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Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey
“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey
Publications and Research
Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …
Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan
Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women’s clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how …
Representations Of Hustling Women: The Figure Of The Black Sex Worker In Ann Petry’S The Street And Louise Meriwether’S Daddy Was A Number Runner, Deborah L. Uzurin
Representations Of Hustling Women: The Figure Of The Black Sex Worker In Ann Petry’S The Street And Louise Meriwether’S Daddy Was A Number Runner, Deborah L. Uzurin
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis provides a close reading of Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970) by analyzing how these two black women authors wrote about sex work and black women sex workers in their novels. Black women writers in the mid-twentieth century were reluctant to write about black women’s sexuality as a result of discourses of racial uplift that rejected the white supremacist stereotype of the hypersexual black woman. While not the focus of their novels, the inclusion of sex workers in their fictional narratives provide a complicated representation of a particular form of …
“An Instrument In The Shape / Of A Woman”: Reading As Re-Vision In Adrienne Rich, William J. Camponovo
“An Instrument In The Shape / Of A Woman”: Reading As Re-Vision In Adrienne Rich, William J. Camponovo
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This single-author-oriented dissertation on the work of Adrienne Rich looks at her extensive body of work both in poetry, and in prose. This project considers how Rich re-visited and re-read her work over the course of her career, often making new discoveries and observations in quasi-autobiographical prose. This dissertation interrogates the ways in which these framing efforts may be in tension with both academic and journalistic narratives of her career arc. In looking at Rich’s own writing that, at times, attempts to re-contextualizes her work, even for herself, this project aims to chart out an oeuvre that functions as a …
“They Do Us The Honour Of Treating Us Like Gods, And We Respond By Treating Them Like Things”: The Problem With Fathers In William Shakespeare’S Titus Andronicus And J.M. Coetzee’S Disgrace, Colleen Walsh
Theses and Dissertations
Titus Andronicus’s obsession with honor eclipses his daughter's agency whereas David Lurie’s acceptance of his daughter's choices ultimately creates conditions of possibility. Coetzee represents Lurie as ultimately shedding patriarchal preoccupation with “dignity” and “honor.”
Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia
Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.
These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …
Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan
Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …
Sartorial Subversion: Eliza Haywood’S Fantomina And The Literary Tradition Of Women’S Community, Ruth Garcia
Sartorial Subversion: Eliza Haywood’S Fantomina And The Literary Tradition Of Women’S Community, Ruth Garcia
Publications and Research
This article locates Fantomina in a literary tradition that proposes all-female communities, such as convents and monasteries, as liberating and empowering spaces. I argue that the novella implies a virtual community rather than an actual one, as the heroine collectively embodies many different women, all of distinct social ranks: the heroine is both one woman and a variety of women brought together under the auspices of a single body, much the way discrete individuals together compose a community. Then, too, Beauplaisir, the object of the heroine’s desire, treats all the personae the same, no matter their social station. This emphasis …
Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella
Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …
British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh
British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“British Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Natural Education” offers a distinct perspective on Romantic-era ideas on “natural” education and human development. Though the Romantic retreat into nature has long been understood as a break from the Enlightenment’s programmatic commitment to the progress of reason, I contend that the ideas on natural development of four canonical Romantic authors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley—actually originate in the ideas of one of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural education is doomed to failure in Rousseau’s thought because “nature” is paradoxically a social construct. I argue that …
'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud
'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …
Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy
Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …
Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund
Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund
Theses and Dissertations
My MA thesis examines sixteenth and seventeeth-century lyric poetry by the male poets Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. These poets make use of different lyric genres and forms, including Petrarchan sonnets and carpe diem arguments, to torture the purported female mistresses. A close examination of specific works, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Donne’s “The Apparition”, Carew’s “Song: Persuasion to Enjoy”, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” demonstrates that they all share a preoccupation with weaponizing poetry in their depiction of mistresses and female lovers in pain and punishment. Poetry functions as a tool for imposing …
“Lay Down My Soul At Stake”: Of Female Friendship In The Merchant Of Venice, Othello, And The Winter’S Tale, Audrey-Melody Cubas
“Lay Down My Soul At Stake”: Of Female Friendship In The Merchant Of Venice, Othello, And The Winter’S Tale, Audrey-Melody Cubas
Student Theses and Dissertations
In this project, I will not only shift a critical eye on both male and female friendship, but more specifically and extensively, I will examine how Shakespeare treats female friendship in three of his plays: The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. The female pairs of focus, in play order, will be Portia and Nerissa, Desdemona and Emilia, and Hermione and Paulina. Additionally, I will give an overlook of the history of Renaissance friendship portrayal in both the literary and historical accounts. This historical background will serve to highlight the clear contrast between the emphasized …
Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman
Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman
Publications and Research
Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.
