English Language and Literature Commons^™

Mud And Truth, Hannah Kass

Bryant Literary Review

Tsofi knew the story since her mother began telling it to her and her brother almost every night. Other villagers would notice how her people did not eat the same meat or observe the same day of rest. In her mind those differences were as arbitrary as preferring to eat lamb or chicken. Yet such arbitrary reasons had sparked the most violent of reactions.

An Open Letter To The White Feminists Holding A Literary Panel On Toni Morrison, Matthew E. Henry

Bryant Literary Review

look to your left, your right—where

are her sisters? why are they missing?

The Clearest Night Sky, Carla Mcgill

Bryant Literary Review

The ending was glass breaking

stones falling from cliffs

The ending was a cat’s purr

the vanishing foam of waves

on all the shores he loved

A Sweet Kid, William Torphy

Bryant Literary Review

I wait anxiously in the United terminal sipping a cup of coffee and feeling ungrounded. My nephew’s flight from Baltimore is late because of a severe weather system over the Midwest. My sister Kat tells me that Justin has become very selfish, even for a teenager, and that he lies and constantly tries to manipulate.

The Flood, Elizabeth Underwood

Bryant Literary Review

I wake

and I am alive

but the wine in my glass

from the night before

is dead.

Let Go, Jane Flint

Bryant Literary Review

Ten minutes

to pack up all my things

like a pocket

turning inside out

“Innocent Bystanders”: White Guilt And The Destruction Of Native Americans In Us Literature, 1824-1830, Noor Al-Attar

Theses and Dissertations--English

Stereotypes describing the Native Peoples as lacking in many attributes such as religion, civilization, self-control, and even family bonds originated in the early years of contact, popularized through captivity narratives, and used in nineteenth century writings to justify the “vanishing” of the Native people. My dissertation adds to the discussion of myth of the Vanishing American by focusing on overlooked representations of Native illness. Illness, a shared human experience, was preserved for white characters in white authors’ writings. Ailing Native peoples were either denied any stories narrating this experience of human vulnerability or were depicted as resorting to superstitious and …

Wholeness And Belonging In Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split: An Eco-Politics Of Resilience And Resistance, Mary Rudolph

Theses and Dissertations--English

Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split illuminates an urgent and radical eco-political project: the creation of whole, resilient, co-species communities capable of surviving interlocking political, social, and ecological crises. Finney foregrounds the strategic practice of belonging as a method of survival within contexts of systemic oppression and climate chaos. “Belonging,” in these terms, is not a “natural” ontological state, but a mode of co-being that is continually (re)created and (re)enacted through daily world-making practices: foodways, spatial habitation, migration and movement. Belonging is a collection of reciprocal, adaptive, situated praxes that make and sustain beings and worlds. They rely on and …

Milton's Plant Eyes: Minimal Cognition, Similitude, And Sexuality In The Garden, Perry Guevara

English and Creative Writing | Faculty Scholarship

This essay turns to minimal cognition, a theoretical extension of embodied cognition, to argue for plant sentience in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton imagines plants as minimally cognitive beings within an affective ecosystem, where they readily enter into the epic poem’s complex circuits of desire with appetites of their own. Specifically, the essay claims that botanical cognition arises at the convergence of two seventeenth-century philosophical systems: the first, Milton’s materialist monism, and the second, Paracelsian medicine, which avers a plant’s therapeutic effect on a human body part sharing morphological resemblance. The essay concludes that Milton’s eroticization of similitude enables a …

The Best Children's Picture Books Of The Year In Spanish [2020 Edition], Bank Street College Of Education. Children's Book Committee

The Center for Children's Literature

An annotated list of the best children's books in Spanish published or translated in 2019. In English and Spanish.

Spanish title: Los mejores libros infantiles en Español.

When Wuxia Met Romance: The Pleasures And Politics Of Transculturalism In Sherry Thomas’S My Beautiful Enemy, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

A case study of Sherry Thomas’s Qing-era My Beautiful Enemy (and its prequel, The Hidden Blade) allows for a fruitful discussion of changing representations of diversity in romance fiction and its appeal to readers. MBE’s heroine is Anglo-Chinese, and the novel’s plot draws on wuxia, a literary and cinematic genre that has a long history in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is also associated with immigration and exile, perhaps resonating with Thomas’s own move from China to the U.S. Readers might find its infusion in romance appealing for two reasons: one, it features a warrior heroine (a …

Enclosure And Escape, Or Escape Into Enclosure?: Heterotopias And Jane Eyre

The Graduate Review

No abstract provided.

Gramsci In The Digital Age: Youtubers As New Organic Intellectuals

The Graduate Review

No abstract provided.

“Directed Into A Bed Of Trenches”: The Shift In The Language Of Elegy Demonstrated By The War Poetry Of Wilfred Owen

The Graduate Review

No abstract provided.

After The Golem: Teaching Golems, Kabbalah, Exile, Imagination, And Technological Takeover., Temma F. Berg

English Faculty Publications

The golem is an elusive creature. From a religious perspective it enacts spirit entering matter, a creation story of potential salvation crossed with reprehensible arrogance. As a historical narrative, the golem story becomes a tale of Jewish powerlessness and oppression, of pogroms and ghettoization, of assimilation and exile, and sometimes, of renewal. As the subject of a course in women, gender and sexuality studies, the golem narrative can be seen as a relentless questioning of otherness and identity and as a revelation of the complex intersectionalities of gender, class, sexuality, race, disability, and ethnicity. As a philosophical motif, the ambiguous …

David: Donatello, Michelangelo, And Bernini, Marie Williamson

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Nvrch Music Festival: Creating And Fulfilling The Strategy, Honore Washington

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Latinx Characters In Young Adult Literature: Perpetuating And Countering Stereotypes, Dallas Gomez

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

The Latinx community is rapidly growing in the United States, and it is important for young readers to find books with characters who are members of this community . However, there are many stereotypes that exist about this group in society, some negative and some positive . To determine how the Latinx community is depicted to readers of young adult (YA) fiction, I selected a set of novels featuring Latinx people as main characters based on their publication date and targeted audience age . By reading and analyzing different books written at different times, not only was it found that …

Syncretic Immersion: Tolkien’S Languages As History, Artifacts, And Meta-Narratives, Stewart Raymond Zdrojowy

Online Theses and Dissertations

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth has been dissected and researched by philologists, medievalists, and literary theorists for decades. Though his work with languages (both historical and invented) has garnered attention over the past few decades, few scholars have looked at his languages in terms of their rhetorical functions within the narrative (as history), with the narrative (as artifacts), and without (as cultural participation). Mark Wolf’s theories on immersion is applied to Tolkien’s legendarium and illuminates his works as uniquely fixated in several modes of immersion at once. Narrative immersion is utilized to understand Tolkien’s works as a furthering of cultural values, languages, …

Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Chu, Seo-Young. “Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation” (chapbook). Black Warrior Review 46.2, Spring 2020.

A Transnational Look At The Modern Women, Isabella Hardesty

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Spanning forty years apart, the short story “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (1926) by Ding Ling and The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath can speak to one another in revealing the position of women in a revolutionary new era. The two stories may be generationally and geographically distant, yet both hold a collective female consciousness in the context of the emerging modernist epoch. By examining these two pieces of literature in relation to one another, similar attitudes and stylistic trends emerge regarding the treatment of women. The common archetypes, for each respective time and country, imprinted onto women are at some …

This Woman's Work: Corrosive Power Structures, Gendered Labor And Weariness In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale And Oryx And Crake, Taylor J. Pryor

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In her 2007 essay “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Lauren Berlant asserts that “in the scene of slow death, a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life, agency can be an activity of maintenance” (759). This concept emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining one’s agency while experiencing chronic exhaustion, or what can be referred to as the “wearied state.” Utilizing Berlant’s theoretical framework, this thesis investigates the concept of weariness in two dystopic texts: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003). The respective protagonists of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake …

Filming Reconciliation: Indigenous Screen Cultures In An Age Of Redress, Kyle L. Killebrew

