American Literature Commons^™

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 …

Arts: Fiction And Fiction Writers: The Americas, Rachel Norman

Faculty Publications

This essay by Rachel Norman, which originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, discusses contemporary Muslim fiction published in the United States with a particular focus on three novels: Mojha Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, and Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home.

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 …

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 …

Toward An Ontology Of Exhaustion: On The Affective Structures Of Masculinity In The American Oilfield, John W. Jepsen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What is the significance of the oil encounter in the lives of men living and working in the modern oilfields of the United States? Engaging with both literary examples of the lives of men in the Interior West and the personal experiences and reflections of the author, this essay seeks to examine the connections between ideology and place as it works to shape the identity and affect of men in America's oilfields, ultimately ending in them identifying with the very resources their activities seek to exploit and exhaust. Utilizing Theodore Adorno's Minima Moralia as its moral touchstone, this essay works …

Female Anti-Heroes In Contemporary Literature, Film, And Television, Sara A. Amato

Masters Theses

The anti-hero character has steadily become more popular in contemporary literature, film, and television. Part of this popularity is due to the character's appeal to the audience. This character type often commits acts that challenge the regulations of society. These acts, however, can become wish fulfillment for some audience members, making the acts of the character a vicarious experience as well as making the character more relatable because of the character's flawed nature.

This study will trace some of the evolution of the female anti-hero by discussing an ancestral character of the female anti-hero—Hester Prynne the protagonist of Nathanial Hawthorne's …

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 …

Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work tracks the role of the American South and Southern characters in Marvel Comics, from 1963 to 2016. This thesis spring from a simple question: how stereotypical does this Northern industry portray the American South? To achieve this goal, I read a lot of comics, applying literary theory (such as Patricia Yeager and Tara McPherson) as well as American cultural studies (1980s televangelism and the history of human trafficking in America) to my findings. After reading multiple comic books from multiple sources, I settled on four different texts, each with a unique approach to portraying the South: the portrayal …

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 …

Economic Enchantment In Eudora Welty's A Curtain Of Green, Elizabeth Moore

Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes Eudora Welty's short story collection, A Curtain of Green, and the interactions between its characters and the Mississippi economy. The paper takes into account Eudora Welty's work with the WPA during the Great Depression and her experiences photographing Mississippians throughout the state. Additionally, this thesis uses Welty's terminology when describing her experience of shopping as a child, specifically the enchantment of goods. This material is used to argue that Eudora Welty does address economic elements in her early short stories. Furthermore, this collection demonstrates a difference between gender participation in the economy, particularly among salesmen and female …

Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …

Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct …

Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar

Theses and Dissertations--English

While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …

Echoes From Heaven, Flora B. Foster

Heritage Material

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.

The Mockingjay Phenomena: A Study On The Position Of Young Adult Women In Dystopia, Hannah Hultman

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore the messages and impact of three young adult dystopian trilogies, The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Uglies. In particular, the role of the American female teenager in political, economic and social spheres is discussed through examining the three female teenaged protagonists of these novels. For comparative purposes, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World function as counterpoints to the young adult novels; the analysis of these different novels will prove that young adult dystopian novels show young adult women that their choices and actions can be integral to their societies …

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 …

Review Of Writing The Environment In Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness Of Early Scribes Of Nature, Edited By Steven Petersheim And Madison P. Jones Iv, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As editors Steven Petersheim and Madison Jones acknowledge in their Introduction, the field of ecocriticism owes much to the work of scholars such as Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Leo Marx. Petersheim and Jones’s intention for Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is to extend the conversation about American writers of nature in a similar vein as Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing (2001). One would expect names such as Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville to be included in a conversation about nineteenth-century American “nature” or “environmental” writing. Although these canonical names do indeed crop up throughout …

Orbic Bards: Religious Liberalism And The Problems Of Representation In The Postbellum Works Of Walt Whitman And Herman Melville, Anthony Gus Cohen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In an attempt to reconcile the critical camps that attempt either to christianize or otherwise, "scripturize" nineteenth century literary texts with the converse, which attempts to paint them cynically as "infidel countertexts" this project seeks to find a middle ground. The works of Herman Melvile and Walt Whitman steeped in the increasingly liberal religious atmosphere of New York City following the Civil War, both strive to offer up an impressively accurate historical and poetical record, free from the problems of hearsay that nagged the deists and transcendentalists, and instead attempted to offer something that instead was nearer to reason, and …

Front Matter, 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.

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.

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.