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American Literature Commons

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Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in American Literature

Faulkner's Media Romance, Julian Murphet., James Altman Dec 2018

Faulkner's Media Romance, Julian Murphet., James Altman

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.


Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter And The Bunker Hill Monument, John Hay Jun 2016

Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter And The Bunker Hill Monument, John Hay

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.


Navigating With Harriet Quimby, Rachael Peckham Jul 2014

Navigating With Harriet Quimby, Rachael Peckham

English Faculty Research

My maternal grandmother Ruth never missed an episode of the game show Jeopardy! One night in 2008, while I was working on my dissertation about a long-forgotten aviatrix with whom my family and I share connections, Grandma Ruth called to tell me about a Jeopardy! clue she had just heard: "The first woman to fly across the English Channel." My grandmother was reserved and soft-spoken, but I imagine her slapping the armrests of the recliner, disturbing the outstretched cat at her side, and beating all three contestants to the buzzer: "Who is Harriet Quimby?"--the subject of my dissertation.


Terror, Hospitality And The Gift Of Death In Morrison’S Beloved, Puspa Damai Jan 2014

Terror, Hospitality And The Gift Of Death In Morrison’S Beloved, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

The “us versus them” narrative still pre-dominates the analysis of terrorism in the West, which invariably associates “them” with terrorism. Toni Morrison’s hauntingly memorable novel – Beloved – provides a radically different and historically grounded view of terror and terrorism in the West. The novel not only releases us from the “us versus them” paradigm by demonstrating America’s intimacy with terror, it also enables us to examine terror and terrorism from the perspective of a gendered and ethnic subject who subverts the easy categorization of “us” and “them” or civilized and terrorist. Following Jacques Derrida’s contemplations on death and terror, …


Identity Anxiety And The Power And Problem Of Naming In African American And Jewish American Literature, Rachael Peckham Oct 2009

Identity Anxiety And The Power And Problem Of Naming In African American And Jewish American Literature, Rachael Peckham

English Faculty Research

This article examines the fraught power of names and (re)naming in African-American and Jewish-authored literature in 20th-century America. The article applies various concepts within critical race theory, such as critic Stuart Hall's theories on cultural identity, to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison's personal essay "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," and Bernard Malamud's short story "The Lady of the Lake." In each of these texts, African-American and Jewish characters' names serve as loaded markers for the shifting planes of identity in tension with a culture and history of oppression.


Pynchon In Popular Magazines, John K. Young Jul 2003

Pynchon In Popular Magazines, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

Any devoted Pynchon reader knows that “The Secret Integration” originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and that portions of The Crying of Lot 49 were first serialized in Esquire and Cavalier. But few readers stop to ask what it meant for Pynchon, already a reclusive figure, to publish in these popular magazines during the mid-1960s, or how we might understand these texts today after taking into account their original sites of publication. “The Secret Integration” in the Post or the excerpt of Lot 49 in Esquire produce different meanings in these different contexts, meanings that disappear when reading …


Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, And Postmodern Popular Audiences, John K. Young Jul 2001

Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, And Postmodern Popular Audiences, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

In this essay the author examines the "Oprah Effect" on the career of Toni Morrison, who after three appearances on "Oprah's Book Club" has become the most dramatic example of postmodernism's merger between Morrison's canonical status and Winfrey's commercial power has superseded the publishing industry's field of normative whiteness, enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience while being marketed as artistically important.