Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Disability In Disney, Chloe Bartz

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

René Girard’s mimetic theory emphasizes the importance of imitation in shaping all human behavior, including desire. The questions driving this project were founded with human imitative behaviors in mind: Is Disney creating characters with disabilities that are inherently desirable to imitate (attractive, popular etc.)? Is Disney creating complex, dynamic characters with disabilities? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Within the Disney canon of animated films there are 13 characters identified as having physical disabilities. By tracking the language used to refer to these characters and their foils an alarming pattern was revealed. When formal titles, the character’s name, and nicknames were …

Where The Ground Was The Enemy: Setting As A Character In The Things They Carried, Mikayla Zobeck

19th Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2020)

This article examines the role of the setting in Tim O’Brien’s classic postmodern novel The Things They Carried. Based on close reading and researched analysis of the text itself, we demonstrate that O’Brien so thoroughly personifies the landscape and terrain of Vietnam that it becomes more than just the setting--it becomes a character. Moreover, the terrain becomes the principal antagonist faced by the narrator and his comrades.

Such a literary move allows the author to avoid demonizing the people, whether friend or foe, of Vietnam. After establishing our basic claim about the role of the landscape, we take our analysis …

Found In Translation: The Complexities Of Edgar Allan Poe In Translation By Charles Baudelaire, Kellyanne Fitzgerald

18th Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2019)

Literary critics have traditionally lauded Charles Baudelaire’s work in translation as the key reason for the success of Edgar Allan Poe in France. While Baudelaire’s voice and editorial choices did affect his translations, the success of his Poe translations was not entirely due to his choices. An idiosyncrasy in the relationship between Poe’s writing style and the structure of French syntax is one of several factors which elevate Poe in translation, which suggests a more complex situation than critics have previously realized. Understanding the context of a translation and the constituent factors of its success (or lack thereof) allows readers …

Mimetic Theory Meets The Oxford Inklings: Girard, Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, And Barfield, Curtis Gruenler

Faculty Presentations

What might the authors known as the Oxford Inklings (J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield) have thought about René Girard’s mimetic theory, if they had had a chance to encounter it? All are among the most prominent Christian literary thinkers of the past century, but in the case of the topic of myth, one that is important to all of them, they take what seem like opposite views. This talk begins with the criticisms the Inklings might have of the anthropological orientation of mimetic theory because of their interest in lively representations of the …

Six Easy Things Profs Can Do To Help Students Learn, David James

Faculty Presentations

No abstract provided.

How To Increase Global Learning In Your Classroom, Ernest D. Cole

Faculty Presentations

No abstract provided.

The 1876 Centennial Exposed: How Souvenir Publications Reveal Contrasting Attitudes Of Race And Gender In The Post-Bellum United States, Hope Hancock

Mellon Scholars' Works

The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 celebrated not only the 100-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence but the industrial innovation and reuniting of American society after the Civil War. Using two rare books about the Exhibiton, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 1876 and The Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exhibition by James Dabney McCabe, Jr., this project compares the portrayal of women and African Americans in the late 19th-century United States.

C. S. Lewis And René Girard On Desire, Conversion, And Myth: The Case Of Till We Have Faces, Curtis A. Gruenler

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How To Read Like A Fool: Riddle Contests And The Banquet Of Conscience In Piers Plowman, Curtis Gruenler

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Desire, Violence, And The Passion In Fragment Vii Of "The Canterbury Tales": A Girardian Reading, Curtis Gruenler

Faculty Publications

Part of a special issue on René Girard. The tales of fragment 7 of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales collectively address the problem of human violence and the potential of literature to perpetuate or remedy this problem. The narrative that links the two middles tales of fragment 7 provides a critique of violence that goes beyond mere opposition to war. In this narrative, Chaucer alludes to Christ's crucifixion and death in order to speak as a witness to suffering. In the first three tales of fragment 7—The Shipman's Tale, The Prioress's Tale, and Sir Thopas,—Chaucer depicts the tendencies to mythologize violence in …