English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon

Theses and Dissertations--English

Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public …

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

Turning Their Talk: Gendered Conversation In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rebecca Beach

Theses and Dissertations--English

Turning Their Talk investigates the pressures placed upon female characters’ communication styles as they enter the heterosexual market in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The title of this dissertation derives from a phrase found in each the six novels I examine--“she turned the conversation”—to suggest the subtle control female characters exercise through speech that allows them to achieve tangible forms of social agency. My dissertation argues that novelistic representations of speech mirror the paradoxical roles women historically faced as they balanced societal …

Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank

Theses and Dissertations--English

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …

The American Dime Museum: Bodily Spectacle And Social Midways In Turn-Of-The-Century American Literature And Culture, James C. Fairfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

The freak played a significant role in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century entertainment, but its significance extended beyond such venues as sideshows and minstrel shows. This dissertation examines the freak as an avatar emblematic of several issues, such as class and race, traditionally focused on in studies of Turn-of-the Century American literature and culture.

Disability and freakishness are explored as central to late-nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Americans’ identity. Freakishness is applied to a series of ways in which Americans in this period constructed their identity, including race, gender, and socioeconomic class, showing the dual role that the freak played for many …

Angel Outside The House: The New Woman In Brittish Periodicals 1890-1910, Lindsay Rosa

Graduate Thesis Collection

The New Woman described in short fiction and editorial articles in British periodicals not only presented the ideal New Woman to readers, but served to shape the perceptions of the reader depending on the demographic of the targeted reading audience for that specific periodical. The audience for specific British periodicals featuring the New Woman included conservative families whose youth saw the New Woman figure as a role model. The New Woman figure easily connected to readers, particularly young, female middle-class readers, who easily identified with her because she possessed similar socioeconomic characteristics. Just as there were many New Women characters …

Shakespeare's Dictionary: One Playwright's Influence On The Modern English Lanugage, Jennifer Walton

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

William Shakespeare is considered to the be the father of Modern English, but what most people do not realize is that he influenced much more in English than just the language. The number of phrases and words he created is over-exaggerated, he borrowed from many other languages, and he was one of the first people to document modern medical disorders. Not to mention Shakespeare was writing during one of the most lexically innovative time periods, so he helped aid in the transition from using “thee” to using “you” when addressing another person. Moving away from language specifically, Shakespeare’s writing has …

Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting The Early American Novel, Karen A. Weyler, Michelle Burnham

English

What are the origins of the American novel? Does it begin with the imagination, when Europeans first began dreaming of life in the New World?1 Does it begin with Daniel Defoe’s adventurers, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and their literary progeny? Or does the novel need a material presence in the soil of the New World? Does it begin in 1789, with William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy?—which Isaiah Thomas, with shrewd prescience, marketed as the “first American novel.” Or does it begin even earlier, in 1742, with Benjamin Franklin’s first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela, …

Contexts Of Lived Realities In Sb 1070 Arizona: A Response To Asenas And Johnson's"Economic Globalization And The'given Situation'", Cruz Medina, Aya J. Martinez

English

Arizona matters to us. Arizona is what Jacqueline Jones Royster would call our "home place."1 We studied together at the University of Arizona during the passing of SB 1070, which legalized racially profiling Latin@s "reasonably suspected" of being undocumented, and HB 2281, which outlawed Mexican American Studies in Tucson Unified School District. Because of our research and Arizona ties, we are responding to the recent Present Tense article, "Economic Globalization and the 'Given Situation': Jan Brewer's Use of SB 1 070 as an Effective Rhetorical Response to the Politics of Immigration" by Jennifer J. Asenas and Kevin A. Johnson. Our …

Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising The Region In The Twenty-First Century, Matthew Dischinger

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Postsouthern Melancholia offers a new way of conceptualizing the elusive concept of melancholia through contemporary fiction, particularly fiction of or about the American South. Critics have long discussed national literature through the lens of melancholia: an unceasing attachment to a lost object or ideal that a subject or culture internalizes. My project positions melancholia as a literary strategy—one that contemporary southern fiction frequently contests and critiques. I read fiction that has been called “postsouthern,” a term applied to texts that reassess the bedrock concepts of southern literature such as community, storytelling, and sense of place. While much scholarship has focused …

