English Language and Literature Commons^™

Walt Whitman: The Man Behind The Words, Sara Duke

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Walt Whitman is often considered to be one of the greatest American poets. His ways of writing were unconventional, inappropriate to a degree (according to Victorian standards), yet they intrigued readers not only of the New World, but also those of the Old World. But his writing was not the only thing he was known for. The “Good Gray Poet” was also known for being gentle and warm-hearted, with a striking face and piercing blue eyes. He was welcoming to his neighbors, visitors, and passers-by on the street.

This thesis seeks to understand the man behind Leaves of Grass. …

Interim Performance Report, Lg‐71‐16‐0152‐16, Extending Intelligent Computational Image Analysis For Archival Discovery, February 2018, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, John O'Brien

CDRH Grant Reports

No abstract provided.

Willa Cather On A “New World Novelist”: A Newly-Discovered 1920 Vanity Fair Essay, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The ability to quote from and publish Willa Cather’s letters is a relatively recent development for scholars. However, the republication of her critical prose began shortly after her death, when Cather’s partner, Edith Lewis, appointed literary executor in her will, facilitated the publication of Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (1949). In line with Cather’s own approach to her early career, which she often dismissed or mischaracterized, this volume collected only her critical prose published from 1920 forward, including magazine essays, prefaces, and one previously unpublished fragment. This volume supplemented Cather’s own collection encompassing critical …

“Always Up Against”: A Study Of Veteran Wpas And Social Resilience, Shari J. Stenberg, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments.

Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the …

From A Distance “You Might Mistake Her For A Man”: A Closer Reading Of Gender And Character Action In Jane Eyre, The Law And The Lady, And A Brilliant Woman, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Peter J. Capuano, Julius Fredrick, Matthew L. Jockers

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This research examines and contributes to recent work by Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff on the relationship between gender and action in the nineteenth-century novel. Jockers and Kirilloff use dependency parsing to extract verb and gendered pronoun pairs (“he said,” “she walked,” etc.). They then build a classification model to predict the gender of a pronoun based on the verb being performed. This present study examines the novels that were categorized as outliers by the classification model to gain a better understanding of the way the observed trends function at the level of individual narratives. We argue that while the …

Balance Of Limits And Experimentation, Viangri Sontay L.

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

In science, there is an equilibrium between advancements in knowledge, ethics, and reason. Equilibrium is when two contrary sides are in balance and, typically, once one side becomes disproportionate, there will be a disturbance. In the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley portrays how going beyond the limits of science can cause a disturbance to human nature. One of the main characters, Victor Frankenstein, fabricated a living creature out of unliving parts. Victor is displeased with the result, leaving the Creature neglected and destined to feel loathing toward his creator. The consequences of seeking glory brought about torture. Aside from providing entertainment, …

Isolation And Revenge: Where Victor Frankenstein Went Wrong, Gabby Escalante Manzano

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley describes the dangers of revenge and isolation caused by abandonment, following the mistakes made by Victor Frankenstein with the creation of a monster. All the events of the novel support one main theme: revenge caused by isolation. Throughout the novel, the reader witnesses the life of isolation that the creature is forced to live. As the story progresses, the question of why revenge becomes an outcome of isolation is asked. Living a life where you are ostracized by everyone, including your own creator, would drive anyone mad, especially a creature that was brought back to life …

Review Of John James Audubon: The Nature Of The American Woodsman, By Gregory Nobles, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When we think about American ornithology, John James Audubon is often the first name that comes to mind. As evidence to Audubon’s lasting ability to enrapture readers, it bears repeating that an original Double Elephant Folio of Birds of America sold for an astounding $11.5 million in 2010 (2). Yet, for a man who produced such stunning and memorable visual and literary work on the avifauna of North America, some of the important details of his life and origins have remained highly contested. Even though Gregory Nobles’s new biography is not explicitly tied to the study of the Great Plains, …

Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction, Daniel Hirschman, Philip Schwadel, Rick Searle, Erica Deadman, Ijlal Naqvi

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Grokking Modernity by Philip Schwadel

