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2022

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Articles 121 - 150 of 1756

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

"I Need To Write About What I Believe": Journaling And Afrofuturism In Octavia E. Butler's Parable Of The Sower And Parable Of The Talents, Shlana E. Sims Dec 2022

"I Need To Write About What I Believe": Journaling And Afrofuturism In Octavia E. Butler's Parable Of The Sower And Parable Of The Talents, Shlana E. Sims

ETD Archive

Butler’s choice of using the diary of a young Black girl and of making that Black girl a leader is directly paralleled in real history via diaries, such as The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Butler’s use of the journaling technique via a Black woman ties the future to the past as the diaries of these influential Black women are read by later generations giving a glimpse of what dreams, hopes, and goals the women had for the Black Community. She further gives cautionary tales of “if-this-continues to-go-on” as a warning for the community to be on its guard, …

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Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton Dec 2022

Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton

All Theses

In his 1986 book America, Baudrillard noted that “the most banal suburb…is more at the centre of the world than any of the cultural manifestations of old Europe.” My thesis argues that this monumental shift from the suburbs as enclaves at the outer edges of cultural urban centers to “the centre of the world” is at the heart of Richard Ford’s realist project in his Pulitzer Prize winning Bascombe series starting with The Sportswriter in 1986. Emergent twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature scholars have been interested in the schism between the fictionalized representation and the lived experience of suburbia — while …

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Exploring The Scp Wiki: Community, Digital Horror, And Apocalyptic Fiction, Justin M. Jones Dec 2022

Exploring The Scp Wiki: Community, Digital Horror, And Apocalyptic Fiction, Justin M. Jones

English Theses - Archive

The SCP is a body of user-submitted fiction broadly classified as horror and often compared to other user-submitted horror such as Creepypasta. While these comparisons have been made in research and among the SCP community, the SCP seems to function differently than other such sites. Very little research has been done on the SCP and what exists examines it as a work of horror and as an example of emerging online folklore. This thesis further expands upon this research by examining how the unique community participating on the SCP Wiki shapes the text, how the SCP is not just a …

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Sex And The Superman: Gender And The Superhero Monomyth, Christopher Maverick Dec 2022

Sex And The Superman: Gender And The Superhero Monomyth, Christopher Maverick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1938 introduction of Superman, superheroes have been ever-present in American popular culture. Indeed, with the modern preponderance of comic book movies dominating the American cinematic box-office, superhero fantasy is arguably the most important genre of fiction being produced in the contemporary moment. Peter Coogan, Kurt Busiek and many other scholars have discussed the prominence and relevance of the superhero fantasy as a genre. Still others, including Umberto Eco and Marco Arnaudo, have asserted that the superhero is not so much a genre and as it is the evolution of mythology. In Sex and the Superman, I argue …

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Hurricane Girls, Kallie Comardelle Dec 2022

Hurricane Girls, Kallie Comardelle

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

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“I Suppose An Island Dweller Should Expect It To Be So”: The Contradiction And Drama Of Maternity And Islands In Caleb’S Crossing, Shayla Frandsen Dec 2022

“I Suppose An Island Dweller Should Expect It To Be So”: The Contradiction And Drama Of Maternity And Islands In Caleb’S Crossing, Shayla Frandsen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Islands have a long tradition of capturing human imagination and functioning as a space that nurtures both magic and mystery. As geographic locations, they seem to avoid easy taxonomy even while behaving easily categorizable: they exist as tourist fantasies separate from everyday landscape even while many operate as an othered land that is still “safe” enough to visit. They are isolated yet capable of nurturing strong cultural identity. They also act as autonomous entities while still being interconnected within larger natural structures, coastlines, and waterways. In these ways and more islands navigate as border spaces of inherent contradiction—contradictions which are …

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Cover And Front Matter Dec 2022

Cover And Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

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To The Lighthouse Or To Mrs. Ramsay? A Study Of Materialization Through The Symbolism Of The Lighthouse In Virginia Woolf’S To The Lighthouse, Virginia Moscetti Dec 2022

To The Lighthouse Or To Mrs. Ramsay? A Study Of Materialization Through The Symbolism Of The Lighthouse In Virginia Woolf’S To The Lighthouse, Virginia Moscetti

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this paper, I argue that the “lighthouse” in Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse operates as a symbol for Mrs. Ramsay’s “self-hood” and for Mr. Ramsay’s obscure desire for sanctuary and domesticity in Mrs. Ramsay. Through this symbolism I further contend that Woolf renders the ambiguous processes associated with self-hood and desire materially legible and, in doing so, demonstrates how metaphor and symbolism reconstitute our material world into representation. Moreover, I argue that we can conceptualize the lighthouse symbolism revolving around and centered in Mrs. Ramsay in terms of T.J. Clark’s “dual figure”; a figure with two symbolic connotations …

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Practicing Re-Enlightenment : Technology Revisited In The Age Of Climate Change, Gyuri Kang Dec 2022

Practicing Re-Enlightenment : Technology Revisited In The Age Of Climate Change, Gyuri Kang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In the age of climate change, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh asks whether humanity is prepared for the unthinkable nature of climate events. The Earth’s climate is changing faster than humans can expect and adapt. Ghosh warns that modern people are too deranged to imagine in what forms of changes are approaching. His term, derangement, suggests that humans are no longer able to imagine the future world shaped by climate change. The signals of the unexpectable realities of climate change, however, may be hidden in existing knowledge. Here, technology can help us access this hidden knowledge through its ability to …

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Character First: Defining And Methodizing Character Depth, Jeff Mason Dec 2022

Character First: Defining And Methodizing Character Depth, Jeff Mason

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper explores the definition of "depth" in characters and provides a radical new definition, supplemented by an applicable model. By looking into significant literary theory, contemporary works of story, and even elements of mathematics, this paper advances our understanding of characters and how they create meaning in stories.

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Marriage And Relationships In Art Spiegelman’S Maus: The Erasure Of The Female Experience, Gretchen K. Picklesimer Kinney Dec 2022

Marriage And Relationships In Art Spiegelman’S Maus: The Erasure Of The Female Experience, Gretchen K. Picklesimer Kinney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this paper, the author explores how Vladek’s focus on money, control, and independence creates an imbalance of power in his romantic relationships with Luica, Anja, and Mala. She explores Vladek’s motivations for continuing (or not continuing) these relationships, and how Vladek tries to maintain power and control. She analyzes how Vladek ignores the perspectives and experiences of these women to create his own biased narrative of the relationships.

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Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese Dec 2022

Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing a girls’ studies perspective and materialist feminist lens, this paper seeks to put Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in conversation with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Besides being published in the early 1940s, both works feature young girls navigating class struggles, exploring their identities, and struggling against dominant ideologies specific to their time and place. McCullers’ and Smith’s novels depict how a patriarchal, capitalist society imposes upon young women a narrow, misogynistic view of themselves and the women around them—facilitating the social reproduction of oppression and alienation. In depicting these realities of …

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A Discourse Analysis Of Cheers, Paul Wiesenborn Dec 2022

A Discourse Analysis Of Cheers, Paul Wiesenborn

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

This paper analyzes the pragmatics features of the language in an episode of the sitcom Cheers to find out what second language learners need to know about the language of the sitcom and about the background knowledge informing it for that episode to be understandable to them and for it thus to be an effective as an instruction tool. To answer this question, the researcher transcribed the speech in the episode and used a speech act theory-based approach to identify and categorize deixis, locutionary forms, illocutionary types, and instances of reduction and types of indirect speech. Categories in these areas …

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The Dream Of Property: Law And Environment In William T. Vollmann’S Dying Grass And Leslie Marmon Silko’S Almanac Of The Dead, Ted Hamilton Dec 2022

The Dream Of Property: Law And Environment In William T. Vollmann’S Dying Grass And Leslie Marmon Silko’S Almanac Of The Dead, Ted Hamilton

Faculty Journal Articles

This article describes how the law inflects the narration of environmental conflict in William T. Vollmann’s Dying Grass (2015) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). By focusing on the legal common sense of settler colonialism—its emphasis on private property in land and its subjugation of Indigenous peoples to the guardianship of the state—the article explores the ways in which Vollmann’s and Silko’s novels present counternarratives to the law’s story of justified conquest. Combining a law and literature approach with ecocriticism, this article highlights the importance of the legal imagination in defining human-land relations in the United States. …

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A Hidden Window: Love And Insecurity For Peter And Clive, Ian Smith '26 Dec 2022

A Hidden Window: Love And Insecurity For Peter And Clive, Ian Smith '26

Best First-Year Seminar Writing

The concept that Peter Walsh’s views in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway are a hidden critique of her fellow Bloomsbury member Clive Bell’s incendiary essay Civilization is in no way innovative or groundbreaking, having been recognized and expanded upon by biographers and literary critics alike. However, this comparison is deceptively easy to extend to realms in which it does not apply. Woolf is first and foremost a novelist, and Peter Walsh is first and foremost a character in a novel. As such, Peter’s presence in Mrs. Dalloway should not be interpreted as a commentary on Bell’s Civilization, but rather as …

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No Better Than Any: An Exploration Of Masculinity And Modes Of Violence, Brian Daniel Lee Dec 2022

No Better Than Any: An Exploration Of Masculinity And Modes Of Violence, Brian Daniel Lee

