American Studies Commons^™

Intermedial Strategies Of Memory In Contemporary Novels, Sara Tanderup

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermedial Strategies and Memory in Contemporary Novels" Sara Tanderup discusses a tendency in contemporary literature towards combining intermedial experiments with a thematic preoccupation with memory and trauma. Analyzing selected works by Steven Hall, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Judd Morrissey and drawing on the theoretical perspectives of N. Katherine Hayles (media studies) and Andreas Huyssen (cultural memory studies), Tanderup argues that recent intermedial novels reflect a certain nostalgia celebrating and remembering the book as a visual and material object in the age of digital media while also highlighting the influence of new media on our cultural understanding and …

Pullinger's And Joseph's Inanimate Alice And Intercultural Engagement, Ana Abril

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Pullinger's and Joseph's Inanimate Alice and Intercultural Engagement" Ana Abril analyzes Kate Pullinger's and Chris Joseph's digital graphic novel and game. Inanimate Alice offers a model for online education environments and has been widely acclaimed. However, Abril's ana-lysis suggests possible ways for improving the empathic and educational potential of the novel/game for interpersonal and intercultural benefit. Abril bases her analysis on the theories of human interpersonal communication and then applies these findings to Inanimate Alice and suggests improvement so that participants would be able to decide if they want to play from the viewpoint of their own …

New Challenges For The Archiving Of Digital Writing, Heiko Zimmermann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing" Heiko Zimmermann discusses the challenges of the preservation of digital texts. In addition to the problems already at the focus of attention of digital archivists, there are elements in digital literature which need to be taken into consideration when trying to archive them. Zimmermann analyses two works of digital literature, the collaborative writing project A Million Penguins (2006-2007) and Renée Tuner's She… (2008) and shows how the ontology of these texts is bound to elements of performance, to direct social interaction of writers and readers to the uniquely subjective …

Streams In The Wilderness, Miranda Beale

The Kabod

Miranda Beale analyzes two award-winning novels by Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), identifying their major themes as the necessity of balancing parental responsibility and God's loving guidance and redemptive power in raising children.

Transferential Poetics, From Poe To Warhol, Adam Frank

Literature

Transferential Poetics presents a method for bringing theories of affect to the study of poetics. Informed by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, it offers new interpretations of the poetics of four major American artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Andy Warhol. The author emphasizes the close, reflexive attention each of these artists pays to the transfer of feeling between text and reader, or composition and audience— their transferential poetics. The book’s historical route from Poe to Warhol culminates in television, a technology and cultural form that makes affect distinctly available to perception. …

The Longing, H. Rice

H. William Rice

No abstract provided.

Stalking Glory, H. Rice

H. William Rice

No abstract provided.

My Father's Dogs, H. Rice

H. William Rice

No abstract provided.

Pledger Lake, H. Rice

H. William Rice

No abstract provided.

The Urgency Of Ecocriticism And European Scholarship, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Urgency of Ecocriticism and European Scholarship" Simon C. Estok argues that there continues to be unduly disproportionate attention within ecocriticism on US-based scholarship and proportionally less on ecocriticism from other parts of the world. Estok focuses on European ecocritical work written in English and published by Rodopi in recent years and argues that this work attests both to the urgency and resolve of European ecocritics. Estok looks at some of the primary contributions of twelve books published within the past ten years by Rodopi in order to show the importance of bending our ecocritical ears, to …

Trashed: The Myth Of The Southern Poor White, April Elizabeth Thompson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The fact of class has been a powerful tool in the process of identity formation, particularly in the American South, which has been viewed as a region apart from the national imaginary. To counter this exclusion, Southerners have often relied on stereotypes. One of the most prevalent and tragic of these is the stereotype of poor white trash, a construction that has been utilized to insist upon elite white Southerners' exceptionalism and innocence and to assert their rightful place in American historiography. While it is difficult to calculate their level of success, as perceptions of the region have varied through …

Ovid, Christians, And Celts In The Epilogue Of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Emily A. Mcdermott

Emily A. McDermott

CHARLES FRAZIER HAS CAREFULLY SITUATED HIS NOVEL ABOUT AN American Civil War deserter within Greek and Latin classical literary traditions. Since its publication, Cold Mountain has all but universally been hailed as an “odyssey” by readers, critics, and scholars, in recognition of its structure as an adventure-laden homeward journey, with the end goal of reuniting two lovers; it is rich with Homeric allusions (even to the point of quotation) and typologies of both character and scene (Chitwood; McDermott, “Frazier Polymêtis.”; Vandiver). In the first chapter, the author further introduces two fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus (18), a thinker whose …

