American Studies Commons^™

Old Industries, Old Conflicts: The Significance Of American Epic Novels, Arturo Alcazar

Honors Projects

This essay focuses on three American epic novels: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and Underworld by Don DeLillo. More specifically, the essay examines the themes of ambiguity, redemption, good and evil, isolation, and violence as they are depicted in these three novels and what they indicate about America and its people and society.

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

"A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy Of The Black Speculative Imagination" Exhibition Catalog, Julian Chambliss, Phillip Cunningham

2020-2021 Afrofuturism Syllabus - Week 20 - "A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination" Exhibit

Exhibition catalog for "A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination," co-curated by Dr. Julian Chambliss and Dr. Phillip Cunningham as part of the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. The exhibit locates Afrofuturist thought in earlier eras of American history and focuses on how African American writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries used speculative/science fiction to imagine a better, freer, more equitable future for Black people.

From The Trenches To The Writer’S Desk: Establishing A Collection Of Children’S Books Authored By Military Veterans In An Academic Library, Casey D. Hoeve

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Kansas State University possesses a collection of juvenile literature to aid Education and English Department programs. KState is also the university with the largest military population in the state. It was discovered that several famous children’s authors were military veterans. Building upon this research, over 160 children’s authors who served in the military were identified. K-State Libraries NEH Endowment Committee funded the curation of a military veteran children’s literature collection, the only known academic library to possess such a collection. The collection enabled the libraries to provide outreach through access to the materials, internet resources, and special collections exhibits.

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

‘The Master And The Man Must Change Places For A Season’: Untangling Historical Narratives Of Race And Loyalty In ‘The Spy,’, David N. Gellman

History Faculty publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review: How To Be An Antiracist By Ibram X. Kendi, Shuntay Tarver

Counseling & Human Services Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Justina Ireland’s young adult novels Dread Nation (2017) and Deathless Divide (2020) tell the story of a Black girl by the name of Jane living in the aftermath of the Civil War, around 1880.

"A Friend, A Nimble Mind, And A Book": Girls' Literary Criticism In Seventeen Magazine, 1958-1969, Jill E. Anderson

University Library Faculty Publications

This article argues that postwar Seventeen magazine, a publication deeply invested in enforcing heteronormativity and conventional models of girlhood and womanhood, was in fact a more complex and multivocal serial text whose editors actively sought out, cultivated, and published girls’ creative and intellectual work. Seventeen's teen-authored “Curl Up and Read” book review columns, published from 1958 through 1969, are examples of girls’ creative intellectual labor, introducing Seventeen's readers to fiction and nonfiction which ranged beyond the emerging “young-adult” literature of the period. Written by young people – including thirteen-year-old Eve Kosofsky (later Sedgwick) – who perceived Seventeen to be an …

Begegnung In Montreal, Edith Borchardt

German Publications

No abstract provided.

The Chronology Of Harlem, Danielle Carr

Open Educational Resources

this course covers the chronology of harlem and the building of freshman composition genres for the high school student

“Nobody” Speaks In A Bog: Emily Dickinson’S “I’M Nobody Who Are You?”, Mei Fujie

English Language Institute

No abstract provided.

Choke, Brooksie Harrington

English Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Who Am I, Brooksie Harrington

English Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Poe Teaching Readers To Solve It Themselves, Grace Cosby

Student Works

Edgar Allan Poe wrote many stories that featured different types of unreliable narrators. These narrators were essential to Poe’s goal of teaching his audience to take more active roles in the stories. Insanity, ulterior motives, and lack of knowledge all contribute to making a narrator unreliable. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell Tale Heart,” and “The Cask of Amontillado” are all short stories in which Poe implemented a different unreliable narrator to show readers how to pay more attention to a story. With little guidance from Poe or the narrator, readers must put together what is true and …

Spiritual Activism And Political Solidarity In So Far From God And Mother Tongue: Two Views By Two Authors, Jean Paul Russo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM AND POLITICAL SOLIDARITY IN SO FAR FROM GOD AND MOTHER TONGUE: TWO VIEWS BY TWO AUTHORS

by

Jean Paul Russo

Florida International University, 2020

Miami, Florida

Professor Anne Castro, Major Professor

This thesis focuses on the intersection between spirituality and political action in the works of two Latinx authors, Demetria Martinez and Ana Castillo. Building on Gloria Anzaldua’s theories of trauma, narrative, and what she terms ‘conocimiento,’ I contend that the novels So Far From God, and Mother Tongue, present an alternative approach to political action that is derived from a common experience of suffering and trauma as …

“Keep Portland Weird”? Carnivalesque Elements In The Rebranding Of The Portland Book Festival, Rachel Noorda, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Portland Book Festival, originally known as “Wordstock,” is the main annual literary event in Portland, Oregon. It is also an increasingly prominent literary festival in the United States. The branding shift from “Wordstock” to “Portland Book Festival” in 2018 unearths key tensions, hierarchies, subversions, and cultural changes in the communicative and social functions of the Festival. The essay identifies transactional and transformative aspects of the Festival. Bank of America’s festival-naming “title” sponsorship, the partnership of cultural heritage organizations, and Portland place branding offer transactional stability for the Festival, where parties give and get in kind. The Festival’s temporary affective …

