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American Studies

2016

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Articles 1 - 30 of 116

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Authorship In Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy And Bowles's Translation Of Moroccan Storytellers, Benjamin J. Heal Dec 2016

Authorship In Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy And Bowles's Translation Of Moroccan Storytellers, Benjamin J. Heal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Authorship in Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy and Bowles's Translation of Moroccan Storytellers" Benjamin J. Heal discusses Paul Bowles's and William S. Burroughs's varying interrogation of the constructed nature of authorship. In his study Heal focuses on the publication history of Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night (1981), which was written with considerable collaborative influence and Bowles's translation of illiterate Moroccan storytellers, where his influence over the production and editing of the texts is blurred as are the roles of author and translator. Through an examination of Bowles's and Burroughs's authorship strategies in parallel with an explication of …

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Burroughs's Folios As An Archival Machine For Artistic Creation, Tomasz D. Stompor Dec 2016

Burroughs's Folios As An Archival Machine For Artistic Creation, Tomasz D. Stompor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Burroughs's Folios as an Archival Machine for Artistic Creation" Tomasz D. Stompor discusses the significance of archival material as a scholarly resource for the analysis of William S. Burroughs's cut-up experiments. Stompor retraces the history of the author's filing system as both a referential repository and a device for documentation and investigates its function as an eperimental machine for the production of cut-up texts and layouts

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Theories Of Opiate Addiction In The Early Works Of Burroughs And Trocchi, Richard English Dec 2016

Theories Of Opiate Addiction In The Early Works Of Burroughs And Trocchi, Richard English

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Theories of Opiate Addiction in the Early Works of Burroughs and Trocchi" Richard English discusses William S. Burroughs's and Alexander Trocchi's representations of opiate addiction with special reference to their early writings. English examines the concept of homo heroin that can be attributed to Burroughs and lists and expounds its qualities. Among these are: immorality, criminality, mono-objectuality, self- and other-indifference, and, most importantly, the radical physical transformation into a new species, which Burroughs extends in Naked Lunch. English shows how homo heroin relates to Trocchi's conception of a heroin addict, which serves to illustrate that homo …

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Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany Dec 2016

Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions in The Yage Letters" Melanie Keomany discusses the contents of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg's The Yage Letters which could be dismissed as openly bigoted and racist. Keomany posits that the text reveals valuable connections between the colonial expansion of the eighteenth century and 1950s USA and Latin America. By re-shaping Burroughs's lived experiences in the Amazon into a text where the narrator William Lee mimics sardonically and parodically the colonial scientific explorer, The Yage Letters provides valuable insight into the complex postcolonial context of the mid-twentieth century.

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Burroughs's Re-Invention Of The Byronic Hero, Franca A. Bellarsi Dec 2016

Burroughs's Re-Invention Of The Byronic Hero, Franca A. Bellarsi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Re-Invention of the Byronic Hero" Franca A. Bellarsi discusses George Gordon Byron's (1788-1824) and William S. Burroughs's (1914-1997) texts as masterful examples of irreverence which earned notoriety in their own days. Yet despite the scandalous aura of lawlessness, iconoclastic cynicism, and nomadic elusiveness which surrounds both authors' work, a parallel between them has never been attempted. Bellarsi argues that more than a hundred years after Burroughs's birth, assessing his work implies understanding that his enduring appeal across languages and cultures rests in part on how his writing pushes the transformation of the Byronic myth further in …

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Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan Dec 2016

Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bowles's Up Above the World as Beatnik Murder Mystery" Greg Bevan discusses Paul Bowles's fourth and final novel, which at the time of its publication was met with mixed reactions from reviewers and its creator alike, and has seen relatively scanty critical attention in the years since. Gena Dagel Caponi perceives in the novel a reflection of Bowles's struggle for control, during the time of its writing, in the face of his wife Jane's terminal illness. Building on this insight, the current essay notes the same tension in the writings of the Beats—a movement with which Bowles …

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Severing Ties: A Lacanian Reading Of Motherhood In Joyce Carol Oates’S Short Stories "The Children" And "Feral", Uroš Tomić Dec 2016

