Digital Commons Network^™

The Black Plumb Line: Re-Evaluating Race And Africanist Images In Non-Black Authored American Texts, Lashondra Vanessa Robinson

Dissertations

This study evaluates Africanisms (representations of racialized or ethnicized blackness) within three contemporary non-black authors’ texts: Jewish American Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King, white southerner Melinda Haynes’ novel Mother of Pearl, and Nyurican poet Victor Hernández Cruz’s works “Mesa Blanca” and “White Table.” Though not entirely unproblematic, each selection somehow redefines black identity and agency to challenge denigrated representations of Africanist people and culture. In the process, each author subverts faulty components of American myths of racial purity, particularly stratifying black-white dualisms that promote whiteness, racial supremacy, and resulting undue privilege. This study also traces how Bellow, Haynes …

The Rhetoric Of A Buffy Fandom : A Study Of Fan Writing, Interaction, And Activism In An Online Community Environment, Kristen Julia Anderson

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

As a topic for academic focus, fan fiction provides a unique medium for studying how multiple factors intersect with and influence a writer from invention to creation through revision. The act of writing fan fiction itself provides multiple possibilities for engaging with and analyzing a source text. In addition, an interactive online fan fiction community formed and based around a specific idea becomes, not only a location for sharing common interests, but also a space for active discourse. Arguments presented in a fan fiction online community are strengthened and supported through the writings posted within its frames. My thesis studies …

The New Chicana Heroine: Representations Of Anzaldua's Mestiza Consciousness In Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions, Monica E. Montelongo

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis analyzes Gloria Anzaldúa‟s mestiza consciousness as a representation seen thematically in Chicana feminist cultural productions. Mestiza consciousness, defined in Anzaldúa‟s Borderlands/La Frontera, is a non-binary feminist ideology, which proposes a third space in female identity, explored in terms of gender, class, race, and sexuality identification. The representation of mestiza consciousness in Chicana feminist cultural productions is proposed as a new trope in Chicana\o cultural studies, which I term the “New Chicana Heroine.” The New Chicana Heroine is both a proposal and representation of a third space in female identity. An examination of several authors, artists, and filmmakers, spanning …

Eng 5061-031: Topics In Literature And Literary Theory: Historicism, Randy Beebe

Summer 2011

No abstract provided.

Mobilizing Sentiment: Popular American Women's Fiction Of The Great War, 1914–1922, Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines American women’s popular novels about the Great War published between 1914 and 1922, and offers a perspective that complicates our understanding of the American experience of WWI. Drawing on a historical framework that illuminates the subtleties of the nation’s the ever-shifting political stance in response to the European War, this study demonstrates how American response to the war was neither monolithic nor static. This study contributes to current efforts to recover women’s voices in the male-dominated terrain of war writing, and promotes the value of studying noncanonical texts. Rarely considered in scholarship of American war literature, women’s …

Towards A Theory Of Comic Book Adaptation, Colin Beineke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary adaptation studies/theories have tended to focus singularly on the movement from the novel/short story to film – largely ignoring mediums such as the theater, music, visual art, video games, and the comic book.  Such a limited view of adaptation has led to an underdeveloped and misplaced understanding of the adaptation process, which has in turn culminated in a convoluted perception of the products of artistic adaptation.  The necessity of combating the consequences of these limited outlooks – particularly in the field of comics studies – is as vital as the difficulties are manifold. In opposition to this current stream …

Reviving The Latent Content Of Alchemy In William Shakespeare's Othello, Sarita Clara Rich

Theses and Dissertations

While many of Shakespeare's alchemical allusions are noted for their language of positive regeneration and healing, the playwright's departures from these conventional uses of alchemy deserve further attention. This essay presents an examination of inversions in the redemptive alchemical paradigm of Othello, a play whose connections to alchemy are not announced by obvious references to gold making, the philosopher's stone, or other key terms relating to the discourse of the opus that a modern audience is likely to recognize. I argue that in Othello, alchemical allusions are more subtly deployed in the language that describes Othello and Desdemona's …

Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms [Review], David P. Rando

English Faculty Research

It appears that the moderns are catching up to the Victorians at last. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier’s edited volume, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940, represents the most forceful statement to date about the possibilities and opportunities for print culture studies in the modernist period. While the study of print culture has flourished in Victorian studies for decades, particularly through the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and its journal, Victorian Periodicals Review, modernist studies has been slower to embrace print culture studies. There are many historical and theoretical reasons for this, but even field nomenclature may make a difference. “Victorian studies” …

The Limits Of Empathy: An Interview With Marianne Noble, Rebecca Lane, Jeffrey Zamostny

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …

Captivating Malaeska: Reading The First Dime Novel As A Captivity Narrative, Elisabeth Ziemba

All Theses And Dissertations

Regardless of the genre under which Malaeska was marketed, the cross-genre tropes and lessons can be seen which mark the novel as one that has been influenced by captivity narratives. Perhaps more so because of the subtle way it has been integrated into popular culture, the heritage of the Native American captivity tale remains even after physical Indian captivity has ceased, providing readers with a multilayered reading which asks them to think about the events of the time in which the story was written as well as the time in which the story is set, while critiquing the white supremacist …

Cold War Playboys: Models Of Masculinity In The Literature Of Playboy, Taylor Joy Mitchell

Humanities & Communication - Daytona Beach

“Cold War Playboys: Models of Masculinity in the Literature of Playboy” emphasizes the literary voices that emerged in response to the Cold War’s redefinitions of space and sexuality and, thus, adds to the growing national discourse of Cold War literary and masculinity studies. I argue that the literature Playboy includes has always been a necessary feature to creating its masculinity model; however, that very literature often destabilizes the magazine’s grand narrative because it presents readers with alternative models of masculinity. To make that argument, I presume five things: 1) masculinity, like femininity, is a construct; 2) the mid-century masculinity crisis …

Joel Faflak, Joel Faflak

Research Day (Arts & Humanities, FIMS, and Education)

My fields of interest are Romantic & nineteenth-century literature & culture; psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, & histories of psychoanalysis & psychiatry; theory & criticism; 18th- & 19th-century philosophy; cultural studies & popular culture; American film musicals.

Review: Ecocritical Explorations In Literary And Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, And Fields, T.S. Mcmillin

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Eng 3009g-002: Myth And Culture, Wharram

Spring 2011

No abstract provided.

Eng 4801-001: Integrating The English Language Arts, Melissa Ames

Spring 2011

No abstract provided.

Eng 3009g-003: Myth And Culture, Wharram

Spring 2011

No abstract provided.

The Perverse In Historical Perception: Anne Frank And Neutral Milk Hotel In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, David Rando

English Faculty Research

The cover art for Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane over the Sea reproduces a turn-of-the-century postcard that depicts bathers in an ocean. In the foreground, the figure of a woman leans propped against a railing. For the album, her head has been replaced with a well-worn drumhead. She and the nearest bather have an arm raised. From behind the woman, another raised arm of an otherwise subtended bather appears. Two figures farther in the distance are in the water up to their heads. The blithe face of the nearest bather looks up toward the woman, whose own face has …

2011 Complete Digest, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Between Reason And Faith: Breaking The Status Quo In Bram Stoker’S Dracula, Erin Newcomb

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Vampires Do(N’T) Exist: Using Past And Present Technologies To Make Dracula Real, Holly J. Mcbee

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Greyhounded, Robert Ficociello

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Short Story, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2011 [Download Entire Issue]

Short Story

No abstract provided.

