American Literature Commons^™

Comic Vision, Gale Acuff

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A narrative, rhetorical poem

Metaphysics And The Charge Of Misanthropy : Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “Circles” As A Cipher For Understanding The Connection Between Robinson Jeffers And Herman Melville, Hunter Stark

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Herman Melville’s and Robinson Jeffers’s metaphysical thoughts reflect Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of looking towards Nature for discovery; all three writers’ observations of Nature influence how they see humanity’s place in existence. Both Melville and Jeffers observe Nature decentralizing humanity, which distinguishes their views from Emerson’s. Where Jeffers’s verse sternly voices this message, openly criticizing the anthropocentric viewpoint, Melville utilizes humor, subtly confronting the anthropocentric proponent and downplaying humanity’s power. Jeffers garners the label of misanthrope, whereas Melville’s metaphysical realm in Moby-Dick largely escapes this charge with the masking quality of his humor. Comparing both writers’ texts to an Emersonian …

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

Edith Lewis As Editor, Every Week Magazine, And The Contexts Of Cather's Fiction, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

On 26 August 1915 the New York Times reported the spectacle of two "Women Editors" who became "Lost in Colorado Canon" as a "Result of Trip with Inexperienced Guide." "Miss Willa Sibert Cather, a former editor of McClure's Magazine, and Miss Edith Lewis, assistant editor at Every Week, had a nerve-racking experience in the Mesa Verde wilds," they reported, giving Lewis and Cather roughly equivalent status as magazine professionals and comic fodder ("Lost"). The war in Europe was still far away for most Americans that August, although the sinking of the Lusitania in May had inched the conflict closer. In …

Susanna Rowson’S Transatlantic Career, Melissa J. Homestead, Camryn Hansen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The contention that Charlotte is best understood as part of Rowson’s career, a career that spanned a period of years and the Atlantic Ocean, is central to our analysis and to the recovery of Rowson’s authorial agency. In Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, Angela Vietto argues for the importance of the “literary career” as a category of analysis for women, of “examinin[g] the course writers followed in their pursuit of writing as a vocation—their progress in a variety of kinds of projects, both in their texts and in their performances as authors” (91). Although we leave the work …

Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives, Najwa Heather Al-Tabaa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis interrogates the postmodern view of popular culture as being banal and questions Theodore Adorno's view of postmodern consumer culture as ultimately anti- human(istic). My re-reading of postmodern popular culture finds that there is potential for meaningful human interaction through popular culture. My re-reading asserts that popular culture is capable of being a vehicle for solidarity. In my analysis I locate a postmodern paradigm shift in which human solidarity becomes a necessary consideration and focus of postmodern narratives and art forms. I term this shift "post-postmodernism" which is marked by a focus on solidarity.1 While the shift to the …

Recovering Brande : Freewriting And Sustainable (Procedural) Expression, Richard Bower

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Dorothea Brande is rarely known in rhetoric and composition yet continues to hold popular influence over writers attracted to Cartesian beliefs. The aim of this project is to recover Brande's contributions in order to rethink composition's trajectories. Chiefly, Dorothea Brande's legacy has been in creative writing through Becoming a Writer. In this bestseller, she establishes a program for putting the Cartesian divide to work. "Writing with the unconscious mind in the ascent," as Brande explains about what Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow later call freewriting, harnesses the bifurcated consciousness of writers and begins a journey of unification.

Photosynthesizer : A Novel, Naoko K. Selland

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Photosynthesizer - A Novel

Silent Letters : Directions In Late Twentieth Century New Lyric Poetry, Charmaine Gladdie Cadeau

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Silent Letters: Directions in Late Twentieth Century Poetry consists of three essays that consider modes of silence in the work of North American poets bpNichol, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. A poetry manuscript, Place Holder, accompanies these critical chapters, investigating silence in human relationships, landscapes, and language itself. The critical-creative work reframes embodiment by interrogating a poetics of intimacy through ephemerality, dialogue, and encounter.

Calvinism And Military Justice In American Literature, Nadia Hamilton Morales

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper explores judicial process in the military as revealed in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny and Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. The purpose of my project was to conduct an in depth study of Essentialism in military justice that is indicative of a culturally specific form of information management, as revealed in these texts. Essentialism is a form of information management that relies upon classification qualified through intuitive knowledge and superficial signification. This signification is used to certify the existence of self-contained states that function as a metaphorical metonymy for multiple unknowns. Moreover, …

True Crime, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Whether or not Capote invented something called the “nonfiction novel,” he ushered in the serious, extensive, non-fiction treatment of murder. In the years since In Cold Blood appeared, the genre of true crime regularly appears on the bestseller list. It is related to crime fiction, certainly – but it might equally well be grouped with documentary or read alongside romance fiction. And while its readers have a deep engagement with the genre that is very different from the engagement of readers of crime fiction, its writers are often forced to occupy a position – in relation to victims, criminals and …

Wolves And The Wolf Myth In American Literature, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim:

Robisch, S. K. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature. Reno, Nevada: Uniiversity of Nevada Press, 2009.

Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough To Tell, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

When Ellen Douglas started writing, she drew inspiration from the way William Faulkner and other southern writers whom she admired, like Eudora Welty, depicted southern places. Douglas planted all of her fiction firmly in the region of Mississippi that she knew best; her Homochitto is modeled of Natchez, where she was born, and her Philippi on Greenville, where she lived with her husband and their children. But Douglas reacted against the gothic and mythic elements in Faulkner's work and used as her first literary models the great nineteenth-century realists: Dostoevsky, Flaubert, James, and Tolstoy. She admired Eudora Welty, but found …

The Heart Is A Strange Muscle, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Rachel’s beeper went off just as her back began growing numb, jammed against the pieces of broken and discarded furniture in the storage room. A second later, Bobby’s went off too. She unwrapped her legs from around his sweaty back, pulled herself up to a sitting position, and groped through the jumble of clothing.

Exile In The Gramola: A Jewinican (Re)Collection, Roberto Alejandro Santos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Exile in the Gramola: A Jewinican (Re)Collection is a poetic attempt at navigating the multicultural landscapes of the ethnic hybrid. It is a collection of poetry that aims to reveal how we ourselves become acculturated in the process acculturating others, and which also aims at promoting opportunities of cross-cultural dialogue, cross-cultural negotiation, cross-cultural overstanding, and cross-cultural endorsement.

Through the themes of exile, divorce, familial separation, and the mixing of the cultural movements of hip-hop and bachata, Exile reaches beyond ideas of ethnicity and cultural norms in order to reveal the hardships we share in our only commonality--our humanity.

Contents, 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 12 Fall 2010

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.

Cultural Reclamations In Helena Viramontes’ “The Moths”, Ashley Denney

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

No abstract provided.

Timeless Feminist Resistance Defying Dominant Discourses In Sor Juana’S“Hombres Necios” And Margaret Atwood’S “A Women’S Issue”, Erin Elizabeth

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.

Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, And The Reclamation Of Disease, Marty Melissa Fink

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a theoretical and archival analysis of HIV/AIDS literature, this dissertation argues that the AIDS crisis is not an isolated incident that is now "over," but a striking culmination of a long history of understanding illness through narratives of queer sexual decline and national outsiderhood. Literary representations of HIV/AIDS can be read as a means of resistance to the stigmatization of people of color, women, immigrants, and queers, debunking the narratives that vilify these subjects as threats to national security and health. In drawing connections between illness, history, and the African diaspora, my work adopts a queer theoretical approach to …

Curle, Richard, 1883-1968 (Sc 2114), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2114. Letter, 30 September 1929, written by Richard Curle to "Katherine" in which he mentions their attendance at a party and her criticism of his novel.

Paul Bunyan Design Assemblage, Ashley Sickler

Art and Design

This project contains a design assemblage dedicated to the legendary figure, Paul Bunyan. The system includes, a typeface, a logo, a color palette, a pattern, and a poster.

The Social Dimensions Of Fiction: On The Rhetoric And Function Of Prefacing Novels In The Nineteenth-Century Canadas, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. The Social Dimensions of Fiction: On the Rhetoric and Function of Prefacing Novels in the Nineteenth-Century Canadas. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher (Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn), 1993. ISBN 3-528-07335-7 188 pages, bibliography, index. Data and analyses of nineteenth-century English- and French-Canadian prefaces to novels with theoretical and methodological frameworks for the study of rhetoric, the sociology of literature, audience research, and genre studies. Copyright of the book was released to Tötösy de Zepetnek by Westdeutscher Verlag in 2003.

Margaret Fuller's Lost Legacy: Literary Criticism, Donna Needham

All Theses

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) is best known as a Transcendentalist, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and first editor of the Transcendentalist publication, The Dial. She is considered a feminist by those familiar with her early work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller was also a literary critic and author of 'A Short Essay on Critics' the seminal American work on literary criticism. Her theory of criticism, like the criticism of Matthew Arnold twenty years later, was based on the philosophy of Goethe.
After stepping down as editor in 1842, Fuller continued to contribute criticisms and essays to The Dial until …

Thaw: A Memoir, Diane Bush

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This collection of creative nonfiction essays is a hybrid text of visual and verbal narratives located broadly within the genres of memoir, research-based nonfiction, and history. Women's memoirs, including a number of non-traditional texts, historical narratives, and an archival collection of photographs, provided springboards for the exploration of and reflection on the emotional terrain of loss, the ache of remembrance, and the ultimate desire for peace.

Ultimately, this work is a search for solace amidst emotional upheaval, beginning in childhood, after the deaths of my father, mother, first husband, and beloved aunt. Unable to sit still with my grief, I …

Rice, Alice Caldwell (Hegan), 1870-1942 (Sc 2096), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2096. Photocopied letters from Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice to Henry and Rebecca Watterson, 1903-1916 (13), chiefly including personal advice, discussions of literary topics, and social invitations. Also includes a brief note to Benjamin W. Huebsch, n.d., giving a positive review of a book titled 'Dragnet; and a letter to William Orton Tewson, n.d., in which Rice discusses literary criticism. Originals are held in the Library of Congress.

Stuart, Jessica Jane, B. 1942 (Sc 1209), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1209. Correspondence between Jessica Jane Stuart and Lawrence S. Thompson regarding a reprint of her story "A Man of Her Own Faith" for the Lost Cause Press. Includes a copy of the story, published in "Bluegrass Woman," Spring 1974. Stuart also writes of her doctoral studies and her difficulty finding a teaching position.

Rice, Cale Young, 1872-1943 (Sc 2094), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2094. Photocopied letters from Cale Young Rice to Henry Watterson, 1906-1917 (11), chiefly thank you notes and letters asking for the support of the 'Courier-Journal' for various causes; to Benjamin W. Huebsch, 1918 and response 1919 (2), about publishing some of his poems; and letter to William Orton Tewson, 1926 (1) in which he discusses literary criticism. Originals are held in the Library of Congress.