American Literature Commons^™

How To Recover From The Great Recession And Reduce The Government Debt, Hunter Cregger

Best Integrated Writing

Hunter Cregger proposes how to recover from the Great Recession of the 2000s and reduce government debt in this essay written for the Integrated Writing course EC 2050: Principles of Macroeconomics, taught by Dr. Hee Young Shin at Wright State University.

Inter-Tribal Disunity: An Analysis Of Inter-Tribal Conflict During The Black Hawk War Of 1832, Megan Bailey

Best Integrated Writing

Megan Bailey explores the effects of inter-tribal disunity and conflict on the Black Hawk War of 1832 in this essay written for the Integrated Writing course HST 3000: Introduction to Historical Analysis, taught by Dr. Noeleen McIlvenna at Wright State University.

Effects Of Caffeine And Vitamin E On Wisconsin Fast Plant, Sarah Ferguson

Best Integrated Writing

Sarah Ferguson examines the effects of caffeine and vitamin E on the growth of Wisconsin Fast Plant in this piece written for the Integrated Writing course BIO 3450: Concepts of Biology I for Early and Middle Childhood Education, taught by Mr. Len Kenyon at Wright State University.

Best Integrated Writing 2015 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

Medical Malpractice, Misdiagnosis, And Tragedy In Modern And Postmodern American Literature, Aaron Danell Hetrick

Student Theses and Dissertations

The relationship between literature and medicine has generated great interest in the last forty years, both in terms of literature's use of the medical field to provide commentary on the human condition and the medical field's use of literature to better understand the human condition. This thesis will analyze the ways in which twentieth century authors Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, J.D. Salinger, and Joe Haldeman employed the motif of medicine and the medical field--specifically medical malpractice, misdiagnosis, and tragedy--to convey the themes of their respective literary movements and to reveal human concerns to those who would read their respective …

The Binding Of Abraham: Inverting The Akedah In Fail-Safe And Wargames, Hunter B. Dukes

Journal of Religion & Film

This article draws upon Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death to trace how two exemplars of atomic bomb cinema reinterpret the Binding of Isaac (Akedah). Released during the twin peaks of Cold War tension, Fail-Safe (1964) and WarGames (1983) invert the Akedah of Genesis 22. In both films, an act of sacrificial patricide accompanies or replaces the sacrifice of an Isaac-like son. When viewed in the context of Cold War cultural politics—events such as Norman Morrison’s Abrahamic self-immolation and Kent State’s rejection of George Segal’s sacrificial memorial— the inverted Akedah emerges as …

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Other Voices

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century.

This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

Toward A Genealogy Of Americanist Expressionism, R. Arvo Carr

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Cultural Readings Of Ojibwe Novelists, Jordan A. Horvath

Open Access Theses

This thesis examines the work of three Ojibwe novelists through the cultural lens of primarily Ojibwe literary and cultural critics. Novels by Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and David Treuer are analyzed with the intent of highlighting aspects of the work in which a heightened understanding of Ojibwe cultural and literary practices, both historical and contemporary, may elevate a reader's engagement with the texts. In the analyzing of these texts, precedence is given to the work of Ojibwe critics such as Vizenor and Anton Treuer. This prioritization of Ojibwe literary theory and cultural knowledge will demonstrate that readers, particularly non-Ojibwe readers, …

“Ab-Soul’S Outro,” “Hiiipower,” And The Vernacular: Kendrick Lamar’S Rap As Literature, Tyler S. Bunzey

Senior Honors Theses

Kendrick Lamar’s “Ab-Soul’s Outro” and “HiiiPower” employ complex patterns of Signifyin(g), testifyin’, and other classical African-American literary tropes in order to construct a nuanced style. Lamar creates a double-voiced text not only within his narrative, but also within the form itself. Lamar plays on rap's unique status in African-American literature as an oral text; it is an extension of the vernacular. Through this oral text, Lamar decentralizes the Eurocentric focus of classical interpretation and qualification of literature to a new Afrocentric perspective that privileges the oral text. These raps are complex, wrapped up in their current context along with a …

Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier

Theses and Dissertations

This project will attempt to provide an outline of some of the most salient constructions of present-day literary fiction, where those constructions might overlap or conflict, and how various contemporary authors and their works might usefully fit within those constructions. This project will argue that fiction-writers following postmodernism are presented with a unique problem of how to write fiction in a way that acknowledges the problems of using language as a primary meaning-making structure without falling down a linguistic rabbit hole where a text ceases to be about anything other than itself. Beginning with David Foster Wallace, this project will …

The Hidden "Homo" In "Rip Van Winkle:" A Queer Theory Reading, Rebecca Knapper

Audre Lorde Prize

No abstract provided.

