English Language and Literature Commons^™

Ogbuu-Kay! The "After Laugh" Lingers On, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Memorial Tribute to Ogbu Uke Kalu, 1942-2009.

The African Roots Of Michael Echeruo’S Poetry: A Close-Reading Of ‘Sophia’, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

This paper argues that, contrary to widespread opinion, the poetry of first generation, postcolonial, modernist Nigerian poet, Michael J. C. Echeruo, draws some of its core and defining tropes from indigenous African system of thought and symbolism. The much maligned early poem "Sophia" is subjected to line-by-line close-reading to illustrate this argument. The analysis suggests that, as a matter of fact, "Sophia" can be read as a portal to Echeruo's poetic corpus as a whole.

Dreadful Sorry: Spots Of Passion And The Memory Of Being Human In Kaufman’S “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” And Pope’S ‘Eloisa To Abelard’, June-Ann Greeley

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Memory is a journey of infinite possibility, a continuous passage through time and sense that offers each person an opportunity not merely to recall and to reflect on former occasions and previous experiences, but to reconsider and to reexamine the past as a guide, as instruction, for healthy individuation. Memory, then, can be understood to be the aggregate of experiential and emotional recollection that frames the essential ground in forming and realizing individual identity. Both Alexander Pope in his poem “Eloisa to Abelard” and Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman in the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” offer portraits of individuals …

The Bachelor Narrator Motif In The Sketches Of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carol L. Anderson

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the bachelor narrator motif in seven of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sketches, published between 1831 and 1843. Hawthorne’s narrators are artists, alienated from society in general, and from women in particular. Moreover, they are modeled upon the figure of the European flaneur, the idle ‘man about town’ who believes he can read the character of the stranger in the crowd. In these first person narrations, Hawthorne explores the problems of subjectivity (involving self-concept, including the split between the conscious and the unconscious, and the gap between the mind and the material world) and the problem of knowledge (involving the …

Gods As Parental Figures In Euripides’ Alcestis, Hippolytus, Iphigenia In Aulis And Tauris, Valbone Dushaj

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The relationship between father and child seems to be a tumultuous one in the Greek tragedies, particularly in Euripidean tragedy. Father and child frequently do not have a loving and unrestrained relationship, but rather a distant, stoic bond void of communication. In Alcestis (438 B.C.), Hippolytus (428 B.C.), Iphigenia in Aulis (406 B.C.), and Tauris (414-410 B.C.), the children, Admetus, Hippolytus, and Iphigenia, deal with disregard, mistreatment, and abandonment by their fathers, Pheres, Theseus, and Agamemnon. Doomed to die, these children often hold their fathers accountable, indirectly or directly, as murderers in their passing. Even as the unwritten law of …

The Rhetorical Construction Of Reader-Writer Identities In Contemporary Fiction Reviews, Katherine G. Giannisis

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The New York Times Book Review is a prestigious, well-known, and widely-read publication. Each Sunday, countless readers turn to the reviews published in the Times for critiques of recently released contemporary fiction. The reviews are written by individuals of experience: novelists, short-story writers, nonfiction writers, professors of Literature, and editors of literary publications. However, in recent years, many websites have begun to publish online book reviews written by everyday readers. Goodreads.com, created in December 2006, is a social networking site devoted solely to reviewing and discussing books. My project examines the identity of the reviewer who writes for The New …

Gendered Spaces In James Joyce’S Dubliners, Cynthia J. Hacker

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis paper, entitled Gendered Spaces in James Joyce’s Dubliners, will explore Joyce’s use of the special environment, both public and private. Joyce designed the built spaces in his stories to reflect the way space was gendered in his time. Each space, whether it was the home, the street, the pub, or a church, was indicative of a pattern of power relationships between men and women. Within these gendered spaces, power relationships were constructed, individual consciousness formed, and national identity debated.