Feminist Theology And The Fantastic In Jewish Poetics And Children's Literature (1960s–Present), Meira S. Levinson
Feminist Theology And The Fantastic In Jewish Poetics And Children's Literature (1960s–Present), Meira S. Levinson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation traces the development of Jewish fantasy rhetoric in post-WWII British and American literature, focusing on three genres: kabbalistic Beat poetry, children’s fantasy, and graphic novels/comics. Despite increasing scholarly attention to all these areas, little work has focused on fantasy rhetoric or issues of gender and sexuality within non-canonical Jewish literature, or on interplays of religion and fantasy in children’s literature. Jewish kabbalistic poetry and children’s fantasy speak to each other in their mutual engagements with the otherworldly, mystical and monstrous, interrogations of gender, and complex portrayals of feminist theological potentialities. I identify and analyze Jewish-hermeneutic themes and methodologies …
Missing Time: Remembrances Of History’S Return, Marissa Brostoff
Missing Time: Remembrances Of History’S Return, Marissa Brostoff
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation chronicles a profound recent shift within the US political left from an essentially backward-looking orientation to one marked by an unfamiliar sense of timeliness. Presented chronologically, the essays included here approach the vertiginous American political landscape since 2016 through readings of cultural phenomena from Bernie Sanders’s short-lived career as an experimental writer to Caitlyn Jenner’s reality show. They make up a Trump-era diary haunted by the ghosts of twentieth-century social movements and an intellectual coming-of-age story about growing up at the end of the end of history.
Awful Nearness: Rape And The English Novel, 1740–1900, Erin A. Spampinato
Awful Nearness: Rape And The English Novel, 1740–1900, Erin A. Spampinato
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Awful Nearness: Rape and the History of the English Novel, 1740-1900,” argues that representations of rape and sexual violence have played an unrecognized role in the history of the novel, indeed that such plots epitomize the most important epistemological questions with which the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel grappled. This project is both literary historical and presentist; while it describes a new genealogy of the British novel, it also traces how representations of rape have substantively shaped our contemporary understanding and rhetoric of sexual violence.
Drawing on the work of a wide array of feminist thinkers, I argue that novelistic rape …
Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu
Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu
Publications and Research
- Chu, Seo-Young. “Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation” (chapbook). Black Warrior Review 46.2, Spring 2020.
Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality Through Race, Mario Digangi
Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality Through Race, Mario Digangi
Publications and Research
When English Literary Renaissance launched in 1971, early modern sexuality studies did not exist. Then again, neither did the feminist, new historicist, post-colonialist, or other “political” approaches that have significantly reshaped early modern literary studies (and the humanities) over the last forty years. Yet whereas feminist and new historicist essays began thickly to populate the pages of Renaissance journals in the early 1980s, studies of sexuality—and of lesbian, gay, or queer sexualities in particular—were slow to arrive. During the 1980s, ELR published only a handful of essays that centered on sex or eroticism. The first explicit treatment of homoeroticism in …
William W. French. Maryat Lee's Ecotheater: A Theater For The Twenty-First Century (Book Review), Carole K. Harris
William W. French. Maryat Lee's Ecotheater: A Theater For The Twenty-First Century (Book Review), Carole K. Harris
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.