Digital Commons Network^™

‘Misticall Unions’: Clandestine Communications From Tristan To Twelfth Night, George W. Eggers

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that important modes of self-definition in the Renaissance draw on the linguistic uncertainty in medieval literary constructions of lovers. Just as in Renaissance texts, medieval lovers such as Tristan and Isolde fashion themselves as a “misticall union”: a conglomerate self that shares one mind and erases all distinctions between sender and receiver as well as grammatical subject and object. This unity expresses itself in the lovers’ inexplicable ability to interpret correctly the most arbitrary of messages from one another while misleading those around them. Considering Shakespearean lovers in this context suggests how deeply this model of self-definition …

Presentation Of Bicultural Identity In Hispanic Children’S Literature, Elena B. Lofton

Honors Theses

Children of all backgrounds can use literature as a means to understand the world in which they live. Therefore, it is important that children’s books represent diverse cultures and experiences. This study analyzed Hispanic children’s literature published in the U.S. that contained child characters with bicultural Hispanic-American identities. The aim of this study was to determine how the linguistic and literary elements in five books, which contained bilingual Spanish-English interwoven text, combined to present a bicultural identity and lifestyle in the United States today. The literary elements analyzed included themes, character portrayal, the roles of family and the elderly, and …

The Fascination Of Manga: Cross-Dressing And Gender Performativity In Japanese Media, Sheena Marie Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The performativity of gender through cross-dressing has been a staple in Japanese media throughout the centuries. This thesis engages with the pervasiveness of cross-dressing in popular Japanese media, from the modern shōjo gender-bender genre of manga and anime to the traditional Japanese theatre. Drawing on theories from gender-studies and performance aesthetics to delineate the female gender in traditional Japanese theatre, I follow the roles of, representation of, and media for women, concentrating on (1) manga, a form of sequential art featuring illustrations with corresponding text, (2) anime, animated productions (where the word anime is the abbreviated pronunciation of “animation” in …

The Art And Science Of Literary Study, Jamie Carr

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The discipline of literary studies has recently gained powerful allies in the sciences and popular media. Scholars in the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and cognitive psychology, have newly taken up literature's defense, conducting empirical studies to prove that literature has value—particularly researching whether fiction reading produces empathy. Both the media reports, and the empirical studies themselves, however, fail to acknowledge a long history of literary criticism and theory that articulate similar claims. Implicit in this subtext, is the privileging of empirical over interpretive or theoretical ways of knowing. In this discourse, literary criticism is broadly criticized for its variability and …

An Inquiry Into A Literary Depiction Of The Construction Of Reality Through The Use Of Nondualism In Vandana Singh's Distances, Amanda Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Vandana Singh's Distances reasons why existence is its own purpose from the framework of nondualism (Advaita Vedanta in Hindu philosophical nondualism). Singh uses her knowledge of concepts from nonduality and represents that which underlies existence for the Advaitan. The concept of a primary state is depicted through the use of nondualist philosophy and the symbol of Vara in Distances. The representation of the binary or triadic structure inherent within nonduality is depicted as Singh creates philosophical realms to construct a novel of latticed meaning-ultimately questioning understanding over experiencing. Singh weaves together a challenging work that lends a poetry to …

(Re)Animating The Horror Genre: Explorations In Children's Animated Horror Films, Megan Estelle Troutman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to define the subgenre of children's animated horror film by examining its classification within the children's film genre and its use of generic conventions of horror. While this project does not aim to conflate children's film as a genre and animation as a medium, the scope of this project will be limited to children's animated horror films from 1993 - present day. In order to explore the subgenre of children's animated horror films from 1993-present, I will focus specifically on the following films: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were …

"Keep Funding Or Else... It's Mustaches": Building A Community Of Literacy At Owl Creek, Ian Whitlow

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The following research report on literacy practices presents an analysis of the data collected over the course of four months at Owl Creek middle school in Northwest Arkansas. Following a qualitative research protocol, I interacted with middle school students who participated in the Razorback Writers after-school literacy outreach program sponsored by the University of Arkansas. This report details the two major literacy practices encouraged in this after school program - the collective read-aloud sessions focusing on the graphic novel I Kill Giants, and the students' creation of their own graphic novels, which were developed in group workshops. In the following …

Julian Of Norwich: Voicing The Vernacular, Therese Elaine Novotny

Dissertations (1934 -)

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), the subject of my dissertation, was a Christian mystic whose writings, Revelation of Love and A Book of Showings, are the earliest surviving texts in the English language written by a woman. The question that has puzzled scholars is how could a woman of her time express her vision in such innovative and literary language? The reason scholars have puzzled over this for centuries is that women had been denied access to traditional education. Some scholars have answered this problem through close textual comparisons linking her text to those in the patristic tradition or through modern …

Obedience Across Romans : Tracing A Book Wide Theme And Illustrating Obedience With Greco-Roman Literature, Jason Andrew Myers

