American Literature | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

The Language Of Suffering: A Review Of Ghost Words And Invisible Giants By Lheisa Dustin, Jill Darling

Criticism

Ghost Words and Invisible Giants by Lheisa Dustin. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021. Pp. 308. $133.00 hardback.

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Lessons From A First Year Seminar: Teaching “Mean Girls” To Become “Nasty Women”, Elif S. Armbruster Phd

Feminist Pedagogy

This essay explores what happened in a First Year Seminar on "Nasty Women in American Literature" when a group of students, instead of embracing the strength and independence that the phrase "nasty woman" came to embody, turned into a group of "mean girls"--led by a "queen bee"--and dominated the course through alliance-building, gossip, and distraction. The Suffolk University English professor teaching the course explains the challenging environment that ensured and what she learned from the experience, enabling her to make important changes in her teaching of the course the following semester.

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"I Will Write Mad Stories": The Hysterical "I" In The Diaries Of George Eliot, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Virginia Woolf, And Sylvia Plath, Jaclyn Marie Swiderski

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation focuses on the long history of hysteria and the ways in which it has been used to denigrate and silence disabled women. Women diagnosed as hysterical, by either the medical establishment or the court of public opinion, are denied the right to generate knowledge about and for themselves – they are epistemologically disabled. The author argues that hysterical women have unique ways of looking at and understanding the world which push back against their epistemological disablement. In order to uncover some of this history of hysterical women, this dissertation uses the diaries of four “hysterical” women over the …

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Shared Shame And Affect In Nella Larsen's Passing, Claudia Ludwick

All Theses

This project focuses on the negative affect of shame in Nella Larsen’s 1920s American novel, Passing. While shame is a universal feeling everyone feels, the project argues that Larsen’s two main characters, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, feel a specific type of invisible shame that pulls on them differently. For Irene, this shame is reactive and aggressive, but for Clare, this shame is passive and often ignored. The project details where and how the shame manifests for each character, particularly focusing on how shame can be seen visibly and invisibly in and on the body. Because no other character recognizes …

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Podcasts Reclaim Literature By Women: A Comparative Study, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This presentation samples some prominent podcasts which highlight my longtime academic specialty, literature by women. At least three podcasts on Individual writers, Emily Dickinson, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth Robins receive attention. At least two podcast series that examine collections of women writers deserve acknowledgment. These are: Lost Ladies of Lit hosted by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew in Los Angeles and one sponsored by Women's Fiction Writers Association, the Debut Author Podcast hosted by novelist Maggie Smith, "Hear Us Roar." I am interested in not only the content and how it is presented, but the ease of use and reach …

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Representations Of Violence Against Native American Women, Christine York

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

It is the aim of this study to provide detailed attention to the representation of violence against Native American women throughout American films and literature. Native American women have been persecuted against since the times of colonization; however, there has been a recent uptake in this crime. This crime has been seen throughout many forms of art, but has not often been a focal point to these artforms. In order to argue that the violence these women experience needs to be central to the texts they are seen in, a comparison between three different texts is imperative. These texts are …

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Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.

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Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur

Publications and Research

Zitkala-Ša (Lakota: Zitkála-Šá, meaning Red Bird) was among the first to write about the experiences of Native American children in the U.S. Indian boarding school program to an English-speaking audience. As a writer and political activist, Zitkala-Ša uses emotional appeals and cultural ideas she learned through her white education to expose the very boarding school institutions that taught her. In American Indian Studies (1921), Zitkala-Ša critiques the violence that the Indian boarding school system inflicts on young Native Americans. She presents these critiques through emotional appeals that take two forms: one, a more traditional sentimental appeal associated with middle-class white …

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Little Cricket On The Hearth: The Quiet Feminism Of _Little Women_, Caroline Anderson Klein

