English Language and Literature Commons^™

Mind The Gap: An Analysis Of The Function Of Love In The Works Of Tom Stoppard And C.S. Lewis., Jacqueline C. Lawler

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Writers C.S. Lewis and Tom Stoppard, though philosophically different, both write about love that embodies the natural law. The natural law can be defined as law that is inherent in man and can be discerned by reason rather than by revelation. Both writers use their observational style in order to reason their way to nearly identical laws of love. Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, Arcadia, Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Real Thing will be analyzed using the framework of C.S. Lewis’s book, The Four Loves.

Science Fiction And Fantasy: The Cosmic Players, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker

Library Presentations, Posters, and Audiovisual Materials

This presentation gives an overview of science fiction and fantasy, including its origins, the prominent writers in each era, and its many subgenres and variations.

"Just A Fool's Hope": J.R.R. Tolkien's Eucatastrophe As The Paradigm Of Christian Hope, Margaret A. Bush

Senior Honors Theses

In his essay titled “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien uses the term “eucatastrophe” to describe the unexpected, fortunate turn of events for the protagonist in a fantasy story. Tolkien applies the word beyond its literary context to signify the Christian’s experience of joy, especially resulting from the Incarnation and Resurrection. Such an explicit link between fiction and theology seems absent from his more well-known work, The Lord of the Rings. Yet both Tolkien himself and critics of his writing have labeled the novel a modern-day classic of Christian literature. This thesis will defend the Christian label of The Lord of …

House Of Leaves: The End Of Postmodernism, Joseph B. Noah

English Theses

Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut 2000 novel House of Leaves is written in part as an essay titled The Navidson Record by Zampanò. Within this essay, Zampanò includes footnotes and citations to many works both real and fictional. Through investigating some of his footnotes and allusions in The Navidson Record, certain connections to the postmodern movement may be drawn. By interpreting Zampanò’s allusions to Freud, Derrida, and Einstein, elements from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism change the reception of Danielewski’s novel. Thorough investigation of a few allusions within the novel House of Leaves reveal many foundations …

Constructing Depth Through Jane: Contemporary Interactions Between Austen And Interiority, Nicole Catherine Peters

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The world is saturated with Jane Austen. She is in the movies, in bookstores, and in college courses. For years “lowbrow” and “highbrow” readers have fought over the “proper” way to read her work. Ian Watt, a popular literary critic, argued that Austen’s value resides in her use of interiority. For years, interiority was held as the measure of a novel’s worth or depth. Deidre Lynch exposed this interiority Watt spoke of as a cultural taste—one which Austen and Watt emerged from and helped to create.

In this project, I look at two contemporary manifestations of Austen—one that is considered …

Dickensian Characters In J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, Alison Mckeever

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

J.K. Rowling includes many Dickensian-esque characters in her Harry Potter series. This thesis compares the characters seen in Rowling's series with many of Charles Dickens's characters, specifically those seen in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Bleak House. Rowling's work is similar to Dickens's novels in many ways. The most interesting connection between the two is how they treat the characters on the periphery of the societies they have created, most notably their orphans, servants, and women.

Orphans are their most obvious comparison. Each author based their texts on the story of an orphan. However, there is more to their orphan …

Unbreakable Glass Slippers: Hegemony In Ella Enchanted, Tori Shereen Mirsadjadi

Scripps Senior Theses

The way Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted simultaneously conforms to its late-20^th-century American standards and rebels against its Cinderella origins is analyzed in this thesis. As an analysis of a piece of literature written for children, the thesis works to defend the notion that playful literature produces a serious dialogue with its readers, and that young female readers are a particularly apropos group for the dialogue about hegemony that Ella Enchanted allows.

The Search For Pan: Difference And Morality In D. H. Lawrence’S St. Mawr And The Woman Who Rode Away, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

Both St. Mawr (1925) and The Woman Who Rode Away (1928) were written at the height of Lawrence’s fascination with New Mexico and demonstrate a continuum of thought about the position of the European and the Indian, but what is most interesting about these stories when read in conjunction is their attitude towards difference. Lou Carrington, the protagonist of St. Mawr, holds herself separate from other women of her class, from other men, from her mother and her Indian groom, finally finding a temporary peace in seeking affinity in a landscape; the woman who rides away from home and …

Post-War Europe: The Waste Land As A Metaphor, Semy Rhee

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes the mindset of twentieth-century Europe through the perspective of a modern individual that T. S. Eliot creates in his poem The Waste Land. Although The Waste Land is the greatest modernist poem, it is often criticized for its esoteric nature. A thorough examination of the poem is useful in understanding and appreciating Eliot’s masterful demonstration of the modernist philosophy. This study analyzes the poem in light of the definition of modernism and the poem’s metaphorical nature. It also aims to reconcile the two most confusing elements of the poem—its allusive content and fragmented structure—to the design …