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In these seventeen short stories, I attempt to elicit and unmask hegemonic structures for what they are: destructive, dehumanizing, and unnatural. In these stories, I have positioned seemingly benevolent or at least nonviolent male and female protagonists in worlds somewhat removed, but not foreign from our own. The stories are intended to convey a sort of bathetic majority response to the destructive forces at work in society. The purpose for these settings and largely nonplussed characters is to better trace the fault lines of the masculine hegemonic structures and to pull symbolic and systemic violence into an atmosphere where it …

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Opening Pandora’S Box: Charles D’Orléans’S Reception And The Work Of Critical Bibliography: The 2022 Annual Meeting Keynote, Elizaveta Strakhov Dec 2022

Opening Pandora’S Box: Charles D’Orléans’S Reception And The Work Of Critical Bibliography: The 2022 Annual Meeting Keynote, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

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Dismembering Monstrous Metaphors In Latinx Speculative Fiction, Danielle Garcia-Karr Dec 2022

Dismembering Monstrous Metaphors In Latinx Speculative Fiction, Danielle Garcia-Karr

Theses and Dissertations

U.S. public discourse and popular media are rife with monstrous metaphors of Latinxs. This thesis argues that these gothic monstrous metaphors construct an affective economy of fear, which results in material violence and the devastation of Latinx lives. I further argue that to intervene within this affective economy, Latinx authors write speculative fiction, employing critical race methodologies, to negotiate monstrosity in relation to citizenship. In other words, speculative Latinx authors disidentify with monsters and enact epistemic disobedience, problematizing the known and naturalized and delinking Latinx people from monstrous metaphors to interrupt cycles of fear and violence. In exploring this metaphoric …

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Intensa: Writings In English And Spanish From A Feminist Immigrant, Nubia Sarahi Reyna Melendez Dec 2022

Intensa: Writings In English And Spanish From A Feminist Immigrant, Nubia Sarahi Reyna Melendez

Theses and Dissertations

INTENSA: WRITINGS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH FROM A MEXICAN FEMINIST is a bilingual work written in hybrid literature. The writings, in both English and Spanish, are free prose poetry and tell the story of its narrator through a feminist and immigrant point of view coming from a overwhelmingly majority catholic country, religion that does not view men and women as equals. The thesis details the narrator's life through a feminist point of view as well as her relationship with her mother, her personal relationships, what it means to be an immigrant and what it is like for her, and many …

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Elis Gruffydd And The Welsh Historical Tradition, Ann Dobbs Riley-Adams Dec 2022

Elis Gruffydd And The Welsh Historical Tradition, Ann Dobbs Riley-Adams

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Elis Gruffydd’s Cronicl is the longest piece of original prose ever written in the Welsh language, and the first example of writing by a Welsh author for a Welsh audience produced on the Continent. In 2018, Elis’s Cronicl was added to the prestigious UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register, one of only five such recognitions in Wales, giving the Cronicl globally recognized status. Despite this, Elis’s Cronicl is understudied, a “forgotten gem” most of which has never been transcribed, translated, or published in book form. Elis lived and wrote in the British military center and staple port, Calais, which …

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Susannah And Cold Mountain: Examining The Portrayal Of Appalachian Culture In Opera, Savannah Bennett Dec 2022

Susannah And Cold Mountain: Examining The Portrayal Of Appalachian Culture In Opera, Savannah Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies qualitative literary analysis and ethnographic methods to examine the portrayal of Appalachia in the operas Susannah and Cold Mountain. The operas were premiered almost 60 years apart, yet they share many themes that epitomize roles, patterns, and stereotypes within the Appalachian region. One theme observed is the role and expectations of Appalachian women and how they have developed over time, as the plots are placed roughly a century apart. The depictions of Appalachian religious traditions and representations of violence are also explored as these themes play a considerable role in Susannah and Cold Mountain. By analyzing …

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Full Issue Dec 2022

Full Issue

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

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The Only Way Out Is Through: Community, Death, And The Desacralization Of Trauma In George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, Josey Gardner Dec 2022

The Only Way Out Is Through: Community, Death, And The Desacralization Of Trauma In George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, Josey Gardner

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The arrival of George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo as yet another trauma narrative is not surprising. What began as a desire for representation of trauma in media and literature has morphed into an obsession in which trauma is the gold standard. Upon becoming so, trauma is inevitably placed upon a pedestal—the shining object that all other decisions are measured against and based upon. Its placement on this pedestal marks the “sacralization” of trauma. However, Lincoln in the Bardo fills a unique niche in the current portrayals of trauma found in popular media by seeking to minimize its importance …

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Genre In Translations Of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Madison Schow Dec 2022

Genre In Translations Of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Madison Schow