Honors Theses

Since the advent of the cult of domesticity, the stakes for female characters in domestic literature have been notoriously high. There was no room for flaws, rebellious decisions, and certainly no room for mistakes—whether of the woman’s own accord, or simply as collateral damage of a male character’s immorality. In this shallowly Calvinist domain, women were never more than one broken guardrail away from social ruin or death. In writing Little Women, Louisa May Alcott breaks these molds through unflinching kindness to her female characters from childhood to adulthood, even unto death. Alcott achieves this quietly feminist feat by …

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The Controlled Narrative Of “Jane Roe:” Norma Mccorvey’S Life Beyond The 1973 Trial, Eleanor G. Strickland

Honors College Theses

Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, 1973, wrote two memoirs twenty years after the Supreme Court trial that surrounded her third pregnancy. These memoirs (I Am Roe, 1994, and Won by Love, 1997), along with the recent documentary AKA Jane Roe (2020), provide an insight into McCorvey’s life and how she was used by politicians and civilians during and after the influential trial. McCorvey lived a complicated life and was constantly being pulled in different directions spiritually, politically, and personally. This thesis shows how McCorvey attempted to re-write the narrative of her life using …

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The Impact Of The Gut-Brain Axis On Alzheimer’S Disease, Elissa Wakim

Best Integrated Writing

Elissa’s review for the Graduate Biomedical Review focuses on the links between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain; the gut-brain axis and the development of Alzheimer’s disease. As a student in the Microbiology and Immunology Masters Program Elissa was particularly interested in the gut microbiota and their connection to neurodegenerative disease. She tidily reviewed the literature and wrote a fascinating and compelling piece of work.

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Best Integrated Writing Spring 2024 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies, Kristie Mckiernan, Tracy Smith

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. This is the first issue after a 5 year hiatus.

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A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Betty Smith’S Bestselling Introduction To The Gilded Age And Progressive Era, Nancy C. Unger

History

An analysis of Betty Smith’s bestselling coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reveals how popular literature can serve as an important introduction to signature issues of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration are highlighted in the novel—as well as attendant problems including poverty, machine politics, child labor, and prejudice and discrimination. Profound ignorance about sexuality and conception abound in a religious culture that made premarital sex and birth control sinful and shameful, with unhappy marriages and unwanted children the result. As poverty and deviant sexuality abound, eugenics is touted as a sensible solution. The novel …

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Women, Animals, Food: Planetary Perspectives On The Non-(Hu)Man, Samu/Elle Striewski

Comparative Woman

The paper comparatively reads Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay (1995) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) to trace the ways in which both novels show the complex intertwinement of the climate crisis with gender, class, race, subalternity, anthropocentrism, and veganism. Bringing together Gayatri C. Spivak’s notion of “planetarity” with ecofeminist philosophy and literary criticism, the article proposes a planetary ecogender reading of the two texts and their representation of the non-man, non-human, and non-subject. Building up further on Jacques Derrida’s critique of carno-phallogocentrism, the pedagogy of a relational ethics of “nurturing” is hence presented …

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The Personality Profile Of Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck, Sophia Geng, Aubrey Immelman

Psychology Faculty Publications

This paper presents the results of a psychodiagnostic case study of Nobel laureate Pearl Buck, 1938 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” Guided by the conceptual perspective of personologist Theodore Millon, psychodiagnostically relevant data about Buck were collected from biographical sources and media reports and synthesized into a personality profile using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC). Then, the personality profile yielded by the MIDC was analyzed in accordance with interpretive guidelines provided in the MIDC and Millon Index of Personality …

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Monstrous Matrilineage In Chinese American Literature, Leina Hsu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In this paper, I explore the monstrous relationships between Chinese American mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Bone by Fae Myenne Ng, and Severance: A Novel by Ling Ma. I employ monsters as metaphors and motifs that illustrate the womens’ genealogical trauma and resistance. By putting Chinese American matrilineages in a monstrous context, I elevate them as alternative knowledge sources that haunt the margins of Western society. In The Joy Luck Club, ghosts reveal the invisibility and survivor mindset of Chinese American immigrant mothers. For Bone, skeletons represent the unspoken trauma that plagues Chinese American …