The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her first novel in 1822 and her last in 1857. Her productivity slackened in the 1850S, as aging weakened her eyesight and arthritis made it difficult to write clearly. However, from 1822 through the 1840s, she published multiple works of prose fiction (tales, sketches, novellas, or novels) nearly every year. Despite this extraordinary record of productivity, Sedgwick regularly appears in literary history as the author of a single work, Hope Leslie (I827), her historical novel about relations between the Puritans and the native inhabitants of New England. A few other women authors before and contemporary with …

Re-Drawing The Borders Of Vision; Or, The Art Of Picturesque Travel, Jason N. Goldsmith

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Jason N. Golsmith's contribution to: Wordsworth Summer Conference, Richard. Gravil, and Wordsworth Conference Foundation. Grasmere, 2012: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference. Penrith, CA: HEB Humanities E-Books, 2012.

The Shamanic Archetype In Robinson Jeffers Poetry, Steven B. Herrmann

Jeffers Studies

This essay pays homage to Robinson Jeffers’s totemic presence as a shaman-poet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the essay’s author was born in 1956. It views shamanism as a symbolic process of transformation that takes place at an emotional, instinctive, and spiritual level; as a method of ecstasy found throughout Jeffers’ poetry and prose from beginning to end of his career. The shamanic archetype takes on concrete form through Jeffers’ ritual enactments of his dreams, spirit visitations, visions, and shamanistic voices that sound to him from Native influences. Science gave Jeffers a vision to behold the world’s spiritual traditions from a vista …

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

Robinson Jeffers,W.B. Yeats, And Ecoprophecy, Deborah Fleming

Jeffers Studies

W. B. Yeats and Robinson Jeffers shared a vision of modernity which rejected contemporary values in favor of tradition. Both emphasized permanence in times of fragmentation and featured dramatic landscapes and cultural myth. Included among Modernist poets in spite of early Romantic influence and his commitment to formalist verse, Yeats fixed his gaze on the past, establishing the poetic terms of decolonization and interconnectedness of culture, place, and nature. Excluded from the circle of Modernist poets, Jeffers’s voiced what we call today ecocentrism—the earth or natural world rather than the human mind being the center of things. Jeffers’s ecoprophecy stems …

Aemilia Lanyer's Use Of The Garden In Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, Anna Brovold

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Aemilia Lanyer used her collection of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to redefine the way that women should look at themselves in the eyes of God. She began her collection with poems dedicated to women that she had deemed virtuous and worthy of individual attention. Her dedicatees were then presented to her readers as the true Disciples of Christ; an honor due to women because of their empathy for Christ's situation. Lanyer rewrote the biblical Passion story in order to include a feminized version of Christ, the rightful female Disciples of Christ and an additional trial presented to Pontius Pilate …

"What's That Noise?": Paying Attention To Perception, Excess, And Meta-Art In David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, Christopher Mccarthy

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In his graphic novel Asterios Polyp David Mazzucchelli is concerned with the nature of human perception. He highlights the limitations of perception through his title character's struggle to find a new way to filter information from the world around him. Mazzucchelli reminds us that no matter which method a person uses to look at the world there will always be excess details that he or she will ignore or simply not notice due to perceptual blind spots. I argue that, while Asterios gains a new method for perceiving the world, his true victory is in his acknowledgement that all perceptions …

Genetic Engineering As Literary Praxis: A Study In Contemporary Literature, Taylor Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis considers the understudied issue of genetic engineering as it has been deployed in the literature of the late 20th century. With reference to the concept of the enlightened gender hybridity of Cyborg theory and an eye to ecocritical implications, I read four texts: Joan Slonczewski's 1986 science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean, Octavia Butler's science fiction trilogy Lilith's Brood – originally released between 1987 and 1989 as Xenogenesis – Simon Mawer's 1997 literary novel Mendel's Dwarf, and the first two books in Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction MaddAddam series: 2003's Oryx and Crake and 2009's The Year Of …

Cold War Legacies In Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The editorial methods developed during the Cold War professionalized scholarly editing and appealed to new ideas about the relationship between American academics and the government by aligning with the supposedly value-neutral goals and methods of the behavioral sciences, much to the discomfort of many humanists. Some of the implicit assumptions underlying midcentury editorial methods persist in digital editing, and may risk positioning digital editions as marginalized scholarship within the digital era, just as print scholarly editions became widely considered second-rate scholarship in the twentieth century.

