American Literature Commons^™

Imagining The Archive: Speculation As A Tool Of Archival Reconstruction, Marieclaire Graham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines a speculative methodological approach towards restoring silenced Black voices in the archive. First, I will discuss the reasons why this work is necessary, exploring the various patterns of muting, distortion, erasure, and disenfranchisement that Black communities experience within the United States in both physical and written forms. The use of speculation specifically addresses the dehumanization that has followed the Black experience in the United States from the earliest violent incarnation of slavery, and creating the foundation of this kind of silencing allows us to understand why speculation, as opposed to other methodological models for archive restoration, is …

The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American …

"He Who Is Conscious Of The Bright But Keeps To The Dark": The Fame And Legacy Of Jack Kerouac, Regina Crotser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis traces the legacy and fame of Jack Kerouac from his lifetime up until current day. Since his death, pop-culture has glorified and stereotyped Kerouac to the point where he is an easily digestible concept of counterculture and coolness. This speaks to what our society craves--celebrities boiled down into clickbait titles and single-faceted understandings. Amidst chaos, who can blame us? But when we look at the real Kerouac, who the biographies and archival research say he is, we see someone much more complex than that. And, through writing autobiographical fiction, he introduced that complexity and messiness to his own …

Vanishing Leaves: A Study Of Walt Whitman Through Location-Based Mobile Technologies, Jesse A. Merandy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Vanishing Leaves is a location-based mobile experience (LBME), which employs mobile devices equipped with GPS and high-speed wireless internet capabilities to take users to Brooklyn Heights to learn about the poet Walt Whitman and his connection to the neighborhood where he lived, worked, and published the first edition of his masterwork Leaves of Grass. Through this active first-person immersive learning experience, Vanishing Leaves embraces experimental scholarly methods that extend outside the classroom and off the page in order to engage learners and invite them to create meaningful, personal connections to writers and their literary works.

The following white paper …

Sexual Harassment Of Professional Women: Joan Williams's The Wintering And Her Apprenticeship With William Faulkner, Naoko Ohri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sexual harassment in the workplace and sexual harassment in higher education have been conceptualized as separate phenomena. Most of prior research on sexual harassment have been conducted in either one of the two categories (Paludi and Paludi Jr. 2003). However, this classification oversimplifies the distinction between the sites of sexual harassment. The existing dichotomy is too organization-oriented and runs the risk of overlooking variants that might be relevant among profession. Such an ossified definition needs a modification so as to capture the subtler reality of sexual harassment. Especially for professional people, sexual harassment can occur in many places including workplaces …

“Whispers Out Of Time”: Memorializing (Self-) Portraits In The Work Of 
John Berryman, John Ashbery, Anne Carson, And Nan Goldin, Andrew D. King

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis documents four distinct post-WWII North American writers and artists—the poet John Berryman, the poet John Ashbery, the classicist and writer Anne Carson, and the photographer Nan Goldin—who expanded traditional definitions and practices of portraiture. Their works—The Dream Songs, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Nox, and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (and “The Cookie Portfolio”)—developed new ways of representing human subjectivity and the self that integrated the influences of Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism, but were not defined by these movements. In an era when notions of autonomous art and human identity became fractured, they picked up the …

Coming To Terms With Gonzo Journalism : An Analysis In Russian Formalism., Beau Kilpatrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gonzo journalism is notoriously difficult to define because of its ambiguous nature. To date, scholarly definitions focus on historical interpretations of Gonzo’s content, its connection to social and political contexts, or the biography of Hunter S. Thompson. These definitional attempts neglect the formal devices of the composition. This thesis aims to redefine Gonzo as its own genre by using the nearly forgotten methods of Russian formalism—specifically the works of Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Boris Tomashevsky—to analyze the formal devices and components of its form. The results are twofold; first, it acts to rejuvenate an unpopular literary theory by illustrating …

Transfigurations Of The News: True Fictions, Strange Thresholds, Jeffrey Peer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation compares twentieth-century literary journalism from the U.S. and Mexico, with a focus on the nonfiction novel and the Mexican chronicle. The dissertation considers the two genres both historically and theoretically, in order to distinguish the borders between literature and unscrupulous journalism. North American journalism is at the heart of a crisis over the epistemological status of facts and their place in our political discourse. Some have argued that works of literary nonfiction can damage social norms like journalistic objectivity. Others argue that forms like the chronicle and the nonfiction novel can describe experience better than news reports. This …