Jean Sénac, Poet Of The Algerian Revolution, Kai G. Krienke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The work presented here is an exploration of the poetry and life of Jean Sénac, and through Sénac, of the larger role of poetry in the political and social movements of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, mainly in Algeria and America. While Sénac was part of the European community in Algeria, his position regarding French rule changed dramatically over the course of the Algerian War, (between 1954 and 1962) and upon independence, he became one the rare French to return to his adopted homeland. I will argue, sometimes polemically, that Sénac was and should be considered a properly Algerian …

“Their Song Filled The Whole Night”: Not Without Laughter, Hinterlands Jazz, And Rural Modernity, Andy Oler

Publications

This essay reads the rural Midwest as a modern space in which the sounds and material apparatus of early-twentieth-century jazz music compose the cultural field of Langston Hughes’s 1930 novel Not Without Laughter. It argues that Not Without Laughter does not attempt to supplant the more conventional urban modernities of Harlem and Chicago. Rather, the novel constructs a rural alternative that forms ambivalence through accumulation, both filling and exceeding the novel’s spaces and the experiences of its characters. Approaching Hughes’s novel through the sonic ambivalences of modern rurality evidences how some authors transgressed the supposed boundaries of the Harlem …

Straight Record And The Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters To Foreign Correspondents, Magdalena Bogacka-Rode

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Straight Record and the Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters to Foreign Correspondents engages with Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War (1959), Virginia Cowles' Looking for Trouble (1941) and Josephine Herbst's The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (1991) as documentaries of struggle. Documentary as a mode of writing and image making reveals dissonance, contradictions and varied perspectives which undermine the official historical record. The three writers, I argue, by republishing their Spanish Civil War (SCW) journalism in book form intended to set their record straight. This was motivated by their commitment to the 1930s struggle and the need …

We Are Cowboys In The Boat Of Ra: Sonny Rollins And Ishmael Reed's Black Cowboy, Brian Flota

Libraries

No abstract provided.

We Are Cowboys In The Boat Of Ra: Sonny Rollins And Ishmael Reed's Black Cowboy, Brian Flota

Brian Flota

No abstract provided.

Here, There, And In Between: Travel As Metaphor In Mixed Race Narratives Of The Harlem Renaissance, Colin Enriquez

Doctoral Dissertations

Created to comment on Antebellum and Reconstruction literature, the tragic mulatto concept is habitually applied to eras beyond the 19^th century. The tragic mulatto has become an end rather than a means to questioning racist and abolitionist agendas. Rejecting the pathetic and self-destructive traits inscribed by the tragic label, this dissertation uses geographic, cultural, and racial boundary crossing to theorize a rereading of mixed race characters in Harlem Renaissance literature. Focusing on train, automobile, and boat travel, the study analyzes the relationship between the character, transportation, and technology whereby the notion of race is questioned. Furthermore, the dissertation divides …

Correspondencias Tempestuosas: Tres Ensayos Para Acompañar A Sycorax Y Calibán, Santiago Vidales

Masters Theses

William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) theatrical work The Tempest was first performed in 1611 at the court of James I. Since the XVII century until today this work of art has travelled the world and has been (re)interpreted from the perspective of multiple ideologies. This thesis seeks to understand the representations and uses that Caliban has had in different spaces and historical moments. The anti-colonial interpretations of Roberto Fernández Retamar authorize us to read metaphorically the current socio-political situation of Latin immigrants in the United States through the perspective of The Tempest. The first chapter of this thesis studies and critically …

Lessons In Liminal Space: Borders As Pedagogical Tools In No Country For Old Men, Steven Norton

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

As scholars continue to explore the territories created by burgeoning interdisciplinarity and ever-growing global networks, the concept of borders become a topic of increased theoretical and pedagogical discussion. Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, set at the Texas-Mexico border, provides an opportunity to explore the liminal nature of borders and their role in identity formation. The novel allows us to embrace the fluidity of borders and see, as Gayatri Spivak argues, that “we are made by the forces moving about the world” (3), rather than divided by them. Throughout No Country for Old Men, McCarthy posits that borders …

Salman Rushdie In The Postmodern Current: New Venues, New Values, Aya Akkawi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this study is to prove that Rushdie's recent novels are not postcolonial in the sense that they abandon the colonial/colonized binary, the embrace of hybridity, and the theme of undermining the coercion and domination of the colonial country assumed in postcolonial discourse. Instead, his recent fiction is labeled postmodern because it is filled with exuberant postmodern techniques such as historiographic metafiction, the hegemony of mode of productions, the postmodern fragmented self, and suspicions of grand narrative. Furthermore, I will argue that there is an association between Rushdie's postmodern narrative technique (his mixing of history and fantasy) and …

