Digital Commons Network^™

Gonzo Eternal, John Francis Brick

Dissertations (1934 -)

Gonzo Eternal enters the recent surge in scholarly attention to the work of Hunter S. Thompson and his practice of Gonzo journalism by examining the growing conflict between the dominant view of Gonzo journalism as Thompson’s unique and proprietary style, and the relatively new trend toward an understanding of Gonzo as a continuum of literary practice that both predates Thompson and continues to adapt and evolve beyond his death in 2005. I contend that this problem is fundamentally one of definition, and that the continued growth of the field depends on a reassessment of Thompson that reframes him from Gonzo …

Sterner Stuff; Sansa Stark And The System Of Gothic Fantasy, Joseph R. Young

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

Contests the suggestion that Sansa Stark, a character in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is a weak and indecisive by analyzing her in relation to William Patrick Day’s system of Gothic fantasy. While Sansa is indeed physically passive, she manages to retain her own identity in a challenging literary environment. This physical passivity allows her to assert herself intellectually, analyzing and indicting the misdeeds and abuses she suffers. This combination of passive and active attributes precisely instantiates the skill set of the detective, a species of literary being developed from the Gothic fantasies Day analyses, and …

2022 Greenleaf Review-- The Gen Z Survival Guide (No. 35), Sigma Tau Delta

The Greenleaf Review

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Janet Brennan Croft

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

Once again we test the limits of both our printer and the U.S. Postal service with the size of this issue of Mythlore. Our inbox overflows with essay and note submissions, and publishers WILL keep publishing books we want to review. The next limiting factors we may face, alas, are continuing paper shortages and prohibitions on shipping to certain countries, whether politically or pandemically-imposed. We’ll deal with those as we come to them; meanwhile, Mythlore’s content continues to be available free on our online platform, even as we move into a new phase with the engagement of our longtime printer, …

A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds To Donald Williams's "Keystone Or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder To Verlyn Flieger On The Alleged 'Conflicting Sides' Of Tolkien's Singular Self", Robin Anne Reid

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

This response traces what the author sees as significant areas of disagreement between Flieger’s essay “The Arch and the Keystone” and Williams’s rejoinder in Mythlore #139, and touches on the wider contemporary context of pushback against diverse scholarship about and readings of Tolkien’s works.

The repository PDF of this note includes an online-only supplement.

Correspondence: 1927-1987 By Joseph Campbell, Phillip Fitzsimmons

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

Correspondence: 1927–1987 by Joseph Campbell, edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Evans Lansing Smith is a fine addition to The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series. It is a solid work and a pleasure to read for fans of Joseph Campbell and his works. The book provides a balance of letters written by Joseph Campbell to friends and colleagues with letters written to him by the same people over the span of his adult life starting at age twenty-four. The letters provide a picture of the remarkable life of a man who was both a friend to many and a …

Intertextuality And Sociopolitical Engagement In Contemporary Anglophone Women’S Writing, Jackielee Derks

Dissertations (1934 -)

My project examines contemporary Anglophone women’s rewriting to locate an emerging mode of intertextuality that defies existing literary categories. Together, the writers in my project present a new and formally innovative intertextuality that rebels against available terminology and requires new ways of reading. This project centers authors from a variety of historical contexts, including the African diaspora and former British colonies, whose intertextuality is grounded in the interrogation of Western forms and conventions. I argue that the rewritings of Ali Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne deploy intertextuality to recuperate women’s experiences while interrogating the mechanisms responsible for their …

Migration And Trauma: Memory And The Myths Of El Otro Lado, Elva Moreno Del Rio

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is composed of two parts that scrutinize the myth of the United States

and el cuento of El Otro Lado. The first part titled, “The Illness Rooted in the American Myth” connects the U.S. myth to J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s piece Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782. In analyzing the writings of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Eden E. Torres, I indentify the impact that Crevecoeur’s myth had on Black, Indigenous and other people of color. This research illustrates the physical and psychological effects that these ideologies have on the mind and body of …

Race And Technology In Southern Literature, Civil War To Civil Rights, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers the intersection of technology and race in the literature of the American South from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though narratives about technology in American literature often promise democracy, equality, improvement, and progress, the role of technology in southern literature is more complex and ambivalent. Literature from and about the South from the Civil War to the civil rights era, by Black and white southern authors like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty reveals technology’s ability to uphold and naturalize southern white supremacy, but also to subvert it. Southern literature traces a pattern …

Restoring Paradise Through Providence: The Emergence Of The Serendipitous Hero In The Hunger Games, Alexandra Elizabeth Oberempt

Theses and Dissertations

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games enhanced the popularity of post-apocalyptic, young adult literature written between 2004 and 2014 (a genre I call millennial dystopia). A government that sends its people to war, spies on them, and sacrifices the sanctity of the community for personal profit while the powerful and wealthy watch from a secure distance is an anxiety addressed in this fiction. The hero of millennial dystopias satiates the suffering that emerges from this angst.

