English Language and Literature Commons^™

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

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Sexual Slander And Working Women In "The Roaring Girl", Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Though scholarship of the early modern era focuses on the character of Moll Frith when considering the gender ideology contained in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's "The Roaring Girl," the play's other female characters are also of interest. The "citizen wives" of the play are women who, though married, work outside the home. Their special status in the emerging capitalist marketplace of the early modern era gave rise to unique anxieties about their economic power and sexual availability. These anxieties in turn made these women especially susceptible to slander against their sexual reputation and thus respectability in the community. An …

Play For Mortal Stakes: Funerals As Modernist Acts Of Fiction, Janine Marie Utell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the ritualization of death in British literature of the interwar period and its implication for narrative and genre. The authors under consideration include poets of the Great War (Robert Graves, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, the Sitwells), and later writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, Ivy Compton-Bumett, and James Joyce. Using the methodology of ritual studies, an interdisciplinary approach combining the perspectives of religion, anthropology, and literary criticism, I examine how these texts create a fictive space in which death can be ritualized and how this process …

We Weren’T Always White: Race And Ethnicity In Italian/American Literature, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Invisible Can Or, Gendering Corporate Globalization Trouble: Technological Utopianism And The Language Of Erasure, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

In the following, noted science fiction scholar Marleen S. Barr argues for an increased attention to science fiction as a literature of the potentials of globalization, a genre that has largely been marginalized in discussions of the future of a globalized techno-culture. Further, Barr argues for greater attention being paid to feminist utopian fiction which helps to reimagine women's roles in the increasingly complex, and increasingly capitalistic, globalized techno-culture that has continued to marginalize the female body (and consciousness) in much the same way that scholars have denied the possibilities of utopian science fiction.

Trapping The Gaze: Objects Of Desire In James's Early And Late Fiction, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

The object of desire in James's fiction is an ironic construct designed to expose the inevitable deformations of the gaze. What we long for--to be seen (understood) from our own perspective or, conversely, to understand another from his or her own perspective--is impossible. Instead there is always a gap, an abyss, between what we see and what we imagine or wish to be true about the Other. For Jacques Lacan, the gaze is, simply, "the subject sustaining itself in the function of desire" (Four Fundamental Concepts 84). In James's fiction, the powerful impulse to create an "ideal" and to believe …

The Pitchman In Print: Oral Performance Art In Text And Context, Joseph Ugoretz

Publications and Research

Oral performance art, patterned performative speech for an audience, is perhaps the oldest and most ubiquitous human art form. Specific instances of this art include the performances of griots and guslars, troubadors and shamans, as well as rappers and riddlers, preachers and politicians. While this art form is by definition oral, it is also the case that, frequently, literary art has represented oral performance art. There is written art which depicts oral art, which describes it, appropriates it, criticizes and co‑opts it.

In this dissertation, I define oral performance art as constituting a separate and unique artistic genre, one which …

The American Colonization Of The Philippines And The Self-Examination, Self-Presentation And Re-Presentation Of American Identity, Jennifer Marie Mcmahon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is an exploration of the disruptions that can be perceived in American identity through a close examination of America's colonial experience in the Philippines in three different, but related, contexts. The first is an analysis of American writers' reactions to the colonization, specifically those of Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William James. These writers were vocal contributors to the debate surrounding the colonization, though, like the colonization itself, these works have been largely ignored. These writers identify contradictions in American identity, focusing on issues concerning race, capitalism, individualism, American innocence, exceptionalism, and self-reliance. These are …

Chaucer's Troilus And Criseyde In Male Homosocial Contexts: The Politicization Of Same-Sex Desire, Richard E. Zeikowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I explore the dynamics of homosociality in late medieval culture, investigating both Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and its cultural and political environments. I articulate two conflicting attitudes toward male same-sex relations: one affirming and celebratory, the other homophobic. I conclude that Chaucer's poem both replicates and generates a late medieval sociocultural discourse characterized by tension between normative male same-sex behavior and the potential politicization of such behavior.

In the introductory chapter, I survey important recent historical and feminist criticism of Troilus and Criseyde and situate my project within the current debate regarding definitions of premodern sexuality. In chapter 2, part …

Literary Reference Into The New Century, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

Changes in providing reference services for academic research in literature are examined, with the emphasis on the effects of new technologies.

Emma And The Countryside: Weather And A Place For A Walk, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Raymond Williams in The Country and the City dismisses Jane Austen's depiction of the land around her as simply "weather or a place for a walk." In Emma's ideology, however, there is a tension between an ostensibly apolitical stance, which is de facto conservative in working to maintain the status quo, and the extent to which a more progressive agenda can be seen through the social mobility of certain principle characters, albeit by "conservative means." For all the leisure, picnics, and parties that constitute the greater part of Emma, labor is evident and valued. The country may be largely …

Ghosts In The Machine: The Black/Africanist Presence In The Sea Novels Of Edgar Allan Poe And Herman Melville, Peter F. Decataldo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The attempt to situate historically the connections between African blacks and the sea represents just one aspect of the broader effort to assess how the presence of blacks operated to determine the language, choices, representations, and directions of the narratives that Poe and Melville set at sea. What is proposed here is a rethinking of American sea fiction from the unique perspective of its racial dynamics, especially with regard to what Toni Morrison has called the "Black/Africanist presence" in American literature, a presence that she justifiably claims to have been silenced, degraded, and distorted in American criticism. This work examines …

