American Studies Commons^™

Desert Literature: The Early Period, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although not entirely free, ours is a fairly easy ride when it comes to living on deserts. Today, in order to survive, few people out in the lands of the giant cactus and the Gila monster eat grasshoppers or spend day after day hoeing beans in the punishing 110° heat. Instead, today’s residents enjoy a created world of air-conditioned homes, schools, and shopping malls. The point is that few people live in the desert anymore. They live on it. Theirs is a colonial society, imposed on the land, fed from the outside, and infused with the life-giving juice of energy …

Reading Wallace Stegner's Angle Of Repose, Russell Burrows

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Wallace Stegner must have felt he was gambling as he settled on Angle of Repose (1971) as the title for his most important novel—the one that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize (1972). “Angle of repose” happens to be a bit of technical jargon from mining, and Stegner meant to extend it to marriage. This unlikely metaphor begins with the practical understanding that mine debris will tumble downhill only so far, because as a slope levels out, the rocks and the gravels and the like will start to pile up at their respective “angles of repose.” And so, …

Walt Whitman: The Optimism Of An Evolutionary Pantheist, Katherine R. Hults

Masters Theses

E.M. Forster may have best described Walt Whitman's prevailing optimism in the following passage:

He is the true optimist—not the professional optimist who shuts his eyes and shirks ... but one who has seen and suffered much and yet rejoices. He is not a philosopher or theologian; he cannot answer the ultimate question and tell us what life is. But he is absolutely certain that it is grand, that it is happiness, and that 'wherever life and force are manifested, beauty is manifested.' (Allen, World 52)

Whitman was aware of the social taboos and social evils of his time, witnessing …

Journey To The Frontiers Of Perception: How Women Wrote About The Westward Movement During The Nineteenth Century In Relation To Land, Animals, And The Domestic Sphere, Brandi Dale Spelbring

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Pirsig's Phaedrus: The Journey Of The Shaman, Joseph E. Levora

Masters Theses

Robert Pirsig, in both his novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila, explores the conflict one man has with the beliefs and values of the culture he is living in. This conflict leads him to mental collapse and eventually a kind of rebirth into a new outlook and way of viewing the cultural values and beliefs of the society he is living in. In this thesis, I propose that Phaedrus, the central character of both of Pirsig's novels, can be compared to a shaman. I am not suggesting that Pirsig deliberately intended the reader to view …

Epic, The Oral Community, And The Memory Of Emancipation In Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

As the recently published epistolary collection reveals, Ralph Ellison was an unabashed Americanist, for better and for worse. Ellison's faith in American identity and the democratic process, which is evident at the end of Invisible Man in the protagonist's determination to "affirm the principle on which the country was built [and not the men who did the violence]" (574), is again manifest in the posthumous novel, Juneteenth. According to John F. Callahan, Ellison's litearary executor, the novel celebrates "the indivisibility of the American experience" (Juneteeth xvi). James Alan McPherson (the African-American writer to whom Ellison showed a portion …

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

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

No abstract provided.

To Barchester And Beyond: Entering The World Of A Novel Today, Michael R. Allen

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

No abstract provided.

Foregrounding Motherhood In Toni Morrison's Sula And Beloved, Lindsay Green

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 3 Fall 2001

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

No abstract provided.

Multicultural Literature: A Study Of A Berks County, Pa High School, Amy Mcfeaters, Sara Smith, Lucy Chen, Rose Thoma

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.

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.

Steinbeck Newsletter Winter 2001, San Jose State University

Center for Steinbeck Studies Newsletter

Winter 2001. Includes: Two Fishes with One Hook: The Ecological Perspectives of John Steinbeck and Joseph Mathews / Louis Owens; Steinbeck and Kaufman at Cherchez La Farm / Don Swain; A Study of the Symbolism of the Name Rose of Sharon / Ikuko Kawata

Bern Porter International: Volume 4 Number 12 (December, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring works by D.A. Russell and C.A. Conrad.

Bern Porter International: Volume 4 Number 10 (October, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring found works by Bern Porter and other artists.

Vol. 20, No. 4 (2000), William Boozer, Tina H. Hahn, Robert C. Khayat

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Bern Porter International: Volume 4 Number 9 (September, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring art by Nguyen Ducmanh and "The Continuing Travels of Black Bear Bob."

Bern Porter International: Volume 4 Number 8 (August, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Bulletin of the Scholars of the Institute for Advanced Thinking.

Featuring art by Sheila Holtz and written work by Roger Coleman and Brendan Connell.

Bern Porter Cosmographic: Volume 1 Number 7 (July, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring "The Travels of Black Bear Bob" (Beltane) and written work by Daniel Russell and Nguyen Ducmanh.

Bern Porter International: Volume 4 Number 7 (July, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Bulletin of the Scholars of the Institute for Advanced Thinking.

Featuring an excerpt from William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech and part 2 of "The Travels of Black Bear Bob."

Vol. 20, No. 3 (2000), Catherine Dupree, Mitchel Globe, Allan Kolsky, William Boozer

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Bern Porter Cosmographic: Volume 1 Number 6 (June, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring art and prose by Sheila Holtz.

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

Bern Porter Cosmographic: Volume 1 Number 5 (May, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring poetry by Daniel Russell and found art by Nick Herbert.

Little Squatter On The Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Kansas Indians, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a person of her time and place. She fictionalized her memories to give what she honestly believed was the truest possible account-true in deeply human ways as well as in accurate details-of one family's settlement history on the Great Plains frontier. I have never really liked her work. While my sister read all the Little House books, I read ... Zane Grey. That I do not share Wilder's values and point of view is no argument against the books-I do not share Zane Grey's values and point of view, either. But Zane Grey is not held …

Bern Porter Cosmographic: Volume 1 Number 4 (April, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring "Inventions" by Richard Eaton and a reprinted review of books by Bern Porter.

Bern Porter International: Volume 4 Number 11 (November, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring collage art by Sheila Holtz.

Vol. 20, No. 2 (2000), Joan Williams, William Boozer

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Bern Porter Cosmographical: Volume 1 Number 3 (March, 2000), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

Featuring found works by Nguyen Ducmanh and Sheila Holtz.