Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Like He Would Jump Me With A Book: Black Humor In Sanctuary And Oliver Twist, Deborah Leclaire

Masters Theses

Although many critics have compared William Faulkner and Charles Dickens, no one has fully developed the resemblance between their uses of black humor. Using several critics' definitions of black humor, I examine several aspects of black humor in Faulkner's Sanctuary and Dickens' Oliver Twist: the presence of the wasteland in society, the irreverent treatment of death and religion, the presence of grotesques and perverse sexuality.

Like the humour noir of the French surrealist movement, black humor in both of these books is very much involved in these authors' indictment of society. Both Faulkner and Dickens use black humor to …

A New Reading Of Ruth Suckow, Judith Pierson

Masters Theses

By 1950, after three decades of writing, Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) was a well-respected writer whose work seemed headed for a permanent position in the canon of American literature. Instead, Suckow's fiction steadily became less known through the following decades. The question of why her work came to be ignored and why such a position is unwarranted is addressed in A New Reading of Ruth Suckow. The conclusion is that a regionalist categorization and a related gender bias in the literary canon have adversely affected Suckow's works.

Gender bias is reflected in the critical assumptions which ascribe an inferior position to …

A Woman's Quest For Happiness: O'Neill's "Private Myth", Andrea Ximena CampañA Garcia

Masters Theses

Following the approach used by James Hurt in his book Catiline's Dream to determine Henrik Ibsen's "private myth" which he retold in play after play, I have delineated O'Neill's "private myth" in a narrower way concentrating on his female characters. Examining parallel motifs in the lives of the dominant women in Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra, I have detected this mythic pattern involving the O'Neillian woman: She goes through an early innocent and submissive state guided by an initial vision of happiness which can be regarded as fairly conventional. But when her …

Narrative Perspective In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, My Antonia And A Lost Lady, Debra L. Will

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

A Checklist Of James Hogg Scholarship Since 1960, Patrick G. Scott

Faculty Publications

Lists with brief annotations scholarship and criticism, including book reviews, published between 1960 and 1991. Originally distributed as South Carolina Working Papers in Scottish Bibliography, no. 2 (1992).

Nodal Humor In Comic Narrative: A Semantic Analysis Of Two Stories By Twain And Wodehouse, Christopher Holcomb

Faculty Publications

This paper shows that a semantic theory of humor offers, despite assertions to the contrary, an adequate description of how particular instances of humor are linked to the narrative in which they appear. After Victor Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor is summarized, and adopted as the starting point of the analysis in this paper, the humor in two short stories is described in terms of their semantic properties. In this paper, humor is said to reside not simply in jokes but in joke-like constructions, for which the term "nodal points of humor" is used. These nodes can be identified …

An Intellectual Odyssey: Intellectual And Cultural Exploration Through The Design Of An American Studies Major For Whittier College, Alycia M. Sanders-Thomas

Whittier Scholars Program

This is more than a senior project. It is also a personal exploration of America itself, a redefinition of terms, and an intellectual odyssey into the strange world of academic discourse. To complete this project, I have had to ask myself hard questions about America and what it means to me, about what I think someone should know to truly understand America, about my place in the Whittier College community and my educational philosophy for that community, and about where, if anywhere, I fit into the realm of professional academic discourse. After journeys across physical space, to Baltimore for the …

Birmingham Poetry Review 8 (Front Matter), Birmingham Poetry Review Staff

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. -2

Address, Al Maginnes

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 26-27

A Head Count Of The Options, Robert Miltner

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 32

Arizona Highway, Carolyn Stoloff

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 41

The Memory Of Abortion Unexpectedly Returns, Leslie Monsour

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 26

Glossing The Feminine In The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Antarctica, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Distance Learning, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Uma, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Ngugi Wa Thion'go: A Documentary Source Book, By Carol Sicherman, Patrick G. Scott

Faculty Publications

A review of Ngugi wa Thion'go: A Documentary Source Book, by Carol Sicherman

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …

The One Right Touch, Katharine Coles

Ahsahta Press

In her collection The One Right Touch, Utah poet Katharine Coles explores the sometimes delicate, sometimes sinewy workings of relationships between men and women. Lovers, spouses, brothers and sisters, as well as fathers and daughters are represented here as Coles speaks to each in all their complexity.

