Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- Philosophy (6)
- Comparative Literature (5)
- Translation Studies (5)
- English Language and Literature (4)
- Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (4)
-
- History (4)
- Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies (4)
- United States History (4)
- African American Studies (3)
- Language Interpretation and Translation (3)
- Rhetoric (3)
- Rhetoric and Composition (3)
- Creative Writing (2)
- Education (2)
- Reading and Language (2)
- Aesthetics (1)
- Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education (1)
- Environmental Sciences (1)
- Ethics and Political Philosophy (1)
- European Languages and Societies (1)
- Film and Media Studies (1)
- Fine Arts (1)
- French and Francophone Language and Literature (1)
- French and Francophone Literature (1)
- Higher Education (1)
- Indigenous Education (1)
- Language and Literacy Education (1)
- Keyword
-
- American literature (15)
- American poetry (7)
- American (6)
- Poetics (6)
- Modernism (4)
-
- Poetry (4)
- American Literature (3)
- American fiction (3)
- Creative Writing (3)
- Faulkner (3)
- Herman Melville (3)
- Indians of North America (3)
- Translation (3)
- Aesthetics (2)
- Composition (2)
- Creative writing (2)
- Delta (2)
- Emerson (2)
- Emily Dickinson (2)
- Ethics (2)
- Fitzgerald (2)
- Hemingway (2)
- In literature (2)
- Literature (2)
- Modernism (Literature) (2)
- Postmodernism (2)
- Race (2)
- Race in literature (2)
- Racism in literature (2)
- Silence in literature (2)
- Publication Year
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 30 of 60
Full-Text Articles in American Literature
Temporalities Of Translation In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Rumi Coller-Takahashi
Temporalities Of Translation In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Rumi Coller-Takahashi
Living in Languages
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia features two fictional worlds, Urras and Anarres, with distinct political structures and languages. Anarres is created by the revolutionaries who departed capitalistic Urras to create a new anarchist community, and its language was invented so as to have no word for “property” or “class.” However, the artificial distinction in the languages do not hold up the binary of possession and non-possession in these worlds, as the word “possession” permeates interpersonal relationships even on Anarres. To replace the binary approach of the revolution, the novel proposes an alternative mode of …
Models Of Emulation: Representations Of Foreign, Indigenous, And Accented Speech In Early American Literature, Elaina A. Frulla
Models Of Emulation: Representations Of Foreign, Indigenous, And Accented Speech In Early American Literature, Elaina A. Frulla
Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)
“Models of Emulation: Representations of Foreign, Indigenous, and Accented Speech in Early American Literature” explores how American writers used depictions of “nonstandard” English and accented English language speech, traditionally described as “literary dialect,” as a way to negotiate identity, power, and political belonging in the formative years of nation building after the American Revolution. Beginning with Noah Webster’s mission to establish a standardized pronunciation of the English language that would simplify and purify spoken American-English and definitively differentiate it from what he saw as the corrupted, cosmopolitan British-English model, each of the three chapters examines literary representations of nonstandard emulated …
Between Languages And Religions: Omar Ibn Said's Voice In The Arabic Narrative And English Translations, Rumi Coller-Takahashi
Between Languages And Religions: Omar Ibn Said's Voice In The Arabic Narrative And English Translations, Rumi Coller-Takahashi
Living in Languages
The Life of Omar ibn Said (1831) is a narrative written by an enslaved person in Arabic and went through multiple English translations over the centuries. This article examines the ways in which these translations involve the nineteenth-century Christian agenda as well as the translators’ decisions in the twentieth-first century that multiply Omar ibn Said’s voice. In response to the recent scholarship’s effort to find Omar’s “true self” in his writings, which shows the meshing of Christian and Islamic faith, I aim to foreground his voice as a powerful presence at the intersections of the two languages and religions. My …
Embracing The Unmanageable: The Critique Of The Everyday And The Postwar Condition In Wallace Stevens’ And Robert Duncan’S Works Circa 1950, Kazuma Morita
Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)
My thesis is designed as an investigation of the ethical and political implications of the everyday in postwar American poetry. While recent scholarship of everyday life studies has clarified the centrality of the everyday or the ordinary to modernism and postwar literature, it does not elaborate enough on the impact of the political condition on literary expressions of everyday life in post-1945 period. Given U.S. military’s infiltration into everyday life of people living inside and outside the country after World War II, it is an important task to spotlight the way American postwar poets tackled U.S. war culture through their …
I Know Not Seems: Contemporary American Fiction And The New Sincerity, Eric C. Koch
I Know Not Seems: Contemporary American Fiction And The New Sincerity, Eric C. Koch
