Digital Commons Network^™

“Blame The Due Of Blame”: The Ethics And Efficacy Of Curses In Richard Iii, Alexandra Malouf

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Language, particularly the language of cursing, plays a powerful role in determining the outcome of events in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Gender imperatives reflected in the speech of Richard III’s characters indicate where power lies and how it is exercised across gendered spheres. While male characters in the history plays typically obtain and exert power through violence, both in war and in secret, the primary source of power held by female characters in Richard III is their use of language. Consistently, the women seal the violent ends of their enemies with curses, and Richard is perpetually given cause to …

Male Laguna Cultural Infulence In The Restoration Of Tayo, Peter Lee Parry

ETD Archive

Scholars have understood Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as a journey to restoration for her protagonist Tayo. The scholarly discussion focuses predominately on the female side of Silko’s novel. Yet Silko balances between the male and female side of Laguna Cutlture which has not been acknowledged enough by scholars. Silko uses three male characters, Robert, Ku’oosh, and Betonie to guide Tayo back to Laguna Culture, which is feminine. I intend to show importance of Silko’s male characters. Silko also intended to use her male characters to present a line that ranges from the family (Robert) to the community (Ku’oosh) to the …

“Moulder[Ing] Into Nothingness Among The Rocks”: Sharpshooters In Gardner’S Photographic Sketch Book Of The Civil War, Harrison Dietzman

Faculty Publications - Department of English

During the American Civil War, sharpshooters were contested igures in the Northern media. Magazines published romanticized proiles of Union snipers, while simultaneously worrying about the deadliness of Confederate sharpshooters. Years after the war, in 1896, the aging painter Winslow Homer wrote that the sharpshooters’ task was as “near to murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army.” Accompanying this sentiment, Homer sketched, in the letter, a soldier trapped within the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope. I use this sketch, along with Homer’s words to his friend, as a way to understand the signiicance of two …

A Declaration Of The State Of The Colony: Type Facsimile Edition, Edward Waterhouse, Dylan Ruediger

British Virginia

Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the State of the Colony is the Virginia Company's official response to the Powhatan attack on the plantation in the spring of 1622. The attack, often called the “Jamestown Massacre,” cost the lives of 25% of the population of the colony (individually listed by Waterhouse in a harrowing catalog of the dead). It led to massive retaliation by the English. It also significantly changed the ideological basis of the colonial project in Virginia from one based on naïve hopes that Indians would voluntarily subordinate themselves to the English towards an aggressive colonialism of dispossession. Waterhouse’s text …

A Declaration Of The State Of The Colony: Photographic Facsimile Edition, Edward Waterhouse, Dylan Ruediger

British Virginia

Edward Waterhouse’s Declaration of the State of the Colony is the Virginia Company's official response to the Powhatan attack on the plantation in the spring of 1622. The attack, often called the “Jamestown Massacre,” cost the lives of 25% of the population of the colony (individually listed by Waterhouse in a harrowing catalog of the dead). It led to massive retaliation by the English. It also significantly changed the ideological basis of the colonial project in Virginia from one based on naïve hopes that Indians would voluntarily subordinate themselves to the English towards an aggressive colonialism of dispossession. Waterhouse’s text …

Lyric X-Marks: Genre And Self-Determination In The Harp Poems Of John Rollin Ridge, R. Arvo Carr

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Rhetoric Of Hospitality: Conditions Of Death In America, Margaret Anne Callahan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Right of Hospitality: Conditions of Death in America calls Western biomedicine’s approach to death into question. Death unifies all human experiences and is always possible, despite the human tendency to deny its existence and, instead, orient the self towards a futurity that is always out of reach. This project investigates the structures influencing how death in America occurs, and traces the roots of Western culture’s rejection of death to the execution by hemlock of Socrates’ immortalized in the Phaedo. Western biomedicine’s institutionalization of medicine requires that both patients and doctors enter into imbalanced hospitable relationships, and these pressures, along …

Violence And Edification In 19th Century Fiction: An Analysis Of The Novels Of Charles Dickens And Leo Tolstoy, Caroline Fassett

Honors Theses

This Thesis argues that violence is essential to the structures and plots of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities and of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is particularly essential to the edification, or the moral and intellectual improvement, of principal characters in these four novels. Additionally, this Thesis contends that this edification is both anticipated and reinforced by the novelists’ incorporation of counterparts whose demeanor and/or narrative overtly mirror that of the principal characters.

To support this argument, I bring the theory of Thomas Carlyle into conversation with the novels of Dickens …

Enclosed From All Sides: Reading Contact And Ambivalence In The Imaginary Al-Andalus Of Hrotsvit's The Passion Of Pelagius And The Song Of Roland, Briana J. Wipf

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s The Passion of Pelagius and The Song of Roland have never been read together in terms of their shared engagement with the Muslim other in the Iberian Peninsula, known during the Middle Ages as Al-Andalus. This project is a comparative reading of the texts’ approach to the presentation of an imaginary Al-Andalus as a space of alterity. The texts’ emphasis on imaginative as opposed to accurate portrayals of Andalusian history and Islamic culture suggests their engagement with a process of Christian identity-building, where the “Christian,” as portrayed in each text, is defined against and in comparison to …

New Paradigms, After 2001, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Valkyrie, Eric Philip Yanders

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

My thesis is a science fiction novella, entitled Valkyrie. My novella focuses on the character Valerie Byrne and her mission to save a utopian city, created in the wake of a third world war, from a megalomaniac android named Dr. Viper. Valerie witnessed her parent's death when she was nine years old, at the hands of the tyrannical government that was responsible for the war. During the conflict, she willingly transformed herself into a cyborg so that she may enact her revenge, and helped overthrow the tyranny that murdered her family. The novella follows her twenty years after the war …

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Revolution Of Bath: The Writing And Re-Writing Of Social History In Jane Austen's Persuasion, Erica L. Pratt

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Being Together Subversively, Outside In The University Of Hegemonic Affirmation And Repressive Violence, As Things Heat Up (Again), Jodi Melamed

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Topic Modeling And The Historical Geography Of Scotland, Michael Gavin, Eric Gidal

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents selected findings from a larger project using topic modeling for clusters of keywords from a defined corpus of 18th and 19th century Scottish topographical sources (including the Old and New Statistical Surveys), linked to GIS mapping, to explore such topics as Scottish industry, transport, antiquities, print culture, and religion, with 10 maps included in the article text.

From Recovery To Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction And (Re)Creating The Future, Daoine S. Bachran

English Language and Literature ETDs

My project assesses how science fiction by writers of color challenges the scientific racism embedded in genetics, nuclear development, digital technology, and molecular biology, demonstrating how these fields are deployed disproportionately against people of color. By contextualizing current scientific development with its often overlooked history and exposing the full life cycle of scientific practices and technological changes, ethnic science fiction authors challenge science’s purported objectivity and make room for alternative scientific methods steeped in Indigenous epistemologies. The first chapter argues that genetics is deployed disproportionally against black Americans, from the pseudo-scientific racial classifications of the nineteenth century and earlier through …

"What's The Use Of Trying To Read Shakespeare?": Modes Of Memory In Virginia Woolf's Fiction And Essays, Sara Remedios Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation maps the relationship between Virginia Woolf’s fiction and essays, and William Shakespeare’s person and plays. I argue that Woolf’s writing is intended as an interactive practice of cultural memory, challenging her readers to become responders and to engage critically with the canon. I further argue that Woolf offers herself as inheritor of a literary practice that actively seeks to shape the values and social ideology of the time. The introduction defines three modes of memory operating in Woolf’s work: memory as opiate; memory as political instrument; and memory as dialectic. The first chapter shows the cultural memory of …

Young Ireland And Southern Nationalism, Bryan Mcgovern

Irish Studies South (Archived)

No abstract provided.

