American Literature Commons^™

Miss Eudora Welty: A Reminiscence, Richard O. Moore

Yalobusha Review

No abstract provided.

Bern Porter International: Volume 2 Number 1 (February, 1998), Bern Porter, Natasha Bernstein, Sheila Holtz

Newsletters

A bimonthly literary newsletter and Bulletin of the Institute for Advanced Thinking.

Featuring Nick Herbert on Quantum Tantra and statements from Institute scholars.

Women In The Contact Zone. Review Of The Frontiers Of Women’S Writing: Women’S Narratives And The Rhetoric Of Westward Expansion By Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Georgi-Findlay's project in The Frontiers of Women's Writing is in many ways a synthesis of these two revisionary projects, both re-attributing importance to women's narratives of westward expansion and re-reading those narratives for their constructions of the colonialist presence in the west. She examines in these narratives, which span genres including fiction, travel writing, semi-public diaries, and personal letters, across "a range of cultural discourses ordering relations of race, class, and gender" (pp. x-xi) to show how "women's accounts are implicated in expansionist processes at the same time that they formulate positions of innocence and detachment" (p. xi). By mobilizing …

An Eastern Mind Attached To A Western Brain: The Influence Of Zen Buddhism On Jack Kerouac, Yuko Taniguchi

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

A great American author, Jack Kerouac, loved the Eastern philosophy, Zen Buddhism, which influenced fifteen years of his writing career. The theory of Zen Buddhism taught him what was in and out of human control as well as the true essence of nature. Kerouac reflected on and described his daily life of Zen Buddhism in his novels, and Zen Buddhism certainly became his spiritual inner home for fifteen years. However, searching for a true spirituality never settled him down emotionally; therefore his loss of faith in Zen Buddhism demolished his inner spiritual home, and his struggle began. My thesis examines …

Thy Will Be Done, My Will Be Done: A Comparative Analysis Of The Diary Of Susanna Gordon Waddell, 1863-1867 And Selected Letters Of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, 1862-1864, Leann Elizabeth Ginther

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

“Renew my will from day to day.

Blend it with thine, and take away

all that new makes it hard to say

Thy will be done.”

December 17, 1863

Susanna Gordon Waddell transcribed the above passage in her diary to reflect her pervading belief and conviction: a resignation to God’s will. She does not indicate the author of the verse, and it so aptly describes the beliefs expressed in her diary she may have written it herself. Interestingly, this particular passage contains an inherent contradiction. The prayer asks God to renew my will while simultaneously asking that it be taken …

In The Fullness Of Time: The Literature Of Denise Giardina, Cathy Pleska

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Appalachia can lay claim to many authors who have written works worthy of critical analysis and scholarly research, as the literature they have produced warrants consideration. This consideration, however, is often not forthcoming, and it is the situation concerning West Virginia author Denise Giardina. To date there has been no definitive, full-length study on her and her literature. As an author of considerable talent, who by any measure has published literature of significant quality, she deserves serious scholarly study, not just as an author of regional literature, but also as a contemporary author of the late twentieth century.

The purpose …

Community Pride Reporter, 01/1998, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Vol. 18, No. 1 (1998), Dean Faulkner Wells, William Pratt, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Alberto Ríos, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Caught up in the current cultural ferment involving race, sex, and ethnic identity, people tend to forget. The all-time best-selling novel in the nineteenth-century United States was an antislavery book written by a woman, and in the 1920s black writer W. E. B. Du Bois was widely celebrated by a large number of critics. Periodically over the course of the nation’s history, both as concerns the general culture and our literature specifically, what we today call minorities, and how we perceive them, have exerted huge influences, shaping much of our lives, from what we wear and eat to what we …

Reading Elizabeth Bishop As A Religious Poet, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Elizabeth Bishop is usually described as a modernist poet with a skeptical mind. This essay contests the critical tendency to dismiss religion as a serious concern in her poetry, by first challenging the widespread dismissal in the United States of all religious approaches to modern poetry and then challenging the tendency to disclaim attempts to read Elizabeth Bishop in religious terms. The essay includes a close reading of “The End of March” as a text which invites intertextual commentary from a Christian perspective.

Joy Harjo, Rhonda Pettit

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Who is Joy Harjo? To anyone familiar with Native American writing and/or contemporary poetry, the obvious answer to this question might be: a Native American poet. Readers familiar with her work might also consider her a Western U. S. writer, since she lives in the Southwest and uses Western landscapes and locales as settings, as vehicles for psychological probing, and as subjects endowed with transcendent power. If these labels seem reductive, other cultural and literary locations Harjo occupies complicate the issue of her identity.

Reading Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America, Joseph Mills

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Last summer, I hiked along the Tomales Point trail in Point Reyes, a National Seashore, north of San Francisco. On my left was the Pacific Ocean, and on my right were fields that were once dairylands but are now a Tule elk preserve.

