English Language and Literature Commons^™

Pecan Grove Review Volume 17, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

Increases In Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even With Typical Text Presentation: Implications For The Reading Of Literature, D. H. Whalen, Lisa Zunshine, Michael Holquist

English Faculty Publications

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding ("she thought I left" embedding her perspective on "I left"), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects the time that it takes readers to read and understand short vignettes in a moving window paradigm. With increasing levels of embedment from 1 to 5, reading times in a moving window paradigm rose almost linearly. However, …

The Attic, Brandon S. Jones

Student Theses and Dissertations

The Attic is a Contemporary fiction novel set in the town of Bitter Springs, Arkansas. Death is the ultimate end to all stories, but death darkens the center of Jonathon Duke's story. Orphaned in 1987 at the age of twelve because of the death of his parents, Jon moves in with his grandparents in the small town of Bitter Springs, Arkansas. Soon he, his best friend and their girlfriends spiral into an abyss of self-destruction with terrifying consequences. Troubled by nightmares spawned by an acid trip and a drug dealer whose payment is taken in flesh, Jon is sent to …

You've Gotta Read This: Summer Reading At Musselman Library (2015), Musselman Library

You’ve Gotta Read This: Summer Reading at Musselman Library

Each year Musselman Library asks Gettysburg College faculty, staff, and administrators to help create a suggested summer reading list to inspire students and the rest of our campus community to take time in the summer to sit back, relax, and read. These summer reading picks are guaranteed to offer much adventure, drama, and fun!

With the 2015 collection, we again bring together recommendations from across the Gettysburg College campus—the books, movies, TV shows, graphic novels and even podcasts that have meant something special to us over the past year. Ninety faculty, administrators and staff offer up a list of 175 …

Jameson's Story: A Tale Of The Human Condition Through Fiction, Steven Kubitza

Honors Projects

A work of fiction focusing on two characters living in the same world, but under much different circumstances. One must try and find out who he is while the other is attempting to uphold his way of life in a society threatening to take it away. The story delves into the ideas of a somewhat dystopian world; one in which our society could ultimately mirror in the near future. The work is unfinished, which is explained in the reflection paper at the beginning of the document.

Understanding Second-Person Point Of View In Fiction, Anastasia L. Hawke

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis consists of a critical introduction followed by a short story and reflection. The critical introduction introduces and analyzes second-person point of view. The first section establishes a working definition for second-person narrative and maps out its unique relationship between narrator, protagonist, and reader. The second section explores the way second-person point of view is taught. The third and last section of the critical introduction focuses on the effects second-person point of view has on fiction narratives.

The short fiction “Pregnancy and Other Dysfunctions” following the critical introduction demonstrates a narrative effectively using second-person point of view. It follows …

Blood At The Root, April Schofield

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a coming of age story about two very different boys – Jason, a Northerner who ends up stuck in a small Southern town and Billy, a Southern boy with an abusive father. The boys become friends and grow up learning the dark secrets that are allowed to fester in a tiny southern town ruled by the Good Ol’ Boy System of justice. The story chronicles how their shared experiences change them in ways they never imagined and ultimately destroys their friendship and their lives. Through a history of violence and prejudice, Billy and Jason learn who they really …

Lavender Bride, Robert Kostuck

Bryant Literary Review

Svetlana and Valery at the late edge of a summer weekend, aligned vacations, rented bicycles, wool sweaters, damp air spilled inland from the half-empty beaches.

Ginger, Charles Butterfield

Bryant Literary Review

After Sam's truck clears the hill, all Lucius hears is the cooing of wild pigeons in the cavernous haymow.

Gerstler's Triumphant Return (1972), Julie Zuckerman

Bryant Literary Review

Sitting among the malodorous teenagers--boys ripe with day-old sweat, girls thick on jasmine scents--Jeremiah Gerstler tried to check his mounting vexation.

Gift-Wrapped, Daniel M. Jaffe

Bryant Literary Review

Will there come a point during your El Al flight home from Israel when you can politely question the elderly man in the middle seat beside you as to why, during taxi yet before take-off, he ensconced himself toe-to-head within a 30-gallon, heavy-duty, clear plastic trash bag?

The Strap, Ruth Latta

Bryant Literary Review

"Carmen? Carmen Lawrence? Where are you, girl?"

I peeked through the planks of the porch stairs

Phantom, Adam Matson

Bryant Literary Review

The pinky finger betrayed her. It sent a signal to Martin, who reached out from beneath the frilly cuff of his costume and grasped it.

Class Mate, John Kristofco

Bryant Literary Review

"Hey, has anybody seen my Hawthorne?" Terrence Terrill poked his head into the small living room.

The Escape Artists, Daniel Gene Hernandez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis, “The Escape Artists”, is a collection of short fiction that represents most of the work I did as a creative writing master’s student. The title is taken from my longest story, a narrative about a young man’s struggle to avoid violence in a federal prison. As a title, “The Escape Artists” also captures major themes in my other stories; characters often pursue emotional escapism or literally seek to evade predators in my fiction. As a writer, I often explore breakdowns in social order, so my stories tend to be set in turbulent, oppressive political climates or else inside …

No Absolutes: A Fantasy Collection, Tiffany M. Hughes

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Genre fiction, particularly fantasy and science fiction writing, has a mixed reception in academia across the world. The notion that make-believe characters and worlds could not be intellectually fulfilling is an old stereotype that reduces some of the most profound fiction of our era down to children’s tales. This fantasy collection serves as an example of how genre fiction can contain impactful stories that challenge our understanding of traditional values. As the title suggests, life, from relationships to self-identity, offers no absolutes for the future. Humanity faces uncertainty of the past, present, and future every day. These stories reflect the …

Satori 2015, Winona State University

Satori Literary Magazine

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970.

Mother's Bed: Gender Representation In Children's Literature, Karin Hanni

Senior Theses

This children's book and accompanying research paper both address gender inequity in children's literature. There is a significant imbalance of gender representation in children's literature, with the number of central male characters almost doubling that of central female characters. Additionally, the roles of males and females still tend to be stereotypical: boys are action-oriented and heroic, while girls are nurturing and passive. Further, it is believed that boys will only enjoy books about boys, while girls will enjoy books about both boys and girls. This imbalance in children's literature hurts both genders. Children not only learn to read from books, …

We Heard Our Voices With The Hyenas And Other Stories: The Community Of Strangers, Rebekah Washburn Olson

Theses and Dissertations

Community is often defined by the familial or residential relationships we have, such as family, neighbors or coworkers. But there is another vital and often unobserved community among strangers. These relationships are often haphazard, temporary relationships formed in a moment of necessity—customers trapped in a convenience store by a storm, orphaned runaway teenagers who band together for safety on the streets, miners trapped in the rubble of a collapsed mine, etc. These communities are spontaneous and often undefined, but have the potential to reveal more about our insecurities, reflexes, and emotional capacities than almost any other relationship. For many, they …

High Clear Bell Of Morning By Ann Eriksson, Lauri Chose

The Goose

Review of Ann Eriksson's High Clear Bell of Morning.

The Dove In Bathurst Station By Patricia Westerhof, Matthew Zantingh

The Goose

Review of Patricia Westerhof's The Dove in Bathurst Station.

Annotated Bibliography Of Elsie Singmaster’S Gettysburg Writings, Susan Colestock Hill

Adams County History

Our fellow Adams Countian, Elsie Singmaster Lewars (1879-1958), was a well -known author of regional fiction during the first half of the twentieth century. She wrote about the people and places she knew first hand. She spent most of her first twenty years in an ethnic Pennsylvania German community, Macungie, Pennsylvania. Having descended on her father’s side from Pennsylvania Germans who settled in the eastern part of the state beginning in the eighteenth century, she understood “her people” because she lived among them. When she began to write for publication in 1905, her first characters and plots drew upon her …

Ring Rust, Suzanne D. Mcwhorter

ETD Archive

The world of professional wrestling, or in the case of Ring Rust, semi-professional wrestling, houses its own culture, and its own sense of family and identity. The two chapters presented here are part of the larger work set in this world and told from four perspectives: Brooks "Jack Raptor" Murphy, star of the Rustbelt Wrestling Alliance Vivian Murphy, his estranged sister Gunnar "The Swedish Storm" Olsen, whose career is intertwined with Jack's and Maxine Hunter, local wrestling blogger. Though only Brooks and Vivian are represented in this excerpt, the lives of all four of these characters intertwine. The relationship between …

Adams County History 2015

Adams County History

No abstract provided.

Fashioning Mobility: Navigating Space In Victorian Fiction, Mary C. Jones

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider …

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 …

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.

Vergilian Allusions In The Novels Of Willa Cather, Nathaniel Wagner

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This work aims to explore the nature of Vergilian allusion in the novels of Willa Cather - how the author implicated classical language in her own texts as well as the purpose and efficacy of such allusions. By surveying traces of Vergilian passages and rhetorical techniques such as ecphrasis and anacolouthon across three of the writer's major novels, My Antonia, The Professor's House and Shadows on the Rock, this study reveals an important and persistent aspect of Cather's artistic program. The author intentionally and regularly uses Vergilian language and figures to lend a sense of grandeur to the small, individual …

Creating The Self: Women Artists In Twentieth-Century Fiction, Bethany Dailey Tisdale

Theses and Dissertations

In novels of artistic development (or künstlerromane) by women in the early twentieth-century, becoming an artist is intimately tied to becoming recognized as an individual. It would appear that an era of rapid change and expanding opportunities for women would result in affirmative narratives of women’s artistry, but studying texts by Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell shows that stringent gender roles can still keep women from realizing artist success.

In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart ruins her prospects on the marriage market by striving for freedom and aesthetic pleasure. Those desires cannot be reconciled …

The Regulating Daughter In John Updike's Rabbit Novels, Sue Norton

Articles

This article considers the ways in which John Updike creates female characters who suffer in some way so that their family units can remain intact. His Rabbit novels privilege the so-called nuclear family as an abiding family form, one which rests upon the sacrificial choices made by girls and women. It uses Family Systems Theory as a tool of interpretation in reading the texts and establishing their underlying ethos.