English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Ownership Of Cultural Objects : Means, Mechanics And Masteries, Anne Marie Salloum

Honors Theses

The issues surrounding cultural objects and their ownership have risen to greater prominence in the recent past. Consider the Elgin Marbles, to take a well-known and hotly debated example. They were taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, and as soon as Greece gained its independence, it demanded their return. Even this relatively simple case raises questions about cultural objects and ownership. To whom do cultural objects belong? Why? What effect do the changing circumstances brought about by the passage of time have on ownership? And the Elgin Marbles are only one …

"I Don't Think She's Like The Rest Of Us" : The Freedom In Disadvantage For Orphan Girls In Early 20th Century Literature, Giavanna Palermo

Honors Theses

Marianne Hirsch notes that often, in literature, the absence of the mother is the basis for the heroine’s development. On this foundation, there is nothing new in the observation that orphan girls in literature enjoy a kind of freedom that comes from being without parents and, specifically, without a mother. What this paper seeks to examine, however, through the textual analysis of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs, is the way in which the figure …

The Death Of The Virtuous Heroine As Social Criticism In Clarissa And Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Carmel Rosanna Nunan

Honors Theses

While Samuel Richardson meticulously documents the slow decline of his heroine in the novel Clarissa, other characters in the novel struggle to understand a death that for them has no rational explanation. The novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, also epistolary and published thirty-five years after Clarissa, allows for a similar interpretation. Contemporary French reactions to Madame de Tourvel’s death cannot compare to the English response elicited by Clarissa’s, but, like Richardson, Laclos also introduces certain social forces that seal his heroine’s fate from without while her own psychological experience of virtue works to destroy her …

'Grung Tell Me Wud': An Introduction To Karl, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Olive Senior informs us in 'The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su: Finding a Literary Voice' that Jamaican elders believe the ground is the place where ancestral wisdom is located and they will explain and validate their warning or advice by saying, 'Grung tell me wud' (36). Jamaican linguist/literary critic/poet/and novelist Velma Pollard has put her ear to the ground of Jamaica and shared many important words of ancestral wisdom with us. This was a natural development for the talented girlchild born into an artistic family in Woodside, Jamaica, a rural community rich in folk traditions: her father was …

Word Oper Findan : Seamus Heaney And The Translation Of Beowulf, Jack Harding Bell

Honors Theses

In 2000, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney published a new translation of the early medieval epic, Beowulf The work was subsequently lauded as a masterpiece. Despite this ensuing surge of interest in Heaney's translation, very few scholars have undertaken the task of a critical analysis of the translation and none have assumed the task of a comparative analysis between the original text and Heaney's version. Most, it seems, have assumed that Heaney's translation is a faithful rendition of the original, and with good reason. Heaney maintains fidelity to the structure, stylistics, and meter of the original, as well as to its …

The Dwarfing Of Men In Victorian Fairy-Tale Literature, Heather Victoria Vermeulen

Honors Theses

As Jack Zipes explains in his preface to Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and the Elves, "The Victorian fairy-tale writers always had two ideal audiences in mind when they composed their tales -young middle-class readers whose minds and morals they wanted to influence, and adult middle-class readers whose ideas they wanted to challenge and reform" (xiv). "It was through the fairy tale," he continues, "that a social discourse about conditions in Victorian England took form, and this discourse is not without interest for readers today" (xi). My project begins with a critical analysis of the Grimm Brothers' …

"I Put The Tale Back Where I Found It": Feeling The Past Through "The Warmth Of The Human Voice", Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In this article, I examine my revelations and growth related to folk culture and literature connected to the African American community. I borrow from and play on the Sudanese formulaic ending for the folktale; it seemed to me appropriate - even obligatory- that "I put the tale back where I found it." This maxim is symbolic, reflecting what I find one of the most characteristic elements of Black folklore - that is, the focus on the group, the community, in terms of the source of the historical situation of the tale; the moral lesson; the content, style, and delivery; and …

Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, And Survival By Meredith M. Gadsby (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

The folk will tell you that salt can either save you or destroy you. Toni Cade Bambara's Velma of The Salteaters realized that her survival depended on learning "the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent." The lesson of similar folk wisdom is the subject of Meredith M. Gasby's Sucking Salt, where she propses as a new framework for the examination of Caribbean women's writing the survival techiniques implied in "sucking salt," techiniques suggested in her aunt's reflections on people she knew. Tantie expounded: "Little salt won't kill …

Reworking "Seeming Trust" Into "Excellent Falsehood" : The Lying Heroes Of William Shakespeare's Dark Lady Sonnets And Antony And Cleopatra, Dorrie Turner Bishop

Master's Theses

William Shakespeare reinvents the speaker of his Dark Lady sonnets as Antony of Antony and Cleopatra, with the former's hesitant appreciation of the benefits of a "lying," lustful relationship reconfigured into the latter's total embrace of an edifying, creative mutuality. This represents an important philosophical shift in Shakespeare's view of aesthetics: where in the Dark Lady sonnets, the speaker chastises himself for feeding his desire with lies and self delusions, Antony, his parallel, believes that the love he and his queen have created is somehow noble, even ideal. He rejects the "truth"- perhaps as the Romans would see it- …

[Introduction To] People Of Paradox: A History Of Mormon Culture, Terryl Givens

Bookshelf

In People of Paradox, Terryl Givens traces the rise and development of Mormon culture from the days of Joseph Smith in upstate New York, through Brigham Young's founding of the Territory of Deseret on the shores of Great Salt Lake, to the spread of the Latter-Day Saints around the globe.

Throughout the last century and a half, Givens notes, distinctive traditions have emerged among the Latter-Day Saints, shaped by dynamic tensions--or paradoxes--that give Mormon cultural expression much of its vitality. Here is a religion shaped by a rigid authoritarian hierarchy and radical individualism; by prophetic certainty and a celebration …

Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives And The Second Generation By Lisa D. Mcgill (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Using second generation Americans Harry Belafonte, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Piri Thomas, and the meringue hip hop group Proyecto Uno, Lisa D. McGill considers in Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation the issues of identity formation of those whose heritage ultimately includes Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, most often New York City. Though her subjects come from different national, racial, and language backgrounds; though they have made their names in different media; and though they have different views of race, identity, and culture, she convincingly makes the argument that "African America becomes powerful site …

Who Was Cock Robin? A New Reading Of Erna Brodber's Jane And Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Much has been written about the quest of Brodber's protagonist Nellie for identity, for wholeness, for balance, for sanity, for finding her way back home into the community. Nellie's efforts to find herself and to integrate into the community will be easier, Brodber declared in a speech in 1988, "when Jane and Louisa come home, i.e., when the women find themselves" (Notes). Brodber also observed in that same speech, "'coming' rather than 'being' is the appropriate action word with which to address the issue of integration into the community," a fact suggested by the game that gives the title to …

English Calvinism And The Crowd: Coriolanus And The History Of Religious Reform, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches,” Greenblatt suggests, is a “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in the playwright's histories and tragedies. To be sure, his little excursions in London left their mark on his scripts, yet he scrupulously sifted his literary sources from which he drew characters and crises onto the stage. He prowled around Plutarch and read Stow and Hollinshed on the wars …

The Lawrencian Becoming Of Deleuze, Saffana Manoun

Master's Theses

Gilles Deleuze and D.H. Lawrence, the philosopher with a poetic writing and the literary man with a philosophical project, invite us to consider their affinities and differences. An unavoidable trace of the Lawrence in Deleuze has not received the attention it should. This lack of critical attention makes the enterprise more worthy of initiation. To demonstrate something of the relationship between them, this essay is divided into three parts that gloss their main points of intersection and difference. I begin with the question of what is at stake in such a comparative endeavor. In the second section, I focus on …

Balancing The Power Of The Patriarchy : The Evolution Of Self-Determined Identity For Women In Josephine Humphreys' Dreams Of Sleep And Rich In Love, Mary Ramsey Evans

Master's Theses

Fifty years after William Faulkner wrote Absalom, Absalom! Josephine Humphreys revisited the patriarchal metaphor of failure of the Old South in her first novel, Dreams of Sleep. In this novel, and again in her second novel, Rich in Love, Humphreys examines the ambivalent state of gender relations in the contemporary South brought on by the destabilization of a traditionally patriarchal society increasingly under economic, social, and political pressure to conform to a more egalitarian national standard. Using intergenerational relationships between women, Humphreys demonstrates how the devolution of patriarchal identity becomes the catalyst for the evolution of a self-determined …

The Mrs. Browns Of Modernism, Kathleen O'Donnell

Honors Theses

I begin with this literary critical parable because I am interested in arguments about and attempts to define what modernism was. I situate the following project after the fall of the modernist canon, in a literary critical context in which it remains doubtful that modernisms could be modernism again. As a response to that situation, I propose a way of defining modernism that may do justice to the complexity and variety of modernist texts, while seeking also to recognize that which they had in common. Although what follows might be called an analysis of literary form, it is not a …

Articulating Silence In The Postcolonial Indian Novel, Kaelin O'Connell

Honors Theses

Whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India can be expressed in writing. As soon as everything of importance is expressed in writing, a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year, in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India.

-James Mill, The History of British India, 1817.

This quotation, from the first philosophical history of India, posits the common British colonial notion that language, specifically the written word, might capture all that is "worth …

Ismith Khan (1925-2002), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Trinidadian novelist who explored the conflicts experienced by East Indians in the Caribbean as well as the racial diversity that characterizes the region. A brilliant storyteller, he created memorable characters through whom the sights and cadences of Trinidad will forever live.

In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

With In Search of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson makes the third major attempt to provide a biography of the elusive Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the mulatto daughter of immigrants from Denmark and the Danish West Indies whose life and fiction were shaped largely by her mixed emotions about her racial heritage and her feelings of abandonment by her white mother, stepfather, and sister. In his introduction, Hutchinson makes much of the errors of prior Larsen biographers Charles R. Larson (Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen [1993]) and Thadious M. Davis (Nella Larsen, Novelist of …

Bennett, Louise, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Louise Bennett, affectionately called Miss Lou, is Jamaica's most beloved folk poet, performer, and collector; she was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on September 7, 1919. Her father, a baker, died when she was seven years old, and her mother worked as a dressmaker to provide for her only child. She was educated in Jamaica at Calabar Elementary School, Excelsior High School, and St. Simon's College, after which she received a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England.

Postcolonial Melodrama : The Satanic Verses, The Mimic Men, The Namesake, Jason Przybylski

Honors Theses

The goal of this project is to explain the appropriateness of the genre of melodrama for understanding postcolonial literature. Throughout this paper I examine how reading postcolonial fiction as melodrama may help us both to understand postcolonial issues in new ways and, at the same time, to grasp how postcolonial literature changes and enhances the notion of melodrama.

Treasuring Identity : Subject-Object Relations In Beowulf, Becky Workman

Honors Theses

Beowulfs introspection leads him to seek glory and wealth to preserve his memory after death. Unlike the battles against Grendel and Grendel's mother, Beowulfs actions against the dragon clearly prioritize the winning of treasure over the safety of the people. Beowulf seems to believe that revenge upon the dragon is a justification for risking not only his life, but the stability of the leadership of his nation. The hoard that he wins illustrates how material objects are not necessarily longer lasting or more stable than mortals. Treasure's intimate connection with the human body in the social structure of the community …

Short Fiction By Women In The Victorian Literature Survey, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The first time I taught a Victorian Literature survey, fresh out of a curriculum integration workshop in graduate school, I taught ten authors: five male and five female. One student evaluation after the course was over complained that despite the promise of “great” Victorian writers, half of those on the syllabus were women. While this did take place in the dark ages of the early nineties, I still find myself, as I design my syllabi, caught in the familiar conundrum as to what to teach, what to cut, and why. In my case, it seems simple: The Victorian period is …

Exploring Memory As A Narrative Strategy For Enabling Black Consciousness In Ezekial Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue And Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood, Christina Leigh Buckland

Master's Theses

Ezekial Mphahlele in Down Second Avenue and Mongane Serote in To Every Birth Its Blood use the function of memory as a narrative strategy to illuminate the evolution of individual black consciousness. Mphahlele's novel is autobiographical, investigating the chronological memory of Zeke as his consciousness evolves. Serote's work is a collection of stories investigating several characters whose individual experiential memories create a collective consciousness. For Zeke in Down Second Avenue and the characters in To Every Birth Its Blood, memory is an active device which can recall apartheid experience in order to heighten black consciousness and analyze the current …

