American Literature Commons^™

Appealing To Truancy: How Mary Oliver Escapes Americana, John Wise

Student Writing

How the work of Mary Oliver disagrees with the American Cultural way of thinking.

Amanda Gorman And Her Way With Poetry, Emma Corbin

Student Writing

Amanda Gorman promotes perseverance and togetherness throughout her poems: “Earthrise,” “The Hill We Climb,” and “The Miracle of Morning” to challenge the narrative of our nation’s history and make the world a better place for the generations to come.

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. …

Ai And The Other, Rosetta Dudley

Student Writing

Literary analysis in MLA format of 3 poems: "Conversation," "Cuba, 1962," and "Disregard" by Ai Ogawa which each address Othered speakers and characters. Links made to Emily Dickinson's writing and being Othered as a woman and non believer in a Puritan society. Overall theme: transcendence of circumstances as Other with the use of apostrophe and conceit.

Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

This chapter draws attention to the lack of parks and nature recreation amenities during the 1920s and 1930s in predominantly African American city neighborhoods through Langston Hughes’s political poetry, specifically his blues-inflected ballad “Park Bench,” as well as “Chicago’s Black Belt” “Restrictive Covenants,” and “One Way Ticket.” Through the figure of the tramp/vagrant/bum, “Park Bench” voices a protest against inequality mapped into city space. Asserting that access to nature should be a fundamental condition of a democratic society, the poem situates the park bench as a charged site for public dialogue. The chapter argues that this poem and other Hughes …

‘Some Foods Are Considered Aphrodisiac Because They Resemble Sexual Organs’: On Isabel Allende’S Aphrodite, Anke Klitzing

Articles

At the age of 56, well into her second marriage and a grandmother herself, novelist Isabel Allende decided to find out whether aphrodisiacs are all they are made out to be. She wrote Aphrodite: The Love of Food and Food of Love after extensive research into erotic literature across some centuries and continents, and this foundation of age-old wisdom also means that the book, while published in 1998, remains a timeless source of inspiration and enjoyment.

A Genealogy Of Self-Development In Modern America, Kelsey M. Binder

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article offers a hypothetical conversation between various authors and creators who have embarked on progressive self-development journeys under the influence of a shared society that intermittently embraces and rejects the structures of the American Dream. While examining the instinctive human motives that cause the radical decision to actualize one’s life, this paper attempts to bridge the psychology of the desire for personal growth to our influential cultural landscape. It explores and analyzes the self-development journeys of individuals such as William Least Heat-Moon and Chris McCandless, as well as the recent message of self-development found in a cinematic pop culture …

The Influence Of Individualistic Ideas On American Mobility, Markus Magiera

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

In this paper I showcase the influence of individualistic thinking ranging back as far as Age of Enlightenment on the development of mobility in America since the eighteenth century. My goal is to identify the factors that shaped the evolution of travel. In order to do so I start by analyzing texts from the early nineteenth century, where travel by foot was the common thing. Next I focus on new means of mobility; first the bicycle, and later on the automobile. I aim to convince that modernity's main instigator was the change in thinking brought forth in the Age of …

Depictions Of Fear In Lev Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches And Stephen Crane's The Red Badge Of Courage, Ralph Willard Schusler Jr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to examine and compare two iconoclastic works dealing with war as experienced by combatants. So much of modern war fiction takes this perspective that one is hard pressed to imagine a time when such was not the case; the watershed was marked in the above named works by the aforementioned writers, which, and who, were first in putting readers inside the heads of common soldiers facing mortal danger. These pioneering authors opened the door to modernist writing about boundary situations involving existential threat, as well as the psychological reactions they evoke – especially fear. …

When Choice Is An Illusion: Suppression Of Women In William Styron's "Holocaust" Novel, William Sewell

Research & Publications

This article examines how Styron shapes Sophie's Choice through Southern Gothic literary techniques. In particular, we will explore the development of Sophie, who throughout the story served as the Gothic archetype of the "damsel in distress." She is a heroine who lacks agency,a character with "a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued– frequently." Ultimately, the harsh suppression of female identity entrenched in Gothic literature contributes to the "unimaginable pain" that forces female characters like Sophie to make their "choice." Finally, we will examine how Sophie, controlled throughout her life, really does not have a real "choice" when …

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

We Are Standing In The Nick Of Time: Translative Relevance In Anne Carson's "Antigonick", Michelle Alonso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated …

Arts: Fiction And Fiction Writers: The Americas, Rachel Norman

Faculty Publications

This essay by Rachel Norman, which originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, discusses contemporary Muslim fiction published in the United States with a particular focus on three novels: Mojha Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, and Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home.