Resistance and the Art of Words by Rick Searle

A Planet Without Gender by Erica Deadman

Beware of Geeks with Good Intentions by Ijlal Naqvi

In this issue, our contributors take up these concerns in four short essays. Philip Schwadel applies theories of communicative functions to look at sci-fi ’s potential to shape our social understandings. Ijlal Naqvi returns to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to argue that dreams of perfect social prediction will remain elusive and perhaps undesirable. Erica Deadman showcases how well LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness illustrates ideas from the sociology of gender. And …

The Relevance And Resiliency Of The Humanities, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Discussion has grown increasingly urgent among those involved in the humanities; threats to funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts are only the most highly visible indicators of what many call a “war on the humanities.” The issue is a familiar one. With everyone’s finances under increasing stress, there is mounting pressure to “cut back on nonessentials,” and among both educational institutions and the broader public community, the humanities seem easy targets for the cutters and the pruners. There’s a general sense that the humanities are not very useful when it comes …

Uncollected Essays, D. W. Robertson Jr., Paul A. Olson

Zea E-Books Collection

Foreword by Paul A. Olson • Buzones, an Alternative Etymology • The Manuel des Péchés and an English Episcopal Decree • Correspondence – The Manuel des Péchés • A Note on the Classical Origin of ‘Circumstances’ in the Medieval Confessional • A Study of Certain Aspects of the Cultural Tradition of ‘Handlyng Synne’ • The Cultural Tradition of Handlyng Synne • Marie de France, Lais, Prologue, 13-16 • Cumhthach Labhras an Lonsa • Chaucerian Tragedy • St. Foy among the Thorns • Amors de terra lonhdana • The Subject of the De Amore of Andreas Capellanus • …

Foreword To D.W. Robertson, Jr., Uncollected Essays, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

During the late summer of 1992, I received a call from Darryl Gless, a professor of Renaissance literature at the University of North Carolina and my former student, asking me if it would be all right if he and other people looking after the literary remains of D. W. Robertson would send me a package of published and unpublished articles that Robertson had left behind upon his death in July of that year. Gless had been a friend of Dr. and Mrs. Robertson in Chapel Hill, visiting with them frequently while trying a bit to look after their well-being in …

Biopolitical Masochism In Marina Abramović’S The Artist Is Present, Jaime Brunton

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay analyzes The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović’s heavily mediatized 2010 performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, through the lenses of Freudian and Deleuzean concepts of masochism, specifically with respect to how the masochistic tendencies of this performance may be read in the current context of biopolitics. The essay seeks answers to questions of political import that many critical analyses of Abramović’s performance, which focus on details of the performer’s personal history, have not adequately addressed. Drawing on the documentary film Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) that follows Abramović through the conceptualization and enactment …

Newsletter: August 2017, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Building News…

Cheyne Walk

George Eliot’s last home for a few weeks. Purchased for 15m two years ago by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the house is empty and appears to be undergoing major alterations. We suggested a donation towards our Visitor Centre from the Bloomberg Foundation but answer came there none.

Bird Grove

First the good news. Four years after we complained to Coventry City Council they have replaced the sign which had spelt Eliot with two ‘I’s, one of which they painted white! Unfortunately, the building associated with the road, Bird Grove, is empty, neglected and up to let. It …

Annotonia: Annotations From Browser To Tei, Greg Tunink, Karin Dalziel, Jessica Dussault, Emily Rau

Digital Initiatives and Special Collections

The Willa Cather Archive (WCA) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) is currently working on transcription and annotation of 1500 letters to be released in 2018. As editors will write several thousand annotations, the workflow logistics are complicated. Annotonia1 is a solution developed within the Center for Digital Research in Humanities (CDRH) that allows editors to write annotations directly on letters in a browser and insert those annotations into Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML files. Multiple editors review annotations, track letters’ annotation statuses, and generate a new TEI file incorporating the annotations, avoiding having to manually edit each file. Annotonia …

Living Lore: B. A. Botkin, Folklore, And The State, Kirby Little

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital project explores government surveillance and political action through folklore. The project focuses on the unpublished essay of folklorist Benjamin Botkin titled “Progress: Negroes and Everybody, From Folk Tale to Science Fiction.” Botkin was a prominent academic in his field, and created the theoretical approach to folklore he termed “applied folklore.” Botkin’s approach to folklore gained considerable attention, both positive and negative, due to his unique emphasis on the present time and the ever-changing nature of folklore, and his politicization of folklore as a method for uniting working class citizens. For decades, Botkin was under clandestine surveillance by the …

