Digital Commons Network^™

Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives In An Age Of Crisis By Molly Wallace And David Carruthers, Bryant Scott

The Goose

Review of Molly Wallace and David Carruthers' Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis.

Mumbai Macbeth: Gender And Identity In Bollywood Adaptations, Rashmila Maiti

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project analyzes adaptation in the Hindi film industry and how the concepts of gender and identity have changed from the original text to the contemporary adaptation. The original texts include religious epics, Shakespeare’s plays, Bengali novels which were written pre-independence, and Hollywood films. This venture uses adaptation theory as well as postmodernist and postcolonial theories to examine how women and men are represented in the adaptations as well as how contemporary audience expectations help to create the identity of the characters in the films. Ultimately, this project hopes to fulfil the gap in scholarship on adaptations in Bollywood.

The Witch, The Blonde, And The Cultural "Other": Applying Cluster Criticism To Grimm And Disney Princess Stories, Valerie F. Garza

Theses and Dissertations

The Brothers Grimm and the Walt Disney Company have produced popular fairy tales for large audiences. In this work, cluster criticism—a rhetorical criticism that involves identifying key terms and charting word clusters around those terms—is applied to four Grimm fairy tales and four Disney princess films. This study aims to reveal the worldview of the rhetors and explore how values present in Grimm tales manifest in contemporary Disney films. Disney princess films in this study have been categorized as “White/European” and “Non-White/Cultural ‘Other.’” Because film is a form of non-discursive rhetoric, an adaptation of cluster criticism designed for film was …

Final Ma Portfolio, Brian Champlin

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

MA Portfolio, English

Ethics, Aesthetics, And The Representation Of Intellectual Disability In The Realist Narrative, Elizabeth Wells

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for a renewed approach to realist texts that rely on conventional perspective and minor characters in their representation of intellectually disabled characters. While disability studies' concepts like narrative prosthesis and the normate have done essential work in arguing for the need for disability's representation from the perspective of the disabled, these ideologies have also negatively influenced the critical reception of texts that do not respond to this need in an immediate or obvious way. By offering new readings of novels with disabled characters whose representations have been frequently questioned, my aim is to complicate the …

Material Culture In The Religious Narratives Of The Old English Exeter Book, Justin J. Larsen

English Language and Literature ETDs

The term “material culture” represents many different approaches and schools of thought across multiple academic disciplines, but its place in the study of medieval literature is particularly difficult to ascertain. The long tradition of simply using the archaeological record to “fill in” gaps left in the textual historical record does little to expand our understanding of the place that these objects actually occupied in the users’ daily lives, nor does it allow us to make greater connections between the texts, their audiences, and their broader environment. Likewise, the role of the text and its reception has a great deal to …

“The Testing Served Its Purpose ”: High-Stakes Testing As A Method Of Categorization And Control In Young Adult Dystopian Novels, Rebecca Lorenzo

Theses and Dissertations

In “‘The Testing Served its Purpose’: High-Stakes Testing as a Method of Categorization and Control in Young Adult Dystopian Novels,” I examine representations of high-stakes testing in the Divergent, Legend, and Testing trilogies using educational, cultural studies, and dystopian/utopian scholarship. In chapters one and two, I examine each society’s system of high-stakes testing and the ideological indoctrination and physical repression used by those in power to maintain control of the citizenry, respectively. In the third chapter, I analyze the ways in which the state’s indoctrination, coupled with an exaggerated focus on the success or failure of specific individuals, creates competition …

Questioning Gynocentric Utopia: Nature As Addict In “Description Of Cookeham”, Liberty S. Stanavage

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In her 1610 “The Description of Cookeham,” Amelia Lanyer presents Cookeham as a space in which women and nature exist in poetry-inducing harmony until the intervention of man. Lanyer’s poem highlights the deference of both the animals (who “sport . . . in her eye” and “attend”), and the landscape to Clifford: the hills “descend” to meet her footstep and then raise themselves again at her whim. This alignment frequently leads critics to describe Cookeham as a utopian feminist landscape that aligns women and nature against an antagonistic masculine influence.

However, this utopian vision dramatizes a landscape that is not …

Whedon Studies After Whedon: A Conversation With Sherryl Vint, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

A Critical Inquiry Approach To Teaching Young Adult Literature, Steffany Comfort Maher

Dissertations

This dissertation presents a critical inquiry approach to teaching young adult literature in English language arts classrooms. Critical inquiry is derived from critical theory and critical pedagogy approaches, as well as pragmatic philosophies of inquiry. The author shows from convincing examples that a critical inquiry approach to teaching empowers students to ask meaningful questions about both what they are reading and the world they live in.

Chapter One: Methods of Teaching Young Adult Literature: Past, Present, and Future is an introduction to critical inquiry and the teaching of young adult literature. Chapter Two: Critical Inquiry in Teaching Young Adult Literature: …

Predatory Value: Economies Of Dispossession And Disturbed Relationalities, Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, Chandan Reddy

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. …

Trumppunk Resists Presidential Bunk Or, Updating Obscure Mirrorshades With Revelatory Magnifying Glasses Enhances Seeing The Forces Of Normalcy, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

Trumppunk is a genre that Marleen S. Barr theorizes as a complement to her original fiction published in WHEN TRUMP CHANGED: THE FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION JUSTICE LEAGUE QUASHES THE ORANGE OUTRAGE PUSSY GRABBER.

Virginia Woolf And The Flâneuse: A Geocritical Approach To Mrs. Dalloway And The Voyage Out, Kayla Dean

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Using the theoretical framework of Geocriticism, Psychogeography, and the literary concepts of the flâneur and flâneuse, I argue that Virginia Woolf’s female walkers have a unique aesthetic experience from the male walker of literature. Although this experience differs because of the strictures on Victorian and Modernist women in cities like London and Paris, I rely on the framework of both literary walkers to refute scholars who question the existence of the flâneuse. Through works like Mrs. Dalloway, The Voyage Out, “Street Haunting,” “Kew Gardens,” “Literary Geography,” and A Room of One’s Own, I contend through a mix of traditional scholarship …

Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens

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

This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers …

“The Idea Of Self In The Land Of Self-Help”: Globalization And A Structure Of Feeling In Mohsin Hamid’S How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, Sharmeen Mehri

Theses and Dissertations

Focusing on the novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, this paper examines Mohsin Hamid’s experimentation with narrative structure and the idea of the split self through the context of Frederic Jameson’s dialectic of the cultural and economic dimensions of globalization and David Harvey’s take on Postmodernism.

El Mundo Anti-Negro Y Los Hip-Hop Blues: Los Rakas Y J-Cole, Josué R. López

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Tenemos que contender con el mundo anti-negro. Los Rakas, un dúo artístico panameño-estadounidense, y J-Cole, un artista afro-estadounidense, utilizan al hip-hop como una avenida para comunicar sus ansiedades, sufrimientos y fortalecerse en la lucha infinita al ser el Otro Oscuro. Los blues forman parte de como uno lidia con la permanencia del racismo y nuestra existencia en un mundo anti-negro. A través de Frantz Fanon, Derrick Bell y Lewis Gordon, argumento que el estilo musical de J-Cole y Los Rakas constituye una forma de los hip-hop blues. Examino las canciones “Sueño Americano” y “Neighbors” para analizar cómo los artistas entienden …

Finding Nemo, Findng Dory, Finding Ourselves: How And Why We Teach Our Children To Think About Disability, Stacie Klinowski

English

My project, a critical thesis titled “Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, Finding Ourselves: How and Why We Teach Our Children to Think About Disability,” investigates how representations of disability within children’s media transcend these texts and contribute to our society’s construction of disabled subjects. By first looking at historical traits of children’s literature in Grimm's Fairy Tales and The Trumpet of the Swan, I establish that the didactic function of this genre reproduces the values of the cultures in which they are written while it also attempts to instill social ideals that will guarantee 'progress.' Representations of disability in these texts …

Party Politics: Domestic Entertaining And The Reaches Of Sociability In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Andrew Forrester

English Theses and Dissertations

Literature in the nineteenth century often featured highly structured scenes of domestic entertaining. Party Politics makes a case for these parties as both literary devices and cultural touchstones, at once practices indicative of the period’s commitment to strict standards of etiquette and capacious arenas in which to test the already blurred boundary between the public and private spheres. Ultimately, this project contends that parties are staples of Victorian sociability and its depiction in literature; they therefore allow authors and their characters to register social, moral, economic, political, and even international developments of the period in the lives of middle- and …

Representations Of Mental Health In Young Adult Literature: A Cultural Analysis Of The Three Ps Of Patient, Practitioner And Population, Christine Gonzales Severn

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the representations of mental health in young adult literature by categorizing texts into a new framework established by this thesis as the Three Ps of patient, practitioner and population. Looking at the Three Ps from an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural view recognizes ways in which literature with themes of mental health is progressively changing with the times. In analyzing John Neufeld’s Lisa, Bright and Dark (1969), Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012), and Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2006), this thesis identifies the changes in mental health visibility and awareness, Sexual Orientation Change Efforts’ …

Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …

English People. Owen Barfield; Narnia And The Fields Of Arbol. Matthew Dickerson And David O'Hara; And The Mythic Dimension. Joseph Campbell, Phillip Fitzsimmons

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

Three books, written about differing themes and released decades apart, still manage to work together to present a complex picture of the images of mythology and their effect upon the human race. The books are English People, a 1929 novel by Owen Barfield; Narnia and the Fields of Arbol, a 2009 study of environmentalism in the works of C.S. Lewis, by Matthew Dickerson and David O’Hara; and The Mythic Dimension, a selection of essays spanning almost three decades by Joseph Campbell.