North Of Ourselves: Identity And Place In Jim Wayne Miller’S Poetry, Micah Mccrotty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, …

Fir-Flower Petals On A Wet Black Bough: Constructing New Poetry Through Asian Aesthetics In Early Modernist Poets, Matthew Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Critics often credit Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement for the development of American poetics. Pound’s interest in international arts and minimalist aesthetics of cross-cultural poetry gained the attention of prominent writers throughout Modernist and Post-Modern periods. From writers like Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein to later poets like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, image and precise language has shaped American literature. Few critics have praised Eastern cultures or the Imagist poets who adopted an East-Western form of poetics: Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Studying traditional Eastern painting and short-form poetry and interactions with personal connections to the East, …

Non/Human: (Re)Seeing The “Animal” In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Non/human: (Re)seeing the “Animal” in Nineteenth-Century American Literature uses canonical literary texts as specific anchor points for charting the unstable relations between human and nonhuman animals throughout the century. I argue that throughout the nineteenth century, there are distinct shifts in the way(s) humans think about, discuss, and represent nonhuman animals, and understanding these shifts can change the way we interpret the literature and the culture(s). Moreover, I supplement and integrate those literary anchors, when appropriate, with texts from contemporaneous science, law, art, and other primary and secondary source materials. For example, the first chapter, “Cooper’s Animal Movements: Across Land, …

The Eternal Detective : Poe’S Creative And Resolvent Duality In The Hardboiled Era, Michael Cresci

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper traces the continuity of Edgar Allan Poe’s archetypal “creative and resolvent” detective from the nineteenth century’s classical detective fiction into the twentieth century’s hardboiled detective fiction. Specifically, this paper asserts that the duality first suggested by Poe in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) did not only define classical era detectives, but it also persisted into the radically different hardboiled era of American detective fiction. First, this paper examines the cultural contexts of each era and establishes the shared links between the resolvent—or analytical—traits and creative—or abstract and Romantic—traits of classical era detectives C. Auguste Dupin and …

"Pure Language" : Authenticity, Punk Ideology, And Belonging In A Visit From The Goon Squad, Kimberly Plaksin

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines Jennifer Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad through its themes of identity, communication, and the search for authenticity, focusing especially on its treatment of punk aesthetics and technological communication. In dealing with these themes, this paper encourages consideration of the novel's portrayal of punk aesthetics as they influence the way the characters perceive their own identities, their sense of belonging within a community, and their views on personal and artistic integrity. Of note are the characters Bennie Salazar and Scotty Hausmann, whose experiences in the punk scene of 1970s San Francisco inform how they recognize …

MōNstrum Ex Machina : Reading The Artificial Life As Monster In Three Contemporary Western Narratives, Constance Lynnette Humphrey

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Using Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Theory (Seven Theses)” as a template for the monstrous and D. Felton’s article “Rejecting and Embracing the Monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome,” this project seeks to investigate the presentation of artificial life as monsters using three science fiction narratives from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The narratives include Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), five episodes of the Ronald D. Moore developed reimagining of Battlestar Galactica television series (2004-2006), Moore’s Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries (2003), and Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2015). Analysis of these narratives will …

An Alternative Reading Of Feminist Criticism On S. Weir Mitchell, Erika Hylton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation represents a renewed look at nineteenth-century physician and author, S. Weir Mitchell. This includes a discussion of how his “rest cure” fits into the medical and cultural trends of his era as well as revisiting the academic responses to both him and his cure. Those in the academy who write on Mitchell today are primarily feminist critics who approach him through the study of women writers who were his patients, such as Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among others. The dominant pathway here is through Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” as well as other documents produced …

Kentucky Council Of Teachers Of English (Sc 3409), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3409. “Literary Landmarks of Kentucky,” a guidebook prepared by the Kentucky Council of Teachers of English. Organized alphabetically by county and thereafter by place name, the guide provides short entries about the literary personalities or literary works associated with that location.

Kentucky Poetry Day (Sc 3408), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3408. Information for school administrators regarding programming for Kentucky Poetry Day. Includes proclamations by the Governor, suggested activities, and historical, biographical and bibliographical data on Kentucky poets.

