Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Buried In Plain Sight: Unearthing Willa Cather’S Allusion To Thomas William Parsons’S “The Sculptor’S Funeral”, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In January 1905, Willa Cather’s story “The Sculptor’s Funeral” appeared in McClure’s Magazine and shortly thereafter in her first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, a collection of stories about art and artists. In the story, the body of sculptor Harvey Merrick arrives in his hometown of Sand City, Kansas, on a train from Boston, accompanied by his friend and former student, Henry Steavens. Cather criticism has long been concerned with identifying real-world prototypes for characters and situations in her fiction, and two such prototypes have been unearthed for “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” First, the return by train of the …

The Transatlantic Village: The Rise And Fall Of The Epistolary Friendship Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick And Mary Russell Mitford, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In June 1830, the American novelist and short-story writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick used the imminent London publication of her novel Clarence as a pretext for initiating a correspondence with the British author Mary Russell Mitford. In her first letter to Mitford, Sedgwick addressed her as “My dear Miss Mitford,” a violation of epistolary decorum in a letter to someone to whom she had not been introduced (FOMRM, 155).¹ As Sedgwick protested, however, “I cannot employ the formal address of a stranger towards one who has inspired the vivid feeling of intimate acquaintance, a deep and affectionate interest in …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Travels (1613) In A Global Context, Kaya Sahin, Julia Schleck

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article revisits Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his travels into Persia (1613), reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. It highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley’s narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that a certain level of Eastern knowledge is present within Western texts from this period and awaits scholarly …

Networking With Middleton And Jonson: Theater, Law, And Social Documents, Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the lines above, the lawyer Tangle seems to be listing the tools of his trade, various legal documents he uses regularly. However, the list names more than just documents; it also labels the stream of blood trickling out of Tangle’s arm as he is forced into a purgative healing. Quieto, a lawyer-cum-healer, prescribes a bloodletting because Tangle’s long association with ink has infected him and the only way to cure him of poisonous legal practice is to drain him. Quieto confirms his diagnosis with the protagonist, Phoenix, who looks into the basin catching the blood and exclaims “This, why …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Trauels (1613) In A Global Context, Julia Schleck, Kaya Sahin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Despite various attempts by literary theorists and historians to find more integrative ways of studying early modern societies and cultures, fairly essentialist notions of the difference between Europe and the rest of the world continue to persist in scholarship. The assumption of fundamental differences then leads to a search for sundry misperceptions, misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and other skewed representations in early modern texts, particularly in those produced by European travelers. Similarly, studies on cultural, ideological, religious, and intellectual exchanges have not always been able to transcend approaches that solely focus on encounters, a word that sometimes implies haphazard meetings and difficult …

Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero

Theses and Dissertations--English

Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing …

José Ramón Marcaida López, Arte Y Ciencia En El Barroco Español. Seville: Fundación Focus Abengoa; Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2014. Pp. 337. Hb, 27 Euros, D. Scott Hendrickson

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A review of José Ramón Marcaida Lopez's book, Arte y ciencia en el barroco español.

Prologue In Nieremberg. Aforismsos Y Fragmentos Sobre La Naturaleza Humana, D. Scott Hendrickson

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Prologue to to bilingual (Spanish - Albanian) edition of aphorisms of the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658).

Two Entries In The Dictionary Of Caribbean And Afro-Latin American Biography, Ana B. Rodriguez Navas

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Two entries in the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography: Gastón Baquero and Lino Ayllón D'ou.

Marilyn Monroe’S Star Canon: Postwar American Culture And The Semiotics Of Stardom, Amanda Konkle

Theses and Dissertations--English

Although Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous American film stars, and a monumental cultural figure, her film work has been studied far less than her biography. Applying C.S. Peirce’s semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol, this research explains how Monroe acquired meaning as an actress: Monroe was a powerful, but simplified, public image (an icon); an indicator of a particular historical and social context (an index); and an embodiment of significant cultural debates (a symbol).