The Terror Of The Political: Community, Identity, And Apocalypse In Don Delillo's Falling Man, Dillon Rockrohr

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Falling Man by Don DeLillo casts the event of 9/11 and its aftermath in such a way that the novel itself enacts an aesthetic terror aimed at explicating the ubiquitous social-atmospheric elements of community- and identity-formation out of which terror precipitates. As DeLillo figures terrorism in the novel as apocalyptic in that it is a violence that reveals the violence constitutive of political community, including the political community of liberal democracy, which ostensibly relegates violence to domains not considered legitimately political. DeLillo’s novel, as an act of aesthetic terrorism, not only thematizes the instantiation of terror that precipitates out of …

Ethics Of Care On The Narrative Margins Of Willa Cather’S The Professor’S House And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Jeannette E. Schollaert

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Willa Cather’s Southwestern novels feature cultured male protagonists as the driving sources of action. The male characters explore the natural world and advance the plot, but Cather positions female figures, particularly spinster figures, on the sidelines of the protagonists’ plots to offer support and connection with the natural world. Using an ethic of care framework and ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s master model, this thesis examines the ways in which Cather marginalizes female figures even as they serve crucial roles in the male protagonists’ development. While the male protagonists link spinster figures and sexualized feminine bodies with the natural world, they imbue …

A City Room Of One's Own: Elizabeth Jordan, Henry James, And The New Woman Journalist, James Hunter Plummer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis considers the portrayal of the female journalist in the works of Elizabeth Jordan and Henry James. In 1898, Jordan, a journalist and editor herself, published Tales of the City Room, a collection of interconnected short stories that depict a close and supportive community of female journalists. It is, overall, a positive portrayal of female journalists by a female journalist. James, on the other hand, uses the female journalists in The Portrait of a Lady, “Flickerbridge,” and “The Papers” to show his discomfort toward New Journalism and the New Woman of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These …

Silence Emerging From Birds, Rebecca Macijeski

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation represents the culmination of five years of creative activity in poetry. Included within this document are three main components: 1.) a critical introduction to my book-length manuscript of original poems complete to satisfy the requirements of creative writing within the English Department; 2.) a description of my creative activity reflected in that book-length manuscript, and; 3.) a sample of previously published original poems from the manuscript. I will describe each of these components in greater detail below.

The critical introduction to the creative work seeks to explore and examine various aesthetic and theoretical influences on my poems. The …

Life In Two Worlds: Autobiography Tradition In Native Women Writers' Literature, Ekaterina Kupidonova

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

My thesis project is a four-section paper exploring the topic of belonging and assimilation in the works of four indigenous women writers. Each section focuses on the autobiographical elements in the pieces of fiction or non-fiction of each author.

The first two sections are dedicated to the writers of the first half of the twentieth century—Zitkala-Ša (born Getrude Simmons; Dakota) and Pauline Johnson (Canadian Mohawk). Both were among the first female Native writers to appear visibly on the literary scene and to voice the problematic issues of living in “two worlds”—white and traditional Native American. The analyzed texts for the …

The Composing, Editing, And Publication Of Willa Cather’S Obscure Destinies Stories, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In 1998, Willa Cather’s 1932 short story collection Obscure Destinies appeared as the fourth volume of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition (WCSE). As the editors would explain in an essay reflecting on the “The Issue of Authority in a Scholarly Edition,” Cather “habitually sought to exert her authority over the full process governing the preparation and presentation of her novels: from drafting and revising the text to shaping the physical appearance of the published books.” In line with that sense of Cather’s authority, the WCSE chose and continues to choose the first edition of each work as book form as …

The Role Of George Henry Lewes In George Eliot’S Career: A Reconsideration, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article examines the “protection” and “encouragement” George Henry Lewes provided to Eliot throughout her fiction-writing career. According to biographers, Lewes showed his selfless devotion to Eliot by encouraging her to begin and continue writing fiction; by fostering the mystery of her authorship; by managing her finances; by negotiating her publishing contracts; by managing her schedule; by hosting a salon to promote her books; and by staying close by her side for twenty-four years until death parted them. By reconsidering each element of Lewes’s devotion separately, Rilett challenges the prevailing construction of the Eliot–Lewes relationship as the ideal partnership of …

