American Studies Commons^™

Style: A New Perspective On Kate Chopin, Daniel Arredondo

Theses Digitization Project

Uses Edward Corbett's theory of style to help define Chopin's style and expose her rhetorical strategies (sentence and paragraph length, diction, tropes, scheme, etc.) in the short story "The Story of an Hour ." Examines the controversy over using literature to teach composition and provides an analysis of the reasons for and against using literature in composition classes. Finally, defends the use of literature in writing classrooms.

The Literacy Event Horizon: Examining Orality And Literacy In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, AndréA Diane Davis

Theses Digitization Project

Applies James Gee's concept of Discourses to illustrate how literacy and orality thematically constitute hybrid identity in Silko's novel Ceremony. Then, applies Wallace Chafe's linguistic framework of integration and involvement showing that the novel is a linguistic hybrid, not just a text that thematically elevates hybridity. Unlike other Native American authors who create half-breed characters merely as bridges between two cultures, Silko creates her character Tayo as an embodiment of an emergent hybrid culture.

R. P. Blackmur And Randall Jarrell On Literary Magazines: An Exchange, Stephen Burt

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Letters between Warren’s acquaintance Blackmur and his close friend and onetime protégé Jarrell on the state of American literary magazines enrich our sense of the literary milieu in which the three worked.

Purity, Panic, And Pasiphaë In Brother To Dragons, John Burt

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Brother to Dragons is a poem that turns chiefly upon guilt over racism and slavery, but many of its most intense passages concern sexual guilt. The poem returns obsessively to the subject of sex because sex provides it with a way of thinking about how the highest and lowest aspect of human nature are inextricably bound together in it. The inextricable duality of love is a model for a similar inextricable duality the poem discusses in political idealism. The way the desire for purity shades into sadism is a model for the ways efforts to purify the political world also …

Divorcing Robert Penn Warren From The South, Paul Murphy

Robert Penn Warren Studies

The author considersWarren’s place in American intellectual history, which is at present problematic. He argues thatWarrenmust be seen as more than a “Southerner.” Though he dealt with Southern materials and saw himself as an uprooted exile and wanderer,Warrenemerged from a modernist ethos and went on to write in an existentialist idiom. His career was played out on a world stage.

A Conversation With Lewis P. Simpson, William Bedford Clark, James A. Grimshaw Jr.

Robert Penn Warren Studies

The co-editors of this journal interview Professor Simpson on a wide range of issues pertaining toWarren, his place in the American canon, and the present state of literature in the academy and the culture at large.

Robert Penn Warren And The South, Lewis P. Simpson

Robert Penn Warren Studies

One of the most acclaimed students of the Southern mind, a critic and editor who came to know Warren well and earned his deep respect, revisits the importance of region and identity in the author’s life and work.

Title Page (Volume 5), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Editors' Forward (Volume 5), William Bedford Clark, James A. Grimshaw

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Places: A Memoir, Rosanna Warren

Robert Penn Warren Studies

The daughter of Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark recalls a series of moving images and moments and, as a noted poet in her own right, offers a unique perspective on her father’s verse.

Memories Of Warren, Charles East

Robert Penn Warren Studies

A distinguished editor and Southern man-of-letters recalls his early discovery of Robert Penn Warren, his first meeting with the poet-novelist, and his later attempts to persuade Warren to publish his verse play Proud Flesh, forerunner of the prize-winning novel All the King’s Men.

Understanding Whittier; Or, Warren In The Aftermath Of Modernism, Mark Royden Winchell

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Although the textbooks he edited with Cleanth Brooks virtually defined the New Criticism,Warren’s critical essays moved beyond close reading and frequently challenged the standards of high modernism when it came to assessing literary excellence. This was particularly true during the last three decades of his life, when his poetry also reflected a turn from strict modernism. His discovery ofWhittier’s poetry in the 1970s revealed new depth and unsuspected complexity in the work of that “fireside sentimentalist” and demonstrates how farWarrenwas prepared to go in fashioning a “newer” criticism.

About The Center (Volume 5), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Circle (Volume 5), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

We Should Be Like Water: Choosing The Lowest Place Which All Others Avoid: John Steinbeck As A Modern Messenger Of Taoism, Andrea Marie Hammock

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis explores John Steinbeck's Cannery Row as a taoist text. It furthers this investigation by examining Cannery Row's recently discovered precursor, The God in the Pipes; examining the question of whether or not both novels were inspired by the ancient eastern philosophy of Taoism. The thesis uses clues from The God in the Pipes to determine which version of the Tao Teh Ching Steinbeck used to compose these novels.

The Split Dark Rider: An Examination Of Labor Conflict And John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, Richard Stephen Sabolick

Theses Digitization Project

Argues that Of Mice and Men is not only a tale of morality, but also a representation of the political themes found in In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. Establishes that Steinbeck does not simply divorce himself from the labor themes of the other two books; rather he uses this novel as a representative account of the social events taking place in California during the 1930s. Examines aspects of the split hero as found in the novel's two main characters, George and Lennie, who resemble a dark rider coming into a ranch with nothing more than a dream …

No Place To Call Home: The 1807-1857 Life Writings Of Caroline Barnes Crosby, Chronicler Of Outlying Mormon Communities, Edward Leo Lyman, Susan Ward Payne, S. George Ellsworth

All USU Press Publications

Caroline Crosby's life took a wandering course between her 1834 marriage to Jonathan Crosby and conversion to the infant Mormon Church and her departure for her final home, Utah, on New Year's Day, 1858. In the intervening years, she lived in many places but never long enough to set firm roots. Her adherence to a frontier religion on the move kept her moving, even after the church began to settle down in Utah. Despite the impermanence of her situation, perhaps even because of it, Caroline Crosby left a remarkably rich record of her life and travels, thereby telling us not …

Female Iconography In Invisible Man, Shelly J. Eversley

Publications and Research

Argument concerning female visuality in Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man.

