Digital Commons Network^™

Batman As Monomyth: Joseph Campbell, Robert Jewett, John Shelton Lawrence, Frank Miller, Grant Morrison, Scott Snyder, And The Hero’S Journey To Gotham, Andrew Thigpen

Masters Theses

In 1988, Jeffrey Lang and Patrick Trimble wrote an article called, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow,” which explains the absence of a hero of the American monomyth in comic books. The American monomyth was proposed by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence and describes a community in harmonious paradise threatened by evil. The normal institutions of law and order fail to defeat the evil, but fortunately, a hero from outside the community arises to resist temptation, defeat the evil, and return the community to its peaceful condition. Lang and Trimble observe the death of Superman during the events …

Contested Spaces: Spatial Discourses And The Struggle For Power In The Early Modern English Empire, Emily O'Hara

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This project examines how early modern English spatial discourses can be used to understand power relations at the beginning of American colonization. Through analyzing John Smith’s A True Relation, Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, Ralph Hamor’s A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia, and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I argue that, despite English attempts to highlight their abilities to exert absolute control over peripheral spaces, English writers ultimately reveal within their texts that the English are unable to definitively control spaces throughout the empire. These spaces include peripheral regions far from English centers of …

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …

Introduction: Scottish Literature And Periodization, Juliet Shields

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces a symposium on the mismatch between literary periodization developed for English literature and the configuration of Scottish literary history, with special discussion of how this issue has been treated in recent scholarship on Scottish romanticism.

Growth And Poverty Traps: Examples From Literature, Danielle Chaloux

Honors Scholar Theses

The writings of Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Knut Hamsun, and Laura Ingalls Wilder capture humanity on the page. The characters in the works of these authors are confronted by realistic or autobiographical situations and make choices based on history, personal preferences, societal pressures, and economic constraints, just as real-life individuals do. They can thus serve as data for illustrating the implications of economic models, specifically poverty traps. To do so, I will draw from Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens, The Fat and the Thin (1873) by Emile Zola, Hunger (1890) by Knut Hamsun, and The First Four Years (1971) …

The Revival Of America's First Genre: Exploring The Panther Narrative's Feminist Principles In Post-Revolutionary War America, Abigail Bentley

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

America’s victory in the War of Independence posed new challenges for the men who drafted the Constitution. Gender roles shifted dramatically during the war, creating a new attitude about women’s roles in the new republic. Before the Constitution was ratified, women like Abigail Adams advocated for women to have a more active role in the new nation. Radical literature regarding women’s roles also became a driving force in the movement. The Panther Narrative used the resurgence of America’s first genre, the captivity narrative, to combine the new republic’s obsession with personal freedom and radical ideas about gender spheres. The anonymous …

Cross Roads Of The Living And The Dead: Necropolitics And Market Logic In Chris Abani's Graceland, Joshua Dunn

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that Chris Abani’s 2004 novel Graceland presents the austerity programs imposed on Nigeria in the 1980s as a form of financialized necropolitics. Through its representation of the entanglement between transnational capital interests and repressive state security forces, Graceland offers new ways of theorizing neoliberal governance and its relationship to the construction of what Achille Mbembe calls “death worlds.” In the novel, the state’s instrumentation and destruction of human bodies (for the accumulation of wealth) becomes an apt metaphor for structural adjustment. But the novel goes further by demonstrating how this logic of accumulation utilizes biopolitical and even …

A Social Study Of Discworld Autonomy, Morgan Rogers

Senior Theses

From 1983 to 2015, Sir Terry Pratchett wrote a series of forty-one novels, several short stories, and companion works set on the Discworld. The Discworld is a flat world that rides through space on the backs of four giant elephants that stand themselves on the back of the Great A’tuin, a world turtle. The Disc is based around the Hub, or central point, and the Rim, or the circumference of the world. There is a waterfall all around the Rim of the world that falls into space itself. The Hub compares to the Earth’s poles in that it is the …

Private Deaths: The Impossibilities Of Home In The Modernist Novel, Ava Bindas

English Honors Projects

This project examines novels by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen featuring female characters who contemplate or commit suicide. Relying on a composite theoretical framework that weaves together geography theories of spaces as well as gendered theories of bodies by authors like Judith Butler, Rita Felski, and Victoria Rosner, I argue women commit suicide because their modern homes fail to accommodate their gendered bodies. Focusing less on the moment of death than on the conditions that make choosing to live impossible, this project tracks how, during a moment of supposed liberation, conceptions of gender, modernity, and domestic …

