Digital Commons Network^™

Full, Caleb Lewis

Bryant Literary Review

Be the cup,

have more purpose when you're filled up.

Unlike Mike, Caleb Lewis

Bryant Literary Review

We lost time while heat simmered on the blacktop.

Our hands stunk of warm rubber

Driving To Look Out Point To See The Sunset, Riley Mayes

Bryant Literary Review

My car or yours?

We already know the answer.

I Am Not A Home, Kiley Mcaleer

Bryant Literary Review

I am from many places, but none of them have ever quite been home. A mint green house where neighbors are always yelling and my dad comes to visit for a few hours every other weekend.

I Drop Your Photograph In The Sea, Claire Kuo

Bryant Literary Review

But I am the sailor submerged

in your endless blue --

Swimming Lessons, Rebecca Mear

Bryant Literary Review

It was time to learn to swim.

Creation’S Face In Moby-Dick, Richard Jackson Guignard Wells

Theses and Dissertations

In 1973, Gerhard T. Alexis published “Two Footnotes on a Faceless Whale” (AN&Q, vol. 11, pp. 99-100) to point out how Melville was alluding to an exchange between Yahweh and Moses in Exodus 33 during a commentary by Ishmael in Chapter 86 “The Tail” of Moby-Dick (1851). By using Ishmael’s allusion to the facelessness of Yahweh in relation to his hand in Exodus 33 as a window, I meditate on the relationship between the hand and face images more properly to propose how they are functioning in Melville’s epic in regard to the phenomenon of veiling. The corporeal body in …

Asexual Protagonists: What Their Patterns Reveal About The Representation Of Asexuality In Current Literature, Jaclyn Hernandez

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper analyzes the most popular books with asexual protagonists and what patterns concerning their gender, race, and romantic orientations reveal about the state of asexual representation in current literature.

Re-Imagining Digital Things: Sustainable Data In Medieval Manuscript Studies, Michelle R. Warren, Neil Weijer

Dartmouth Scholarship

The Middle English prose Brut chronicle survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts. This corpus has been the subject of extensive study for more than a hundred years. The most recent research, however, has turned out to be the most fragile. In 2017, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imaging History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” disappeared from the live Internet, only a decade after its publication. We describe the website’s lifecycle as well as our progress so far in creating a new dataset for the Brut corpus, “Re-Imagining History,” part of the ongoing project “Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of …

What Compels Millennial Parents To Buy Books For Their Children?, Emma Wolf

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

Millennials (those born between 1981-1996) make up the largest generation in U.S. history, and due to their relatively recent entrance into parenthood, there is little preexisting information available about their purchasing habits, which differ greatly from those of previous generations (McGee). Now that millennials are becoming parents, companies targeting the children of this generation—including those in the book publishing industry—would benefit from a better understanding of how and why this demographic chooses products; this paper focuses on how they buy books for their children. Through academic research and a survey of 150 participants, several indicators were discovered regarding how millennial …

2021 Greenleaf Review-- Voices In Color (No. 34), Sigma Tau Delta

The Greenleaf Review

No abstract provided.

A Commentary On The Interpretation Of Dreams, Kayla J. Baur

Publications and Research

Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams explains the role of the theory of psychoanalysis as it pertains to dreams. Freud then leads into the idea of how psychoanalysis as a theory applies to literature. Along with Oedipus Rex, Freud uses William Shakespeare’s Hamlet to exemplify the way in which literary texts express the desires, emotions, and/or memories of the unconscious mind, just as dreams-thoughts (unconscious desire) display themselves in dreams. Hamlet experiences troubling emotions upon the death of his father as he finds himself referring back to his childhood feelings about him, and thus finds it difficult to exact …

“Am I Wrong To Want Justice?”: How J. M. Coetzee’S Disgrace Forces Readers To Think Through The Problem Of Law, Nicholas Langenberg

Masters Theses

Since the publication of J. M. Coetzee’s first post-apartheid novel, Disgrace, a number of scholars have noted the ways that this text encourages its readers to re-think their understanding of law. Many other scholars have also noted the ways that Disgrace explores the ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. However, up until this point, there has been no analysis written that considers the legal explorations of Disgrace alongside the legal philosophies of Deleuze, and in this thesis, precisely such an analysis will be offered.