Monsters Without To Monsters Within: The Transformation Of The Supernatural From English To American Gothic Fiction, Tryphena Y. Liu

Scripps Senior Theses

Because works of Gothic fiction were often disregarded as sensationalist and unsophisticated, my aim in this thesis is to explore the ways in which these works actually drew attention to real societal issues and fears, particularly anxieties around Otherness and identity and gender construction. I illustrate how the context in which authors were writing specifically influenced the way they portrayed the supernatural in their narratives, and how the differences in their portrayals speak to the authors’ distinct aims and the issues that they address. Because the supernatural ultimately became internalized in the American Gothic, peculiarly within female bodies, I focus …

Criterion, Volume 33, 2015, Loyola Marymount University English Department

Criterion

Faculty Advisor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy

Co-Editor-in-Chiefs: Jimmy Kehoe & Megan Brown

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy Of Rage, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

"Born There": Faulkner, Oxford, And Lafayette County, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Dear Zelda, Nicole Trackman

The Great Gatsby Unit

This talk-show activity is best done after students have read through chapter seven in The Great Gatsby. Students will be asked to write a “Dear Zelda” letter- seeking advice for a problem that has come to light in their (the character’s) life. Perhaps Tom would like some marital advice, Wilson may need to learn about the grieving process, Myrtle may ask how she could have communicated with Wilson more productively – and thus avoided her untimely death. It is up to the students to decide what their character needs help with. Students will take the stage and talk out their …

[Introduction To] Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own mid-life journey to lock his hair.

After leading a far-too-conventional life for forty years, Ashe began a long, arduous, uncertain process of locking his own hair in an attempt to step out of American convention. Black hair, after all, matters. Few Americans are subject to snap judgements like those in the African-American community, …

[Introduction To] Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love And Fear In U.S. Antebellum Literature, Kevin Pelletier

Bookshelf

In contrast to the prevailing scholarly consensus that understands sentimentality to be grounded on a logic of love and sympathy, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism demonstrates that in order for sentimentality to work as an antislavery engine, it needed to be linked to its seeming opposite—fear, especially the fear of God’s wrath. Most antislavery reformers recognized that calls for love and sympathy or the representation of suffering slaves would not lead an audience to “feel right” or to actively oppose slavery. The threat of God’s apocalyptic vengeance—and the terror that this threat inspired—functioned within the tradition of abolitionist sentimentality as a necessary goad …

[Introduction To] Indians Playing Indian: Multiculturalism And Contemporary Indigenous Art In North America, Monica Siebert

Bookshelf

Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as “Native Americans” complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world’s immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization. Monika Siebert’s Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains …

[Introduction To] Posthumanism And Educational Research, Nathan Snaza, John A. Weaver

Bookshelf

Focusing on the interdependence between human, animal, and machine, posthumanism redefines the meaning of the human being previously assumed in knowledge production. This movement challenges some of the most foundational concepts in educational theory and has implications within educational research, curriculum design and pedagogical interactions. In this volume, a group of international contributors use posthumanist theory to present new modes of institutional collaboration and pedagogical practice. They position posthumanism as a comprehensive theoretical project with connections to philosophy, animal studies, environmentalism, feminism, biology, queer theory and cognition. Researchers and scholars in curriculum studies and philosophy of education will benefit from …

Modern American Myth-Making In Mass Media Texts, Kassandra Andreadis

Honors Theses

What is an American myth? “Myth” can have many meanings and can refer to many different types of works. For example, Edwards and Klosa refer to Frankenstein as “an important mythic text” (Edwards and Klosa 34), which provides a middle point between ancient myths (e.g. the Odyssey) and current myths, showing that myths have continued to be produced and establishing myth-making as a continuous process. This process continues into the present, all over the world, so it stands to reason that the United States of America has its own myths. The identity of those myths is less certain. While ideas …

Living In An (Im)Material World: Consuming Exhausted Narratives In New Grub Street, Emma C. Eisenberg

