Digital Commons Network^™

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

2023 Aegs Proceedings: Struggles And/As Transformation, Marquette University

Association of English Graduate Students

No abstract provided.

Female Pleasure And Theories Of Desire In Narrative Structure: Evolution, Futurity, And Species Survival In The Post-Human And Science Fiction Imaginary, Laura L. S. Bauer

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the complex relationship between an expanded narratological theory of narrative desire, inseparable in its relation to evolution and biological reproduction, and the future survival of humanity imagined across the narrative structures of three 21st-century works of dystopian science fiction. By examining the genre's potential to address species survival specifically through female forms of desire identified as narrative recurrence, prolonged duration, and emotional resolution, this study concurrently develops a metatextual methodology that cultivates the overlooked liminal space of quiescence. This analytical framework emphasizes narrative structure over theme-based analysis to unlock the radical imagination present in the texts …

Political Bodies In The Ulster Cycle: Space, Conflict, And Comedy In Scéla Muicce Meicc Dathó, Glenn S. Ritchey Iii

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Scéla Muicce Meicc Da Thó (SMMD; The Tale of Mac Da Thó's Pig) is a humorous Old Irish myth that takes its cues from its Ulster Cycle cousins, notably, An Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). The connective tissue is its cast, plot structure, and the author's mastery of cultural and storytelling traditions. SMMD is brief and rapid, which aids its near-absurdist representation of masculinity, kingship, and honor in heroic saga culture. This thesis uses postcolonial and medieval literary scholarship to analyze medieval and modern depictions of the Ulster Cycle. Contemporarily, the Irish …

The Politics Of Tools, Stephen Ramsay

Department of English: Faculty Publications

A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,” [Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.

Reading In Place: Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wendell Berry, And Post Critique, Calvin L. Coon

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The twenty-first century, marked by neoliberalism and suspicious, visibly violent far-Right politics, has presented new challenges to critical and literary theorists. In response, some theorists advocate for a postcritical turn, challenging both the surface/depth picture of language and the privileged status of suspicion in interpretation in order to explore alternative pictures of language and reading that can better address the challenges of our own day. In this thesis, I connect one of these alternatives, Toril Moi’s use of Ordinary Language Philosophy in literary studies, to Wendell Berry’s prioritization of place in environmentalist activism. In connecting these two thinkers, I contend …

Bibliography, Print Culture, And What To Do With Comics In A Rare Books Library, Michael C. Weisenburg

Faculty and Staff Publications

Comic books are among the rare books of the future. In fact, some comic books are scarcer and more valuable than many of the “old books” that fill special collections stacks. This essay proposes to answer the questions of “What do we do with comics in an academic library?” by analyzing comics as a popular phenomenon that is deeply rooted in book history and the developing print culture of the past 100 years. Using the traditional methods of bibliographic analysis, we might better situate comics within the mission of academic libraries as we work to foster learning, discovery, and inclusivity …

“I’Ll Tell You No Lies”: An Exploration Of Trauma, Memory, And Violence Against Women In North Carolina Murder Ballads, Madison Ava Helman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation explores trauma, memory and violence against women in Western North Carolina murder ballads “Tom Dooley,” “Poor Omie Wise,” “Poor Ellen Smith,” “The Ballad of the Lawson Family,” and “Frankie Silver.” I posit that these ballads were influenced by prescriptive societal conceptions of femininity, which in turn influenced societal ideations of violence against women. Using folklore performance theory, I analyze the text and context of these ballads and their subsequent histories, eventually arriving at a template for polyvocality that incorporates multiple ballad variants and encourages diverse performances.

Reading Zora Neale Hurston's Works Through An Islamic Lens: The Absence Of Islam In Moses, Man Of The Mountain And Jonah's Gourd Vine, Asma Abdullah Saud Alqahtani

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Zora Neale Hurston is an African-American writer, anthropologist, and ethnographer of the Harlem Renaissance. She is distinguished for documenting and celebrating the religions of African Americans in the South. In this study, the author argues that Hurston represents the practiced religions in Southern African-American communities in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain while noticeably omitting Islam, despite the fact that Islam predominated in more Northern African-American Communities as a reclaimed religious history and practice. Hurston’s exclusion prompts inquiries into the history of Islamic erasures in Southern African-American communities and introduces ambiguity in interpreting the metaphors found in …

Nonhuman Animals And Hope: Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go And Philip K. Dick’S Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, David P. Rando

English Faculty Research

What can critical animal studies learn by temporarily directing attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature? Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? allow readers to experience the hopes of engineered or artificial nonhuman creatures. Without presuming to know the unknowable or to make the animal speak, these novels help to further animal liberation discourses by democratizing the ostensibly human concept of hope, opening new paths of empathy between nonhuman and human animals while making it harder to accept the instrumentalization of nonhuman animals under anthropocentric capitalism.