By considering these two bodies of work in light of one another, it will be …

Egyptian Stasis And Imperial Quick-Time: Recursive Xenophobia Cloaked In Mysticism, Laura S. Deluca

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I will be examining temporality in British texts about Egypt across time. In order to achieve this, I analyze the play Antony and Cleopatra (1606) by William Shakespeare, and put it in conversation with Pharos, the Egyptian (1899) by Guy Newell Boothby. I will also be discussing Alexandria (2009) by Lindsey Davis, as a demonstration that the pattern in my findings is enduring. I will be dissecting the portrayal of Egyptian temporality, which I have found to be conveyed as a stasis, as contrasted by the quick-time of dominating imperial powers. These sources will allow me to compare depictions of …

The Stolen Children: Their Stories: Aboriginal Child Removal Policy And Consequences, Peter U. Wildgruber

Student Publications

From 1910 to 1970, the Australian government embarked on a policy of Aboriginal child removal which sought to acculturate Aborigine children of mixed descent into white Australian society. The 1997 report, Bringing Them Home, records the individual testimonies of hundreds of victims of child removal and argues that prolonged familial separation caused irreparable damage to native Australian communities. Carmel Bird’s edited version of the report, The Stolen Children: Their Stories, was published in 1998 to disseminate the report's findings and advocate for legislative action. Her book includes the stories of seventeen individuals and responses to the original report …

Memory, Identity, And World Ii In Australia: Liz Reed's "Bigger Than Gallipoli", Christopher T. Lough

Student Publications

This paper is structured as a review of Liz Reed's 2004 study Bigger Than Gallipoli: War, History, and Memory in Australia, an analysis of the Australian government's public commemoration of the Second World War from 1994-95. Critiquing certain aspects of Reed's methodology, I bring in some of Jill Ker Conway's insights on Australian identity from her 1989 memoir The Road from Coorain, as well as other scholars of historical memory and political theory. While Reed makes some important insights on the merits and deficiencies of political nostalgia, I argue that her book represents a missed opportunity overall.

The Narrow Road To The Deep North By Richard Flanagan, Patrick R. Sullivan

Student Publications

A review of Richard Flanagan's novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This paper looks at the background, the themes, the story, and the contribution of this novel to the conversations on the Burma Railway, war, legacy, and love. The usage of the novel form by Flanagan contributes greatly to the power of his novel which becomes a major analytical point of this paper.

“Around We Go”: The Apocalypse As Revolution And Revelation In David Mitchell’S Cloud Atlas, Emma G. Schilling

Student Publications

The tradition of global disasters in literature is long-standing and David Mitchell contributes to that discussion. For him, the possibility of political, social, and environmental collapse is imminent based on patterns he traced throughout human history. One common thread Mitchell weaves throughout his works is the presence and the relevance of the apocalyptic. In his best known work, Cloud Atlas, Mitchell explores the cyclical trends of humanity across time and space, including the recurrence of predacity, cruelty, and systematic oppression. Rather than being overwhelmed by a nihilistic reality, Mitchell centers Cloud Atlas around recurring figures of revolution, resisting and …

“Where Beauty And Anguish Had Contended”: Eden, Gender, And Creativity In Melville’S Pierre, Kersey Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations

Much critical interest regarding incest in Pierre has been focused horizontally on the Glendinning family tree, in terms of the brother-sister relationship forged between Pierre Glendinning and Isabel Banford. But this thesis evaluates incest within Melville’s scheme of creativity and gender in the novel. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have established, to author a text is to become owner of its subjects—a father of one’s “brain-children” (Gilbert and Gubar 7). So, as Pierre writes Isabel into the Glendinning name, the incestuous relationship between Pierre and Isabel may be viewed through the lens of a father-daughter dynamic between the …

A Brief And True Report Of The Newfoundland Of Virginia, Thomas Hariot

English 144 Class Projects

No abstract provided.

“Everything Will Be As It Is Now, Just A Little Different”: Affectively Imagining Alternative Worlds In Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Grace Riley

Theses and Dissertations

One of the most crucial concerns of cultural criticism today is the question of how to grapple with what Mark Fisher refers to as the “malaise” of the present; the pervasive belief that capitalism is the only viable option, that there is no alternative ‘other.’ However, there remains a vibrant scholarship committed to resisting such pessimism that theorizes the possibility of alternative, utopian futures that lie athwart the apocalyptic present. This thesis explores the question of how one begins to imagine such alternative futures from within a capitalist order that constantly works to pre-emptively subsume any possibilities of resistance. Art …

Sacrificial Bodies And Hegemonic Femininity: The Creation Of The Heroine In The Twilight, The Hunger Games, & Divergent Series, Tiffany R. Boyles

Senior Theses

Within this thesis, I analyze The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games Trilogy, and The Divergent Trilogy and how the portrayal and treatment of the protagonists’ bodies within these texts uphold tenets of white, hegemonic femininity. I discuss first how their bodies are feminized, in part by their whiteness and smallness, but also through the comparison to the bodies of male characters. While the men are strong and physically capable, the protagonists are weak and physically incapable. As a result, the protagonists cannot act in the way a traditional hero might, using offensive action for self-preservation. Instead, the protagonists …

The Voyage Of The Reunion, Hamilton Keller Bright

Masters Theses

The Voyage of the Reunion is a collection of short stories centered around three men, Captain Adams, Mr. Freire, and Reverend Kaff, on a mission to reunite Earth’s lost colonies with the galaxy at large. However, not all is well on these lost worlds, and many dangers await them in the darkness of space. In the course of their journey, they wrestle with questions of mankind’s relation to technology, personal identity, and what it means to be human.

