Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Speculative Bill, Tess Grogan

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

This essay discusses some difficulties of teaching Renaissance engagements with race, class, and gender in diverse twenty-first-century classrooms and looks to contemporary romance—science fiction and fantasy—for examples of humane and reparative pedagogy. Ursula K. Le Guin’s feminist revisioning of her Earthsea trilogy in the late story “Dragonfly” both models the humility required to make change and stages a teaching practice that welcomes the disruptive and uncomfortable questions posed by a university’s first female student.

Review Of "Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue", Joshua S. Reid

ETSU Faculty Works

Review of the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue (RCCC) database, edited by Brenda Hosington.

A Sermon Writ In High Heaven: Astrology And Interpretation In Moby-Dick, Amanda Gallop

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores Herman Melville's use of astrology in Moby-Dick in relation to the novel's stance on meaning-making and interpretation. It analyzes Ishmael and Ahab's respective methods of interpretation established in the first half of the novel, then explores Stubb's use of astrology in "The Doubloon" chapter. I propose that Stubb's astrological soliloquy poses a potential solution to the conflict between Ishmael and Ahab's diametrically opposed methods, thus offering an avenue into a new understanding of the novel's epistemological project.

Shape, Space And Typeface: Mapping Black Subjectivity Through Caribbean Aesthetics, Samantha Stephens

Master’s Theses

The Caribbean is frequently imagined and aestheticized by the image of the basin, which limits the way the region is confined in geographic and historic terms. By conceptualizing the poets as mapmakers, the collections by Kei Miller, Olive Senior, and M. NourbeSe Phillip reference the container of the basin but remediate it in poetic terms. The movement towards a distinctive lack of containment illustrates the dynamic literary and geographical operations of the Caribbean, linking typography and topography. Reading with a new lens, including digital resources that re-spatialize these poems, demonstrates the complexities that characterize the formation of these texts and …

Landscape, Gender, And The Politics Of Belonging In Thomas Hardy’S The Woodlanders And Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Sarah Dickerson

Master’s Theses

In my thesis, I analyze Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), exploring the way that Hardy’s depictions of both landscape and gender are interwoven to illuminate the larger issue of belonging as a central concern for his characters. I argue that in these two novels, we can analyze how one’s belonging to a physical environment and performative gender role directly relate to characters’ tragedy or success in the narratives. Characters who challenge normalized gender roles and characters whose place attachment manifests in natural rather than social spaces, endure worse tragedies than their gendered insider and …

Perspectives On Lynching In William Faulkner's Fiction And Nonfiction, Tabitha Fisher

Master’s Theses

This thesis analyzes William Faulkner's "Mob Sometimes Right" (1931), Light in August (1932), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and "Letter to the Leaders in the Negro Race" (1953) alongside recent critical perspectives for their depictions of lynching and black empowerment to determine Faulkner's racial narrative regarding racial violence and civil rights.

Criterion, Volume 38, 2020, Loyola Marymount University English Department

Criterion

Faculty Advisor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy

Editor-in-Chief: Éva Enriquez & Rena McInerney-Olk

Slow Metadata, Rachel Sagner Buurma, J. Shaw

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Teaching Archive: A New History For Literary Study, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered …

Pitfalls Of Ambiguity In Contexts Of Islamophobia: Mohsin Hamid’S The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Ambreen Hai

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

This article examines the implications of particular representational and narrative strategies that postcolonial writers, especially from Muslim-majority nations, can utilize to respond to 9/11 and its aftermath. Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been hailed as the paradigmatic counter-discursive, antiimperialist, non-Western Muslim response. Literary scholars of various stripes have tended to regard its sustained ambiguities and deliberately incomplete ending as a sign of its richness. However, this article intervenes to offer instead a nuanced critique of Hamid's uses of ambiguity, based on postcolonial feminist literary analysis and a reading of actual readers' readings. Drawing on Hamid's own stated goals …

Rattlesnake Religion, Sarah Morgan

Bryant Literary Review

We tried to trap rabbits
lit ants on fire with matchsticks

Jaffa Coffee, Tehila Wenger

Bryant Literary Review

The waitress placed the cappuccino down carefully on my left, next to the open computer. I glanced into the mug and noted that there was no design in the foam. My anticipation for the caffeinating process dropped immediately by several degrees, along with my belief in the basic goodness of mankind.

Mud And Truth, Hannah Kass

Bryant Literary Review

Tsofi knew the story since her mother began telling it to her and her brother almost every night. Other villagers would notice how her people did not eat the same meat or observe the same day of rest. In her mind those differences were as arbitrary as preferring to eat lamb or chicken. Yet such arbitrary reasons had sparked the most violent of reactions.

Going For Wood, Molly Vaux

Bryant Literary Review

I.

I would never have chosen a window seat, but there I was, staring at great banks of clouds while the plane, rocked by invisible currents, sailed upward.

