Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Sherwood Anderson And The Industrial Corruption Of Midwestern Individualism, Hudson Rice

Senior Honors Theses

Sherwood Anderson’s literary Midwest reflects many of the idealistic characteristics resulting from the region’s frontier, agrarian origin. The most prominent of these characteristics is the region’s emphasis on and appreciation of human particularity. His novels Winesburg, Ohio and Poor White document the region’s unique relationship with individual particularity and how this particularity clashed with a new industrial lifestyle. The two novels reflect the Midwest’s unique understanding of individuality and offer an explanation for why the region’s response to an industrial cultural overhaul was so damaging for the Midwest’s identity, as the traditional identity was supplanted by an industrial one.

Discovering Dune: Essays On Frank Herbert’S Epic Saga., Edited By Dominic J. Nardi And N. Trevor Brierly, G. Connor Salter

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

G. Connor Salter reviews Discovering Dune: Essays on Frank Herbert’s Epic Saga, edited by Dominic J. Nardi and N. Trevor Brierly, considering its new contributions to studies of Frank Herbert's work. Essays included fit into four categories (Politics and Power, History and Religion, Biology and Ecology, and Philosophy, Choice and Ethics) and range from Herbert's use of ecology in Dune to how game theory may help explain certain characters' apparent ability to see the future. Discovering Dune also includes an appendix which contains the only up-to-date bibliography of Herbert's work (primary and secondary sources).

A New Atticus Is Afoot: The Portrayal Of Lawyers In Popular Culture, Anna Thrush

Senior Theses

This project analyzes the stereotypical image of lawyers in popular culture, focusing on either overly demonic or unrealistically heroic. Both stereotypes that are common portrayals of attorneys in popular culture are unrealistic and deny society a true comprehension of the profession. Popular culture has molded the image of lawyers to the characteristics that sell, rather than focusing on a realistic portrayal. Therefore, popular culture creates a falsely dramatized image of attorneys to generate revenue, putting the reputation and future of the profession as risk. These stereotypes are exemplified in this project through a close literary analysis of lawyer characters from …

Robert X House Collection, Dan Bonenberger, Brooke Boyst, Franklin Haywood, Carrie Malas, Jaclyn Panter, Ian Tomashik, Laura Waskiwicz, Taylor Williams, Austin Martin

Digital Heritage Preservation Collection

This collection examines the Robert X House at 18827 Keystone Street in Detroit, Michigan, a significant site in the history of the Nation of Islam and the broader narrative of Black empowerment and civil rights in mid-20th century America. Originally built in 1951 as a modest Federal Housing Administration (FHA) minimum ranch-style home, the property was purchased by Robert Davenport (later known as Robert X), an influential leader in the Nation of Islam. The house became a hub for religious instruction, community-building, and activism.

Robert X, a former boxer and musician, became a prominent figure in Detroit’s Nation of Islam …

Masculine Desire And Feminine Imitation: Contextualizing Heterosexual Relationships In Sister Carrie, Jennifer L. White

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

Theodore Dreiser is generally considered one of the greatest American naturalist authors across the genre. His depiction of life is gritty and harsh, his characters at the mercy of their natural impulses and their unforgiving environment. However, there is also a sentimental element to Dreiser’s work, especially in his portrayal of romantic relationships. In the face of unrelenting adversity, there is a glimmer of possibility in the longing for meaningful human connection, if only under different circumstances. While Dreiser’s naturalistic approach suggests that such relationships can never be truly fulfilling due to either the innate frailty of the participants or …

Still Lending You The World: The Toledo Lucas County Public Library In The 21st Century, Cade Clem

Honors Projects

This research paper focuses on how the Toledo Lucas County Public Library (TLCPL) has adapted to the 21st century, with an emphasis on the impact of digital materials and the Internet. This paper looks at these changes primarily through three lenses: official policies, services and programs, and internal culture. This paper uses quantitative data to determine if TLCPL has maintained overall growth in areas such as number of cardholders, customer counts, circulation, computer usage, and program attendance. These numbers show that, while not always maintaining growth, TLCPL has adapted quite well to the 21st century, bringing in record high numbers …

The Ambush At Saint Marys River, Micah P. Bellamy

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

At a critical time in the American Civil War, President Lincoln was up for re-election, concerned that he might lose re-election, President Lincoln desired the Union to secure Florida. As Col. Guy Henry led an advancement from Jacksonville, Florida, across the northwest, there came word that the Confederate Army had a significant number of soldiers stationed at Lake City. Col. Henry and his men began to make their way towards Lake City, but on February 10, 1964, they were caught in an ambush as they attempted to cross the St. Marys River. This paper seeks to provide an examination of …

Teaching With And For Gender Equity, Katie Dineen

National Youth Advocacy & Resilience Conference

In this workshop, humanities educators will learn how to integrate primary sources, life stories, essays, and learning activities that center women’s voices, contributions, and experiences in their curricula and classrooms. Educators will pair provided resources to be meaningfully incorporated into existing humanities curricula, aiming to support students in recognizing their own agency, valuing diversity, and appreciating difference.

