American Studies Commons^™

Le Silence Du Bonheur And The House Of Forgiveness: Space And Silence In Flood, Aimee Berger

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Katrin Meise reformulates Wittgenstein's famous dictum-"What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence"-in a way that is particularly germane to a reading of Warren's novel Flood: ''What we pass over in silence, we must speak about." Warren establishes a complex aesthetic that incorporates silence into the circuit of discourse, forcing characters to confront the limitations of language, even as they realize the redemptive power of telling a "true" story.

Philosophers, Fools, And Kings: Notes On The Brothers Karamazov And All The King's Men, C. Jason Smith

Robert Penn Warren Studies

A comparative analysis of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov (1879-80) and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946) based on the analysis of archetypal characters found in the work of both authors. The Philosophers, whose world-view is based in post-enlightenment reason, operate in a dialectical relationship with the Fools who interact with the world through faith. Culturally, the resolution of the dialectic between reason and faith yields the synthesis of the King who embodies reason and faith, the temporal and the eternal, in his position of god-given power. However, both Dostoyevsky and Warren actively reject the social imperative towards …

Abigail Scott Duniway, Debra Shein

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1895, as she launched a new journal dedicated to bringing equal rights to all the women of America, Abigail Scott Duniway had already been a key figure in the national woman’s movement for over two decades. And during those years, dramatic changes had been taking place. As she wrote, “though ‘Liberty for all the inhabitants of the land’ has not yet been secured, we have made much permanent progress, and now nobody doubts our ultimate success” (“Salutatory” PE 16 Aug. 1895). At the beginning of Duniway’s career, women’s rights were severely restricted. With few exceptions, marriage brought an end …

Testimony, Refuge, And The Sense Of Place: A Conversation With Terry Tempest Williams, David Thomas Sumner

Faculty Publications

This interview with Terry Tempest Williams is part of a series of conversations with contemporary western writers about the ethical and cultural implications of nature writing.

Testimony, Landscape And The West: A Conversation With Stephen Trimble, David Thomas Sumner

Faculty Publications

This interview with Stephen Trimble is part of a series of conversations with contemporary western writers about the ethical and cultural implications of nature writing.

Activism, Fly Fishing, And Fiction: A Conversation With David James Duncan, David Thomas Sumner

Faculty Publications

This interview with David James Duncan is part of a series of conversations with contemporary western writers about the ethical and cultural implications of nature writing.

Chronological Bibliography Of The Works Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lucinda Damon-Bach, Allison Roepsch, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This two-part bibliography has been built by consulting the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) and the bibliographies compiled by Sister Mary Michael Welsh ("Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Her Position in the Literature and Thought of Her Time up to 1860," Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1937) and Richard Ranus Gidez ("A Study of the Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick," Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1958); library cataloging records; and the personal records of Lucinda Damon-Bach and Melissa J. Homestead. In most cases, entries have been confirmed through books, periodicals, photocopies, or microfilm received through interlibrary loan. We were not able …

Behind The Veil? Catharine Sedgwick And Anonymous Publication, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick's name appeared on the title page of only one of her books published during her lifetime, her 1835 Tales and Sketches, a volume collecting pieces that had originally appeared in the annually published "gift books" in the preceding nine years. Sedgwick is the earliest writer included in Mary Kelley's influential book on women's authorship, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America, and Kelley claims that women writers published anonymously or pseudonymously because of the great anxiety that appearing in public through the medium of print caused them: "The literary domestics could write and, as …

Frank Chin, John Charles Goshert

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Born in Berkeley in 1940, Frank Chin lived in the Motherlode country of California’s Sierra foothills during the Second World War before returning to the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended the University of California at Berkeley as an English major, but was drawn away to work for railroad companies throughout the west. Such early experiences of movement and transience would provide the foundations for the shifting settings of much of his drama, fiction, and criticism that would follow; additionally, this transience would also underlie the complex tone, treatment, and perception of Asian American identity that characterizes his work and …

William Kittredge, Ron Mcfarland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Equally at home whether speaking before the Humanities Colloquium at Cedar City, Utah, the Nature Conservancy at Bend, Oregon, the Regional Newswriting Colloquium at Salt Lake City, or the Wyoming Outdoor Council at Sheridan, William (Bill) Kittredge has emerged over the past thirty years as one of the most prolific and outspoken exponents of the New West. He has edited or co-edited seven anthologies ranging in nature from Great Action Stories (1977) and Stories into Film (1979) to the monumental Montana compilation, The Last Best Place (1988) and The Portable Western Reader (1997). He is the author of two notable …

We Weren’T Always White: Race And Ethnicity In Italian/American Literature, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

John Irving, Female Sexuality, And The Victorian Feminine Ideal, Tara Coburn

Masters Theses

In an interview about The Cider House Rules, John Irving states, "It is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel" (qtd. in Herel, para. 18). However, in book reviews, jacket blurbs, literary criticism, and Irving's own writing, readers and critics and Irving often assert that he is a neo-Victorian novelist, and the Victorians were a notoriously political bunch. Though Irving does not admit to the political nature of his writing, the way he treats feminist politics in his fiction has drawn particular notice by the media, who often label him as a feminist writer. …

Reading Louis L'Amour's Hondo, Joseph Mills

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks, I know it’s literature and I know it will be read 100 years from now.
—Louis L'Amour on his work (Jackson 168)

In 1946, publisher and editor Leo Margulies invited Louis L’Amour to a party in New York. Each of them had a problem. L’Amour, having served in the Army during World War II, had recently returned to the States to discover the pulp fiction markets in which he had established himself as a writer were changing. In the 1930s, he had sold numerous adventure, sports, and detective stories to magazines …

Supposing A Space: The Detecting Subject In Paul Auster’S City Of Glass, Richard Swope

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …

Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since the early nineteenth century, when white southern writers began to defend slavery, relationships between blacks and whites became a central concern in southern literature. Many nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century works by white writers exacerbated racial prejudice by reproducing southern white society's racist ideology. But other southern writers, both white and black, have attempted to redress this problem by using literature to dismantle stereotypes and to imagine new relationships. The results of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement speeded up the process, suggesting new plots, new endings, and new points of view to southern writers of both races.

Screening Readerly Pleasures: Modernism, Melodrama, And Mass Markets In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Although Faulkner had already, with his earlier fiction, established himself as a practitioner of a rarefied, regional modernism, in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem he addresses the reading tastes and pleasures of the commercial market. Commenting as he does on the doctor and his wife’s tastes in the novel’s opening, Faulkner reveals his disdain for people who prefer the culture industry’s generic products to something more personal or idiosyncratic. Yet as his potential audience, those people or their tastes were of interest to Faulkner in 1939, the year the novel appeared. Following extended periods working in Hollywood, as well as …

To Blend In The Place You're In, But With A Mind To Do Something: The Practice Of Merging In James Dickey's To The White Sea, Casey Clabough

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In a final sortie the day before the great fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in the last months of World War II, Muldrow (his first name is purposefully never given), an American tail gunner, parachutes from his burning B-29 into the city. Protected at first by the smoke-blackened anarchy on the ground, he journeys north, away from the chaos and ruin of Tokyo, instinctively drawn toward Japan's sparsely-populated northern island of Hokkaido, a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure his survival. With little more than a knife and a small map of Japan he makes his way …

Processes Of Embodiment And Spatialization In The Writings Of Paul Auster, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Processes of embodiment and the spatialization of interior categories such as thought and memory are defining characteristics of Paul Auster's novels, essays, and poetry, and a brief survey of these aspects can offer a new perspective on Auster's oeuvre as an organic whole. It is the underlying assumption of this paper that the transformation of interior into exterior constitutes a specific instance of the transpositional processes discussed therein. Within the theoretical framework of cultural studies -- as opposed to the more narrowly defined literary studies -- such transformations can be regarded as processes of embodiment, that is to …

The Flowers That Bloom In The Spring: A Critical Look At Flower Imagery In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Elizabeth Peloso

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

No abstract provided.

Cukor's Little Women And The Great Depression: Sacrifice, Morality, And Familial Bliss, Katherine Kellett

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

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.

Claiming The Feminine: Assimilationism And Militantism In Three Lesbian Texts, Travis Ferrell

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.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 4 Fall 2002

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

No abstract provided.

This Man's Heart: Masculinity In The Poetry Of E.E. Cummings, Willis John Whitesell Iii

Masters Theses

"This Man's Heart: Masculinity in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings" explores changing masculinity in the life and poetry of E.E. Cummings. The relationship between Cummings and his father, his first male role model, became strained when Cummings was a teenager finding his own male identity. As he rebelled against his father, a Unitarian minister, he began writing poetry in a modernist style under the direction of a new mentor, Ezra Pound.

Cummings' early modernist poems criticize conventional male roles and configurations of masculinity as outdated. As Cummings continued to grow as a man and writer, he confronted new realities which …

Bern Porter International: Volume 5 Number 24 (December 15, 2001), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring found art on homelessness and mail art by Bobolink Bob.

Bern Porter International: Volume 5 Number 23 (December 1, 2001), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring mail art by Black Bear Bob and art by Carolyn Chute.

Index 2 (1994-2001), Lawrence Wells

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.