In Joyce’s stories, women occupy the space of the home in a way that suggests it is their expected …

Lost In A Lie : Examining The Language Of Storytelling, Lying And Untruths In Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Demons And The Brothers Karamazov, Anastasia Shamin

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis will focus on the liars in three of Dostoevsky’s major novels: The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot and Demons. It will consist of three chapters devoted to one character (liar) from each novel. I will focus on several definitions of lying by examining the concepts of untruth and misfire, which will help to differentiate the characteristics of each character’s motivations, as well as the consequences that their words have on the discourse within the novels. This project’s primary focus will be in exploring the rhetoric of lying by studying the style of each liar’s verbal delivery. The degrees and …

Hali Meiðhad: Normalizing The Sponsae Christi, Sharon E. Rhodes

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Homelessness And Stranger-Ness As Critical Potentialities In Early British Novels, Bonghee Oh

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In its early stages, the British novel generally validates individuals' particularized views of the world, rather than collective ones, and it explores such views in the context of individual's experiences of feeling homeless and of being strangers both within and without the place of home. Broadly conceived, the issues of homelessness and stranger-ness are intimately tied to questions of category, especially regarding the relation between the individual and community, particularity and generality, and the innovative and the traditional in the novel's emergence as a distinct, modern species of writing. By examining the status of orphans and strangers--both in a literal …

Poe's Beauty: The "Sublime" Philosophy Between Burke And The Troubadours, Tara T. Brock

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Collaborative Ethnic Studies: Reference, Influence, And Comparison Of Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children In Carlos Bulosan's America Is In The Heart, Timothy Rowan

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Impolitic: Kent Johnson's Radical Hybridity On Doubled Flowering: From The Notebooks Of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1997), Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets (Blazevox, 2004), Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions To The War (Effing Press, 2005), I Once Met (Longhouse, 2007), And Homage To The Last Avant-Garde (Shearsman Books, 2008), Michael Theune

Scholarship

The past twenty years in American poetry have given rise to middle space poetry, poetry—sometimes labeled “Third Way,” “Hybrid,” and/or “Elliptical”—that situates itself in the middle space between mainstream/lyric and avant-garde/experimental aesthetics. While work in the middle space by now should have added up to an important and fruitful development in contemporary poetry—for there is much shared ground for these aesthetics to explore—middle space thinking and poetry for the most part has been very problematic. Paradoxically, the problems of the middle space—especially as it is presented in its three key anthologies: Reginald Shepherd’s The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries …

Phallus/Phallocentrism, Abigail Rine

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "In psychoanalytic theory, the phallus serves as the supreme symbol of masculine power and, concurrently, of feminine lack. “Phallocentrism” is a term used primarily by feminist theorists to denote the pervasive privileging of the masculine within the current system of signification."

Cold Fusion, Jason Gray

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 37

Holiday Figures, Joanna Pearson

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 77

The Rose, First Edition, Austin Segrest

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 82

The Present Tense, Claudia Emerson

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 24

Wake, Amy Arthur

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 6

Apartment Lullaby, Luke Johnson

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 45

I, Claudia Emerson

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 25

Pomegranate, Jason Gray

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 36

Birmingham Poetry Review 37 (End Matter), Birmingham Poetry Review Staff

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 90-98

Humbaba Clothed In Seven Cloaks, Okla Elliott

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 19

First Death, Claudia Emerson

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 22

Angel As Cigarette, Joanne Lowery

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 59

On The Razor's Edge, Luke Johnson

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 44

Bad Garden, William Logan

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 56

Change Of Season, Linda Parsons Marion

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 60

“She Brings Everything To A Grindstone”: Sympathy And The Paid Female Companion's Critical Work In David Copperfield, Lauren Hoffer

Faculty Publications

In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens employs Rosa Dartle, Mrs. Steerforth's paid female companion, as an agent of his narrative. The companion in Victorian literature is an ambiguous figure whose status as a genteel insider and outsider within the domestic circle makes her a unique vehicle for the disclosure of important information the narrative cannot otherwise convey. Companions in the nineteenth century were hired to provide company, amusement, and, most important, a sympathetic ear for their mistresses' confidences. But, as Dickens and other Victorian writers show, this purchased sympathy-for-hire can be corrupted and distorted to serve the companion's own selfish …