American Literature Commons^™

Narrating Injustice: Race, Law, And American Literature, Taylor A. Levine

Honors Scholar Theses

This project examines the relationship between race and law as it is portrayed by works of American literature. It argues that the gap between the legal system’s claims of neutrality and the lived experiences of Black individuals exposes systemic injustice that may be concealed in traditional legal discourse. Texts examined include Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Additionally, Prison Noir, an anthology of narratives written by incarcerated individuals edited by Joyce Carol Oates, is examined to emphasize how modern mass incarceration works to …

Living The Humanities: Ghosts, Literature, & Social Justice, Emily A. Phillips

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

How do we bridge the perceived divide between the study of humanities in our Jesuit universities and the real-world problems that surround our campuses? Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology" offers us a compelling way to move between the classroom and life, to guide our students through the Universal Apostolic Preferences of “To walk with the poor, the outcasts of the world, those whose dignity has been violated, in a mission of reconciliation and justice” and “To accompany young people in the creation of a hope-filled future.” This article offers a framework for combining literary analysis, historical inquiry, and creative writing in an …

On Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction And The Reshaping Of The American Canon By Alexander Manshel, Pieter Vermeulen

Criticism

Review of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon by Alexander Manshel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. Pp. 352. $140.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback.

The Islamic Orient In Antebellum America: The Influence Of Edgar Allan Poe In Contemporary Arabic Literature, Sohaib Alkamal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation posits a comprehensive overview of the debate about Orientalism, particularly early American depictions of the Islamic Orient. The study investigates the antebellum American portrayal of the Islamic Orient, focusing on Edgar Allan Poe’s Orientalist readings. While Said’s Orientalism concentrates heavily on aspects of power in West-East relations throughout history, this study expands on several aspects of Said’s book. This study provides a new approach to exploring the field of Orientalism by giving a voice to Arabic sources that are absent in Said’s Orientalism and rarely known to Western audiences. Such sources are medieval Islamic sources, which include phantasies …

"The Way It Comes—Through Nature:" Christian Realism, Rural Landscapes, And Divine Confrontations In Flannery O'Connor's Farm Fiction, Ashton Bailey Thomas

Master's Theses

Flannery O’Connor, though often labeled a Southern Gothic writer, preferred to place herself in the genre of “Christian Realism.” For her, the grotesque nature of her stories’ endings reflects not grace itself but the culmination of repeated rejections of grace. In her essays and letters, O’Connor argues that grace should be depicted “the way it comes—through nature,” equating the spiritual with the natural world. In her stories’ farm landscapes, O’Connor presents an ever-present grace through nature that, though often ignored or rejected, serves as a catalyst for spiritual confrontations. When this grace is continually denied, violence becomes the only force …

Negotiating (Im)Migrant Identity In The (Un)Assimilated Nation: American Literature Of The Late Nineteenth Century, Haley M. Steffens

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation examines representations of immigration, assimilation, and multinational cultural identity in late nineteenth-century American literature, autobiography, and print culture. Through a comparative analysis of diverse authors and immigrant communities, the project explores how literary and popular culture narratives framed the expectations and limitations of assimilation for disparate populations. By contextualizing these works within historical immigration policies, labor economies, government instability, and burgeoning nationalism, this study reveals how fiction and media shaped public attitudes toward assimilation and influenced policy. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that late, long-nineteenth-century literature functioned as both a reflection of and response to national debates about immigration, …

Between Languages And Religions: Omar Ibn Said's Voice In The Arabic Narrative And English Translations, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

The Life of Omar ibn Said (1831) is a narrative written by an enslaved person in Arabic and went through multiple English translations over the centuries. This article examines the ways in which these translations involve the nineteenth-century Christian agenda as well as the translators’ decisions in the twentieth-first century that multiply Omar ibn Said’s voice. In response to the recent scholarship’s effort to find Omar’s “true self” in his writings, which shows the meshing of Christian and Islamic faith, I aim to foreground his voice as a powerful presence at the intersections of the two languages and religions. My …

