English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism And The Posthumous By Erin E. Edwards, A. Irene Mangoutas

The Goose

Review of Erin E. Edwards' The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous.

Review: Architectural Involutions: Writing, Staging, And Building Space, C. 1435–1650. Mimi Yiu., Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Mimi Yiu’s Architectural Involutions is an expansive, impressive, and largely interdisciplinary study. Many recent books have touched on related topics—probably most relevantly Henry Turner’s The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630—but this one reads from architecture and space forward rather than seeks answers about the theater foremost. The book’s main focus is to theorize the “inward journey” made possible by modes of understanding, building, and reading space in early modern Europe, although England is central to much of the work’s concerns. As Yiu explains in her introduction, the book “suggests a method for spatial mapping …

Of The Silmarils And The Ring: J. R. R. Tolkien's Fiction And The Importance Of Creation And Art, Michael Hartinger

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

J. R. R. Tolkien embodies the opposing ideals of Enchantment and the Machine in the Silmarils and the One Ring respectively. These created objects oppose each other just as Tolkien’s ideals of art do. Enchantment is art’s ideal, it's purpose is to glorify and enrich the beauty of reality through subcreation. The Silmarils exhibit the delight of making and perceiving beauty. Whereas the Machine is art’s shadowy reflection that utilizes apparatuses or devices rather than personal talent in order to coerce others and reality itself. Overall Tolkien's aesthetic theories reflect many fears surrounding modern attitudes toward weaponizing art. Tolkien supplies …

Who Died: Redefining The Elegy Through Affect And Trauma, Brittney La Noire

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This project introduces the claim that death literature, specifically elegies and epitaphs, do not rely on set structure or content, but rather are poetic effects of trauma and affect. Both have been defined and redefined by critical scholars, but there is still a division about their use. The beginning of the project will pull together Paul De Man, Cathy Caruth, Theresa Brennan, and Diana Fuss to apply the theoretical principle of trauma and affect transhistorically through Theocritus, John Milton, and Percy Shelley. The final portion will be an original creative collection of elegies combined with epitaphs as ending couplets about …

English People. Owen Barfield; Narnia And The Fields Of Arbol. Matthew Dickerson And David O'Hara; And The Mythic Dimension. Joseph Campbell, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

Three books, written about differing themes and released decades apart, still manage to work together to present a complex picture of the images of mythology and their effect upon the human race. The books are English People, a 1929 novel by Owen Barfield; Narnia and the Fields of Arbol, a 2009 study of environmentalism in the works of C.S. Lewis, by Matthew Dickerson and David O'Hara; and The Mythic Dimension, a selection of essays by Joseph Campbell spanning almost three decades.

Modern American Cover Art: The Great Gatsby Through Time, Jessica Harrell

Senior Theses

Book jackets and cover art are, more than anything, an advertising tool used to attract consumers, promote book sales, and establish company identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a staple in the canon of American literature whose cover art has drastically transformed in the ninety years since its original publication. This thesis traces these changes over time, focusing specifically on publishing history, art history, American culture, and thematic interpretations. In doing so, I found that the most substantial influences on these covers were publishing house identity, design trends, and available artistic techniques. Ultimately, The Great Gatsby’s cover …

The Victorian Body, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century is extremely important for the study of embodiment because it is the period in which the modern body, as we currently understand it, was most thoroughly explored. This was the era when modern medical models of the body were developed and disseminated, when modern political relations to the body were instantiated, and when modern identities in relation to class, race, and gender were inscribed. While questions about the distinctions between personhood and the body were studied by the ancients, nineteenth-century developments in technology, economics, medicine, and science rendered such categories newly important for Britons who were the …

Shakespeare, Antony And Cleopatra, And The Nature Of Fame, Robert A. Logan

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame is a characterological study, presenting new perspectives on Antony and Cleopatra, the most ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays. It offers fresh insights into Shakespeare's understanding of the attributes of fame, the process by which it occurs, and the significance of being famous—and into the origins and nature of the playwright's own imperishable fame. Inclusive and enlarging, the study considers a fresh method of dealing with the longstanding difficulties theater-goers and readers have had in responding to the characters of Shakespeare's plays, the seventeenth-century contexts of the play that the playwright …

Memory In Memoir & Biography: Science, Place, And Agency, Johnathan E. Longo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores modern scientific understanding of memory in humans and how it affects works of life writing. Scientific research shows that memory is unreliable and often misunderstood by the general public, and this has implications for different forms of life writing. This paper uses biographies, memoirs, and hybrid forms of life writing to explore how memory, with all its limitations, is used in service of a life story. How do writers of these sub-genres use memory and why are those strategies different from one another? Questions of agency and authority over written and spoken material make the issues still …