James Stevens, James H. Maguire

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

By 1930, James Stevens had gained a national reputation as one of the Northwest’s most promising and outspoken young writers. Seventy-five years later, he has slipped so far into obscurity that relatively few people know of his contributions not only to Northwest writing but also to American literature in general and to the literature of the American West in particular. His tall tales made Paul Bunyan one of the great heroes of American popular culture. The controversial literary manifesto he co-authored with Oregon author H. L. Davis led to a new era in the history of the Northwest’s literature. And …

Braber, Thomas Cornelius, 1922-2008 (Sc 1437), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1437. World War II poem written by U.S. soldier Thomas C. Braber about the Omaha Beach battle (6 June 1944) on the European battlefront. Also printout of a photo of Braber and his salvage group on Omaha Beach, and related data.

Gary Paul Nabhan, Gioia Woods

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Between spoonfuls of posole at the Morning Glory Cafe in Flagstaff, Arizona, Gary Paul Nabhan mused about the distinctive character of western American literature. “What is western literature about?” I asked him. Without hesitation, he replied, “It is about a process of disorientation and reorientation.” The mountains, sand dunes, and canyons of the western landscape govern western imagination. That landscape, he believes, is responsible for the dis- and reorientation that characterizes the work of many western writers. Nabhan continued, “I should say that in an odd way, that’s even true of Native American literature [....] Leslie Silko writes about the …

Josephine Miles, Erik Muller

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“You could say I saw California grow up. Right along with me!” So Josephine Miles linked her life and region (Childress 40). The link between her poetry and California has not always been declared by the poet or detected by her readers. Miles mused upon the problem: “Sometimes there’s a certain kind of critic that says I’m a California poet [. . .] he says I have a lot of loose lines and a lot of locale. But then another critic will say, ‘She’s not to be identified as anything but English because her poetry is rather neat and universal’” …

Louis Owens, Linda Lizut Helstern

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“'I prefer infinitions to definitions,’” Alex Yazzie, the cross-dressing Navajo anthropologist in Louis Owens’ Bone Game, declares (46). So did Louis Owens. In his life, in his death, and above all in his writing, Louis Owens (1948-2002), novelist, essayist, literary and cultural critic, crossed boundaries and refused definitions. Born in Lompoc, California, Owens came to understand the arid landscape of the west through the lens of his early childhood in the Yazoo bottoms of Mississippi. He was a Native mixedblood who acknowledged not only his multi-tribal heritage, Choctaw on his father's side and Cherokee on his mother’s, but the …

An Anti-Locust Campaign In Nabokov (And Pushkin), Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

Pushkin’s non-apocryphal anti-locust campaign is reflected in Nabokov’s unpublished sequel to The Gift.

But Who Is Any Longer Interested In The Possible?: Kathy Acker In Hell Failing Fuck You, Jake Kennedy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In 'But who is any longer interested in the possible?': Kathy Acker in Hell Failing Fuck You I explore and celebrate Acker's use of a tropics of failure (plagiarism, pain, terror, gender-play, bad jokes, dumbness) as an inimitable strategy for achieving counter-cultural art and community. The prose style and scholarly apparatus of my article reflect not only my position as a poet/academic but also attempt to model an ethical, non-authoritative, Acker-informed critical language.

Interracial Love, Virginians' Lies, And Donald Mccaig's Jacob's Ladder, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The Old South's taboo against love between blacks and whites has cast a long shadow. No cross-racial relationship has been so pathologized by American society. Even in 1967, when the Supreme Court finally declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia, sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage, down from thirty states as recently as 1948. Not until 1998 and 2000 did ballot initiatives in South Carolina and Alabama finally eliminate the last of the antimiscegenation laws, although no one had tried to enforce them for years. Recent U.S. census figures show interracial unions increasing--up from 3 …

The Graveyard Of Genre: David Markson's Postmodern Epitaphs, Camelia Elias

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

David Markson is a writer who in a series of novels entitled Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Reader's Block (1996), and This is not a Novel (2001) explores some of our basic conceptions of genre. Can we call a book of fragments a novel? Is a novel still a novel when the characters are given names such as Author, Protagonist, Reader? What are we left with, when critics resort to labels such as novel of intellectual reference and allusion . . . minus the novel, or seminonfictional semifiction to categorise his texts? Through an apparently endless list of anecdotes and facts regarding …

One-Way Street In A Global City: Don Delillo And The Lugubrious Boredom Of The New Economy, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

few of the things we have fought against in cultural studies include the erroneous perceptions that the forces associated with globalization are 1) benefiting the world's peoples and 2) producing a homogeneous global culture. Against this, we have proffered endless texts documenting the sufferings of the world's peoples and critiquing the underlying assumptions regarding U.S. and Western hegemony as well as more hopeful tracts charting a more equitable future as an alternative to crushing regimes of neo-liberalism. In this, we have been joined by countless activists as well as others in women's studies, Latino/a studies, international relations and …

Lions And Tigers And Rears And Environmental Activists, Oh My! An Eco-Critical Reading Of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, Mollie Barnes, Rebecca Weber

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.