Capitalism And Control: An Examination Of Capitalist Trends Against Consumers, Sravan Ramaswamy

Pop Culture Intersections

This article will be covering a number of debates over years. A number of studies have been done on the nature of privacy and its place in the modern world as we move forward in the digital age. One study called "The Privacy-Innovation Conundrum" by Ted Zarsky argues for the existence of a tradeoff that policy makers have to make between favoring innovation and hurting privacy or favoring privacy, but reducing the incentive to create new ideas[1]. This argument makes a great deal of sense if we view information as not dissimilar to money. However, it leaves open interpretation for …

Aggression And Driving: Separating Ourselves From The Games, Jennifer Yin

Pop Culture Intersections

In 2015 on a busy street in Los Angeles, California, two cars were driving next to each other. One decided to cut in front of the other, angering the first driver, who decided not to let the second into his lane. The frustrated second driver eventually managed to get into the other lane, when both decided to get out of their vehicles. The drivers ended up getting into a fist fight in the middle of the road, and one driver was almost struck by the passing vehicles. Unfortunately, both returned to their vehicles and were not caught by the police …

The Poet's Corpus: Memory And Monumentality In Wilfred Owen's "The Show", Charles Hunter Joplin

Master's Theses

Wilfred Owen is widely recognized to be the greatest English “trench poet” of the First World War. His posthumously published war poems sculpt a nightmarish vision of trench warfare, one which enables Western audiences to consider the suffering of the English soldiers and the brutality of modern warfare nearly a century after the armistice. However, critical readings of Owen’s canonized corpus, including “The Show” (1917, 1918), only focus on their hellish imagery. I will add to these readings by demonstrating that “The Show” is primarily concerned with the limitations of lyric poetry, the monumentality of poetic composition, and the difficulties …

The Undiplomatic Girl, Ryder W. Miller

The Mythic Circle

The knight Gawain watched as the young lady walked away again. She was fair and slight of form. There was also a wonderful shimmer of silver in the green dress she wore, but Gawain found her perplexing.

“I Must Tell The Whole World”: Septimus Smith As Virginia Woolf’S Legal Messenger, Riley H. Floyd

Indiana Law Journal

This Note explores the disjunctive moral gap between a civilian ethic of mutual responsibility and the laws of war that eschew that ethic. To illustrate that gap, this Note conducts a case study of Virginia Woolf’s rendering of shell shock in her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. The war put mass, mechanized killing at center stage, and international law permitted killing in war. But Woolf’s character study of Septimus Smith reveals that whether war-associated killing is “criminal” requires more than legal analysis. An extralegal approach is especially meaningful because it demonstrates the difficulty of processing and rationalizing global conflict that plays …

Shadows Of Empire: The Displaced New World Of Antony And Cleopatra, Christopher Kane

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Gandalf And Guardini: A Fresh Look At The Theology Of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord Of The Rings, Margaret Stadtwald

Celebration of Learning

My Honors Capstone looks at the various critical responses to the theology of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, with a focus on Augustinian theology. It then posits that the modern/postmodern theology of Romano Guardini better encompasses the work’s theological depths and worth as a piece of literature.

An Answer For Orual: C. S. Lewis As Defender Of The Faith, Donald T. Williams

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Shakespeare, Orson Welles, And The Hermeneutics Of The Archive, Benjamin Lynn Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines certain theoretical underpinnings of the historical processes by which Shakespeare's history plays became the de facto collective memory of the events they depict, even when those events are misrepresented. The scholarly conversation about this misrepresentation has heretofore centered on Shakespeare's potential political motivations. I argue that this focus on a political, authorial intent has largely ignored the impact these historical distortions have had over the subsequent 400 years. I propose that, due to Shakespeare's unique place in the historical timeline of the development of collective memory, Shakespeare's historical misrepresentation in the history plays is a byproduct of …

Dislocating Camps: On State Power, Queer Aesthetics & Asian/Americanist Critique, Christopher Alan Eng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that the history of Asian racialization in the United States requires us to grapple with the seemingly counterintuitive entanglement between “the camp” as exceptional space of biopolitical management and “camp” as a performative practice of queer excess. While each practice of camp has been theorized as exemplary of modernity, these considerations have been largely separated into studies of political economy on the one hand, and queer aesthetics on the other. Taken up predominantly in political philosophy and the social sciences, the former centers the death camps in Europe during World War II as epitomizing state violence within …

"A Flame That Is Burning The World": Edwin Muir, War, And History, Margery Palmer Mcculloch

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the impact of successive wars on the Scottish poet, translator and critic Edwin Muir (1887-1959), with especial focus on his experiences in post-World War II Prague and his response to the threat of nuclear warfare and human annihilation.