Through her story, Katniss is pushed to her destiny on a path that leads her to become the hero of The Hunger Games trilogy. In …

Gower In Exile, Joel Fredell

Accessus

The articles in Hope and Healing reveal John Gower's interest in an inclusive approach to human suffering, but also a clear-eyed look at its suffering. The experience of Amans in the Confessio Amantis, exiled from the love court of Venus, represents a powerful vision of love-agony as a central form of human suffering, not a cliche of love poetry.

Writing Into Hope: Laughter, Sadness And Healing In John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Natalie Grinnell

Accessus

This article uses the theory of the narrative creation of the self to contend that the Confessio Amantis creates a space for narrative healing within the acknowledgement of mortality. Rather than being traditionally funny or ending in amorous or military victory, Gower’s poem uses the encyclopedia knowledge of the interpolated tales to establish a healing narrative in the face of failure and loss.

The Price We Pay For Envy: A Political And Social “Maladie”, Will Rogers

Accessus

"The Travelers and the Angel" is a curious exemplum: depicting envy as almost an emotion, it depicts the seemingly hopeless worsening of the world, as the envious care more for others' pain than their own happiness. While the exemplum's moral is undoubtedly true, even for 21st century readers, we might address how Gower's particular framing of envy doesn't account for envy's potential to drive positive change.

The Unfinished Hope Of Gower's Transgender Children, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

Accessus

This article examines two of Gower's tales from the Confessio Amantis that deal with trans youths: Iphis and Narcissus. Considering these two tales together, I ask the question: why does one story end with hopeful futurity for the trans masculine youth and the other end with death and the absence of futurity for the trans feminine youth. Connecting these medieval texts to premodern contexts and then with modern contexts, I map the trajectory of centuries long problems facing trans youths. In the end, I conclude that trans youth possess a healthier and more stable future when they receive trans affirming …

The Consolation Of Exempla: Gower’S Sources Of Hope And “Textual Healing” In The Confessio Amantis, Curtis Runstedler

Accessus

This article examines the role of exempla as the root cause of hope and healing in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I argue that these exempla provide remedial action in the text. The exempla are sources of metaphorical healing in the text, functioning as what I have termed “textual healing,” that is the medicinal aspects of the text that helps remedy Amans (and the reader, to a certain extent) back to full health. This article also draws upon reading the Confessio Amantis as a consolatio poem, linking it to Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy in particular. I also discuss the role …

Healing, Accountability, And Community In Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Kara L. Mcshane

Accessus

This piece focuses on the Tale of Lucrece and the Tale of Mundus and Paulina in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I examine how these two quite distinct narratives of sexual assault emphasize key themes in community response to trauma. In these two tales, Gower emphasizes the extent to which interpersonal violence is also social violence; further, community demands for accountability are essential to social healing in both cases. These two models demonstrate the extent to which contemporary society, too, struggles to hold authority accountable and address social wrongs.

An Exercise In Exceptions: Personhood, Divergency, And Ableism In The Star Trek Franchise, Jessica A. Blackman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1987, more than two decades after Star Trek: The Original Series aired on television for the first time, the Enterprise returned to delight audiences with an all-new crew in Star Trek: The Next Generation. With the new generation came new issues and adventures for the crew and the audience to explore, and the popularity of the show lead to the production of three successful spin-offs. These four new shows in the Star Trek franchise dealt with more complex plots and commentaries than the original series before them; three characters in particular – Lt. Commander Data, Dr. Julian Bashir, and …

“The Only Story I’Ll Be Able To Tell”: An Analysis Of Shame And Queer Identity In Gothic American Campus Novels, Aubrey Dickens

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes shame and queerness in contemporary gothic American campus novels, also known as “dark academia” novels. The thesis looks specifically at the novels The Secret History by Donna Tartt, published in 1992 and considered to be the first dark academia novel, and Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, published in 2020 and a more modern adaptation on the subgenre. The two novels deal explicitly with how shame constitutes identity, specifically in regards to individuals who are depicted as queer or outside of heteronormative expectations of sexuality. Queerness in the context of this paper is defined as any portrayal of …

Orientalism Restated In The Era Of Covid-19, Joey Kim

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay bridges a gap between an analysis of anti-Asian targeting and an analysis of Orientalism. Because histories of Orientalism and anti-Asian targeting pre-date the current moment, I demonstrate the centrality of Orientalism to the evolution of xenophobic language and sentiment in U.S.-foreign historical relations. I recount instances of anti-Asian, xenophobic, and “Yellow-Peril” rhetoric in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, I examine the racialization of COVID-19 as a trope of orientalism. This racialization, I argue, places the Asian-presenting body in a state of heightened visibility, precarity, and susceptibility to plunder. The newfound precarity of the …

Structural Analysis Of Code-Switching In Tanzanian Swahili-English Online Telecom Adverts, Emmanuel Ilonga Dr

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This study analyses structural configurations of code-switching from Swahili-English online business-related advertisements in Tanzania. The study uses advertisements disseminated by telecom corporations on Facebook. Through the matrix language frame (MLF), and the 4–M models of code-switching, the study discloses the dominance of Swahili as the matrix language (ML), supplying a relatively higher quantity of content morphemes (CM) in clauses; whilst English becomes the embedded language (EL). The Swahili’s supremacy in larger mixed language structures reflects the higher application of Swahili in day-to-day interactions in Tanzania, while English ‘chips in’ at times. In bundle names, which are phrases in structure, the …

Book Review: Anti-Racism And Universal Design For Learning: Building Expressways To Success., Donna Fortune, Kenya Motley, Mason Engelhardt, Carey Stewart, Kia Powers

Virginia English Journal

No abstract provided.