Pecan Grove Review Digital Archive, Cristal Rose Mendez

Capstone Projects

I created a digital archive for the Pecan Grove Review, a literary magazine published by St. Mary’s University. This project digitized the collection of nineteen issues, dating back to 1996, making the magazine accessible to the public. Powered by Omeka-S, this site will also include future issues of the Pecan Grove Review, historical information related to the magazine, and can be used to collect writing submissions and volunteer applications.

Transgressive Migrations: Gender Roles, Space, And Place In American Novels, 1900-1999, Selena Gail Larkin

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine how gender roles combine with changes in space and place to affect women protagonists in twentieth-century American literature. I argue that as these characters migrate, the (self-)perception of their identities shift. Particularly, their outward performances as well as their internal awareness change. My analysis concentrates on the novel genre because of specific characteristics—plot, characterization, and narration. The chosen literary works on which I focus are The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Quicksand (1928), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Dollmaker (1954), and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996).

Concepts that I …

“What Can There Be But Witchcraft?”: History, Women, And Witches In Sylvia Townsend Warner’S Lolly Willowes And Graham Swift’S Waterland, Thomas Bedenbaugh

Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous relationship between history, women and witchcraft in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Graham Swift’s Waterland foregrounds the constructedness of historical narratives while also recuperating women’s marginalized positions within history. Both novels link historical narratives with the received ideas upon which norms of gender, sexuality, and the nation are constructed. In recognizing this, both authors challenge the monolithic male gaze of history, revealing it to be a story which, totalizing as it may be, is not in fact “natural.” While many women in both novels are configured as haunting figures - women who confuse the boundary separation presence …

Sanctuary Poetics And Contemporary Us Culture, Alex Howerton

Theses and Dissertations

Sanctuary Poetics and Contemporary US Culture argues that contemporary poets of color create spaces of safety, relation, and justice through the act of writing as resistance itself. Sanctuary Poetics discusses poetry responding to the myriad crises of our contemporary moment, and considers how poets, through formal techniques such as ekphrasis or synecdoche, envision moments of shelter and connection that provide necessary relief to imperiled populations. I introduce the idea of a sanctuary poetics through Amanda Gorman’s recent poem “The Hill We Climb,” performed at Joseph Biden’s inauguration. The first chapter covers citizenship and the work of the Undocupoets, a multiracial …

“Power And The Orientations Of Resistance In Twentieth-Century American Literature”, Victoria Eleanor Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

"Power and the Orientations of Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Literature” analyzes the intersections of space, power, and the possibility for alternatives to power structures. I argue that social power circumscribes the spatial possibilities of normative and non-normative subjectivities. In particular, power curtails the ability of marginalized subjects (such as women, queer people, and people of color) to forge alternatives to the current social order. In dialogue with recent scholars of race studies, feminism, and queer theory, this project reveals how dominated subjects employ their quotidian spaces as sites of resistance and survival. The literature I examine in this dissertation identifies …

Southern United States English As A Rhetorical Device In The Field Of Marketing: A Study And Implications For Business Writing Pedagogy, Megan Jacklynn Busch

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation project, I examine how professionals in the South use their Southern United States English (SUSE) to communicate in business situations. My goals are to (1) understand how regional language variety rhetorically shapes writtenprofessional communication and (2) establish a pedagogical framework for business writing that attunes to the nuances of language variation in the workplace. I hypothesize that speakers of SUSE implement regional dialects to form interpersonal business connections and build ethos and that SUSE has a significant rhetorical role to place in professional communications. To test this hypothesis, I develop a hybrid method of interviewing, discourse analysis, …

Uprooting Medievalism: Ya And The Future Of Fantasy, Zoe Phillips

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

This thesis looks at the development of the young adult neo-medieval fantasy genre, measuring famous works from the Medieval period against works such as Tolkien's, to examine the impact of female protagonists and female authors on the genre and readers alike as neo-medieval fantasy continues to gain in popularity. Works examined include: Beowulf, Lanval, Le Roman de Silence, The Hobbit, Uprooted, and The Hero and the Crown.