Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

English Language and Literature Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

American Studies

Institution
Keyword
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type
File Type

Articles 1291 - 1320 of 2140

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Facing The Wreck: Death, Optimism, And The Fragmented Form, Rachael Marie Schaffner Aug 2014

Facing The Wreck: Death, Optimism, And The Fragmented Form, Rachael Marie Schaffner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Walter Benjamin described history as a winged angel who faces backwards, staring perpetually into the past as the violent winds of destiny carry him into the future (Illuminations). Despite a western, post-enlightenment myth of eternal progress, the wreckage of human contributions to history is clearly evident in our 21st-century understanding of anthropogenic impact on global ecology. In the context of these ecological crises (and the resulting political and economic questions), postmodern novels reveal a powerful ability to imagine different ways of living and interacting with the world. This thesis traces the relationship between fragmentation, death, and liminal experiences …

Go to article

Salman Rushdie In The Postmodern Current: New Venues, New Values, Aya Akkawi Aug 2014

Salman Rushdie In The Postmodern Current: New Venues, New Values, Aya Akkawi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this study is to prove that Rushdie's recent novels are not postcolonial in the sense that they abandon the colonial/colonized binary, the embrace of hybridity, and the theme of undermining the coercion and domination of the colonial country assumed in postcolonial discourse. Instead, his recent fiction is labeled postmodern because it is filled with exuberant postmodern techniques such as historiographic metafiction, the hegemony of mode of productions, the postmodern fragmented self, and suspicions of grand narrative. Furthermore, I will argue that there is an association between Rushdie's postmodern narrative technique (his mixing of history and fantasy) and …

Go to article

Reading Nostalgia, Anger, And The Home In Joyce Carol Oates’S Foxfire, Heather A. Hillsburg Jul 2014

Reading Nostalgia, Anger, And The Home In Joyce Carol Oates’S Foxfire, Heather A. Hillsburg

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This article draws from Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia to explore the intersections between violence, memory, and the home in Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire. Through reflective nostalgia, Maddy is able to link the abuse she and her friends endure to various iterations of the home. Reflective nostalgia also allows Maddy to draw connections between anger and the domestic realm, and to write the members of FOXFIRE back into dominant narratives that largely exclude their lived experiences. Ultimately, this paper argues that because nostalgia often centers on the home, it is ideally suited to foreground the untenable nature …

Go to article

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess Jun 2014

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …

Go to article

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler Jun 2014

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ("cruft"), which it uses to challenge its readers' abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it …

Go to article

Rendering The Unthinkable: (Un)Knowable Animality, Compulsory Recovery, And Heterosexualized Trauma In The Hunger Games, Jennifer Polish Jun 2014

Rendering The Unthinkable: (Un)Knowable Animality, Compulsory Recovery, And Heterosexualized Trauma In The Hunger Games, Jennifer Polish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dystopian fiction is expected to reflect deeply on the interactions between identities, bodies, and state control. Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy is no exception. The disturbing trilogy situated animality, disability, and trauma (both of non-humans and of humans) as being firmly controlled by the power of the state (the Capitol). Through its portrayal of hunting and genetic manipulation, the trilogy constructed a state-created animality which refused definitive labeling and insisted upon facing animal subjectivity while simultaneously disregarding the needs and desires of those considered to be non-human. Similarly, the state held sway over both the creation and elimination of …

Go to article

Committing To The Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments, Karinne Keithley Syers Jun 2014

Committing To The Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments, Karinne Keithley Syers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Committing to the Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments reads Ralph Waldo Emerson as a writer of assignments for living and working whose senses can be taken up across a wide array of creative and exploratory fields. Shifting between an interdisciplinary array of contexts ranging from philosophy and poetics to dance, performance, and somatic movement experiments, I join the practical sense of creative inquiry embodied in these fields to the abstract images of Emerson's assignments. I argue that Emerson's descriptions of intelligence and power, and so his approaches to navigating skepticism and loss, as well as the non-possessive sense of what "self" …

Go to article

"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners, Michael Seth Stewart Jun 2014

"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners, Michael Seth Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American poet John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self-styled poete maudit in the fifties; a protege of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized at state hospitals. Wieners lived on the "other side" of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Though …

