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Articles 1 - 30 of 140
Full-Text Articles in American Literature
Speaking From The Underground: Notes On Lois Elaine Griffith & The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Aesthetic, Joseph Anthony Cáceres
Speaking From The Underground: Notes On Lois Elaine Griffith & The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Aesthetic, Joseph Anthony Cáceres
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Speaking from the Underground explores the work of Lois Elaine Griffith, an Afro-Caribbean diasporic visual and literary artist of Barbadian descent and one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a Puerto Rican cultural institution grounded in Afro-Caribbean traditions located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the common, cultural parlance, the Cafe has become synonymous with spoken word and slam poetry. Since 1973 it has been the place where artists of mostly African, Caribbean, Latinx descent gather to craft works centered around lived experiences to shape a language to counter a conventional understanding of history and a …
Love And Power: Narrative Resistance In The Contemporary Literature And Film Of The Americas, Tania Nicolaou
Love And Power: Narrative Resistance In The Contemporary Literature And Film Of The Americas, Tania Nicolaou
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project analyzes the ways in which narratives of love, care, and intimacy support sociocultural change through cinema, literary fiction, and memoir in Indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic communities in the United States, Haiti, and Cuba. The project’s intervention revolves around how we compare and examine narratives of the marginalized, underrepresented, and misremembered in a way that does not focus primarily on pain and trauma, but on experiences that embody radical change, healing, and a shift in the colonial matrix of power. The chapters consider love as constructed through family, identity, memory, and nationhood, all in relationship to what love looks …
Transatlantic Literary Networks, 1949-1972, Cristina Iuli, Stefano Morello
Transatlantic Literary Networks, 1949-1972, Cristina Iuli, Stefano Morello
Publications and Research
Il racconto di Donald Barthelme “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne”, pubblicato sul New Yorker il 9 luglio 1971, si apre su una famiglia newyorkese di classe media sull’orlo di una crisi matrimoniale. Wanda, la moglie, sfoglia Elle, costringendo il marito a prestare attenzione alle foto dell’elegante ristrutturazione di un vecchio mulino in Bretagna da cui spiccano arredi di Arne Jacobsen e “cose di plastica arancione e rosso brillante che arrivano da Milano” (Barthelme 1971, p. 26). Barthelme, che aveva trascorso tutta l’infanzia e buona parte della gioventù a Houston, in Texas, dove il padre era direttore del museo di …
Scene Transatlantiche: Eco Italiane Nella Beat Generation, Stefano Morello
Scene Transatlantiche: Eco Italiane Nella Beat Generation, Stefano Morello
Publications and Research
Nella maldestra intervista con Fernanda Pivano trasmessa dalla RAI nel settembre del 1966, Jack Kerouac, interpellato riguardo le infuenze letterarie che avevano ispirato la sua produzione, rispose negando con forza l’impatto di autori italiani sulla sua poetica. Il rifuto di Kerouac – uno dei pochi esponenti della Beat Generation a poter vantare un radicamento nel territorio nordamericano da più di dieci generazioni (FamilySearch) – può essere letto come il tentativo di un autore aggrappatosi, nella parte fnale della sua vita, a un’ideologia conservatrice e nazionalista, di inscrivere la propria poetica all’interno di una tradizione letteraria puramente americana. Nella frase successiva …
“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson
“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation seeks to play with the similarity between the queer and the mystical, and in the process, defines something I call “queer mysticism.” I include four cardinal figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Duncan. Beginning with Walt Whitman, I show how each of these poets bear witness to an experience of the divine that is both immanent and immanently queer. Through historical and biographical research, I uncover their poetic inspiration in popular modes of expression and in the esoteric and arcane. By establishing a connection with a few Catholic mystics …
"White Slaves Of California": Race, Religion, And The Railroad In Maria Amparo Ruiz De Burton's The Squatter And The Don, Katie Buonanno
"White Slaves Of California": Race, Religion, And The Railroad In Maria Amparo Ruiz De Burton's The Squatter And The Don, Katie Buonanno
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In The Squatter and the Don (1885), Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton depicts the decline of the Alamars, a patrician Californio family, in the years after California was annexed by the United States. This thesis explores the different rhetorical maneuvers Ruiz de Burton makes to place the Californios in a broad, enfranchising Anglo-American national paradigm. The novel negotiates the messy, competing histories of Spanish, Mexican, and American colonialism, ultimately making the case for the enduring presence of Spanish missionization in the region, as well as the cultural assimilability of the Californio population. While the novel has frequently been read as …
Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia, Jacob Elias Aplaca
Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia, Jacob Elias Aplaca
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Bad Becomings surveys queer autobiographical works published over the last 30+ years to better understand the animosities and complicities of the queer and the so-called normative. While the limited scholarship on queer autobiographical writing has characterized this corpus of texts based on an edginess, a radicality, and a rejection of the liberal individual that both flies in the face of “traditional autobiography” and indulges queer theory’s persistent idealization of queer culture as radical and antinormative, this dissertation asks that we suspend our desire for so absolute a differentiation. Rather than assume that “queer” automatically makes “autobiography” radical and antinormative, I …
The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino
The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was …
Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica
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.
Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur
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 …
The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman
The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thematic project examines the notion of self-division, particularly in terms of the conflict between cognition and metacognition, across the fields of philosophy, psychology, and, most recently, the cognitive and neurosciences. The project offers a historic overview of models of self-division, as well as analyses of the various problems presented in theoretical models to date. This work explores how self-division has been depicted in the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe, Don DeLillo, and Mary Shelley. It examines the ways in which artistic renderings alternately assimilate, resist, and/or critique dominant philosophical, psychological, and scientific discourses about the self and its …
Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21st-century poets and their 20th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …
Genres Of Labor: Wageless Work And The Aesthetics Of Stagnation, Martin A. Jensen
Genres Of Labor: Wageless Work And The Aesthetics Of Stagnation, Martin A. Jensen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Genres of Labor identifies and explores a little-acknowledged fact about labor—that it appears to us in highly conventionalized forms that are subject to evaluation, appraisal, and interpretation. I call this appearance the “aesthetic” dimension of labor, and I show how it increasingly comes into view in the period since 1973, as a contracting economy pushes off work onto unwaged realms of human activity. In chapters on Andy Warhol’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), I demonstrate that literary texts participate in …
A Study Of Geo-Regional Place-Consciousness In American Literature, Eugene Slepov
A Study Of Geo-Regional Place-Consciousness In American Literature, Eugene Slepov
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The ancient Greek notions of topos, or place, and choros, or region, emerge from a an oral, narrative-based tradition that predates geography. These concepts remind us that that best source of material to study place is to be found in literary fiction. American fiction in particular will give us the evidence by which we can compile a qualitative, experiential understanding of the role of place in people’s lives. This dissertation inquires into the formation of the imaginative constructions that characters put upon place—such as through the process of consolidating and dwelling in places—and the way place puts …
The Personal And The Planetal: Essaying The Ecological, Eric Dean Wilson
The Personal And The Planetal: Essaying The Ecological, Eric Dean Wilson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological” investigates contemporary American personal essays in an environmental mode in order to illuminate the boundaries between “self” and “planet.” It does so with an eye toward ecological devastation—namely, the violent effects of global warming—because I sense that thinking about the essay can help us better understand the ethical problems of climate change. Part of our climate crisis is a failure to recognize the boundaries of the personal and what I call the “planetal” (in an attempt to defamiliarize it from the more common “planetary”). Using a method that I call “the ecological …
Emancipatory And Retributive Labor: Conflicting Representations Of Enslaved Labor In Us And Caribbean Literature, 1830–1855, Michael Druffel
Emancipatory And Retributive Labor: Conflicting Representations Of Enslaved Labor In Us And Caribbean Literature, 1830–1855, Michael Druffel
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Emancipatory and Retributive Labor follows the development of a concept that I call emancipatory labor as it appeared in the US and Caribbean during the period 1830 to 1855. Emancipatory labor is a subversive tactic in which enslaved people in the United States and Caribbean redefined a portion of their labor in capitalist terms. Re-theorizing a portion of enslaved labor stakes a claim to agency and humanity according to Western, humanistic logic. Examples of the types of labor being redefined include selling commodities, hiring time, and working “extras” for wages. I use enslaved person Lunsford Lane’s 1842 narrative as a …
Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena
Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
From childhood, Mary Hunter Austin resisted the social conformity expected of a young girl in 1850’s Carlinville, Illinois. Instead, causing her mother to “shed tears of vexation,” she was outspoken, opinionated, and read the “wrong” books, which, according to her mother, “was what made you queer so that people didn’t like you.” Young Mary had a rich inner life and was drawn in a spiritual, mystical way to the minutiae of the natural world. Also, she questioned the strict social structure that caused her mother to be outcast as a widow, while, at the same time, young women were beginning …
Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson
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. …
Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender
Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