Analyzing Monroe as an icon reveals how her personal life, which contradicted her official publicity story, generated public sympathy and led to …

The Exploration Of Self Construction Through Art, Pelumi Adegawa

Fine Arts Theses

This thesis investigates the different outlets of starting a conversation with people about our contemporary dilemmas, while exploring influences from historical and modern views. I do this by elaborating on the importance of discourse in making art and how these conversations can impact and widen our lives and understandings. Within these discourses, topics surrounding controversial issues such as gender disparities, social acceptability, race inequality and body images are brought up. My main arguments explore the importance of self-construction and the limitations and influences that the outside world might bring forth, the impact and results of speaking out and how it …

Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women's Movement In Asia And The Women's International Democratic Federation, Elisabeth Armstrong

Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality: Faculty Publications

The 1949 Conference of the Women of Asia held by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) amplified a new anti-imperialist solidarity movement for women in the global South. Leftist feminists emerged from anticolonial movements to organize mass-based women’s groups, a process that created new alliances between regional women’s groups. In India, and across Asia, most groups concentrated their efforts on rural women embedded in the agricultural economy. This article looks at the forms of solidarity and the ideologies of anti-imperialist women’s activism that turned the charity model of Western feminist internationalism on its head. Before the celebrated Bandung Conference of …

The Search For Agency: Female Sexual Desire In U.S. Sex Education And Coming-Of-Age Cinema, Mckenzi A. Vanderberg

Honors Program Theses

The following essay provides an analysis of the gendered ideologies present in coming-of-age cinema, as well as a critique of heteronormative, patriarchal concepts that hinder female sexual agency and adolescent empowerment. More specifically, this essay will critique the harmful portrayal of female puberty as romantic, passive, and emotional in comedic coming-of-age cinema. This essay will be split into three primary segments. The first segment will consist of a literature review discussing the correlation between sexual desire and autonomy, as well as the importance of portraying female sexual agency rather than passivity in media and sex education curricula, in order to …

Manifest Imperialism: Race And American Imperial Aspirations In The Pacific, Bryan Richter

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The Pacific Ocean has long been held by the United States as an outlet to project power and to forge and international fiefdom for themselves. The historical precedence of military intervention in this portion of the globe can be traced back to the colonial conflicts in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. This conflict began a century of heavy American military involvement which saw the United States become entrenched in four major wars from the Philippines in the south to its northern most point in the Korea. However, in each of these wars there were more at …

Pacific Horizons: The Transformation Of European Perceptions Of Paradise, 1880-1900, Luke Scalone

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Since the publication of Bernard Smith’s European Vision in the South Pacific in the 1960s, an immense amount of literature has been produced about how European exploration in the Pacific Ocean affected explorers, national governments, elite classes, and indigenous peoples. However, there is little scholarship about how the interactions between Europeans and Pacific Islanders in the 19th century influenced the perceptions of readers on the continent. This project will fill in this gap by showing how colonial and imperial literature affected European readers’ perception of what constitutes an ideal society between 1880 and 1900. To explore these changes, I will …

Beyond The Flesh: Contemporary Representations Of The Black Female Body In Afro-Brazilian Literature, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Africana Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay takes an intersectional and transnational approach to analyze how selected poetic texts by contemporary Afro-Brazilian writers Conceição Evaristo, Esmeralda Ribeiro Cristiane Sobral, Miriam Alves, and Elisa Lucinda (re)design portrayals of Afro-descendant/black female bodies. As cultural artifacts, I argue that these poetic/political constructs give evidence of Afro- Brazilian female bodies as historical: on one hand, they represent the embodiment of “otherness” as they historically differ from the standards of (white) “normalcy;” on the other hand, they carry both the silenced histories of racial and sexual exploitation and the appeal of hyper-sexualized and exoticized stereotypes. I am also interested in …

“Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá”: Garífuna Subjectivities And The Politics Of Diasporic Belonging, Paul Joseph López Oro

Africana Studies: Faculty Publications

López Oro analyzes two census campaigns—one in New York City and one in Honduras—geared toward Garifuna populations in order to interrogate larger questions about how Garifuna populations are included, or not, within dominant discourses of Honduran multiculturalism and US Latinidad. He argues that Garifuna are a quintessentially diasporic population who disrupt common assumptions about what it means to be Honduran, Latino, and/or Black in the Americas.

St. Louis As Historical Hub, Jeffrey Smith

Faculty Scholarship

In May 2011, the Missouri legislature adjourned without passing an economic stimulus bill that included an “Aerotropolis” at Lambert Airport in St. Louis. The idea behind it was to create a hub for international trade, particularly with China, through a series of tax credits for those forwarding goods to foreign destinations and incentives for those building the facilities to support that commerce.1 On the surface, it seemed like a bold innovation to connect Missouri, located in the center of the United States, with the global trade far from its borders by envisioning St. Louis as a “gateway zone” for goods. …

Ovid Butler, Sally Childs-Helton

Scholarship and Professional Work

Dr. Sally Childs-Helton's essay on Ovid Butler, a Contribution to The Indiana Historical Society's publication: Indiana's 200: The People Who Shaped the Hoosier State.