Severing Ties: A Lacanian Reading Of Motherhood In Joyce Carol Oates’S Short Stories "The Children" And "Feral", Uroš Tomić

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This paper approaches two of Joyce Carol Oates’s short stories (“The Children” and “Feral”) from a Lacanian perspective on the tripartite structure of personality in an attempt to analyze questions of motherhood and the parent-child separation process. Although published 35 years apart both stories deal with mothers who have trouble containing their maternal attitude and children who become elusive entities for their parents. Utilizing as well the concept of what Oates has termed “realistic allegory” in the analysis of characters situated within highly specific settings and circumstances, the paper aims to shed light on Oates’s vision of the workings of …

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Exploring Psychological Territoriality Through The Domestic Gothic In Beloved And Mama Day, Lori L. Cook Dec 2016

Exploring Psychological Territoriality Through The Domestic Gothic In Beloved And Mama Day, Lori L. Cook

English Department Theses

The novels, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, and Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor, contain narratives of families with a history of slavery that explore how their female protagonists claim their identities within the new boundaries of freedom. Using a framework of the Domestic Gothic, this paper explores how formerly enslaved female characters claim new psychological territory in bounded domestic spaces by using the chores they were forced to perform during their times of slavery as a means to independence. Domestic duties such as cooking and gardening along with magical and religious ceremonies and acts of violence are passed down through the …

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Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

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Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King Dec 2016

Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …

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A Place For Poe: The Foreign In Two Tales Of The Gothic, Shelby Spears Dec 2016

A Place For Poe: The Foreign In Two Tales Of The Gothic, Shelby Spears

English Class Publications

There are certain words we use so often in life that they begin to lose their meaning—buzzwords, or broad categorical ones, like millennial. These words, too, crop up in literature: Here I would like to explore one of these in particular, Gothic. We talk often of Gothic literature, Gothic writers, Gothic horror, Gothic post-core triphop—but our definition is so often fuzzy. We know that to be Gothic means to be scary, to be full of the strange and terrifying, but where exactly do we draw the line between Gothic and other forms of horror fiction? Is Stephen King Gothic? Is …

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Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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Crime And Culture : A Thematic Reading Of Sherlock Holmes And His Adaptations., Britney Broyles Dec 2016

Crime And Culture : A Thematic Reading Of Sherlock Holmes And His Adaptations., Britney Broyles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character and stories into the television shows Sherlock and Elementary on air today. The project will consider three central questions: 1) Why is this Victorian detective hero still popular in the twenty-first century and what has remained constant and still resonates with modern audiences? 2) Both television shows transport Holmes in time by setting their narratives in the present day; therefore, what has been changed in this process of adaptation? 3) How do these changes represent shifts in our cultural thinking about important aspects of humanistic inquiry? The …

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A Critique Of Puritan Values And Social Restrictions, Laura Guebert Nov 2016

A Critique Of Puritan Values And Social Restrictions, Laura Guebert

Scholars Week

This paper outlines and discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter through the lens of feminist and social critiques. It attempts to draw attention to the fates of both male and females characters in the story according to their personality and status. Therefore, by examining the complex treatment and relationships between the four principle characters of The Scarlet Letter and their author, Hawthorne’s use of a feminist critique can be understood as a wider criticism of Puritan and, by extension, mid-nineteenth century social and moral restrictions and expectations.

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"One Accord Of Sympathy": The Relationship Between Narrator, Reader, And Puritans, Brianna E. Taylor Nov 2016

"One Accord Of Sympathy": The Relationship Between Narrator, Reader, And Puritans, Brianna E. Taylor

Scholars Week

Ambiguous narration in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter creates a reader that is simultaneously an insider privy to uncertain narrative report and an outsider sympathetic to Hester’s ignominy. While current reader response criticism explores narrative techniques of ambiguity and sympathy in isolation, this paper analyzes how these techniques are used in conjunction to establish a relationship between narrator and reader. The narrator’s role as storyteller and gossip, accepting explanations of a rational contemporary audience and superstitious Puritans, both defies Puritan inflexibility and creates intimacy that includes readers in this community. At the same time, a sympathetic relationship with Hester distances …

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From Recovery To Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction And (Re)Creating The Future, Daoine S. Bachran Nov 2016

From Recovery To Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction And (Re)Creating The Future, Daoine S. Bachran

English Language and Literature ETDs

My project assesses how science fiction by writers of color challenges the scientific racism embedded in genetics, nuclear development, digital technology, and molecular biology, demonstrating how these fields are deployed disproportionately against people of color. By contextualizing current scientific development with its often overlooked history and exposing the full life cycle of scientific practices and technological changes, ethnic science fiction authors challenge science’s purported objectivity and make room for alternative scientific methods steeped in Indigenous epistemologies. The first chapter argues that genetics is deployed disproportionally against black Americans, from the pseudo-scientific racial classifications of the nineteenth century and earlier through …

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Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu Nov 2016

Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …

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Visionaries Of The American West : Mari Sandoz And Her Four Plains Protagonists, Lisa Rae Lindell Oct 2016

Visionaries Of The American West : Mari Sandoz And Her Four Plains Protagonists, Lisa Rae Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

The authorial reputation of Mari Sandoz has long rested in the shadow of other writers of her era. First of all, Sandoz wrote from and about a relatively remote region of the United States. In addition, she firmly refused to produce popular works at the expense of sacrificing the truth she perceived and wished to express. Consequently, Sandoz has often been classified as a regional writer and her works have been overlooked by many readers and critics. Her status as a woman, her unconventional writing style, point of view, and subject matter, and the blending of historical and fictional elements …

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Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong Oct 2016

Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

This article considers how recent narratives about Vietnamese refugees engage with the Vietnam War’s visual archive, particularly iconic photographs from the war and ensuing “boat people” crisis, and contribute to present-day discourses on American militarism and immigration. The article focuses on two texts, a National Public Radio special series about a US naval ship (2010) and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again (2011), which recounts a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage. By refiguring famous photojournalistic images from the war, the radio series advances a familiar rescue-and-gratitude narrative in which the US military operates as a care apparatus, exemplifying a cultural …

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The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez Sep 2016

The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a provocative style of autobiographical verse had emerged in postwar America, literary critics christened the new genre “confessional poetry.” Confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s are often characterized by scholars of contemporary poetry as a cohort of writers who, unlike previous generations before them, dared to explore in their work the personal and inherited traumas of mental illness, family suicides, failed marriages, and crushing addictions. As a result, the body of work these writers produced is often experienced as a collection of stylized, literary self-portraits. What can these self-portraits reveal to us about the connection between confessional poetry …

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Boone, Joy (Field) Bale, 1912-2002 (Mss 588), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Sep 2016

Boone, Joy (Field) Bale, 1912-2002 (Mss 588), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 588. Papers of poet, editor and activist Joy Bale Boone, Elkton, Kentucky, relating primarily to her service as chair of the Committee for the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University. Includes correspondence, Committee records, collected data on Robert Penn Warren, and photographs. Also includes audio and video interviews of Boone and colleagues.

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Speaking And Mourning: Working Through Identity And Language In Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, Matthew L. Miller Sep 2016

Speaking And Mourning: Working Through Identity And Language In Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, Matthew L. Miller

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In my essay entitled “Speaking and Mourning: Working Through Identity and Language in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” I argue that the novel’s protagonist Henry Park finds himself at a critical juncture in his life at the novel’s beginning. I analyze the protagonist’s relationship to language acquisition and identity, which have been developed by Lee to be associated as traumas. Furthermore, these topics are complicated by the death of his son, Mitt. This loss is a trauma of the heart and of the self for the main character who sees a successful navigation of language and immigration lost by his …

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Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers Sep 2016

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …

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Partisanship In The Media: A Comprehensive Look At The History And Potential For Bias In News Media, Henry Ferguson Sep 2016

