English Language and Literature Commons^™

Dislocating Camps: On State Power, Queer Aesthetics & Asian/Americanist Critique, Christopher Alan Eng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that the history of Asian racialization in the United States requires us to grapple with the seemingly counterintuitive entanglement between “the camp” as exceptional space of biopolitical management and “camp” as a performative practice of queer excess. While each practice of camp has been theorized as exemplary of modernity, these considerations have been largely separated into studies of political economy on the one hand, and queer aesthetics on the other. Taken up predominantly in political philosophy and the social sciences, the former centers the death camps in Europe during World War II as epitomizing state violence within …

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

Mediated Technologies: Locating Non-Authorial Agency In Printed And Digital Texts, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

Early modern printers, publishers and booksellers not only influenced readers to purchase particular books but continue to shape our reception of printed books today. Through title-page advertisements, prefaces and indexes, these ‘print agents’ forged unique relationships with new and returning readers. Paying attention to paratextual structures can uncover strategies for marketing new books, corralling readers and outlining new genres. A consideration of framing devices can also further our understanding of digital resources: much as print agents mediated printed books, digital humanists help reinforce the value of new technologies for the study of early modern texts, guiding users to apply new …

Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactual statement (“Were I the Moor, I would not by Iago”) that is most significant about his relation to Othello. From there I consider the overlap between the play’s representations of animality and black skin. Read in the context of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on animals, I consider the deconstructive value of linking …

Disciplines, Institutions—And Desires, Will Stockton, Mario Digangi, Ruth Mazo Karras, Melissa E. Sanchez

Publications and Research

Will Stockton: I would like to begin by asking you to consider the chiasmus under which we gather: “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire.” The chiasmus focuses our attention on the crossing of two terms, each with noun and verb forms their grammatical flexibility indexed, perhaps, to the methodological flexibility of the fields in which most of us work: early modern (here both Renaissance and late-medieval) queer and/or sexuality studies. Talk a bit about the definitions of desir/e/ing and histor/y/icizing, and the relation of these terms to the periodization and thematization of your and our work. Is defining these words more …

Discourse Functions Of Modal Verbs 'Will And Shall' In Christian Prayers, Olalekan T. Adepoju

Publications and Research

Prayer and language can be said to share similar definition in that they are both means of communication, though in prayer, one is communicating solely with a Supreme Being. This communication implies that a prayer is a form of discourse due to the presence of interaction; as such a discourse analysis of prayer will not be out of place. This study therefore investigates the use of modal verbs by pastors in Christian prayers. This is with a view to identifying and examining the discourse functions performed by these modal expressions. The Speech Act Theory and Systemic Functional Grammar, mainly using …

"I Bought The Book And I Didn't Need It": What Reading Looks Like At An Urban Community College, Rachel Ihara, Annie Del Principe

Publications and Research

Based on a qualitative study of students’ experiences, we offer a new typology of student reading behaviors across the disciplines at a community college.

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

The Virtue Mentality, Rachel Eckhardt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my study of early feminist fiction and contemporary queer intentional communities, highly ambitious and nearly impossible aspirations emerged as a singular uniting theme. From early feminist novelists to the intrepid founders of lesbian lands, utopian women share a passionate commitment to transform the world. This thesis engages with feminist concepts of virtue and how they influence utopian projects in both fiction and in life, whether the word “virtue” itself is used to describe the project or not. Virtue has made a lasting impact on contemporary feminist utopian projects that sometimes creates conflict and often undermines its liberatory aspirations. When …

Transparent Interiors: Detective And Mystery Fiction In The Age Of Photography, Melissa D. Dunn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a meditation on the mutable boundaries that define interior life in the age of photography. I probe these boundaries through selected readings in two literary genres that share conceptual links with photography—detective fiction and mystery fiction. Photography plays an important role in a radical reconsideration of the boundaries between public and private, engaging two dominant and often conflicting cultural values that shape American life at the turn of the twentieth century—the mandate to define and protect privacy and the simultaneous call for greater transparency in public and personal life. Photography, through its perceived transgressions against private life, …

