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A Monstrous Outbreak: Epidemics And Biology In The Creative Porcess Of Fuillermo Del Toro's Symbolic Vampires, Maria Teresa Depaoli

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

A Web Of Connections: How Early Twentieth-Century American Women Writers And Photographers Situated A New Way Of Seeing, Kristina Krause

CGU Theses & Dissertations

While there are several studies of the relationships and influences between American male photographers and writers, this study examines the lesser known and understudied collaborations and connections between early, twentieth-century American women photographers and writers, beginning around the end of the nineteenth century and extending into the 1930s. The web of connections between women writers and photographers, connections created through influence, through mentorship, through friendship, or through collaboration, provided a space in which they could situate a new way of seeing and defining each other as women and as artists, and it manifested in the empathetic manner in which they …

Shakespeare’S Cosmology On The Supernatural: All Is Illusion, Yiju Liao

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines how Shakespeare approached elements of the supernatural – ghosts, madness, and witchcraft – in his plays. The aftermath of the England’s break from the Catholic Church led to societal upheaval in the way early modern England viewed the supernatural. Prior to this break, Europeans interpreted the supernatural through the religious explanations provided by the Church. However, the Reformation opened the gates for scholars, physicians, and theologists to offer up non-religious explanations for supernatural phenomena. In England in particular, tropes and fears towards the supernatural were colored by the foreign threats against Queen Elizabeth I by the Catholic …

When Wuxia Met Romance: The Pleasures And Politics Of Transculturalism In Sherry Thomas’S My Beautiful Enemy, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

A case study of Sherry Thomas’s Qing-era My Beautiful Enemy (and its prequel, The Hidden Blade) allows for a fruitful discussion of changing representations of diversity in romance fiction and its appeal to readers. MBE’s heroine is Anglo-Chinese, and the novel’s plot draws on wuxia, a literary and cinematic genre that has a long history in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is also associated with immigration and exile, perhaps resonating with Thomas’s own move from China to the U.S. Readers might find its infusion in romance appealing for two reasons: one, it features a warrior heroine (a …

Disrupting An(Other): Sexuality As Political Resistance, Emma C. Downey

Master’s Theses

If sexual knowledge can threaten social and political institutions and their control, how do the contents and subjects of literature and publications in the interwar period make that legible? Moreover, if female sexuality–represented or real–was seen as something disruptive to the normal functioning of society, did sexuality offer a useful entry point for social, political, or ideological critiques of the interwar period? My project responds to these questions by analyzing the lives and writings of two female authors of the interwar period: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) and Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963). In my analysis, I focus on two major points of connection. …

A New Happiness?: Reading Literature With Deleuze And Guattari In 2020, Fiona Connolly

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Gilles Deleuze is one of the most influential French philosophers of the twentieth century. He collaborated with political activist and radical psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari to create Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and What is Philosophy ? (1991), among other works. At the center of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought was the belief that philosophy is the production of concepts, such as territorialization/deterritorialization, lines of flight, and rhizomes. In this thesis, I will use Deleuze and Guattari to examine three seemingly unrelated literary texts: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and John Green’s Paper Towns. By …

"The Island Has Two Sides": Female Subjectivity In Postcolonial Adaptation, Teah Goldberg

CGU Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation is entitled: “The Island has two sides: Female Subjectivity in Postcolonial Adaptation.” In it I will argue that many postcolonial narratives either consciously or unconsciously adapt Shakespeare’s The Tempest in an effort to resurrect repressed female narratives of resistance. Through an examination of Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1988), and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), this dissertation will contribute to the fields of feminist and postcolonial studies by arguing that the kinds of female critical voices that we find embedded within these postcolonial texts, either …

“An Unquiet Soul”: Despair And Doubt Of God’S Benevolence In The Novels Of Charlotte Brontë, Heidi Zameni

CGU Theses & Dissertations

As a nineteenth-century writer, Charlotte Brontë lived during a tumultuous time of

challenges to previously incontrovertible mores, leading to a refashioning of societal beliefs and attitudes. Challenges to the Church of England, such as the split by the newly formed Free Church of Scotland and an increase in Dissent, disputes against the historical accuracy of the Bible, the loss of nature as a source for spiritual replenishment, and political and economic strife permeated the lives of the Victorians. All institutions within the British system—law, medicine, prisons, civil service, army—were subject to challenges during this period. The criticism led to a …

Introduction: The Politics, Praxis, And Performativity Of Teacher Neutrality, Daniel P. Richards

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Teaching Archive: A New History For Literary Study, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered …

Thinking With Christian Existentialism: Freedom In Burke’S Logology And Berdyaev’S Dostoevsky, Steven J. Mailloux

English Faculty Works

Kenneth Burke’s logology is a way of thinking about how to understand the use of language—what he calls “symbolic action”—and how to use language to make sense of various human practices, including interpretive acts. This is a dialectic in thought between rhetoric as language-use and interpretation as making-sense. In The Rhetoric of Religion Burke’s theotropic logology uses theology to interpret symbolic action and symbolic action to interpret theology. Burke extends to other interpretive projects this same rhetorical-hermeneutic strategy of analogically translating words from one domain into another, from one meaning into another. This strategy is one way Burke thinks with …

Maladaptive Grief: Irish And American Experiences Of Loss, Mourning, And Trauma, Abby Hey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Literature that responds to loss and expresses mourning, a genre referred to as the elegy, traditionally follows an adaptive pattern in which a mourner reaches consolation and comfort. In the modern period, however, mourning transformed into destructive experiences that were notably private. With this phenomenon of greater social and emotional isolation, writers like Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bishop expressed rumination and irresolution. In contrast, before the twentieth century, elegies were not only more consolatory, but there was a greater emphasis on shared feeling, and this communal type of mourning is more often adaptive. By grieving together in the …

Simulating Gender: Student Learning In Clinical Nursing Simulations, Lillian Campbell

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Body Image/Imagining Bodies: Trauma, Control, And Healing In Graphic Memoirs About Anorexia, Kristine M. Gatchel

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase of graphic narratives focusing on the intersection of comics and medicine, a subgenre known as graphic medicine. These memoirs, known as graphic pathographies, are written from those who interact with disease in various capacities from patient, to doctor, to caregiver. This project closely examines three graphic pathographies written about the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Prior writing, both fictional and personal memoir, on anorexia has often been considered as problematic for its ability to function as a how-to manual for anorexics. Anorexia is a complex disease that exists largely within the …

Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of Marina’S Character In Kyomuhendo’S Secrets No More, Esther J. Masele, Deogratias M. Kisweka

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Based on the assumption that characters in a literary text are true representations of human beings, this paper intends to interpret Kyomuhendo’s characterization of Marina in Secrets No More, applying psychoanalytic theory thereby, authenticating Freud’s concept of personality in the understanding of characters’ deeds in the novel. Taking into consideration that Freud’s psychoanalysis is a wide and complex theory, this paper focuses on the basics of ‘Id’, ‘Ego’ and ‘Super-ego’ as modes of interpretation to evaluate the effectiveness of the theory in providing a deeper understanding of a character’s personality and meaningful interpretation of a text. In the same context, …

Final Master's Portfolio, Hammed Oluwadare Adejare

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains four related essays concerned with issues of race and migration in literary creations of diasporic African writers and film texts by African American film producers. The first essay offers a general exploration of contemporary African diasporic writings and the pervading Afropolitan politics of home and belonging. The next essay in the collection provides a theoretical grounding for this writing genre, tracing the connections between the theory, Afropolitanism, and earlier modes of theorizing global race relations such as postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism. The third essay explores the application of these theories to Teju Cole’s diasporic novel, Open City, explicating …

My Palate Hung With Starlight: A Gastrocritical Reading Of Seamus Heaney’S Poetry, Anke Klitzing

Articles

Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney is celebrated for his rich verses recalling his home in the Northern Irish countryside of County Derry. Yet while the imaginative links to nature in his poetry have already been critically explored, little attention has been paid so far to his rendering of local food and foodways. From ploughing, digging potatoes and butter-churning to picking blackberries, Heaney sketches not only the everyday activities of mid-20th century rural Ireland, but also the social dynamics of community and identity and the socio-cultural symbiosis embedded in those practices. Larger questions of love, life and death also infiltrate the …

"Blue," "Tapestry," And Oil: Rethinking Oil Capitalism And Feminism Through Two Key 1970s Singer-Songwriter Albums, Joshua Friedberg

Faculty Research and Creative Activities Symposium

This project generally argues that oil capitalism has enabled new forms of feminism in music, in addition to its more well-known environmental devastation. It examines two key 1970s singer- songwriter albums, both recorded in Los Angeles and released in 1971, through the lens of what is called "petroculture." Oil is everywhere in popular culture, especially with the ever- presence of automobiles in film and television, and contemporary Cultural Studies scholarship is starting to recognize its importance in popular culture and literature since oil was first discovered in the U.S. in the nineteenth century. However, while oil capitalism has clearly had …

Reader Response Theory: Students’ Encounter And Challenges With E- Literature, Ma. Junithesmer D. Rosales, John Paolo Sarce

English Faculty Publications

This paper investigated the overall experience of learners with e-literature (e-lit). E-lit as a new form of economy in the field of literature and humanities prompted authors and scholars to create newborn sites of learning — videograph fiction, kinetic poetry, text tula (hyperpoem), and hyperfiction. Thus, the digitization of resource materials in literature led the researchers to investigate the outer circle of some of these new born sites by focusing on the following: readers and their experiences on understanding and learning through e-lit; textual which is concerned with performance and complexities of using this new form of literature; and cultural …

Deconstructing Turok: The Kiowa Dinosaur Hunter In Comics And Film (1954-2014), Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Articles & Research

The Dell and Gold Key Comics series Turok: Son of Stone (1954 ­ 1982) were groundbreaking in their introduction of a Native American protagonist who starred in his own adventure series instead of serving as the marginalized sidekick of a white male adventurer.

Loving In Plain Sight: Amish Romance Novels As Evangelical Gothic, Sigrid Cordell

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

This article examines Beverly Lewis’s highly popular trilogy The Heritage of Lancaster County, a series often cited as inspiring the Amish romance novel trend. Although Lewis did not invent the Amish romance, the high visibility that her work enjoys in the media, and the conventional wisdom that she was the first to develop the genre, means that subsequent novels are necessarily responding to and adapting Lewis’s texts. Looking at Lewis’s trilogy as a foundational text, this article analyzes the ways in which it draws on Gothic conventions to perform evangelical cultural work (to use Jane Tompkins’s phrase). Considering the trilogy …

Girl Warriors: Feminist Revisions Of The Hero's Quest In Contemporary Popular Culture By Svenja Hohenstein, Maria Alberto

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Svenja Hohenstein’s 2019 Girl Warriors: Feminist Revisions of the Hero’s Quest in Contemporary Popular Culture is a timely, readable, and well-researched intervention into ongoing conversations about adaptation, representation, and characterization in literature and films about young heroines embarking on quests. Hohenstein focuses on the heroines of three texts –Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games, and Merida of Brave – as examples of the “feminist quest heroine” (14) and reads primary, secondary, and tertiary texts about them in order to assert that “retellings of quest stories can reflect upon and offer insights …

Imperatrix, Domina, Rex: Conceptualizing The Female King In Twelfth-Century England, Coral Lumbley

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article draws on methods from transgender theory, historicist literary studies, and visual analysis of medieval sealing practices to show that Empress Matilda of England was controversially styled as a female king during her career in the early to mid twelfth century. While the chronicle Gesta Stephani castigates Matilda’s failure to engage in sanctioned gendered behaviors as she waged civil war to claim her inherited throne, Matilda’s seal harnesses both masculine and feminine signifiers in order to proclaim herself both king and queen. While Matilda’s transgressive gender position was targeted by her detractors during her lifetime, the obstinately transgender object …