Reading Carlos Bulosan/Documenting The Filipino Diaspora: An Editorial Introduction To Writer In Exile/Writer In Revolt: Critical Perspectives On Carlos Bulosan, Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

This editorial introduction to Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan (2016) sheds light on the diasporic scope of Bulosan’s literary imagination and the literary scholarship on his diverse body of writing. Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt gathers for the first time nearly sixty years of literary criticism by scholars in the United States and the Philippines on Bulosan, a pioneering twentieth-century Filipino writer in the United States. The editorial introduction highlights the ways in which Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt documents the unfolding of Bulosan’s radical literary imagination which straddles the colonial and neocolonial periods of …

Willa Cather On A “New World Novelist”: A Newly-Discovered 1920 Vanity Fair Essay, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The ability to quote from and publish Willa Cather’s letters is a relatively recent development for scholars. However, the republication of her critical prose began shortly after her death, when Cather’s partner, Edith Lewis, appointed literary executor in her will, facilitated the publication of Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (1949). In line with Cather’s own approach to her early career, which she often dismissed or mischaracterized, this volume collected only her critical prose published from 1920 forward, including magazine essays, prefaces, and one previously unpublished fragment. This volume supplemented Cather’s own collection encompassing critical …

In Anthropocene Air: Deleuze's Encounter With Shakespeare, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

“Always Up Against”: A Study Of Veteran Wpas And Social Resilience, Shari J. Stenberg, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments.

Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the …

From A Distance “You Might Mistake Her For A Man”: A Closer Reading Of Gender And Character Action In Jane Eyre, The Law And The Lady, And A Brilliant Woman, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Peter J. Capuano, Julius Fredrick, Matthew L. Jockers

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This research examines and contributes to recent work by Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff on the relationship between gender and action in the nineteenth-century novel. Jockers and Kirilloff use dependency parsing to extract verb and gendered pronoun pairs (“he said,” “she walked,” etc.). They then build a classification model to predict the gender of a pronoun based on the verb being performed. This present study examines the novels that were categorized as outliers by the classification model to gain a better understanding of the way the observed trends function at the level of individual narratives. We argue that while the …

Preserving Jeffers Country, Shelley Alden Brooks

Jeffers Studies

For more than one hundred years, writers and artists have interpreted the beauty and power of Big Sur. No artist has done so more enduringly than Robinson Jeffers, whose writing helped define a land ethic for this prized California coastline. To a degree greater than any other private individual, and arguably more than any single county, state, or federal land manager, Jeffers can be credited with shaping perceptions and attitudes regarding the appropriate treatment of the Big Sur landscape. The iconic beauty of Big Sur has long been celebrated in advertisements and portrayals of the California coast, luring millions of …

Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky

Theses and Dissertations--English

Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …

Dialogical Numbers: Counting Humanimal Pain In J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Mike Piero

English Faculty Publications

This essay argues that J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello stages numerical sequences strategically, dialogically, and parodically in order to call attention to the ideological weight involved in counting. Focusing on how one counts - and accounts for - human and nonhuman animal pain, I contend that the repetition of numbers in the novel works to subvert the neoliberal faith put in numbers, quantification, and data. Without succumbing to some religious-mystical numerology, this reading attempts to expose the fiction involved in the act of counting and the need to pay more attention to numerical discourse in literary fiction. In tracking these numbers …

The Inevitability Of Decay: Disability In Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea, Dominic Robin

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

To many, Ernest Hemingway embodies a certain image of "masculinity," one centered around ability and physical performance. Such a narrative ignores the truly complicated and dynamic shape his understanding of the body took. Through an analysis of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, I examine the form this ideology took in his later life, focusing particularly on Hemingway's evolved understanding of the body. Through this research, a more nuanced picture of Hemingway emerges, one that recognizes the complicated and dynamic nature his view of the "able" body took.

Representations Of García Lorca In American Poetry: Articulating And Floating Metaphor Of The Historical Connections Between Spain And The United States, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Relevance And Resiliency Of The Humanities, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Discussion has grown increasingly urgent among those involved in the humanities; threats to funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts are only the most highly visible indicators of what many call a “war on the humanities.” The issue is a familiar one. With everyone’s finances under increasing stress, there is mounting pressure to “cut back on nonessentials,” and among both educational institutions and the broader public community, the humanities seem easy targets for the cutters and the pruners. There’s a general sense that the humanities are not very useful when it comes …

Promoting Student Success: Bilingual Education Best Practices And Research Flaws, Lillian Fassero

Senior Honors Theses

This paper first determines the benefits which bilingual education offers and then compares transitional, dual-language, and heritage language maintenance programs. After exploring the outcomes, contexts, and practical implications of the various bilingual programs, this paper explores the oversight in most bilingual studies, which assess students’ syntax and semantics while neglecting their understanding of pragmatics and discourse structures (Maxwell-Reid, 2011). Incorporating information from recent studies which question traditional understandings of bilingualism and argue that biliteracy requires more than grammatical and vocabulary instruction, this paper proposes modifications in current research strategies and suggests best practices for transitional, dual-language, and heritage maintenance programs.