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Since the publication of David Foster Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Plurum,” in 1993, critics have attended ever more closely to the problematic effects of postmodernism. Postmodernism, with its origins located in poststructuralism’s antifoundational philosophy, fashions a world without anchors or boundaries, where relativism holds sway and irony is the culture’s habitus. The twin concepts of relativism and irony are, of course, primary in postmodern literature, and therefore indicate why postmodernism’s trajectory terminates in overt metafiction, experimental excess, and nihilism. By reading postmodernism as a reflection of these principles, we begin to register how the literature of the period following postmodernism …
Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan
Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan
English Faculty Scholarship
Poetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period's activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because …
Babel Blackness: The Aesth-Ethical Turn In Post-Colonial Translation, Emanuela Maltese
Babel Blackness: The Aesth-Ethical Turn In Post-Colonial Translation, Emanuela Maltese
Living in Languages
“How do we make art in an ethical way?” (Marlene NourbeSe Philip) is the leading question lying at the basis of this article, which inspired by the story of the unauthorized Italian translation of Zong! seeks to investigate on the ethics of translation and propose a new turn in translation studies, namely a black aesth-ethical one. The proposal here examined is indeed informed by both aesthetics, and ethics. It presents translation as a practice, that draws on recent debates on black aesthetics, with specific reference to the Afro-optimism (AO) of cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten (2013, 2018, 2019) and …
Democratic Spaces Of Reading : Constituting A Reader Figure In Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture, Rumi Coller-Takahashi
Democratic Spaces Of Reading : Constituting A Reader Figure In Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture, Rumi Coller-Takahashi
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation examines the ways in which print materials in nineteenth-century America constitute “a reader figure” as a political subject of democracy. Neither a purely historical entity nor a textual construct, this reader figure is understood as the process of subjectivation that emerges from the aesthetic modes of writing informed by the texts’ contemporaneous print culture. Focusing on the moments when expansionism and slavery reveal the antagonistic constitution of America as a “republic,” each chapter will examine a text that enmeshes the act of reading in unique spatiality: contiguous newspaper columns of untranslatable languages, a ship stowage that traps the …
Before Realism : The Great American Novel And The Forms Of Nationhood, 1851-1882, Naoto Kojima
Before Realism : The Great American Novel And The Forms Of Nationhood, 1851-1882, Naoto Kojima
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation uses the concept of the Great American Novel as a strategic framework for understanding the cultural ascendance of realism. Much more than a naïve expression of literary chauvinism, the rise of the idea of the Great American Novel marks a transformative moment in the decades before realism becomes institutionalized as a “new school” in the 1880s. Examining how Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, and Henry James anticipate or respond to the call for the national novel which mediates among regions, Before Realism demonstrates that American literary realism emerged out of its engagement and negotiation with the Great …
Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann
Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The dissertation studies the pre-history of trauma in US American fiction, examining how experiences of large-scale adversity are represented before the concept of psychological trauma emerges in the late nineteenth century. Distinctly modern forms of violence—diffuse, systemic, lacking direction and intent—bring forth less individual and personal experiences of grief and suffering than those imagined by twentieth-century trauma theory. Studying forms of feeling and of genre that make trauma legible historicizes the way a Western idea of modern subjectivity, as white, self-possessed, agential, and split, has shaped out understanding of how a person processes crisis. The dissertation visits three spaces that …
Defining African American Authorship, April Quattlebaum
Defining African American Authorship, April Quattlebaum
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
James Weldon Johnson and Melvin B. Tolson are pivotal figures of the early 20th century. They represent a fundamental question that has been and is indeed still in the minds of African American authors: What is a Black author? African American authorship necessarily involves the challenge of forging a literary identity in the face of a society structurally and temperamentally predisposed to marginalize and dismiss them. In their creative and scholarly works, Johnson and Tolson methodically dissect Black authorship, looking both to the past and to their present situation as they strive to imagine a future for African American literary …