The collection includes the prize-winning poem “Sex As A Trope” as well as a longer work entitled “Provisions,” which is made up of ten small poems under the headings of “Hunting,” “Cultivation,” and “Gathering.” The sections interweave the stories of the speaker hunting with her father as a teenager, attending a party …

The Year-God, Gerrye Payne

Ahsahta Press

No abstract provided.

Charles Kingsley And Literary Theory Of The 1850’S, John C. Hawley

English

In 1850 Thomas Carlyle advised Charles Kingsley to "pay no attention at all to the foolish clamour of reviewers, whether laudatory or condemnatory" (LK 1: 245).' Kingsley had just published his first two novels, Alton Locke and Yeast; he thanked Carlyle for the advice and assured him that he would welcome the "folios of 'articulate wind"' not as inducements to improve his style or as coercion to accept the increasingly demanding artistic norms for the novel, but as vindications of his efforts to touch "some really deep cancer" in society (LK 1 :267). By the end of the decade, however, …

Charles Kingsley And The Via Media, John C. Hawley

English

With the recent centenary of Newman's death attention has again been paid, in passing, to his notorious opponent Charles Kingsley ( 1819- 7 5). 1 For the last century this has largely been the case: as Kingsley's most recent biographer has noted, "It was [his] misfortune to be the fly embedded in the clear amber of his antagonist's apology" (Chitty 237). Though for Roman Catholics the 1864 controversy that led to the Apologia pro vita sua still seems to be the most interesting aspect of Kingsley's career, its unfortunate polemics must not be allowed to cloud the larger role that …

Religious And Spiritual Elements In Young Adult Literature: A Content Analysis, Patricia C. Rosenberg

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this study was to use content analysis to focus on the nature of traditional religious and spiritual elements in young adult fiction books.

Thirty-two books from ALA/s "Best of the Best Books 1966-1986" were read, and eight religious contexfs were checked. The findings revealed over one half of the books included moderate traditional religious contexts. About three fourths of the religious contexts were positive, but over one half of them were also negative. Most of the negatives were applied to religious workers and participants in religion. The one book which had strong religious context was totally negative. …

Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

Faulkner's Subject offers a reading of William Faulkner for our time, and does so by rethinking his masterpieces through the lenses of current critical theory. The book attends equally to the power of his work and to the current theoretical issues that would call that power into question. Drawing on poststructuralist, ideological, and gender theory, Weinstein examines the harrowing process of becoming oneself at the heart of these novels. This self is always male, and it achieves focus only through strategically mystifying or marginalizing women and blacks. The cosmos he called his own--the textual world he produced, of which he …

"He Come And Spoke For Me": Scripting Lucas Beauchamp's Three Lives, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Lycidas: Eternity As Artifice, Thomas H. Blackburn

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Elegy For James Rosier, Craig Williamson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Labyrinth Of The Wind And The Artifice Of Eternity: A Study Of The Lyric Poetry Of William Butler Yeats, Danita Sain Stokes

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study of the lyric poetry of William Butler Yeats concentrates on his ideas about nature and art, with a focus on the imagery of the wind. Though each of Yeats's poems may be read and enjoyed individually, a study of the body of Yeats's lyric poems gives the reader a better understanding of a symbol such as the wind. As a whole, the poems form a narrative of the development of Yeats's mind; by looking closely at the single symbol of the wind, we gain insight into the development of Yeats's ideas about art and nature. In Yeats's early …

"Nobody Said Anything" Issues Of Communication In The Short Stories Of Raymond Carver, Darren Bosch

Honors Papers

In this paper I plan to divide my consideration of the different levels of communication in Carver's work into several categories, realizing that these categories overlap and are in no way mutually exclusive. First, I will consider Carver's characters, what might be called communication within the story, or communication as theme. Second, I will specifically look at the narrator, who is both character (and therefore a part of the issues of communication within the story) and communication link between the text and the reader. Finally I will address how narrative point of view and other aspects of Carver's style, such …

The Mythmaking Self (Or The Myth Making Self): Fiction And Experience In Galway Kinnell's The Book Of Nightmares, Michael Patrick Robertson

Honors Papers

The Book of Nightmares is a myth of questioning and renewal, with the self as its subject and the world as its text. The problem, however, is that these two are fundamentally at odds. Kinnell's ideals are fixed on the assertion of the self, as artistic authority and mythic wholeness, but the reality of the present produces a range of conflicts and ambiguities which problematize this striving. The poet fixes himself at the center of a process of mythopoesis, using the notion of myth to give form and meaning to experience. Thus it becomes a demiurgic endeavor -- he is …