Empathic Encounters: Negotiating Identity In 9/11 Fiction And Translation, Kirsty A. Hemsworth

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Dominated by the polarized strategies of domestication and foreignization, conventional literary translation approaches tend to operate on the assumption that source and target cultures, and, by extension, their literary works, are fundamentally irreconcilable on the basis of linguistic, stylistic and ideological differences. Dislocated by the traumatic force of the event, only to be further uprooted by the translation process itself, the identities at stake in American works of 9/11 fiction cannot be so clearly differentiated and securely defined. Moreover, any attempt to fictionalize and translate this real-world trauma inevitably encounters the event as a visual singularity, whereby the image supersedes …

Whiteness As Cursed Property: An Interdisciplinary Intervention With Joyce Carol Oates’S Bellefleur And Cheryl Harris’S “Whiteness As Property”, Karen Gaffney

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This article begins with the assertion that now more than ever, in the aftermath of Ferguson and in a time when many believe our society to be post-racial, we need to bring together scholars and activists who care about racial justice, regardless of discipline, and build interdisciplinary tools for fighting racism. Furthermore, we need to understand and reveal how whiteness has been socially constructed because the power of whiteness lies in its invisibility, and that fuels the perpetuation of systemic racism. In making whiteness visible, we can see how it has been wielded as a weapon, which in turn will …

Another Country: When Your Nation Doesn’T Consider You To Be A Citizen, William B. Daniels Ii

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

I plan to show how the characters in Another Country uncover the inherently racist and homophobic requirements for citizenship in a nation. The novel Another Country by African American author James Baldwin (1924-1987) exposes the fallible nature of hetero-normative and racial ideals that narrowly define a model citizen of a nation-state. The queer interracial relationships in the novel, particularly between the main character Rufus and his lover Eric, transgress the boundaries of nation, race, and sexuality, thus revealing the illusionary nature of categorizations that are defined and applied by nation-state apparatuses in order to discriminate and maintain uniformity. In addition …

The Rise And Fall Of Female Stereotypes In Looking For Alaska, Alina Zabolotico

Audre Lorde Prize

No abstract provided.

Thomas Savage’S Queer Country, O. Alan Weltzien

Western Writers Online

Novelist Thomas Savage (1915–2003) grew up in the lonely world of the northern Rockies during the twentieth century’s first half and in eight of his thirteen novels continually re‑inhabited it as a scene of gender protest. He left Montana, his native state, at twenty‑two, only periodically visiting after that and returning only once after the 1960s. His daughter said he “hated Montana” and wanted to get as physically far away from it as possible, but that’s not the whole story. In those eight novels Savage critiques the limited roles available to men and women in the high landscapes between his …

Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Instead of describing poetry as a set of constraints or history of practices, Muriel Rukeyser calls it "one kind of knowledge." Dark Matter heeds Rukeyser's call, theorizing a poetics of the "scholar's art," in which documentary investigation, autobiographical exploration, and formal innovation are mutual, interwoven concerns. The dissertation pairs American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), reading their hybrid works not through the received categories of American poetry, or through common generic and disciplinary divisions, but using an inductive methodology that takes its lead from the poets. Understanding Howe and Rukeyser's literary experiments as serious interventions in …

Loosening The Critical Corset: New Approaches To The Short Fiction Of Kate Chopin And Ruth Stuart, Kathryn Erin O'Donoghue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation uses the works and lives of two popular late-nineteenth-century writers, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin, as a heuristic to solve the literary mystery of how "fiction by women" became "women's fiction." While feminist scholars resuscitated Chopin, Stuart remains ignored. The realism and irony of Chopin's novel The Awakening resonate with modern readers, but the sentimental aspects of Stuart's work and Chopin's short fiction remain problematic. The aesthetic movements of realism and naturalism influenced literary taste to the extent that sentimentalism is anathema to contemporary critics. I participate in recent scholarship that explores how sentimentalism has been used …

The American Aspasia: The Woman Lecturer In American Women's Rights Fiction, 1839-1915, Angela Ridinger-Dotterman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the figure of the woman lecturer/speaker that appeared in American women's rights fiction in the period between 1839 and 1915. I argue that examining the figure of the woman lecturer/ speaker in a wide variety of texts and over an extended period of history reveals that the figure served as a dynamic vehicle for women writers to advance a broad range of social and political interests; writing in a social and historical context that discouraged women's participation in public speech, women authors used fiction as a rhetorical space to articulate different visions …

