Digital Commons Network^™

Lord Byron’S Feminist Canon: Notes Toward Its Construction, Paul Douglass

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

Lord Byron took a highly ambivalent attitude toward female authorship, and yet his poetry, letters, and journals exhibit many proofs of the power of women’s language and perceptions. He responded to, borrowed from, and adapted parts of the works of Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Lee, Madame de Staël, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, Joanna Baillie, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Dacre. The influence of women writers on his career may also be seen in the development of the female (and male) characters in his narrative poetry and drama. This essay focuses on the influence upon Byron of Lee, …

Mary Shelley And The Early Goddess, Anne Schreuder

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

For my thesis, I intend to focus on elements of Greek idealism in Mary Shelley’s Valperga, Frankenstein, and The Last Man. I will define “classicism” and seek to understand the ideals of the ancients that are concerned with the assertion of a masculine identity and fear the interference of the female voice in the quest for that assertion. I will show how Mary Shelley’s revisionist history undermines the classical ideals of masculinity in the search for the lost feminine. I will use Shelley’s two plays, Proserpine and Midas to support my claim that Shelley is interested in revisionist history of …

The World War I Poems Of Nathaniel Whilc, Joe R. Christopher

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Telling History Through The Stories Of Women: Julia Alvarez's In The Time Of The Butterflies And In The Name Of Salomé, Nicole Marie Carlson

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis discusses the ways in which Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and In the Name of Salomé (2000) are revolutionary texts contesting traditional, male dominated history and redirecting historical and communal foci to the lives of Dominican women. I employ Walter Benjamin's theories found in his essays "The Storyteller" (1936) and "On the Concept of History" (1940) to assist my exploration of Alvarez's questions concerning the power and effect of storytelling, and the importance of reconstructing various historical voices and images, specifically, the importance of reconstructing female voices in male dominated cultures. I discuss the …

Intertextuality In The Fiction Of Cormac Mccarthy, Benjamin J. Burr

Theses and Dissertations

The moral and aesthetic complexity of Cormac McCarthy's fiction demands sophisticated theoretical reading paradigms. Intertextuality informed by poststructuralism is a theoretical approach that enables one to read the moral and aesthetic elements of McCarthy's work in productive ways. McCarthy's work is augmented by its connection to the works of other great artists and writers. As a result, McCarthy's work forces us to read his precedents from a different framework. An examination of the conversation between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, and Frederic Jameson about Van Gogh's A Pair of Boots creates an intertextual framework for examining the connection between …

Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism And Virginia Woolf's Critique Of Philosophy, Michael Lackey

English Publications

Woolf was one of many modernists who led an assault on philosophy. Given her anti-philosophical orientation, those scholars who use philosophy to interpret Woolf, I argue, are implicitly at odds with her aesthetic. Crucial to my argument is Woolf's conception of what I refer to as the semiotic unconscious, which predetermines the conceptual systems we use to systematize our experiences of the world. Based on my findings, I suggest an alternative frame for understanding Woolf's treatment of philosophy and, more generally, modernist anti-philosophicalism. Instead of assuming that philosophy signifies intellectual depth, as many scholars do, I suggest approaching Woolf, as …

Abroad At Home: Xenomania And Voluntary Exile In The Middle Passage, Salt, And Tide Running, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

This essay re-examines the causes and consequences of Caribbean alienation, with implications for understanding alienation in other postcolonial societies. The author argues that while externalization does follow colonial incursions or international travel by the colonized, exile and alienation also result from emotional or psychological migrations within the mind, a consequence of neocolonial mechanisms tied to globalization.

Theorizing The Diaspora, John C. Hawley

English

In his provocative essay on the place of the committed writer in contemporary western society (“Inside the Whale”), George Orwell makes a passing observation about the effects of exile, self-imposed or otherwise, on the scope of a writer’s subject and purpose: “[L]eaving your native land,” he suggests, “[. . .] means transferring your roots into shallower soil. Exile is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet, because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and narrow down his range to the street, the cafJ, the church, the brothel …

Negotiation Through Identification: Elizabeth Tudor's Use Of Sprezzatura In Three Speeches, Alisa Brough

Theses and Dissertations

Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England, weaves the courtier's strategy of sprezzatura throughout her public orations in order to help her identify with her audience of courtiers, scholars, and politicians. Through her use of sprezzatura, Elizabeth woos her audience and transcends the differences of opinion that lead to conflict between the Queen and her audience members. Using Kenneth Burke's theory of rhetoric as identification, this thesis employs rhetorical analysis in order to discover how Queen Elizabeth's use of sprezzatura enables her to portray herself as a humanist scholar, a political servant, and a dedicated defender of her country and thus, identify …

Eng 3009-001: Myth And Culture, Susan Bazargan

Summer 2006

No abstract provided.

The Style And Diction Of Till We Have Faces: Medieval And Renaissance Undertones, Larry E. Fink

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

'A Very Odd Piece Of Work': A Glimpse Into Dorothy L. Sayers's Nurture And Development Of The Detective Story Genre, Anne Marie Hardy

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

Dante And Tolkien: Their Ideas About Evil, John Seland

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

C.S. Lewis And Frederick Buechner: Literary Expression Of Faith, Victoria S. Allen

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

Full Issue 2006 (Volume V)

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

2006 Printed Program, Taylor University

Colloquium Schedules

No abstract provided.

