American Literature Commons^™

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 …

Occupying The Pedestal: Gender Issues In Ellen Gilchrist, Karon Reese

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ellen Gilchrist's works shows the struggles of women living in a postmodern South. This dissertation explores Gilchrist's representations of southern women as they transition from the old South to modernity. Gilchrist's work depicts women who attempt to break off the pedestal of white Southern womanhood, but never quite do, often simultaneously disrupting and confirming traditional notions of a "good Southern lady." Gilchrist shows how women occupy the pedestal as a form of refuge and also as a form of protest. These are women who, as they navigate the transition to a new South, are reluctant to surrender the privilege of …

Decoding Literary Aids: A Study On Issues Of The Body, Masculinity, And Self Identity In U.S. Aids Literature From 1984-2011, Alexander Shimon Abrams

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rather than waiting decades to respond, novelists of nearly every literary genre began conceptualizing the AIDS epidemic shortly after the first documented case of the virus in the United States in 1981. Writers, feeling a sense of urgency, wasted little time constructing didactic texts that differ from much historical fiction in that they were written as the tragedy they are commenting on occurred. However, AIDS literature has changed as the disease has spread well beyond the gay communities of San Francisco and New York, causing people to reexamine their longstanding beliefs on masculinity, sexuality, and body politics.

My Master's thesis …

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.

David Foster Wallace To The Rescue, James K.A. Smith

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

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.

Love Is Just A Word For The Last Body I'D Like To Keep Vigil Over, Robert Jagger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Love is Just a Word for the Last Body I'd Like to Keep Vigil Over is a collection of poetry that was composed during my time spent at UNLV. Comprised mostly of prose poems, it was heavily influenced by the works of Richard Hugo, Robert Coover, Joshua Marie Wilkinson and several French poets who are often categorized as being members of either the Symbolist or Decadent movement. At its best, the collection attempts to invoke a sense of Joseph Cornell's boxes--odd juxtapositions of everyday items and language that create new and uncertain circumstances. Unlike Cornell's boxes, however, the poems aren't …

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 …

Contriving History : Making Dead Time In Select Works Of William Faulkner, Anthony Joseph Delgado

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The protagonists of three of William Faulkner's major novels, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Go Down, Moses each suffer from a compromised self that originates out of a past that contains excised elements. This revised history, which redacts past sins of rape, murder, and racial mixing, serves as a foundation for the present, passed down to the Faulknerian protagonists, Quentin, Jason, and Isaac, along lines of paternal inheritance. The three novels each suggest that when an idea of the self in the present is founded upon a past that has been rewritten, a shattering occurs when that …

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.

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

"Undone By Murmurs Of Love": Traumatic Legacies And The Struggle For Personal And Communal Identity Formation In Toni Morrison's Trilogy, Fida Yasin

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Implications of racial oppression on personal and collective African American identity formation in Toni Morrison’s trilogy are explored in this thesis. Morrison reconstructs African American history in her trilogy, but she also enacts a cultural healing through content and form. Impossible choices are made by characters in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise who are influenced by the racial trauma they experience and inherit. The legacies of oppression--traumatic memories, fragmentation, stereotypes and negative associations—distort the way these characters view themselves and one another. They are disoriented, isolated, and displaced. Characters recover from their past trauma— together—when they share their stories. …

The Simms Initiatives - University Of South Carolina, Todd Hagstette

Digital Projects

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Gilmore Simms did more than any other writer and editor to frame white southern self-identity, nationalism, and historical consciousness. He also did more to foster the South’s literary life and place in America’s imagination.

The Simms Initiatives, generously funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the University of South Carolina Libraries, offers full access to this prolific author’s work. That comes through both digital and Print-on-Demand editions. Our digital holdings represent three categories of works: Printed Materials, Scrapbooks, and Scholarship.

We strive to enhance the value of these materials and grow the study of Simms and …

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.