The Naulahka: A Story Of Cultural Representation, Eve Papa

Sacred Heart University Scholar

This article addresses the issues of cultural theory and representation that arise in Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott Balestier’s 1892 novel The Naulahka: A Story of West and East. Kipling and Balestier’s novel highlights cultural differences between America and India, and in doing so raises controversial points on acceptance and understanding (or lack thereof). Framed through the theme of service travel, the novel’s characters navigate a new life riddled with culture shock in an attempt to find their own version of cultural compassion. Additionally, this article will reference the cultural theories of Stuart Hall to help understand representation of Indians in …

English And Cultural Studies, Fall 2019, English And Cultural Studies Department

Bryant University Communications and Press

No abstract provided.

Open City'S Abschied: Teju Cole, Gustav Mahler, And Elliptical Cosmopolitanism, Josh Epstein

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay addresses Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), a deconstructed bildungsroman preoccupied with Gustav Mahler’s late compositions. Building on Theodor Adorno’s account of Mahler, the essay argues that Cole positions Julius’s violent subjectivity in dialectical tension with the patterns of consumption that inform both his and Mahler’s intellectual landscapes. Previous scholarship, though attentive to Cole’s cosmopolitanism, has ignored the novel’s fixation on Mahler: a Jewish Bohemian-Austrian composer whose cosmopolitan sensibilities led him to appropriate a range of literary and musical sources, Western and Eastern. These sources, Adorno argued, are mediated in Mahler’s music as “pseudomorphs” that unravel their own pretenses …

Twenty-First Century Book Studies: The State Of The Discipline, Rachel Noorda, Stevie Marsden

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

During the 25th annual Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) conference in 2017, held at the University of Victoria, Canada, Stevie Marsden and Rachel Noorda moderated a workshop on the topic of “The Twenty-First Century Book.” Six scholars (Beth Driscoll, Per Henningsgaard, Simone Murray, DeNel Rehberg-Sedo, Simon Rowberry and Claire Squires), whose research is predominantly positioned within the twenty-first century, were invited to discuss the challenges and opportunities for studying the twenty-first century book. The 2017 SHARP conference, “Technologies of the Book”, seemed the perfect setting to hold this workshop. Not only did the conference theme …

I Had To Do The Reading: A Phenomenological Case Study Of College English Students, Jennifer Eleanor Frank

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

The purposes of this qualitative phenomenological case study were to investigate multiple student experiences in a general elective introduction to literature course when music was added as an autonomously structured assignment. Music and song lyrics are no strangers to the classroom setting, but there is a gap in the literature examining the space where students can create meaningful links between music they enjoy and assigned course readings in college English. Informed by social constructivism and English studies theories this study was designed to investigate any impact that autonomously driven music-link assignments may have on students. The structured assignments were called …

Fanfiction As Performative Criticism: Harry Potter Racebending, Khaliah A. Petersen-Reed

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Fanfiction anatomizes a text and in this textual nakedness fanfiction writers recognize gaps in their chosen source texts and seek to supplement these deficiencies through literary disruption. This essay focuses on the kind of fanfiction that critically disrupts through artistic cultural production—a practice that I am labeling performative criticism. I look at Racebending fanfiction that intervenes in the gaps of the Harry Potter series—specifically the gaps related to race. Using fanfiction produced by Harry Potter fans, I will show that by reading and writing fanfiction these writers are blurring demarcation between creative writing and literary criticism.

Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja., Piotr Marecki

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

In 1989, Janusz Pelc wrote the game Robbo on an 8-bit Atari, one of the first personal computers, which enjoyed a cult-like status in Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Robbo, a small robot, collects screws and has to get through 56 planets. The game has achieved cult status, spawning hundreds of remixes and modifications. Beginning in the 1980s, fans (once mainly young boys, today adult men) played this game, collecting screws and running away from enemies such as bats, flying eyes, devils etc., while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, eating crisps and telling jokes. One …