Digital Commons Network^™

Unmasking The Monster: Cathy Ames In John Steinbeck's East Of Eden, Julia N. Parker

Honors College Theses

Critics have considered Cathy Ames, the heinous villain of East of Eden, to be John Steinbeck's most complicated character. Although she is at times truly despicable, readers are prejudiced against her before she is even introduced by the narrator, who couches her entire existence as something monstrous and withholds information that might garner her any sympathy until her literal hour of death. Through a study of both Steinbeck's narrative techniques and his letters to his editor about her, we can see that she may not be as villainous as she is presented to be, but she is most certainly …

Eudora Welty’S “Clytie”, The Mirror Stage, And The Grotesque, Samantha Miller

Global Tides

At first glance, Eudora Welty’s short stories seem to exist in paradox with the writer’s own intentions. Welty is well known for co-opting the “plots, settings, characters, image patterns, and vocabulary” of Gothic literature, yet upon being asked if she was a Gothic writer, she responded vehemently: “They better not call me that!”. What is a reader then to make of Welty’s short story “Clytie” which is saturated with homages to the imagery of the Gothic— the display of psychological breakdown of an isolated family trapped in a crumbling, memory-haunted mansion, centering on a trapped, unmarried woman who slowly realizes …

A Man Not A Monster : Reimagining Disability In Hollow Crown's Richard Iii, Taylor E. Uphus

Honors Theses

Traditional portrayals of William Shakespeare’s Richard III (1592) in film interpret Richard’s physical disability as an outward reflection of his evil. In recent years, disabilities studies scholars have reconsidered the historic association of Richard’s physical deformity with immorality. Unlike previous Richard III films, the BBC’s Hollow Crown: Richard III (Dominic Cooke, 2016) highlights Richard’s mental abuse and trauma. While the film does not shy away from Richard’s villainy, its more empathic depiction of Richard contests the one-dimensional stage and film representation of him as a conniving monster. Ultimately, this film presents Richard III to critique society’s treatment of disabled individuals.

English Is Not Dead! Long Live English: Teaching The Evolution Of English And Inclusive Communication Via Online, Face To Face Or Hybrid Instruction, Teresa Marie Kelly, Stephanie Thompson, Sheryl Bone

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

When popular media and many individuals discuss changes in English, some erroneously contend that the language has always been the same and changes amount to little more than “politically correct woke liberalism” desired by only certain people. The English language continually evolves as a natural process that nothing can force nor prevent. Field-specific language also changes with increased understanding and knowledge. The variety of English taught to most students also shifts as Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)/Writing Across Disciplines (WAD) initiatives increasingly focus on Global English rather than the standard of any one country or group. Even informal interactions with …

Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, Graham C. Goff

Journal of Religion & Film

The allegory of Leviathan, the biblical serpent of the seas, has undergone numerous distinct and even antithetical conceptions since its origin in the book of Job. Most prominently, Leviathan was the namesake of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 political treatise and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film of the same name, a damning indictment of Russian corruption. These three iterations underscore the societal transition from the recognition of power as being derived from God to the secularization of power in Hobbes’s philosophy, to the negation of the legitimacy of divine and secular institutional power, in Zvyagintsev’s controversial film. This examination of Leviathan’s three unique …

Breaking Bias, Building Belonging: Racism And Misogyny In Campus Communities, Kayla Batalha

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

Breaking Bias, Building Belonging: Racism and Misogyny in Campus Communities is a project that uses art as a research medium in order to first understand how the Bryant community perceives issues of race, gender, and bias, as well as using creative modes of expression to educate participants on issues that are often invisible and go undiscussed on campus. Using qualitative and ethnographic research methods, this exhibit is infused with both primary and secondary research. Data gathered from the literature review explores the theme of community, which serves as the foundation for this project that was subsequently narrowed to focus on …

Triggered Emasculation In Southern Literature: Applying The Masculine Overcompensation Thesis, Delaney Holt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Coined by Stanford University sociologists Dr. Rob Willer and Dr. Christabel L. Rogalin in 2005, the masculine overcompensation thesis asserts that a man will reciprocate challenges to his masculinity with his own intense display(s) of masculinity. This new thesis combined the preliminary research completed by Adler and Freud, offering a new perspective on masculinity. Alongside societal and psychological applications, the masculine overcompensation thesis can also be applied to fictional literary relationships, especially within the pages of three southern novels: Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle, Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden, and Lewis Nordan’s The Sharpshooter Blues. A common thread of overcompensatory …

The Best Children's Books Of The Year [2022 Edition], Bank Street College Of Education. Children's Book Committee

Children's Book Committee

Includes more than 600 titles chosen by the Children’s Book Committee as the best of the best published in 2021. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.

