Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Maternal & Spiritual Healing In J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, Emily Pittman Hoste
Maternal & Spiritual Healing In J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, Emily Pittman Hoste
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
After World War II, spiritual and emotional healing was needed in America, despite a dependence upon materialism and conspicuous consumption for success. J.D. Salinger’s short-story cycle, Nine Stories (1953), explores what loss and trauma look like from all sides of war—mother, child, soldier, lover—all are harmed by war. Nine Stories emphasizes the need for nationwide spiritual healing and suggests that mothers offer the necessary antidote to consumeristic America. In fact, eight of Salinger’s Nine Stories employ one of three types of mothers: the self-serving and ineffectual mother; the spiritual, often surrogate maternal guide; and the ideal mother. While the ineffectual …
Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen
Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen
MSU Graduate Theses
By critically analyzing Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, I was able to conclude that the transgressive portrayal of hyperrealized consumerism warranted a close examination into the value American society places on an individual’s ability to replace authenticity for consumer obedience. Palahniuk’s dangerous representation of the body throughout the novel serves to highlight numerous ways in which a consumer transgresses against their own physical and mental well-being to achieve happiness constructed by capitalistic agendas. By using French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality in connection with gender, disability, and feminist theory and ecocriticism, I attempt to deconstruct the neoliberal ideology to which …
Simulating America: Ludocapitalism Of The 1990s In Wall Street Kid And Animal Crossing, Emily C. Byrne
Simulating America: Ludocapitalism Of The 1990s In Wall Street Kid And Animal Crossing, Emily C. Byrne
English Honors Theses
The 1990s witnessed a rapid and unprecedented growth in technology. People watched more television and film, conversed with strangers in anonymous chat rooms, messaged each other on personal pagers, and increased their consumption of video games. The 1990s mark the third decade of the video game industry’s existence. Similar to other forms of digital media, the video game industry participated in rapid technological development during the decade. Home and handheld consoles became increasingly widespread, driving players away from the arcades of the past. Genres such as the first person shooter, fighting games, and survival horror started gaining significant popularity. These …
Keeping Up With The Lammles: The Impact Of Wealth And Identity On Victorians In Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Haydn Jeffers
Keeping Up With The Lammles: The Impact Of Wealth And Identity On Victorians In Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Haydn Jeffers
English Class Publications
These lines, taken from Part III of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, come from a chapter entitled “A Marriage Contract.” Dickens named the chapter very well, as the marriage that takes place in it is indeed a contract between two people who, while not in love with each other, are in love with the idea of gaining wealth and improving their social status. Alfred and Sophronia Lammle are both led to believe that the other is rich by their so-called dear friend, Mr. Veneering, who believes himself to be a matchmaker. The illusion of wealth is the driving force …
Text And Paratext: Analyzing Edith Wharton's Hudson River Bracketed In Its Periodical Context, Paige Szmodis
Text And Paratext: Analyzing Edith Wharton's Hudson River Bracketed In Its Periodical Context, Paige Szmodis
English Summer Fellows
Studying a novel in the context of its paratexts — including the illustrations, advertisements, and captions surrounding the fiction — reveals how the publication context can shape a literary work. This project examines Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and its paratexts by comparing the final version of the novel with textual changes made in its monthly periodical publication in the magazine The Delineator (1928-1930). As mass-consumerism and advertising increasingly targeted women during the 1920s, examining Wharton’s work in a popular middle-class women’s magazine like The Delineator illuminates how paratexts affect audience perceptions of the novel’s characters, conflicts, and themes. …
Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier
Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I argue that out of postmodernity, subjectivity has seen distinct mutations inflected by consumer technology. As postmodern mediators of ordinary people, reality TV, Facebook, and YouTube are steeped in concerns about authenticity. Reality TV, for example, cannot escape its authenticity problem because of the conventional hierarchy of production it maintains, a hierarchy that prompts consumer skepticism regarding its truth value. However, seemingly democratic Internet platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, promise consumer engagement in which users can break down those hierarchical barriers preventing authentic expression. Under the guise of presumed mediational accuracy, the resulting feedback loop between …
Leading Ladies In Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Hannah C. Badenhop
Leading Ladies In Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Hannah C. Badenhop
Master's Theses
This paper analyzes the women in Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House and demonstrates the ways in which the women are able to adapt to change better than the men in the novel, even though the women are degraded for their materialism and behaviors. By looking at previous scholarship, this thesis highlights how women in this novel have for some reason been excluded from the academic debate surrounding The Professor’s House. This exclusion is often the result of scholars placing more emphasis on St. Peter and Tom as the main characters in the story. What this ignores, however, is the …
Living In An (Im)Material World: Consuming Exhausted Narratives In New Grub Street, Emma C. Eisenberg
Living In An (Im)Material World: Consuming Exhausted Narratives In New Grub Street, Emma C. Eisenberg
Honors Papers
Journalists often write about the death of various print and media forms—deaths that have yet to occur, but which we continually anticipate in deference to a tacit law which discards the past as a “useless encumbrance” of outmoded styles of consumption. But is that encumbrance necessarily useless? In this paper, I argue that George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), which narrates the deaths of two realist novelists and has been called an “epitaph for Victorian fiction,” lives out its own virtual death to good purpose. I discuss how Gissing uses the realist novel’s transitional or partially exhausted state to conserve …
Toni Morrison’S Depiction Of Beauty Standards In Relation To Class, Politics Of Respectability, And Consumerism In Song Of Solomon, Karen Jensen
University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations
In Song of Solomon, published during a transitional moment in the history of U.S. feminism, Toni Morrison portrays the destructive forces of hegemonic female beauty standards, materialism, and consumerism in a Midwestern African-American community from the 1930s to the 1960s. She reveals a hierarchy in which men define standards of beauty and respectability that enforce white bourgeois ideals. Focusing on five female characters, this thesis examines this hierarchy; the agents who maintain it; and the ways in which it affects female characters who accept and/or reject it. While one of the characters, Hagar, perishes in her attempt to live …