Beyond Gender : The Pursuit Of Power In The Henriad And Coriolanus, James Aaron Beavers

Master's Theses

The feminine in Shakespeare's plays, like the Bakhtinian grotesque, often offers a critical perspective on patriarchal society. Shakespeare creates characters whose feminine perspective enables them to stand outside of the patriarchal paradigm and operate according to alternative modes of behavior. While the dominant system regards power solely as a masculine territory, Shakespeare suggests that true power can only be effectively pursued by those who are not bound to a particular gender identity, but are able to shift their personas in accordance with their ever-changing milieu. In Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, and Coriolanus, Shakespeare depicts …

Didactic Anti-Didacticism : Aesthetics And Contradictions In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Dominic Laron Finney

Master's Theses

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray calls for a reinvention of aestheticism during the Victorian Age. Wilde felt that the Victorians had surrendered any ornamentation in art to the rules of formality in religion and politics. He also believed that art should teach solely through its existence that there is a realm above mankind. Art should not be used for anything else. Dorian curses himself when he uses his portrait to exchange his soul for eternal beauty. Wilde wrote this novel as his work of art. And, the novel is to "civilize" the Victorian public, to return them to …

Katherine Anne Porter's Notorious Virgins : Female Sexuality And Catholicism In "Virgin Violeta", "Flowering Judas", And "Old Mortality", Christine L. Grogan

Master's Theses

The intersection of Roman Catholic ideology and female sexuality remains at the heart of Katherine Anne Porter's short stories, "Virgin Violeta" (1924), "Flowering Judas" (1930), and "Old Mortality" (1937). In these works, Porter implicitly suggests that the Catholic ideology of the early twentieth century has been reduced to a matter of sexuality, particularly female sexual purity. Through her portraits of the young virgin Violeta in "Virgin Violeta" and the frigid adult Laura in "Flowering Judas," Porter challenges the Roman Catholic emphasis on female chastity. In tracing the development of Miranda in "Old Mortality," Porter subverts Roman Catholic ideology by presenting …

From Fancy Women To Demimondames : Working Class Women In Peter Taylor's Short Fiction, Frank Sung Cha

Master's Theses

In "The Fancy Woman" and "The Old Forest," Peter Taylor examines the identity of working class women in the southern social structure and the roles they play in revising class and gender perceptions. Josie Carlson, "The Fancy Woman's" protagonist, discovers the stifling nature of class divisions. The gap between the working and upper-middle-classes remains as the social hierarchy and Taylor himself lock Josie in a subordinate position. They prevent her from attaining any sense of liberation. However, the working class 'Demimondames' in "The Old Forest" exhibit a stronger independence spirit, compelling society to reevaluate traditional social perceptions. Although they too …

The Politics Of Theater And The Theater Of Law: The Legal And Cultural Implications In Langston Hughes And John Wexley's Dramatizations Of The Scottsboro Trials, Mosby Garland Perrow Iv

Master's Theses

Collectively, the charges and convictions of nine black youths in Scottsboro in 1931 became a symbol of corruption and oppression for those interested in reshaping America's political and legal landscapes. Scottsboro instigated a decade of trials and retrials, two landmark United States Supreme Court opinions, countless dramatic interpretations, and various artistic responses. In particular, Scottsboro, Limited by Langston Hughes and They Shall Not Die by John Wexley were cultural revisions of the trials in 1931 and 1933, respectively. While both works supported the defendants, they were distinguished by their form, production and ultimate statement about the meaning of Scottsboro. These …

Narrating The Middle Ground : B The Examination Of Objects In The Modern Genre Of Immigrant Fiction, Meagna A. Patinella

Honors Theses

Dislocated objects tell stories about the places they come from, their migration, and their new surroundings. More importantly, they disclose the narratives of people that possess or interact with them. In this paper I examine objects present in novels ofimmigration and transnational movement, for objects in such fictions are most noticeably dislodged from their original or expected context. Their relocation allows me to interpret them and their narratives, which in turn, allows me to think about the genre of immigrant fiction in a new light.