Cluster Conversation: (Re)Writing Our Histories, (Re)Building Feminist Worlds: Working Toward Hope In The Archives, Ruth Osorio, Lamaya Williams, Megan Mcintyre

English Faculty Publications

[Introduction] "Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. [...] Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency." - Rebecca Solnit

In 2018, Cheryl Glenn wrote, "The work of feminist rhetorical historiography is far from done; in fact, it has just begun-and it is anchored in hope." Following Glenn, we explore hope in this cluster as a methodological imperative in the archives. Informed by theorists Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Rebecca Solnit, and Cornel West, the writers in this Cluster Conversation envision hope as a radical orientation toward …

“How Do You Do It?” : Shifting Points Of View For Diverse Perspectives, Sue Norton

Articles

No abstract provided.

Roadmaps And Blueprints: Ecofeminism In The American Novel, Maegan Bishop

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The theory of ecofeminism in literature combines ecocriticism and feminism to articulate the overlap of environmental concerns and the subjugation of women and other vulnerable populations. In American Literature, the application of ecofeminist theory is a tool used to expose cultural anxieties throughout time by emphasizing the roles of women and the importance of their connection to the environment during moments of national progression. Current scholarship surrounding ecofeminism in American literature addresses this trend as it applies specifically to texts written by women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, but does not extend further to legitimize ecofeminism as it …

Centuries Of A Heavy Conscience: American Ecogothic In Cormac Mccarthy’S The Orchard Keeper And Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, Michaela Smith

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

With the rising concern about negative human treatment of the Earth, studies in the Gothic—a genre which always invites conversation about concerns and anxieties—have recently expanded to include the ecogothic. This critical framework at its core combines the Gothic with ecocriticism and invites conversation about the human impact on the natural landscape and its creatures. The American Gothic is already a genre that discusses guilt and remorse regarding the nation’s colonization of Indigenous people and role in slavery; however, the conversation about American emotions can be expanded to include ecogothic guilt. This sentiment is especially true when considering the ecogothic …

Transatlantic Literary Networks, 1949-1972, Cristina Iuli, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

Il racconto di Donald Barthelme “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne”, pubblicato sul New Yorker il 9 luglio 1971, si apre su una famiglia newyorkese di classe media sull’orlo di una crisi matrimoniale. Wanda, la moglie, sfoglia Elle, costringendo il marito a prestare attenzione alle foto dell’elegante ristrutturazione di un vecchio mulino in Bretagna da cui spiccano arredi di Arne Jacobsen e “cose di plastica arancione e rosso brillante che arrivano da Milano” (Barthelme 1971, p. 26). Barthelme, che aveva trascorso tutta l’infanzia e buona parte della gioventù a Houston, in Texas, dove il padre era direttore del museo di …

Scene Transatlantiche: Eco Italiane Nella Beat Generation, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

Nella maldestra intervista con Fernanda Pivano trasmessa dalla RAI nel settembre del 1966, Jack Kerouac, interpellato riguardo le infuenze letterarie che avevano ispirato la sua produzione, rispose negando con forza l’impatto di autori italiani sulla sua poetica. Il rifuto di Kerouac – uno dei pochi esponenti della Beat Generation a poter vantare un radicamento nel territorio nordamericano da più di dieci generazioni (FamilySearch) – può essere letto come il tentativo di un autore aggrappatosi, nella parte fnale della sua vita, a un’ideologia conservatrice e nazionalista, di inscrivere la propria poetica all’interno di una tradizione letteraria puramente americana. Nella frase successiva …

I Know Not Seems: Contemporary American Fiction And The New Sincerity, Eric C. Koch

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Since the publication of David Foster Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Plurum,” in 1993, critics have attended ever more closely to the problematic effects of postmodernism. Postmodernism, with its origins located in poststructuralism’s antifoundational philosophy, fashions a world without anchors or boundaries, where relativism holds sway and irony is the culture’s habitus. The twin concepts of relativism and irony are, of course, primary in postmodern literature, and therefore indicate why postmodernism’s trajectory terminates in overt metafiction, experimental excess, and nihilism. By reading postmodernism as a reflection of these principles, we begin to register how the literature of the period following postmodernism …

A Study Of Geo-Regional Place-Consciousness In American Literature, Eugene Slepov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ancient Greek notions of topos, or place, and choros, or region, emerge from a an oral, narrative-based tradition that predates geography. These concepts remind us that that best source of material to study place is to be found in literary fiction. American fiction in particular will give us the evidence by which we can compile a qualitative, experiential understanding of the role of place in people’s lives. This dissertation inquires into the formation of the imaginative constructions that characters put upon place—such as through the process of consolidating and dwelling in places—and the way place puts …

Writing New Normals: A Study Of American Pandemic Fiction In The Wake Of Covid-19, Riley E. Droppleman

Gaines Fellow Senior Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the aspects of pandemic fiction that extend beyond the illness itself. In this thesis, I show that while the disease that spreads is a large focus of pandemic fiction, the truths that spring from these novels reveal larger societal issues, such as class hierarchies, racial inequalities, and failings of the government to fight the pandemic. In fact, pandemics act as catalysts for the uncovering of these societal ills, and the authors of pandemic fictions bring these greater faults of society to the forefront of their novels. I analyze three novels from the …

Democratic Spaces Of Reading : Constituting A Reader Figure In Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation examines the ways in which print materials in nineteenth-century America constitute “a reader figure” as a political subject of democracy. Neither a purely historical entity nor a textual construct, this reader figure is understood as the process of subjectivation that emerges from the aesthetic modes of writing informed by the texts’ contemporaneous print culture. Focusing on the moments when expansionism and slavery reveal the antagonistic constitution of America as a “republic,” each chapter will examine a text that enmeshes the act of reading in unique spatiality: contiguous newspaper columns of untranslatable languages, a ship stowage that traps the …

Reading In Place: Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wendell Berry, And Post Critique, Calvin L. Coon

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The twenty-first century, marked by neoliberalism and suspicious, visibly violent far-Right politics, has presented new challenges to critical and literary theorists. In response, some theorists advocate for a postcritical turn, challenging both the surface/depth picture of language and the privileged status of suspicion in interpretation in order to explore alternative pictures of language and reading that can better address the challenges of our own day. In this thesis, I connect one of these alternatives, Toril Moi’s use of Ordinary Language Philosophy in literary studies, to Wendell Berry’s prioritization of place in environmentalist activism. In connecting these two thinkers, I contend …

Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing a girls’ studies perspective and materialist feminist lens, this paper seeks to put Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in conversation with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Besides being published in the early 1940s, both works feature young girls navigating class struggles, exploring their identities, and struggling against dominant ideologies specific to their time and place. McCullers’ and Smith’s novels depict how a patriarchal, capitalist society imposes upon young women a narrow, misogynistic view of themselves and the women around them—facilitating the social reproduction of oppression and alienation. In depicting these realities of …

Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty, Clare E. Callahan, Joseph Entin, Irvin Hunt, Kinohi Nishikawa

English Faculty Publications

Together, the essays in this issue of American Literature stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see.

Reconstructing Queer Outsiders: Intersecting Identities Of Contemporary Gay Ethnic American Poets, Anthony Salazar

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores poetry and memoirs written by recent poets who identify as gay, ethnic, and American. As a result of the complex process of both integrating their intersecting identities and confronting various forms of oppression, the work of gay ethnic American poets has become necessarily more layered than that of their white heteronormative counterparts. They have also transformed a genre traditionally defined by the limited and limiting category “gay” into a multivalent “queer” medium that embraces a futurity of vast and unapologetically ambiguous possibilities. Their very act of emphasizing ethnicity and sexuality in relation to other intersecting identities ultimately …

American Performance: Artistic Experience And The American Dream, Savannah M. Barrow

