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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Writing For Social Action: Affect, Activism, And The Composition Classroom, Sarah Finn
Writing For Social Action: Affect, Activism, And The Composition Classroom, Sarah Finn
Open Access Dissertations
Due to the public turn in Composition and Rhetoric, many teachers look beyond the academy in order to give students a "real" writing experience for social change purposes. However, as Bruce Horner notes, this denigrates the real work that is done within the classroom. In this dissertation, then, I argue that we can find ingredients for writing for social action in our courses, and we can do so by studying activist students who are already writing for just change. Using a case study methodology, I learn from activist students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I find that these students' …
Feeling With Imagination: Sympathy And Postwar American Poetry, Timothy A. Dejong
Feeling With Imagination: Sympathy And Postwar American Poetry, Timothy A. Dejong
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation examines how sympathy, defined as the act of “feeling with” another, develops within American poetics from 1950-1965 both as aesthetic strategy and as political response to Cold War culture. Re-examining the social aims of postwar poets typically either thought of as apolitical or yoked to political positions not in fact evidenced by their poems, I argue that these poets, by developing forms of sympathy that negotiate the middle space between the aesthetic conventions of late modernist poetry and the social concerns of postwar American culture, instantiate a self-questioning, often implicit form of “soft politics” that both prefigures and …
Beyond The Looking-Glass: The Intensity Of The Gothic Dream In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Anne N. Nagel
Beyond The Looking-Glass: The Intensity Of The Gothic Dream In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Anne N. Nagel
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The dream is a contested space in terms of allegory and affect, the non-conscious intensity associated with feelings and emotions. Readers tend to express disappointment when a narrative turns out to be “just a dream,” yet the dream is uniquely capable of evoking powerful affective intensity. Yet most scholarship approaches the literary dream through representational interpretation, which not only overlooks the intensity of affect, but dampens it. The dreamer cannot interpret the dream while engrossed in dreaming. By taking into consideration the perspective of the dreamer, this thesis moves beyond the reflective lens of symbolic interpretation to explore the intensity …
Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee
Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee
Publications and Research
In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …