Pullinger's And Joseph's Inanimate Alice And Intercultural Engagement, Ana Abril

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Pullinger's and Joseph's Inanimate Alice and Intercultural Engagement" Ana Abril analyzes Kate Pullinger's and Chris Joseph's digital graphic novel and game. Inanimate Alice offers a model for online education environments and has been widely acclaimed. However, Abril's ana-lysis suggests possible ways for improving the empathic and educational potential of the novel/game for interpersonal and intercultural benefit. Abril bases her analysis on the theories of human interpersonal communication and then applies these findings to Inanimate Alice and suggests improvement so that participants would be able to decide if they want to play from the viewpoint of their own …

New Challenges For The Archiving Of Digital Writing, Heiko Zimmermann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing" Heiko Zimmermann discusses the challenges of the preservation of digital texts. In addition to the problems already at the focus of attention of digital archivists, there are elements in digital literature which need to be taken into consideration when trying to archive them. Zimmermann analyses two works of digital literature, the collaborative writing project A Million Penguins (2006-2007) and Renée Tuner's She… (2008) and shows how the ontology of these texts is bound to elements of performance, to direct social interaction of writers and readers to the uniquely subjective …

Intermedial Strategies Of Memory In Contemporary Novels, Sara Tanderup

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermedial Strategies and Memory in Contemporary Novels" Sara Tanderup discusses a tendency in contemporary literature towards combining intermedial experiments with a thematic preoccupation with memory and trauma. Analyzing selected works by Steven Hall, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Judd Morrissey and drawing on the theoretical perspectives of N. Katherine Hayles (media studies) and Andreas Huyssen (cultural memory studies), Tanderup argues that recent intermedial novels reflect a certain nostalgia celebrating and remembering the book as a visual and material object in the age of digital media while also highlighting the influence of new media on our cultural understanding and …

Setting A Good Example In Pride And Prejudice, Joanna L. Colmery

The Kabod

Although most readers of Pride and Prejudice think that the book centers on the romance between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, I argue that the central message is a warning about romantic fulfilment gone awry as illustrated through Lydia and Wickham. I compare the two suits and identify Austen’s cautionary tale that only through honorable and sincere means in courtship can two people be ensured a happy, satisfying marriage.

Distaste: Joyce Carol Oates And Food, David Rutledge

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Distaste: Joyce Carol Oates and Food

Abstract

In many of her short stories and novels, Joyce Carol Oates depicts an unhealthy relationship with food. The range of these unhealthy relationships is wide, from overeating to the point of suicide, in Expensive People, to starving oneself in an attempt to deny one’s physical nature, in “Orange” and them. Overindulgence is a means for attempting to fill that space where the soul should be; undereating is often an attempt to deny one’s place in the social world. The eating disorders she portrays are rooted in both personal and social causes. …

December 27, 2014: Brian Gogan Kicks Off Spring Season For Ellis Speakers Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Radical Rejections And Sloppy Seconds, Meaghan Dodson

English Student Scholarship

Jane Austen is famous for her heroines and their marriages; at the same time, however, she is also infamous for these same heroines rejecting proposals of marriage. This paper explores how Austen uses the failed marriage proposal to show how women need not fear putting their own happiness first - an idea that is just as radical in our own day and age.

Lisbeth Salander Lost In Translation - An Exploration Of The English Version Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Kajsa Paludan

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This thesis sets out to explore the cultural differences between Sweden and the United States by examining the substantial changes made to Men Who Hate Women, including the change in the book’s title in English to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. My thesis focuses in particular on changes in the depiction of the female protagonist: Lisbeth Salander. Unfortunately we do not have access to translator Steven T. Murray’s original translation, though we know that the English publisher and rights holder Christopher MacLehose chose to enhance Larsson’s work in order to make the novel more interesting for English-speaking …

Invincible: Legacy And Propaganda In Superhero Comics, Natalie R. Sheppard

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Captain America and Iron Man are both iconic American heroes, representing different American values. Captain America was created during the Golden Age of comics and represents a longing for the past, while Iron Man was created at the height of the Cold War and looks forward to a new America. This paper will first establish the historical and cultural relationship between comic books and propaganda, beginning with the first appearance of Superman. It will pay special attention to the similarities and differences of Captain America and Iron Man, focusing on their representation of American values over time, and discuss how …

The Folly Of Erasmian Scepticism In Shakespeare’S A Midsummer Night’S Dream, James Cafferty

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Streams In The Wilderness, Miranda Beale

The Kabod

Miranda Beale analyzes two award-winning novels by Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), identifying their major themes as the necessity of balancing parental responsibility and God's loving guidance and redemptive power in raising children.

Transferential Poetics, From Poe To Warhol, Adam Frank

Literature

Transferential Poetics presents a method for bringing theories of affect to the study of poetics. Informed by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, it offers new interpretations of the poetics of four major American artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Andy Warhol. The author emphasizes the close, reflexive attention each of these artists pays to the transfer of feeling between text and reader, or composition and audience— their transferential poetics. The book’s historical route from Poe to Warhol culminates in television, a technology and cultural form that makes affect distinctly available to perception. …

(Un)Wrapping Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Relational Power And Contagious Wonderment Of Candy And Other Things, Brooke Clark

Honors Theses

Huddled in the corner of the cold, sterile floor of The Art Institute of Chicago, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991 is a mound of individually wrapped, multihued candy that can be possessed, consumed, and rearranged by the audience (artic.edu). The parenthetical remark within the title suggests the portrait is that of a human. In fact, Ross was the artist's lover, who died of AIDS in the year 1991. The candy spill memorializes Ross at his healthy weight of one hundred seventy-five pounds. Even as Ross's body is implicated in the candy, the candies themselves contain and …

Beyond Marriage And Motherhood: The Motifs Involved In The Portrayal Of Women In Literature, Hannah Hunter

Honors Theses

When I was in elementary school most of the books that I voluntarily read featured female characters. Part of the reason was that it was expected of me and those books (about girls/women) were the ones recommended to me. Another part was that female characters were the ones I could most closely relate to. They gave me ideas about what it is to be a woman, and subtly led me to approach the question of what kind of woman I wanted to be. It took me years to really pick up on the stereotypes and recurring female characters, and it …

'Precious Objects': Strange 'Things' In James And Wharton, John Kinard

Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I attempt to examine the importance of things, the strange agency of objects, which emerges in the literature of the late nineteenth century. To this end, I examine the economy of things in both Henry James and Edith Wharton. I attempt to connect this object agency with the emergent discourses and technologies of the time, and to link these both with media and queer theory.

Telescopes And Spyglasses: Using Literary Theories In High School Classrooms, Danielle M. Rains

Honors Projects

This handbook is structured in a way that can be directly applied to the classroom. The theories are organized and ordered to build on one another; the skills that your students learn from one will help them complete the tasks of the next. Each chapter provides information about the theory, how to conduct a reading following the theory’s guidelines, and how to introduce the theory to your students.

Gothic Literature And The Politics Of Indistinction, Nicholas Everett Miller

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

I recover the Gothic as a literature of political possibility. While scholars have long associated the Gothic tradition with political fear, I argue that Gothic novels challenge liberal ideas of the self to produce a sometimes radically egalitarian politics of freedom in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Edmund Burke made much of the fearfulness of an egalitarian politics in the 1790s, and literary historians have relied on his influence to argue that Gothic fiction is primarily an expression of the fear that comes with the collapse of familial, social, and political distinctions. But fear is not all that accompanies such …

Living On The Moon: Women, Home Making, And The House After World War Ii In Shirley Jackson’S We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Leslie Dennis

Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis, I concentrate on Shirley Jackson, her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and women’s place in post-World War II American society. To start, I introduce Jackson and her role in literary history, the housewife writer in the 1950s and 60s, and magazine culture. Then I move to a historical perspective of the 1950s and propaganda during the atomic war era. I focus my attention on how government literature worked to contain women in the home and control sexuality and gender roles. Following my discussion of domesticity, I concentrate on the history of the Gothic novel …

The Poetic Works Of Charlotte Smith: Philosophy, Sympathy, And Forging Community, Jessica Danielle Castillo

Theses and Dissertations

This work will focus on Charlotte Smith’s poetic works and how, over the course of her entire poetic career (the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century), she exhibits a concrete sense of a poetic ethos regarding sympathy in her writing. I seek to account for the overwhelming focus on suffering subjects by illuminating her view of the relation between poetry and sympathy for others. I will also place her within a history of writers and philosophers who examined the epistemological and practical nature of feeling, sympathy, and emotional connection among human beings. Smith feels that poetry renders suffering visible to others, …

Revising For Genre: Mary Robinson's Poetry From Newspaper Verse To Lyrical Tales, Shelley Aj Jones

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, not as the culminating point to which her writing inevitably led, as is frequently imagined in accounts of her life and work, but, instead, as the product of an intricate process of revision that highlights her investment in genre. Versions of many of the poems that Robinson included in Lyrical Tales originally were published in newspapers and periodicals. Rather than seeing the changes as a move toward a best or most mature or inspired version, I argue that Robinson revised to meet the requirements of her new genre, the lyrical tale. I …

Gothic Sense And Sensibility, Stephanie Abigail Taylor

The Kabod

It is well known that Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is a parody of the Gothic genre, and this paper supports that reading. However, this paper analyzes the novel through the use of Austen’s identification of the terms “sense” and “sensibility” that she constructs in Sense and Sensibility to explain specifically how and why Austen parodies Gothic novels that were all the fashion in her day.

“Readers’ Disappointed Expectations: Religious Symbols In ‘The Jilting Of Granny Weatherall’”, Rachel I. Gessel

Student Works

The short story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter is the account of a devout Catholic woman on her death bed who dwells on being jilted at the altar sixty years earlier. It is commonly accepted among scholars that the “jilting” in the title also refers to a second jilting at the end of the story. Although it could be debated that the jilting referred to in the title could only refer to Granny’s jilting at the altar, over ten peer-reviewed articles about this short story suggest or acknowledge that the jilting also refers to Christ jilting …

Jane Austen And The 21st-Century Classroom, Maureen Jecrois

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Across the United States, educators and administrators have been discussing whether classical literature still has a place within the high school classroom. Included in this discussion are the works of Jane Austen. And while Jane Austen’s texts have much to offer as far as discussion on gender and familial dynamics, economic and political tension, and, of course, societal norms (what our communities expect from us individually and as a whole), the texts present many challenges within the frameworks of today’s classroom. What we have come to know as “our” time is a rapidly changing environment filled with experiences and technologies …

December 11, 2014: Undergraduate English Majors Submit Papers To The Medieval And Renaissance Studies Colloquium 2015!, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Looking Again At James Currie's Inventory: The Other Side Of The Burns Correspondence, Patrick G. Scott, Joseph C. Durant

Faculty Publications

This article, based on editorial work in progress for the forthcoming Letters Addressed to Robert Burns, 1779-1796, briefly describes the larger project and then explores one of the major project sources, James Currie's inventory of the letters in Burns's possession at the time of his death, to show the range of his correspondence and how some of the brief inventory letter-summaries can be expanded by research. The article is based on a videorecorded presentation for Project Symposium no. 3: "Textual Landmarks," for the AHRC-funded project Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century, Center for Robert Burns Studies, University of …

English Language Learning Through Visual Arts Practices: A Curriculum For Conflict-Affected Youth In Secondary Education, Jenny Lemper

Master's Projects and Capstones

This field project summarizes recent research in conflict and education, and presents an English language learner curriculum designed to address the current gap in quality education for conflict-affected youth. The curriculum contains six modules and develops English language literacy through student visual arts projects using text and images. The purpose of the curriculum is to familiarize students to the various confidence-building and coping mechanisms available in creative expression and to develop valuable visual and verbal language related life skills, therefore equipping students with tools to support successful futures.

The Rape Of Blanche: An Examination Of Critical Analysis & Sexist Overtones, Audrey Thayer

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The first people to ever listen to the words of A Streetcar Named Desire were two women, Margo Jones and Joanna Albus. Tennessee Williams read them an uncompleted first draft of the play. Margo Jones was “supportive of the play but urged him to rewrite it and to soften Blanche's hysteria. He listened, and ignored her” (Rader 199). The very first people who were privy to the violent, sensual, chaotic world of Blanche and Stanley were two women who found fault in Stella's character. They saw her hysteria, no doubt an unbecoming trait, as “far out,” or perhaps unbelievable. Much …

Birth By Sleep: An Immersive Adventure Through Wonderland, Edd Bass

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

When Lewis Carroll wrote down Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland he never expected it to become a worldwide sensation. His work has gained a following as psychoanalysis has allowed people to dive deeper into Alice’s dream world. Many books and movies based on the Alice books have been released, such as Sucker Punch. On a seemingly unrelated topic, a company called Punchdrunk has created an immersive theatre piece known as Sleep No More in which the audience runs around a “hotel” following different actors and trying to unveil the story unfolding. Immersive Theatre allows for the audience to be swallowed up …

The Supernatural’S Role In The Juxtaposition Of The Ideas Of Modernity, Traditionalism And Identity In Zakes Mda’S The Heart Of Redness, Thabo Lucky Mzileni

English 502: Research Methods

The supernatural is an entity found in many African literary texts as it is an important part of the African cultural fabric that informs and shapes the African way of life. In modern times the supernatural still informs these African cultures even though it is oftentimes defined by some unknown entity outside the realm of understanding, beyond reason. This paper explores the ideas presented in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness—a novel sourced from the Xhosa cattle killings of 1856-1857, prompted by Nongqawuse’s prophetic message. Specifically, the paper examines how ideas of modernity, traditionalism and identity are influenced by …

Marcus Clarke: Confronting Spectacle With Spectacle In For The Term Of His Natural Life, Mary E. Perkins

English 502: Research Methods

While Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life is unquestionably a valuable contribution to Australian literature, his journalism career also deserves equal attention, particularly as an influential antecedent to the creation of his seminal text not only on a technical basis as John Conley details in “Marcus Clarke: The Romance of Reality”, but also as a social platform. In “Marcus Clarke and the Society of the Spectacle: Reflections on Writing and Commodity Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne,” Andrew McCann demonstrates how the “Peripatetic Philosopher”— one of Clarke’s more successful journalistic endeavors—and other selections reveal Clarke’s critique of the colonial …