English Language and Literature Commons^™

Lessons In Humanity: A Memoir, Chelsi Joy Sutton-Linderman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the opening pages of his work, Dog Years; A Memoir, Mark Doty explains: Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles, or gibberish. This is why I shouldn't be writing anything about the two dogs that have been such presences for sixteen years of my life. How on earth could I stand at the requisite distance to say anything that might matter? (1)

In this thesis I argue that Doty, among other respected contemporary writers, is saying something that matters when he writes of …

A Transnational Study: Young Adult Literature Exchanged Between The Us And Germany, Kristana Miskin

Theses and Dissertations

Both young adult literature and transnational literature occupy transitional spaces and defy simple classifications. Their commonalities naturally suit the two sets of literature for concurrent study. However, the field is underdeveloped, particularly in the United States. With a concentration on the exchanges taking place between the U.S. and Germany, this thesis addresses the need to assemble primary materials and pertinent critical commentary into a single place available to educators, scholars, and researchers to acquire background on transnational YAL themes. The thesis delineates methods used in conducting and compiling research on U.S.-German YAL exchange and highlights the translation and publication concerns …

Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 [Review], David Rando

English Faculty Research

Like Stranger Shores (2000), Inner Workings collects J. M. Coetzee’s recent literary essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books or as introductions. Bound together, they accrue a taste and texture that readers might not have suspected if they encountered these essays in their original publications. Coetzee engages a compelling cluster of twentieth-century writers, including, among others, Italo Svevo, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, W. G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, V. S. Naipaul, and, likely of special interest to this journal’s readers, Philip Roth. Walt Whitman is the lonely denizen …

A True War Story: Reality And Simulation In The American Literature And Film Of The Vietnam War, Alexis Turley Middleton

Theses and Dissertations

The Vietnam War has become an important symbol and signifier in contemporary American culture and politics. The word "Vietnam" contains many meanings and narratives, including both the real events of the American War in Vietnam and the fictional representations of that war. Because we live in a reality that is composed of both lived experience and simulacra, defined by Baudrillard as a hyperreality, fiction and simulation are capable of representing particular realities. Vietnam was shaped by simulacra of Vietnam itself as well as simulacra of previous American conflicts, especially World War II; however, the hyperreality of Vietnam differed largely from …

Children's Film As Social Practice, Joseph L. Zornado

Faculty Publications

In his paper "Children's Film as Social Practice," J. Zornado argues that the animated feature is a genre distinct in its own right, and, although overlooked by film criticism up to now, deserves rigorous, scholarly attention. Zornado employs the term "iconology" to develop a foundation for a critical methodology indebted to Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan as well as contemporary film criticism. Iconology of the animated feature film is the study of the meaning systems of the dominant culture and the ways in which such systems are inscribed into all kinds of social practice geared, specifically, to seduce and inform the …

Dying Gods And Sacred Prostitutes, Katherine Elizabeth Williamson

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Explores the ways in which D.H. Lawrence revises and complicates archetypal characters and stories in his fiction. Lawrence's mythic revisions are frequently along gender lines, thus having significant implications for femininst or gendered readings of his works. Focuses mainly on The Rainbow and The Plumed Serpent but also treats some of Lawrence's shorter fiction.

"So I Shall Tell You A Story:" The Subversive Voice In Beatrix Potter's Picture Books, Veronica Bruscini

Honors Projects

Describes how recent literary scholarship has begun to interpret the themes and topics found within the children's picture books of Beatrix Potter through the lens of the code-language in Potter's secret journal, deciphered and published by Leslie Linder in 1966. Analyzes three tales from Potter's collection of picture books, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Two Bad Mice, and The Tale of Pigling Bland, to illustrate the ways these books continued to represent the social and personal observations, voicing subversive reactions to the excesses and hypocrises of Victorian culture, that Potter first began in her journal.

Using Stanley Cavell, Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

Stanley Cavell often speaks of inheriting and carrying on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other writers. These writers help him move on in his own thinking, turning him around when he feels lost, provoking him when he gets discouraged or stuck. His indebtedness to J. L. Austin in the acknowledgements to Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) captures one way he benefits from all the writers who have influenced him: “To the late J. L. Austin I owe, beyond what I hope is plain in my work, whatever is owed the teacher …

Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation To "Finnegans Wake" [Review], David Rando

English Faculty Research

Books about Finnegans Wake announce their forms with unusual regularity: skeleton keys, plot summaries, reader’s guides, first-draft versions, lexicons, gazetteers, censuses, genetic guides, annotations, and more. Every form offers a particular route through the Wake, and we hope our collective efforts add up to a cartography of possibilities. But until now we have never been issued an “invitation” to the Wake. Many readers of this journal will realize that they must have invited themselves uncouthly to the Wake long ago, and some will imagine that it is too late for invitations when one has already been at the party …

Ordinary Apocalypse, Anthony Villella

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Work of short fiction, in which a young man, struggling with contempt for his family and himself, makes a terrible mistake and is forced to deal with who and what he has become.

American Suburban, James Michael Ashworth

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

A collection of poetry that examines contemporary American suburban life through the author's reflections on his own working class consciousness and aspirations for a middle class lifestyle.

Words & Images 2008, University Of Southern Maine

Words and Images

Words & Images is an annual arts and literature publication distributed by the University of Southern Maine.

Publishing Director: Ryan Gato

Assistant Publishing Director: Grace Mueller

Managing Editor: Benjamin Rybeck

Literary Retrospection In The Harlem Renaissance, Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

In 1925, book collector and Harlem Renaissance patron Arthur A. Schomburg began the essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past," published in Alain Locke's landmark anthology The New Negro (1925), by proclaiming that the "American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. ... So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and opt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all" (231). These words might be surprising to the beginning student of the Harlem Renaissance, seduced by …

Parnassus 2008

Parnassus

The 2008 edition of the student literary journal, Parnassus, published by Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.

Fontana Hall And Other Stories, Vincenzo Lucciola

Honors Projects

Collection of short stories, including three pieces of flash fiction, three short stories, and one longer story. The author aims at developing a wider grasp of the craft of fiction writing and uses as a running theme the ways by which we choose to negotiate the imperfect life situations in which we find ourselves.

Asides As Discourse: The Pendulum Of Power Between The Sexes In Shakespeare's Richard Iii And Titus Andronicus, Rosalinda Simone

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Elements Of Mythmaking In Witness Accounts Of Colonial Piracy, Plamen Ivanov Arnaudov

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Focusing on historical accounts (1684-1734) by English, French, and Spanish witnesses, this dissertation establishes a continuity in fictionalized representations of anti-heroic pirates from the buccaneering period to the Golden Age of Piracy. Informed by history, literary, myth, and performance theory, the analysis identifies significant distortions in reports by observers and participants. The distortions that pertain to mythmaking patterns are classified and analyzed further. Conflicting and ambivalent representations of the pirate as an anti-hero are resolved through the positing of a literary scapegoat hypothesis drawing from René Girard and Joseph Roach. While demonstrating mythical archetypes at work in the construction of …

Learning To Transgress: Embedded Pedagogies Of The Gothic, Jan Wellington

Jan Wellington

No abstract provided.