Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Never Put Your Head Down Unless You Pray: The Stories Of African American Men In The Wisconsin Prison System, Julia Marie Kirchner
Never Put Your Head Down Unless You Pray: The Stories Of African American Men In The Wisconsin Prison System, Julia Marie Kirchner
Theses and Dissertations
Prior research on offender narratives has not examined culture as a factor in how prisoners explain their crimes. This qualitative ethnographic research project explores the self-constructions of African American male prisoners using both participant observation with active gang members on the street and discourse analysis of over 300 letters written by incarcerated men. Focusing primarily on six prisoner consultants, this study investigates the claims that offenders make about themselves in reference to their identity. These convicted felons justify their crimes as rational under the circumstances prevalent in segregated inner cities. In reference to economic crimes such as drug dealing and …
Identification Through Inhabitation In Literature, Film, And Video Games, Charlotte Palfreyman Smith
Identification Through Inhabitation In Literature, Film, And Video Games, Charlotte Palfreyman Smith
Theses and Dissertations
In real life we each experience the world separately through our individual bodies, which necessitates what Kenneth Burke calls "identification." In this paper, I assert that as artistic media have structured our aesthetic experience in a way that increasingly resembles our lived, embodied experiences, our identification with fictional characters requires less imaginative effort and is more automatic and powerful. I will show this by analyzing how we inhabit characters through sensory engagement, point of view, and narrative form in literature, film, and video games (specifically action/adventure games, RPGs, and MMORPGs). I will then build off of Burke's foundational theory to …
Blues Trope As A Cultural Intersection In Alice Walker's The Temple Of My Familiar And Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, Julia Leuthardt
Blues Trope As A Cultural Intersection In Alice Walker's The Temple Of My Familiar And Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, Julia Leuthardt
Theses and Dissertations
Though bound historically through hundreds of years, the African-Native American relation has not received much attention by scholars of literature; hence, the emphasis of this thesis is to investigate the literary portrayal of the interethnic relation between African Americans and Native Americans through the blues trope. The blues trope provides an intriguing literary platform for the psychological and physical struggles in finding an identity within such a diverse multiethnic society like the United States. For African American writer Alice Walker and Native American author Sherman Alexie the blues trope is a successful literary device in expressing long lost and rediscovered …