American Literature Commons^™

Bibliography, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Cheryl Hopson.

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …

Translation, Weather, And Erasure In Bhanu Kapil’S Schizophrene, Flore Chevaillier

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

For Bhanu Kapil, the drafting process of writing involves the translation of non-linguistic realities into storytelling, the nature of which must leave room for the performative experience that shapes writing. In Schizophrene (2011), Kapil engaged in adventitious composition processes when she sealed her manuscript in a Ziploc bag and threw it in the garden to spend months outdoors in the Colorado winter. The text, full of gaps created by the erased parts of the “winterized” manuscript, documents schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities. The decaying process of the book that created a void in her writing also impacts the …

Bibliography, Kristi Branham

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Kristi Branham.

Comic Literature And Graphic Novel Uses In History, Literature, Math, And Science, James O. Barbre Iii, Justin Carroll, Joshua Tolbert

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Graphic novels and comics have a rich history and have long served as a medium for both education and entertainment. Although we live in an increasingly technology-rich era which offers abundant visual stimulation to compete with comics, graphic literature is arguably a more immediate and robust resource than ever before. The following paper highlights specific applications of graphic literature to pedagogical purposes, including implications for the use of comics in teaching history, world languages, English as a new language, science, and mathematics. Across these areas, a wide degree of application exists for teachers, in both K-12 and post-secondary settings. In …

The Textual Gutter: How Gene Luen Yang Redefines The Gutter In Boxers & Saints To Tell A Transnational Tale, David Lucas Jr

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This paper attempts to provide a new understanding of the gutter and how it is used to significant effect in Gene Luen Yang's, Boxers & Saints. This research draws upon the work of Scott McCloud to establish a framework for the theoretical applications of the gutter. Most prior research focuses on the gutter within the page. This article demonstrates how Yang pushes the concept of the gutter further by creating a new type of gutter that moves beyond the pages and across texts. Then the research attempts to demonstrate how the idea of the textual gutter heightens the transnational elements …

A Companion To The Works Of Elizabeth Strout, Katherine Montwieler

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Including an exclusive interview with bestselling American novelist Elizabeth Strout, this groundbreaking study will engage literature scholars and general readers alike.

Written in accessible language, this book is the first to offer a sustained analysis of Elizabeth Strout’s work. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the O. Henry Award, among other accolades, Strout has achieved a vast popular following as well. Amy and Isabelle was made into a television movie; Olive Kitteridge, which sold more than one million copies, was adapted as a miniseries; The Burgess Boys has been optioned for HBO; and My Name Is Lucy Barton was …

Herstory& Female Identity: Postmodern Feminist Revision Of Female Characters In Islamic Narrative In Mohja Kahf’S Hagar Poems, Aya Elbably

Dentistry

Contending with the re-reading and re-writing of history that has always excluded women from its grand narratives, postmodern feminist writers have always sought to revise canonical texts from a gynocentric perspective. Through their revisionary fiction, they aimed at challenging the subordinate, marginal and invisible position of the women characters in these texts. In place of the alleged objectivity of these accounts, postmodern feminist revisionist writers transform these ancient tales while employing female insight to re-narrate the story of humanity, yet through women’s perspective. Thus, they create new texts to challenge the fundamental gender stereotypes, namely the binary images generated by …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Literary critics conducting a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple diligently tend to the relationship between the two women, particularly at an intertextual level. This paper sheds light on an important third member of this relationship: Black women readers. An articulation of Black regality, which involves the incorporation of monarchical symbols and titles in characterizations of Black people, provides these readers with political tools poised to liberate Black women from hegemonic male authority and control. Examining the significance of adornment for the self exclusively to combat invisibility, the power …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

Grotesque Masculinities In The Works Of Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, And Padgett Powell, Matt Brandon Blasi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Grotesque Masculinities in the Works of Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and Padgett Powell” explores how these authors use the grotesque to complicate, distort, and criticize hegemonic white Southern masculinity as represented in contemporary American literature. In “Grotesque Masculinities,” I argue that the presence of the grotesque mode in these author’s works offers a unique critical perspective by which to better understand how masculinity is constructed by and for white Southern men in literature, and how alternative configurations of identity are not only possible, but necessary to decenter whiteness and heteronormativity as dominant categories. Using what sociologists refer to as body-reflexive …

Review Of The Man Who Thought Himself A Woman, Ed Christopher Looby, Carrie D. Shanafelt

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Christopher Looby's anthology of queer nineteenth-century American short stories is a fascinating collection of both obscure and familiar texts that together constitute a powerful argument for the queerness of the short story and for the centrality of queerness to American literary aesthetics.