City Poems And Urban Crisis, 1945 - Present, Jeffrey Nathan Mickelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

City Poems proposes that twentieth-century American city poets hold important concerns, commitments, and strategies in common with urban theorists and city planners. The study situates canonical and lesser-read city poetry, including work by William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Wanda Coleman, among others, in relation to discourses of urban crisis. Following Raymond Williams, Henri Lefebvre, and James Scully, it approaches city poetry as a form of social action that holds particular value for practitioners of progressive city planning. Because poetic representations of cities influence public perceptions, City Poems suggests, they have the potential to …

The Queen's Feud: Women And Kinship In Malory's Morte Darthur, Elsa K. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of blood feud on the knights of the Round Table in Malory's Morte Darthur is clear and has been well studied. Likewise documented is the shift to an institutionalized political system focused on individual chivalry after the founding of the Round Table. This study focuses on the feuds and political changes, which also swept up the women in and around the Round Table including Nynyve, Lyonesse, Guenivere, and Morgawse. Individual chivalry gives women significant independence in action and changes the values they are celebrated for, but their family connections are always considered as primary motivations. The women of …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Imagining A "Poethical" Classroom, Erica Kaufman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation begins at the crossroads of three fields—creative writing, contemporary poetics, and composition studies—and attempts to unite what is normally kept separate: the teaching of freshman composition and contemporary poetry. It is rooted, then, in the following anomalies: few students (unless they are English majors) encounter contemporary poetry; and few living poets (who often earn their livings as adjuncts, teaching composition) ever engage in a conversation about composition pedagogy. Fewer still teach the kind of poetry they write. Through a qualitative study of student writing in composition courses, this project investigates how encouraging students to engage with this form …

Wandering In Contemporary Literature: A Narrative Theory Of Cognition, Hillel E. Broder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study offers a theory of wandering cognition as an animating feature of western literature, in general, and of contemporary literature, in particular. Unlike existing theories of peripatetic bodies and minds in fiction that focus primarily on political critiques, cultural practices, or pleasures of digression, this theory of wandering offers an aesthetic philosophy and ethical critique of representing cognition, memory, and narrative identity that finds affinities in the political, phenomenological, and ethical thought of Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben.

Unlike existing cognitive theories of literature that apply cognitive theory to literary study (or vice versa), this study develops …

Ceasing To Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers And Hydro-Logical Thought, Annie M. Cranstoun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Starting from two central ecopoetic convictions—the constitutive role of environment in human experience (and vice versa), and text’s ability to connect with the world—this dissertation then moves in a different direction from most ecocritical projects. Instead of looking at the ways literary representation flows back into nature in the forms of attitude, praxis, and policy, this study focuses on the earlier part of the loop: the emergence of text from environment, particularly its aquatic parts, via the faculty of the imagination. In its scrutiny of images that spring directly from matter and its faith in the concept of a personal …

The Papers Of Ruth B. Scult, Brooklyn College

Finding Aids

This small collection contains primarily the poetry written by Ruth Bermant Scult. The two volumes here are titled Count Me Still Among You, the Complete Poetry of Ruth Bermant Scult. In addition, there are papers (dated from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s) that Ms. Scult wrote professionally for conferences that cover various topics, such as techniques for supervisors, patience and basic skills, dealing with learning disabilities, fear, gestalt, kinesis, and more.

The Papers Of Roberta Kalechofsky, Brooklyn College

Finding Aids

This small collection is comprised mainly of Roberta Kalechofsky’s writings. There are 3 boxes containing 40 file folders of Ms. Kalechofsky’s notes on the various short stories she has written, numerous scripts (handwritten or typed), as well as proofs of her book Bodmin: 1349, and a book penned in 1974 published the Writers’ Cooperative titled Justice, My Brother. In addition, there are also a number of CD’s and floppy discs with Ms. Kalechofsky’s writings.