The Calamus Root: American Gay Poetry Since World War Ii, Walter Ralph Holland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that there is a clear gay poetic tradition dating back to nineteenth century Europe, and it describes an historical taxonomy for gay poetry in America since 1945 by reference to its characteristic themes, influences and leading figures. After a brief discussion of early precursors such as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, C. P. Cavafy, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes and W. H. Auden, the dissertation traces, through close explication of texts, the works of Harold Norse, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Frank O'Hara, Adrian Stanford, Richard Howard, Alfred Corn and Essex Hemphill. The influences on such poets of …

Knowledge And Representation In The Ambassadors: Strether's Discriminating Gaze, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

I propose a radically new reading of Lambert Strether's subjectivity in Henry James's The Ambassadors, one that challenges critical readings to date and suggests that Strether's journey reflects a tacit but very definite confrontation with the fundamental illusion of the core self. As he follows the trajectory of his desire, initially through identification with the "masculine" identity of Chad Newsome, Strether comes to see the limitations of conventional notions of masculinity. He discovers that the freedom he seeks is not to be found in the illusion of power characterized by masculine control and repression but rather in the vulnerable acceptance …

I Couldn't Kill It Any Other Way: Infanticide In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Deirdre Mary Day-Macleod

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at maternal infanticide in texts by William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in order to trace a relation between the rise of a discourse of the moral mother in the Eighteenth century and literary depictions of infanticide in the Nineteenth century. In Wordsworth's "The Thorn" (1798) infanticide provides a means to express anxiety over modernization, industrialization and authorship in a revision of the traditionally oral and rural ballad. The Heart of Midlothian (1818) by Sir Walter Scott tells the story of the effects of an infanticide that has never occurred suggesting maternal infanticide …

(En)Gendering Romanticism: A Study Of Charlotte Bronte's Novels, Ariella Bechhofer Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through her writing, Charlotte Bronte takes issue both with the masculinist assumption of Romanticism and the limitations of the conventional woman's novel. Bronte was drawn to Romanticism for its elevation of subjectivity, the poet's creative imagination, and emotional intensity, as well as its representation of the questing spirit in pursuit of self-definition and transcendence. She also appreciated the Romantics' recognition of the limits of expression and the fields of interpretation opened up by the lack of fixity which is emphasized by Romantic irony. Yet, writing as a Romantic also presented an obstacle to Bronte as a woman writer, for the …

Breaking And Entering: An Italian American's Literary Odyssey, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

In this personalized account, Gardaphe presents audiences with his own-first person story of the meaning of ethnic identity in America. Gardaphe relates his story of how his own adventures, on the streets of Chicago and in the libraries and school, shaped his views on becoming an intellectual and fashioned his career as a writer and professor of Italian American culture.

Asses And Wits: The Homoerotics Of Mastery In Satiric Comedy, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

This essay explores master-servant homoeroticism in three seventeenth-century satiric comedies: Ben Jonson's Epicoene and Volpone and George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher. Whereas "sodomy" always signifies social disorder, "homoerotic" useful for describing same-sex relations that are socially normative or orderly. Thus homoerotic master-servant relations become "sodomitical" only when they are perceived to threaten social order. In Epicoene, the character associated with the disorder of "sodomy" is neither Dauphine or Epicoene, but the "unnatural" Morose, even though he has not literally had sex with the boy he marries. The erotic master-servant relationship in Volpone is sodomitical because it transgresses against …

“A Little Space, A Little Time, Some Way To Hold Off Eventfulness”: African American Quiltmaking As Metaphor In Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jane Hindman

Publications and Research

In her article" New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism," Deborah McDowell notes the" lack of precision and detail" that has marked Black feminist scholarship and theories. She posits what she sees as one essential for a more precise and complete definition: like feminist criticism in general, Black feminist theory can be seen as" a'corrective, unmasking the omissions and distortions of the past—the errors of a literary critical tradition that arise from and reflect a culture created, perpetuated, and dominated by men'"(186).

Mary Mccarthy, Mary Gordon, And The Irish-American Literary Tradition, Stacey Lee Donohue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a distinct literary canon in the United States, composed of Irish-Catholic-American writers, which requires different modes of criticism or evaluation than other U.S. literatures, particularly the dominant, largely Protestant or Protestant-influenced, American literary canon. In addition, as a recently recognized literary tradition, many women writers have either been ignored or unnoticed because their works do not immediately fit into the evolving criteria of evaluation for the Irish-American literary tradition. My purpose in this study is not to survey the Irish-American literary canon, but to examine two women writers who have not always been admitted to an innately misogynistic …

Laguardia Literary Magazine: Indigo, Spring, 1994, Laguardia Community College

LaGuardia Community College Publications

Editor-in-chief: Vanesa Yi-Perez, Associate Editor: Humaira Qureshi, Assistant Editor: Russell Alvarez, Editors: Ivy Gosine, Tanya Naiken, Verai Ramsammy Faculty Advisor: Dr. Tom Fink

The Spectacle Of Suffering: Repetition And Closure In The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel, Rebecca E. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 initiated the genre of the gothic novel, critics have claimed that gothic endings are bland, inadequate, or otherwise unsatisfying. Analyzing works written in the period 1764 to 1820 by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Mary-Anne Radcliffe, Mary and Percy Shelley and Charles Robert Maturin, this dissertation demonstrates that the focus on endings has blinded critics to the reader's source of pleasure in the gothic. I have drawn upon a representative sampling of novels to present a model of the interaction of reader and gothic text focused on …

Disseminating Heterotopia, Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Publications and Research

Focuses on the motion picture The Passion of Remembrance by Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood, and the book Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delany. Highlights of the motion picture and the book; Author's argument that the tendency to ossify myths only leads to further confusion; Understanding of the mythic process.