A New Definition Of Magic Realism: An Analysis Of Three Novels As Examples Of Magic Realism In A Postcolonial Diaspora, Sarah Anderson

Honors Program Projects

In the world of literature, magic realism has yet to find its place as an established genre or style. The following paper posits that magic realism stems from marginalized writers in a postcolonial diaspora, attempting to make sense of their world without the influence of Western gaze. Gabriel García Márquez in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight’s Children, and Toni Morrison in her novel Paradise use similar elements of magic realism in order to establish a grounding mythology for their cultures. These three novels can demonstrate the direction of fiction that uses magic …

Of Sonnets And Archives: Robert Graves, Laura Riding, And The Erasure Of Modern Poetry, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

In the nearly eighty years since Laura Riding and Robert Graves ceased their collaborative endeavors there has been much speculation as to the nature and extent of their literary partnership. Graves retold the past to his biographers, constructing Laura Riding as a queen yogi figure wielding an almost sinister influence. In response to these accusations Riding returned fire with volley after volley of “corrective” letters which she sent to Graves’s biographers as well as any magazine or student that she found to be sympathizing with Grave’s account of the creative partnership. At the time of her death in 1991, Riding …

“Ab-Soul’S Outro,” “Hiiipower,” And The Vernacular: Kendrick Lamar’S Rap As Literature, Tyler S. Bunzey

Senior Honors Theses

Kendrick Lamar’s “Ab-Soul’s Outro” and “HiiiPower” employ complex patterns of Signifyin(g), testifyin’, and other classical African-American literary tropes in order to construct a nuanced style. Lamar creates a double-voiced text not only within his narrative, but also within the form itself. Lamar plays on rap's unique status in African-American literature as an oral text; it is an extension of the vernacular. Through this oral text, Lamar decentralizes the Eurocentric focus of classical interpretation and qualification of literature to a new Afrocentric perspective that privileges the oral text. These raps are complex, wrapped up in their current context along with a …

The World In Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress", Tiffany L. Fajardo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject …

The Judge’S Hold: A Struggle For Voice In Cormac Mccarthy’S Blood Meridian, Daniel R. Johnson

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is a novel that provides a clear critique on the ways in which the American west was acquired. The text is awash with gratuitous violence, symbolism and storytelling, together creating a piece that offers a modern interpretation of American identity. This analysis will approach the novel by examining a struggle for voice between the two main characters Judge Holden and The Kid in the narration. In doing so, it will be shown that Blood Meridian uses Holden's voice to suppress all other worldviews within the text in order to show the invulnerability of the political rhetoric …

Fire-Lookout Literature, Austin Schilling

2013 Projects

The Keck Summer Collaborative Research Program provides opportunities for Linfield College students and faculty to conduct research on issues related to the Pacific Northwest, and to bring the research findings back into the classroom within the subsequent academic year. Students partner with faculty to conduct research and present their work to other students, Linfield staff and faculty, and community members during a series of brown bag lunches. Austin Schilling conducted research with David Sumner and gave this presentation during the summer of 2013.

Sinking Your Teeth Into Popular Culture: Why Reading Twilight Could Kill You, Carolyn Eve Friedman

Honors Scholar Theses

A scholarly criticism of the themes and styles utilized in the popular series Twilight and their implications. Inspects the Twilight series incorporation of values and literary concepts commonly found in romance, young adult, and vampire literature in an attempt to understand the foundation of the series.