Mapping The Geographic Imagination In Harriot Stuart And Euphemia At An Hbcu, Leah M. Thomas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Teaching Charlotte Lennox’s Harriot Stuart (London, 1750) and Euphemia (London, 1790) offers a transatlantic perspective of the New York region and its diverse population of African Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans as understood from a British woman novelist who lived in New York in the 1740s during the time in which both novels are set. In addition to this diversity, her novels demonstrate the conflicts and networks within this part of America, all of which can be explored through historical and geographical contexts of contemporaneous maps. These maps not only engage the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) focus …

F. Scott Fitzgerald’S Homme Épuisé: Usurping The “Madwoman” In Tender Is The Night (1934) [2022], Emma Hill

Master's Theses

Nineteenth-century women writers commonly use themes of entrapment and madness in what are now classified as gothic novels. In texts such as Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, and The Yellow Wallpaper, confinement and madness are synchronous in developing the figure of “the madwoman.” These texts were written during a time when it was uncommon for female writers to seek publication, and many used pseudonyms to get their works published or to be taken seriously by critics. The “madwoman” emerged as a powerful trope to articulate what writing under a patriarchal system feels like. That is to say, confinement scenarios resulting from female …

Decolonizing Female Archetypes: Creating An Oppositional Consciousness In Contemporary Chicana And Iraqi Women’S Fiction, Semah Salih Hussein

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In dominant imperialist discourses, women, such as Iraqi women and Chicanas, have been marginalized in political, social and economic structures and have been manipulated to maintain imperialist exploitation and processes. They have been frozen within certain archetypal configurations. Iraqi women have been misrepresented as victims of their culture and traditions, and Chicanas have been represented in derogatory terms or excluded from mainstream hierarchies of representation. This study examines some counternarratives and oppositional subjectivities/ consciousnesses provided by Iraqi and Chicana women writers through their utilization of the legacy of a number of fictional and historical female figures. The primary texts analyzed …

135th Street Branch: Librarianship And The Passing Fictions Of Regina Anderson Andrews And Nella Larsen, Caitlin Matheis

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, I examine how two writer-librarians that worked in the 135^th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in the 1920's, Regina Anderson Andrews and Nella Larsen, grappled in their fiction writing with questions of classification, information, and knowledge that encompassed their daily work in the library. I begin by contextualizing the branch within the Harlem Renaissance and Arturo A. Schomburg's call for the preservation of Black history and literature at a time when the field of librarianship was being professionalized by implementing library schools and classification standards. I then provide readings of Andrews's one-act play …

She Speaks Her Truth: Black Female Self-Empowerment In African-American Centric Texts, Britt N. Seese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

A Master's Portfolio that looks into African-American Women in African-American literature and theatrical works.

Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, share a place in the canon of American children’s literature as novels centered on female protagonists coming of age within an emblematic period in American history, respectively the duration and aftermath of the Civil War and the post-Homestead Act settlement of the Western frontier. Each text portrays the intertwined processes of girlhood and nationhood through the eyes of rebellious, gender-nonconforming protagonists, Jo and Laura, who each undergo an arc towards starting a traditional family and immersing themselves in normative national projects (respectively a philanthropic school for the poor, …

Reading The Traumatic Moment: The Role Of Socioeconomic Systems In The Color Purple And The Bluest Eye, Andrea Doll

