American Literature Commons^™

Cultural-Studies Criticism, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Faulkner’s “career” within cultural studies began, within the history of the cultural-studies movement itself, comparatively late. This is not an especially remarkable point about Faulkner or any one particular writers; as a critical movement, cultural studies was never concerned more with any one figure than another, and was always concerned with an interdisciplinary and interdiscursive focus rather than a writer’s singularity. It is a point worth noting, however, because of the specific ways in which Faulkner’s work seems hospitable to cultural studies’ concerns. From his earliest stages of writing, Faulkner was aware of his work’s position within a field of …

Front Matter, Tom Mack,

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 6 Fall 2004

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.

Contents, Tom Mack,

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

No abstract provided.

Sins Of The Father: Patriarchy And The Old South In The Early Works Of William Faulkner, John Easterbrook

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

No abstract provided.

Paul Laurence Who? Invisibility And Misrepresentation In Children's Literature And Language Arts Textbooks, Mary Jackson Scroggins, Jane M. Gangi

Education Faculty Publications

This article is a call-and-response-type conversation between two women—educators, mothers, lovers of words—on the representation of books about children of color in literature and language arts textbooks for preservice teachers. Scroggins shares anecdotes on the experience and real-life effects of invisibility, misrepresentation, and underrepresentation; her comments are italicized. Gangi reviews select textbooks and booklists. Both comment on the state of multiculturalism in children's literature.

Parts of this article were presented at the conference "Color, Hair, and Bone: The Persistence of Race into the 21st Century," held at Bucknell University on September 27, 2002. Other parts are adapted from Encountering Children's …

Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Night Gwen Stacy Died:' The End Of Innocence And The Birth Of The Bronze Age, Arnold T. Blumberg

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The time was 1973, and superheroes had some growing up to do.

The signs were already there as the genre eased into its fifth decade as the dominant force in American comic books. 1968 had seen the introduction of Robert Crumb's Zap Comics [1], an underground comic more concerned with counterculture trends and bucking the establishment than chronicling the exploits of spandex-wearing conservatives. The medium was testing its boundaries, finding flexibility where once there had been rigidity, and soon superheroes began to look like a timelost collection of crusaders who spoke to a generation long since past.

Pynchon's Age Of Reason: Mason & Dixon And America's Rise Of Rational Discourse, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

By drawing upon astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon for the unlikely protagonists of Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon develops a revisionist history of these two Englishmen as they come to terms with America in the so-called Age of Reason, which was informed by a European philosophical movement with its roots in rational discourse aimed at cultural and political intellect that eventually served as the foundation for American independence and democracy. But as Thomas Paine suggests, time wields a stronger power than does reason, and what history calls the Age of Reason may remind one of an ideal …

Review Of Writing Back: Sylvia Plath And Cold War Politics, By Alan Clinton, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Pynchon In Popular Magazines, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

Any devoted Pynchon reader knows that “The Secret Integration” originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and that portions of The Crying of Lot 49 were first serialized in Esquire and Cavalier. But few readers stop to ask what it meant for Pynchon, already a reclusive figure, to publish in these popular magazines during the mid-1960s, or how we might understand these texts today after taking into account their original sites of publication. “The Secret Integration” in the Post or the excerpt of Lot 49 in Esquire produce different meanings in these different contexts, meanings that disappear when reading …

Imperialism & Globalization: Lessons From Frank Herbert's Dune, Kevin Williams

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

These are the words of The Preacher (a character in Frank Herbert's Children of Dune who is simultaneously the metaphorical reincarnation of the fallen prophet, Muad'Dib, and the self-exiled Emperor, Paul Atreides) as he addresses the masses enslaved by their devotion to his messianic Empire. These words, culled from the pages of science fiction, are more than mere exposition from Herbert's narrative, they point toward several important conditions facing the political world today. These conditions concern certain failures of democracy and effects of globalization spawned, in part, by an intensification of imperialist expansion in the name of democracy.

Selected Definitions For Work In Communication And Media Studies & Selected Bibliography Of Publications In Comparative Media Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Paratextuality And Economic Disavowal In Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, Sarah Brouillette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Dave Eggers' recent novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), concerns two friends who suddenly stumble upon a lot of money, feel guilty about it, and travel around the world trying to give it away. Like almost all of what Eggers is involved in producing, Velocity is profoundly self-justifying. In fact, if we follow Gerard Genette's model and understand a work's paratexts to be all the physical and social texts that attend its existence, controlling its dissemination and reception, then Velocity thematizes paratextuality and practices it, as a text about Eggers' career and his overriding concern with the …

Innovating Superheroes, Alvise Mattozzi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Introduction]

Superhero comics have changed. They have passed through a Golden Age and Silver Age, they have been transformed, cancelled, revived, killed, deconstructed, reconstructed, revisited, etc. My aim is to account for part of these changes and show how superhero comics have been innovated. In order to track these changes I chose to compare different versions of a few DC Comics series, such as Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Shade, that had been cancelled and then revived and are known to have introduced relevant changes between the earliest and the subsequent versions.

Before tackling the series mentioned, I …

Bern Porter International: Volume 7 Number 2 (February 2003), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring "Why I Wrong" by Joel Dailey and "Barn Full of Air" by Daniel Russell.

Bern Porter International: Volume 7 Number 1 (January 2003), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz

Newsletters

A Literary Newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute of Advanced Thinking

Featuring poems by Anna Carroll and David Stone.