The Literary Legacy Of The Federal Writers' Project, Sara Rendene Rutkowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Established by President Roosevelt in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) put thousands of unemployed professionals to work documenting American life during the Depression. Federal writers--many of whom would become famous, including Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West--collected reams of oral histories and folklore, and produced hundreds of guides to cities and states across the country. Yet, despite both the Project's extraordinary volume of writing and its unprecedented support for writers, few critics have examined it from a literary perspective. Instead, the FWP has …

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Faculty Publications & Research

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

Features Of Independence: Teaching “Theresa - A Haytien Tale”, Michael P. Dean

Faculty Publications & Research

One of the core beliefs of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) states that we believe that “diverse perspectives enrich understanding and inspire discovery and creativity,” and in keeping with that aim, I chose to participate in the Just Teach One: Early African American Print project. As a school primarily focused on STEM subjects, IMSA still offers a robust English curriculum that values and supports a diverse literary canon, and our incoming sophomores are asked to complete a two-part Literary Explorations course that features America texts from colonial era up to the 21^st century.

The City Is Full Of Bugs, Michael Stanley

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

This essay explores the use of symbolism and metaphor in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, focusing on a particular scene inside Mary Rambo’s apartment in the middle of the novel. The use of symbolism in the novel is extensive, and many objects and characters serve as metaphors for social classes and groups, and often these representations also function as direct satire for various political groups, folkways, and the expectations or prejudices of the time period in which the novel is set. The objects and events that take place in Mary Rambo’s apartment go beyond symbolism to include a forecast of …

Tale Of The Whale, Joel Schlaudt

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

In his critique of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, A.N. Deacon accurately captures one of the main tenets if not the central theme of the book; however, he also makes several claims about the novel that do not seem to fit with the evidence seen in the actual story. For example, Deacon holds that Melville is attempting to show that the power and attributes of Moby Dick are the source, symbolically, of truth and meaning. However, this is not the impression we get when we look closely at the work itself and note Melville’s treatment of the subject. Furthermore, Deacon …

I Would Prefer Not To Help You, Christen Dunn

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

Bartleby, the Scrivener recounts a story of a scrivener who would prefer not to do anything, whether that be parts of his job, changing his location, or eating his dinner. The narrator’s reaction to Bartleby’s lazy desires seem to be admirable, but his selfish motivation and false compassion are evident. The way the narrator views and treats Bartleby is consistent with the standards of philanthropy of the wealthy during the mid-nineteenth century. The narrator truly believes he has helped Bartleby to the best of his ability, yet fails to connect with Bartleby outside of offering him money and future assistance …

In The Hands Of The Reader, Allie J. Kapus

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

“In the Hands of the Reader” is an analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” integrating the views of Michael Jay Lewis in his article “Contingency, Narrative, Fiction: Vogler, Brenkman, Poe.” “The Black Cat” is a narrative penned by a man reflecting on his life as he awaits his own death. As the narrator is mentally unstable and therefore unreliable, the reader is brought into the story to interpret the truth or falsehood of the narrator’s story. Lewis is accurate in his strong acknowledgment of the unreliability of the narrator, yet he fails to address in-depth the reason for …

The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow: An Ambiguous Ghost Tale, Elisa R. Jacobs

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

Abstract

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Booth Tarkington Materials., Booth Tarkington, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

This collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, and other materials relating to the life and work of Booth Tarkington. Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was a writer from Indiana, well known for his novels of life in the midwest. Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to him for The Magnificent Ambersons and for Alice Adams. He attended Purdue University and Princeton, where he was a well-known literary and social figure. In later life he divided his time between Indiana and his estate, Seawood, in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he became friends with neighbor Kenneth Roberts.

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Waldo Peirce Materials., Waldo Peirce, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The collection comprises letters, scrapbooks, and manuscript items by Waldo Peirce, an American painter, bohemian, and expatriate born in Bangor, Maine. Waldo Peirce (1884-1970) was born in Bangor, Maine, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover and Harvard University. He later studied at the Art Students League in New York City and at the Julian Academy in Paris. As an expatriate American, he drove ambulances for the French Army in World War I and led a bohemian life with notable companions such as Ernest Hemingway and John Reed. His later life was spent in Searsport, Maine, and Newburyport, Massachusetts, where …