Full Issue

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Ghosts’ Stories: Addictive Behaviors And Complicated Grief In George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, Jc Leishman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

When experiencing the natural motions of the grieving process, some individuals encounter an inability to pass this process by a phenomenon known as complicated grief. To deal with the cyclical trauma this causes, the human mind seeks to engage in addictive behaviors (both substantive and behavioral) that work to artificially and momentarily circumvent grief. This process, as it appears in George Saunders' experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, reveals a depth of commentary on human attachments and grieving processes through the lives and narratives of ghosts found in the bardo.

Entropic Interactionist Theory: Reading Social Constructionism Through Thermodynamics And Samuel Beckett, Brie Barron

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay aims to explain the breakdown of social constructs through the concept of Entropic Interactionist Theory. EIT argues that it is the nature of creations to be vulnerable to the same forces as their creator, and that social constructions (like identity, for example) are subject to the very same physical forces that give rise to humanity’s creative impulse. At its core, EIT is informed by social constructionism and Nietzschean sociological theory, but it names the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy as the driving force behind societal disintegration. The complication with this theory is that it …

Screen Time Effects/ Initiates Social Anxiety In Young Children And Adolescents, Ameri Morris

First Year Writing Showcase

No abstract provided.

The Dilemma Of Banned Books: Questioning The Ethics Of Censoring Literature In Schools, Kyle King

Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics Essay Contest

Literature, specifically in the form of novels, has been a vital organ of the public education system within the United States. Not only does reading such works transform us into better close readers and strengthen our vocabulary, but the texts at hand can be very essential to analyze specific contexts or issues that might have existed either throughout history or even in the present day. In today’s country, the issue of banning certain books from school curricula has become as prevalent as ever, where mostly Southern Republican officials are calling for lists of books to be restricted from teaching due …

‘Conspiring Together’: Woolf’S Investigations On ‘Party Consciousness’ And Interwar Instability In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Madeline Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Woolf has been generalized popularly as enthusiastic about parties, relishing their effervescence and conversation, and she had a particular bent for imagining a party’s vivacity while often remaining distanced from it. This imagination and duality would mark Woolf’s thoughts as is recorded in her diary entries, and they became especially apparent in her fiction. In an entry on April 27^th, 1925, less than one month from Mrs. Dalloway’s May 14^th publication, she declares that “people have any number of states of consciousness” and reports that she “should like to investigate the party consciousness” (A Writer’s …

Seeing Double: Tolkien And The Indo-European Divine Twins, Kristine Larsen

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

The archetype of the Divine/Celestial/Heavenly Twins as described in Donald Ward’s 1968 The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition has been used to argue for Greco-Roman literary precedents for the sons of Elrond. However, the genesis of the mythological trope of the Divine Twins in Indo-European scholarship originated a century before, for example, in the work of Max Müller. This essay briefly reviews the history of the trope of the Divine Twins that was argued by some late 19^th and early 20^th century authors to exist within so-called Indo-European mythology before tracing parallels between the trope …

The Walls That Define Us, Kaitlyn C. Nielson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” tells the story of Bartleby, a man living in the lower-class of nineteenth century New York City, who secures a job copying legal documents. Unlike the other employees’ eagerness to work, Bartleby remains behind his “green screen” that demarcates his office space and repeatedly responds “I would prefer not to” when asked to complete a task.

Most readers and critics alike interpret Bartleby’s behavior as a mode of passive resistance against his boss and the larger institutions of Wall Street and capitalism. However, through close reading, I instead …

A Sharply Worded Silence: Silence As The Revelatory Link Between Past And Future In Faithful And Virtuous Night, Noah Hickman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Given the recent celebrity of 2020 Nobel Prize Laurette Louise Glück, the 2014 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night enjoys a relative bounty of reviews and criticism for such a recent collection. Most of these reviews make oblique reference to Glück’s use of silence in the collection, but none forward any serious argument regarding the function of silence in the argument of the collection. This essay argues that Glück relies on silence as a kind of revelation for her speakers, marking the end of a given system of being and the inauguration its supplanting ontology. Within the collection, Glück’s silence represents …

Encouraging Activism In Secondary English: Reading And Writing For Social Justice, Elisabeth Spinner

Dissertations

This dissertation presents researched backed, social justice oriented teaching strategies secondary English teachers can implement to encourage their students to think critically and take action on issues that matter to them. Foundational to this research is critical inquiry which encourages students to not read or listen to information passively, but rather to investigate, critique, explore, and ask questions of what they are reading. This approach is necessary when encouraging students to dispel myths and stereotypes, understand questions of rights and justice, and find the right way to be involved. The English classroom is an ideal place for students to do …

