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American Literature Commons

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Full-Text Articles in American Literature

A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez May 2021

A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project examines how the U.S. ethnic authors Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz reflect the dynamic, reciprocal process of transculturation by decoding popular cultural forms. Using strategies made available by cultural studies, hemispheric theory and neoMarxism, critical attention will be directed to each author’s major literary work: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, and Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This dissertation further analyzes a hitherto overlooked area of U.S. multiethnic literary studies: the ethnic subject’s relationship to encoded popular culture forms and how they impact dentity formation. Recent scholarship has focused on the ethnic …


Uncommon Convergences: A Hemispheric And Comparative Approach To The Great Gatsby And Pedro Páramo, Ariel Jade Santos May 2015

Uncommon Convergences: A Hemispheric And Comparative Approach To The Great Gatsby And Pedro Páramo, Ariel Jade Santos

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Over the past thirty years, American literary scholarship has shifted focus away from a national approach centered on the United States to a hemispheric methodology that includes all of the countries within this hemisphere. As scholars begin to break down the once iron-clad borders that stood between the American canon and the authors of our hemispheric neighbors, new opportunities have arisen for literary exploration. As an original contribution to this field of scholarship, my thesis project uses a hemispheric and comparative methodology to identify and examine the manifestations of reification and patriarchy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) …


The Dakini Project, Kimberley Harris Idol May 2014

The Dakini Project, Kimberley Harris Idol

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation merges creative writing with scholarship using the novel, The Dakini Project, to provide the subject matter to which the criticism applies. It will focus on the source of mystery format as that codified by Edgar Allan Poe that is later taken in hand by his fellows Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (as novelists), authors of the hard-boiled American style, and it will use Chaos theory to assess to idea of catastrophe in terms of emergence rather than disintegration. Though the format comes from American beginnings, the scope of the stories discussed here are tangled around …


"Divine William" And The Master: The Influence Of Shakespeare On The Novels Of Henry James, Amy M. Green May 2009

"Divine William" And The Master: The Influence Of Shakespeare On The Novels Of Henry James, Amy M. Green

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Henry James's most sustained commentary on Shakespeare comes in the form of an introduction to an edition of The Tempest that was published in 1907. In it, he remarks that the play is a reflection of Shakespeare "consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imaged creative Expression...to show him as unresistingly aware" (1207). This praise ties unerringly back to James's praise of the artist as one who views the world through open eyes and can capture the nuance of experience. James himself worked at the craft of fiction, and writes extensively in his notebooks and …