An Open Letter To The White Feminists Holding A Literary Panel On Toni Morrison, Matthew E. Henry

Bryant Literary Review

look to your left, your right—where

are her sisters? why are they missing?

Dreams Of Flight, Beth Paulson

Bryant Literary Review

A man with wings large enough and duly attached might learn to overcome the resistance of air. Leonardo da Vinci

No Icarus, you knew pulleys and winches would keep a man tethered
to earth though he rise high above a stage for a duke’s entertainment.
In your fabrico you built mechanical birds of wood and bright-dyed
linen, then raised men up on ropes to fly and float, angels with dark
curls, gilt-edged wings.

A Sweet Kid, William Torphy

Bryant Literary Review

I wait anxiously in the United terminal sipping a cup of coffee and feeling ungrounded. My nephew’s flight from Baltimore is late because of a severe weather system over the Midwest. My sister Kat tells me that Justin has become very selfish, even for a teenager, and that he lies and constantly tries to manipulate.

Gunn Hill, Pat Daneman

Bryant Literary Review

Given time, a place becomes a thing

small enough to hold in memory’s grip,

strong enough to struggle free. Frightened

A Twisted Skein Of Desire: Confession, Gaze, And Time In Andre Aciman’S Call Me By Your Name, Anthony Isenhour

Honors Theses

In interacting with others, and particularly in intimate relationships with others, desire becomes a complex emotion entangled with the specific identifications of each person. These complications are also often shaped by social conventions, internal thoughts, and the ability to communicate. In all its narrative structures, themes, and plot points, Andre Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name is framed by one question on this topic, stated in a time of deep conflict by the narrator: “Are ‘being’ and ‘having’ thoroughly accurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 20, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Ignoring The Harlem Renaissance: The Failure Of Modernist Scholarship, Emily Elvoid

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

From Libertine To Incel: How The "Manosphere" Has Fostered The Continuation Of Gender Violence In Western Culture, Lauren Ziolkowski

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I examine the similarities between the ideologies of the Restoration libertine and the present-day beta-male, the social and cultural forces that shape those ideologies, and the practices of flirtation and seduction shared by the libertine and beta-male. This thesis addresses the expansion of female agency and power in the mid-eighteenth century and twenty-first century, as well as how this expansion of power threatens the social, cultural, and economic privilege held by the Restoration libertine and beta-male respectively. In the eighteenth century, this expansion of power manifests in the emergence of the bourgeoisie class and the development of …

The Reluctant Fundamentalist's Depiction Of The Postmodern, Kathryn Nicolai

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I examine postmodern fiction in the wake of 9/11. Specifically, I investigate initial predictions of how postmodernity would end after 9/11, Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality, 9/11 as a semiotic-saturated event, 9/11-novels’ representations of hyperreality and postcolonial intersections with postmodern texts. These focuses are analyzed in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The novel chronicles the protagonist, Changez’s life before, during and after 9/11 and how his perspective on America’s capitalist-centered society and his own identity shifts in the wake of the attacks. After 9/11, Changez undergoes a demystification with America’s nostalgia-based regression and returns to Pakistan. Similar …

The Theology Of John Donne's Body Politic, Carolyn P. Marino

Honors Theses

This thesis investigates John Donne’s body/soul dialectic, and discusses how this relationship extends towards both the individuated and communal body. The first chapter grounds Donne’s “Songs and Sonnets” in theology through his facilitation of the Platonic Ladder and the Great Chain of Being. It also gestures towards a shift in Donne’s poetry from subjectivity to intersubjectivity. Finally, it discusses Donne’s commissioned elegies, interrogating Renaissance ideas about the gendered soul, and expounding upon the impact of one person’s death on the communal body. The second chapter historically contextualizes ideas of martyrdom, suicide, and Donne’s term “self-homicide.” It discusses the content of …

Love And Loss In Willa Cather’S Novels, Sara Abbazia

English Honors Papers

Past scholars of Willa Cather, the American writer known for her novels describing life on the frontier, go to great lengths to explore how colonial settlement, loss, and queerness play their separate parts in her narratives. This analysis seeks to go further and examine how these elements intermingle under the influence of nostalgia. The two works that are analyzed, A Lost Lady and The Professor's House , feature main characters who experience the loss of a queer relationship and who try to regain their lost happiness through a nostalgic indulgence in pastoral memories. These memories, however, are inaccurate, and often …

To Tell The Truth And Find That It Is Music: An Interview With Betty Adcock, Lana K W Austin

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 27-44

Backing Up The Gospel Singers, David Bottoms

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 85-86

Mark Strand On The Moon, Nick Norwood

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 47-63

Ode To San Giorgio Of The Gorgeous Brassieres, Barbara Hamby

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 118-119

Crown, Lisa Fay Coutley

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 96-97