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Articles 91 - 120 of 329
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
New Year, Old Blues, Joy Bowman
New Year, Old Blues, Joy Bowman
Theses and Dissertations--English
This collection aims through the use of folktale and familial history to investigate the bounds of gender and memory against a rural Appalachian landscape. The work utilizes superstition, myth, and the commonplace to search the shadows for the forbidden and unspoken, in an attempt to redefine and reconcile personal dissonance through an observational and at times, voyeuristic lens.
Book Review: The Gilded Age And Progressive Era: A Historical Exploration Of Literature, Jennifer A. Bartlett
Book Review: The Gilded Age And Progressive Era: A Historical Exploration Of Literature, Jennifer A. Bartlett
Library Faculty and Staff Publications
One of the latest volumes in ABC-CLIO/Greenwood’s “Historical Explorations of Literature” series, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a useful and interesting introduction to framing key literary works of this time period in their historical context. Each volume in the series presents a discussion of four or five representative works of a historical era, such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicano Movement, the Jazz Age, and the Civil War Era.
Regimes Of Prestige And Power: Transnational Authorship And International Acclaim In Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, Kyle Eveleth
Regimes Of Prestige And Power: Transnational Authorship And International Acclaim In Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, Kyle Eveleth
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
This essay will examine the reception of Rutu Modan’s international-award-winning graphic novel Exit Wounds (2007) in the massive cultural centers of the United States and France by situating its success within the inter/transnational dynamics of the contemporary comics market, or what James English would term an “economy of prestige.” My essay reconsiders Exit Wounds beyond its popular status as an international phenomenon—that is, one that crosses national borders but which maintains distinctions between those nations it enters and its home state—by considering it a transnational work—one which blurs the lines between nation-states in its form, function, and reception. To do …
At Home In The Free-Market World: The Neoliberal Cosmopolitan Man In Salman Rushdie's Fury, Mary J. Nitsch
At Home In The Free-Market World: The Neoliberal Cosmopolitan Man In Salman Rushdie's Fury, Mary J. Nitsch
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
This article offers an exploration of the concept of cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie's novel, Fury. Through both Rushdie's and his protagonist's cosmopolitanism, the ambivalence of the position is revealed in particular through the latter's (un)easy access to global commodities and problematic exploitation of women. The economic and gender exploitations oddly converge in Solanka's latest creative project, the success of which glosses over the problematics of class and gender privilege. Ultimately, the protagonist’s cosmopolitanism truly impedes any critique cosmopolitanism might afford: he is readily swept up in the rising tide of the 90s financial boom and the frequently misogynist sexuality …
Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero
Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero
Theses and Dissertations--English
Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing …
Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey
Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey
Theses and Dissertations--English
Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …
Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven
Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives Of (Ec)Centric Religion In The Works Of Faulkner, O’Connor, And Hurston, Craig D. Slaven
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project explores the ways in which key literary texts reproduce, undermine, or otherwise engage with cultural narratives of the so-called Bible Belt. Noting that the evangelicalism that dominated the South by the turn of the twentieth century was, for much of the antebellum period, a relatively marginal and sometimes subversive movement in a comparatively irreligious region, I argue that widely disseminated images and narratives instilled a false sense of nostalgia for an incomplete version of the South’s religious heritage. My introductory chapter demonstrates how the South’s commemorated “Old Time” religion was not especially old, and how this modernist construct …
The Convergance Of Arcadia, John Duncan
The Convergance Of Arcadia, John Duncan
Theses and Dissertations--English
The Convergence of Arcadia is a story about people losing things. Stretching from the Jim Crow South, the Korean War, New York City and central Kentucky circa 1980, this story follows a one armed man who has given up on life, a sheriff haunted by his past, a Korean War veteran with a terrible secret and a family broken from suicide. The Convergence of Arcadia follows three families as their fates are inextricably wove together in the tradition of Southern Gothic literature.