Hit The Ground Running: A Novella And Other Stories, Lisa Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This creative thesis contains a collection of short stories divided into two parts. The first half, a novella entitled Clothes on a Line, consists of a series of linked vignettes that depict the life of a young, unnamed Appalachian girl and her relationship with her promiscuous mother. Throughout the work, the narrator struggles to create and come to terms with her identity as she experiences the adversities of sexual abuse, death, alcoholism, and the looming “secret” of her unknown father. The second half, Consumed and Other Stories, features several short pieces that, while not inter-related like those in …

Internal Dialogues: Construction Of The Self In The Woman Warrior, Ann Shirley Modzelewski

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis considers past autobiographical theory and questions whether it addresses the autobiography of the female writer. Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Margaret Sanger, and Maxine Hong Kingston are examined to reveal their polyvocality, use of the autobiographical "I", and rhetorical strategies maintained in order to create a close relationship with the reader. Particular attention is paid to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Sidonie Smith's autobiographical "I."

Billing Below Title : The Contested Autobiographies Of Frances Farmer And Louise Brooks, Karen M. Anderson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Today autobiography and memoir hold great interest for the average reader as well as the literary scholar. Some argue this form has replaced the novel as the dominant modern/postmodern narrative expression. Its study crosses departmental boundaries, surfacing in disciplines such as psychology, as well as English/literature. This thesis focuses on the autobiographies of two Euro-American actresses of the early twentieth century. Intersecting the study of film, narrative, autobiography (“female” or feminist, as well as canonical or “male”) and modernism, it focuses on text and subtext, analyzing reasons for both the works’ and actress/authors’ cultural marginalization. In art as well as …

Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Holliday

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

On February 19, 1942, approximately ten weeks after Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt approved Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of all people of Japanese descent from vulnerable areas of the United States’ west coast. Meant as a security measure to protect the dams, power plants, harbors, railroads, and airports from spies who would attempt to compromise America’s vulnerable infrastructure, this order eventually led to the complete removal of all Japanese from Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, relocating 120,000 people by mid-1942 (Only What xi-xii). Such actions …

Constance Cary Harrison, Refugitta Of Richmond : A Nineteenth-Century Southern Woman Writer's Critically Intriguing Antislavery Narrative Strategy, Gaillynn Marie Bowman

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Although often maligned by literary scholars, Constance Cary Harrison, nineteenth-century novelist, journalist, essayist, and short-story author, achieved popular success with her subtle, but often radical, explorations of gender, and slavery during the antebellum and post-Civil War years. Furthermore, Harrison developed innovative characterizations of African-Americans while seeking nineteenth-century southern and northern readership through conciliatory prose. In particular, Harrison characterized a slave who gained his freedom and maintained a successful, independent life, without white assistance. This unique perspective for a Southern writer of her era stemmed from the war time destruction of her homestead, Vaucluse, which compelled Harrison to recreate an idealized …

Things Are Seldom What They Seem: Judges And Lawyers In The Tales Of Mark Twain, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

This article explores the many and varies legal characters that populated the bench and bar in Mark Twain’s work. Judges and lawyers have long captivated the minds and talents of authors, and Twain was a prolific creator of jurisprudential characters. This article’s thesis is that a careful study of Twain’s fiction reveals a disturbing pattern of inconsistency between the conduct of his attorneys and judges and the quality of justice that their actions bring about. In all too many of Twain’s tales, true “justice” is far more likely to be achieved where lawyers and judges violate legal rules through deception, …

Michael Mcclure, Rod Phillips

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, over twenty plays, two novels, and three collections of essays, Michael McClure is one of the most prolific and enduring figures to emerge from the Beat movement. As one of the five poets to begin his career at the Six Gallery reading in 1955, the reading which launched the Beat movement, he shares a long and rich history with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and many other writers of San Francisco’s Beat period.

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, James H. Maguire

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Marilynne Robinson has written a first novel that one reads as slowly as poetry—and for the same reason: The language is so precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn’t want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience” (Schreiber 14). Many other reviewers, critics, and general readers agree with reviewer Le Anne Schreiber that Robinson’s novel is beautifully written. And since Housekeeping’s virtual poetry echoes the beauty of the language found in works of nineteenth-century American writers such as Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, it comes as no surprise that Robinson’s favorite authors are the American Romantics.

J. Ross Brown, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Caught by his own whimsical pen often used to illustrate his books, the writer sits on a log with sketch pad in hand. He’s in the midst of a vast, wild country. Behind him are mountains and, closer, an apparently abandoned adobe. Beneath a sans-souci floppy hat, he gazes over spectacles comically slid down his nose with that look of the artist in the intense act of considering a scene or of a schoolmarm about to scold. Yet there’s also a different kind of tension to his body. One eyebrow is raised, almost as if he’s listening for something behind …

Reading Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, P. Jane Hafen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The writings of Louise Erdrich not only reflect their author’s multilayered, complex background but they also confound a variety of literary genre and cultural categories. Although Erdrich is known primarily as a successful contemporary Native American writer, her finely polished writing reveals both her Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Euroamerican heritages. Nevertheless, her diverse imageries, subjects, and textual strategies reaffirm imperatives of American Indian survival. She prescribes the literary challenge for herself and other contemporary Native writers in her essay “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place”: “In the light of enormous loss, [contemporary Native writers] must tell …

Lacunae: Narrative "Lacks, Holes Or Gaps" In Faulkner's And Morrison's Novels, Phyllis Ann Karpus

Masters Theses

The moment a reader opens a book, turns to the opening lines and begins to read, a circular relationship immediately develops with the author and the text. An implied alliance is formed wherein the author, most often through a narrator, omniscient or otherwise, proposes to the reader that he/she accept a degree of responsibility for understanding the plot, theme, and the underlying meaning in the work.

Retrospectively the theory sounds simple and, with many authors, it is effective. William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, however, not only command but also demand, the reader's absolute attention in, and responsibility to, many of …

The Soldier's Strife: An Introspective View Through The Work Of Tim O'Brien, Mandy Solomon

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.