Utopian Promises, Dystopic Realities: Teaching Bell Hooks “No Love In The Wild”, Naimah H. Ford

Feminist Pedagogy

This original teaching activity discusses bell hooks’ film review of Beasts of The Southern Wild and explains how it can be used to encourage students to recognize how popular culture reproduces and reinforces disturbing paradigms. This original teaching activity, based on hooks’ review “No Love in The Wild,” encourages students to be informed while navigating visual images in popular culture. This activity also explains how hooks’ film review and the film can be used to empower students with strategies to analyze film and other visual images that are seemingly progressive but support the strictures and structures that reinforce patriarchy, racism, …

Quote Transcript, We Exist Series 5: Stories Of Education And Employment In Maine, University Of Southern Maine Digital Projects

Quotes

Accompanying materials for We Exist Series 5: Stories of Education and Employment in Maine.

Oo-Mah-Ha Ta-Wa-Tha (Omaha City), Fannie Reed Giffen, Susette La Flesche Tibbles, Judi M. Gaiashkibos

Zea E-Books Collection

“This little book tells many important tribal stories for today and for future generations. These historic vignettes of the Omaha Nation and its leaders are shared so personally by author Fannie Reed Giffen and her col­laborators, Susette and Susan La Flesche. It has been a treasure of mine for 25 years and I hope it becomes one of yours.

The re-publication of the original comes on the 125-year anniversary of the 1898 Omaha Trans-Mississippi Expo­sition and Indian Congress. Its arrival is timely as many of its stories and people are vital to our nation’s history. A sculpture of Omaha Chief …

The Owl House: Queerness And Witchcraft In Modern Media, Gray E. Takahashi

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

The Owl House is a groundbreaking television series on Disney Channel created by Dana Terrace. The show follows Luz, a young human, as she makes a new home for herself in a magical realm called the Boiling Isles. (Vorrasi-Banis 102). Within the series, there are many queer elements, in terms of literal LGBTQ+ representation as well as in a more expansive and critical sense. The Owl House is unique because of its willingness to break and queer a multitude of social conventions. This paper examines the evolution of the witch as both figure and trope of patriarchal resistance as well …

Remembering Complicity And Resistance: A Review Of Mihaela Mihai’S Political Memory And The Aesthetics Of Care: The Art Of Complicity And Resistance (2022), Sofía Forchieri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds …

Terada Torahiko, A Physicist And A Haikai Poet, Akira Komiya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads …

Orature: The Political Interpretation Of Performance Framework In Anthills Of The Savannah And Half Of A Yellow Sun, Jing Duan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity …

Loving Blackness: A Sense Experience, Ricardo J. Millhouse

Feminist Pedagogy

The late bell hooks framed feminist pedagogies as a set of practices and systems that provide a description of feminism, a feminist learning environment, and ways to cultivate a community that is ready for feminist instruction. Using intersectionality, hooks (1992) discussed “loving blackness” as a representational and destabilizing practice to de-center whiteness. hooks (1992, 20) writes, “loving blackness as a political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.” I propose a black feminist praxis teaching tool, “a sense experience,” …

‘Reading The Cultural Landscape’ In The ‘Birthplace’ Of Modern Race/Racism: Using Hooks To Invite Students In As Critical Knowledge Producers & Co-Conspirators, Danielle Docka-Filipek

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Apocalyptic Films: Don't Look Up, A Case Study, Elyse Kuperus

Student Work

"This idea that in the end, while science can offer reasoning and understanding, only faith can offer comfort, is not lost on the characters, and should not be lost on the viewer either."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the movie Don't Look Up from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/apocalyptic-films-dont-look-up-a-case-study/

Apocalyptic Films: Questions To Ask, Elyse Kuperus

Student Work

"When faced with our own world falling down around us, how will we act? Where will we turn?"

