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A Door Into Ocean’S Nonviolent Resistance As Pragmatic Social Vision, Melodie A. Roschman

Andrews Research Conference

In this essay, I examine how Joan Slonczewski’s 1986 feminist science fiction novel A Door into Ocean outlines a practical program of nonviolent resistance to oppression. Unlike many dystopian and utopian novels, which provide social commentary and offer up ideals but not practical solutions, A Door into Ocean depicts the citizens of a peaceful alien nation, Shora, using various practical tactics of resistance against invading Valan forces that can be applied to contemporary protest and political action. I begin my study by examining the threefold influences on the Shoran’s philosophy of resistance: postcolonial resistance, ecofeminism, and Quaker theology. I then …

“The God Of The Age”: Religion And Servitude In The Works Of Augusta Jane Evans, Jeffrey Warren King

English Dissertations - Archive

Despite her widespread popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, Augusta Jane Evans and her novels went largely unnoticed for most of the twentieth century. It was not until Nina Baym included a chapter on Evans in her 1978 book Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 that scholars began to turn their attention to the once-popular novelist. Evans’s presentation of intellectual, ambitious women who forsook their careers for marriage became controversial among scholars who argued whether Evans could, in the words of Diane Roberts, “be recovered for feminism” (xvi). Scholars Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Sara S. Frear, …

Bridging The Gap Between Manner And Matter : The Friction Of Reticence And Resistance In Sylvia Townsend Warner's Intimate Poems, Giana Milazzo

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis works to question the peculiar relationship between form and subject in the intimate poems of the undeservedly forgotten voice of Sylvia Townsend Warner. We will engage with feminist, lesbian, and modernist criticism to help explain why a writer placed so richly in the prime of modernism and with a revolutionary Communist spirit sometimes depicts in her verse a conservative, domestically repressed female speaker who is often silenced, subdued, and controlled by her female lover—and why Warner choses to construct these subjects using more formal poetic strategies.

Sylvia Townsend Warner is an important figure to examine, as there is …

“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …

[Re]Visiting The Rime: A Case Study Of Adaptation As Process And Product With The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Sally Ferguson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis combines adaptation theory with ecology to examine Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and its adaptations; it argues further combinations of adaptation with evolutionary theory and ecological ideas could allow for a better interpretation of many texts. The adaptation Rime of the Modern Mariner (2011) by Nick Hayes and the appropriation Perelandra (1943) by C.S. Lewis will also be present in individual chapters to examine the texts' interactions with each other as they evolve and how each work represents the combined theory.

A Band Of Sisters: Female Detectives, Authority, And Fiction From 1864 To The 1930s, Amanda Renee Schafer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Because mystery and detective fiction have been classified as “popular” genres, the complex ideas and ideologies that the authors work with and within reach a wide and varied audience through formulaic and familiar ways. The perceived conservatism of the genre allows authors to present and pursue distinctly anti-conservative views in disguise. For fictional detectives and, especially female detectives, disguise is an effective tool for solving their cases. Often, these detectives will disguise themselves as someone infinitely more conservative than they are in order to gain access to their quarry. Similarly, mystery and detective fiction wear a cloak of conservatism to …

Considering The Crossroads Of Distance Education: The Experiences Of Instructors As They Transitioned To Online Or Blended Courses, David D. Hoffman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the short history of online education research, researchers studying teacher experiences regularly relied on anecdotal examples or small samples. In this research, we sought to support and enhance previous findings concerning the best practices in online education by performing randomly sampled, nationwide survey of online and blended course instructors. The survey inquired about demographics (such as age, race, and gender), professional position (i.e. tenured professor), institution, department, and their initial and current feelings about teaching online education. It questioned if the respondents studied online as students, what resources administrators provided, their audience, length of instructional experience, and personal behaviors …

Mapping Gender In Middle-Earth, John Miller

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

Examines the geography and both natural and created landscapes of Middle-earth in terms of what they reveal about gender and race, and how Tolkien used landscape to “[map] alternative masculinities onto […] different races” and emphasize contrasting depictions of femininity through female characters and races that either “stay put” or wander.

