American Literature Commons^™

Ideal Objects: The Dehumanization And Consumption Of Racial Minorities In Joyce Carol Oates's Zombie, April D. Pitts

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This essay explores the relationship between race and ideal democratic citizenship in Joyce Carol Oates's novel, Zombie (1995). It argues that in Zombie, white social status is depicted as dependent upon the dehumanization and consumption of racial minorities.

An Uninformed Pilgrim, Lillian Fassero

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

Joseph C. Pattison’s article, “The Celestial City, or Dream Tale,” examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” and portrays the narrator as a Christian hero standing against the modernist persuasions of his time – a protagonist who enters the story with firm orthodox convictions and exits his dream journey with unaltered principles or character. However, Hawthorne’s narrator frequently adopts new modernist arguments and wavers in his pre-formed convictions. He toys with Christian faith but promptly discards any accusations of guilt that such beliefs suggest. While he repeatedly compromises his principles and doubts the ramifications of Christian faith, his dynamic nature is …

Analyzing True Self-Reliance And Individualism, Stephanie Greene

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

This essay analyzes the story of “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving and criticizes Daniel Plung’s assessment of it in his article, “Rip Van Winkle’: Metempsychosis and the Quest for Self-Reliance.” In Plung’s article, he assesses that in the story of “Rip Van Winkle,” the main character, Rip, attains self-reliance and individualism through his escape and experience on the mountain. However, although Plung’s points support his assessments, there are also many other details in the story that contradict Plung’s analysis. This essay seeks to enlighten readers to a differing interpretation of “Rip Van Winkle” by studying other details in the …

Payne, William Samuel, 1941-2015 (Sc 2968), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2968. Letters of William Samuel Payne to Cora Jane Spiller, Bowling Green, Kentucky, mostly with news of his cousin, Louise (Natcher) Murphy, a novelist and the daughter of Kentucky Congressman William H. Natcher.

“That Paradox Of Unjoyful Joyousness” Or Pure And Impure History: Retrospection And The Past In Robert Penn Warren’S A Place To Come To, Noah Simon Jampol

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Loving The Unlovable Body In Lois Ann Yamanaka’S Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada

Publications and Research

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by explicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the …

The Taboo Of Experience, Brian Glaser

English Faculty Articles and Research

A lyric essay discussing Henry James and cosmopolitanism
from the perspective of a scholar
visiting a German university.

When Is An Agrarian Not An Agrarian? A Reading Of Robert Penn Warren’S “The Briar Patch”, Clare Byrne

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Editor’S Foreword: The Need For “Deep Engagement”: Robert Penn Warren, Malcolm X, And Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mark D. Miller

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

"La Vida Es El Honor Y El Recuerdo": Oscar Zeta Acosta's Paratextual Struggle For Survival, Allison Fagan

Department of English - Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the publishing history surrounding Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) by examining two key paratextual elements: the introduction to the 1989 reprint edition, supplied by Hunter S. Thompson, and the illustrated cockroaches inserted throughout the narrative by Straight Arrow Books designer Jon Goodchild. It examines Acosta’s tandem efforts to employ and destabilize the singular identity at the heart of Chicano nationalism through the figure of the cockroach, and it suggests that such strategic essentialism is also at the heart of the publishing process.

It argues that Acosta combatively collaborates with his friends and …

Hip Hop And The Huxtables: Identity, Hip Hop, And The Cosby Effect In Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor, Jonathan Naumowicz

The Graduate Review

Identity is a tricky thing for anyone in the formative years of adolescence, a thing made much more complex when you don’t fit the mold of any preexisting social group. For a black American in the 1980s, the formulation of identity was a remarkably unique challenge. The rise of hip hop as a major element of American culture gave a far-reaching voice to the challenges faced many black Americans, but its roots in and content about impoverished, usually violent urban areas offered a decidedly limited and negative view of black Americans. In Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead delves into this complicated …

A Tightrope Over An Abyss: Humanity And The Lords Of Life, Timothy Francis Urban

The Graduate Review

The American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson is a precursor to the thought of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's writings have often admitted to the profound influence Emerson had on the latter's own philosophy. Both thinkers shared common ground in viewing philosophy and language as an active process, always in a state of becoming, where the subject is the sole creator of meaning. This paper argues that Emerson and Nietzsche recognized the liberating quality of language in the creation of one's subjectivity. Emerson and Nietzsche dismissed notions of objective knowledge by looking at how language is arbitrary, and, as such, …

Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero

Theses and Dissertations--English

Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing …

“Yellow Crowfoot In The Pond,/Not Lotus, Not Lily”: Mapping The River, Mapping Voices, Pamela J. Rader

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This paper examines the prosody of Chin’s eponymous poem, "The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty," through an eco-critical lens. While it does not dismiss the hybrid cultural influences of the poem, it focuses on the ways the non-human agents, or the figures in the poem’s landscape, “speak.” Poetry, like the poem’s terraced gardens, traces tension between the controlling human forces experienced by the narrating female I personas and the natural world’s affective inclinations.

Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek, Jason W. Ellis

Publications and Research

Literary and cultural critics call science fiction the premiere story form of modernity because it relates the adventures of educated men and women who use science and technology to reshape the material world and build new, hopefully better societies. As such, it is no surprise that many authors working in this popular genre explore how educated men and women might use science and technology to reshape the physical body and build new, hopefully better versions of humanity itself. Yet, lingering even in the most optimistic imaginings of a posthuman future is the doubt that these transformations will be evenly distributed …

Book Review - Slab: On That Hallelujah Day When Tiger & Preacher Meet, Rita J. Spisak

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

American Girls, Elizabeth Farschon

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

These four pieces explore different aspects of American life through the eyes of female characters. Best in Show, Meadows, and Dads and Dancers each capture childhood moments where being a girl really counts, whether for better or for worse. While the poems tell specific stories, the questions and realizations are common for many girls growing up in America. How do we teach girls about their bodies and worth through the ways we allow men, especially their fathers, to interact with them? How are gender roles established even in childhood playtime?

The fourth poem, Venus, contrasts the first …

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 …

How To Find What's Lost When What's Lost Is You: The Presence Of Disappearing Bodies In Vietnam, Afghanistan, And Iraq War Literature, Brandy Rachele Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this study is on disappearing bodies in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq war literature. The term “disappearing body” has several connotations. Disappearing bodies refers to throwaway or neglected bodies, bodies that routinely absorb into the landscape. Women and African Americans typically fall into this category, but at times, Vietnamese, Afghani, or Iraqi people may fall into this category as well. The race, gender, and region of the author often determines how Others are posited in the literature. Disappearing bodies also occur in the form of grotesquerie. These bodies appear as dismembered, decapitated, mutilated, and wasting away. Bodies disappear …

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Gender And Power In Waiting For Godot, Ryan Wright

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

No abstract provided.

The Reader's Complicity: Universality In Waiting For The Barbarians, The Laramie Project, And The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, Aubrey Kosa

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

No abstract provided.

Blind With Superstition, Cursed With Illusions: Masculinity And War In Bierce’S “Chickamauga”, Salina Patterson

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

No abstract provided.

James Joyce’S Gnomon Of Pain In “Grace” And “The Dead”, Bari K. Boyd

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

No abstract provided.

The Game Debate: Video Games As Innovative Storytelling, Melissa Somerdin

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

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 18 Fall 2016

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

No abstract provided.

Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three twentieth-century novels—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—in the context of posthumanist animal studies. A Foucauldian biopolitical lens foregrounds the inextricably linked ways that both human and nonhuman animal bodies are governed and controlled in a biopolitical era. Each chapter focuses on textual links between speciesism and the oppression of particular human groups based on gender, sexuality, and race, arguing that each novel offers new ways of thinking about both our own species, other animal species, and how humans relate to the nonhuman world.

God's Gonna Trouble The Water, Dominiqua Dickey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"God's Gonna Trouble the Water," is a noir set in Grenada, MS in the 1930s. This novel explores the issues of race, gender, and class via the protagonist, a thirtysomething black woman who despite her low status in the socioeconomic hierarchy of this small southern town is able to navigate the delicate complexities of the environment to search for her missing granddaughter, a mixed raced toddler whose father is the son of a prominent white land owner. Although national history portrays Mississippi as maintaining a polarizing view on race relations, the novel will explore how this idea of Mississippi is …