English Language and Literature Commons^™

Dystopian Surface, Utopian Dream: Wittman Ah Sing Foresees Postethnic Humanity, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"Dystopian Surface, Utopian Dream" examines the postethnic and the posthuman in fiction by Maxine Hong Kingston, Octavia Butler, and Isaac Asimov.

Alexander In The Himalayas: Competing Imperial Legacies In Medieval Islamic History And Literature, Anna Akasoy

Publications and Research

In 1888, Rudyard Kipling published a collection of stories in a volume with the title The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales. The collection includes the short story The Man Who Would be King, in which Kipling's alter ego, a British journalist in India, makes the acquaintance of a pair of adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, who demand his help as a fellow Mason. The two shady characters have set out to take advantage of divisions among the natives and are determined to install themselves as kings in Kafiristan, a remote region inhabited by pagans in the north of the …

Purloined Voices: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay unfolds the complex intertextual relationship between the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of Edgar Allan Poe. References to and extended borrowings from Coleridge’s poetry and philosophical texts mark Poe’s œuvre throughout, but – as is only fitting for borrowings from the great borrower Coleridge – they are never anything as simple as plagiarisms or acts of intellectual theft. As this piece demonstrates through readings of Poe’s early poetological text “Letter to B–,” the Dupin story “The Purloined Letter,” and the late tour-de-force prose-poem Eureka, tracing the recurrence of Coleridgean poetry and prose in the work …

Angels And Demons: Christina Rossetti’S Goblin Market As A Social Critique Of The Victorian Ideal Of The “Angel In The House” And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Response To That Ideal, Melissa Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration …

Science Fiction And Postmemory Han In Contemporary Korean American Literature, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this essay, Seo-Young Chu explores representations of a specifically Korean American type of postmemory that she calls "postmemory han."

The Lgbtq Short Story, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

“The LGBTQ Short Story” is a lengthy entry in the three-volume encyclopedia LGBTQ America Today, edited by queer scholar John Hawley. The entry explores the characteristics of the genre and synthesizes the work of the top 25 living queer short story writers.

"Whether Beast Or Human": The Cultural Legacies Of Dread, Locks, And Dystopia., Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

Analyzing the ongoing problem of Caribbean racial exploitation, particularly fear signified through one of the most potent Caribbean symbols, dreadlocks, Kevin Frank offers a paradigm shift in arguing that Medusa's alterity is altered by Rastafarians' snake-like hair, but the transformative power of Rasta dreadlocks is contested through certain cinematic depictions of dread.

Female Agency And Oppression In Caribbean Bacchanalian Culture: Soca, Carnival, And Dancehall, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank discerningly analyzes agency and gender in public sexual performances emanating out of what Paul Gilroy identifies as part of the compensatory politics of the subordinated within Black Atlantic culture, Jamaican dancehall (dancehall reggae/ dancehall queens).

The Paradoxes Of Intimacy In Early Modern Drama, Brenda Marina Henry-Offor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the early modern period intimacy was neither well-defined nor discussed in the drama in the way that we do today. My dissertation is an examination of the paradoxical nature of intimacy in Renaissance drama and the impact of space on this intimacy. I am looking at the behavior of married couples and same-sex couples within the home during the early modern period. To elucidate my theory of intimacy I have chosen the plays: Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness, William Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and John Webster's …

The Missing Child In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Thomas R. Frosch

Publications and Research

The Indian boy over whom the king and queen of fairies quarrel is the most important of several characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who do not appear on stage: his parents, who form with him a missing nuclear family; a child god, Cupid; and a female authority figure, the dowager to whose property the lovers Lysander and Hermia flee. In its narrative structure the play presents a healing regression to the early mother and the primary process. However, the regressive movement has disturbing, as well as adaptive, elements; in addition, while the characters are still in the forest, the …

Engaging The Eighties: Ethics, Objects, Periods, Kevin L. Ferguson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a recent decade in American history whose unique notion of self-periodization generated important questions of ethical engagement and withdrawal. Situated during a time of an increasingly complex relationship between literature and theory, thinkers in the 80s self-consciously shifted towards making claims about their present moment which were based on the logic of rupture, and which thus created an either-or logic of pessimism or optimism in response to this rupture. These kinds of self-periodizing notions generally are collected under the rubric "postmodernism" and the first chapter deals with a transatlantic movement between theorists such as Fredric Jameson and …

Abroad At Home: Xenomania And Voluntary Exile In The Middle Passage, Salt, And Tide Running, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

This essay re-examines the causes and consequences of Caribbean alienation, with implications for understanding alienation in other postcolonial societies. The author argues that while externalization does follow colonial incursions or international travel by the colonized, exile and alienation also result from emotional or psychological migrations within the mind, a consequence of neocolonial mechanisms tied to globalization.

