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Aphrodite On The Home Front: E.R. Eddison And World War Ii, Joe Young

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

The centrality of service to the goddess of love in E.R. Eddison’s conceptions of heroism and the properly lived life is the focus of this study of the Zimiamvia trilogy. Eddison considered his work an important response to World War II and a call for a more meaningful type of courage and way of living both during and after the war.

Faramir And The Heroic Ideal Of The Twentieth Century; Or, How Aragorn Died At The Somme, Steven Brett Carter

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

After Frodo, Faramir perhaps best represents Tolkien’s thinking on war and processing of his World War I experiences. Carter reveals Faramir to be a far more modern warrior than any of his compatriots, particularly in contrast to Aragorn and Boromir, who are representative of much older and rapidly obsolescing models of heroism and methods of warfare.

The Fall Of Gondolin And The Fall Of Troy: Tolkien And Book Ii Of The Aeneid, Alexander M. Bruce

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

Takes us back to classical warfare and the Fall of Troy with his examination of what Tolkien did with the Aeneid when he used it as a source for “The Fall of Gondolin.” The parallels between the stories of Tuor and Aeneas are striking, but more interesting is how Tolkien put his own thematic and symbolic stamp on the material.

Remembering And Recording The Vietnam War, Margaret Brunk

English Honors Projects

In this project I consider the process of narrative construction in Vietnam War memoirs and oral histories, with special emphasis on Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and I examine the interaction between traditional narrative norms and the irregularities of the Vietnam War. Beginning with an exploration of the unique nature of war stories, I discuss the difficulty of communicating the war experience. I then explore the interplay of public accusation with authorial confession and justification, arguing that the desire to explain the particular conditions of the war informs not only the content but also the language and structure of the texts.

Eng 3703-002: Twentieth Century American Literature, 1900-1950, Stephen Swords

Spring 2012

No abstract provided.

Eng 3809-001: Contemporary British Literature, Robert Martinez

Spring 2012

No abstract provided.

The After Effects Of Colonialism In The Postmodern Era: Competing Narratives And Celebrating The Local In Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Priyanthan A. Pillainayagam

ETD Archive

Through the utilization of Jean-Francois Lyotard's views on the Postmodern condition, this paper highlights the failure of metanarratives to accurately convince, as well as convey information and understanding in a postmodern society. This is due in part to what Lyotard believes is an increasing skepticism towards the grand totalizing nature of metanarratives and their reliance on some form of universal truth. In order to reverse the overarching effect of the metanarrative, its all-encompassing nature, and its power to legitimize illegitimate versions of institutionalized truths one must focus on what Lyotard describes as "petit recits" or "little stories". This theoretical framework …

Reverse Orientalism: Laila Halaby's Once In A Promised Land, Amanda Lloyd

ETD Archive

Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land (2007) offers instructive insight into the struggles facing Arab Americans in post 9/11 America. Specifically, Halaby inverts the Western gaze upon the Arab world in doing so, she represents an America that is conspiratorial and inundated with religious zealotry. After 9/11, Halaby's American characters become increasingly intolerant and distrustful of Arabs and Islamic cultures. Halaby, then, portrays intolerant and xenophobic American characters overwrought with suspicion and paranoia and reveals a post 9/11 America that is rife with anti-Arab racism. Halaby also suggests that the pervasive American perception of a world distinctly divided between …

The New Pilgrim's Progress, Anglican Longings, And Eighteenth-Century Missionary Fantasies, Laura M. Stevens

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

At its core, this paper is a recovery project, focused on a neglected novel, and so I will begin with a brief plot summary. The New Pilgrim's Progress, or, The Pious Indian Convert, first published in London in 1748, tells the story of its narrator, James Walcot, a young Anglican clergyman who, feeling called to convert the heathens of America, emigrates to Jamaica. There he nearly triggers an uprising by telling slaves that he believes slavery to be unjust. He then sails to Charles Town, South Carolina, where he becomes personal chaplain to a wealthy landowner and assists …

Carlyle, Arnold, And Wilde: Art And The Departure From Humanism To Aestheticism In The Victorian Era, Caitlin Larracey

Undergraduate Review

The Victorian era of British literature spanned almost an entire century and saw writers from Carlyle to Rossetti, Kipling to Barrett Browning, and Dickens to Tennyson. The fabric of London changed as industry and invention flourished, along with poverty and social decay. Significant changes in politics, science, and religious thinking emerged as well. As British society moved further away from its roots in agriculture and devout religion, British literature also moved further away from its roots in Renaissance humanism towards the decadence and aestheticism that characterize late nineteenth-century works. By tracing the shift of styles and use of rhetorical devices …

Dismembering The Master Narrative: Michelle Cliff’S Attempt To Rewrite Jamaican History In Abeng, Marissa Petta

English Senior Seminar Papers

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay's first paragraph.