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines Indigenous cinematic cultures in the United States and Canada since 1998 in the context of international reconciliation movements between settler and Indigenous states. This project examines the contested intersections of twenty-first century Indigenism and multiculturalism, exploring the ways in which Native voices in media navigate international cultural marketplaces. I focus on Georgina Lightning’s Older than America, Igloolik Isuma’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Sherman Alexie and Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ A Red Girl’s Reasoning. Specifically, I am concerned with Indigenous cinemas and media that envision and enact models of reconciliation, healing, and social justice using …

Book Reviews- Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of Mind, 1770–1830, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Joanna Wharton’s Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830 is a recent addition to the interdisciplinary series Studies in the Eighteenth Century that Boydell Press (Boydell & Brewer Publishers) is publishing in association with the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of work that addresses the contributions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British women writers to areas of scientific, philosophical, and otherwise “learned” discourse that have historically been associated primarily—and in many cases exclusively—with male thinkers and writers. Wharton’s study therefore helps to flesh out the picture …

Elizabeth Bishop's Perspectives On Marriage, Jeffrey Westover

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is always the source of true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another.
- Martin Buber

In a number of texts, both published and unpublished, Elizabeth Bishop addresses the themes of marriage, love, and courtship. Such issues were vexed ones for her. As a young woman, she rejected Robert Seaver’s marriage proposal (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 112). Later, her friend Pauline Hemingway wondered in a letter whether she and Tom Wanning were engaged (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 201), and Robert Lowell famously confessed to her that she was the …

Blanche Matthias: Part I, Huntington Library Papers; Part Ii, A Portrait In Friendships, James Karman

Jeffers Studies

Blanche Matthias’s papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, include two documents of interest to Jeffers scholars: a memoir by Blanche that recounts experiences involving Robinson and Una, and a letter to Blanche from Charles Roberts Aldrich that mentions Jeffers, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and other mutual friends. The memoir and letters are published here for the first time, along with a portrait of Matthias that describes her relationship with seven noteworthy friends: Una Jeffers, Georgia O’Keeffe, Margery Latimer, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Rosalind Rajagopal, Mima Porter, and Charles Roberts Aldrich.

Modern World Literature: Contemporary Anglophone Writers, Michele Chinitz

Open Educational Resources

This document explains how to annotate a PDF online using hypothes.is. The instructions give guidelines for producing analytical annotations that relate to the course Contemporary Anglophone Writers (Fall 2020).

Maladaptive Grief: Irish And American Experiences Of Loss, Mourning, And Trauma, Abby Hey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Literature that responds to loss and expresses mourning, a genre referred to as the elegy, traditionally follows an adaptive pattern in which a mourner reaches consolation and comfort. In the modern period, however, mourning transformed into destructive experiences that were notably private. With this phenomenon of greater social and emotional isolation, writers like Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bishop expressed rumination and irresolution. In contrast, before the twentieth century, elegies were not only more consolatory, but there was a greater emphasis on shared feeling, and this communal type of mourning is more often adaptive. By grieving together in the …

Images Of Ancient Egypt And The Gender Politics Of The Faerie Queene, Genavieve Alt

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My thesis argues that Edmund Spenser uses radically different representations of Ancient Egypt to explore complex ideas about gender roles in the Faerie Queene. Book III emphasizes the negative view of Egypt perpetuated through the Book of Exodus and Greek understanding of the mythological king Busiris. Book V emphasizes the positive view of Egypt through the many benevolent myths surrounding the goddess Isis. Spenser uses images of good and evil Egypt to discuss the abolition of normative gender roles.

The introductory section will introduce the mythology surrounding Isis followed by a discussion of the literature referenced throughout. The first …

Nine Stories And The Society Of The Spectacle: An Exploration Into The Alienation Of The Individual In The Post-War Era, Margaret E. Geddy

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the thematic links between three of J. D. Salinger’s short stories published in Nine Stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “Teddy”), ultimately arguing that it is a short-story cycle rooted in the quandary posed by the suicide of Seymour Glass. This conclusion is reached by assessing the influence of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” on these stories, something that is understood through the Marxist frame of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.