Undergraduate Theses

There are many points of sameness between Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Both novels occur in the mid-20th century and focus on protagonists within the same race, gender, and relative class. Of all the similarities between the texts, the most influential is the trauma, sexual and otherwise, shared between Pecola Breedlove and Celie. Most notably, both characters experience incestuous rape resulting in pregnancy shortly after their first menstruation. Despite their numerous shared events and attributes, what occurs after their sexual trauma differs drastically for each character. At the end of The Color Purple …

‘The Female Marine’ And ‘Clotel’: An Analysis Of Female Crossdressing To Escape Coercive Labor Situations In 19th Century American Literature, Kaelyn Ireland

Symposium of Student Scholars

Although illegal in many U.S. cities, crossdressing was a point of fascination for Americans of the nineteenth century. Stories of real women passing as men to serve in the military—for example, Revolutionary War veteran Deborah Sampson—enchanted readers and inspired writers, such as that of The Female Marine. Ostensibly written by its heroine, but most likely written by Nathaniel Hill Wright, The Female Marine was a popular story about a young woman who was forced to become a sex worker and cross-dressed to escape her situation, then enlisted in the Navy where she served abroad the U.S.S. Constitution. At …

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Examining Katniss Everdeen's Gender Ambiguity In The Hunger Games : How Suzanne Collins Utilizes The Ya Genre To Resist Feminine Stereotypes, Moriah K. Mcdonald

Honors Theses

Even those who passively engage with modern media are likely to notice a binary frequently imposed on young adult women—that of the kind, reputable and trustworthy “good girl” or the mean, scandalous and deceitful “bad girl.” Such themes remain significantly featured in young adult (YA) literature, a genre specifically aimed at teenagers. Thus, in analyzing The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, I undertake a twofold analysis. I illustrate how Collins’s works tackle the specific issue of binary representation of women in the media, thereby validating the usefulness of the YA genre in commenting on current day issues facing teens.

Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Recasting the Salem witchcraft trials in light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on historiography, this paper revisits the question of history by examining ways in which Tituba is dis/con-figured as the subject of American history in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Both stories of persecution revolve around the figure of Tituba, a slave from the Caribbean to whom the beginning of the witch trials is attributed, as the nodal point of different modes of representing the Salem history. The telos in Miller’s drama coincides with the subject-formation of Proctor as the legitimate …

Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …

Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue (1984) provides a fascinating critique of the ideologies inscribed into patriarchal language and evokes an extremely valuable linguistic and political awareness. This article will examine the liability of the ways the novel revolts against the patriarchal society via the introduction of a gynocentric linguistic intervention. I claim, Elgin’s novel showcases an invaluable instance of how it is possible for women to revolt against the pillars of patriarchy through manipulations at the gestalt and schematic level of language and most specifically, the bodily metaphoric quality of the English. This proposed transformation of the schematic and …

Two Trans-Atlantic Divorce Novels: In Camilla, Elizabeth Robins Counters Edith Wharton’S The Custom Of The Country, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This paper argues that Elizabeth Robins' reading of The Custom of the Country (recorded in her diary, 25 November 1913) impacted the way Robins drafted her very next novel, Camilla. Unlike Wharton’s Undine, whose careers with men might be characterized by the sequence of her last names (Spragg Moffatt, Marvell, de Chelles, Moffatt), Camilla undertakes one long reflective flashback on her early life with her ex-husband, Leroy Trenholme, as she crosses the Atlantic, east to west, having been proposed to by a deeply caring and comforting Englishman. This reliving of the unraveling of her marriage (especially the scene of …

Anonymity As A Bridge From Actress To Author: The Case Of Elizabeth Robins, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Any scholar working on the origins of the feminist journey of the actress turned writer Elizabeth Robins ought to be aware of her two earliest short works of fiction she wrote and published in The New Review under nearly perfect anonymity. This paper will profile these two earlier stories, published in 1894 even before her first novel, George Mandeville's Husband, attracted attention when it appeared under her perhaps thinly disguised pseudonym, C. E. Raimond.

Robins saw the potential and, yes, to her mind, the necessity, of establishing herself as a writer so that she could more securely support herself. …