Twentieth-Century Feminine Visionary Poetics : Vulnerable Visions Of Survival And Healing:, Lucyna Prostko
Twentieth-Century Feminine Visionary Poetics : Vulnerable Visions Of Survival And Healing:, Lucyna Prostko
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
H.D. and Denise Levertov, two visionary poets of the twentieth century, represent both female poets’ awakening of political and historical consciousness and their engagement with the poetics of vulnerability and survival. H.D. and Levertov offer lyrical visions that dismantle the binaries of real and unreal, earthly and transcendent, and individual and communal. The subject of this project is visionary imagination and its various reverberations, limitations, and potentialities. What is at stake in feminine visionary twentieth-century poetics is the creation of imaginative worlds, the space of possibility, and the shaping of a lyrical form that encompasses the voices of survival, vulnerability, …
Meeting Places : The Entanglements Of Poetry And Science In The Modern American Imagination, James H. Searle
Meeting Places : The Entanglements Of Poetry And Science In The Modern American Imagination, James H. Searle
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
“Meeting Places: The Entanglements of Poetry and Science in the Modern American Imagination” explores how Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser responded to the rise of modern science and industrial technology by reflecting on the similarities and differences between the poetic and scientific imaginations. Across four chapters, I show how the growth of the natural and social sciences from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century spurred these writers to rethink the social and cultural functions of literature in a democratic society. Unlike many of their peers, these figures refused to treat science either as a …
Proletarian Modernism : Aesthetic Intervention In Naturalist Epistemology In Steinbeck, Wright And Mccullers, Kenji Kihara
Proletarian Modernism : Aesthetic Intervention In Naturalist Epistemology In Steinbeck, Wright And Mccullers, Kenji Kihara
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation explores three proletarian novels published at the end of the Depression era—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—in light of how their aesthetics complicates the inherited epistemology of literary naturalism in response to the changing political climates in the age of the Popular Front. Calling these texts “proletarian modernism,” I investigate how their aesthetics mediate the relations among Marxist ideas, political solidarity and the American value of individualism in an age when it became gradually difficult to fundamentally criticize capitalism and liberalism.
Dickinson At Thirty, Philip Pardi
Dickinson At Thirty, Philip Pardi
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
When we say there are “no Mozarts in literature,” we point to an enticing fact: writers become. Pick any text you love or revere, and there was a moment earlier in the author’s life when it could not have been written. The writers we remember develop over time; they change and are changed. Their careers divide, if not always easily, into a before (often thought of as a kind of apprenticeship) and an after (a work or body of work that has a significant claim on our attention). Personal relationships, lived experiences, social and political contexts, readers real and imagined, …
The Legacy Of Uncle Tom : The Transformation Of Black Masculinity And Racial Politics, Lauren R. Weeks
The Legacy Of Uncle Tom : The Transformation Of Black Masculinity And Racial Politics, Lauren R. Weeks
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The main aim of this thesis is to reveal the immense effect that literature can have on society spanning generations. It explores the restriction of black men’s political possibilities due to their perceived relationship with the character Uncle Tom, which not only causes harm to black activist projects by inciting disunity, but also becomes a source of inner turmoil for black men who struggle to be identified in society. This project offers to call these harmful standards that black men are judged by, due to the creation of Uncle Tom, as the binary of black masculinity. By analyzing how this …
Idealist And Materialist Approaches To Abolition In Uncle Tom's Cabin And The Daughter Of Adoption, Jillian Shea
Idealist And Materialist Approaches To Abolition In Uncle Tom's Cabin And The Daughter Of Adoption, Jillian Shea
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Sentimentalism was a popular aesthetic, moral, political, and literary movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and England, and both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) use sentimentalism in their attempts to advocate for the abolition of slavery. Scholars such as Lauren Berlant critique sentimentalism, specifically Stowe’s use of sentimentalism, for its potential to make structural problems appear as if they can be assuaged by personal change, and I situate this understanding of sentimentalism within an idealist framework, or a framework that primarily emphasizes subjectivity’s role in …
Crossing Boundaries, Drawing Anew : Exploring The Treatment Of American Indian Land With A Penobscot Lens Through The Life And Traditions Of The Red Man By Joseph Nicolar, Andrea Guerrero
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The relationship between the Wabanaki and the land informs their creation myths, their cultural expertise, and individual and communal identity. The connection is so integral to their identity that when privatization of property usurps their connections to the land, an entire
Misfitology : Misfit Narratives In Ideology, Kennedy Lyn Coyne
Misfitology : Misfit Narratives In Ideology, Kennedy Lyn Coyne
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This hybrid thesis, part critical and part fiction, examines experimental and nontraditional texts that showcase how misfits allow viewers and readers to glimpse ideological structures—particularly interpellation. It argues that the misfit is essential to the visibility of the ideological process because the misfit shows the disconnect between the inverted and the real world. The inverted world seems like the real world but it is masked by ideology. This thesis examines how a pair of films – David Lynch’s films Blue Velvet and Mullholland Drive – and a pair of novels – Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls, and Chris Kraus’ I Love …
Before Nature's Nation : Ecological Thought And Early American Poetry, Joshua Bartlett
Before Nature's Nation : Ecological Thought And Early American Poetry, Joshua Bartlett
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This project examines early American encounters with the natural world through the context of contemporary ecocriticism. In readings of Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Michael Wigglesworth, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, and Mohegan minister Samson Occom, it demonstrates how poetic attentions to nature transformed collective antagonism toward the “howling wilderness” into personal feelings of affection and wonder. Likewise, it develops an understanding of the “ecological” that is both methodology, a way of thinking about specific things, such as trees or stones, and epistemology, a kind of thinking that emphasizes relational perception. It then situates these experiences amidst both canonical Americanist scholarship …
Dis/Inheritance : Love, Grief, And Genealogy In Faulkner, Daisuke Kiriyama
Dis/Inheritance : Love, Grief, And Genealogy In Faulkner, Daisuke Kiriyama
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation is devoted to the close examination of two novels of William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. I find in them the repression and return of prohibited emotions and a consistent pattern of “the race between the pursuing white man and the fleeing black man.” I explore how these are related to the Faulknerian conception of time and the establishment and disruption of the conventional Southern notions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The white man’s pursuit, performed in various forms, ultimately aims to prove his mastery and masculinity, racial superiority, or everything that whiteness means to …
The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom
The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The Enlightenment has been thought of as the Age of Reason: the birth of the individual, the rise of print culture, the beginning of the middle class, and an exponential growth in the sciences. The Enlightenment shaped the world into the form that it is today, but it also marks the start of colonization and the slave trade. The following thesis seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Enlightenment to both colonization and the slave trade; that without it neither of these practices would have had the reach that they achieved over time. Using the works of Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques …
Attitudes Toward Mental Illness And Mental Health In The Literature Classroom, Melissa B. Guadron
Attitudes Toward Mental Illness And Mental Health In The Literature Classroom, Melissa B. Guadron
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The purpose of this study was to observe undergraduate students’ attitudes toward mental illness and mental health in the literature classroom. This was an observational, inductive study of Jeffrey Berman’s literature course, featuring books written by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This setting was chosen because of Berman’s unique pedagogy, which encourages self-disclosure and psychoanalytic readings. Three questionnaires and three introspective reader response diaries were collected from fifteen participants; text analyses were performed on diaries. Research inquiries questioned a participant’s interactions with the books: How did participants respond to the portrayals of characters with mental illness or mental health …
Ten Klicks South Of Whiskey : A Play In Three Acts, Ryan Jeffrey Smithson
Ten Klicks South Of Whiskey : A Play In Three Acts, Ryan Jeffrey Smithson
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Ten Klicks South of Whiskey is a stage performance in three acts, consisting mostly of monologues from soldiers of various backgrounds. It follows the trials of 4th platoon, Delta Troop, 463rd Cavalry Squadron, a fictional unit that achieves a near-mythic reputation of heroism and invulnerability in Iraq. As the monologues begin to reveal, however, not every tale about the 463rd can be substantiated. The audience is first challenged to search for truth and then to understand that truth is not the ultimate--or even the desired--goal of war stories.