English People. Owen Barfield; Narnia And The Fields Of Arbol. Matthew Dickerson And David O'Hara; And The Mythic Dimension. Joseph Campbell, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

Three books, written about differing themes and released decades apart, still manage to work together to present a complex picture of the images of mythology and their effect upon the human race. The books are English People, a 1929 novel by Owen Barfield; Narnia and the Fields of Arbol, a 2009 study of environmentalism in the works of C.S. Lewis, by Matthew Dickerson and David O'Hara; and The Mythic Dimension, a selection of essays by Joseph Campbell spanning almost three decades.

Seeing Trauma: The Known And The Hidden In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Alisa M. Deborde

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Trauma as an official diagnosis first entered the DSM in 1980 and literary theorists began employing the term to discuss literature not too long after. Since the 1990s, theorists have largely focused on twentieth-century trauma literature with Holocaust and Modernist texts garnering much of the critical interest. Yet, Victorian life was also marked by trauma-causing events. From railway catastrophes, to industrial accidents, to premature deaths, and infectious diseases, Victorians reckoned with wounds to the mind through their lived experience. Trauma scholars who do work with nineteenth-century texts, with few exceptions, consider trauma in terms of its modern theories. While the …

Development Of A Literary Dispositif: Convening Diasporan, Blues, And Cosmopolitan Lines Of Inquiry To Reveal The Cultural Dialogue Among Giuseppe Ungaretti, Langston Hughes, And Antonio D’Alfonso, Anna Ciamparella

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to create a literary dialogue among the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the African American author Langston Hughes, and the Quebecois writer Antonio D’Alfonso. Giuseppe Ungaretti and Langston Hughes were more or less contemporaries. Ungaretti was born in 1888 and Hughes in 1902, and both were active in modernist movements that shaped the literary history of their own countries. D’Alfonso was born in Canada about half a center after Ungaretti and Hughes. Besides significant generational differences, these three authors also underwent personal and intellectual experiences that shaped their writing in seemingly incomparable ways. While a traditional comparative approach …

Syntax, Newsletter Of The Suffolk University English Department, Issue 2, 2018, English Department

Syntax Newsletter of the Suffolk University English Department

No abstract provided.

Cultural Context: An Argument For New Historicism Over Postmodernism In Analyzing Popular Literature, Conor King

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Blackwood's To Hawthorne In Light Of Its Mid-Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Reputation, Holly Young Boud

Theses and Dissertations

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was arguably the most important and widely published literary magazine of the nineteenth century. Its readership extended from Britain to America, shaping literary tastes across the Anglophone literary marketplace. BEM wrote two reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction during the author's most prolific years. The first was published in 1847 and contained a lengthy reflection of the state of American literature that prefaced its review of Mosses from an Old ManseM. In 1855, BEM reviewed Hawthorne's novels. The language of these reviews encouraged BEM's transatlantic readership to interpret Hawthorne in a very particular light: a dark, intense, …

Literary Cosmopolitanisms Of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, And Arundhati Roy, Sunil Samuel Macwan

Dissertations (1934 -)

Since the 1980s, literary critics have examined contemporary cosmopolitanism’s relationship with globalization from postcolonial perspectives. An intriguing question in this area is: how do postcolonial authors justify their cosmopolitan critiques of globalization while relying on the economic structures that sustain the publishing industry? This dissertation attempts to answer the question by studying literary cosmopolitanisms of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy. It argues that by developing forms of literary cosmopolitanisms through fiction, some postcolonial writers create alternatives to neoliberal globalization and a reactionary nationalism from within those systems. The primary methods employed in this study include close-reading and critical-research-qualitative …

;Blackwood's ;Responses To Hawthorne In Light Of Its Mid-Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Reputation, Holly Young Boud

Theses and Dissertations

Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine was arguably the most important and widely published literary magazine of the nineteenth century. Its readership extended from Britain to America, shaping literary tastes across the Anglophone literary marketplace. BEM wrote two reviews of Nathaniel Hawthornes fiction during the authors most prolific years. The first was published in 1847 and contained a lengthy reflection of the state of American literature that prefaced its review of Mosses from an Old Manse. In 1855, BEM reviewed Hawthornes novels. The language of these reviews encouraged BEMs transatlantic readership to interpret Hawthorne in a very particular light: a dark, intense, and …