music lessons is a digital chapbook that explores the relationships between James Baldwin’s writing and Beauford Delaney’s paintings through music. From Delaney’s “Composition 16” (1954-56) to Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), their collaboration with the core elements of jazz music gives their work rhythm and melodic contour that any/body can vibe with. Absorbing the influences of artists Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and putting them to paint and text, music lessons demonstrates how music not only transforms the ways we experience and move our bodies but also the ways that we perceive space, relationships, and time. What’s …
Indigenous And Western Sciences In Carlos Hernandez's The Assimilated Cuban's Guide To Quantum Santeria, Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Indigenous And Western Sciences In Carlos Hernandez's The Assimilated Cuban's Guide To Quantum Santeria, Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Publications and Research
This chapter examines Carlos Hernandez’s The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria as an example of how authors of alternative futurisms can draw on Indigenous knowledge to destabilize Eurowestern perceptions that Western science is more modern and rational than Indigenous knowledge. Joy Sanchez-Taylor argues that Hernandez combines references to Santería and quantum physics to demonstrate parallels between Indigenous knowledge and Eurowestern “rational” science. Ultimately, references in Quantum Santeria to ideas of spiritual healing and nonlinear time demonstrate how authors like Hernandez are working to restore Biskaabiiyang, or a return to self, within science fiction.
Bildung And Flânerie: Aesthetics, Genre, And Modes Of Development In The Moviegoer, Sean P. Phillips
Bildung And Flânerie: Aesthetics, Genre, And Modes Of Development In The Moviegoer, Sean P. Phillips
Theses and Dissertations
My thesis frames Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1961) as a novel that pits the fading tradition of the Bildungsroman, aligned with what its protagonist calls the "vertical" throughout the text, against the supposed alternative of "the search", aligned with horizontal wandering. As the vast changes of modernity, namely technology and industrialization, transformed Western society throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, many novelists began to see the Bildungsideal as incompatible with their new world. Walker Percy's novel begins with a similar conclusion, and I track how The Moviegoer engages with the Bildungsideal and its supposed failure to sustain itself into the …
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson
"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 …
Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein
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, …
Contesting Imagined Communities: Minor Feelings, Opacity, And Spectrality In Ling Ma’S Severance, Christine Marks
Contesting Imagined Communities: Minor Feelings, Opacity, And Spectrality In Ling Ma’S Severance, Christine Marks
Publications and Research
This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the example of Ling Ma’s dystopian pandemic novel Severance (2018). Emphasizing fiction’s capacity for symbolic intervention in a pandemic era, I argue that the text undermines tropes of nation-building through strategic employment of minor feelings, opacity, and spectral liminality. My analysis focuses on the Chinese American protagonist’s conflicted relationship with imagined communities forged in the conventional “outbreak narrative” (Wald) as her unhomely positionality places her at odds with unifying ideological responses to the catastrophic upheaval of the pandemic. At the intersection of pandemic and diasporic literature, Ma’s novel constitutes a …
Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes
Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. Further Toward Minor Literatures operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. Minor literature is self-theorizing, perhaps even authotheoretical, in its expressing and fulfilling the mobile orientations of its minoritarian communities. This study …
"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider
"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …
Skin Worlds: Black And Indigenous Science Fiction Theorizing Since The 1970s, Lou Cornum
Skin Worlds: Black And Indigenous Science Fiction Theorizing Since The 1970s, Lou Cornum
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation unfolds along two trajectories, the first following from an ascendant interest in minoritarian traditions in speculative and science fiction and the second following the reiterative conversations across Black and Indigenous Studies. Science fiction theorizing is introduced as a frame for thinking these two trajectories together, with science fiction texts by authors Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko and Samuel Delany providing a paraliterary mode of imagining the planetary from which to understand the interconnected processes of settler colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery. Science Fiction theorizing across these texts disrupts notions of linear progressive time, human/alien boundaries, …
Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton
Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton
Publications and Research
This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …
Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero
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.
The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella
The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella
Dissertations and Theses
In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …