English Language and Literature Commons^™

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Death Positivity: A New Genre Of Death And The Genre Function Of Memento Mori, Melony Elsie Del Real

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores Caitlin Doughty’s “death positivity” as an evolved form of the medieval memento mori, and how this medieval genre serves as a genre function for current day thanatophobic audiences. This is specifically done by analyzing Doughty’s book titled Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, as well as some of her other death positivity mediums. By modeling her rhetoric of death positivity after memento mori, Doughty can effectively deliver her anti-death fearing message to the very audiences that fear death.

Furthermore, analyzing Doughty’s rhetoric as operating within the genre function, a concept put forth by Anis Bawarshi, …

Iron Manicures: Sex, Power, And Sedition In Margaret Atwood's Writing, Anna Zarra Aldrich

Honors Scholar Theses

Margaret Atwood has often been criticized as a bad feminist writer for featuring villainous, cruel women. Atwood has combatted this criticism by pointing out that evil women exist in life, so they should in literature as well. Every story requires a villain and a victim, for Atwood these roles are both usually played by women. This thesis will explore the idea of the woman as spectacle in both behavior and body. Women are controlled by the idea that they must care. When they stop caring, they become a threat. At the heart of Atwood’s writing are the relationships between women …

"The Flat Earth Made Round And Tolkien’S Failure To Finish The Silmarillion", John D. Rateliff

Journal of Tolkien Research

Towards the end of his career, J. R. R. Tolkien faced many obstacles both internal and external that stood in the way of his finishing and publishing The Silmarillion. This paper explores the various elements that contributed to his dilemma and concludes that the key factors were twofold.

First came the traumatic breakdown of his efforts to publish the book through Collins, leading to a catastrophic interruption of his work on the book.

In addition, by this time Tolkien had concluded that many of the most iconic elements in his mythology could no longer command evoke secondary belief in …

The Enduring Hold Of The Bible On Modern Literature: Exploring The Fall Narrative As A Conceptual Metaphor For American Literature In John Steinbeck’S East Of Eden, Lauren Stotsky

Undergraduate Honors Theses

There is no greater work of literature, perhaps, than the Bible. The Bible has shaped and influenced more literature, art, and culture than any other work in our time. The effects of the Bible’s words are still woven into modern literature today, illustrating that the Bible’s themes, allegories, parables, fables, metaphors, and characters are things that we humans are unable to depart far from even many decades later. One of the very first stories in the Bible, found at the beginning in Genesis, tells of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve’s depiction as the first kind of our species and …

Commensality And Connection: How Shared Food Experiences Connect Characters In Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials, The Book Of Dust And ‘Lyra’ Stories, Susan Anna Grace

Articles

Commensality is an inherently social activity that shapes society and enacts social dynamics. Consequently, these shared exchanges can reveal much about the society and the individuals who engage in the act. This thesis explores commensality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Book of Dust Series and companion texts to the novels. The research investigates how commensal exchanges create and maintain connections between characters across the collection. In doing so, it considers how literary characters differ from real-life humans and how the existing body of knowledge on commensality can be applied to literary figures. A qualitative approach was …

Beyond Maidens And Mothers: A Study Of Till We Have Faces, Tamar Peterson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examines how C.S. Lewis’ final novel, Till We Have Faces, demonstrates a significant diversion from the author's typical writing habits, especially regarding his depictions of women. Progressing through the novel chronologically, this thesis studies sixteen notable scenes that demonstrate this diversion. It tracks the development and depiction of women characters who exemplify a more realistic, complex, egalitarian writing style—one that allows women to wield legitimate power, excel in military combat, operate as conduits to the Divine, and enjoy their sexuality in affirming ways.

This thesis begins with an introduction to Lewis' position as a lay theologian and popular …

Dissecting The Man Of Steel: The Evolution Of Superman As A Reflection Of American Society, Marie Gould

Undergraduate Theses

Since his debut during the Great Depression in 1938, Superman has become an American cultural icon. His symbol is not only known throughout the nation, but the world as well. Despite this, many consider Superman to be irrelevant and unrelatable to reality because he is written as an outrageously overpowered being with “boy scout” morals. However, he has not always been written this way. This research seeks to uncover the connections between Superman’s various narratives and the changing social and political ideas of American Society throughout history. Specifically, the objective of this study is to establish whether Superman has changed …

Hawthorne’S Faith, Cecelia Little

English Student Scholarship

Major: English and Philosophy

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Margaret Reid, English

This project is an examination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, particularly focused on Hawthorne’s identity, philosophy, and spirituality. Placing these ideas in the context of early American history as well as in the context of Hawthorne’s biography, Cecelia Little focuses on how Hawthorne offers pieces of a new and complex philosophy of the individual human soul within the human community. This powerpoint includes a structured compilation of many, but by no means all, of her findings, and she plans to delve much further into Hawthorne’s life and works. The primary focus …

Blake’S Method: Blake Imagining Milton In The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, Micaela Freeman

English Student Scholarship

Major: English

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Bruce Graver, English

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is William Blake’s articulation of his reaction to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. After analyzing Blake’s reaction to Paradise Lost, I will suggest how Blake’s reading of Milton helped shape 20th-century criticism, specifically post-war Miltonic criticism. My paper will begin by considering Blake’s rewriting of Milton in the ‘Argument’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, starting at the Adamic myth. I will continue my analysis with looking at the famous passage on Plate 6 when Blake writes, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote …

Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Texts: In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious …

Time And The Bibliographer: A Meditation On The Spirit Of Book Studies, Matt Cohen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with …

The Figure Of The Animal In Modern And Contemporary Poetry By Michael Malay, Brian Bartlett

The Goose

Review of Michael Malay's The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Flower Unfurling: Buddhist Modernism And The Early Writing Of James Joyce, Erin Garrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the history of the references to Buddhism in Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s first and unpublished novel, through the author’s previous writing, his sources, and his context, in order to determine how—if at all—the tradition bore upon his earliest depiction of consciousness. Acknowledging that Joyce habitually revisited and refined earlier ideas and prose, it attends to previous essays, notebooks, book reviews, conversations, letters, epiphanies, poems, and autobiographical prose; to available material, bibliographical, and biographical evidence about the specific volumes and performances to which Joyce had access; to language and paratext—including advertisements, introductions, and appended essays—in those volumes; …

“What Do I Think Of Glory?”: On Middlemarch By George Eliot, Beverley Park Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?”1 This is the famous reply Emily Dickinson wrote to her bookish cousins in 1873 after her first reading of George Eliot’s novel. Dickinson’s sentiments were also my own when I completed my first reading of Middlemarch (1871–1872), about thirty-five years ago. Middlemarch is the book that made me realize literature could be more than a source of entertainment, that it could be Art with a capital A. Here was a text with fascinating and seemingly limitless possibilities for interpretation that would continue to reward scrutiny. Of course, …

Zephyrus, Western Kentucky University

Student Creative Writing

The fine arts magazine of Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green.

Finding Tender Roots: Affiliation, Disability, And Racial Melancholia In Monique Truong’S Bitter In The Mouth, Amanda Ong

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Early on in Bitter in the Mouth, we learn that the protagonist, Linda Linh-Dao Nguyen Hammerick, has auditory-gustatory synesthesia—that is, nearly every word she hears evokes a specific taste. Hammerick, for example, tastes like Dr. Pepper and Linda tastes like mint. There are many articles that analyze Linda’s synesthesia but few articles approach the text through the lens of disability studies. In this article, I employ feminist disability studies and diaspora studies to argue that Linda's identity as a disabled transracial adoptee allow her to seek out additional forms of affiliation and kinship. By constructing an alternative family tree …

Book Reviews- Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of Mind, 1770–1830, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Joanna Wharton’s Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830 is a recent addition to the interdisciplinary series Studies in the Eighteenth Century that Boydell Press (Boydell & Brewer Publishers) is publishing in association with the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of work that addresses the contributions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British women writers to areas of scientific, philosophical, and otherwise “learned” discourse that have historically been associated primarily—and in many cases exclusively—with male thinkers and writers. Wharton’s study therefore helps to flesh out the picture …

Blanche Matthias: Part I, Huntington Library Papers; Part Ii, A Portrait In Friendships, James Karman

Jeffers Studies

Blanche Matthias’s papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, include two documents of interest to Jeffers scholars: a memoir by Blanche that recounts experiences involving Robinson and Una, and a letter to Blanche from Charles Roberts Aldrich that mentions Jeffers, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and other mutual friends. The memoir and letters are published here for the first time, along with a portrait of Matthias that describes her relationship with seven noteworthy friends: Una Jeffers, Georgia O’Keeffe, Margery Latimer, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Rosalind Rajagopal, Mima Porter, and Charles Roberts Aldrich.

"'In A Distant Unknown Country': A New Historicist Look At James Joyce’S “Eveline,” Argentina, And The Zwi Migdal In The Early 1900s.", M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This article analyzes James Joyce’s story “Eveline” (1904) looking at the moral panic about “white slavery” in Europe and the new continent, especially focusing on Argentina, the foremost recipient of trafficked women between 1880 and 1930 (and, of course, Joyce’s destination of choice for Eveline). It was precisely at the turn of the twentieth century that, along with the popularity of transatlantic migration, sex trafficking went fully global and news about international “dangers” for single white women reached the general public, provoking all kinds of repressive reactions through what became known as the “social purity” movement.

So How Does Elastic Grammar Create Meaning In Children’S Literature?: Storytelling And Elastic Grammar In Haroun And The Sea Of Stories (1990), Inkheart (2003), And A Monster Calls (2011), Kate Lomas Glendenning

Theses : Honours

So why is grammar an unsung hero that rarely receives acknowledgement? And why do the first two sentences of this abstract start with coordinating conjunctions? This thesis will explore elastic grammar: a term I coined to recognise style devices that are traditionally thought of as grammatically incorrect but are used to create a deeper level of meaning within fiction. The analysis of the elasticity of grammar will be conducted through close readings of three children’s books and three elastic grammar devices. Since each novel’s primary focus is storytelling, this thesis analyses elastic grammar that relates to storytelling. The three elastic …

Speculative Satire In Twentieth-Century Utopia And Dystopia, Benjamin Craig Parker

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study integrates the literature and correspondence of such Inklings authors as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien into the arc of Commonwealth utopian and dystopian literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because utopian authors such as Samuel Butler, William Morris, and H. G. Wells employ the utopian form pioneered by Thomas More but largely abandon More’s Augustinian Catholic view of human nature, their works frequently fail to address the impediments to justice and equity that More satirically addresses in Utopia. Thus, the speculative fiction of later Augustinian Christian authors such as Lewis and Tolkien complements …

Diasporic Strangers In The Mirror: Ever-Evolving Identity And The Immigrant Experience, Meriam Metoui

Theses and Dissertations

This text explores the disparity between immigrant parents and their American born or raised children and show the chasm of misunderstanding between generations navigating different national and cultural contexts found in novels such as The Joy Luck Club, The Namesake, Americanah, and Everything I Never Told You.

Michael Field : Decadent Moderns, Sarah Parker, Ana Parejo Vadillo

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In the last twenty years, Michael Field has emerged as one of the most fascinating poets of the Victorian era. Through their collaborative partnership as “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper engaged in the aesthetic and decadent movements of the fin de siècle, while their poetry and verse drama articulate ideas associated with the New Woman and boldly express queer and lesbian desire. Michael Field: Decadent Moderns extends the focus on these key literary and cultural contexts by emphasizing their continuing significance within twentieth-century literary modernism. Through a series of interdisciplinary essays, this book addresses Michael Field’s energetic engagements …

Feeling It: Toward Style As Culturally Structured Intuition, Keith Rhodes

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I have been moved to write a serious article about teaching style not because I have great and earth-shaking method to impart, but in some sense because I do not, even after years of study—including the small bit of empirical research at the core of this article. Style, as it turns out, remains as difficult, complex, and ultimately intuitive as most of the rest of writing. I hope, ultimately, to encourage writing teachers to focus more attention on style, basing approaches on what we already know rather than waiting and hoping for some flawless system to materialize. Indeed, by the …

The Gendering Of Death Personifications In Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol From Baudelaire To Barnes, Amanda Mcnally

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The time of modernity, defined here as 1850-1940, contributed to massive changes in the representation of the feminine in literature. Societal paradigm shifts due to industrialism, advances in science, psychology, and a newfound push for gender equality brought transformation to the Western World. As a result of this, male frustrations revived the ancient trope of the femme fatale, but the modern woman—already hungry for agency, tired of maligned representation in heinous portrayals of skeletons, sirens, and beasts—saw a symbol begging for redemption rather than the intended insult. Women of the nineteenth century infused texture to a two-dimensional accusation that argued …

Walt Whitman At The Aurora: A Model For Journalistic Attribution, Kevin Mcmullen, Stefan Schöberlein

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Relatively little manuscript material exists to definitively tie Walt Whitman to the bulk of the journalistic writing attributed to him, particularly the writing in the early years of his career. Because the vast majority of his early journalistic work was unsigned, attribution is most often based on the knowledge of Whitman’s involvement with a given paper, coupled with the identification of some sort of Whit- manic voice or tone in a given piece of writing. However, a writer’s style and tone are often affected by the form and context in which they are writing, meaning that Whitman’s journalistic voice is …

“This Damned Act”: Walt Whitman And The Fugitive Slave Law Of 1850, Kevin Mcmullen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

“THERE IS A SIN OF OMISSION often laid at [Walt] Whitman’s door by ardent humanitarians,” Clifton Furness wrote in 1928; “‘How is it,’ they say, ‘that a poet of democracy and humanitarianism did not express himself on the subjects of abolition, ill-treatment of slaves, the Missouri Compromise, and the national issues leading up to the Civil War?’”1 For all his expansiveness of both form and content, Whitman was indeed, on certain key matters, a poet of omission. As Kenneth M. Price, Martin Klammer, Ed Folsom, and others have demonstrated, the poet repeatedly grappled with issues of slavery and race in …

Linguistic Ideologies In The Performance Of Bulgarian Identity, Chelsey Norman

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Since the end of Communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2007, Bulgarians have experienced much greater mobility and access to the global community. Despite this more global perspective, Bulgarians maintain a strong sense of national identity. Given this interplay between global and national identities, Bulgaria is an apt location to conduct this ideological research. Using a combination of ethnographic observations (June-July 2018) and semi-structured interviews with bilingual Bulgarians in Sofia, this study examines how large-scale phenomena like nationalism and globalization are found in the micro-scale interactional construction of identity. Results show that a great deal of ideological …

The Acquisition Of Diminutives In Moroccan Heritage Speakers In France, Amal El Haimeur

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

This study addresses the acquisition of diminutive forms by Moroccan heritage speakers in France. Diminutive formation depends on stem modification. 15 Moroccan-French participants took part in this study. In a production experiment, participants were asked to form diminutives for 6 types of stems, since the stem type determines the diminutive pattern. The findings of this study show that the mean percentage of source-like use of the diminutive forms is 38%. The results revealed that just two patterns that were acquired by a significant number of participants: CCiCa and CCiCjCjəC. Diminutive forms that do not require complex processes are acquired by …