Honors Papers

Journalists often write about the death of various print and media forms—deaths that have yet to occur, but which we continually anticipate in deference to a tacit law which discards the past as a “useless encumbrance” of outmoded styles of consumption. But is that encumbrance necessarily useless? In this paper, I argue that George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), which narrates the deaths of two realist novelists and has been called an “epitaph for Victorian fiction,” lives out its own virtual death to good purpose. I discuss how Gissing uses the realist novel’s transitional or partially exhausted state to conserve …

Can Bình Speak?: Marginalization, Subversion, And Representation Of The Subaltern In Monique Truong’S The Book Of Salt, Joanne Eun Jung Lee

Honors Papers

This paper examines The Book of Salt as a subaltern project. Binh, the protagonist of the novel, is a figure whose story has been recovered from the margins of history. The first part of the paper examines the oppressive conditions that marginalize him and how he negotiates and subverts those conditions. The second part explores the limits of such subaltern subversion and representation. Through such an examination, I raise critical questions about representing the subaltern subject in the fields of literature and Asian American studies. How can we represent the subaltern, when we cannot represent the subaltern? How do we …

George Lippard’S The Quaker City: Disjointed Text, Dismembered Bodies, Regenerated Democracy, D. Berton Emerson

English Faculty Scholarship

This essay argues that George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844–1845), originally published in ten separate numbers, is best understood when read more consistently with Lippard’s own mid-production assessment: that he was producing two different books, a novel and its sequel. Doing so reveals that the target of Lippard’s unruly social protest transitions away from a nation-framed story featuring the seduction of an innocent woman and the moral degradation of a community in which such a crime would be possible, to a broader complaint in the sequel against the lack of democratic power and agency at the local level. I start …

Lost Voices Of Ancient Israel Reclaiming Eden: An Ecocritical Exegesis, Nazeer Bacchus

HIM 1990-2015

This work addresses the historically-read despotism Genesis 1.28 has often received in its subordination of nature for the interests of human enterprise and counters the notion of reading the entire Bible as an anti-environmental, anthropocentric text. In using a combined literary lens of eco-criticism and new historicism, this work examines the Hebrew Bible with particular attention to the books of Genesis and Exodus, offering within the Torah’s oldest literary tradition (the J source) an environmental connection between humanity and the divine that promotes a reverence of natural world and, conversely, a rejection of rampant urbanization and its cultural departure from …

The Early Modern Space: (Cartographic) Literature And The Author In Place, Michael C. Myers

HIM 1990-2015

In geography, maps are a tool of placement which locate both the cartographer and the territory made cartographic. In order to place objects in space, the cartographer inserts his own judgment into the scheme of his design. During the Early Modern period, maps were no longer suspicious icons as they were in the Middle Ages and not yet products of science, but subjects of discourse and works of art. The image of a cartographer’s territory depended on his vision—both the nature and placement of his gaze—and the product reflected that author’s judgment. This is not a study of maps as …

Eugene Debs And The Politics Of Parrhesia, James P. Flynn

Theses and Dissertations

The general public often views the practice of politics to be incompatible with truth telling. Despite this perspective, I argue these two concepts coexisted in the 1912 campaign of Eugene V. Debs. Using Michel Foucault‟s unfinished work on parrhesia, or frank speaking, I argue that Debs functioned as a parrhesiast. To make this argument, I analyze Debs‟s discourse against what Foucault‟s work suggests are the three essential elements of parrhesia: compulsion, risk, and authenticity. Because Debs‟s parrhesiastic sensibilities become more obvious when compared with his opponents in the 1912 election, I analyze Debs‟s discourse in relation to William Howard Taft, …

Melville's Mardi And The Book Of Mormon, Giordano Lahaderne

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

While Melville’s Mardi has long remained a puzzle to both readers and critics, scholars agree that his third novel marked a significant turning point in his writing career. It is with Mardi that Meville realized the novel as a form suited to grapple the various philosophical and religious questions he would famously explore in his following book, Moby Dick. Although scholars have already pinpointed many various sources for Mardi, this thesis examines the heretofore overlooked connections between Melville’s third book and the esoteric volume of American scripture, the Book of Mormon.

The first chapter of this thesis examines …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 16, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Gouging For Glass, Hastings Hensel

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 67-68

At Dante's Tomb, John Poch

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 124