American Studies Commons^™

Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct …

Strong, Independent, And In Love: Fighting Female Fantasies In Popular Culture, Allison P. Palumbo

Theses and Dissertations--English

During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics like Janice Radway began to reconsider so-called women’s genres, like romance novels and soap operas and melodramas, in order to address the forms of subversion and expressions of agency they provided female audiences. However, in spite of greater willingness to consider the progressive potential in romance narratives, there has been little such consideration given to stories of romance for the fighting female character—defined as a protagonist who uses violence, via her body or weapons, to save herself and others. The fighting female has received a good deal of attention from critics like …

Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar

Theses and Dissertations--English

While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …

Run Of The Mine: Miners, Farmers, And The Non-Union Spirit Of The Gilded Age, 1886-1896, Dana M. Caldemeyer

Theses and Dissertations--History

“Run of the Mine” examines why workers refused to join unions in the late nineteenth century. Through a focus on the men and women involved in the southern Midwest coal industry who quit or did not join unions, this dissertation analyzes the economic, geographic, and racial factors that contributed to workers’ attitudes toward national unions like the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). It argues that the fluidity between rural industries that allowed residents to work in multiple occupations throughout the year dramatically shaped worker expectations for their unions. This occupational fluidity that allowed miners to farm and farmers to …

The Re-Recruit, Devon Brody Geyelin

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetics Of Propaganda: Modern Design At The 1959 American National Exhibition In Moscow, Charlotte Hecht

American Studies Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Echoes From Heaven, Flora B. Foster

Heritage Material

No abstract provided.

Collier's "Choosing Courage: Inspiring Stories Of What It Means To Be A Hero" (Book Review), Leslie R. Starasta

The Christian Librarian

A review of Collier, P. (2015). Choosing courage: Inspiring stories of what it means to be a hero. New York: Artisan Books. 224 pp. $18.95. ISBN 9781579655969

The Reader's Complicity: Universality In Waiting For The Barbarians, The Laramie Project, And The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, Aubrey Kosa

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

No abstract provided.

Listening To Afro-Latinidad: The Sonic Archive Of Olú Clemente, Patricia Herrera

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

For many Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, Roberto Clemente was more than just a baseball star. Above all, he was a symbol of hope and humanitarianism, succeeding despite the overt racial discrimination he encountered as a Black Puerto Rican. Off the field, Clemente was renowned and beloved for his involvement in charity work in Puerto Rico and other Latin American countries. His final humanitarian act came about in 1972 on New Year’s Eve when the plane chartered to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua crashed into the ocean off the coast of Isla Verde, Puerto Rico. His sudden and …

Community-Based Organizing For Educational Justice: A Case Study Of The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Jessica Kannam

American Studies Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans' Interracial Family Histories, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The interracial mixing of American families dates back to colonial times, but the history of slavery and racism in the American South made public discussion of the subject taboo—so shameful for whites that they long repressed facts that challenged their fantasies of racial purity, so painful or politically incorrect for African Americans that they suppressed the details of their mixed ancestry. In the 1970s the popularity of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), and the television miniseries that followed, sparked an interest in genealogy among many African Americans, who had long given up hope of tracing African roots severed by the middle …

Music As Narrative In American College Football, John M. Mccluskey

Theses and Dissertations--Music

American college football features an enormous amount of music woven into the fabric of the event, with selections accompanying approximately two-thirds of a game’s plays. Musical selections are controlled by a number of forces, including audio and video technicians, university marketing departments, financial sponsors, and wind bands. These blend together in a complex design that offers audible and visual stimulation to the audience during the game’s pauses. The music chosen for performance in these moments frequently communicates meaning beyond entertainment value. Selections reinforce the game’s emotional drive, cue celebrations, direct specific audience actions, and prompt behaviors that can directly impact …

The Mockingjay Phenomena: A Study On The Position Of Young Adult Women In Dystopia, Hannah Hultman

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore the messages and impact of three young adult dystopian trilogies, The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Uglies. In particular, the role of the American female teenager in political, economic and social spheres is discussed through examining the three female teenaged protagonists of these novels. For comparative purposes, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World function as counterpoints to the young adult novels; the analysis of these different novels will prove that young adult dystopian novels show young adult women that their choices and actions can be integral to their societies …

Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three twentieth-century novels—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—in the context of posthumanist animal studies. A Foucauldian biopolitical lens foregrounds the inextricably linked ways that both human and nonhuman animal bodies are governed and controlled in a biopolitical era. Each chapter focuses on textual links between speciesism and the oppression of particular human groups based on gender, sexuality, and race, arguing that each novel offers new ways of thinking about both our own species, other animal species, and how humans relate to the nonhuman world.

Thrill Of A Billion Eyes: The Prancing J-Settes, Mary Paige Blessey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The “Prancing J-Settes” is the official name of the dance line for the Sonic Boom of the South marching band at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. The popular form of dance termed “J-Setting” sources its name from the Prancing J-Settes. The Sonic Boom of the South and the Prancing J-Settes have a loyal fan following and have had a lasting and widespread influence on popular culture. This is an oral history interview project focusing on the current Prancing J-Settes themselves to hear their thoughts and definitions of the form of dance they perform and its significance. The primary interviews …

God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"God's Gonna Trouble the Water," is a noir set in Grenada, MS in the 1930s. This novel explores the issues of race, gender, and class via the protagonist, a thirtysomething black woman who despite her low status in the socioeconomic hierarchy of this small southern town is able to navigate the delicate complexities of the environment to search for her missing granddaughter, a mixed raced toddler whose father is the son of a prominent white land owner. Although national history portrays Mississippi as maintaining a polarizing view on race relations, the novel will explore how this idea of Mississippi is …

Apportioned Commodity Fetishism And The Transformative Power Of Game Studies, Ken S. Mcallister, Chris Hanson, Judd Ethan Ruggill, Carly A. Kocurek, Tobias Conradi, Kevin A. Moberly, Steven Conway, Randy Nichols, Jennifer Dewinter, Marc A. Oullette

English Faculty Publications

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, and vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification.

Review Of Writing The Environment In Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness Of Early Scribes Of Nature, Edited By Steven Petersheim And Madison P. Jones Iv, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As editors Steven Petersheim and Madison Jones acknowledge in their Introduction, the field of ecocriticism owes much to the work of scholars such as Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Leo Marx. Petersheim and Jones’s intention for Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is to extend the conversation about American writers of nature in a similar vein as Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing (2001). One would expect names such as Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville to be included in a conversation about nineteenth-century American “nature” or “environmental” writing. Although these canonical names do indeed crop up throughout …

Orbic Bards: Religious Liberalism And The Problems Of Representation In The Postbellum Works Of Walt Whitman And Herman Melville, Anthony Gus Cohen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In an attempt to reconcile the critical camps that attempt either to christianize or otherwise, "scripturize" nineteenth century literary texts with the converse, which attempts to paint them cynically as "infidel countertexts" this project seeks to find a middle ground. The works of Herman Melvile and Walt Whitman steeped in the increasingly liberal religious atmosphere of New York City following the Civil War, both strive to offer up an impressively accurate historical and poetical record, free from the problems of hearsay that nagged the deists and transcendentalists, and instead attempted to offer something that instead was nearer to reason, and …

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Gender And Power In Waiting For Godot, Ryan Wright

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

No abstract provided.

Blind With Superstition, Cursed With Illusions: Masculinity And War In Bierce’S “Chickamauga”, Salina Patterson

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

No abstract provided.

The Game Debate: Video Games As Innovative Storytelling, Melissa Somerdin

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

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

James Joyce’S Gnomon Of Pain In “Grace” And “The Dead”, Bari K. Boyd

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

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 18 Fall 2016

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

No abstract provided.

Time In American High Modernism: Reading Fitzgerald, Hemingway, And Faulkner, Masahiko Seki

Wayne State University Dissertations

There were important changes about understanding of time in the early 20th century. Newtonian view of time that supports linearity and irreversibility of time was challenged in various fields. This trend promoted high modernists to seek new representations of time.

On the whole, high modernists denied Newtonian view of time and tried to describe merging of the past, the present, and the future. They often envisioned a romantic moment, in which this merging is perfectly achieved. But unlike European high modernists, American high modernists were more attracted to a traditional understanding of time that emphasizes a decisive difference between the …

The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Radical South” examines the art and writings of Civil-Rights-era social movements and locates U.S. based political structures in a hemispheric and global network. I reveal that the Civil Rights Movement, ethnic nationalism, and second-wave feminism were not separate entities; rather, the cultural work of activists was an intersectional effort that defied national strategies, such as non-violent protest and race-based separatism, that were often determined by their urban counterparts. Thus, I argue that new political aesthetics emerged from grassroots activism and set in motion ethnic and racial cultural expressions that embraced multiple, even conflicting, identities. As much as this art …