Pains And Contradictions In The Catcher In The Rye And Franny And Zooey, B. Daniel Rösch

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

Holden Caulfield and Franny Glass struggle with the phoniness and egotism that pervades society. They long to escape their problems and decide to run away -- he by becoming a hermit and she by retreating into spirituality through the Jesus Prayer. They soon realize the folly of their solution and through their pains and contradictions, they learn how to cope with social squalor. Holden realizes that he needs to love and accept people unconditionally, and Franny learns that she needs to shed her egotism and act altruistically. I believe J. D. Salinger outlines a spiritual coping strategy through Holden and …

The World Would Do Better To Ask Why Is Frimbo Sherlock Holmes?: Investigating Liminality In Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies, Adrienne Gosselin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Magic - No! Miracle - Yes! The Founding And Early Development Of The University Of South Alabama, James F. Caldwell

James Caldwell Book

This document's purpose is to present a thesis in the form of memoirs to account for my involvement in the development of the University of South Alabama. It was made possible by a confluence of several factors including federal legislation to help the nation meet the problems of demobilization of the military forces of the United States, the sweep of historic events having to do with the election of Harry Truman as president of the United States in 1948, the political situation in Alabama that led to the election of George C. Wallace as the governor of the State of …

Vern Rutsala, Erik Muller

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

According to one version of regionalism, the poet readily draws from the experience of living in a particular place. The poet’s youthful books, like many first novels, depict the autobiography and the home scene. Later, the poet learns to generalize from the local or to abandon it altogether for a broader, more significant canvas. The poet progresses to writing about the universal.

Rick Bass, O. Alan Weltzien

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In July 1992, Newsweek ran an article titled “Don’t Fence Them Out,” a piece that explores the Intermountain literary renaissance of the past few decades. The article includes a sidebar describing places where there are “Too many writers,” listing “Albuquerque,” “Portland,” and “All of Montana.” The same sidebar includes four titles under the heading “Books walking off the shelves out West (but good luck finding 'em back East).” One of those works listed is Rick Bass’s The Ninemile Wolves (1992), his sixth book. Bass’s career substantiates the prideful claim reflected in the title of Montana’s centennial literary anthology, The Last …

Warren's Audubon: A Vision Revisited, Sylwia W. Zechowska

Masters Theses

This thesis consists of a Polish translation of a volume of Robert Penn Warren's poetry: Audubon: A Vision accompanied by an introductory essay focusing on historical, cultural and psychological aspects of the poems. As a novelist, Robert Penn Warren is well known to the Polish reading public. All his major novels have been translated into Polish and received with great acclaim, which has been confirmed by numerous editions. Warren's popularity among Polish readers may be attributed to the fact that his fiction is permeated with a peculiar sense of melancholy and a profound awareness of tragic national history, features inevitably …

"America Represented By A Woman" – Negotiating Feminine And National Identity In Post-Revolutionary America, Michelle Navarre Cleary

School of Continuing and Professional Studies Faculty and Staff Works

Post-Revolutionary feminism peaked in the early 1790s when even thinkers as radical as Mary Wollstonecraft found a popular audience for their critiques of women's dependence upon and subordination to men. As the decade advanced, however, a backlash developed that characterized the feminine as a dangerous threat to the political order, denied women's authority outside the domestic sphere, and reasserted their dependence upon men. Through readings of two political cartoons by Paul Revere, a popular 1776 sermon by Samuel Sherwood, and Judith Sargent Murray’s “Story of Margaretta,” I argue that this backlash resulted, in part, from the frequent linking of feminine …

The Imperative That African-American Authors Define The Nature Of African-American Heroes In Literature: Or Uncle Tom To Jedediah West, Harry Jackson Jr.

Theses

This document will demonstrate the need for African-American authors to define the essential and fundamental characteristics, disposition and purpose of the literary heroes of African Americans by way of an analysis of the novel, Cowboy, the Saga of Jedediah West, which I wrote between 1995 and 1998. The creation of a distinct literary heroic tradition for African Americans is necessary, I contend, because the culture virtually has been deprived and devoid of literary, imaginary heroes. Because people of every culture require heroes for healthy evolution, African Americans have weighted their heroic tradition with living heroes exclusively who are accepted …

Community Pride Reporter, 11/1997, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Bern Porter International: Volume 1 Number 2 (Autumn, 1997), Bern Porter, Natasha Bernstein, Sheila Holtz

Newsletters

Featuring a list of works by Bern Porter and a list of "scholars" of the Institute of Advanced Thinking.

Community Pride Reporter, 10/1997, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Vol. 17, No. 4 (1997), Cynthia Shearer, William Boozer, Dean Faulkner Wells

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Steinbeck Newsletter Fall 1997, San Jose State University

Center for Steinbeck Studies Newsletter

Fall 1997. Includes: Thinking Back / Joseph Bragdon; On Long Island, In Sag Harbor / Susan Shillinglaw; Steinbeck's Transfigured Night: A Note / John Ditsky; The Chinese Translation of The Grapes of Wrath / Zuoya Cao

Community Pride Reporter, 09/1997, Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.

Exploring African American Identity In Harlem: Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, Michelle Lynn Simone

Theses & Honors Papers

Carl Van Vechten became a predominant figure within Harlem Renaissance literary circles because of his patronage of black artists and his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. The novel depicts scenes of cabarets and Harlem night life, emphasizing themes of racial prejudice and the struggle for identity in the black culture. Van Vechten's fictional portrayal of Harlem received mixed reviews--to say the least. Many black authors and critics aligned themselves with W.E.B. Du Bois and lambasted the bawdy scenes and racially derogatory title. Others, including James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, defended Van Vechten' s astute observations of Harlem and his skillful …

Bern Porter International: Volume 1 Number 1 (Summer, 1997), Bern Porter, Sheila Holtz, Natasha Bernstein

Newsletters

A Literary Newspaper

Featuring the Bern Porter International mission statement with an introduction to the Institute of Advanced Thinking and Porter's literary philosophy.

Vol. 17, No. 3 (1997), Jennifer Byron Owen, Wendy Goldberg, Michael A. Crivello, Walter G. Watkins Jr.

Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review

No abstract provided.

Community Pride Reporter, 07/1997 (Summer), Community Pride Reporter

Community Pride Reporter (1993-1999)

No abstract provided.