on has the semiotic power to shift dominant attitudes about waste and gives freegans the means to survive with limited participation in the economy, but this waste is a byproduct of capitalist production, not a cause of it. Freegans are conceptually paving …


When Ana Becomes The Protagonist: Eating Disorder Narratives, The Pursuit Of Thinness And Social Resistance On The Internet, Nadezh Mulholland May 2014

When Ana Becomes The Protagonist: Eating Disorder Narratives, The Pursuit Of Thinness And Social Resistance On The Internet, Nadezh Mulholland

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

There is media concern that books about eating disorders are harmful to young readers. However, there is little research on how readers interpret the content of novels and memoirs featuring characters with eating disorders. This project considers the thinspiration images used as motivation to lose weight on so-called pro-ana and pro-mia social networks for people with eating disorders, and draws parallels between thinspiration and images used on the covers of eating disorder books. This paper uses a Gramscian lens to dismantle media claims by analyzing the interactions between members of eating disorder social networks, showing that website users tum to …


Take Off Your Masc: The Hegemonic Gay Male's Gender Performance On Grindr, Duncan Shuckerow May 2014

Take Off Your Masc: The Hegemonic Gay Male's Gender Performance On Grindr, Duncan Shuckerow

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

The hegemonic Grindr clone is a gay male Grindr user who enforces the privileging of traditional masculine gender performance and condemns effeminacy. Through this project’s own field work along with the website “douchebagsofgrindr,” the hegemonic Grindr clone is here within analyzed. Drawing upon the theory ofhegemony articulated by Gramsci, a historical analysis of the 1970s urban gay male clone, and contemporary analysis and research, the project argues that the hegemonic Grindr clones, while only a minority group of Grindr users, rules over the cyberspace as sexual gatekeepers. Hegemonic Grindr clones maintain their privileged status on the application through depicting and …


The Heartland Of The Democracy: Presidential Politics In Oley Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania, 1860-64, Benjamin Petersheim May 2014

The Heartland Of The Democracy: Presidential Politics In Oley Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania, 1860-64, Benjamin Petersheim

Masters Theses

Oley Township, founded in 1740, in Berks County, Pennsylvania holds a special place in the commonwealth's history because of its unique religious, political, and cultural history. With hundreds of historic buildings and its Pennsylvania German heritage, the heart of the Oley Valley continues to attract colonial and Pennsylvania German historians from great distances so that they are able to analyze and research its rich heritage. Indeed, the area was designated as a National Historic District by the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and much of the farmland has been preserved through land trusts and historical preservation efforts. Many …


‘My Freedom Is A Privilege Which Nothing Else Can Equal’: The Life And Writings Of Venture Smith And Phillis Wheatley, American Slaves, Donald Holmes Ii May 2014

‘My Freedom Is A Privilege Which Nothing Else Can Equal’: The Life And Writings Of Venture Smith And Phillis Wheatley, American Slaves, Donald Holmes Ii

Honors Theses

Slavery in the United States was an evolving institution that lasted nearly 400 years. To understand the colonial era of slavery within the United States, I examine the life and times of Venture Smith, as documented in his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa (1798), and that of Phillis Wheatley using The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (1988). Both Smith and Wheatley were African-born slaves brought to America during the eighteenth century. In Smith’s narrative, he concludes by proclaiming “my freedom is a privilege which nothing else can equal” (31). This statement …