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In Quest Of A Mythopoetic Native American Subjectivity: Joy Harjo’S Poetry, Aya Elbably

Dentistry

In their resistance to the Anglo-American colonialism and white supremacy, Native American writers use storytelling and mythical motifs to reclaim their Indigenous cultural memory. Through these mythical narratives, they seek to emphasize their tribal cultures, political sovereignty and nationalism. In their challenge of the traditional negative stereotypes, Native women writers have correspondingly engaged in a process of decolonization and self-definition to reclaim their subjectivity. Hence, this paper examines some of Joy Harjo’s poems that are published in In Mad Love and War (1990) and She Had Some Horses (1983) volumes. Drawing on Native feminism and Gerald Vizenor’s concept of ‘survivance’ …

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Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

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Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

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Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

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Elizabeth Robins Portrays Working Women In Suffragette Literature: A Reflection Through The Lens Of The 2015 Film, Suffragette, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

I place the 2015-released film Suffragette within a context of the efforts Elizabeth Robins made to document and, by witnessing, to advocate, the early phases of the British Women’s Suffrage Movement in England. Robins wrote and participated across margins. An expatriate American living in England, she had no personal advantage to gain with a franchise. In her late forties and in ill health, she took perhaps only "safe" opportunities to thrust herself into the fray. But as Jane Marcus points out, with her research on the play that became Votes for Women, she took efforts to experience how working-class …

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Bibliography, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Cheryl Hopson.

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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. …

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Bibliography, Kristi Branham

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Kristi Branham.

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Full-Text Articles in American Literature

The Language Of Suffering: A Review Of Ghost Words And Invisible Giants By Lheisa Dustin, Jill Darling

Criticism

Lessons From A First Year Seminar: Teaching “Mean Girls” To Become “Nasty Women”, Elif S. Armbruster Phd

Feminist Pedagogy

"I Will Write Mad Stories": The Hysterical "I" In The Diaries Of George Eliot, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Virginia Woolf, And Sylvia Plath, Jaclyn Marie Swiderski

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Shared Shame And Affect In Nella Larsen's Passing, Claudia Ludwick

All Theses

Podcasts Reclaim Literature By Women: A Comparative Study, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Representations Of Violence Against Native American Women, Christine York

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur

Publications and Research

Little Cricket On The Hearth: The Quiet Feminism Of _Little Women_, Caroline Anderson Klein

Honors Theses

The Controlled Narrative Of “Jane Roe:” Norma Mccorvey’S Life Beyond The 1973 Trial, Eleanor G. Strickland

Honors College Theses

The Impact Of The Gut-Brain Axis On Alzheimer’S Disease, Elissa Wakim

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing Spring 2024 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies, Kristie Mckiernan, Tracy Smith

Best Integrated Writing

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Betty Smith’S Bestselling Introduction To The Gilded Age And Progressive Era, Nancy C. Unger

History

Women, Animals, Food: Planetary Perspectives On The Non-(Hu)Man, Samu/Elle Striewski

Comparative Woman

The Personality Profile Of Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck, Sophia Geng, Aubrey Immelman

Psychology Faculty Publications

Monstrous Matrilineage In Chinese American Literature, Leina Hsu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Quest Of A Mythopoetic Native American Subjectivity: Joy Harjo’S Poetry, Aya Elbably

Dentistry

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Elizabeth Robins Portrays Working Women In Suffragette Literature: A Reflection Through The Lens Of The 2015 Film, Suffragette, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Bibliography, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

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

Theses and Dissertations--English

Bibliography, Kristi Branham

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

A Companion To The Works Of Elizabeth Strout, Katherine Montwieler

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

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

Dentistry

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

Theses and Dissertations

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

Theses and Dissertations

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

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

Master's Theses