Discursive Mapping: Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca And Thomas Jefferson’S Construction Of Selfhood And Otherness, Monica Doebel

Undergraduate Research Awards

The binary of savage versus civilized was deeply embedded in the structure of early American society and the consciousness of early generations of colonizers, codified through multiple methods of inscribing meaning upon native land. Thomas Jefferson, in his pseudo-scientific Notes on the State of Virginia, taxonomizes life in native America using maps, charts, and textual descriptions for the purpose of consolidating an American identity premised on superiority over native people and black slaves. In contrast, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca maps native America purely through language, constructing the illusory infallibility of European colonizers while crafting an overall narrative of native …

The Long Side Of The Tracks, James Metzger

The Tuxedo Archives

In just three short weeks I traveled upwards of 8000 miles of rail, circulating around an antiquated network of industrial savagery, from Oakland CA to Oakland CA, trading stories and cigarettes with other wayward travelers while waiting for more important trains of cattle and produce to take the tracks. ~excerpt from short story

Traveling Women And Consuming Place In Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters And Journals, Cassie Patricia Childs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals considers how various women-authored travel narratives of the long eighteenth century employ food in the construction of place and identity. Chronologically charting the letters and journals of Delarivier Manley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Janet Schaw, and Frances Burney, I argue that the “critical food moments” described in their letters and journals demonstrate material, cultural, and social implications about consumption. My interdisciplinary project is located at the intersection of three seemingly divergent topics: food studies, human geography, and women-authored travel narratives. Approaching “place” as a way of being-in-the-world, my project …

Religion, Science, And Truth In The Human Experience: Poetry As Living Synthesis In Walt Whitman’S Leaves Of Grass, Karen E. Luidens

Masters Theses

Walt Whitman’s great masterpiece Leaves of Grass stands out in the canon of nineteenth-century American poetry for both its innovations in form and its bold ventures into controversial subjects. One such subject is the role of science as opposed to religion in shaping the modern worldview. Whitman’s poetry alternately and at times simultaneously expresses both materialistic and metaphysical cosmologies, criticizing and casting away ancient traditions as often as he calls on them for inspiration.

In this paper I explore the influence of contemporary science on Whitman’s worldview, analyze how its theories shape the cosmology presented by his poetry, and discuss …

Beauty Outside Our Doors: Conservation Stories Of Black Hawk County, University Of Northern Iowa. Environmental Literature (Spring 2017).

Environmental Literature Project

Beauty Outside Our Doors collects stories, poems, essays, and interviews with people of Black Hawk County, Iowa, giving voice to their relationship to the land, in their own words. From beekeeping to family farms to kayaking down the Cedar River and nature therapy, this work serves as a witness to the beauty to be found here—and the challenges we still face as citizens and lovers of the natural world.

Published as a collaboration between the Soil and Water Conservation District and students in the Spring 2017 Environmental Literature class at the University of Northern Iowa, this unique anthology invites you …

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.

Portfolio Vol. Ii N 3, Ira Price Ii, Harry Clement, Robinson Jeffers, Bill C. West, Robert Maxwell, Stanley Hanna, Avery A. Shaw, H.A. Deweerd, Paul Saunders, Robert Smith, Bernard Bailey, Don Bethune, David Mitchell, Meridan Bethune, Dick Wager, Virginia Martindale

Portfolio

Jeffers, Robinson. "From 'The Beaks of Eagles'". Poem. 6.

Clement, Harry. "Mr. Bigger Tries Faith". Prose. 7.

Shaw, A.A. "Students of Denison". Prose. 9

Deweerd, H.A. "New German War Prophets". Prose. 11.

West, Bill C. "Reproach". Poem. 14.

West, Bill C. "Dilemma". Poem. 14.

Manship, Paul. "Dancer and Gazelles". Picture. 14.

Saunders, Paul. "Review of New Books". Prose. 15.

Smith, Bob. "Review of New Records". Prose. 15.

Picasso, Pablo. "Nude (Pink)". Picture. 16.