Visible Effects: Narrative Spectacle And Affective Response In The Late Eighteenth-Century Novel, Tanya Radford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eighteenth-century visual culture and literature reflect a struggle between two models of vision and understanding: on one side, an Enlightenment vision dedicated to disembodied objectivity and technical precision; on the other, a sentimental or expressive vision that produces irrational or emotional insight. If the disembodied eye can be seen as an emblem of reason and the goal of the Enlightenment approach to scientific knowledge, the spectatorial and incarnate eye represents an alternative and equally significant emblem of the period's visuality. This dissertation focuses on novels from the late Eighteenth century in which the spectatorial and incarnate eye is the dominant …

Urban Fervor: Los Angeles Literature And Alternative Religion, Christine M. Daley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using alternative religion and other dynamics within the spiritual life of Los Angeles opens up the city's literary canon; employing religion as a critical lens illuminates the conjunction of history, literature, and urban growth that characterizes Los Angeles culture. This is especially relevant in a setting where, according to a 1941 guide to the city, "the multiplicity and diversity of faiths that flourish in the aptly named City of Angels probably cannot be duplicated in any other city on earth." It is apparent, however, that the specific social phenomena of abundant sects in this urban space can provide keys to …

Henry James’S "The Ambassadors": Anatomy Of Silence, Marie Leone Meyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the use of silence in Henry James's novel The Ambassadors. James uses silence rich in meaning to portray the protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether's unfolding consciousness. James creates different types of silences that reflect a shift from the spoken or written word to alternate symbol systems. James's novel perches on the threshold of modernity, as his work reflects the ideas of a line of thinkers extending back from James and his brother, William, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sampson Reed, and Emanuel Swedenborg. At the same time, the novel draws on the contemporary ideas of Charles Darwin, prefigures …

An Opera In Aid Of The Reading Of History, B. Mcevoy Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis consists of six chapters and a frontispiece/CD recording of a song cycle, Blue Orpheus: Hymns and Lullabies, written and performed by the author. This arrangement responds to currents within queer theory, which view questions concerning its historical and philosophical origins as diversions from its ability to determine present conditions, by reframing these "presentist" (and its close relative, "performative") orientations in terms of "place" and the corresponding laws and freedoms that originate from its cultivation—in politics, the art of memory, and systems theory and design. Generally speaking, to each concept of place I devote two chapters.

Chapter one …

Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity In Going To Meet The Man, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

"Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man" employs the conceit of “impossible” fatherhood to critique mutually reinforcing racist and heteronormative constructions of reproduction. It argues, first, that the white paternal fantasy of creating “pure” white sons is undermined by the homoerotic necessity of bring the phantasmatic black eunuch, castrated yet powerfully potent, into the procreative white bed. The “fact” of the “white” child produced in that marital bed, however, not only cloaks the failure of racial reproduction in the living proof of success but also occludes the male/male union that subtends the heteronormative fantasy of reproduction. …

"Feathered Glory": A Poet In Flight From Medieval Ireland To The Twentieth Century, Denell Marie Downum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Feathered Glory explores the relevance of the medieval Irish character Suibhne, usually anglicized as Sweeney, to twentieth-century writers. Suibhne is the protagonist of the twelfth-century text Buile Suibhne, in which he is depicted as a minor king who goes mad on the field of battle, abandons his kingdom and his role in society, and flies like a bird into the woods, where he becomes a poet of exceptional power and beauty. This tale languished in obscurity for many centuries, but following J. G. O'Keeffe's publication of a scholarly edition and English translation of Buile Suibhne in 1913, Suibhne has …

Review Of Macbeth, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

Review of Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth: http://www.media-party.com/discland/2007/12/macbeth-2006.html

Charting An Ethics Of Desire In "The Wings Of The Dove”, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

James’s characters are nothing if not willful—and ultimately alone—in their quests. Like figures from ancient Greek drama, they demand everything and give up nothing, enacting Jacques Lacan’s ethical claim that “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.”[i] In doing so, they seem to call into question, or at least complicate, the Kantian categorical imperative and the ideal of disinterested action, offering a radical ethical alternative. James’s characters enact, I will argue, an ethic of desire.