A Sailor's Intimacy: Homosocial Labor In Nineteenth-Century Oceanic Narratives By Dana And Melville, Adrian R. Salgado

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the male sailor community in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and how they are portrayed in terms of homosociality and intimacy. The presence of a homosocial community on board a sailing vessel provided a means of forming a group of men that cultivated relationships and communications through the production of labor with one another. Both Melville and Dana engaged readers in the workings of a sailor’s life and how those interactions on board a ship with fellow sailors formed a premise for the evaluation of maritime labor in nineteenth-century oceanic …

Writing And Well-Being: Story As Salve In The Work Of (More Than) Two Updikes, Sue Norton

Articles

No abstract provided.

Scared Sexless: Divergence From Faulkner’S Archetypal Women In “Barn Burning”, Laura Bass

ScholarsArchive Data

This essay discusses the way that Faulkner describes the women in "Barn Burning" and the social implications for the "white trash" woman.

Ai And The Other, Rosetta Dudley

Student Writing

Literary analysis in MLA format of 3 poems: "Conversation," "Cuba, 1962," and "Disregard" by Ai Ogawa which each address Othered speakers and characters. Links made to Emily Dickinson's writing and being Othered as a woman and non believer in a Puritan society. Overall theme: transcendence of circumstances as Other with the use of apostrophe and conceit.

The Charles Chesnutt Archive: Charles Chesnutt And The Black Community Who Aided Him, Bianca Swift, Bianca Swift

UCARE Research Products

A pioneer of African American literature and the first to reach a national audience with his writings, Chesnutt wrote nine novels, eighty-five short stories, and more than seventy essays and speeches. As a prolific writer Chesnutt often interacted with other black intellectuals and academics including; W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Walter F. White, and Kelly Miller. This poster makes the argument that his connections to these figures aided him in his writings and his presence in history. As well as comparing his standing in history as a black person speaking about race to the 21st century view through poetry.

"O Lost Moon Sisters" : Feminist Revisions In Diane Di Prima's Loba, Chelsea Megan Mathes

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In her master work, Loba, Diane di Prima revises a variety of traditionally malecentered narratives from a feminist viewpoint in the long tradition of feminist revision that is a cornerstone of Second Wave Feminism. This thesis examines five of the revisions of Christian, Jewish, and Greek stories present in Loba: The Virgin Mary, Eve, Lilith, Helen of Troy, and Persephone. Di Prima revises these stories to include the full— physical, spiritual, and emotional—experience of the woman, often from her own point of view, to give the woman agency over her own story and subvert the woman-as-object tradition present in male-authored …

A Damn Short Prayer, Beth Jane Toren

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This poster presents a transcript poem created with murder tales in oral history recordings. Leveraging the creative arts of storytelling, transcript poetry and visual orality, the poster brings light and music to Appalachian storyteller voices in tales of shady murders.

The handout presents the poem with visual orality methods juxtaposed beside Standard English orthographic transcription, enabling a visual comparison, a link a video with graphic text and the original voice recordings, and brief readings about concepts and methods.

Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks And Americans’ Tenuous Right To Place. By Esther Sullivan. Berkeley: University Of California Press, 2018. Pp. Xiv+264. $85.00 (Cloth); 29.95 (Paper)., Ranita Ray

Sociology Faculty Research

Traditionally, ethnographers of urban poverty in the United States have tended to write about the everyday lives, tentative morality, and curious practices of the "poor" as if poverty were a suprise outcome of illusive structures and intensely complex behaviors of the poor. ... See full text for complete abstract.

Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

This chapter draws attention to the lack of parks and nature recreation amenities during the 1920s and 1930s in predominantly African American city neighborhoods through Langston Hughes’s political poetry, specifically his blues-inflected ballad “Park Bench,” as well as “Chicago’s Black Belt” “Restrictive Covenants,” and “One Way Ticket.” Through the figure of the tramp/vagrant/bum, “Park Bench” voices a protest against inequality mapped into city space. Asserting that access to nature should be a fundamental condition of a democratic society, the poem situates the park bench as a charged site for public dialogue. The chapter argues that this poem and other Hughes …

Motions Like Sleep In Robert Penn Warren’S “Lullaby”, Cameron Fontes

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

“Where Inner And Outer Meet”: Dissociation And The Creative Process, Joseph Shoulders

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

Correspondence With The Season Of Autumn, Seth Nevin

Robert Penn Warren Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

Writing And Well Being: Story As Salve In The Work Of (More Than) Two Updikes, Sue Norton

Books/Book Chapters

Analysis of the work of David Updike and Linda Updike in relation to John Updike.