Go to article

The Over-Education Of The Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education And The Black Intellectual, Archie Lavelle Porter Jun 2014

The Over-Education Of The Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education And The Black Intellectual, Archie Lavelle Porter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the academic novel - a literary genre which fictionalizes the lives of students and professors in institutions of higher education. In particular this project focuses on academic novels written by black writers and which address issues in black higher education. This dissertation has two concurrent objectives: 1) to examine the academic novel as a particular genre of literature, and to highlight some specific novels on black American identity within this genre, and 2) to illustrate the pedagogical value of academic fiction. Through the ancient practice of storytelling, academic novels link the travails of the individual student …

Go to article

A Chant Of Dilation: Walt Whitman, Phrenology, And The Language Of The Mind, Anton Borst Jun 2014

A Chant Of Dilation: Walt Whitman, Phrenology, And The Language Of The Mind, Anton Borst

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Chant of Dilation analyzes Walt Whitman's poetic engagement with two very modern ideas: the materiality of the mind and the discursive nature of science. During the antebellum period these ideas found expression in the popular science of phrenology, the theory that the mind was divided into various faculties physically located in different parts of the brain. This theory would find a ready audience in Whitman, a poet preoccupied with the body, the soul, and their connection. The writings and publications of premier American phrenologists Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, surveyed in this project, rhetorically mediated emerging conceptions of the brain-embodied …

Go to article

Redefining Blackness In The Age Of Whiteness: Mimicry, Ancestry, Gender Performance, And Self-Identity In Afro-Caribbean And Afro-American Literature, Brandon Marcell Erby May 2014

Redefining Blackness In The Age Of Whiteness: Mimicry, Ancestry, Gender Performance, And Self-Identity In Afro-Caribbean And Afro-American Literature, Brandon Marcell Erby

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The elements associated with mimicry and colonialism are found in Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), as the novel reveals how colonized subjects use mimicry to survive their colonized spaces. Keeping in mind the ideologies of Homi Bhabha and Wumi Raji, the novel also suggests how a subject’s pre-existing condition before being colonized develops agency. Comparably, while Elizabeth Nunez’s novel illustrates how imitation is used by black and native Caribbeans, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1958) contextualize and exhibit W.E.B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness theory and the struggles that black Americans experience while mimicking …

Go to article

Gender And Self-Representation In Maya Angelou's Autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings 2014, Jay-Nel Steitz May 2014

Gender And Self-Representation In Maya Angelou's Autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings 2014, Jay-Nel Steitz

Master's Theses

A voice that has been silenced for so long has much to say. Whether still confined or set free, the statement applies equally to both. The silenced voice wants not only to tell his or her story, but to share the life experiences which in turn reveal the identities of these individuals. These silenced voices then are not those of the oppressors, but the oppressed; and when an oppressor wants to share his or her story, the oppressed wants to tell their side of it as well. How can those labeled the marginalized outcasts of society express their feelings and …

Go to article

Middle-Earth's War On Terror: A Post-9/11 Reception Study On The Works Of J.R.R. Tolkien, James William Peebles May 2014

Middle-Earth's War On Terror: A Post-9/11 Reception Study On The Works Of J.R.R. Tolkien, James William Peebles

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how Americans can and do interpret Tolkien's works in light of 9/11 and its proximity to Peter Jackson's film adaptations hitting theaters.

Go to article

‘My Freedom Is A Privilege Which Nothing Else Can Equal’: The Life And Writings Of Venture Smith And Phillis Wheatley, American Slaves, Donald Holmes Ii May 2014

‘My Freedom Is A Privilege Which Nothing Else Can Equal’: The Life And Writings Of Venture Smith And Phillis Wheatley, American Slaves, Donald Holmes Ii

Honors Theses

Slavery in the United States was an evolving institution that lasted nearly 400 years. To understand the colonial era of slavery within the United States, I examine the life and times of Venture Smith, as documented in his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa (1798), and that of Phillis Wheatley using The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (1988). Both Smith and Wheatley were African-born slaves brought to America during the eighteenth century. In Smith’s narrative, he concludes by proclaiming “my freedom is a privilege which nothing else can equal” (31). This statement …

