American Literature Commons^™

"Exploring The Cuckoo's Nest:" A Study On American Fiction And Mental Health, Emily Smeds

Honors Projects

This is a study on American fiction and mental health. The project discusses the short stories "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, "Careful," and "Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver, and the novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. All of these works are discussed in how they relate to and portray the psychological disorders of schizophrenia, depression, substance abuse disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Bibliography, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Cheryl Hopson.

Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty, Clare E. Callahan, Joseph Entin, Irvin Hunt, Kinohi Nishikawa

English Faculty Publications

Together, the essays in this issue of American Literature stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see.

The Demorest Contest: Prohibition Leader In Conversation With Wctu And Martha Mcmillan, Grace E. Kohler

Martha McMillan Research Papers

This essay explains the history of the Demorest Contest and connects it to Martha McMillan and her journals. The Demorest Contest was a temperance advocacy event run by William Jennings Demorest and the Women's Christian Temperance Union that encouraged youths to pledge to Prohibition.

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 …

Valiant Consequences, Johnjulius Lodato

Student Publications

War and conflict are significant events that hold a reasonable possibility to alter countries and their cultural populations. These transforming effects can come in many forms, ranging from mental trauma to the abandonment or modification of culture and its ideals. In this illustration, perhaps no group has endured the same everlasting detrimental effects as the Native Americans and their underlying consequences stemming from World War 2. These detriments can be seen in the form of erratic drunken or violent behavior and forgotten traditions. On the contrary, these effects may have at one time been diminished and replaced by the gratitude …

Colonial Prehistories Of Indigenous North America, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most common inquiries received by Filson Historical Society librarians concerns the myth of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Of the myth’s many versions, the one most familiar to Ohio Valley History readers goes like this: Madoc, a Welsh prince escaping an internecine conflict over political rule at home, supposedly sailed to North America in the twelfth century. His force either landed at the Falls of the Ohio or made it there after landing further south and being driven north by hostile locals, possibly Cherokee people. Madoc and his contingent intermixed with Indigenous populations, whose fair-haired, blue-eyed, …

Bigger And Abnormal Psychology: How Antisocial Personality Disorder And A Lack Of Identity Helped Shape Bigger's Behavior, Trayton N. Armstrong

English Class Publications

One of the most discussed murders in modern American literature is Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). The novel centers on the last days of Bigger’s life, as he commits two homicides, extortion, and rape. These crimes led to a death sentence of the electric chair after a flimsy trial. While it might appear at first that Bigger’s situation is simply a result of the racism of the late 1930s, with the segregated South Side noticing and hating the disparity they see compared to the more affluent white residents in neighboring burgs, I would argue that …

From The Trenches To The Writer’S Desk: Establishing A Collection Of Children’S Books Authored By Military Veterans In An Academic Library, Casey D. Hoeve

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Kansas State University possesses a collection of juvenile literature to aid Education and English Department programs. KState is also the university with the largest military population in the state. It was discovered that several famous children’s authors were military veterans. Building upon this research, over 160 children’s authors who served in the military were identified. K-State Libraries NEH Endowment Committee funded the curation of a military veteran children’s literature collection, the only known academic library to possess such a collection. The collection enabled the libraries to provide outreach through access to the materials, internet resources, and special collections exhibits.

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Book Review: How To Be An Antiracist By Ibram X. Kendi, Shuntay Tarver

Counseling & Human Services Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Damn Short Prayer, Beth Jane Toren

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This poster presents a transcript poem created with murder tales in oral history recordings. Leveraging the creative arts of storytelling, transcript poetry and visual orality, the poster brings light and music to Appalachian storyteller voices in tales of shady murders.

The handout presents the poem with visual orality methods juxtaposed beside Standard English orthographic transcription, enabling a visual comparison, a link a video with graphic text and the original voice recordings, and brief readings about concepts and methods.

Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks And Americans’ Tenuous Right To Place. By Esther Sullivan. Berkeley: University Of California Press, 2018. Pp. Xiv+264. $85.00 (Cloth); 29.95 (Paper)., Ranita Ray

Sociology Faculty Research

Traditionally, ethnographers of urban poverty in the United States have tended to write about the everyday lives, tentative morality, and curious practices of the "poor" as if poverty were a suprise outcome of illusive structures and intensely complex behaviors of the poor. ... See full text for complete abstract.

Vardis Fisher's Last Essay, Alessandro Meregaglia

Library Faculty Publications and Presentations

When Vardis Fisher died on July 9, 1968, the Idaho novelist left behind an extensive bibliography: more than two dozen novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poetry, as well as three books written for the Federal Writers’ Project. But he also left behind multiple projects in mid-process. Obituaries and memorials noted that Fisher was at work on a book called The American West: The World’s Greatest Physical Wonderland. Biographers over the ensuing decades also mentioned this incomplete project but didn’t elaborate further.

The Intermedial Politics Of Handwritten Newspapers In The 19th-Century U.S., Mark A. Mattes

Faculty Scholarship

Handwritten newspapers appeared in a variety of social contexts in the 19th-century U.S.1 The largest extant portion of 19th-century handwritten newspapers emerged from home and school settings. More far-flung examples include those written aboard ships during exploratory and military voyages. Others were produced within institutions such as hospitals and asylums. Such works were written during times of privation, including life in an army regiment or a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. At other times, handwritten newspapers accompanied efforts at westward settlement and transcontinental railway journeys. Impromptu papers could follow in the wake of natural disasters that knocked out print-based …