Margaret Wise Brown Papers, 1938-1960., Beth S. Harris

Finding Aids: Guides to the Collections

Materials related to the career of children's author Margaret Wise Brown. The collection includes literary manuscripts, correspondence, legal papers, biographical information, periodical publications, sound recordings, ephemera, and clippings

Family Affairs Newsletter 2016-01-01, Zack Paakkonen

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS was a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out around the 1st and 15th of each month. It covered the State of Maine only. The list was begun and maintained for many years by Jean Vermette in Bangor, and later operated by Zack Paakkonen of Portland. Over the years it evolved from a social activities newsletter into a business directory, classified ad service, and community bulletin board.

Polemics And Patronage In The City Of Victory, Valerie Stoker

Books Authored by Wright State Faculty/Staff

How did the patronage activities of India’s Vijayanagara Empire (c. 1346–1565) influence Hindu sectarian identities? Although the empire has been commonly viewed as a Hindu bulwark against Islamic incursion from the north or as a religiously ecumenical state, Valerie Stoker argues that the Vijayanagara court was selective in its patronage of religious institutions. To understand the dynamic interaction between religious and royal institutions in this period, she focuses on the career of the Hindu intellectual and monastic leader Vyasatirtha. An agent of the state and a powerful religious authority, Vyasatirtha played an important role in expanding the empire’s economic and …

The Direction His Eyes Are Facing: An American Geography, Amelia R. Gramling

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

This paper tracks the archetypical figure of the conquistador across the historical impressions and canonical depictions left in his wake since European “explorers” like Columbus sailed into an unidentified land mass five hundred years ago and ushered the New World into the Imperial age. Through diverse and disparate set of sources--from pop culture to Columbus' log books--this paper maps conquest across the mythology of the American nation, weaving school shooters manifestos in with fictionalizations of the American West in with personal interviews and memoir to complicate and challenge the American understanding of nation—our gendered mappings of power and identity then …

When I Am Away From The Water And You, John Davis

The Lindenwood Review: a journal of literary prose

No abstract provided.

Contemplations Of A Colonel’S Remembrances Of A Ukrainian Girl, Nicole Yurcaba

The Lindenwood Review: a journal of literary prose

No abstract provided.

Sacred Women Of Africa And The African Diaspora: A Womanist Vision Of Black Women’S Bodies And The African Sacred Feminine, Arisika Razak

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Contemporary U.S. society is full of stereotypical images that marginalize and degrade Black women’s bodies (Bogle, 1994; Collins, 2000; Gilkes, 2001). However, many precolonial, spiritually based cultures of North and West Africa (Badejo, 1996; Gleason, 1987; Jell-Bahlsen, 2008) developed indigenous concepts of the African Sacred Feminine, a term I use to describe African representations of the feminine aspects of nature and divinity, as well as the innate, human and spiritual powers embodied by women. Using artistic depictions from ancient Algeria, dynastic Egypt, and West and Central Africa, this essay explores several iconographic traits of the African Sacred Feminine: nudity or …

My Mother Cleans And Starts The Gumbo, Karen Maceira

The Lindenwood Review: a journal of literary prose

No abstract provided.

“I Can’T Relate”: Refusing Identification Demands In Teaching And Learning, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

In literature, composition, and other areas of English Studies, relateability can be an important tool to inscribe marginalized subjects as academic citizens. However, its larger arc reproduces ethnocentric and individualistic ideologies at the national and personal levels that foreclose the true understanding of and engagement with Otherness that defines learning. What are the particular intellectual and other challenges, pleasures, and rewards of refusing the pedagogical imperative to engage and understand through identification? I conclude the article by deploying theorists of difference to ask what it means to understand difference as difference, how this understanding might be facilitated, and what the …

The Edith Wherry Muckleston Collection, University Of Oregon Library, James Karman

Jeffers Studies

Novelist Edith Wherry Muckleston (1876–1961) and Una Jeffers met in 1907 at a sorority event at the University of California, Berkeley. Edith describes their meeting and the friendship that ensued in a 1929 memoir titled “A Poet’s Wife — Una Jeffers.” The memoir is included among Edith’s papers at the University of Oregon, along with ten letters to her from Una, one from Robinson, and a draft of a letter from Edith to Robinson. These documents are published here for the first time, along with a biographical introduction.

Cheat Sheet, Brandon Washington, Raquel Davis

Crimes of the Heart (2016) - Lighting

Lighting for this show created a nostalgic feeling in the kitchen as well as a false sense of safety and privacy from the swirling world of rumors and gossip outside. A sunset that penetrates through the windows of the house, moonlight that calms and focuses with the revelation of facts, and a sunrise that violates the kitchen in the same way as before were the bigger vocabularies of light used to help tell this story.