Loving The Unlovable Body In Lois Ann Yamanaka’S Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada

Publications and Research

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by explicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the …

The Invisible Hand Of The Lyric: Emily Dickinson’S Hypermediated Manuscripts And The Debate Over Genre, Dominique Zino

Publications and Research

Between the mid-1990s and the present, a poetics of digitization emerged around Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, performed primarily by the members of the Emily Dickinson Editorial Collective. Translating Dickinson’s work across archival sources, scanned images, typographic transcripts, and coding languages has offered Dickinson’s editors an escape from the determinism that accompanied the age of print and an opportunity to highlight the continuum along which the poet composed her body of work. Through multimodal, interactive exhibits, electronic editors of the Dickinson corpus often seek to demonstrate that no one medium is sufficient to represent the range of meaning implied in Dickinson’s body …

Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek, Jason W. Ellis

Publications and Research

Literary and cultural critics call science fiction the premiere story form of modernity because it relates the adventures of educated men and women who use science and technology to reshape the material world and build new, hopefully better societies. As such, it is no surprise that many authors working in this popular genre explore how educated men and women might use science and technology to reshape the physical body and build new, hopefully better versions of humanity itself. Yet, lingering even in the most optimistic imaginings of a posthuman future is the doubt that these transformations will be evenly distributed …

The Self Is A Moving Target: The Neuroscience Of Siri Hustvedt's Artists, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Unworking Milton: Steps To A Georgics Of The Mind, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed to not one but two revolutions in the history of seventeenth-century English radicalism—the first, ‘the one which succeeded[,] . . . the protestant ethic’; and the second, ‘the revolution which never happened,’ which sought ‘communal property, a far wider democracy[,] and rejected the protestant ethic’—I show how Milton’s Paradise …

Jonson's Old Age: The Force Of Disgust, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Jewel, Purse, Trash: Reckoning And Reputation In Othello, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

This article offers an analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello alongside arithmetic textbooks for merchants and soldiers. It argues that Othello dramatizes a problem that also haunts the pages of these math books: the problem of calculating the value of persons in a society where new forms of commercial credit were unsettling traditional notions of worth grounded in status, military prowess and sexual purity. Othello’s loss of faith in his wife and the disintegration of his sense of self both depend on Iago’s manipulation of two competing models of reputation: one based on martial valor and sexual purity (reputation as honor) and …

She Voices Them: Evidence Of Black Feminism In Black Women’S Harlem Renaissance Literature, Danielle Carr

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

"Voices At The Crossroads: East Indian Women, Grass-Root Culture, And The Power Of Becoming", Rufena Watson

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

“Why Italian? Why Not Italian?” Jhumpa Lahiri, Amara Lakhous, Ali Mumin Ahad, Maristella Lorch And Their Unique Journeys Through Italian Language, Mariagrazia De Luca

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Portraits Of Children Of Alcoholics: Stories That Add Hope To Hope, Meagan Lacy

Publications and Research

This literary analysis examines the emergence of children of alcoholics narratives and their growth from "resource" texts to literary subgenre. While early texts offer useful information about parental alcoholism, they are also limited. Namely, they do not adequately mirror the diversity of children, families, and problems associated with parental alcoholism nor do they offer alternatives for children whose parents do not, or cannot, seek treatment for their addiction. Literature, on the other hand, in inviting what philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to as "narrative play," can help children learn to understand and empathize with others, nourish their inner curiosity, and, most …

Anthology And Absence: The Post-9/11 Anthologizing Impulse, Anne Lovering Rounds

Publications and Research

The decade after the attacks of 9/11 and the fall of the World Trade Center saw a proliferation of New York-themed literary anthologies from a wide range of publishers. With titles like Poetry After 9/11, Manhattan Sonnet, Poems of New York, Writing New York, and I Speak of the City, these texts variously reflect upon their own post-9/11 plurivocality as preservative, regenerative, and reconstructive. However, the work of such anthologies is more complex than filling with plurivocality the physical and emotional hole of Ground Zero. These regional collections operate on the dilemma of all anthologies: that between collecting and editing. …