Digital Commons Network^™

Negotiating Gender And Sexaulity In Contemporary Turkey, Jaspal Kaur Singh 2508334, Mary Lou O'Neil

Books

Turkey is often visualized as a modern nation-state having a perfect balance of Eastern and Western cultural mores and traditions within dominant ideological constructions and representations, but on closer inspection, one can detect conflicts and contradictions within various texts - particularly in regards to depictions of gender and sexual identity. Upon its foundation as a nation, Turkey embarked on a state-centered, elite-driven path toward modernization and Westernization while also seeking to produce a monolithic culture. At the time, it was widely believed that Turkey could not rank among modern, Western countries without the emancipation of women. As a result of …

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero

Theses and Dissertations--English

Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing …

Within And Without: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, And The Healing Narrative, Carrie Crisman Oorlog

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this collection, I explore the process of writing to heal from trauma. In exploring the rhetorical landscape of trauma writing, I offer a new framework for understanding how those who experience a traumatic event may use the process of writing creatively to engage in a process of healing. I argue that through the creation of art, individuals may take ownership of their experiences and memories, thus exerting the agency over the experience that was lost as the result of trauma. I also demonstrate and reflect upon my own journey in creating the healing narrative as a process of healing …

Autoethnography And Assimilation: Composing Border Stories, Mark Noe

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Introducing autoethnography in composition classes brings together personal narratives, academic discourse, and awareness of audience in surprising ways among students in south Texas.

The Many Transformations Of Albert Facey, Ffion M. Murphy, Richard Nile

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth [...].

Becoming South: Postmodern Southern Distinction, Melody Knight Pritchard

Theses and Dissertations

Within Southern studies scholarship, much has been said (or told) about "the South" and southern distinction or essentialism. No one can define what, exactly, the South or southernness is, but we are determined to spend much energy and ink writing about it, anyway. Since the late 20th century, southern studies scholarship has largely followed a discourse-focused trajectory, and the popular (or at least the loudest) answers to questions about the South's distinction have often been angry “nos,” critical rejections of a "special" South that functions—or even exists—outside of discourse. Though this line of inquiry is well-intentioned, it has done little …

The Contest Of Marriage: Domestic Authority In The Victorian Novel, Morgan Richardson

Theses and Dissertations--English

In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate …

Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar

Theses and Dissertations--English

While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …

Revolution, Redemption, And Romance: Reading Constructions Of Filipino Spanish American Identities And Politics Of Knowledge In Rizal’S Noli Me Tangere And El Filibusterismo Alongside Filipino American Fiction, Steven Beardsley

Departmental Honors Projects

This project analyzes the literary works and the iconic role of Filipino nationalist José Rizal before, during, and after the Spanish American War of 1898. Rizal’s social activism and writing inspired a revolution against the Friarocracy in the Philippines. He also influenced Filipino American writers who reference Rizal’s construction of the Filipino woman in Christianity and Filipinos fighting against colonial oppression. Additionally, Filipino American writers illustrate how being Filipino in the US today is a transcultural experience rather than a simple binary of traditional Philippines and modern America. Recognizing Spain as an earlier colonizing force is critical in understanding the …

“There Is Only Power”: Surveying The Structures And Operations Of Power In The Magical World Of Harry Potter, Aaron D. Marciniak

Departmental Honors Projects

As the internationally best-selling series Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling moves into its second generation of readers, it becomes increasingly important to analyze the assumptions it communicates about power differentials between people and belief systems. A central tenant of narrative paradigm holds that humans are innately narrative, internalizing narrative frameworks as a means to understand the world which then become externalized through human action. Thus, while the social hierarchies, collective actions, and institutional authorities in the fantasy world of Harry Potter in some ways map onto Anglo-American social and political structures, the significant differences between these textual and “real world” …

Illustrations Of Nepantleras: Bridge Making Potential In Ana Castillo's So Far From God And The Guardians, Amanda Patrick

All Master's Theses

Chicana literature to date has extensively illustrated the process of identity construction—the development of mestiza consciousness—as the means through which Mexican American females may thwart the agents of oppressive patriarchal authority in their lives. While this highly theoretical and politicized literature has contributed greatly to discussions of identity, agency, and the subjective self, many Chicana authors and activists express concerns regarding the fate of the Chicana/o collective. Some consider the relationship between feminist Chicanas and their more traditional families and communities to be irreconcilable. Using the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa, I argue that the novels So Far from God and …