[i]Lacan, Seminar VII, 319.

"More Than Ever Can Be Spoken": Unconscious Fantasy In Shelley's Jane Williams Poems, Thomas R. Frosch

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Creole Carnival: Unwrapping The Pleasures And Paradoxes Of The Gift Of Creolization, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank goes against the current in questioning the social and intellectual embrace of the poetics of creolization, in terms of its the efficacy in subverting biases that underpinned colonial subordination and exploitation.

Two Kinds Of Utility: England’S ‘Supremacy’ And The Quest For Completion In David Dabydeen’S The Intended, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

This essay concerns the Caribbean writer’s crucial confrontation with colonial literary models. In it, Kevin Frank argues that the central protagonist of David Dabydeen’s The Intended, the unnamed narrator, resembles the author in that he is torn between cultures (English, East Indian, and West Indian), and torn between two kinds of utility: one base, mechanical, and calculating, and the other, romantic. The latter predicament, Frank demonstrates, is a natural consequence of the convergence of romantic and utilitarian ideology underpinning British colonialism. Moreover, Dabydeen’s ambivalence about his allegiances and literary heritage is similar to that of one of his literary …

How Much Does Chaos Scare You?: Politics, Religion, And Philosophy In The Fiction Of Philip K. Dick, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

"Certain themes appear with surprising consistency in Dick’s fiction. They crop up in the early short stories, called by some critics, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Dick’s “apprentice” fiction. They appear in the novels of Dick’s most productive period, the 1960s. And they are a part of the last novels, the VALIS trilogy and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer—written when Dick was, according to Eric Rabkin and others, insane. These themes fall into three inter-related categories: metaphysics, religion, and politics. The first concerns perception and the world, and the individual’s interaction with both. The second, the moralities of creator/creation relationships. The …

Unshap'd Monsters: Political Farce On The London Stage, 1717-1737, Melissa Ann Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reexamines the role of John Gay's and Henry Fielding's anti-government satirical farces during the politically contentious 1720s and 1730s in London. Although their plays were and still are considered, variously, burlesques, entertainments, farces, and satires, I call them satirical farce for two reasons. First, contemporaries used the term farce as much to signify political and social stances as dramatic type or function. Those political and social stances are the central focus of this dissertation. Second, I see in this collection of plays—Gay's Three Hours After Marriage (1717) and The Beggar's Opera (1728), Fielding's The Author's Farce (1730), The …

“Neither In Nor Out Of Blackwood's": The Marketing Of Edgar Allan Poe’S Prose Address, Jonathan Hartmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to help explain Poe's circulation of his journalism by performing close readings of both canonical works including "William Wilson" (1839) and "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) and lesser-known articles such as "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844) and "Loss of Breath" (1832/5). Chapter One describes Poe's involvement in the transatlantic literary marketplace prior to the enforcement of literary copyright. Chapters Two and Three treat his development of a literary brand in works including "Letter to B" (1831/6) and "A Reviewer Reviewed" by playing off his critical assertions against his practice as a critic. Chapters Four …

Dangerous Memories: Lynching And The U.S. Literary Imagination, Anne P. Rice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The terrorization of African Americans through lynching was a national cultural trauma producing a struggle over the meaning of suffering, victimization and moral responsibility. The lesson you were meant to learn from white supremacy and terror powerfully affected how you remembered lynching. My dissertation asks who remembered (and did not remember) what about lynching and how these habits of memory influenced literary and visual representations. I consider the impact of race, gender, class, and sexuality on how lynching was textualized and performed, avoided and blocked. While much recent scholarship has concentrated on the visual technologies of lynching, lynching was also …

Sacco And Vanzetti: The Italian American Legacy, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Intentionalism: On The Assumption Of Authority In Literature, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Writing As A Reader: The Deserted Village Of Jay Parini, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.