Digital Commons Network^™

Missing Shakespeare's Law: Some Writing About Some Reading About Close Reading, Karen Cunningham

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Literature And The Law Of Nations, 1580-1680 / Christopher N. Warren, Jason E. Cohen

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

The Art Of Cognition: British Empiricism And Victorian Aesthetics, Rachel Kravetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The British are credited—or charged—with establishing empiricism, the view that all knowledge is embedded in sense experience. My project argues for and describes an undercurrent of idealism within British empiricism: the writers of my study investigated modes of thinking that transform sensory experience. To see their idealism at work, it is necessary to look closely at how they conceived of ideas in the mind as pictures. Given that the term “picture” was used to refer to both inner ideas and actual paintings, it is not surprising (though rarely noticed) that when empiricists wanted to consider how the mind shapes ideas, …

Dark Stars Of The Evening: Performing African American Citizenship And Identity In Germany, 1890-1920, Kristin L. Moriah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dark Stars of the Evening: Performing African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890-1920 demonstrates that black performers in Germany developed wide networks in the performance world as they sought artistic opportunities beyond the racist circumscription of the American popular stage. Their performances became emblematic of modernity, globalization, and imperial might for German audiences at the turn of the century. African American-styled blackness contributed to the formation of the city of Berlin while allowing African American performers to assert themselves on the global stage. Groups like the Four Black Diamonds had a lengthy engagement with the popular stage in Berlin, …

"The Engine Of Free Expression": The Political Economy Of Copyright In The Colonial British Atlantic And Early National United States, Nora Slonimsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1985, the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that copyright was included in the Constitution in order to serve as the “engine of free expression.” By providing economic incentive to drive artistic and scientific innovation, the nation received essential information and other tools of learning necessary to make sound political decisions. However, transnational copyright disputes, then and now, frequently resulted in complex and often contradictory understandings of free expression. The formation of copyright in America was thus a far more complex story, and it is that story that forms the basis of this project.

Amidst the many moving …

Canvases Of Representation: Addressing The Cultural Politics Of Black Male Superhero Identity In Graphic Narratives, Danielle L. Cochran

Theses and Dissertations

Canvases of Representation: Addressing the Cultural Politics of Black Male Superheroes Identity in Graphic Narratives is an analytical literary mixtape dedicated to Black male superheroes Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Black Lightning. Cochran draws out how superheroes play a role in the socio-political, identity, and cultural representations Black identity. The work argues that what is not just the symbolic/cultural destruction of the Black image in popular culture but how such representations provide a template for how the Black body is actively managed, controlled, surveilled, and contained in the material world. Examining these figures through the blended genres of Afrofuturism, film, …

Dalgish Studies, Teaches The Complexities Of Languages., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“I tell my students that if they want to see the world, they might consider studying linguistics, because that is how I got my start,” says Dr. Gerard Dalgish, a professor of English at Baruch College. “I went to many different countries, and if you have that sort of background, you can live for a while working part-time or something like that if you like the particular place you’re visiting.”

These compelling words come from someone who has specialized in teaching English as a second language or ESL, as it is also known.

Colonial Shame And Its Effect On Puerto Rican Culture, Alison Torres Ramos

English Dissertations - Archive

I explore how American influence affects Puerto Rican culture through colonial shame. My dissertation is informed by the following questions: (1) In what ways does Puerto Rican culture attempt to move away from colonial shame? (2) What underlying desires and fears are present in Puerto Rican cultural productions? (3) How does colonial shame create agency in the struggle to achieve cultural currency within the wider American society? (4) How does colonial shame affect transculturation between Puerto Rico and the United States? The second chapter of my dissertation explores Puerto Rican attempts at moving away their colonial shame to subvert it. …

Disabling Sex Education: Science, Narrative, And The Female Body In Feminist Medical Fiction, 1874-1916, Stephanie P. Tavera

English Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation offers a feminist disability theory approach to women’s medical fiction during the Comstock Law Era. I argue that, in responding to Comstockian censorship, women authors of medical fiction resisted sexed and gendered narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sex education discourses, but in so doing, they recast the female body within disability rhetoric. Using feminist body theorists such as Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Emily Martin, and Elizabeth Grosz, I frame each work of feminist medical fiction within a specific historical nexus before discussing how the authors–Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Charlotte Perkins …

Greening Gawain : Connecting Environmental Damage And Masculinity In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight., Austin Putty

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This paper explores medieval environmental attitudes through a historical reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the study of which provides a blueprint for what may be a method of combating climate change denial at its cultural roots, which I will argue in this paper links to an outdated mode of European warrior masculinity. This paper will demonstrate the connections between hegemonic masculinity and environmental degradation at work as a discourse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through chivalric behaviors, as well as a burgeoning environmental conscientiousness at play that undermines it. The conflict between Gawain and …

From Damsel In Distress To Active Agent : Female Agency In Children's And Young Adult Fiction., Megan Sarah Mcdonough

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the different ways in which female characters in children’s and young adult fiction can claim agency. Using adaptation theory, feminist theory, and theories of agency and autonomy, this project examines how portrayals of female protagonists have changed to accept a multiplicity of strong females, and why we need these different kinds of characters within our culture. Working with the definition of agency as the choices one makes and the subsequent actions she takes, this dissertation examines how female characters from paradigm shifting texts claim agency. Each chapter uses a specific feminist lens to explore literary texts and …

"A Shot In The Dark": Post-9/11 One-Off Speculative Fiction, Michael Lynn Brittain

English Dissertations - Archive

The cultural, political, and historical impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as an event, continues to be questioned. For this project, I will examine six “one-off” or “one-time” works of speculative fiction from highly-acclaimed and award-winning writers— Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), and Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012) —who, prior to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, all worked predominantly in creating works in the genre of realist …

How Documentary Poetry Imagines, Seunghyun Shin

English

As we face the end of the post-modern world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the preceding decades of postmodernity can be seen to have led to a widespread underappreciation of reading and writing poetry in general. If we want to say that poetry is necessary in the world, how should literary scholars and writers defend its value? The value of reading and writing poetry owes to its socio-political efficacy. This research will highlight how poetry can be political through exploring the works of three documentary poets: Muriel Rukeyser, C.D. Wright, and Claudia Rankine. The goal is to refute …

Composing The Postmodern Self In Three Works Of 1980s British Literature, Jonathan Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis utilizes Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” to examine three texts from 1980s British literature for the ways that postmodern writers compose the self. The first chapter “Liminality and the Art of Self-Composition” explores the ways in which liminal space and time contributes to the self-composition in J.L. Carr’s hybrid Victorian/postmodern novel A Month in the Country (1980). The chapter on Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) titled “Intertextuality and the Art of Self-Composition” argues that Winterson’s intertextual play enables her protagonist Jeanette to resist the dominance of religious discipline and discourse and …

"A Magic Deeper Still": Sacramental Poetics In William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, And C.S. Lewis, Eric Michael Bontempo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A sacramental poetics requires a particular mode of being-in-the-world. Religiously-minded poets, from Dante and Milton to Donne and Herbert, have long considered how the individual becomes attuned with creation and God’s will. But what happens when modernity and secularization challenge long-held assumptions about the universe and how humankind fits into it? A reevaluation is then needed. My thesis begins with an examination of how William Wordsworth, who sort of falls into modernity, seeks to reoccupy the functions of religion in an increasingly secularized landscape. One consequence of the European Enlightenment is the disentangling and distancing that occurs in regards to …

Books Noted And Received, Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

No abstract provided.

An Examination Of Hegemonic Structures : Deconstructing The Myth Of Education As An Equalizer, Daniela Conte

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

“I will no longer be made to feel ashamed about existing. I will have my voice... 1 will overcome the tradition of silence.” — Gloria E. Anzaldua. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza describes the acculturation process as violent and cruel, effectively muting the voices of minority groups to keep them and their experiences marginalized. This description sparks many questions about the experience of minority groups in higher education, especially concerning language: are marginalized cultures able to keep their ethnic identities present in higher education composition? Furthermore, should there be space for cultural identity …

Delving Into Multicultural Literature With Inquiry, Juan Gonzalez

Honors Theses

This paper argues for the use of multicultural literature in the classroom, and puts forth a unit plan that uses critical literacy in an English 11 classroom, though it can be readapted to fit other grade levels. Bishop (1990) describes multicultural literature as a set of windows, that people use to view the experiences of others, and mirrors, that reflect and validate peoples’ experience, a core principal in this paper. Critical literacy is comprised of four dimensions (Lewison, Flint, & Van Sluys, 2002) that allows for analyzing literature in a different and meaningful way. The final part of this paper …

A Praxis Redefined, Christina A. Slick

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

“A Praxis Redefined” submitted to the English Department of Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of: Master of Arts in the field of English with a specialization, in English Teaching, exemplifies a portion of the substantial research and analysis that reflects theoretical conversations in reading, visual rhetoric, linguistics, grammar, and composition that most influence my practices as an English scholar and educator. Furthermore, the analytical narrative included in this portfolio shows how participation in a variety of challenging pedagogical conversations have changed me from a theoretical outlander to theoretical compromiser. All the …

The Horse And The Heroic Quest: Equestrian Indicators Of Morality In Lancelot, Don Quixote, And Tolkien, Kirsten G. Rodning

English MA Theses

There is a strong connection in Don Quixote and the works of Chretièn de Troyes and J.R.R. Tolkien between a character’s moral decisions and the way that said character treats his horse or horses. The Horse and the Heroic Quest: Equestrian Indicators of Morality in Lancelot, Don Quixote, and Tolkien studies the moral factors that affect the way heroic characters are revealed to readers and how these morals relate to the ways in which characters interact with horses. This ecocritical study focuses on the protagonists in Chretièn’s Lancelot, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and …

Ambiguous Pleasure(Ers): Negotiating The Bodies Of Falstaff And Moll, Lauren Van Atta

Honors Theses

The British Early Modern Period was a time of shifting social ideologies where class as well as gender were mapped onto bodies and embedded in the very material conditions of life. But class and gender were not discreet categories with dichotomous definitions like ‘male’ and ‘female’, or ‘nobility’ and ‘peasant’. They had many inbetweens, and the theater was perhaps the most glaring inbetween of all. The theater necessarily complicates definitions and ways of viewing bodies as no body is what they seem. And at the heart of these ambiguous identities lay the fat body. It is consumptive, it is transgressive, …

Toward A Crip-Of-Color Critique: Thinking With Minich’S ‘Enabling Whom?’, Jina B. Kim

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

Response to Julie Avril Minich, “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now,” published in Lateral 5.1. Kim elaborates upon a crip-of-color critique, which has possibilities to both criticize structures that inherently devalue humans and to take action to work toward justice. Kim’s nal call is to identify and act against the inequalities and harm of academic labor, urging readers to take seriously a “politics of refusal” that might help academics of color survive through alternative collectivities.

Moyo Vol. Vii N 2, Paul Durica, Amy L. Spears, Randall Frey, Nina Clements, Robert Levine, Jean Lamont, Dan Fisher, Kirk Combe, Adam Williams, Jon Pfleeger, Kirsten Werne

Moyo

Durica, Paul. "Editor's Letter". 4.

Spears, Amy L. "As If Lipstick Was A Sign of My Declining Mind (How ChickRock Happened)". 5.

Frey, Randall. "Portrait of the Cartoonist as a Young Man". 6.

Clements, Nina. "Grease Me Up: One Woman's Descent into the Depths of Pittsburgh Dinner Culture". 7.

Levine, Robert. "Under the Needle's Point (The Healing Power of Acupuncture)". 8.

Durica, Paul. "The Glory that was/is Greek: Denison Three Years After the Decision". 12.

Lamont, Jean. Smokin' Joe Lights Up". 13.

Durica, Paul. "Ode on a Second Grecian Turn: An Interview with President Michele T. Myers". 14.

Fisher, Dan. …

Zamyatin's Reception Of Wells's Fiction, Natalia Aksenova, Marina Khatyamova

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Zamyatin's Reception of Well's Fiction," Natalia Aksenova and Marina Albertovna Khatyamova examine several essays written by Yevgeny Zamyatin on Herbert Wells's texts and analyse Zamyatin's reception of Wells's work. Wells's ironic mindset, plot-driven writings, and attraction to parody drew Zamyatin's attention. Zamyatin felt a rapport with the central role of plot dynamics, unorthodox socialist politics, and dystopian tendencies in Wells's fiction. Discussions of the artistic qualities of Wells's writings allow Zamyatin to expound upon his own aesthetic program, known as "synthetism." In these discussions Zamyatin interprets Wells's work as a complex interpretation of technological modernity where the …

Mobility And Academic Literacies : An Epistolary Conversation., Jan Blommaert, Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In what follows, we explore the implications of a mobilities perspective for the conceptualization, teaching, and study of academic literacies. Mobility has come to serve as a catalyst for rethinking scholarly work in a variety of fields – most provocatively, the assumed stability as well as uniformity of what is studied and the location and products of acts and actors of study. The concept of academic literacies aligns with a mobilities perspective in its challenge to a still-dominant conception of ‘literacy’ as singular, universal, uniform, and stable. However, in recognition that any attempt to define mobility, academic literacies, or ‘mobility …

The Environmental Humanities In A Post-Truth World, Amanda M. Di Battista, Paul Huebener

The Goose

Editorial introduction to The Goose Volume 15, Issue 2 (2017).

Making Common Causes: Crises, Conflict, Creation, Conversations: Offerings From The Biennial Alecc Conference Queen’S University, Kingston 2016, Jenny Kerber, Astrida Neimanis, Pamela Banting, Tania Aguila-Way, Ron Benner, Mick Smith, Adeline Johns-Putra, Peter C. Van Wyck

The Goose

At ALECC’s biennial gathering at Queen’s University in June 2016, participants came together to explore the possibilities of “making common causes” from a host of angles, yet all were anchored in an acknowledgement of the diverse more-than-human relationships that make up our common worlds. The following collection of short essays, authored by some of the gathering’s keynote speakers, explores specific aspects of making common causes. In this special section of The Goose, we deliberately invoke the plural of conversation. We understand the effort to make common causes as a process, rather than a “one and done” act. It is multifaceted …

Small Fires By Kelly Norah Drukker, Emily Mcgiffin

The Goose

Review of Kelly Norah Drukker's Small Fires.

Chalked, Elizabeth Anne Godwin

The Goose

Poetry by Elizabeth Anne Godwin