Two Poems: Stop Time Before; Forsaken Ones, Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This creative work features two poems: Stop Time Before; Forsaken Ones

Politicized Identity In Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl And The Fortunes, Savanna S. Batson

English Department Theses

This thesis explores the effects of politicized identities on the basis of particular aspects of an individual’s being, such as gender, ethnicity, or nationality in Peter Ho Davies’s novels The Welsh Girl (2007) and The Fortunes (2016). By carefully studying each of his protagonists within the context of the particular time and place in which they have come of age, and are now living, this thesis demonstrates how Davies engages with themes of identity, community, and alienation relative to the specific socio-cultural matrix that informs the politicization of identities at their time. It explores how Davies’s characters undergo the process …

Guthrie, Alfred Bertram, Jr., 1901-1991 (Sc 3395), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans of selected items (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3395. Three autobiographical sketches by author A. B. Guthrie, Jr., written in response to requests. Also includes Guthrie’s article on the historical novel, written for the Fall 1954 Montana Magazine of History, and a review of his book of collected stories The Big It, with his comments, published in the Saturday Review, 25 February 1960.

Poetry Packet, James Hearst

James Hearst Documents

Poems of James Hearst either clipped from publications or original typescript.

Boyd, John Allen, 1938?-2017 (Sc 3394), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3394. Poems written by John Allen Boyd, a WKU graduate, teacher, and resident of Louisville, Kentucky. One collection is bound in pamphlet form and inscribed to WKU faculty member Frances Richards; others are included, with commentary, in a graduate project entitled “Experiments in Verse and Poetry” and written for an advanced composition class at WKU.

A Pilgrim’S Progress For The Digital, Post-Human(Ist) Age?: Social And Religious Allegory In Russell Banks’S Lost Memory Of Skin, David J. Buehrer Dr.

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

In Lost Memory of Skin (2011), his twelfth novel, Russell Banks continues his exploration of the dark underbelly of American society—in this instance, the moral wilderness of a group of convicted sex offenders exiled to living beneath a concrete causeway in the south Florida city of Calusa, a fictionalized Miami. Banks, who has long been “our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male” (Schulman 8), focuses in Lost on a twenty-two-year-old parolee referred to throughout only as “The Kid.” While guilty and duly convicted of propositioning an underage girl online for sex, The Kid is still presented in …

Spottswood, Henry Mercer, Iii,B. 1940 (Mss 665), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 665. Correspondence with poet and author Jim Wayne Miller, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Chiefly letters to Spottswood which contain numerous attachments about Miller’s writing and speaking engagements. Also includes a small amount of correspondence from Miller’s wife, Mary Ellen Miller, and an unpublished book of poems by WKU students.

A Once And Future Queen: Jackie Kennedy And Her Kingdom, Alyssa J. Windsor

Honors College Theses

The Kennedy Camelot was important to the American people and how we now come to view families in the White House. Jacqueline Kennedy was perhaps one of the most important characters in this story that was tragically interrupted. A historical figure not fully developed, Jackie single handedly created the beloved Camelot era and changed the way we view twentieth century America. Taking a deeper look into the private life of the most popular First Lady in American history in relation to the political rollercoaster that was the 1960s, new conclusions can be drawn about the Kennedy’s Camelot and who truly …

Noe, James Thomas Cotton, 1864-1953 (Sc 3379), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3379. Christmas cards and letters to WKU faculty member Frances Richards from Cotton Noe, first Poet Laureate of Kentucky. Each includes a poem by Noe, but in his 1950 letter he advises Richards that he will be discontinuing this forty-year-long custom. He describes his activities with a poetry guild in Los Angeles, California, and recalls their friendship. Includes Noe’s obituary from the Louisville Courier-Journal and a 1969 clipping from the same paper about Noe.

Walton, Laura S. (Sc 3378), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3378. “The Prentice Poets,” an English paper by WKU student Laura Walton with sketches of the careers of four female poets who contributed to Kentucky’s Louisville Journal under the editorship of George D. Prentice.

Letter From Patty With The Poem Portrait Of A Poet

James Hearst Documents

A letter from a friend named Patty which is primarily a poem Portrait of a poet, written after 1953.

Farming The Land And Writing Poetry, James Hearst, Robert J. Ward

James Hearst Documents

A partial transcript of an interview of James Hearst conducted by Robert Ward in the summer of 1981. This section of the interview is on the relation between farming and poetry.

Summers, Hollis Spurgeon, 1916-1987 (Sc 3376), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3376. Vita documenting education, teaching experience, family and publications of Hollis Summers, current to 1957; biographical narrative, written shortly after Summers joined the faculty of the English department at the University of Kentucky in 1949.