The Holy Surprise Party: Glimpses Of Divinity In Suddenly Emerging Literary, Artistic, And Geographical Settings, 1660-1785, Kevin L. Cope

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Antiquity, eternity, and expectation often intersect in outof- the-way environments. In rural southwest Louisiana, an unlikely venue in which to encounter the Ancient of Days, the Zigler Museum, a pair of exhibition halls housed in an incongruous, somewhat less than Cajun colonial-style building, displays its collection of eighteenth-century paintings beneath an optimistic sign reading "The Age of Reason:' The symmetrically arranged portraits gaze on an imagined focal point near the center of the room while scattered landscape paintings open windows on a mild English pastoral world far away from rice fields and crawfish ponds. Imported memories of a British culture …

Liminal Practice In A Maturing Writing Department, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph]

In Spring 2011 I was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant to "consult, collaborate, and inform" on the future of the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, located in the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. The Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications department (hereafter, RWC) was a pioneer in writing instruction in Canada, where it became the first unit to establish itself independently as a department with a full-‐time faculty committed to both teaching and scholarship in writing and rhetoric. It remains a rare phenomenon on the Canadian higher education scene, where studies …

Seeing Subjects: Recognition, Identity, And Visual Cultures In Literary Modernism, George Micajah Phillips

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Seeing Subjects plots a literary history of modern Britain that begins with Dorian Gray obsessively inspecting his portrait’s changes and ends in Virginia Woolf’s visit to the cinema where she found audiences to be “savages watching the pictures.” Focusing on how literature in the late-19^th and 20^th centuries regarded images as possessing a shaping force over how identities are understood and performed, I argue that modernists in Britain felt mediated images were altering, rather than merely representing, British identity. As Britain’s economy expanded to unprecedented imperial reach and global influence, new visual technologies also made it possible to …

‘The Monstrous Anger Of The Guns’: Critical Commentary On The War Poems Of Gabriel Okara, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Throughout the Biafran War of Independence from Nigeria (1967-1970), Gabriel Okara remained a committed Biafran. But he was neither an iconoclastic secessionist (determined to wantonly wreck any well-founded order, including the subaltern state of Nigeria) nor a romantic revolutionary (dreaming of a postcolonial African utopia rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the failed postcolonial state of Nigeria), he was a Biafran at a higher level of philosophical and humanist reasoning as eloquently argued throughout his war lyrics discussed in the present paper, whose themes include: commitment, nationalism and pacifism as they pertain to his Biafran experience; modern warfare …

Gender, Genre And Slavery: The Other Rowson, Rowson's Others, Eileen Razzari Elrod

English

Readers familiar with Susanna Rowson as the author of Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794) do not think of her as an abolitionist. But in 1805 Rowson articulated an anti-slavery position in Universal Geography, a textbook addressed to schoolgirls such as those she herself taught at the Young Ladies Academy in Boston. Condemning those who viewed sugar and slavery as a winning equation that would make them rich, Rowson denounced the “purchase and sale of human beings,” and insisted that anyone “enlightened by reason and religion” would oppose the “horrid trade,” and see it as she did, as “a disgrace to humanity.”1 …

文学研究的合法化：一种新实用主义、整体化和经验主义文学与文化研究方法 (Legitimizing The Study Of Literature: A New Pragmatism And The Systemic Approach To Literature And Culture), Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven (斯蒂文·托托西). 文学研究的合法化：一种新实用主义、整体化和经验主义文学与文化研究方法 (Legitimizing the Study of Literature: A New Pragmatism and the Systemic Approach to Literature and Culture). Trans. Ma Jui-ch'i (马瑞琪翻). Peking University Academic Lectures Series 7. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1997. ISBN 7-301-03482-2 217 pages. The book contains texts of invited public lectures at Peking University in 1994, 1995, and 1996 on radical constructivism, culture and literary theory and methodology, women's writing, film and literature, and Canadian and Hungarian modern and contemporary prose. The Peking University Press 1997 print version of the book does not include a Works Cited: in the 2011 pdf version …

Review Of "Bricks Without Straw: A Novel" By A. Tourgée, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.