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The American Dream was first epitomized by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography (1791), in which he instructs his fellow citizens on how to procure the American promises of social mobility and economic prosperity. However, the moral and social performances reinforced by Franklin’s recipe-for-success promote an ideological system that prevents marginalized communities such as women, immigrants, and people of color, from procuring the Dream’s most foundational features. Inequitable access to the Dream is a theme revisited throughout American literature, wherein disenfranchised characters consume the aspirational narrative of American social mobility through art, media, and propaganda. This essay tracks the representation of …

Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The dissertation studies the pre-history of trauma in US American fiction, examining how experiences of large-scale adversity are represented before the concept of psychological trauma emerges in the late nineteenth century. Distinctly modern forms of violence—diffuse, systemic, lacking direction and intent—bring forth less individual and personal experiences of grief and suffering than those imagined by twentieth-century trauma theory. Studying forms of feeling and of genre that make trauma legible historicizes the way a Western idea of modern subjectivity, as white, self-possessed, agential, and split, has shaped out understanding of how a person processes crisis. The dissertation visits three spaces that …

Defining African American Authorship, April Quattlebaum

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

James Weldon Johnson and Melvin B. Tolson are pivotal figures of the early 20th century. They represent a fundamental question that has been and is indeed still in the minds of African American authors: What is a Black author? African American authorship necessarily involves the challenge of forging a literary identity in the face of a society structurally and temperamentally predisposed to marginalize and dismiss them. In their creative and scholarly works, Johnson and Tolson methodically dissect Black authorship, looking both to the past and to their present situation as they strive to imagine a future for African American literary …

Scenes Of Subversion: How Monstrous Subjectivities Affect Futurity In Gothic Horror, Salvatore S. Dibono

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen begins his conclusory section of his influential essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” stating, “Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return” (52). Yet, Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive makes a statement which complicates the idea of the monster being “our child” when discussing that the normative (conservative) movement will “recurrently frame their political struggle…as a ‘fight for our children—for our daughters and our …

Grappling With The Aftereffects Of Modernism In American Literature And Culture: Spiritual, Political, And Ecological, Joseph Neary

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Joe Neary examines various texts within contemporary American culture, including David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon,” Harmony Korine’s film, Spring Breakers, Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory, and Bruce Holsinger’s book of criticism, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror.

Meeting Places : The Entanglements Of Poetry And Science In The Modern American Imagination, James H. Searle

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

“Meeting Places: The Entanglements of Poetry and Science in the Modern American Imagination” explores how Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser responded to the rise of modern science and industrial technology by reflecting on the similarities and differences between the poetic and scientific imaginations. Across four chapters, I show how the growth of the natural and social sciences from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century spurred these writers to rethink the social and cultural functions of literature in a democratic society. Unlike many of their peers, these figures refused to treat science either as a …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

Such News Of The Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, Thomas S. Edwards, Elizabeth A. Dewolfe

History Faculty Books

This pathbreaking collection, which contains 19 essays from scholars in a variety of fields, illuminates the work of two centuries of American women nature writers. Some discuss traditional nature writers such as Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Austin, Gene Stratton Porter, and Annie Dillard. Others examine the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Anzaldua, and Leslie Marmon Silko, writers not often associated with this genre. Essays on germinal texts such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas's The Everglades: River of Grass stand alongside examinations of market bulletins and women's gardens, showing how the rich diversity of women's nature writing has shaped and expanded …

Alaska And The Arctic In The U.S. Imaginary, Ryan Charlton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Popular narratives of Alaska have long relied on the region’s mythical status as the “last frontier” a perception which enfolds Alaska into a continental narrative of U.S. expansion. This frontier image has foreclosed our ability to appreciate the profound instability which the 1867 Alaska Purchase brought into U.S. national discourse at a time when Americans were eager to adopt a fixed national identity. In the three decades following the purchase Alaska would resist incorporation into the national imaginary challenging the coherence of U.S. national identity and calling into question foundational myths of the United States as a continental and agrarian …