American Studies Commons^™

About The Circle (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Hillbillies, Rednecks, Crackers And White Trash, Anthony Harkins

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Title Page (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Circle

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Robert Penn Warren’S Emblematic Imagination In All The King’S Men, Thomas J. Derrick

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren’s use of a static image with an explanatory motto has not been traced to its roots in Renaissance emblems. Warren’s coy responses to interviewers about the historical basis of the Huey Long story were balanced by admissions of the literary influence of Elizabethan and Italian culture. Realistic and imaginative events provided material for the author’s deep and slowly developed technique of a dynamic relationship between image and idea. Three phases of development are noticed in Warren’s fiction. His preliminary experiment was seen in the 1943 novel, At Heaven’s Gate; his intermediate development came in his 1950 novel, …

Twilight Of The Boss: All The King’S Men And Norse Mythology, Leverett Butts

Robert Penn Warren Studies

This essay explores the deep connections between Warren’s third novel and Norse mythology, particularly the Ragnarok myth. By comparing characters, settings, and events in the novel with various figures from Norse mythology, as well as Richard Wagner’s operatic interpretation of the Ragnarok myth Ring of the Nibelung, this paper contends that Warren employs Norse myths that mirror his own themes of balance and acceptance that run throughout his novel.

“Always The Truth, And Always The Lie”: Language As Symbol In Brother To Dragons, Allison Vanouse

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren, in an introductory note to Brother to Dragons, writes that the poem is not ruled by action, but by its characters’ “inner urgencies ... the urgencies of argument.” He seems to be addressing something about the agency of language. In addressing the intoxicating puissance of argument itself, Warren activates a strange and uneasy space between words and the truths they try to describe. It is by navigating this space that he draws parallels between the voice of Thomas Jefferson — struggling with the unfulfilled legacy of his political writings — and the troubled role of the poet …

Notes On Contributors (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Center (Volume 9), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

The Red Revolution From The Perspective Of Visual Cultural Studies: A New Chapter In Art, Commerce And Corporate Social Responsibility, Caroline Karanja

American Studies Honors Projects

This honors project is a critical examination of Project RED, a corporate campaign designed to heighten the appeal of a set of consumer products to a transnational youth demographic by associating these products with the eradication of HIV/AIDS in Africa. The project seeks to understand Project RED in the context of visual cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham School, and also of critical work on the use of culture as a tool for corporate growth. The project rests on a close reading of visual texts, including a HBO documentary and a set of advertisements, that constitute Project RED.

"Thrown On Their Own Resources": Collaboration As Survival In Imitation Of Life, Kristi Branham

Gender & Women's Studies Faculty Publications

The article presents an analysis of the film adaptation of "Imitation of Life," a 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst. It states that the repetition of the story across the first half of the twentieth century shows its resonance for U.S. audiences. It mentions that the woman question and the race question are brought together in the passing story in both the 1934 and 1959 film versions of the novel.

Faces Of The Future: Race, Beauty And The Mixed Race Beauty Myth, Clara Younge

American Studies Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

The Shanachie, Volume 24, Number 1, Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society

The Shanachie (CTIAHS)

This special issue of The Shanachie is titled Ireland, Irish-America and the Titanic. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, the issue includes a timeline of the sinking, illustrations and portraits, and historical reports of Irish who survived and those who did not.

Trans(Nacional) Bodies In Motion: Reframing Violence And Resistance In Mexicana Performance And Chicana Theater, Gabriella Deal-Márquez

American Studies Honors Projects

This project considers how Chicana playwrights Cherríe Morgana and Josefina Lopez, as well as Mexicana performance and video artists, Astrid Hadad and Xomena Cuevas, use performance as a space of cultural and political resistance. These cultural and racialized constraints, social marginalization, as well as real physical violation and pain. I interrogate performance through a feminist lens as a site for understanding violence against women. This thesis seeks to generate reactive dialogues that grant women agency by giving a voice to existing silences.

The Shanachie, Volume 24, Number 4, Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society

The Shanachie (CTIAHS)

No abstract provided.

The Shanachie, Volume 24, Number 3, Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society

The Shanachie (CTIAHS)

This issue of The Shanachie is dedicated to the contributions of some of the many Irish pace-setters, ground-breakers and radicals who have enriched 350 years of Connecticut history.

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The Shanachie, Volume 24, Number 2, Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society

The Shanachie (CTIAHS)

No abstract provided.

Florida: The Mediated State, Julian C. Chambliss, Denise K. Cummings

Faculty Publications

"The Mediated State" addresses the perceived and the real experience linked to Florida and demonstrates the state acts as a bellwether for understanding postwar America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Examining historical shifts linked to perceptions of the state, Chambliss and Cummings argue contemporary observers, like their historical antecedents, look to Florida to glean some greater understanding of the broader national experience.

Reintegrating Human And Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology In Rachel Carson And Barbara Kingsolver, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Rachel Carson and Barbara Kingsolver were both trained as scientists and may be expected to embrace the rationalist, mechanical view of nature as something separate from, and perhaps even inferior to, the world of humans. Yet these two women both promoted a more complex approach to modernism's scientific paradigm in which nature is not merely a separate entity for dispassionate study but also an integral part of the human community. Both women display in their rhetorical choices a keen understanding of the language of community and interconnection, and their language and writing styles constantly promote the reintegration of humans and …

Stylizing, Commodifying, And Disciplining Real Bodies: An Examination Of Wwe Wrestling, Isamu Horiuchi

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines professional wrestling in the U.S., in particular, live and television shows produced by the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Through the examination, it addresses complex issues of authenticity, audience, commodification, and discipline in contemporary popular culture and media.