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

"Le Créole Est Chez Moi": Le Créole Haïtien Et Dany Laferrière, Jessica Gerdisch

French: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Sailing To Babylon / Virtue, Big As Sin, Stephen Kampa

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 177-185

Split / Small Porcelain Head / The Tulip Flame, Michelle Chan Brown

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 166-170

The Liquid Nature Of Self In Maxine Kingston's Autobiographical Story The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Jablonski

ETD Archive

This work examines the notion of self in the autobiographical narrative of Maxine Hong Kingston. Self-writing is constructing a discursive body, and Kingston presents the reader with a unique articulation of her identity. Conventional autobiographical narratives tend to define a self as an opposition to the other. In such texts the literary discourse is intended to secure the integrity of the self. This image of the self can be called conventional. While the conventional narrative self claims to demonstrate developmental stages of an individual that acquires his or her maturity by the end of the quest, the constantly changing self …

Truth, Lies And Literature: An Examination Of Representations Of Power In Mario Vargas Llosa’S The Feast Of The Goat, Claude Chianesse

Theses & ETDs

The Feast of the Goat is a novelistic depiction of the lasting and detrimental effects that one particular individual, in this case the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, has on the people of the Dominican Republic. The novel creates a portrayal of this individual through which we can see the effects of corruption on his own mind and the unprecedented consequences of his power. With this novel we take a close look into the mind of power and examine the ways in which Trujillo constructed himself up to be an essential aspect of Dominican public and private life virtually without any …

Reading Of/Writing Through Copy/Paste: An Examination And Practice Of Appropriative Poetry, Taylor Barton

Theses & ETDs

This senior project begins with a chronological and theoretical examination of the development of appropriative tactics in poetry and literature over approximately the past one hundred years. Following is a collection of original poetry composed by appropriative means. Following each poem is an examination of the process that brought it about, and a consideration of its theoretical and conceptual implications. I borrowed every word of each poem from preexisting material, reformatted and re-contextualized them, and made them into new works, calling into question traditional notions of authorship, creativity, and originality. I attempted to incorporate experimental, conceptual, procedural appropriation with the …

Travel Literature In Dialogue: Negotiated Resistance In The Colonial Encounter, Jessica Loeb

Theses & ETDs

This thesis examines representation and resistance in the colonial encounter through a literary analysis of the following four books: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) and Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1995). These books are organized in chapter form in pairs, representing masculine and feminine, colonized and colonizer, Western and native, fiction and non-fiction perspectives. The literature covers a multiplicity of diverse times and places, yet all deal with similar problems, and in many ways are in dialogue with one another …

The Mockingbird - 2015, Department Of Art And Design, East Tennessee State University, Department Of Literature And Language, East Tennessee State University

The Mockingbird [magazine]

Blaine Boles [My Father]; Kevin Brown [Heterophemize (from A Lexicon of Lost Words], Latibulate (from A Lexicon of Lost Words]]; Dayna Bruell [Black and Blue]; Danielle Byington [About a Cheerleader I Used to Know, The Shining, Thunder and Nursery Rhymes, On The Lady and the Unicorn]; Raleigh Cody [Broken Handle, Digging Trench in Unicoi, TN]; Rima Day [Untitled]; V. Kelsey Ellis [Doomed Beauty]; Tucker Foster [Excerpts from “Driving Like an Idiot”]; Lauren Fowler [The Cut]; Trish Gibson [On Jack and the Dead Old Lady in the Bathtub from Brantner: Annalee 16, Taylor 24, Mariah 18, Catlett: Anna 16, Jackson 12]; …

A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon

Theses and Dissertations--English

Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public …

Why Are Grimms' Fairy Tales So Mysteriously Enchanting?, Ana Neophytou

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Trauma Thesis: Medical And Literary Representations Of Psychological Trauma In The Twentieth Century, Sarah Louise Eilefson

Dissertations

The historian Samuel Hynes has observed that World War I was not only the greatest military and political event of its time but also the greatest imaginative event. Soldiers and civilians struggled to comprehend the war’s devastation and the changes it produced while medical practitioners and artists examined the war as a site of extraordinary trauma. My project explores two of the many archives of trauma: the medical discourse through which trauma was defined; and representations of trauma in a variety of English language novels from the early and mid-twentieth century. I begin with a historical survey of the medical …

Censorship And Intolerance In Medieval England, Richard Obenauf

Dissertations

Censorship is difficult to prove conclusively in the Middle Ages because manuscript culture is susceptible to the destruction of evidence, namely by burning works deemed unacceptable. Moreover, medieval authors were subject to many forms of intolerance which shaped their literary decisions. This dissertation proposes that the roots of formal print censorship in England are to be found in earlier forms of intolerance which sought to enforce conformity and that censorship is not distinct from intolerance, but rather is another form of intolerance. I draw on political writings by Peter Abelard, John of Salisbury, and William of Ockham to establish a …