The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin
The Age Of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, And Narrative During The War On Drugs, Ashleigh M. Hardin
Theses and Dissertations--English
While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a …
Strong, Independent, And In Love: Fighting Female Fantasies In Popular Culture, Allison P. Palumbo
Strong, Independent, And In Love: Fighting Female Fantasies In Popular Culture, Allison P. Palumbo
Theses and Dissertations--English
During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics like Janice Radway began to reconsider so-called women’s genres, like romance novels and soap operas and melodramas, in order to address the forms of subversion and expressions of agency they provided female audiences. However, in spite of greater willingness to consider the progressive potential in romance narratives, there has been little such consideration given to stories of romance for the fighting female character—defined as a protagonist who uses violence, via her body or weapons, to save herself and others. The fighting female has received a good deal of attention from critics like …
A Culture Of Rape: In Twentieth Century American Literature And Beyond, Lisa M. Schroot
A Culture Of Rape: In Twentieth Century American Literature And Beyond, Lisa M. Schroot
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project examines rape culture in American literature and society, exploring factors of rape culture through the narratives of literary protagonists and current women alike. Each chapter is grounded in a work of literature, which serves as a lens through which to analyze a factor of rape culture, and is then broadened in scope to incorporate recent court cases that have had significant sociocultural impacts. The introduction includes a critical review of rape in feminist theory, from Susan Brownmiller to Ann J. Cahill. The first chapter treats the rape of Dolores Haze and victim blaming in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita …
Patriarchal Trauma In Appalachian Literature, Michelle Justus
Patriarchal Trauma In Appalachian Literature, Michelle Justus
Theses and Dissertations--English
Patriarchal Trauma in Appalachian Literature examines the effects of subjugation on women as it is represented in three novels set in Appalachia. I define patriarchal trauma as an act causing mental anguish to a woman and perpetrated against her because she is a woman. I use the term to encompass violent, catastrophic harms but more particularly to pinpoint the traumatic effects of the quotidian, systemic deprivation of women’s autonomy. Reconsidering classic texts such as James Still’s River of Earth and Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage as narratives of women’s trauma establishes a lineage on the subject, …
Comanche Boys, Benjamin D. Honea
Comanche Boys, Benjamin D. Honea
Theses and Dissertations--English
Comanche Boys is a novel that was written and revised during Benjamin Honea’s time at the University of Kentucky. The novel focuses on Brandon, who lives in rural southwest Oklahoma, and how the arrival of two people in his life, one old and one new, changes his future irrevocably. Taking place at the intersections of modern American and Native American life, the narrative explores history, culture, mythology, faith, despair, racism, poverty, vengeance, and justice. The struggles of the past and present, the lost and reclaimed, propel and pervade the lives of the characters.
Hat And Man, Sean L. Corbin
Hat And Man, Sean L. Corbin
Theses and Dissertations--English
Rapid life changes can lead to a certain amount of cognitive confusion if not full dissonance. Events take on new meaning. Images stand for new ideas. Through prose poetry, surrealism, deadpan humor, and word play, this thesis gives the sudden advent of fatherhood, domestication, intellectual exhaustion, and shifts in mental and physical health new shapes.
Life Matter: Women Subjects And Women's Objects In Innovative American Poetry, Jenna L. Goldsmith
Life Matter: Women Subjects And Women's Objects In Innovative American Poetry, Jenna L. Goldsmith
Theses and Dissertations--English
Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, and Juliana Spahr employ innovative poetic practices attuned to nature and environment in order to understand their personal lives and depict these understandings for readers. My dissertation investigates how these poets enact an inclusive posture toward environment that many innovative and experimental women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries possess, but are rarely recognized for. To this end, my dissertation provides counterarguments to characterizations of innovative or experimental poetic practices as reclusive, language-centric, opaque, and/or disconnected from the material world. I offer readings of poems, prose pieces, film, and art, to illustrate how materially innovative …
Distinctly American: Performing Humanity In African American Literature From Proto To Post New Negro Renaissance, Julie A. Naviaux
Distinctly American: Performing Humanity In African American Literature From Proto To Post New Negro Renaissance, Julie A. Naviaux
Theses and Dissertations--English
This project demonstrates how African American literature from the 1910s through the 1940s uses performance in order to stage debates within African American identity and American culture. Drawing on recent literary scholarship, performance studies, and early critical writing on African American art and performance, the project examines scenes of public performance in order to show how these literary scenes create space to investigate social and cultural constructions. The project investigates the ways performances within the texts also critique performances of race, gender, and class. Within these performance scenes, the literary texts also critique the audiences’ reactions to the artistic product …
The Contest Of Marriage: Domestic Authority In The Victorian Novel, Morgan Richardson
The Contest Of Marriage: Domestic Authority In The Victorian Novel, Morgan Richardson
Theses and Dissertations--English
In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate …
Northside, Jesse L. Houk
Northside, Jesse L. Houk
Theses and Dissertations--English
The Northside of Lexington, Kentucky is an area with its own culture, community and art. While living in this community I was able to learn, grow and develop alongside this newly renovated area. The people and their lives intersect in such a way that creates a tension at times. However, many social awareness advocates vie for the success of this neighborhood for many years to come. The objective of studying such an area as the Northside in Lexington is to focus on the similarites rather than the differences in culture, community and artistic endeavor. With a collection of essays and …
Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar
Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar
Theses and Dissertations--English
While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …
Resonant Texts: Sound, Noise, And Technology In Modern Literature, Leah Hutchison Toth
Resonant Texts: Sound, Noise, And Technology In Modern Literature, Leah Hutchison Toth
Theses and Dissertations--English
“Resonant Texts” draws from literary criticism, history, biography, media theory, and the history of technology to examine representations of sound and acts of listening in modern experimental fiction and drama. I argue that sound recording technology, invented in the late 19th century, equipped 20th century authors including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and Samuel Beckett with new resources for depicting human consciousness and experience. The works in my study feature what I call “close listening,” a technique initially made possible by the phonograph, which forced listeners to focus exclusively on what they heard without the presence of an accompanying …
Slow Emergencies, Jordyn N. Rhorer
Slow Emergencies, Jordyn N. Rhorer
Theses and Dissertations--English
Like the ever-circling lines in the skin of trees, sometimes the whole of a person is peeled back, layer by layer, until only seeds remain. Names, faces, stories, and relationships are unmade and molded into new shapes. Without warning, those left at the base, at the roots, can’t recognize this maple’s form. They hold a pile of leaves, a bottle of glue, and the hope that something familiar will take sprout again. The tree becomes new, and its tangled branches reach out. These poems explore the lives of those living with and caring for those with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. …
Increases In Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even With Typical Text Presentation: Implications For The Reading Of Literature, D. H. Whalen, Lisa Zunshine, Michael Holquist
Increases In Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even With Typical Text Presentation: Implications For The Reading Of Literature, D. H. Whalen, Lisa Zunshine, Michael Holquist
English Faculty Publications
Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding ("she thought I left" embedding her perspective on "I left"), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects the time that it takes readers to read and understand short vignettes in a moving window paradigm. With increasing levels of embedment from 1 to 5, reading times in a moving window paradigm rose almost linearly. However, …
Revolution Demythologized, Jonathan Allison
Revolution Demythologized, Jonathan Allison
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
"Speak 'Em Fair": Discourse And Dissembling In The Jew Of Malta, Andrew Bozio
"Speak 'Em Fair": Discourse And Dissembling In The Jew Of Malta, Andrew Bozio
Kaleidoscope
Barabas, the title character of Marlowe's tragedy, is the embodiment of contradiction. Under persecution, he trangresses Christian norms in order to create his own identity, and yet, in the same instant, his antics make him the very monster of medieval legend. Hence the question arises: is Barabas' rebellion skillful enough to deconstruct Maltese (and English) anti-Semitism, or do his actions merely confirm the Jewish stereotype? In working toward an answer, in this paper I provide an introduction to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, using containment theory to create a theoretical framework for addressing the problems of representation in The Jew …
Revamping The Roles Of Women In Vampire Film Or Women Who Suck The Life Out Of You, Christy Freadreacea
Revamping The Roles Of Women In Vampire Film Or Women Who Suck The Life Out Of You, Christy Freadreacea
Kaleidoscope
No abstract provided.
Antitheatricalism And The Movement Of Sexual Difference, Andrew Bozio
Antitheatricalism And The Movement Of Sexual Difference, Andrew Bozio
Kaleidoscope
No abstract provided.
The Opening Chapters Of: Only A Game, Andrew Crown-Weber
The Opening Chapters Of: Only A Game, Andrew Crown-Weber
Kaleidoscope
These are what may turn out to be the first chapters of a novel tentatively called “Only A Game,” which could possibly be finished some time in the future, maybe. At present this book-to-be deals with the life of a young man who is addicted to one of the few new drugs to be discovered this century: massively multiplayer online role-playing games. If you are unfamiliar with this digital scourge, have some time on your hands, and haven’t eaten recently, I recommend Googling the term for an eye-opening experience. I won’t spoil all the many surprises and twists and intrigues …
Power And The Cultural Other: Insights From Jane Eyre And Wide Sargasso Sea. A Critical Literary Analysis, Stacy Wilder
Power And The Cultural Other: Insights From Jane Eyre And Wide Sargasso Sea. A Critical Literary Analysis, Stacy Wilder
Kaleidoscope
World history has repeatedly been characterized by countries dominating one another, controlling everything from social norms and expectations to currency. It is difficult to consider modern Western culture without regarding the influence of past power struggles between conflicting nations — nations whose own cultures have shaped the ones existing today. History texts detail these relations, and although many of these factual accounts of nation ownership provide a broad, sweeping idea of life in an imperially dominated country (those countries operating under the rule of another nation), literature supplies a much more detailed, intimate examination of what it means to live …
Kayardild Morphology And Syntax, By Erich R. Round (Review), Gregory Stump
Kayardild Morphology And Syntax, By Erich R. Round (Review), Gregory Stump
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Capitalism And "Blithedale": Exploring Hawthorne's Response To 19th Century American Capitalism, Kyle G. Phillips
Capitalism And "Blithedale": Exploring Hawthorne's Response To 19th Century American Capitalism, Kyle G. Phillips
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
With the intensive migration of the American public from rural to urban settings in the mid-nineteenth century came many logistical problems. Chief among them was the contention that the city was a place fundamentally void of, or else lax with morals. The examination into these issues explores why Americans felt the city was a catalyst for immorality, specifically examining prostitution and the exploitation of the working poor. It seeks to answer these questions within the framework of the anchor text, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance”.