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …

Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores how the three umbrella models of disability (medical, functional, and social) are shown in several disabled characters from three novels published after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum. Through the utilization of literary analysis from a cultural studies perspective, this project shows that the models of disability, despite the various flaws in their respective designs, prove to be useful lenses to see disability through, both in these novels and in real life, …

Feeling For Deaf Resonance In The Eighteenth Century And Beyond, Jason S. Farr

English Faculty Research and Publications

The article examines how resonance has anchored deaf self-representation in the eighteenth century and the present. Through an interdisciplinary framework that foregrounds Deaf and sound studies in the context of the eighteenth century, the article conducts a close reading of writing from two of the first published deaf authors, Pierre Desloges and Charles Shirreff. The argument is that synchronous vibration figures centrally into their sentimental self-fashioning at a time when organized deaf education was first being implemented in Europe. The article also reveals personal stakes in examining resonance alongside John Bulwer's seventeenth-century multisensory model of perception in Philocophus: or the …

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

Monstrous Oil: Theorizing Petromodernity's Monsters, Madalynn Lee Madigar

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Petroleum, a primary global energy resource, serves as a foundation of our contemporary society. However, the pervasive influence of oil as substance, commodity, and industry in our petromodern lives often goes unrecognized. In the present moment of biogeocultural crisis surrounding fossil fuels, recognizing and understanding our multifaceted engagements with petroleum is critical. This thesis contributes to the growing field of Petrocultural Studies by considering the conceptualization of petroleum through the associated tropes and figure of the monster. Through the petromonstrous, a term that encapsulates the massive scale, haunting effects, and human-other entanglements of petroleum, cultural attitudes and anxieties about oil …

Black Elk Faces East: Beb Vuyk, Cultural Translation, And John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay examines the work of the Dutch-Indonesian author Beb Vuyk in producing one of the first foreign-language translations of John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks: the 1964 Dutch edition Zwarte Eland spreekt. Published in the Netherlands, Vuyk’s translation connects the 1932 as-told-to autobiography of the Oglala Lakota heyoka Black Elk to the career of one of the most important Dutch-Indonesian authors after World War II, who had a prominent voice in debates on Indonesian decolonization. Linking the literary history of two different colonial contexts, Vuyk’s edition also connects Black Elk Speaks to a Cold War-era history of …

Review Of The Life And Legend Of Catterina Vizzani: Sexual Identity, Science And Sensationalism In Eighteenth-Century Italy And England, By Clorinda Donato, Ula E. Lukszo Klein

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani: Sexual Identity, Science and Sensationalism in Eighteenth-Century Italy and England, by Clorinda Donato, written by Ula Lukszo Klein. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool University Press, 2020, 347 pp., 3 b/w images. ISBN: 978-1-789-62221-8

Teaching Mary Wollstonecraft's Travelogue Of Historical Trauma, Annette Hulbert

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Abstract: I teach Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in an undergraduate English literature course on “Survival Narratives of the Eighteenth Century” at the University of California, Davis. The aim of this course is to show how significant perilous voyages were to the ways in which writers in eighteenth-century Britain imagined and interpreted their world. The course draws from the burst of new scholarship on rethinking the traditional “rise of the novel” narrative in imperial, oceanic, and global contexts and develops interpretive frameworks for the eighteenth century’s changing relationship to commerce and …

Vol. 49 No. 2 - Whole No. 355, Jason Fisher

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Sex And The Superman: Gender And The Superhero Monomyth, Christopher Maverick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1938 introduction of Superman, superheroes have been ever-present in American popular culture. Indeed, with the modern preponderance of comic book movies dominating the American cinematic box-office, superhero fantasy is arguably the most important genre of fiction being produced in the contemporary moment. Peter Coogan, Kurt Busiek and many other scholars have discussed the prominence and relevance of the superhero fantasy as a genre. Still others, including Umberto Eco and Marco Arnaudo, have asserted that the superhero is not so much a genre and as it is the evolution of mythology. In Sex and the Superman, I argue …

Dismembering Monstrous Metaphors In Latinx Speculative Fiction, Danielle Garcia-Karr

Theses and Dissertations

U.S. public discourse and popular media are rife with monstrous metaphors of Latinxs. This thesis argues that these gothic monstrous metaphors construct an affective economy of fear, which results in material violence and the devastation of Latinx lives. I further argue that to intervene within this affective economy, Latinx authors write speculative fiction, employing critical race methodologies, to negotiate monstrosity in relation to citizenship. In other words, speculative Latinx authors disidentify with monsters and enact epistemic disobedience, problematizing the known and naturalized and delinking Latinx people from monstrous metaphors to interrupt cycles of fear and violence. In exploring this metaphoric …

Maneuvering Mestizaje In Shakespeare's Tragicomedies, Andrea Phiana Borunda

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project explores and wades through the implications of mestizaje in the murky depths of Shakespeare’s oceans. Disguises and mistakes in identities and in gender and “race” draw on the hybridity and indeterminacy of the early modern stage and its fluidity and lack of order to reflect an unhomed and unmediated formation of nationhood, diaspora, and (trans)global identities. Drawing on ecocritical and critical race theories, I contend the tragicomic works of Shakespeare expose and dismantle ecoracial fantasies of white male supremacy to curate a space of mestizaje for a new generation of BIPOC scholars.