"Their Past In My Blood": Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, And Octavia Butler's Response To The Black Aesthetic, Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman

Dissertations

Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women’s sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. An examination of their works reveals the need for additional …

Must Pay Now, David C. Perkins

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These poems attempt to stand amidst the towering shadows of Enlightenment. One of these pillars involves the newfound land from a collective western European vantage and these lands are called the Americas. This space is where these poems are located. They suckle at the monolithic breasts of Enlightened Romance as did Romulus and Remus to the She-Wolf. The poems in their own originality engage with writers such as Jonathan Edwards, Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti, William Blake, and John Cage. If there ever was such a thread in tradition, these people might …

History And Transnational Identities In Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Brian Joseph Flores

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of my thesis is to analyze Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and evaluate the role literature plays within the larger context of the relationship among the different countries and cultures in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the place historical events play within this understanding. In Díaz’s novel, there is an understanding of the presence of multiple cultural identities. This awareness of multiple cultural identities leads to the difficulty the characters encounter when trying understanding themselves as individuals. On a much larger scale, the characters also try to understand their cultural, social, and historical …

Your Presence Is Requested At Suvanto, Maile Chapman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative dissertation is a novel set in a fictional private hospital on the southwestern coast of Finland. The main character, Sunny Taylor, is an American nurse whose loneliness and isolation give the novel its distant emotional atmosphere and outsider’s perspective on life in Finland (a densely forested country long perceived as linguistically, culturally, and geographically remote from the rest of Europe). Other main characters include a reserved, chronically ill Finnish woman born before independence from Russia and educated as an architect; an unpleasant expatriate Danish woman who once gave ballroom dance lessons in Finnish cafés; an American obstetrician who …

The Crooked Median, Monica Zarazua

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Words search. There are specific points designated by written language, where one might stand for just a little while until the satisfaction of a pattern is revealed. In this collection of stories, one of the forces that serves as a catalyst for this search is the outside gaze. The gaze exerts itself onto characters. The characters may or may not be conscious of it, may or may not welcome it, but they must grapple with it. The gaze projects its needs and desires onto the characters. It seeks to control them, and it desires to be viewed with admiration, lowered …

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

Library Faculty Research

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 Research

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 …

Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives, Najwa Heather Al-Tabaa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis interrogates the postmodern view of popular culture as being banal and questions Theodore Adorno's view of postmodern consumer culture as ultimately anti- human(istic). My re-reading of postmodern popular culture finds that there is potential for meaningful human interaction through popular culture. My re-reading asserts that popular culture is capable of being a vehicle for solidarity. In my analysis I locate a postmodern paradigm shift in which human solidarity becomes a necessary consideration and focus of postmodern narratives and art forms. I term this shift "post-postmodernism" which is marked by a focus on solidarity.1 While the shift to the …

The Dilemma Of The Italian American Male, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

“The Dilemma of the Italian American Male.”

Originally published in Pimps, Wimps, Studs, Thugs and Gentlemen: Essays on Media Images of Masculinity. Ed: Elwood Watson. McFarland, 2009

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

The Sociology Of Scenes, The Sacramento Poetry Scene, Dana Nell Maher

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

For this ethnography, I use my feminist perspective, grounded theory, participant observation, and autoethnographic techniques to explore an urban poetry scene. I suggest that scene studies are a viable alternative to community studies and that we move our articulation of social experience to reflect it as it occurs, on a multitude of continuums. My goal with this project is to develop, use, and discuss the utility of a definition of scene that is intended to be useful to scene studies researchers. To this end, I both evaluate an outdated definition of scene (Irwin 1973 & 1977), and define the three …

Heaven Overland, Jim Murphy

KSU Press Legacy Project

These poems record, from our own language—spoken on the street in Atlanta or Dayton or Chicago, in the graveyard in Charleston, on the rivers of Ohio or Missouri or Illinois, on the road in Mississippi, or on the radio anywhere in America—momentary beauties, to show us that song, however rare, proceeds from the common tongue. So these poems promise that any speech, that any mouth, might be an occasion for beauty or blessing.

Everywhere in this collection, ears, eyes, minds open to discover new abundance in landscapes thought familiar. These poems discover in America and its history boundless vistas, to …

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 …

Templeton's Peace, Trent Devell Hudley

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This novel is a work of fiction.