Unworking Milton: Steps To A Georgics Of The Mind, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed to not one but two revolutions in the history of seventeenth-century English radicalism—the first, ‘the one which succeeded[,] . . . the protestant ethic’; and the second, ‘the revolution which never happened,’ which sought ‘communal property, a far wider democracy[,] and rejected the protestant ethic’—I show how Milton’s Paradise …

The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin

Theses and Dissertations--English

While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19^th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a …

Patriarchal Trauma In Appalachian Literature, Michelle Justus

Theses and Dissertations--English

Patriarchal Trauma in Appalachian Literature examines the effects of subjugation on women as it is represented in three novels set in Appalachia. I define patriarchal trauma as an act causing mental anguish to a woman and perpetrated against her because she is a woman. I use the term to encompass violent, catastrophic harms but more particularly to pinpoint the traumatic effects of the quotidian, systemic deprivation of women’s autonomy. Reconsidering classic texts such as James Still’s River of Earth and Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage as narratives of women’s trauma establishes a lineage on the subject, …

Distinctly American: Performing Humanity In African American Literature From Proto To Post New Negro Renaissance, Julie A. Naviaux

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project demonstrates how African American literature from the 1910s through the 1940s uses performance in order to stage debates within African American identity and American culture. Drawing on recent literary scholarship, performance studies, and early critical writing on African American art and performance, the project examines scenes of public performance in order to show how these literary scenes create space to investigate social and cultural constructions. The project investigates the ways performances within the texts also critique performances of race, gender, and class. Within these performance scenes, the literary texts also critique the audiences’ reactions to the artistic product …

Northside, Jesse L. Houk

Theses and Dissertations--English

The Northside of Lexington, Kentucky is an area with its own culture, community and art. While living in this community I was able to learn, grow and develop alongside this newly renovated area. The people and their lives intersect in such a way that creates a tension at times. However, many social awareness advocates vie for the success of this neighborhood for many years to come. The objective of studying such an area as the Northside in Lexington is to focus on the similarites rather than the differences in culture, community and artistic endeavor. With a collection of essays and …

Female Agency In Religious Disassembly Of Culture: Where Do Women Fit In?, Megan Elizabeth Kirby

Online Theses and Dissertations

A study of The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy as they relate to cultural disassembly and the relationship to missionaries from Western cultures. Some focus is placed on Alice Walker's views on female genital mutilation and how that was impacted by Christian viewpoints. Theoretical perspectives from Homi Bhabha and Chandra Mohanty emphasize the role of so-called "third world women" in world politics and feminism.

Queen Of Kings: Beyoncé Politics And Pedagogy In The Juvenile Detention Center Classroom, Sarah Kahn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In 2016, the cultural conversation around feminism and intersectionality has shifted towards new problems of inclusion and change. Feminists are beginning to ask whether the commodification of female sexuality and objectification are extricable, whether a hypersexualized mainstream identity and a feminist one are mutually exclusive, how to integrate female experiences of different socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and cultures into a new feminism, and how to define feminism as we begin to move away from binary gendering. Increased visibility of trans issues has brought genderqueerness and femmephobia into the feminist conversation, and technology and globalization have forced that conversation to open up …

Drawing On The Victorians: The Palimpsest Of Victorian And Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts, Anna Maria Jones, Rebecca N. Mitchell

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.

From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism …

Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing In The Classroom, Melissa Tombro

Milne Open Textbooks

Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom is dedicated to the practice of immersive ethnographic and autoethnographic writing that encourages authors to participate in the communities about which they write. This book draws not only on critical qualitative inquiry methods such as interview and observation, but also on theories and sensibilities from creative writing and performance studies, which encourage self-reflection and narrative composition. Concepts from qualitative inquiry studies, which examine everyday life, are combined with approaches to the creation of character and scene to help writers develop engaging narratives that examine chosen subcultures and the author’s position in relation to …

Animal Welfare And Animal Rights, M.E. Rolle

Animal Sentience

This overview of Broom’s book, Sentience and Animal Welfare (2014), considers the role the book could play in the animal rights debate. In a thoroughly researched and objectively presented text, Broom lays out information that could place doubt in the minds of decision-makers. By highlighting not just the ways animals resemble humans, but also the ways humans resemble animals, Broom shines a light on a solidly grey area in the animal rights debate.

Ethical Dilemma And Nihilism In Munro's "Passion", Xiying Liu, Hongbin Dai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Ethical Dilemma and Nihilism in Munro's 'Passion'" Xiying Liu and Hongbin Dai discuss ethical issues in Alice Munro's short story "Passion." When attempting to escape the shackles of multiple ethical identities, the short story's protagonist Grace encounters dilemmas and in consequence makes wrong decisions with regard to the principle of ethics. The other protagonist of the story, Neil, commits suicide demonstrating that he breaks off all relationship with the world. Liu and Dai argue that Neil's death deconstructs Grace's ethical dilemmas and thus the narrative constructs a sense of nihilism. Liu and Dai posit that Munro's short …

Human Cloning As The Other In Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Wen Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Human Cloning as the Other in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go" Wen Guo analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's novel with focus on Ishiguro's analogy between human cloning and people of marginality in contemporary society. Guo discusses the novel's ambience of doubt and suspense and elaborates on how the theme of otherness is addressed by Ishiguro's mock-realism in a landscape of science fiction. Further, Guo analyses the "unhomely" Hailsham of the novel, the clones' self-pursuit, and their ethical attitudes. Guo argues that in Ishiguro's novel a person's ethical choices are determined by his/her situation which confirms Ishiguro's beliefs with …

Perspectives Of Ethical Identity In Ng's Steer Toward Rock And Jen's Mona In The Promised Land, Hui Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Perspectives of Ethical Identity in Ng's Steer toward Rock and Jen's Mona in the Promised Land" Hui Su examines Fae Myenne Ng's and Gish Jen's novels. In the novels, the protagonists make different decisions: in Steer Toward Rock Jack after displacement in China adopts US-American identity and in Mona in the Promised Land Mona, a second generation Chinese American, selects Jewish identity. Owing to their different situations, the two protagonists reflect challenges of identity building in the case of the "Other" in US-American culture and society. Su argues that Ng and Jen, although varying in their …

Ethics Of Counter Narrative In Delillo’S Falling Man, Qingji He

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ethics of Counter-Narrative in DeLillo's Falling Man" Qingji He analyzes Don DeLillo's counter-narrative in his post-9/11 novel Falling Man. The objective is to show how ethical dimensions function fundamentally in formulating an appropriate counter-narrative and why DeLillo's counter-narrative echoes views expressed in his "In the Ruins of the Future." He argues that DeLillo's counter-narrative entails the necessity of ethical consciousness and responsibility. It is Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings instead of media representation that become pivotal in Lianne's transformative and redemptive process after the terrorist attack. Similarly, David Janiak's performance art and Richard Drew's picture …

The View From Elsewhere: A Response, Andrew Hook

Studies in Scottish Literature

Reviews and responds to the symposium contributors, recounting briefly growing up as a Scot in England and Scotland, and doing National Service, and drawing on 60 years experience studying, researching, and teaching in both Scotland and the United States, commenting that while Scottish studies in the 1960s was primarily concerned with traditional culture and reclaiming a folk tradition, its future probably lies in interdisciplinary study focused on contemporary Scotland and modern Scottish writing.

Robert Frost’S New Hampshire, Philip Larkin’S England, And Seamus Heaney’S Ireland: Non-Urban Place And Democratic Poetry, Faisal I. Rawashdeh

Dissertations

In Anglo-American Modernist poetry, place is reduced to an analogue for the cultural degradation brought forth by the disruptive experience of modernity. This demotion stands in sharp contrast to the representation of place as a center of value in the poetry of Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. In this dissertation, I shall explain this value in terms of its connection to a particular cultural substance which Frost, Larkin, and Heaney deem foundational for their non-ideological terms of belonging to place. Frost embraces New England vernacularism first as the basis for his egalitarianism and second as the core substance …

Ecology 101, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Manzanar Murakami As Radical Mathematician, Logan Bishop-Van Horn

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

In Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, characters attempt to make meaning of the many complex structures in which they are situated. In his unique meaning-making process, Manzanar Murakami, a homeless Sansei, “conducts” the Los Angeles traffic with a silver baton from atop a highway overpass. In conducting his music, Murakami per- forms complex mathematics, finding meaning in connection by mapping the rhythmic flow of humans, machines, and goods. Through his baton, to the sounds of a beautiful orchestra, he translates precisely the relationships he sees before him. Murakami’s music and Yamashita’s fantastic images constitute a “mathematical realism,” a lens …