Thoughts And Prayers, Chloe Kardasopoulos

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Examining the symbolic Gun against its tangible counterpart illuminates abstract attachments of power and superiority this nation associates with the weapon. These elements loaded in the Gun transform the weapon into an object representative of American identity. Analyzing ideological commitments within the Gun guides a critical response to examine disproportionately increasing national gun violence against stagnant federal gun control. The ongoing gun debate must be analyzed in its entirety, beginning at its source - the Second Amendment. Scholars such as Gary Wills dissect the Second Amendment to extract its contextualized intent from modern writers’ manipulated interpretations. It is not the …

Societal Rebirth: The Importance Of Spirituality, Lauren Rothstein

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

This article offers an exploration of what the social consequences are when modernity strips away religious-human relationships to the land. The two texts Black Elk Speaks and Grapes of Wrath both include moments of anonymous forces imposing systematic modernization on society. Particularly, I try to understand the controversial subject of societal rebirths, traditionally defined through employment and steady food source availability. This paper proposes an approach to societal rebirths that emphasizes the importance of spiritual connection to the land through a critical analysis of Bakhtin's theory of Chronotope and Leopold's theory of Land Ethic. On the issue of spiritual connection …

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 …

Cultural And Narrative Shifts Of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature In Hawthorne's Wonder Book For Girls And Boys, Kristen Clark Brandt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century such as dominant …

Clarke, Kenneth Wendell, B. 1917 (Mss 635), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 635. Manuscripts, notes, publisher’s correspondence, and photographs relating to the scholarly work of WKU English and folklore professor Kenneth W. Clarke, principally "Bud Long: The Birth of a Kentucky Folk Legend" and "The Harvest and the Reapers."

Female Cyclists: Two Essays From The 1869 Hancock Jeffersonian, Paige Zenovic

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Paige Zenovic introduces and explains two nineteenth-century essays from the Findley, Ohio Hancock Jeffersonian on the subject of women riding bicycles from the time when they were first being introduced to Ohio.

The Purloined Letters: A Collection Of Mail Robbery Reports From Ohio Papers, 1841-1850, Marc Cibella

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Marc Cibella’s essay introduces and explains why nineteenth-century Americans got excited about newspaper reports of mail robbery.

“When One Shingle Sends Up Smoke”: The Summit Beacon Advises Akron About The Epidemic Cholera, 1849, Elizabeth Hall

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Elizabeth Hall explains the American cholera epidemic of 1849, with special attention to how cholera afflicted Akron, a booming canal town in Northeast Ohio. The article presents the full text of 1849 Akron newspaper articles on cholera and explains how their mix of good and bad information was published right before scientific breakthroughs in cholera research.

Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Sinister Wisdom Issue 3, published the year 1977 holds an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, titled, “It is the lesbian in us...”; The cover of the same issue has art by photographer Tee Corinne. Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. This non-fiction creative essay written by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz reflects on the first year of Sinister Wisdom's publication as a celebration of 40 years through this special edition anniversary print for which only 1000 have been printed. The essay remarks on the shift in lesbian identity and community and the potential impact of the Sinister Wisdom journal …

Truer Than Fiction: Flannery O'Connor's Fictional Fathers, Addison Crow

English Class Publications

Flannery O’Connor grew up with a loving and supportive father, so it is perplexing that she fills her stories with fathers who portray the opposite. O’Connor’s fictional fathers, when they are included in the story, are controlling, harsh, and malicious—the complete opposite of her father, Edward O’Connor. Why would O’Connor create fathers whose image so intensely contrast that of her own supportive, gentle, and loving father? My purpose in this paper is to examine O’Connor’s fictional fathers in her short stories, “The Artificial N” and “The Comforts of Home,” and her novel, The Violent Bear It Away, and attempt …

"Unsex Me Here": A Queer Reading Of Faith In O'Connor, Shelby Spears

English Class Publications

In this essay, the author examines the O'Connor stories "The Life You Save may be Your Own," "The Comports of Home," and "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" from a queer perspective using psycho-biographical evidence.

All Men Created Equal: Flannery O'Connor Responds Communism, Nina Hefner

English Class Publications

From her mother’s farm, Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia, Flannery O’Connor found her writing inspiration by observing the ways of the South. Naturally, a pervasive motif in her works is racism. For instance, in “Revelation” Ruby Turpin spends a good portion of the short story thanking God that she is neither white trash nor black. In her essay “Aligning the Psychological with the Theological: Doubling and Race in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction,” Doreen Fowler points out that “[Ruby’s] insistence on setting racial boundaries has been an attempt to distinguish a white, superior identity” (81), equality with African Americans being Ruby Turpin’s ultimate …

A City Room Of One's Own: Elizabeth Jordan, Henry James, And The New Woman Journalist, James Hunter Plummer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis considers the portrayal of the female journalist in the works of Elizabeth Jordan and Henry James. In 1898, Jordan, a journalist and editor herself, published Tales of the City Room, a collection of interconnected short stories that depict a close and supportive community of female journalists. It is, overall, a positive portrayal of female journalists by a female journalist. James, on the other hand, uses the female journalists in The Portrait of a Lady, “Flickerbridge,” and “The Papers” to show his discomfort toward New Journalism and the New Woman of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These …

Promise That You Will Sing About Me: Kendrick Lamar In Posterity, Brandon Apol

Music and Worship Student Presentations

Sometimes it would seem that the quietest moments turn out to have the loudest repercussions. This would seem to be a consistent case for twenty eight-year old Kendrick Lamar, whose career has been defined by surprise and unannounced publications of music that shortly afterward are spun into respected works of art. With an album that no one anticipated going to the 2013 Grammy awards, another album that leaked a week ahead of schedule (and brought Kendrick 5 Grammys), and an album that was released with almost no warning whatsoever, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth makes headlines with his art; of this there …

Reimagining Movements: Towards A Queer Ecology And Trans/Black Feminism, Gabriel Benavente

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples.

In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but …