George Macdonald's Phantastes As A Bildungsroman Of Spiritual Reality, Hannah O'Malley

Senior Theses

George MacDonald's 1858 novel Phantastes is one of the first fantasy novels written for adults, but it has received little attention in part because of its confusing structure. I argue that Phantastes is best understood as a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation. While the Bildungsroman is usually a realist novel of commercial society, Phantastes’ fantasy elements allow the protagonist to grow up into a spiritual reality that contrasts with many commercial values. MacDonald uses the fantasy genre to show his protagonist's inner development as he learns humility, gains feminine and childlike virtues, and leaves behind the old self

Being Psyche: The Jungian Soul In Glome, Kelly Webber

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

In C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Orual undergoes a psychological transformation as a predecessor to her spiritual conversion. Understanding her psychic journey through the lens of a Jungian archetypal story assists the reader in understanding how she is eventually able to approach the gods bareface.

Tolkien And Bakhtin: Symphony Of Time In The Lord Of The Rings, Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltsev

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

The essay reveals the nature of time and space in Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings with the help of the chronotope concept proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s classification of spatiotemporal relations in the novel identifies the type of chronotope in Tolkien’s major narrative as one close to folklore, idyll, and epic. Tolkien uses memory and its functioning to create a unique symphony of time in The Lord of the Rings. As a concept that reaches the depth of philosophical abstraction and at the same time appeals to a concrete textual context, Bakhtin’s chronotope is a surprisingly flexible …

The Tao Masters Who Walk Away From Omelas, Sabina Schrynemakers

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

Le Guin primarily intended to portray Taoist enlightenment in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” rather than a moral contemplation or lesson. She first describes Omelas as the pinnacle of human flourishing from a Taoist perspective, then how the residents of Omelas have achieved moral maturity through coming to terms with the necessity of evil, and finally she describes the even greater transcendence of those who have achieved detachment from the goods of Omelas, the Tao Masters. This interpretation is supported by parallels with the Tao Te Ching.

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.

Innovation, Genre, And Authenticity In The Nineteenth-Century Irish Novel, David Aiden Kenney Ii

Dissertations (1934 -)

Attempts to reintegrate nineteenth-century novels into the narrative of Irish literary history have been greatly hampered by their long neglect and persistent critical narratives that regard the literary output of this era as either an ingenuous or inartistic failure to establish an authentic literary tradition. Through four case studies, this dissertation explores how national romance and picaresque novels of the mid to late nineteenth-century made significant contributions to the development of the novel form within the Irish literary tradition through stylistic dexterity and cultural subtlety that has long gone unrecognized. To illustrate this, I first analyze Sheridan Le Fanu’s The …

Negotiating Ideology, Self, And Classroom Instruction: A Framework Of Critical Text Selection For High School English Language Arts Curricula, Abigail Bautista , '22

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Kindness In The Bardo: Empathy As A Catalyst For Healing In Victims Of Dissociation, Julia Dorothea Chopelas

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, a host of undead characters find themselves in a spiritual limbo based on the bardo. Although they won’t admit it to themselves, Roger Bevins III and Hans Vollman are most certainly dead. Despite their supernatural makeup as ghosts, Bevins and Vollman bear strong psychological resonance with the living: they are human, heartbroken, and lost. For the ghosts of Oak Hills Cemetery, the inefficient coping mechanism of dissociation perpetuates their afterlife imprisonment in the bardo. Bevins and Vollman suffer from a variety of dissociative symptoms, their minds’ psychological defense against the trauma that has …

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 …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol 30, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Backstage with The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis“

“Sinclair Lewis Society Announces Virtual Conference for Summer 2022”

“Remembering Daniel Chabris”

“Letter from the Editor: Sinclair Lewis Society Celebrates 30 Years!,” by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“New York Times Book Review Celebrates Lewis and Babbitt“

“Babbitt and Thucydides?,” by Rex Levang

“Significant Writer: Flawed Man: A Review of The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis by Bob Beverage,” by Sean C. Denniston

“Sinclair Lewis’s Leading Ladies: Part I: Irene Dunne: Perfect Lady, as Ann Vickers, 1933,” by Susan K. O’Brien

“...Reveling In That Freedom”: Roxane Gay’S Hunger As 21st-Century Freedom Narrative, Kendra R. Parker

Literature: Faculty Publications

Work published in South Atlantic Review.