American Literature Commons^™

On The Road From Melville To Postmodernism: The Case For Kerouac's Canonization., Jeffrey Warren King

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the publication of On the Road in 1957, Jack Kerouac became a cultural phenomenon. Crowned the "King" of the Beat Generation, Kerouac embodied the restlessness of Cold War-era America. What no one realized at the time, however, was that the movement that he supposedly led went against Kerouac's own beliefs. Rather than rebellion, Kerouac wanted to write in a way that no one had written before. Heavily influenced by, among others, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Herman Melville, and, especially, James Joyce, Kerouac used the influence of his predecessors to formulate his own style of writing-spontaneous prose. The …

Foot Held Against The Edge, Joseph Schumacher

All Theses

The poems included in this creative thesis demonstrate a growth in the author's personal development and interpretation of the world. This collection contains 27 poems, which use a variety of styles, themes, and structures to study alternative perspectives and to scrutinize cultural norms. The purpose of this creative thesis is to show the author's proficiency in this genre while also challenging readers to examine their own interpretations of the world around them.

'Barren, Silent, Godless': The Southern Novels Of Cormac Mccarthy, Melissa Davis

All Theses

Though best known for his Western works that have been read widely in the literary community and adapted to film, Cormac McCarthy is rarely discussed in terms of his contribution to Southern literature. However, his first four novels--The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree--are set in the mountainous area around Knoxville, Tennessee. In this setting, McCarthy traces the change of the South and humanity from its agrarian, showing the violent and gothic nature of a modernizing society.
In considering the struggle between the old and new South as presented in the characters of The Orchard Keeper, the …

Pictures, Puzzles, And Missing Pieces: The Childlike Solution To Trauma In The Mature Novel, Natalie Couch

All Theses

Throughout literary history the child in literature has played multiple roles but was most frequently used as either a symbol for innocence or evil. In the case of three contemporary novels, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon; and M. T. Anderson's novel entitled The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party, the authors use the image of the precocious child to evoke thoughts about learning and education. These three novels invite their audiences to experience an almost anti-Bildungsroman …

'Poe And Not Poe': A Study Of The Radio Adaptations Of Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories, Ashley Davis

All Theses

This master's thesis analyzes four of Poe's short stories--'The Pit and the Pendulum,' 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' 'Metzengerstein,' and 'The Purloined Letter'-in comparison with their respective radio adaptations. Using the texts and Poe's essay 'The Philosophy of Composition' as guides for comparison, it is apparent that the respective changes made in each radio play veer greatly from Poe's original stories. Although the radio adaptations leave behind some traces of Poe's signature technique, they mostly remove that which was deemed too scary, too dark, or too overly philosophical for radio audiences. Therefore, the stories become at once comforting and disarming, at once …

On Sea-Goats, Chase Hart

All Theses

This thesis can be viewed as mediation between two processes of interpretation. Once process affirms freeplay and the continuation of the game. The other still wants a center or 'the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game' as Derrida calls it. On a deep level, these poems try to realize themselves as inevitably subject to play, while also acknowledging themselves as trying to meaningfully interpret experience.

'Picking And Choosing': Marianne Moore's Strategic Revision Of The Romantic Sublime, Emily Atkins

All Theses

While many Modernist writers made conscious attempts to position themselves against an existing Romantic literary tradition, careful examinations reveal important overlaps and connections in theme, imagery and purpose. While Marianne Moore's work is perhaps farther away from a Romantic aesthetic than that of many of her contemporaries, a close examination of the body of her work reveals an engagement with many themes, motifs, and ideas that can be traced to her Romantic predecessors, a relationship that might best be described as 'picking and choosing,' to use her words. Many of her poems involve an appropriation and interrogation of the sublime, …

Why Katahdin Runs: A Play In Three Acts, Jaisey Bates

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

For KATAHDIN, a Mixed Blood young woman who grew up in non Native group foster homes, running is her safest means of escaping her anger and her lack of family, roots, and memory.

This is the story of how Katahdin's ancestors help her find a home within, roots, and joy.

Ordinary Apocalypse, Anthony Villella

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Work of short fiction, in which a young man, struggling with contempt for his family and himself, makes a terrible mistake and is forced to deal with who and what he has become.

American Suburban, James Michael Ashworth

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

A collection of poetry that examines contemporary American suburban life through the author's reflections on his own working class consciousness and aspirations for a middle class lifestyle.

Elizabeth Bishop And Her Women:Countering Loss, Love, And Language Through Bishop's Homosocial Continuum, Donna Rogers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Elizabeth Bishop's seemingly understated and yet nuanced poetry with a specific focus on loss, love, and language through domesticity to create a poetic home. In this sense, home offers security for a displaced orphan and lesbian, moving from filial to amorous love, as well as the literary home for a poet who struggled for critical recognition. Further, juxtaposing the familiar with the strange, Bishop situates her speaker in a construction of artificial and natural boundaries that break down across her topography and represent loss through the multiple female figures that permeate her poems to convey the uncertainty …

Writing The Wrongs : A Comparison Of Two Female Slave Narratives, Miya Hunter-Willis

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis compares slave narratives written by Mattie J. Jackson and Kate Drumgoold. Both narrators recalled incidents that showed how slavery and the environment during the Reconstruction period created physical and psychological obstacles for women. Each narrator challenged the Cult of True Womanhood by showing that despite the stereotypes created to keep them subordinate there were African American women who successfully used their knowledge of white society to circumvent a system that tried to keep their race enslaved. Despite the 30 years that separate the publication of these two narratives, the legacy of education attainment emerges as a key part …

Female Hysteria Across Cultures And Periods In American Literature, Jessica Daine Droogsma

Honors Program Theses

Modernity would like us to believe we are in control: you can be whatever you want if you work hard enough; you are in charge of your own destiny; practice makes perfect; if you don’t like something, change it; you are what you eat. These popular aphorisms reflect our society’s addiction to self-determinism. We are completely set on the idea that we create and direct our own lives. However, there are larger influences in the world which are sometimes out of our control. The government, the media, society as a collective, and other such establishments have power over the individual. …

Motherhood:Portrayals In American Literature, Christine J. O'Leary

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this Thesis is to illustrate five categories of motherhood in American literature. The five categories chosen are: the self-absorbed mother, the self-martyred mother, the child-sacrificing mother, the self-sacrificing mother, and the substitute mother. I chose these five categories because they appear frequently in texts written by people of multiple ethnicities who represent several larger American cultures.

1. The self-absorbed mother lives for her personal pleasures. Her children are a burden. She prefers her happiness over the day to day care of the children.

2. The self-martyred mother believes that she is responsible for all the difficulties …

The Revolutionary Writings Of Mary And Royall Tyler: Marital, Medical, And Political Discourse In An Early-Nineteenth-Century Family, Elizabeth Anne Bond

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Celebrity And The National Body: Encounters With The Exotic In Late Nineteenth-Century America, Caroline Carpenter Nichols

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This project uses the remarkable careers of anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, stunt reporter Nellie Bly, anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, and war correspondent Richard Harding Davis, as well as literary texts by Davis and Henry James, to frame a set of questions about the politics and implications of cultural crossover at the end of the nineteenth century. Through their work as participant observers of racial, ethnic and social Others, these reporters, reformers, and authors were gradually transformed into charismatic exotics. More than simply mediating between a mainstream (usually white, middle-class) audience and a more exotic people or place, these individuals …