A Rhetoric Of Suicide: Audience And The Confessional Poetry Of Anne Sexton And Sylvia Plath, Deirdre Byrne

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

All Our Old Heroes Are Dead: The Nostalgia Of Chivalry And The Myth Of The 'Good War' In Game Of Thrones, Elizabeth Wawrzyniak

Foley Library Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Writing Resistance: Agency And Politics In The Postmodern And Contemporary Novel, Bradley Michael Poling

Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to substantiate a key ambivalence at the heart of contemporary literature: what does it mean to "return" to politics? Critics of contemporary literature have outlined the new literary aesthetic, using social and political engagement as a key component in distinguishing the contemporary novel from its postmodern predecessor. This project, in response to this claim, will examine both the discursive and representation politics of two landmark postmodern novels, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Don DeLillo's Libra, while examining Jennifer Eganâ??s A Visit from the Goon Squad as a descendent of this literary lineage. This project argues that the …

The Hopeful Elimination Of Nuclear Weapons, Shailesh Patel

2016 Honors Council of the Illinois Region Papers

Nuclear weapons is not a topic that is often talked about, or even crosses the mind of the "common Joe" on a regular basis, however, it should be a pressing concern for everyone living in the world. Created in a century that saw two world wars, multiple genocides, and downright human indecency, nuclear weapons represent all the negatives of the 20th century. This presentation covers the costs and risks of keeping them, and suggests how society would benefit from the funds being spent elsewhere. The information for this project was derived from credible sources such as The Brookings Institute, CNN …

"Why Is Bilbo Baggins Invisible?: The Hidden War In The Hobbit", Jane Beal Phd

Journal of Tolkien Research

Why is Bilbo Baggins invisible? This study suggests that Tolkien’s knowledge of philology, theology, philosophy, literature, history, and his own life experience all contribute to the development of the symbolic, moral, and psychological significance of invisibility in The Hobbit. On one level, Tolkien’s theology is informed by his philology, so that being invisible (or “not able to be seen”) becomes a way of symbolically representing the Augustinian concept of evil as the absence of good in the world. On another level, Tolkien’s use of invisibility in The Hobbit demonstrates his knowledge of the philosophic and literary tradition associated with the …

Barbara D’Austria: Women And Religious Upheaval In 16th-Century Europe, Victoria Fox, Brandie Siegfried

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to recover source documents regarding the life of a significant 16th-century woman who has been otherwise largely left out of history. Barbara d’Austria, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I and Anna of Bohemia and Hungary, was an intensely religious and ambitious woman who was said to have used her own funds to provide shelter for women who had been displaced by an earthquake. But other than this general knowledge, and a few poems written at her marriage celebration by Torquato Tasso, little else has been developed regarding her life and influence. After scouring …

Proto-Postmodernism: Constructing Postmodern Ethics Through Cold War Literature And Theory, Rock Lamanna

Departmental Honors Projects

While postmodern theory and literature is typically viewed as either “anti-humanist” or a rejection of Humanism, this essay reconsiders these assumptions by exploring ethical questions in early postmodern novels and theory, referred to as “proto-postmodernism.” For proto-postmodernists such as Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut, Humanism—the ethical framework that asserts a centered “self” and a collective “metanarrative” of human progress—causes and legitimates violence, yet in their theories and literature, they promote the humanist value of dignity in their critiques of modern ethics and politics. To examine this hybrid stance toward Humanism, the first section situates …

Incarceration Memoirs And The Captivity Genre, Vincent James Carafano Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The captivity genre has a rich history in fiction and memoir. In this work, I argue that the expansive parameters of the captivity genre should include an additional subset of texts: incarceration memoirs. Working with two canonized Indian captivity narratives - Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and the Goodness of God and Sarah Wakefield's Six Weeks in the Sioux Teepees - and two contemporary incarceration memoirs - Stanley Tookie Williams' Blue Rage, Black Redemption and Sanyika Shakur's Monster - I suggest that, across a range of thematic and contextual metrics, incarceration memoirs participate in the captivity genre. These equivalences include: the abduction …

An Introduction To The Psychedelic Pastoral: Tracing Mind-Altering Plant Life Into The Modern Industrialized West, Amy Nicole Buck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My Masters thesis offers literary pastoralism as a viable entry into the conversation on psychedelic plants and their use in mind-alteration by the industrialized West. I will, first, establish that the ancient pastoral tradition can be related to the existence of psychedelic plants, and that the use of such plants has inspired a deeper communion with various levels of the natural world. Next, my analysis focuses on parallels between pastoral literature and accounts of psychedelic hallucinations, which are often comprised of ultra-pastoral visions of landscapes, arabesques, and even cosmic space. These similarities suggest that psychedelic plants initiate a peculiar and …

Biopolitical Education: The Edukators And The Politics Of The Immanent Outside, Roland K. Vegso, Marco Abel

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The article examines the relationship of biopower and cinema through the analysis of a specific film, Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (2004). It argues that in the age of biopower, resistance to power cannot be conceived of in terms of a radical outside to power. Rather, biopolitical resistance must take place on the terrain of this power itself, that is, within the field of life. Therefore, what we call the “viral” politics of The Edukators must be interpreted precisely in this context. The film argues that the exhaustion of political paradigms inherited from the past century forces us to take the …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Travels (1613) In A Global Context, Kaya Sahin, Julia Schleck

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article revisits Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his travels into Persia (1613), reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. It highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley’s narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that a certain level of Eastern knowledge is present within Western texts from this period and awaits scholarly …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Trauels (1613) In A Global Context, Julia Schleck, Kaya Sahin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Despite various attempts by literary theorists and historians to find more integrative ways of studying early modern societies and cultures, fairly essentialist notions of the difference between Europe and the rest of the world continue to persist in scholarship. The assumption of fundamental differences then leads to a search for sundry misperceptions, misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and other skewed representations in early modern texts, particularly in those produced by European travelers. Similarly, studies on cultural, ideological, religious, and intellectual exchanges have not always been able to transcend approaches that solely focus on encounters, a word that sometimes implies haphazard meetings and difficult …

Remnants Of The Past: Grendel’S Mother, Wealhtheow, And The Pagan Past, Sarah Kinkade

Senior Theses

"Within medieval studies, Beowulf is, by far, one of the most well-known and analyzed texts. While much scholarship focuses on subjects such as lexical analysis, Beowulf’s actions, the symbolism of Grendel, women’s roles and expectations, medieval politics, and many other notable topics, a less-popular, but significant theme within Beowulf is the fluctuating state of religion throughout Anglo-Saxon history. Rather than depicting a binary system between Christianity and paganism, the poem acknowledges the ongoing conversion process, which presented overlaps of both beliefs. The result of this process was folklore and this ambiguous system plays a major role throughout Beowulf. However, this …

"You Are All A Lost Generation" : The Wandering Soldier In The Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Denn

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

American involvement in World War I, although for only one year, wreaked havoc upon millions of young men, many never overcoming the horror and suffering. Although the men returned to America externally fit and physically intact, internally the war still raged. Drawn into a nightmarish world thousands of miles from home, the American World War I veteran endured the carnage, chivalrously defeating the evil attempting to permeate the world. Exposed to sophisticated weaponry, as well as incompetent leaders, these young men from American farms, cities and suburbs persevered and sailed home, welcomed and greeted as heroes by their homeland.

Upon …

Adult Influences In The Construction Of Youth War Diaries, Amanda Slater

Undergraduate Research Journal

In her article, “Youth Voices in the War Diary Business,” Susan Honeyman argues that interviews with children and youth – although influenced by the adult population – “resist being reducible simply to war propaganda or protectionist sentimentality” (74). This is especially true for award-winning author and peace activist Deborah Ellis, whose recent nonfiction – Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees (2009), Off to War: Voices of Soldier’s Children (2008), and Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children (2004) – tend to lack “imposing adult interpretation” (Honeyman 82). While this may be accurate within the work of Ellis as well as …

The Self Is A Moving Target: The Neuroscience Of Siri Hustvedt's Artists, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Continuity In Color: The Persistence Of Symbolic Meaning In Myths, Tales, And Tropes, Mckinley May

Honors College Theses

This paper examines the symbolism of the colors black, white, and red from ancient times to modern. It explores ancient myths, the Grimm canon of fairy tales, and modern film and television tropes in order to establish the continuity of certain symbolisms through time. In regards to the fairy tales, the examination focuses solely on the lesser-known stories, due to the large amounts of scholarship surrounding the “popular” tales. The continuity of interpretation of these three major colors (black, white, and red) establishes the link between the past and the present and demonstrates the influence of older myths and beliefs …

The Contest Of Marriage: Domestic Authority In The Victorian Novel, Morgan Richardson

Theses and Dissertations--English

In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate …

Heaney At Halftime, Kieran Quinlan

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 31-38

Birmingham Poetry Review 43 (Complete Issue), Birmingham Poetry Review Staff

Birmingham Poetry Review

No abstract provided.

Jewel, Purse, Trash: Reckoning And Reputation In Othello, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

This article offers an analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello alongside arithmetic textbooks for merchants and soldiers. It argues that Othello dramatizes a problem that also haunts the pages of these math books: the problem of calculating the value of persons in a society where new forms of commercial credit were unsettling traditional notions of worth grounded in status, military prowess and sexual purity. Othello’s loss of faith in his wife and the disintegration of his sense of self both depend on Iago’s manipulation of two competing models of reputation: one based on martial valor and sexual purity (reputation as honor) and …

Orbic Bards: Religious Liberalism And The Problems Of Representation In The Postbellum Works Of Walt Whitman And Herman Melville, Anthony Gus Cohen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In an attempt to reconcile the critical camps that attempt either to christianize or otherwise, "scripturize" nineteenth century literary texts with the converse, which attempts to paint them cynically as "infidel countertexts" this project seeks to find a middle ground. The works of Herman Melvile and Walt Whitman steeped in the increasingly liberal religious atmosphere of New York City following the Civil War, both strive to offer up an impressively accurate historical and poetical record, free from the problems of hearsay that nagged the deists and transcendentalists, and instead attempted to offer something that instead was nearer to reason, and …