Facing The Wreck: Death, Optimism, And The Fragmented Form, Rachael Marie Schaffner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Walter Benjamin described history as a winged angel who faces backwards, staring perpetually into the past as the violent winds of destiny carry him into the future (Illuminations). Despite a western, post-enlightenment myth of eternal progress, the wreckage of human contributions to history is clearly evident in our 21st-century understanding of anthropogenic impact on global ecology. In the context of these ecological crises (and the resulting political and economic questions), postmodern novels reveal a powerful ability to imagine different ways of living and interacting with the world. This thesis traces the relationship between fragmentation, death, and liminal experiences …

The Influence Of Literacy On The Lives Of Twentieth Century Southern Female Minority Figures, Laura Leighann Dicks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The American South has long been a region associated with myth and fantasy; in popular culture especially, the region is consistently tied to skewed notions of the antebellum South that include images of large plantation homes, women in hoop skirts, and magnolia trees that manifest in television and film representations such as Gone With the Wind (1939). Juxtaposed with these idealized, mythic images is the hillbilly trope, reinforced by radio shows such as Lum and Abner, and films such as Scatterbrain (1940). Out of this idea comes the southern illiteracy stereotype, which suggests that southerners are collectively unconcerned with education …

Framing Identity: Repudiating The Ideal In Chicana Literature, Michael A. Flores

All NMU Master's Theses

In the 1960s Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez penned his now canonical, epic poem “I Am Joaquin.” The poem chronicles the historic oppression of a transnational, Mexican people as well as revolutionary acts of their forefathers in resisting tyranny. Coinciding with a series of renewed, sociopolitical campaigns, collectively known as the Chicano Movement, Gonzales’ poem uses vivid imagery to present an idealized representation of Chicanos and encouraged his reader to engage in revolutionary action. Though the poem encourages strong leadership, upward mobility, and political engagement the representations of women in his text are misogynistic and limiting.

His presentation of the “black-shawled …

The Influence Of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick On Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian, Ryan Joseph Tesar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While many works exert an influence on Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, I argue in this thesis that Herman Melville's Moby-Dick stands above them all in importance. I examine some areas where Melville's influence on McCarthy's work can be most notably located. I argue that Melville's importance to McCarthy can be seen in the latter's use of several characters from Moby-Dick in his own novel. I also examine the parallels that arise when one examines the confluences between the two novels' structures, vocabularies, and settings. I also consider how Melville's violent aesthetics …

Reading Nostalgia, Anger, And The Home In Joyce Carol Oates’S Foxfire, Heather A. Hillsburg

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This article draws from Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia to explore the intersections between violence, memory, and the home in Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire. Through reflective nostalgia, Maddy is able to link the abuse she and her friends endure to various iterations of the home. Reflective nostalgia also allows Maddy to draw connections between anger and the domestic realm, and to write the members of FOXFIRE back into dominant narratives that largely exclude their lived experiences. Ultimately, this paper argues that because nostalgia often centers on the home, it is ideally suited to foreground the untenable nature …

Kittens In The Oven: Race Relations, Traumatic Memory, And The Search For Identity In Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Natalie Carter

Natalie Carter

The search for an ever-elusive home is a thread that runs throughout much literature by authors who have immigrated to the United States. Dominican authors are particularly susceptible to this search for a home because “for many Dominicans, home is synonymous with political and/or economic repression and is all too often a point of departure on a journey of survival” (Bonilla 200). This “journey of survival” is a direct reference to the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The pain and trauma that Trujillo inflicted upon virtually everyone associated with the Dominican Republic …

Transnational Conversations: The New Yorker And Canadian Short Story Writers, Nadine Fladd

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores The New Yorker magazine's role in shaping the Canadian short story, the contributions of Canadian authors to the magazine, and the aesthetic and ideological implications of transnational literary production. Using archival evidence, it explicates the publication histories of stories by Morley Callaghan, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro, as well as these authors' relationships with their editors at The New Yorker, in order to demonstrate some of the ways that Canadian literature emerged out of, as well as contributed to, North American transnational contexts. This project uses the work of textual studies scholars, and applies theories of …

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …

Committing To The Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments, Karinne Keithley Syers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Committing to the Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments reads Ralph Waldo Emerson as a writer of assignments for living and working whose senses can be taken up across a wide array of creative and exploratory fields. Shifting between an interdisciplinary array of contexts ranging from philosophy and poetics to dance, performance, and somatic movement experiments, I join the practical sense of creative inquiry embodied in these fields to the abstract images of Emerson's assignments. I argue that Emerson's descriptions of intelligence and power, and so his approaches to navigating skepticism and loss, as well as the non-possessive sense of what "self" …