Threads Of Truth : Aesthetics Of A Sacrificed Self In The Nineteenth-Century American Romance Of Susanna Rowson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James And Kate Chopin, Anne S. Jung
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Abstract
Altered States : Challenges To Narratives Of State Unity In 19th Century American Fiction, Aaron Minar Wittman
Altered States : Challenges To Narratives Of State Unity In 19th Century American Fiction, Aaron Minar Wittman
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation critiques the treatment of State spaces in four 19th Century American novels--Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1793), James Fenimore Cooper's Wyandotte; or, the Hutted Knoll (1843), John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), and Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales (1856)--to expose underlying resistances to the limiting historical narratives that fuel and justify the imperialistic expansion of State. Through a close examination of the narrative construction and interpretation of geographic features, topographical layouts, and other environmental elements, I detail how these texts engage issues of State expansion and appropriation, establishing prominent correlations between territorial capture, …
Self-Effacement Of The "Author" To Circulate Texts : Strategies To Construct Authorship In Antebellum America, Rumi Takahashi
Self-Effacement Of The "Author" To Circulate Texts : Strategies To Construct Authorship In Antebellum America, Rumi Takahashi
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
From the post-Revolutionary days, American print materials and political institutions were interrelated with each other for the purpose of building a new nation. The democratic institutions composed of the president and a sovereign people marked the country's difference from European monarchy, while the book trade served as a means that would disseminate a moral image of an ideal citizen to endorse the national identity. Yet, as drastic changes of industry in the 1820s enabled more people to participate in the economic system, the sovereignty of people turned out to be potentially subversive power of the mob, which required the literary …
Queer Bodies And Queer Materials In Post-Wwii American Texts, William Joseph Whalen
Queer Bodies And Queer Materials In Post-Wwii American Texts, William Joseph Whalen
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Although the primary subject of this dissertation is contemporary American literature and popular culture--individual chapters are devoted to careful studies of Octavia Butler's short story "Bloodchild," Cormack McCarthy's gothic novel Child of God, Chuck Palahniuk's epistolary novel Pygmy, and the track "It's Good" by hip-hop artist Lil Wayne featuring Drake and Jadakiss--I develop a reading of these contemporary texts that places them within much older and richer intellectual, spiritual, psychological, and even biological traditions. My primary focus is the human body, both literal and figurative, as the site of dynamic exchanges, movements, blockages, and productive potentialities. I argue that at …
A Study Of The Native American Captivity Narrative, Meghan Daniele Madden
A Study Of The Native American Captivity Narrative, Meghan Daniele Madden
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis examines the genre of Native American captivity narratives and their evolution from their first appearance in the seventeenth century to their waning popularity in the nineteenth century. The thesis starts with the Puritan narrative as a device for spiritual elevation and pronouncement. As Calvinism begins to diminish and the American Revolution approaches, captivity narratives take a turn from anti-Jesuit propaganda to anti-Indian propaganda. Narratives were used not only to warn colonists and Americans of the savagery of Indians, but also to strengthen the separation between the English and Indian inhabitants of America. The anxiety of degenerating into savages …
Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo
Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also …