Digital Commons Network^™

Linking Genesis To Modern Day Castaway Narratives, Shawndra Russell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis analyzes two castaway novels, Lord of the Flies and John Dollar, and compares these novels to segments of Genesis, focusing primarily on the story of Adam and Eve. To compare and contrast these three works, I pulled out eleven similar ideas found in each text which formed eleven different chapters. This project evolved into offering an alternative way to interpret these castaway narratives as retellings of the creation story. The characters in John Dollar and Lord of the Flies become Adam and Eve type figures as they try to survive on Edenlike islands. At the same time, this …

Complexity Of Character In Jonson’S Sejanus, Jennifer Dawn Jones

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Critics claim Jonson’s Sejanus, the first of his only two surviving tragedies, lacks the emotional elements of more popular tragedies because Jonson relies on historical sources and simplifies his characters. This study first establishes Jonson’s own unique requirements in tragedy that affect his character development, then it provides textual evidence of complex characters and offers a reading of the play with Rome, or the body politic, as the tragic hero.

War As A Focal Metaphor In The Sun Also Rises And Catch-22, Lee Ogletree

The Corinthian

Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Heller are linked to one another in fascinating ways, for both authors achieved their greatest acclaim upon publication of their first major novel, works written during and about the respective postwar eras each author found himself in after directly participating in the war effort years earlier. One of the more interesting aspects of the abundant literary criticism devoted to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Heller's Catch-22, concerns critical opinion regarding the authors' treatments of war in their most celebrated novels. While it is generally agreed that neither novel is "about war" per se (a …

The Robert Penn Warren Collection At Emory University: A Personal Account, Richard Schuchard

Robert Penn Warren Studies

The Special Collections division of the Emory library is home to a vast array of materials of remarkable value to the study of Robert Penn Warren, and this account provides a useful running guide to those extensive holdings.

Hybrid Identity And Arab/American Feminism In Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz, Nicole Michelle Khoury

Theses Digitization Project

In her novel Arabian Jazz, Diana Abu-Jaber attempts to explore the Arab American identity as something new; as an identity that exists related to, but ultimately separate from, the Arab and American identities from which it was originally created. This thesis discusses the emergence of the depiction of the Arab American female identity in the novel, examining how the characters explore issues of race, class, imperialism, and sex within both the Arab and the American cultures as those issues shape female identity. The thesis also presents a rhetorical analysis of the speeches that allow the characters a voice with respect …

"I Thought Perhaps The Reaper Was Going To Do Something To You": The Serpent's Kiss And The Issue Of Reverse-Objectification, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

In this discussion, I examine the continual problem of female representation in the movie narrative. Movie narratives often rely on female characters situated in roles that find them objectified by males, allowing us to hypothesize--as the body of feminist film criticism has done since at least the mid- I970s--that she also becomes objectified by her viewing audience. Then calling for a sweeping change in the mindsets of both male and female filmmakers, Sharon Smith precisely points out the problems of female representation:

"The role of the woman in a film almost always revolves around her physical attraction and the mating …

From Darwin To Dracula: A Study Of Literary Evolution, Erin Alice Lamborn

Theses Digitization Project

Argues that, without the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species," Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula" and Oscar Wilde's novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" would not have been written with their distinct style and themes, as evolution clashes with degeneration and female power (and the sexuality derived from that power) clashes with the new science. Stoker and Wilde combine the science of the late 19th century with the characters of their imaginations. Natural and sexual selection plays a part in these characters' core development. The mixture of sexuality, science and power in these two novels all combine to formulate what …

A Skeptical Feminist Exploration Of Binary Dystopias In Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists Of Avalon, Alexandra Elizabeth Anita Lindstrom

Theses Digitization Project

In Marion Zimmer Bradley's retelling of the Arthurian legends, The Mists of Avalon, she creates two dystopic cultures: Avalon and Camelot. Contrasting Bradley's account of the legends with the traditional version, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, reveals that Bradley's sweeping revisions of the tradition do little to create a feminist ideal. A skeptical questioning of the text's plot and characters with the Women's Movement in mind opens an interpretation of the text as a critique of feminism itself.

Purity, Panic, And Pasiphaë In Brother To Dragons, John Burt

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Brother to Dragons is a poem that turns chiefly upon guilt over racism and slavery, but many of its most intense passages concern sexual guilt. The poem returns obsessively to the subject of sex because sex provides it with a way of thinking about how the highest and lowest aspect of human nature are inextricably bound together in it. The inextricable duality of love is a model for a similar inextricable duality the poem discusses in political idealism. The way the desire for purity shades into sadism is a model for the ways efforts to purify the political world also …

A Phantom Fly And Frightening Fish: The Unconscious Speaks In Sports Night, Douglas Keesey

English

No abstract provided.

Racial And Criminal Types: Indian Ethnography And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Sign Of Four', John S. Mcbratney

English

No abstract provided.

Facing Tough Realities And Inspiring Change: The Comic Satire Of Sherman Alexie, Jill Alison Henry

Theses Digitization Project

Examines the comic modes Sherman Alexie uses, the purposes behind his critical, yet humorous, commentary, the multiple audiences toward which his satire is aimed, and the desired outcomes of his satire. Explores the theme of alcoholism in Alexie's writings that plays a role in the degradation of Native American lives in modern times and why alcoholism has become a problem for the Native American community. Also, examines why Native Americans have become so dependent on White handouts and how this passivity and acceptance has created problems in Indian society. Finally, offers insights into Alexie's use of humor as a means …

"Betwixt Sunset And Sunrise": Liminality In Dracula, Mark M. Hennelly Jr.

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Dracula And The Afterlife: A Psychological Explanation, Jack D. Maser

Journal of Dracula Studies

Until relatively recently, the primary psychological approach to understanding Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the folklore of vampires has been psychoanalysis. Maurice Richardson asserted in 1956 that Dracula must be seen from a Freudian standpoint, since “from no other does the story really make any sense” (427). However, the psychoanalytic approach shares little with modern, scientifically based psychology. Fascinating though it may be, psychoanalytic theory has almost no measurable attributes and may itself be as mythical as vampires and an afterlife. Rather, psychoanalysis is a creative theory of human cognition and behavior that can be neither proven false, objectively replicated, nor …

Beyond The Pale: Women, Cultural Contagion, And Narrative Hysteria In Kipling, Orwell, And Forster, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Attractive-Repulsive American: Thomas Chandler Haliburton's Sam Slick, Gerald Lynch

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Writing For The Illustrated Story Papers In The 1870s: Individuality And Conformity In Isabella Valancy Crawford's Stories And Serialized Fiction, Michael Peterman

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Gabrielle Roy's ÉVeline: Re-Visioning American Landscape And Identity, Maureen Thum, Matthew Hilton-Watson

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Romantic Love As A Spiritual Companionship? A Buddhist Re-Reading Of George Eliot, Richard Winter

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Introduction

Like most of George Eliot's fiction, Daniel Deronda can be read as a story about the possibility of redemption. Gwendolen Harleth' s vanity and ambition make her vulnerable to Grandcourt' s desire for dominance, and their marriage is a disaster. Belatedly, Gwendolen comes to recognise that a marriage to Daniel Deronda instead of Grandcourt might have rescued her from her egotism and led to her moral and emotional salvation. But for Deronda finding a wife is part of exploring a wider social and spiritual significance for his existence - i.e. his Jewish cultural origin and the Zionist religious, historical, …

The Widening Vision And Undying Hope In The Spanish Gypsy, Miyuki Amano

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 20 May 1839, young Mary Ann Evans wrote to her close friend, Maria Lewis, about her 'oscillating judgment' on a religious matter: 'On no subject do I veer to all points of the compass more frequently than on the nature of the visible church. I am powerfully attracted in a certain direction but when I am about to settle there, counter assertions shake me from my position'.1 This confession foreshadows a characteristic pattern of thinking of the later George Eliot. Her keen insight enables her to grasp the validity of multiple perspectives, and at the same time prevents her …

Review Of Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art, Marina Van Zuylen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The obvious monomaniac in Middlemarch is Casaubon, determined and devoted to writing his 'Key to All Mythologies'. This, his idee fixe, orders his world and certainly his relationship with his wife Dorothea, who seems an unwitting victim of his obsession and his coldness. But in Marina van Zuylen's Monomania, Dorothea becomes the focus of attention: in a chapter on Middlemarch, Miss Brooke's persistent 'urge to sublimate' her will to Casaubon's is read as monomania, with compelling results.

Van Zuylen's interdisciplinary study surveys incarnations of monomania beginning in nineteenth-century Europe; she constructs monomania as an obsession whose psychical function is to …

Review Of The Effective Protagonist In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Scott, Bronte, Eliot, Wilde, Terence Dawson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Let me declare my critical prejudices from the outset. Terence Dawson's study is a work of psychological criticism, of post-Jungian criticism to be exact, and I am frequently left unconvinced by such critical inquiry. As Dawson admits, 'it is often held that the weakness of psychological analyses of literary works is that they require the reader to accept their premises. This both is, and is not so.' In the case of Dawson's book, I can't help but feel that it is so, and by the end of a dense, if often suggestive, study, I remained unpersuaded as to the merits …

A Focused Study Of The Social Outcast In Literature: A Healing For America's Youth, Darcey A. Voyles

Masters Theses

Adolescence can be a difficult time in life, and today's teenagers face even more difficult situations in the high school atmosphere. A frequent element in the high school social scene is alienation of the "uncool" kids. This social isolation can have devastating effects on the outcasts and school community as a whole. Within this thesis, I reveal my plan for alleviating the emotional trauma of social isolation by bringing the discussion of social outcasts into the literature classroom. Literature reflects society, thereby giving young readers a lens through which to view the alienation in our global world that they may …

Jaepl, Vol. 11, Winter 2005-2006, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Linda T. Calendrillo

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Essays

Kami Day. We Learn More Than Just Writing.

In a composition class, students learn a great deal more, for good or ill, than just strategies for writing. This article shows that, as students and teachers learn to recognize and value their own inner teachers, they can also develop relationships with each other that nourish their spirits as well as their intellects.

Gina DeBlase. 'I Have a New Understanding': Critical Narrative Inquiry as Transformation in the English-History Classroom.

This case study highlights what roles classroom discussion and activity around literature, history, and society play in developing one student’s …

Headstands, Writing, And The Rhetoric Of Radical Self-Acceptance, Geraldine Deluca

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

By emphasizing the importance of patient practice as an end in itself, yoga offers a model teaching and learning writing that can help students move forward in a context of self-acceptance and find the sources of their own talents and values.

Front Matter

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Editors' Message

Inner Work: Teaching and Learning (from) Within

”There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” Gerald Manley Hopkins writes in God’s Grandeur, capturing in this line, as he sought to reveal through the marvelously unique sounds and rhythms of his poetry, the “inscape” or the unique inner essence of all natural things. “The dearest freshness deep down things” is also Parker Palmer’s focus in The Courage to Teach, where he argues for a teacher’s and a learner’s inner work: exploring “the inner landscape of the teaching self” because “[t]he more familiar we are with our inner …

What Happens When We Read: Picturing A Reader’S Responsibilities, Laurence Musgrove

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

A graphic representation of reading as a process enables students to respond more fully and responsibly to literature by attending to what they contribute to the act of reading, what the world to the text can offer, what kinds of responses are available to them, and what they can do to make sure they have responded as thoughtfully as possible.

Poetry And The Art Of Meditation: Going Behind The Symbols, Stan Scott

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Combining reader-response theory with spiritual teachings, this article explores how reading poetry may serve as an introduction to the art of meditation.

“I Have A New Understanding”: Critical Narrative Inquiry As Transformation In The English-History Classroom, Gina Deblase

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This case study highlights what roles classroom discussion and activity around literature, history, and society play in developing one student’s understanding of complex social issues, and what ways of talking and thinking develop over time.

Reviews, Edward J. Sullivan, Gabriele Rico, Megan Brown, Kim Mccollum-Clark

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Reviews

Edward J. Sullivan. Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion. (Frank Visser, 2003).

Gabriele Rico. A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. (Ed. Dale Jacobs and Laura R. Micciche, 2003).

Megan Brown. Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making. (Gian S. Pagnucci, 2004).

Kim McCollum-Clark. Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse. (Candace Spigelman, 2004).