Mind The Gap: An Analysis Of The Function Of Love In The Works Of Tom Stoppard And C.S. Lewis., Jacqueline C. Lawler

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Writers C.S. Lewis and Tom Stoppard, though philosophically different, both write about love that embodies the natural law. The natural law can be defined as law that is inherent in man and can be discerned by reason rather than by revelation. Both writers use their observational style in order to reason their way to nearly identical laws of love. Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, Arcadia, Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Real Thing will be analyzed using the framework of C.S. Lewis’s book, The Four Loves.

Rain Inside The Elevator: Dualities In The Plays Of Sarah Ruhl As Seen Through The Lens Of Ancient Greek Theatre, Hannah Fattor

Summer Research

Considering the modern playwright Sarah Ruhl’s current body of work through the paradigm of ancient Greek theatrical tradition illuminates many links to Greek theatre and highlights the depth of the emotions within her plays. The ancient Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, along with Ruhl, confront themes of love and death with both sorrow and humor, considering the different ways people cope with traumatic circumstances. They focus in particular on the relationships that form between people after a significant loss, and how humans come together in a community, seeking connection with each other. By theatrically exploring the themes of …

Barking At Death: Hemingway, Africa, And The Stages Of Dying, James Plath

Scholarship

From amazon.com:Considering the time Hemingway spent not only on the safaris but also in preparing for them beforehand and writing about them afterwards, Africa was a major factor in his life and work. But surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to this aspect of Hemingway's oeuvre. This book fills that empty niche, opening the way for a long-delayed and multi-faceted conversation on a neglected aspect of Hemingway's work. Topics treated include historical, theoretical, biographical, theological, and literary interpretations of Hemingway's African topics and motifs.

Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0534-3 299 pages, bibliography, index. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents a framework of comparative literature based on a contextual (systemic and empirical) approach for the study of culture and literature and applies the framework in audience studies, film and literature, women's literature, translation studies, new media and scholarship in the humanities and in the analyses of English, French, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and English-Canadian modern, contemporary, and ethnic minority texts. Copyright release to the author in 2006.

Moving Through Fear: A Conversation With Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Jennifer L. Fabbi, Amy L. Johnson

Library Faculty Publications

Prior to its release in August 2010, Susan Campbell Bartoletti's newest book, They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group (2010), received an incredibly positive response in the form of starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Publisher's Weekly, Horn Book, and Kirkus Reviews. Through her impeccable research and ability to weave a compelling story out of the place "where darkness and light smack up against each other" (Bartoletti & Zusak, 2008), she has made it possible for children and young adults to access and understand the horror of the Third Reich …

Jack Kerouac: Le Sel De La Semaine, Thomas A. Ipri

Library Faculty Publications

In 1967, Jack Kerouac appeared on the French service of the Canadian Broadcasting Service on the program Le Sel de la a Semaine. This Icarus Films release takes a fascinating look at Kerouac’s connection to Quebec where his parents are from. This interview by Fernand Seguin took place just 2 years before Kerouac’s death, making the program all the more poignant.

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

Review Of Axes: Willa Cather And William Faulkner And Violence, The Arts, And Willa Cather, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather and William Faulkner represent an intriguing and potentially productive pairing for comparative study. Their works and careers are located at the rich intersection between regional ism and modernism, and both early 20th-century writers often looked back to the 19th century in their fiction. Even in the absence of influence or intertextual reference, these commonalities would give a literary historian much to say. However, in her study of these two authors, Merrill Maguire Skaggs exhaustively catalogs similarities and differences as proof of a decades-long competition between the authors at the expense of depth and subtlety in her analysis of …

Visual Aid: Teaching H.D.'S Imagist Poetry With The Assistance Of Henri Matisse, Christa Baiada

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Tragic No More?: The Reappearance Of The Racially Mixed Character, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

During the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, the tragic mulatto/a figured prominently in American fiction, only to recede after the Harlem Renaissance when African-American writers called for "race pride" and racial solidarity and to disappear entirely in the late 1960s after the Black Power movement ushered in racially conscious concepts such as "Black Is Beautiful." Since 1990, however, the mixed black-white character has made a significant comeback in American fiction. Contemporary representations suggest that choosing one's racial identity is only slightly less difficult than it used to be because of American society's conflation of skin color and identity. …