Melodrama, Masochism, And Biopolitical Encounters In The Fosters, Jaime Brunton

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Since the television drama The Fosters, which centers on the daily struggles of two lesbian moms (Stef Foster and Lena Adams) and their multi-ethnic family of foster and adoptive children, debuted on ABC Family in 2013, the show has garnered numerous awards and nominations. . . . The Fosters has struck a chord with American television audiences and critics. While part of the show’s appeal no doubt rests in its representations of LGBTQ people and people of color (as its awards suggest) and its dealing with topical issues such as gay marriage and racial profiling, it also worth noting …

The Division Of The Humanity, Bryan Chavez

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Jane Austen's personal experiences can be seen through the influence presented in her novel Pride and Prejudice. Austen grew up in the Victorian Era, a time period where women were socially and economically immobile, with the exception of marriage. Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice suggests that society is separated into a diversity of unfair and unequal socio-economic classes which still persists today. This is most evident in the lack of access to quality education for many members of lower socio-economic groups in the United States.

The Victorian Era heavily relied on a social structure that created socio-economic diversity …

Kathleen And Bill Adams - Memories Of Old Friends, Michael Harris, Ruth Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

About 55 years ago when we were engaged to be married, Ruth came down from Scotland to Coventry for a holiday, and I was concerned to demonstrate to her that Warwickshire had much to offer to the visitor and prospective resident. Having, as I thought, exhausted the possibilities of Coventry, Kenilworth, Warwick etc., I asked her if there was anywhere else she would like to visit. I ought not to have been surprised, knowing that she had an English degree and was an English teacher, when she expressed a wish to discover more about George Eliot. So we took the …

Against Egology: Ethics And Style In George Eliot And Emmanuel Levinas, Athanassia Williamson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I will argue that the ethical pluralism characteristic of Eliot's late writings anticipates Levinas's rejection of legislative, deontological ethics in the early 1960s, especially from Totality and Infinity (1961) onward. Both Eliot and Levinas problematize an intellectualist or theoretical ethics that fails to attend to our moral experience as an embodied and affective process. They are both sceptics of their inheritances of moral theory, and in their work attempt self-consciously to re-orient or reconstruct that inheritance. For Eliot, Feuerbach is a major encouragement to rethinking the grounds for moral agency; for Levinas, it is the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger …

'A Being Apart': Sympathy And Distance In Middlemarch, Charlie Tyson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I wish to contend that Eliot in Middlemarch (1871-2) frequently tries to attenuate the sympathy that we, her readers, feel for her characters, and that this process of attenuation relies on emphasizing, rather than diminishing, forms of distance between reader and character. She checks our sympathies through techniques of visual staging that press her characters farther away from us in our imagined fields of vision, and through philosophical commentary that emphasizes the commonplace nature of the yearnings and sufferings these characters experience, instead of allowing us to see those circumstances as highly particularized. Despite the standard moral-philosophical observation that sympathy …

Felix Holt And 'A Fine Sight Of Lawsuits', Sheila Woolfe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

During the festivities surrounding the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, much was said about his Warwickshire roots, and commentators noted, not for the first time, his use of Warwickshire dialect. The same is frequently said about George Eliot, of course. A good example occurs early in Felix Holt, in the coachman's words as he takes passengers up the hill past the village of Little Treby:

How many times in the year, as the coach rolled past the neglected-looking lodges which interrupted the screen of trees, and showed the river winding through a finely-timbered park, had the coachman answered the same …

Review Of Victorians Undone: Tales Of The Flesh In The Age Of Decorum, Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a superb book, written with deep scholarship by one of our leading biographers, which breaks new ground in its attention to the physicality of its subjects. In her introduction Kathryn Hughes says that she has felt 'chronically short-changed by the lack of physical detail in biography'. This book, she says, is 'an experiment to see what new stories emerge when you use biography .... to put mouths, bellies and beards back into the nineteenth century' by introducing 'a certain lumpiness to canonical life narratives that have previously been rendered as smooth, symmetrical, and as strangely unconvincing as a …