Korbel, Mario. "The Andante". Picture. 16.

Bethune, Don. "Review of 'Susan and God'". Prose. 17.

Baily, Bernard. "Thornton Wilder's 'Out Town" Reviewed". 17.

Maxwell, Robert. "Reflections". Poem. …

Flamingo Vol. Ix N 3, Reed Smith, James C. Kemper, George Mcdonald, Dorothy O'Dell, Richard Shiokawa, Orville Smrcina

Flamingo

Anonymous. Untitled. Prose. 1.

Anonymous. Untitled. Prose. 2.

Anonymous. Untitled. Prose. 3.

Ollapod, Cornell. Untitled. Prose. 3.

Anonymous. Untitled. Prose. 4.

Anonymous. Untitled. Prose. 5.

Smith, Reed. Untitled. Cartoon. 8.

Anonymous. "Gripes and Groans". Prose. 9.

J.C.K. ""You Disgraceful Being," She Said". Picture. 10.

Anonymous. Untitled. Prose. 10.

Anonymous. "Homecoming". Prose. 1.

Anonymous. "My Girl". Prose. 1.

McDonald, George. Untitled. Picture. 11.

O'Dell, Dorothy. "Edifying Adventures of Alice (In Wonderland)". Prose. 12.

Anonymous. "I. Though Stuff". Prose. 12.

Anonymous. Untitled. Prose. 12.

Anonymous. Untitled. Prose. 15.

Anonymous. "Hi-Glims of Denison's History". Prose. 16.

Anonymous. "Hi-Glims of Denison's History". Picture. 16. …

"A Poem Containing History": Pound As A Poet Of Deep Time, Newell Scott Porter

Theses and Dissertations

There has been an emergent trend in literary studies that challenges the tendency to categorize our approach to literature. This new investment in the idea of "world literature," while exciting, is also both theoretically and pragmatically problematic. While theorists can usually articulate a defense of a wider approach to literature, they struggle to develop a tangible approach to such an ideal. By examining Ezra Pound's critical approach to poetry, especially in The Cantos, an applicable visualization of a global approach to literature becomes more transparent.

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 …

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 …

Flamingo Vol. I N 2, Virginia Reel, Dorothy K. Funk, William Vogel, Phelan Steacock, Dorothy Breeze, Kilburn Holt, Alonzo Quinn, A.M. Mcneil, A.M. Shumaker, C.H. Dickerman

Flamingo

Exchange. "Skin Tight". Prose. 1.

Yale Record. Untitled. Prose. 1.

Orange Peel. Untitled. Prose. 1

Judge. Untitled. Prose. 1.

Jester. Untitled. Prose. 1.

Virginia Reel. Untitled. Prose. 1.

Punch Bowl. Untitled. Prose. 1.

Octopus. Untitled. Prose. 1.

Jester. "For The Backward Reader". Poem. 2.

Scalper. Untitled. Prose. 2.

Sun Dial. "Yea, Shakespeare". Prose. 2.

Sun Dial. "Refined". Prose. 2.

Squib. "Do Tell". Poem. 2.

Reel, Virginia. "A Hot One". Prose. 2.

Reel, Virginia. "Joking A Side". Prose. 2.

Widow. "Craughty". Poem. 2.

Widow. "Even His Hair Was Wavy". Poem. 2.

Funk, Dorothy K. Untitled. Picture. 3.

Anonymous. Untitled. Picture. 4. …

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

Elegy For Water And Ourselves, Gillian Harding-Russell

The Goose

Poetry by gillian harding-russell

Hinterland Who's Who, Nathan Dueck

The Goose

Poetry by nathan dueck

Symbiosis Above The Arctic Circle, Yvonne E. Blomer

The Goose

Poetry by Yvonne E. Blomer

Haydn: The Unpublished Sonatas, Hob. Xvi.18-20, 44-46, Jan Zwicky

The Goose

Poetry by Jan Zwicky

Infinite Citizen Of The Shaking Tent By Liz Howard, David Carruthers

The Goose

Review of Liz Howard's Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent.

The Oxford Handbook Of Environmental History Edited By Andrew C. Isenberg, Lorelei L. Hanson

The Goose

Review of Andrew C. Isenberg's The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History.