Go to article

Don’T You Be Telling Me How Tah Talk: Education, Ebonics, And Code-Switching, Laquita N. Gresham May 2014

Don’T You Be Telling Me How Tah Talk: Education, Ebonics, And Code-Switching, Laquita N. Gresham

Honors Theses

Ebonics, currently referred to as African-American English (AAE), is a highly-controversial topic inside and outside of the classroom. Many educators, scholars, and legislators debate how teachers should approach students who speak AAE and how they can fill the gap between African-American English and Standard English in a way that disbands the dialectal prejudices that may exist. This thesis focuses on code-switching as a pedagogical tool to help teachers instruct Black students in mastering Standard English on a proficient level, particularly Black students who speak AAE. This study explores current problems and practices in the way that English teachers approach AAE …

Go to article

Using Stable Isotope Analysis To Study Altitudinal And Latitudinal Bat Migration, Lily Arias May 2014

Using Stable Isotope Analysis To Study Altitudinal And Latitudinal Bat Migration, Lily Arias

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The general lack of knowledge on basic aspects of the biology of temperate and tropical bats, their low reproductive rates, and threats such as white-nose syndrome, wind farms, and habitat loss, make them very susceptible to population declines. My research uses an innovative technique, the analysis of stable isotopes, to study the ecology of bat migration with the main goals of contributing significantly to the understanding of bat biology and assessing the conservation status and susceptibility of bats. In the first chapter, I measured the content of hydrogen isotopes in fur samples of migratory bat species killed at a wind …

Go to article

Gaines's Preachers And Their People: Personalism, Community, And Social Action In A Lesson Before Dying, In My Father's House, And A Gathering Of Old Men, Brooke Light May 2014

Gaines's Preachers And Their People: Personalism, Community, And Social Action In A Lesson Before Dying, In My Father's House, And A Gathering Of Old Men, Brooke Light

Masters Theses

Personalist theology, along with Ernest J. Gaines's fiction, resists the idea of isolation and instead highlights the importance of the communal good, criticizing social and religious institutions that fail to uphold the value of human dignity and community. In "Personalism and Traditional Afrikan Thought," Burrow argues that "the church exists for the person and not the other way around" (347) and that churches should be judged and evaluated on the extent to which they meet the needs of the community. Representing their churches, the preachers in three of Gaines's novels (A Lesson Before Dying, In My Father's House, and A …

Go to article

Queer Tastes: An Exploration Of Food And Sexuality In Southern Lesbian Literature, Jacqueline Kristine Lawrence May 2014

Queer Tastes: An Exploration Of Food And Sexuality In Southern Lesbian Literature, Jacqueline Kristine Lawrence

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Southern identities are undoubtedly influenced by the region's foodways. However, the South tends to neglect and even to negate certain peoples and their identities. Women, especially lesbians, are often silenced within southern literature. Where Tennessee Williams used literature to bridge gaps between gay men and the South, southern lesbian literature severely lacks a traceable history of such connections. The principal objective of this thesis is to explore the ways in which southern lesbians manipulate food metaphors to describe their sexual desires and identities. This thesis only begins to lay out a history of southern lesbian literature as many lesbian writers …

Go to article

Best Integrated Writing 2014 - Complete Edition Apr 2014

Best Integrated Writing 2014 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

Go to article

"Take It And Like It": Violence In The Pulp Magazines, Brian Flota Apr 2014

"Take It And Like It": Violence In The Pulp Magazines, Brian Flota

Libraries

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Seeing The Rebel: Or, How To Do Things With Dictionaries In Nineteenth-Century America, Tim Cassedy Apr 2014

Seeing The Rebel: Or, How To Do Things With Dictionaries In Nineteenth-Century America, Tim Cassedy

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Minor Characters With Major Impacts : Examining Giovanelli’S Role In Henry James’ Daisy Miller 2014, Zachary Lang Apr 2014

Minor Characters With Major Impacts : Examining Giovanelli’S Role In Henry James’ Daisy Miller 2014, Zachary Lang