The Sympathetic Imagination: Healing The Wounds Of Individualism In The Incarnational Aesthetics Of C.S. Lewis, Philip Harrold

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

C.S. Lewis, Apologist, Suzanne House Ebel

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

Charles Williams, The "Other" Inkling, Thomas Howard

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

From Caricature To Character: The Intellectually Disabled In Dickens's Novels (Part 2), Paul Marchbanks

English

No abstract provided.

Samuel Beckett's Late Aesthetics Of Subjectivation, Jianxi Lie

Lingnan Theses

No other writer has explored so metaphysically the problem of human existence as Samuel Beckett, the Irish writer who first gained world renown in 1953 with the formal radicalism and existential angst of Waiting for Godot. In the bleakest forms, Beckett has denied human experience the most fundamental of all certainties – subjectivity and self-consciousness – and exposed conventional realism’s inability to convey the ungovernable flux of the world and the individual’s unfixed, subjective response.

Taking Beckett’s manipulation of pronominal, spatial and temporal deixis as an entry point, this thesis captures the late works in its central dilemma of Beckettian …

The Narrative Lens: Understanding Eudora Welty's Fiction Through Her Photography., Brandon Clarke Ballentine

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Eudora Welty's brief photographic career offers valuable insight into the development of her literary voice. She discovers many of the distinguishing characters of her fiction during the 1930s while traveling through Mississippi writing articles for the Works Progress Administration and taking pictures of the people and places she encountered. Analyzing the connections between her first collection of photographs, One Time, One Place: Mississippi during the Depression: A Snapshot Album, and her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories, reveals the writer's sympathetic attitude towards her characters, the prominence of place in her fiction, and her …

Samuel Taylor Coleridge And Opium., Donald John Marotta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Coleridge's usual use of opium was through laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. This thesis presents the history of and criticism regarding the poet's use of laudanum and the physical and emotional consequences the drug held for him and his writing career.

Metaphor Manifested: An Examination Of Metaphor In Katherine Mansfield, Kathleen E. Kotaska

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Oedipus' Wake: The (Neo-)Masculinization Of The Self In Late Twentieth-Century American Women's Memoir, Thomas Johnson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Without pretensions to exhaustiveness, this study briefly examines the mid- to late-twentieth-century flowering of western theory and criticism built around autobiographical writing and follows the feminist branch(es) of that theory and criticism through a reading of the following four memoirs: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, All the Lost Girls by Patricia Foster, Lying by Lauren Slater, and Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Using both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as they relate to literature, I argue that the selves these four women write in their memoirs are not selves built around the model historically set for women by …

I Am Elizabeth Gaskell: The Literary Evolution Of Elizabeth Gaskell Throughout Mary Barton, North And South, And Wives And Daughters, Jessica Leigh Watkins

Theses & Honors Papers

An overview of the literary evolution of Elizabeth Gaskell throughout Mary Barton, North and South, and Wives and Daughters is reviewed in this thesis. Gaskell’s novels contain a plethora of themes and concerns, ranging from the plight of the Industrial working class, to the developing romance of young lovers, and even to the social implications of the developments of rural life. Throughout the three novels, Gaskell’s personal evolution and her struggle to develop a complete female consciousness within her writing can be tracked. As the female characters in her books grow into an understanding of working class life or learn …

Influence And Its Opposite: Presence And Absence In The Work Of Harold Bloom, Joshua Henderson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In the years since he formulated and expanded on it in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), and Kaballah and Criticism (1975), Harold Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence" has engendered more ambivalence than serious investigation into his theory and its influences. In part, the ambivalence is due to Bloom's persona, which irritates the academic "left" and "right" alike. Surprisingly, it is not Bloom's defense of canonicity against post-structural Marxism, feminism, and New Historical criticism that generates the most resistance; instead, Bloom's dissenters more often come from the ranks of conservative traditionalists who might be …

Masculinity And The Postmodern In American Psycho And Fight Club, Sean Mccray

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Initially, this paper traces masculinity in America from the nineteenth century and up through the mid twentieth century in order to define traditional masculinity and identify some of its characteristics. Traditional masculinity, typically demonstrated though aggressive and violent behavior, is currently undergoing cultural and social revisions due to various contemporary ideas. In analyzing American Psycho and Fight Club, two controversial novels written in the past twenty years, the paper makes clear that the protagonists acutely feel the tension that exists between historical perceptions of masculinity and current ideas of what men should be. They react to that tension by exhibiting …

Genres, Media, And Usability In The Evaluation Of Writing Quality In Digital Environments, Lisa Ferrara

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) has recognized that there may be a problem with depending too much on usability studies for identifying some weaknesses in digital media. In their effort to find a substitute, they have funded more than $250,000 in research in the past two years.

Adolescent Fears And Anxieties: A Comparative Analysis Of Parents' And Teachers' Perceptions Of Adolescent Differences, Carolyn B. Miller

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purposes of the study were 1) to compare parents and teachers and students perceptions of students' fears and anxieties, and 2) to determine if there were differences in students' fears and anxieties based on grade level or gender. This study was quantitative in nature. Four hundred eighty-six middle school students in a five through eight configuration, and their parents and teachers were included in the sample. Two surveys were given: The Middle Level Survey was created by the researcher, and the Comprehensive Assessment of School Climate is a National Study of School Evaluation (NS SE) product created by Kelley, …