I use three approaches in this study. First, I apply the theory of culture industry, developed by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, to understand WWE wrestling. I examine how the WWE thoroughly stylizes its products to attract fans and condition them to repeat the same calculable reactions. However, contemporary fans often refuse to react as the WWE wants them …

Another World Entire: The Posthumanism Of Cormac Mccarthy, Margaret Henson Pless

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cormac McCarthy's novels are thought experiments in what it might mean to write posthuman works of fiction. In a close reading of three of his novels, Child of God, The Crossing, and The Road , this project reveals how McCarthy's stories paradoxically unravel the dangerous human desire to make of our world a story. His characters, Lester Ballard, Billy Parham, and the boy, become posthuman as they live increasingly outside of narrative. Their existences extend beyond the page, in a radical intimacy with the world, evident in the haunting and elusive presences, and absences, of wolves, hawks, trout, and even …

After A Funeral, Before A Test; And Other Stories, David Stewart Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

After a Funeral, Before a Test; and Other Stories is a collection of nine fictional short stories. Their focus is diverse in regard to multiple aspects of creative fiction: subject matter, theme, style, setting and characters. Despite the array of material, one common method was to provide narration that would invite readers to make their own interpretation rather than to present overt, didactic stories. This narrative strategy was accomplished by using fictional concepts of setting, the objective correlative, and literary minimalism. Other elements include surrealism, Hemingway’s “iceberg effect,” and psychologically complex narrators. Literary influences include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great …

Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis combines history, rhetoric, and feminist identity studies to discuss the subject of black lung disease and the Appalachian coal miner. The first chapter examines the "evolution of mentalities" in historical and popular discourse surrounding the miner, which reflects James V. Catano's subversive form of the self-making identity in Ragged Dicks. The second chapter uses the feminist theory of silence as a form of control and power to understand the absence of black lung disease from the literature of coal. The final chapter is a case study of the correspondence between Congressional Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and …

The Curious Case Of Asa Carter And The Education Of Little Tree, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Little Tree was number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list on October 4, 1991, when historian Dan T. Carter published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that demolished the image of the book’s author, explaining that Forrest Carter was in reality Asa Carter, and he was no Indian. Rather, Dan Carter (no relation) wrote, “Between 1946 and 1973, the Alabama native [Asa Carter] carved out a violent career in Southern politics as a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right-wing radio announcer, home-grown American fascist and anti-Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous 1963 speech …

Wonder Woman Wears Pants: Wonder Woman, Feminism And The 1972 'Women's Lib' Issue., Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

This article originally appeared in a special issue of Colloquy, Tights and Tiaras: Female Superheroes and Media Cultures. -- The history of the Wonder Woman comic book character is full of events and personalities as dramatic as the tales detailed in the text. The origins and development of this iconic female superhero demonstrate how competing ideas of what womanhood meant were reflected in popular culture. In this essay, the focus is on a particular issue of the Wonder Woman comic book, with a story by writer and literary critic Samuel R. Delany in 1972. In this issue Wonder Woman takes …

Sources: Movies In American History: An Encyclopedia (Review), Robin Imhof

University Libraries Librarian and Staff Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

"Spectacular Opacities": The Hyers Sisters' Performances Of Respectability And Resistance, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions, Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad, two slavery-to-freedom epics, and Urlina, the African Princess, the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters used gender passing to perform opposite one another as heterosexual lovers in …

Collective Memory, Commemoration And Ways Of Remembering Little Rock: 50 Years After The Integration Crisis At Central High School, Caroline Daly

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis uses the 50th Anniversary of the 1957 Integration Crisis at Central High School as a case study to explore issues of memory and remembrance. After looking at various forms of commemoration, Little Rock proves to provide key insights into the dangers of memory, as well as more effective ways of remembering.

Lola Ridge : Poet And Renegade Modernist, Anna Hueppauff

Theses : Honours

This thesis examines the poetry of Lola Ridge as a form of alternative Modernism. Poet, editor, anarchist, Lola Ridge is largely an unknown identity in Modernist discourses. Primarily recognised as a social justice poet, her work has been viewed through a traditional Modernist lens and excluded to the periphery as ‘sentimental’. This thesis argues that Ridge personally and professionally exceeds these categories. She modelled a practice of engagement in her personal life by actively participating in rallies and protests against injustice, and living in poverty in solidarity with the poor, giving her work an authenticity worth investigating. Her poetry provides …

Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, And The Little Bighorn, Ron Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the summer of 1876, the United States government launched the Great Sioux War, a sharp instrument intended to force the last nonagency Lakotas onto reservations. In doing so, it precipitated a series of events that proved disastrous for its forces in the short run and calamitous for the Lakotas in the much longer scheme of things.

On June 17, Lakotas and Cheyennes crippled General George Crook's l,300-man force at the Battle of the Rosebud in southern Montana. Eight days later and thirty miles to the west, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the "Boy General" of Civil War fame, led …

Leading The "Father" The Pawnee Homeland, Coureurs De Bois, And The Villasur Expedition Of 1720, Christopher Steinke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1742 two sons of the explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Verendrye met an indigenous nation they called the Gens de l'Arc somewhere along the middle Missouri River near present-day Pierre, South Dakota.¹ Louis-Joseph and Francois were searching for the mythical Sea of the West, and the former asked the chief of the Gens de l'Arc if he "knew the white people of the seacoast." When the chief replied that "'[tlhe French who are on the seacoast are numerous'" and have "'many chiefs for the soldiers, and also many chiefs for prayer,'" Louis-Joseph believed he had at …