Master's Theses

Henry James’s first journey into the world of the American girl came in the form of one of his most read novellas, Daisy Miller. Through the eyes of Frederick Winterbourne, the reader begins a study of Daisy Miller, a character whom James uses to showcase many of the issues that were prevalent at the time including the role of women, societal standards, and class mobility. Winterbourne and Daisy are the principal characters, and as such they are given the most attention from readers and critics alike. The minor character Giovanelli, however, has received little critical attention. Despite being a minor …

Go to article

Hippie Caulfield: The Catcher In The Rye's Influence On 1960s American Counterculture, Richard Neffinger Apr 2014

Hippie Caulfield: The Catcher In The Rye's Influence On 1960s American Counterculture, Richard Neffinger

Masters Theses

This study covers the influence of The Catcher in the Rye on the 1960s youth counterculture in America. Drawing heavily from postmodern and new historicist theory, The Catcher in the Rye has developed a unique connection with the American public, most notably youth culture. This study examines why youth are so attracted to the character of Holden Caulfield and what implications their connection has meant and will mean for future generations of young Americans.

Go to article

Multiple Generations In Today’S Workplace, Nicole Ritter Mar 2014

Multiple Generations In Today’S Workplace, Nicole Ritter

Best Integrated Writing

Nicole Ritter explores how to manage differences between Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation X’ers, and Millennials in the workplace in this essay written for MGT 3110: Business Ethics & Leadership Development, taught by Mrs. Donna Back at Wright State University.

Go to article

A Review Of Anatomical Presentation And Treatment In True Hermaphroditism, Jodie Heier Mar 2014

A Review Of Anatomical Presentation And Treatment In True Hermaphroditism, Jodie Heier

Best Integrated Writing

Jodie Heier studies genetic and hormonal contributors to gender identity in hermaphroditism in this essay written for PSY 4950: Sexuality and Endocrinology Capstone, taught by Dr. Patricia Schiml at Wright State University.

Go to article

The Global Market And The Status Of Women, Khadija Kirksey Mar 2014

The Global Market And The Status Of Women, Khadija Kirksey

Best Integrated Writing

Khadija Kirksey examines the exploitation of women working in textile factories in India in this essay written for SOC 4090-03/WMS 4000: Gender and Sexuality: Global Issues, taught by Dr. Julianne Weinzimmer at Wright State University.

Go to article

Health Program Planning/Evaluation 2012-2013 Grant Application, Tyler Begley Mar 2014

Health Program Planning/Evaluation 2012-2013 Grant Application, Tyler Begley

Best Integrated Writing

Tyler Begley proposes a plan to get junior high and high school students to eat more fruits and vegetables in this essay written for HED 4430: Health Program Planning and Evaluation, taught by Dr. Mary Chace at Wright State University.

Go to article

Successful Strategies: Marketing For Tomorrow, Benjamin Banning, John Breyer, Candice Turner Mar 2014

Successful Strategies: Marketing For Tomorrow, Benjamin Banning, John Breyer, Candice Turner

Best Integrated Writing

Benjamin Banning, John Breyer, and Candice Turner generate a marketing campaign for a tricycle using three different aspects of psychology in this essay written for PSY 4100: Applied Psychology Capstone, taught by Dr. Gina F. Thomas at Wright State University.

Go to article

End Of Life Ethical Dilemma, Gregory Heiser Mar 2014

End Of Life Ethical Dilemma, Gregory Heiser

Best Integrated Writing

Gregory Heiser explores the options and dilemmas involved in deciding on care for a 93-year-old female patient with Alzheimer’s disease in this essay written for NUR 4800: Transition to the Role of the Professional Nurse, taught by Dr. Ann M. Stalter at Wright State University.

Go to article

Classicism And Humanist Ideology In Donatello’S Gattamelata And David, Shayla Wheat Mar 2014

Classicism And Humanist Ideology In Donatello’S Gattamelata And David, Shayla Wheat

Best Integrated Writing

Shayla Wheat traces Classical and Humanist influences on Donatello and his works Gattamelata and David in this essay written for ART 3130: Early Italian Renaissance, taught by Dr. Caroline Hillard at Wright State University.

Go to article

First Prev Next Last