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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Forgiveness And Literature, Michael Fischer
Forgiveness And Literature, Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
Imagine a community where constructive dialogue across political, class, and other differences is rare. Threatened by disagreement, individuals cluster together with like-minded believers, often egging one another on into taking even more extreme positions, usually against their ideological opponents. Sources of information are selected to ratify existing views instead of challenging them. Shielded from external perspectives, individuals stay stuck in anger, opposition, and resentment, recycling grievances against their enemies and spinning out fantasies of revenge.
George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando
George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando
English Faculty Research
George Saunders peoples his stories with the losers of American history—the dispossessed, the oppressed, or merely those whom history’s winners have walked all over on their paths to glory, fame, or terrific wealth. Among other forms of marginalization, Saunders’s subject is above all the American working class. In the last twenty or more years, however, for reasons that include the fall of the Soviet Union, the impact of poststructuralist theory, conceptualizations of identity that more and more take race and gender into consideration alongside class, and the general cultural turn in class analysis, it has become increasingly difficult to write …
My Kingdom: Sentimentalism And The Refinement Of Hymnody, Claudia Stokes
My Kingdom: Sentimentalism And The Refinement Of Hymnody, Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
Few features of mid-nineteenth-century American women’s literature seem as foreign and outdated today as the omnipresence of hymns. In countless literary works, hymns are quoted, sung, discussed, and contemplated. Hymns in these texts are rivaled in influence only by the Bible and are potent catalysts of religious experience, sparking conversion in the unbeliever and offering reassurance to the faithful during times of trouble. In the literary world of the American mid-century, the singing of a hymn can bring tears to the eyes of even the most hardened unbeliever. Such scenes pervade fiction of the period. During Ellen Montgomery’s sorrowful trip …