American Literature Commons^™

Quiet Testimony : The Ethical Impulse Of Silence In Emerson, Douglass, Melville, And James, Shari Goldberg

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project proposes that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville and Henry James invoke silence in order to make evident, if not audible, the oppression of slaves and the absence of the dead. Challenging the opposition between advocacy and quietism that has largely structured scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature, I argue that these writers produce testimony by engaging voicelessness in their texts. In effect, their work revises the idea that testimony consists in a first-person report of past events. Quiet Testimony consequently suggests that, in signal American texts, political claims may not be explicitly argumentative, a testifying subject bears …

The Cultural And Literary Discourse Of War In 20th Century America, Robert Michael Ficociello

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In The Cultural and Literary Discourse of War in 2oth-century America, war is re-examined and re-historicized from an American perspective. First, war is contextualized in relation to urban studies, anthropology and literature. The dominant model, war is an extension of politics, for the analysis of war is decentered, and politics becomes the extension of war. In respect to America since the Revolutionary War, the nation is literally birthed from war, and the nation becomes an extension of that war. The perpetual re-writing of that war is seen through the discourses of history, politics, and literature. Therefore, the Cold War can …

Specular Subjects : Technologies Of Vision In The Transatlantic Novel, 1719-1850, Matthew Henry Pangborn

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Scholars of the long eighteenth century have traced the rise in modern Anglophone culture of an observational, episto-factual standard of truth and value, new techniques of surveillance and disciplinarity, image-based and global networks of consumption and exchange, and a mass culture honing its ostensibly comprehensive power of sight through new media of text and image. While debate has occurred over the origins and meanings of the ascendancy of such an overwhelmingly visual mode of engagement with the world, scholars have tended to examine such topics in isolation, with little attention to the ethical and political consequences of the material practices …

The Willa Cather Archive In The Classroom, Andrew Jewell

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

This essay discusses many of the opportunities for teachers I believe are present in the Willa Cather Archive (http://cather.unl.edu), particularly in the way the Archive makes new materials available or older materials available in a new way. Additionally, this essay suggests some of the implications of the Archive’s digital presentation of resources. However, the place of digital scholarship in academic life is still evolving, and students and teachers are just getting accustomed to using the form. Given this circumstance, many of my thoughts are inconclusive, observations based upon preliminary understandings into how this resource affects our classrooms. I avoid confident …

Female Captivity Narratives In Colonial America, Kathryn O'Hara

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The female captivity narrative provides a complex view of colonial American history by recounting the experiences of women captured from their colonial homes by Native Americans. Male editors, often family friends or town ministers, generally compiled the experiences of female captives, and separating the voice of the female captive from influence of the male editor presents a challenge. Puritan captivity narratives in particular demonstrate conflict between attempts by Puritan ministers to impose a unified religious message in the sagas and the captives’ individual experiences, which often contradicted Puritan doctrine. During the early colonial era, ministers’ attempts to promote the Puritan …

Kinds Of Faulknerians, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

There are, it seems, two kinds of Faulknerians. Or there used to be. Although not contending critical camps per se, these two approaches to the long career of this modernist from the American south nevertheless partake of very different ways of considering the canonical writer. In the process, they seek to maintain Faulkner’s continuing relevance in ways that say much about his contribution to a uniquely American and regional modernism as well as a body of work marked, particularly in his later novels, by post-Second World War—if not also postmodern—practices and concerns.

Transcultural Transformation: African American And Native American Relations, Barbara S. Tracy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by …

When I Was Famous, Colin Rafferty

English & Linguistics Articles

The author presents a personal narrative which explores his experience on being famous.

Fatal Passion: The Early American Conspiracy Plot And Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Rebecca Bossie

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Using the Bavarian Illuminati scare of 1798, this work attempts to trace how Charles Brockden Brown uses these conspiracy narratives to plot other important eighteenth century narratives in his first novel, Wieland, and its companion piece Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. This Thesis covers a broad range of topic important to the eighteenth century, but focuses more specifically on eighteenth century politics, historiography, patriarchal and family values, and women's work and voices in literature.

Standing In The Night, Karin Jane Millhouse

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Standing in the Night has been completed under the influence of phenomenology with its curious regard towards reality. Yet it makes no claims to be anything other than what it is: really, we're just making it all up as we go along.

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Recontextualizing Guy Endore’S Babouk In The Shadow Of Orientalism, Nathan Sacks

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 11 Fall 2009

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Dystopian Surface, Utopian Dream: Wittman Ah Sing Foresees Postethnic Humanity, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"Dystopian Surface, Utopian Dream" examines the postethnic and the posthuman in fiction by Maxine Hong Kingston, Octavia Butler, and Isaac Asimov.

Review: Late For School, Tracy Walker

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the children's book "Late for School," written by Mike Reiss and illustrated by Michael Austin.

Spotlight On Teen Reading

Georgia Library Quarterly

The 2008 nominees for the Georgia Peach Award for Teen Readers.

It's Bigger And Hip-Hop: Richard Wright, Hip-Hop, And Masculinity, Marcos Julian Del Hierro

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In Native Son, Richard Wright presents a view of the impoverished, inner-city from an insider's perspective, which reflects the anger and hate brewing towards the rest of the nation as a result of living under harsh, isolating conditions. Wright's main character, Bigger Thomas serves as an archetypal ghetto figure both in his attitudes and the treatment he receives from Anglo Americans. Additionally, the reception of Native Son by a majority white reading audience also reflected the voyeuristic thrill of the bourgeoisie when consuming cultural products by African Americans. The selection of Wright's novel into the Book of the Month …

Templeton's Peace, Trent Devell Hudley

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This novel is a work of fiction.

Gods R Us, Alivelu Nagamani

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Around Grecian orchards. On Trojan battlefields. In Siva's realm. Inside Hanuman's heart. Of gods, demons, and others who love us, hate us, serve us, interfere with us. Of humans larger than life. When gods were not in hiding. About a space not reached via explanations. Poems in Gods R Us come from Greek/Roman and Indic myths, they retell myths, comment on myths, and refer to myths - they could not have been without myths. Distillation and attentiveness create the time needed to be one in the spirit of the poem. I range from reverential to playful.

The Casaloma, Justin P. Burnside

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Casaloma was written to challenge held beliefs in what constitutes genre, what constitutes "selfhood," and what constitutes borders.

First, it is an examination of Rimbaud's famous line, "I is an other," which challenges the position of the "I" in relation not only to the self, but the self in relation to the world around it. This I call the poetics of the pre-positional, or prepositional relationship. This poetics is explored and tested through the voices, and the suigenerous nature of the material that constitutes the book.

Secondly, this book is meant to be an exploration of ideas that were …

Dancing In The Ashes, Vytautas Adolph Malesh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following novel is the third draft of my creative thesis entitled Dancing in the Ashes . It is an exploration of the Detroit rave scene in its dying days, and it mixes real and imagined places and events in order to portray the essence of that time, if not the factuality. The bulk of the novel follows just over two weeks in the life of Thomas Kowalski, a drug dealer living with his parents in suburban Detroit. He parties constantly and seldom works except as necessary to keep his job at a local record store - an invaluable source …

Word~River Literary Review (2009), Jo Gibson, Lollie Ragana, Martin Dean Dupalo, Homeira Foth, Lily I. Mackenzie, Susan Ribner, Anne Stark, Mike Jaynes, Allan Johnston, Taylor Altman, Susan Nyikos, Lisa Konigsberg, Alex M. Frankel, Kristin Elsie Graef, Mari-Carmen Marin, Brian R. Young, Stacy Esch, Heather Trahan, Lee Casson, Rebecca Grace Williams, Kate Doughtery, Linda Maxwell, Mark Evan Davis, Erin Kelley, Rowan Johnson, Natalie Carter, John Shields, Kevin P. Keating, Renée E. D’Aoust, Anna Geyer, Heather Moymer, Algie Ray Smith, Adam Cushman, Margaret Finnegan, Alan Ramón Clinton, Thomas Sabel, Deborah Stark, Maggie Landess

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Our premier issue was published in Spring 2009. We are always looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching under part-time contracts during the summer or …

Review: Carry Me: Animal Babies On The Move, Sarah Mcghee

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the children's book "Carry Me: Animal Babies on the Move," written and illustrated by Susan Stockdale.

From Feminism, Adam Strauss

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

From Feminism means to emphasize a world-view rather than an a-priori eye towards women; the manuscript does occasionally strike a generic feminist-didactic mode, but for the most part its concerns are with humanity/ecology and gender goes un-marked or people are altogether absent. The world is various, and in terms of form, the poems in this book are rangy: sonnets, prose poems, serial fragments, free verse tercets, measured and rhymed tercets, couplets, over-the-top monuments to generation by rhyme. Unconventional use of white-space occurs fairly frequently. My thought is that having breaks in articulation in two places, not just the end of …