How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(Con)Figures Race And Gender, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(con)figures Race and Gender" Beatriz Revelles-Benavente explores Morrison's Facebook page and comments on it. In 2010, Morrison opened a Facebook page where she received a large amount of comments and created debates and Revelles-Benavente analyses how these comments navigate questions of race and gender. Based on theoretical considerations about issues of race and gender in cyberculture and applied to the narratives posted on Morrison's Facebook page, Revelles-Benavente argues that the problematics of race and gender are relational and the question needs to be centered on the object of study as the relation …

Writers, Readers, And The Sharing Of Consciousness: Five Nepali Novels, Michael Hutt

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies

In his seminal book Literature, Popular Culture and Society, Leo Lowenthal argues that studies of the representation of society, state, or economy in the literature of a particular country or time contribute to our knowledge of ‘the kind of perception which a specific social group—writers—has of specific social phenomena’ and therefore to our knowledge of the ‘history and sociology of shared consciousness’ (1961: 143). This discussion will focus on five Nepali novels published between 2005 and 2010, i.e. during the final months of the internal conflict between the CPN (Maoist) and the monarchical state, and the period of political transition …

Tales That Tell All: A Political Analysis Of Folktales Of Iran, Yass Alizadeh

Doctoral Dissertations

This research presents an analytical study of the rewritten folktales of Iran in 20^th century, and investigates the ideological omissions and revisions of oral tales as textual productions in modern Iran. Focusing on the problematic role of folktales as tales about the unreal and the fantastic serving a political purpose, this study traces the creative exercises of Iranian storytellers who apply ideological codes and meanings to popular folk language. The works of Mirzadeh Eshqi (1893-1924), Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951), Samad Behrangi (1939-1968) and Bijan Mofid (1935-1984) are examples of a larger collection of creative writing in Iran that through the …

Foreign Language News, Georgia Southern University

World Languages & Cultures: News & Publications (2013-2023)

• Dr. Dolores Rangel published in Tema y variaciones de literatura
• Dr. Marcela Ruiz-Funes published in book

• Teresa Buzo Salas published in La Voz Latina

Bound By Words: Oath-Taking And Oath-Breaking In Medieval Lceland And Anglo-Saxon England, Gregory L. Laing

Dissertations

The legal and literary texts of early medieval England and Iceland share a common emphasis on truth and demonstrate its importance through the sheer volume of textual references. One of the most common applications of truth-seeking in these sources occurs in the swearing of oaths. Instances of oath-taking and oath-breaking, therefore, are critical textual loci wherein the language of swearing unites an individual’s socially constructed reputation and his personal guarantees under the careful supervision of the community. Traditionally, scholars looking at truth and attestation from the later medieval period tend to view early cases of swearing as procedural, artless, or …

Japanese Poetry And Nature In Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida, Shoshannah Ganz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida" Shoshannah Ganz shows how the limited focus of research on Roo Borson oversimplifies the poetry and ignores the tradition that Borson is aligning her work with both in form and content: classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and their perspectives on nature. Further, Ganz explores the ways in which Borson's poetry overcomes intuitively the binaries of East/West, human/non-human, and the further binaries within the human/non-human created through representational language. Ganz contextualizes Borson's work within the master/disciple lineage of Chinese and Japanese tradition and explores how Borson …

All At One Point: The New Physics Of Italo Calvino And Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Thomas Rinaldi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work of comparative literary criticism focuses on the presence of mathematical and scientific concepts and imagery in the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, beginning with an historical overview of scientific philosophy and an introduction to the most significant scientific concepts of the last several centuries, before shifting to deep, scientifically-driven analyses of numerous individual fictions, and finally concluding with a meditation on the unexpectedly fictive aspects of science and mathematics. The close readings of these authors' fictions are contextualized with thorough explanations of the potential literary implications of theories from physics, mathematics, neuroscience and chaos theory. …

Remapping The Present: Dave Eggers's Spatial Virtuality And The Condition Of Literature, Nathan Frank

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Piggy-backing on the spatial turn in literary studies, this paper "remaps the present" by making a parallel spatial turn in virtual theory. Surveying and synthesizing the many invaluable contributions to conceptualizing virtuality - from those of Bergson and Deleuze through to those of Daniel Downes and Brian Massumi - a "spatial virtuality" accounts for an increasing focus on digitization without dismissing the previous (and, at times, prescient) preoccupations with temporal virtualities. But I also frame spatial virtuality in terms of N. Katherine Hayles' compelling work in which virtuality is a condition. Within such a framework, many things happen, not the …

My/Mi Lengua Franca: "Language," Manipulation, And Cultural Heritage In Chicana Art And Literature, Elena Avilés

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

Chicana feminist literary and artistic cultural production since the second half of the twentieth century is characterized with a critical sensibility commissioning the arts to actively interrogate how cultural mores misconstrue female identity. By questioning the miss'-representation of cultural myths and images, Chicanas expose the patriarchal language and hegemonic discourse that code and sign cultural icons. Chicana feminist interrogations of traditional representations of La Malinche illustrate how signs are a construction, and thus, indefinite and plastic, like language. By combining various methodologies such as semiotics, visual analysis, cultural and feminist studies, this study underscores the significance of the development of …