The Machine, The Victim, And The Third Thing: Navigating The Gender Spectrum In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake And The Year Of The Flood, Lindsay Mccoy Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Atwood's depiction of gender in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. In an interview from 1972, Margaret Atwood spoke on survival: "People see two alternatives. You can be part of the machine or you can be something that gets run over by it. And I think there has to be a third thing." I assert that Atwood depicts this "third thing" through her characters who navigate between the binaries of "masculine" and "feminine" in a third realm of gender. As the female characters—regardless of their passive or aggressive behavior—engage in a quest for agency, …

Frank And Gala, Heather M. Mcgrail

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through the gossip and rumors in a small town in Minnesota, the townspeople discuss and react to the Levison family's claimed perfection.

Sublime Beauty & Horrible Fucking Things - The Finer Worlds Of Warren Ellis, William James Allred

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work constitutes an in-depth discussion of the muted postmodern characteristics of contemporary comics writer and novelist Warren Ellis, highlighting his major long-form works within comics, Planetary, Transmetropolitan, StormWatch, and The Authority, as well as several shorter works such as Ocean, Orbiter, and Global Frequency. In addition, Ellis is situated within the British science fiction tradition, specifically, the British Boom movement which contains other comics writers such as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore.

Kurt Vonnegut's Early Novels: Searching For Meaning In A Meaningless World, Matthew Praxmarer

All Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates three novels by Kurt Vonnegut: The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and the philosophical stance which informs these works. The Sirens of Titan represents Vonnegut’s cosmology as well as his first attempts to propose one purpose for human life not based on any absolute knowledge. Cat’s Cradle proposes a provisional, ever-changing belief system in the religion of Bokonon, a religion which also speaks to Vonnegut’s humanism. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater satirizes the discourses of the free enterprise system through protagonist Eliot as he struggles to use his wealth …

Uncle Tom’S Cabin In The National Era: Commentary On Chapter 1 And 2, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the first chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe warns her readers that the “indulgence” of slave owners and the “affectionate loyalty” of the slaves themselves towards their masters have misled some observers to believe the “poetic legend” of slavery as a benevolent “patriarchal institution.” She does not deny the genuineness of these emotions, but she warns that “the shadow of a Law” makes a mockery of the human relationships that develop between masters and slaves: “So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a …

Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma

Department of English: Faculty Publications

We were fishermen.

Father first called us so after he whipped us sore for fishing at the Ala stream in the summer of May 1995. Earlier that year, the bank had transferred him from our hometown of Akure to Yola, a volatile and violence-prone city in the north of Nigeria. Father wouldn't move us with him so he lived apart and visited only once in two weeks, always coming at midnight on Fri- days and disappearing at dawn on Sundays. Each time he returned, mother would detail how the house had fared in his absence - a breakdown of home …

Fulfillment Of Woman And Poet In Elizabeth Barrett Brown's Aurora Leigh, Beth Leonardo

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Perpetual Creation And Provocation Of The Self, Krista Damico

Senior Honors Projects

The Perpetual Creation and Provocation of the Self

Krista D’Amico

Faculty Sponsor: Stephen Barber, English

This project consists of four related parts. The first part is a critical and creative work of prose in which I converse with the thought of two philosophers, namely Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze. This conversation enables me to present my own thought and subjectivity in relationship to a very important aspect of my life: music-making. The second part of my project is a critical essay in which I contemplate the work of another artist, Virginia Woolf, and the way that her credo Three Guineas (1938) …

Towards A Theory Of Comic Book Adaptation, Colin Beineke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary adaptation studies/theories have tended to focus singularly on the movement from the novel/short story to film – largely ignoring mediums such as the theater, music, visual art, video games, and the comic book.  Such a limited view of adaptation has led to an underdeveloped and misplaced understanding of the adaptation process, which has in turn culminated in a convoluted perception of the products of artistic adaptation.  The necessity of combating the consequences of these limited outlooks – particularly in the field of comics studies – is as vital as the difficulties are manifold. In opposition to this current stream …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

Early Modern Evil Genius: Hyperconformity And Objectivity In Sixteenth And Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Christine Hoffmann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the response among early modern and postmodern audiences to the experience of information overload, and suggests that the most appealing response to living in a communications network that appears both systematic and random is to use a rhetoric of struggle that is ambiguous in the same way. >The reasons for this appeal are twofold: firstly, the rhetoric of struggle is a way to cope with the difficulty of situating oneself within a system of circulating information that operates according to its own arbitrary rules. Mimicking that arbitrariness is a way of finding aesthetic synchronicity between how one's …