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

A comparison of J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published posthumously in 1975, and Simon Armitage’s 2007 translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight reveals that a translator’s choices can affect the genre of a work. Tolkien’s foreignizing translation situates Sir Gawain in the tradition of medievalist fantasy and should be read in the context of twentieth century fantasy, the same genre as Tolkien’s original works. Armitage’s domesticating translation places Sir Gawain in the context of twenty-first century fantasy. An examination of the subgenres represented in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ghost story, thriller, …

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Fragments And Foreignness In Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Cutter Mendenhall Dec 2022

Fragments And Foreignness In Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Cutter Mendenhall

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This analysis investigates Claudia Rankine’s redefinition of foreignness as the fragmenting force of microaggressions that splinters the African American identity. This fragmentation has implications that shatter and reconstruct the traditional understanding of the African American self, the source and fallacies of both white and black anger, and what it means to be native to mainstream American society. Ultimately, Rankine asserts that the foreignizing nature of microaggressions is a socially constructed form of oppression. This foreignness breaks the African American identity into easily accessible subhuman caricatures that leave the black identity in a ruptured state of cognitive dissonance. While making coherence …

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Hawthorne’S Human Nature And Sin: Criticisms Of Puritanism And Progressivism, Oscar Martinez Nov 2022

Hawthorne’S Human Nature And Sin: Criticisms Of Puritanism And Progressivism, Oscar Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

One of America’s greatest authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a time of rapid scientific, material, and intellectual advancement. However, unlike many of his peers who went all-in on utopian reform movements, Hawthorne took a cautious and reserved approach to progress even though he supported the idea abstractly. Using six tales written acrossHawthorne’s career, this work will examine what each has to say about Hawthorne’s belief in human nature and why he takes such a skeptical position against movements aiming to fundamentally reshape people and society. The tales from the 1830s, “The Gentle Boy,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Minister’s Black …

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An Analysis Of Shylock In The Merchant Of Venice, Mark Muhich Nov 2022

An Analysis Of Shylock In The Merchant Of Venice, Mark Muhich

Augsburg Honors Review

Because he is Jewish and a shrewd businessman, the Venetians consider him to be an outsider in their cofiununity, but his isolation from the community mav be his way of protecting his Jewishneis. In other words, Shylock fears that non-business interactions with Christians will damage the pride he has in his religion because all the Christians ridicule him. Because he mocks the Christians in Venice, most literary critics believe that Shylock is a literary villain. H. B. Charlton says that Shylock is often interpreted as "an inhuman scoundrel whose diabolical cunning is bent on gratifying a satanic lust for Christian …

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Heroine Of The Peripheral: An Exploration Of Feminism And Anti-Feminism In The Poetry Of Sylvia Plath, Devoney Looser Nov 2022

Heroine Of The Peripheral: An Exploration Of Feminism And Anti-Feminism In The Poetry Of Sylvia Plath, Devoney Looser

Augsburg Honors Review

Recognizing that there are many legitimate ways to view Plath's work, this study doesn't claim a definitive reading or even a glimpse into the 'real' Sylvia Plath. Instead, the following exploration will focus on feminist and anti-feminist renderings of motherhood in Plath's Crosstng the Water, Ariel, and Winter Trees. This study doesn't set out to prove or disprove these labels as they relate to Plath either. My intention is not to make value judgments about various aspects of the poetry but rather to highlight the contradictions and the co-existence of feminist and anti-feminist qualities in the text.

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Tolkien’S Coleridgean Legacy, Martina Juričková 928827 Nov 2022

Tolkien’S Coleridgean Legacy, Martina Juričková 928827

Journal of Tolkien Research

In his published materials, Tolkien rarely ever directly mentioned by name any philosophers or literary theoretics he might have been influenced or outright inspired by in forming his own views on the origin, nature, and purpose of myth, imagination, and literature as presented in his essay On Fairy-stories. However, as an Oxford Don, he must have been well acquainted with the theoretical-philosophical work of one of the greatest British literati and, I daresay, progenitor of the fantasy genre in the Isles, Samuel Coleridge. Anyone conversant with Tolkien’s lore who starts reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria must be stricken by how …

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Bonnets, Braids, And Big Afros: The Politics Of Black Characters’ Hair, Kay Siebler Nov 2022

Bonnets, Braids, And Big Afros: The Politics Of Black Characters’ Hair, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

The representations of a Black woman character’s hair say some- thing about her. The hair of a Black character is never neutral and nuances of hair are noticed by Black woman audience members. In my research interviewing 103 Black women about the representations of Black women in the shows/films they consumed, 12% of the participants discussed the politics of Black women’s hair as a marker of authentic representation. This article analyzes contemporary representations of hair in shows primarily directed/produced by Black women, arguing that representations of Black women’s hair can be empowering to Black women audience members. Hair styles, rituals, …

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