Nasty Woman: An Analysis Of Women's Rage In Popular Culture, Sarah Kee

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The goal of this senior project was to analyze the underlying cause for why certain female characters in popular culture were villainized for their behavior and generally deemed to be “nasty woman.” After reading numerous books and viewing films that contained “nasty woman”, there was a common denominator that linked their behavior and influenced their decision to enact their often-bloody retribution: the patriarchy. These women were a victim of some aspect of the patriarchy, commonly sexual assault, and could not receive the support they needed, so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The “nasty women” analyzed in …

Building Community In An Asynchronous Write-To-Learn Course, Mary K. Tedrow

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This study examines one online asynchronous course, Writing in Literature, devised by the researcher to determine the potential for building a student-centered course functioning as a learning community in spite of the limitations of the lack of shared space or time. The course was examined via student surveys that qualified experiences within the course as well as a review and coding of end-of-course student reflections. The survey and reflective commentary indicate that it is possible for an asynchronous course to effectively build a vibrant learning community. The learner to learner, learner to instructor, and learner to content framework recommended …

Publishing In The Pacific Northwest, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda, Nathalie Op De Beeck

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Overview of how 11 Pacific Northwest booksellers survived Covid, and continue to thrive after pandemic lockdowns have lifted. After many consumers shifted to online book buying, what techniques are these book stores using to attract and keep customers?

Anthropocene Fiction: Empathy, Kinship, And The Troubled Waters At The End Of The World, Megan Mandell Stowe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anthropocene literature features characters and environments grappling with the devastation of climate change. Donna Haraway’s term Chthulucene narrows this category further by exposing the tentacular connections between overpopulation, dependence on material goods, species loss, and other facets of global warming—such as water as a resource. Three novels of the Chthulucene exhibit these connections, centering on the importance of water to both ecologies and personal identity. As seen in the novels, place attachment brings ecology and identity together by forging a stewardship between person and location, often resulting in efforts to defend and preserve a place. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of …

Undergraduate Session Iiia English: Presentation 1 - Marketing To The Marginalized, Rebecca Majorel

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

A study of the impact the tobacco industry had on the town of Winston Salem, North Carolina. Specifically focused on RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co.

The Impact Of Women On The Life And Legacy Of Mark Antony, Lauren E. Yaple

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Throughout the life of Mark Antony, the women he became involved with had a large impact on his political career, life, and legacy. These women, such as Fulvia and Cleopatra, used Antony as a means to achieve their own political, economic, and personal goals and were able to gain power in a very anti-feminist society through their relationships with and manipulations of him, affecting the career of Antony in many ways including his politics and his actions as a military commander, as showcased by the examination of primary sources from the late Roman Republic and early Roman empire periods. This …

My Brother: A Picturebook About My Brother's Story Living With Type 1 Diabetes., Lydia Manes

Honors Projects

My Brother is a picturebook about my brother's story living with type 1 diabetes. This story includes real life events, medical terminology, and emotionally connecting text to engage potential readers. The purpose of this picturebook is to serve as an educational tool and to help other children cope with their diagnosis of type 1 diabetes.

Language And Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics In Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go, Netty Mattar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Netty Mattar discusses in her article “Language and Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” the complexities of ethical compassion in this biotechnological age. Mattar highlights how genetic technology creates new forms of life that dissolve the line between ‘human’ and ‘technology.’ In spite of this, contemporary ethical discussions do not take into account changing conceptions of human subjectivity and instead reinstate older assumptions about what ‘human’ is. Mattar argues that speculative fiction (SF), as a self-conscious play on signs and signification, can draw attention to how ethical responses are determined by the language we use. …

Who’S His Daddy? Approaches To Merlin’S Father In Children’S And Ya Media, Michael Torregosa

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In the 1130s, Geoffrey of Monmouth originated the character of Merlin, setting him upon the world stage as a wonder-working youth fathered (in the tradition of Greek and Latin authors of the past) by a daemon. However, later writers of the Middle Ages, beginning with Robert de Boron, reconceived Merlin within a more Christianized world, altering his heritage and transforming his sire into a demon from Hell. This shift from benign daemon to malevolent demon has impacted the representation of the wizard of Camelot for centuries. Contemporary fiction for the page as well as for the screen has adopted and …