Abeng by Michelle Cliff is a coming- of-age novel set in colonial Jamaica. The heroine, Clare, struggles with defining herself across the lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Intertwined with Clare’s journey to find herself is a large discussion of Jamaica’s history as a colonial territory as well as the permanent effects of English colonization on the island. Cliff recognizes that the typical European history of Jamaica is told through the eyes of superior white male colonizers and it most commonly shows that all things native and/or black …

A Memoir Of Uncertainty:Tim O’Brien’S Vietnam Narratives, Mitchell Bailey

English Senior Seminar Papers

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay's first paragraph.

Uncertainty is human. It is part of our nature. As unique individuals, we see the world differently than those around us, sometimes subtly; in other cases fundamentally, different. Uncertainty deals with the way we understand and interpret information; experiences, education, emotions, and biases affect comprehension. Uncertainty displays itself in the decision-making process. (Cohen 40) Humans react to provocations much differently than others. Decisions are based on the nature of these internal and external impressions. All warfare is uncertain because it is human based. As humans, it is our very …

Deterritorialization, Pure War, And The Consequences Of Indian Captivity In Transnational Colonial Discourse, Billy J. Stratton

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

The genre of the captivity narrative has operated as a vital circuit for transnational colonial discourse since its inception. Throughout the age of discovery, accounts of the captivity became an indispensible means of connecting the European metropole to foreign lands in Asia and Africa, as well as North and South America. The development of the Indian captivity narrative within the Atlantic context functioned as an effective tool for the dissemination of knowledge concerning the New World and its Indigenous inhabitants. In this essay, I examine some of the ways in which the captivity narrative functions as a colonial apparatus vital …

The Sacrament Of Violence: Myth And War In C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, Tanya Engelhardt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My primary aim for this study is to illuminate the Ransom trilogy's inherent psychological and spiritual themes, as well as demonstrate how these themes clarify Lewis's philosophical and political goals for the text. Specifically, by investigating Lewis's mythic imagery and suffering motifs in light of psychoanalytic and theological literary criticisms, I elucidate the reasoning behind Lewis's unique—and at times, horrific—portrayal of fear, violence, and death. I also investigate how Lewis integrates his theology with the horrors of personal and intrapersonal suffering, as well as how he utilizes imagination and myth to explicate the practical (or political) implications of his theodicy. …

"What Shall We Use To Fill The Empty Spaces?": Displacement In Frank Norris's Mcteague, Jennifer Bugna Lambeth

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Author's abstract: McTeague, Frank Norris's Naturalistc text written in 1899, depicts the corruption of a California couple due to influences outside of their control. In positioning Trina McTeague as a woman unable to identify with either of the two major feminine ideologies of the day, the Angel in the House and the New Woman, this paper examines her identity as conflicted because of this lack of autonomy. Her failure to identify herself leads to a mental break that is reflected in the domestic spaces she inhabits. The places she lives each become smaller and dirtier reflecting her diminished mental capacity. …

The Big Green Mama-Mind-Fuck Machine, Byron W. Cross

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

PREFACE

"so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens."

-W. C. Williams

The Big Green Mama-mind-fuck Machine was born in a debris field of violence, of conflict. I write mostly from an autobiographical place and a debris field is the perfect way to describe the careful stitching together of my experiences, taking a memory and extracting the emotional boom it left behind. I take the piece and spin it in zero gravity, carefully examining it. For this reason, writing an Ars Poetica without "I" would be an impossibility for me. So, after …

Linguistics And The Study Of Comics , Frank Bramlett

Faculty Books and Monographs

Editor: Frank Bramlett, UNO faculty member.

Chapter 8: Linguistic Codes and Character Identity in Afro Samurai, authored by Frank Bramlett.

Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? What is the impact of English on comics written in other languages? These questions and many more are answered in this volume, which brings together the two fields of comics research and linguistics to produce groundbreaking scholarship. With an international cast of contributors, the book offers novel insights into the role …

Christianity, John C. Hawley

English

According to tradition and to the early church historian Eusebius, Christianity was preached in Ethiopia by the apostle Matthew before it reached Europe; Mark the evangelist is said to have established the church in Alexandria in 43 C.E. What is clear is that some of the most important early Christian theologians were from northern Africa: Augustine, from present-day Algeria, and Clement and Origen, from present-day Egypt. The monastic movement in the early church drew its inspiration from these writers. By the 4th century, Christianity was well established in what are today Ethiopia and Eritrea, and was centered in a city …

Pledging Peace In Aldous Huxley’S Eyeless In Gaza, Charles Andrews

English Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …

Prose And Polarization: Environmental Literature And The Challenges To Constructive Discourse, Paige E. Costello

CMC Senior Theses

This work explores how authors employ literary modes to persuade readers towards one side or another of the environmental debate and whether the works promote constructive discourse on environmental issues. It uses two seminal works from each side of the environmental discourse, Silent Spring and The Population Bomb and The Ultimate Resource and The Skeptical Environmentalist, to analyze stylistic differences and similarities, to compare public reception, and to explain the increasing polarization of environmental discourse.

Diesen Kufl Der Ganzen Welt!: Locating German Enlightenment Through The Idea Of Tolerance, Paul E. Kerry

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Where does one find the German Enlightenment? General surveys and otherwise highly serviceable scholarly readers on the Enlightenment tend to neglect it. A recent book on the German Enlightenment by T. J. Reed observes that for many outside Germany, including scholars, the connection Aufklarung und deutsch (Enlightenment and German) is almost paradoxical. Why should this be so? One explanation is that the German Enlightenment is overshadowed by the French Enlightenment. A second explanation is that late-nineteenth-century Germany is associated with a turn away from Enlightenment ideas, in part a countervailing reaction to the terror of the Napoleonic Wars and French …

The Enlightenment Tradition Of Hume And Smith In Austen: Windows To Understanding, Nicole Coonradt

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith notes the importance of "little department[s]"-those smaller circles of social contact: "By Nature the events which immediately affect that little department in which we ourselves have some little management and directions, which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events which interest us the most, and which chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows:' Alasdair MacIntyre would agree with this idea of one's sphere of influence, especially in the works of Jane Austen. Clearly, this concern with self, others, and country might …

Facing The Future With The Shield Of Aeneas: Virgil And The Testing Of Dryden's Catholic Faith In The 1690s, John J. Burke Jr.

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The shield of Aeneas has always had a sense of mystery about it. His shield, like that of Achilles in the Iliad, is not merely a physical object designed to protect him from crippling wounds or death while in battle; oddly, it is also a work of art. Moreover, it is a work of art that is supernatural in origin, fashioned in this instance by the Roman god Vulcan and presented to the Trojan exile Aeneas by his goddess mother, Venus, in book 8 of Virgil's Aeneid. There have been countless discussions of what we are to make …

Literary Annual, Katherine D. Harris

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

No abstract provided.

Subversive Liminality And Ideological Warfare: The Zombie Mash-Up As Resistance To Hypermasculine Revenge Narratives Post-9/11, Veronica L. Cooper

Online Theses and Dissertations

This project plots the coincidence of the "zombie renaissance" and system-justifying nationalist rhetoric post-9/11. The project discusses this cultural cross-section with zombie mash-up fiction, using masculinity and trauma theories, in an attempt to illuminate the motives of "us vs. them" rhetoric and hypermasculine revenge narratives in the post-9/11 decade. First, I use Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (2009) to examine liminality as subversive counter-discourse to the masculine hegemony post-9/11. Second, I use Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) to look at the effects of revenge culture and how non-emphasized femininity and hegemonic (hyper)masculinity co-construct each other.

Lines Of Communication: Uncovering War’S Reality Through Fictional Styles, Kelly Hoarty

English Student Scholarship

In looking at war literature, Word War I was a pivotal event in how many authors view the war and communicate its effects on society to their audiences. Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway are two novelists in the twentieth century, who wrote to portray the physical and psychological damage soldiers suffered in battle and upon returning home. All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque and The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway utilize different writing styles, but both effectively work within fiction to bridge the gap of understanding between the soldiers’ experiences and the civilians on the home front, …

The Two Gates, Evan Mitchell Frees

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis contains one short story and one novella. Both are set in a historical setting and contain themes of loyalty, duty, morality, and spirituality. What connects them is a common setting and similar conflicts, both internal and external, as well as the protagonist of the novella’s involvement with the conclusion of the short story. In my introduction, I show how three authors use setting to help portray three novels and one short story that are set in historical time periods and cultures. I then explain how I’ve adopted certain techniques to aid me with the creation of historical and …

The Great War And Narnia: C.S. Lewis As Soldier And Creator, Brian Melton

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

Looks at influence of World War I in Lewis’s autobiography and on war in Narnia, correcting mistaken search by some critics for deep-seated war trauma in Lewis’s life. Reinforces that Lewis and Tolkien were not psychological twins, had differing personalities going into the war, and came out of it with different approaches to dealing with war in their fiction. The Chronicles being children’s books, Lewis operated under certain self-imposed restrictions in writing them, and yet managed to convey some realistic lessons about war learned through his own harrowing experiences. Also addresses the issue of gaps in Lewis’s autobiography.

Fighting A War You've Already Lost: Zombies And Zombis In Firefly/Serenity And Dollhouse, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

This article explores the use of zombie imagery in two sf narratives created by Joss Whedon: Firefly (US 2002–3), Serenity (US 2005) and Dollhouse (US 2009–10). The translation of the zombie from its traditional horror-movie context to the far-future space opera of Firefly/Serenity and the near-future cyberpunk of Dollhouse reveals the zombie's allegorisation of the consequences of biopolitical governmentality and neoliberal capitalism. In both series zombies function as a figure for both the dehumanisation caused by state and market forces and the possibility of Utopian resistance to these forces.