Projecting Culture Through Literary Exportation: How Imitation In Scandinavian Crime Fiction Reveals Regional Mores, Bradley Hartsell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the beginnings of Swedish hardboiled crime literature, in part tracking its lineage to American culture and unpacking Swedish identity. Following the introduction, the second chapter asserts how this genre began as a form of escapism, specifically in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. The third chapter compares predecessor Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Roseanna, and how Sweden’s greater gender tolerance significantly outshining America’s is reflected in literature. The fourth chapter examines how Henning Mankell’s novels fail to fully accept Sweden’s complicity in neo-Nazism as an active component of Swedish identity. The final chapter reveals …

Young Adult Literature: The Reality On The Page, Chelsea Elmore

Selected Honors Theses

The genre of young adult literature has grown from a didactic category made of problem novels and taboo themes into a mimetic vision of modern life by way of dystopian fiction. In my thesis, I will discuss the ways in which young adult literature has changed over time and what those changes will mean for its readers and its future as a genre. The first section will analyze three groundbreaking novels that have disrupted the previously established didactic mindset of young adult literature. The publication of such novels (The Catcher in the Rye, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret …

Foreword To D.W. Robertson, Jr., Uncollected Essays, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

During the late summer of 1992, I received a call from Darryl Gless, a professor of Renaissance literature at the University of North Carolina and my former student, asking me if it would be all right if he and other people looking after the literary remains of D. W. Robertson would send me a package of published and unpublished articles that Robertson had left behind upon his death in July of that year. Gless had been a friend of Dr. and Mrs. Robertson in Chapel Hill, visiting with them frequently while trying a bit to look after their well-being in …

The Irishtheatre As Imaginative Space: A Vehicle And Venue For The Reconstruction Of The Irish Identity, Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

Current cultural and political changes have prompted the theatre to play a significant role in staging the transformations of the Irish identity. Over time, it has provided an impetus for expressions of the collective new self-image of the Irish. Re-inventing the self requires a manifestation of space and the production of space whether geographical, metaphorical or a physical stage representation. ‘Space’has been utilisedin Irish drama in terms ofgeographical location, cartography, socialmedia, technology, immigration, and the theatre stage. Globalisation has also played a crucial role in terms of creating overlapping spacesand multiple belongings.This study will examinethrough Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, …

Andy's Inner Society: Warhol's Philosophy And Sense Of Self, Amyjoy V. Sedberry

The Catalyst

Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is an intimate look at the internal world of the painter and graphic artist. The general public often assumes that Warhol’s life was little more than a whirlwind of success and partying. His Philosophy conflicts with the general presuppositions about who Andy Warhol was. It reads like a diary and is rich with disclosures of his beliefs about love, beauty, success and underwear. Despite the intimate nature of these subjects and the apparently candid delivery of Warhol’s philosophies and life experiences, he maintains a cagey and detached voice throughout. I argue that his …

Biopolitical Masochism In Marina Abramović’S The Artist Is Present, Jaime Brunton

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay analyzes The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović’s heavily mediatized 2010 performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, through the lenses of Freudian and Deleuzean concepts of masochism, specifically with respect to how the masochistic tendencies of this performance may be read in the current context of biopolitics. The essay seeks answers to questions of political import that many critical analyses of Abramović’s performance, which focus on details of the performer’s personal history, have not adequately addressed. Drawing on the documentary film Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) that follows Abramović through the conceptualization and enactment …

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Desire, Curiosity, And The Search For Truth In Proust, Moreno, And Bechdel, Santiago Parga Linares

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marcel Proust’s influence on twentieth century literature is broad and has been well documented. This dissertation attempts a comparative reading of À la recherche du temps perdu that places it in contrast with Colombian writer Marvel Moreno’s 1987 novel, En diciembre llegaban las brisas, and Alison Bechdel’s 2006 comic memoir, Fun Home. Starting from a Deleuzian reading of the Recherche, this dissertation proposes the notion of the “proustian truth seeker”, a thematic and stylistic phenomenon which can be traced in all three writers. The characteristics of the truth seeker can be used to understand the ways in …

Heroes Vs. Villains, Evan A. Poole

Sierpinski’s Square

This article questions the use of heroes and villains in literature, whether our perceptions of these characters as good and evil is proper, and what literature should do beyond this dichotomy.