Partisanship In The Media: A Comprehensive Look At The History And Potential For Bias In News Media, Henry Ferguson

Pop Culture Intersections

On July 10, 2016 Republican Presidential Nominee Donald Trump tweeted, “The media is so dishonest. If I make a statement, they twist it and turn it to make it sound bad or foolish. They think the public is stupid!”[1] On August 10, 2016 Trump’s campaign released a statement titled, “Trump Campaign Statement on Dishonest Media.”[2] The statement itself had nothing to do with media dishonesty, but rather the statement clarified some remarks the candidate made during a speech about gun control. Both of these statements were made due to Trump’s feeling that his words had been twisted and …

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Tinder: True Love Or A Nightmare?, Anthony Kao Sep 2016

Tinder: True Love Or A Nightmare?, Anthony Kao

Pop Culture Intersections

The computer first played matchmaker in the late 1950s. Data would have been fed into the system, and after some data crunching, it would spit out a match based on common interests. Today’s dating sites, such as eHarmony.com, PlentyOfFish, and Match.com are reminiscent of the earliest days of online dating - they rely on algorithms to pair potential matches based on shared interests. With the advent of mobile dating apps such as Tinder, of which I will examine in-depth in my paper, the ability for geo-location, which allows users to “see” other users that are nearby their location, has opened …

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Green Religion: Manipulation Transcending Ideology, Miranda Wittmond Sep 2016

Green Religion: Manipulation Transcending Ideology, Miranda Wittmond

Pop Culture Intersections

As more Americans become aware of the environmental consequences of their actions and decisions, corporations have moved to profit off of rising environmental consciousness. However, instead of changing their practices to actually become environmentally conscious, many corporations often instead present a false front to make our society perceive them as green when they are not, an action commonly referred to as greenwashing. This allows them to gain advantage over their competitors, some of which might actually be sustainable, by taking advantage of consumers’ environmental consciousness. Despite legal action taken to stop this and federal laws putting restrictions on green advertising, …

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Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia Sep 2016

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …

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Capitalism And Control: An Examination Of Capitalist Trends Against Consumers, Sravan Ramaswamy Aug 2016

Capitalism And Control: An Examination Of Capitalist Trends Against Consumers, Sravan Ramaswamy

Pop Culture Intersections

This article will be covering a number of debates over years. A number of studies have been done on the nature of privacy and its place in the modern world as we move forward in the digital age. One study called "The Privacy-Innovation Conundrum" by Ted Zarsky argues for the existence of a tradeoff that policy makers have to make between favoring innovation and hurting privacy or favoring privacy, but reducing the incentive to create new ideas[1]. This argument makes a great deal of sense if we view information as not dissimilar to money. However, it leaves open interpretation for …

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Influence Of Mass Media On Medical Screening, Specifically Breast Cancer Screening, Yashvi Siddhapura Aug 2016

Influence Of Mass Media On Medical Screening, Specifically Breast Cancer Screening, Yashvi Siddhapura

Pop Culture Intersections

Mass Media has influenced various aspects of our culture, from how we wake up to how we sleep. Over the years, popular media has expanded in our society due to the technological advancements; we are now able to access these various mass media mediums through one tap. One of the most influential topics in our culture is health and mass media has played a huge role in impacting a healthy lifestyle. Through this medium, people are also informed about medical advancements which can be very helpful in maintaining a healthy lifestyle if they are at a risk for a disease. …

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Aggression And Driving: Separating Ourselves From The Games, Jennifer Yin Aug 2016

Aggression And Driving: Separating Ourselves From The Games, Jennifer Yin

Pop Culture Intersections

In 2015 on a busy street in Los Angeles, California, two cars were driving next to each other. One decided to cut in front of the other, angering the first driver, who decided not to let the second into his lane. The frustrated second driver eventually managed to get into the other lane, when both decided to get out of their vehicles. The drivers ended up getting into a fist fight in the middle of the road, and one driver was almost struck by the passing vehicles. Unfortunately, both returned to their vehicles and were not caught by the police …

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