Posting about evaluating cinema from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/apocalyptic-films-questions-to-ask/

International Intrigue In The American Colonies, Arianna Vicinanza

Graduate Research Conference (GSIS)

Spies have always been a subject of intrigue, nowadays we are surrounded by films, tv series, and books based on undercover business. Usually espionage is associated with WW2 or the Cold War, two periods of times in which espionage and secret agencies were essential in order to gather critical information about the enemy. Despite common belief that secret services developed one century ago, espionage and Spy Rings are as old as time. Espionage is the oldest profession in the world, kings used spies to monitor the enemy or to discover plots going around the royal court. In the American Revolution, …

Writing Mississippi Delta Heritage: The Literary Creation Of Place, Maureen T. Richmond

Student Theses and Dissertations

Since the late twentieth century, scholars of Heritage Studies have spoken of the processual nature of cultural inheritance, claiming that even the most respected traditions are often composed of memory, imagination, and fragments of history combined and artfully assembled. This contemporary analysis of heritage as an ongoing construction or creation shares points of similarity with the process of literary creation. Both blend the observation of fact with the operations of imagination to construct a desired reality. Both can be used to construct a sense of place. Using the paradigm of heritage constructionism, this dissertation examines fiction in the form of …

Religion: A Repertoire Of Earth Ethics – A Study On The Ecospiritual Dimensions In Refuge: An Unnatural History Of Family And Place By Terry Tempest Williams, Nissi Karunya Ms., Shanthi K. Dr.

Between the Species

Ecological crisis, a contemporary reality has triggered a paradigm shift in human thinking and discourse. Greening of religion is a novel approach to the interpretation of religious literature. The purpose of this study is to identify how literature reflects religious ethics centred on ecology and it brings out perspectives of religion regarding environmental conservation. Through a close reading of the literary text Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams, this paper aims to validate how the ecological ethics of religions can be a solution to environmental crisis and how this ecological reformation in spirituality should …

Unsung Heroines In Black And White: Sixties Girl Groups As Sonic Rock Rebellion, Hilarie Ashton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Before the Beatles arrived in America, exploding open the intersection between pop music and the emerging genre of rock and in so doing, drawing heavily on the work of Black music and musicians, girl groups were powerfully enacting a kind of cultural rebellion in both of those genres. In contrast to the historical impulse to privilege a breathlessly incomplete white male lineage, "Unsung Heroines" examines in closer, more connected spotlights the subversive creative work of the Black and working-class teenage girls in the Ronettes, the Chiffons, and the Shangri-Las. Across four chapters, "Unsung Heroines" shows how these singers subversively tucked …

Bozo The Clown: An Icon As American As An Apple Pie In The Face, Gregory Kent Oswald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is no single path toward the creation of an American icon, a person or item with resonance to all in the country as well as having an ability to serve as a symbol of America itself for those outside the borders. This thesis considers certain elements that propelled the journey of the entertainment for children, Bozo the Clown, into a representational figure in the minds of young and old. Like all things American, his roots include many elements from outside the country: the name derives from foreign tongues mostly in derisory terms, but in at least one instance as …

Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

music lessons is a digital chapbook that explores the relationships between James Baldwin’s writing and Beauford Delaney’s paintings through music. From Delaney’s “Composition 16” (1954-56) to Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), their collaboration with the core elements of jazz music gives their work rhythm and melodic contour that any/body can vibe with. Absorbing the influences of artists Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and putting them to paint and text, music lessons demonstrates how music not only transforms the ways we experience and move our bodies but also the ways that we perceive space, relationships, and time. What’s …

Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life, Marshall N. Armintor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In late 2011, ex-Amazon developer Steve Yegge’s rant about his former company described Amazon’s rapid transformation from an online bookstore to a web-services entity with a ruthlessly unified platform, all guided by the idea that the company’s effort to streamline its internal efficiency could be monetized, and the resultant software products sold through Amazon Web Services. The media consumerism that fed Amazon’s early years funded a surveilling behemoth, one that everyone feared Microsoft would become. As such, AWS has become a manifestation of the internet’s Lacanian unconscious (even providing the services and hosting for Reddit), structured around the optimization of …

Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data, Macy Mcdonald

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ever since ProPublica published their groundbreaking analysis of Northpointe’s Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Core Risk and Needs Assessment software (COMPAS) in 2016, this web-based decision support system (DSS) has spawned a wide range of critiques and charges of racial bias. COMPAS provides a full suite of decision support applications to the US prison-industrial complex, including algorithmically derived recidivism predictions that increasingly guide parole decisions. The larger conversation surrounding COMPAS raises the question of how we analyze powerful, and yet opaque, data assemblages. In this article, I model an allegorical analysis of data assemblages. I argue the skills …

Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure, Irina Kalinka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together …

The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …

“There Is No Pandemic”: On Memes, Algorithms And Other Interpassive Forms Of Right-Wing Disbelief, Scott Krzych

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay examines several prominent memes that have circulated on Right-wing social media during the Covid-19 pandemic. The memes coordinate what I describe as a mode of interpassive humor, which positions those who “believe” in the crisis as naïve dupes, infantilizing those subjects who have fallen prey to the idea that they should take the pandemic seriously, and thereby delegating fearfulness to the other so that reactionary Covid-19 denialists may continue with their lives unaffected. The essay thereby seeks to draw suggestive lines of affiliation between studies of digital memes, evolutionary mimetics, and psychoanalytic theory, pointing to the algorithmic …