Exploring The Semantics And Functionality Of Ghanaianisms, James Nsoh Adogpa

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Ghanaian users of English have developed a variety of English that includes, among other things, lexical items whose usage and meanings are impregnated with cultural values, concepts and meanings. In this thesis I call these items Ghanaianisms and argue that their significance is to allow an institutionalized second language to acquire new meanings in the new context, in order to function effectively and to express new identities. The new norms that have arisen in the Ghanaian context include both feature norms and behavioural norms, and both were investigated as part of the study. The methodology used is ethnographic in nature. …

“It's So Normal, And … Meaningful.” Playing With Narrative, Artifacts, And Cultural Difference In Florence, Dheepa Sundaram, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article considers how player interactions with religious and ethnic markers, create

a globalized game space in the mobile game Florence (2018). Florence is a multiaward-

winning interactive novella game with story-integrated minigames that weave

play experiences into the narrative. The game, in part, explores love, loss, and

rejuvenation as relatable experiences. Simultaneously, the game produces a unique

experience for each player, as they can refract the game narrative through their own

cultural, identitarian lens. The game assumes the shared cultural space of the player,

the player-character (PC), and the non-player-character (NPC) while blurring the

boundaries between each of these …

Mini Memoirs: Poetry As A Medium For Memories, Liesl Anna Counterman

Masters Theses

For the critical paper, I explore the use of poetry as a form of memoir. Over the years, I have journaled by writing poetry, and for the purpose of this paper, I have studied the marriage of poetry and memoir. My critical paper research has directed me towards how memoirists (including autobiographers and biographers of the past) have used poetry in their writings and how the truth about the past is verified and enhanced by poetic works. Poetry seems to be a vehicle of preserving truth, thus proving the veracity of the emotions and experiences within a historical context. Since …

Cross-Cultural Performativity Of Gender Communication In Heather Raffo’S Nine Parts Of Desire, Shaimaa M. Saeed

English Language and Literature

Since the mid-twentieth century, the study of gender has constituted a fundamental part of many interdisciplinary research works due to its multi-perspective nature which made it a fertile ground for analysis in diversified fields of science. Discussions over sex/gender distinction and the representation as well as perception of gender ceaselessly exist within controversially enriching, discursive frameworks. In 1990, Judith Butler (1956- ), one of the prominent feminist theorists in the field of gender studies, first coined the concept of “gender performativity,” where she challenged the conventional notions of ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists who restricted the perception and communication of gender to …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

“A Sick Eagle” And “I Am”: Hymns To Sculpture By Keats And Rilke, Ya-Feng Wu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

At the turn of eighteenth and nineteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sculpture came to serve as an emblem of humanity’s response to the challenges of the times. John Keats and Rainer Maria Rilke, felt compelled at their encounters with ancient Greek sculpture in the museum to reflect upon their vocation in an age disrupted by political upheaval and rampant commercialization respectively. Keats’s sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817), registers an intimation of his latent grandeur in the form of a “sick eagle,” confronting “a shadow of a magnitude.” To overcome this experience, Keats made attempts at epic on the …

The Silmarillion By J.R.R. Tolkien And Shahnameh By Firdausi: A Sadraic Interpretation Of Free Will And Determinism, Mohsen Hanif, Masoud Tadayoni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Fate, doom, and free will have always proved to be controversial terms among philosophers. The chief problem is whether a deterministic power prescribes the destiny of creatures or they possess pure free will in shaping their destinies. Mulla Sadra, a 17th century Iranian philosopher, believes in a blending of determinism and free will which he develops in the terms of Qaza and Qadar respectively. He introduces a model of fate through which determinism and free will equally participate. Using the human soul as a model, Mulla Sadra points out that people meet their fate through several factors, one of which …

Extending The Frontiers Of The Detective Novel In Adaora Ulasi’S The Man From Sagamu, Onyeka Odoh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Part of the beauty of detective literature is the mental engagement and psychological contest it stages between the author and the readers, as well as its fascinating probe into the nature and dynamism of crime. However, of greater import are the formulaic structural elements that define the genre—a crime, the detection of the crime, an omniscient detective who intelligently investigates the crime, and a justified resolution of all. Though the structure of Adaora Ulasi’s The Man from Sagamu does not exactly fit into the above model, it is still a detective novel. Therefore, this essay aims to propose a new …