English Language and Literature Commons^™

Dreams Of Flight, Beth Paulson

Bryant Literary Review

A man with wings large enough and duly attached might learn to overcome the resistance of air. Leonardo da Vinci

No Icarus, you knew pulleys and winches would keep a man tethered
to earth though he rise high above a stage for a duke’s entertainment.
In your fabrico you built mechanical birds of wood and bright-dyed
linen, then raised men up on ropes to fly and float, angels with dark
curls, gilt-edged wings.

Mud Minor Mass, Kevin Walker

Bryant Literary Review

Even Johann Sebastian Bach
had to fake it through the mirk
on merciless days,

Grief, Be My Coverlet, Mohja Kahf

Bryant Literary Review

Grief, be white daisies

Charcoal Nude, John Sibley Williams

Bryant Literary Review

Roughed-up: edges indistinct: body

softly black & blending with all this white

If The Stars Had Voices, Buff Whitman-Bradley

Bryant Literary Review

If the stars had voices
They would surely sound
Like cricket song

Brutality, Laurie Lessen Reiche

Bryant Literary Review

I.

There is something I want to say about brutality.

It comes out the lips of the hateful

mother, the beautiful mother.

My Father’S Loaves And Fishes, Lennie Hay

Bryant Literary Review

In his soft throaty voice he speaks of rice—

washing and rinsing hard kernels,

how hands knock them on the side of a pot

until water runs clear. How it will rise

That Thing, Susan Taylor Chehak

Bryant Literary Review

My pap’s eyes are bad. It’s not the books or the computer, not the
peering at small letters on a page or on a screen. And it isn’t just a
consequence of age either. His peepers went bad a long time ago, when
he was young.

When Death Comes, Carol Tyx

Bryant Literary Review

after Mary Oliver

When death comes

like the dentist,

sticking her hand

into your mouth,

Gunn Hill, Pat Daneman

Bryant Literary Review

Given time, a place becomes a thing

small enough to hold in memory’s grip,

strong enough to struggle free. Frightened

When I Think About The Funeral, I Find I Can Taste The Mints, Nichole Page

Bryant Literary Review

I can hear the crinkle of the wrapper, the sniffling and speeches

My fingers push it from the plastic casing giving me something to do

Raul, Paul Lamar

Bryant Literary Review

On the twelfth day of his new job as a security guard outside of S–, one of M–’s finest men’s shops, Raul B– stumbled upon a unique answer to the question of store security, though he was never to be aware of his particular gift or its profound impact on crime in M–.

Fragments Of Mother, Sheree La Puma

Bryant Literary Review

daughter, i rock your empty

cradle & ask myself,

how long will we

make war?

Could We Be Coyotes, George Longenecker

Bryant Literary Review

who howl all night behind the house,

whose ancestors mated with wolves?

Our Tiny Somewhere, Martina Nicholson

Bryant Literary Review

a description of Earth from Maria Popova

The speck in the last

Voyager photograph

was Earth,

Amends, Renay Costa

Bryant Literary Review

Quinn searched the chalkboard menu of the café deliberating what the appropriate beverage would be. What does a soon-to-be-divorcée drink while composing a letter to the man she separated from about a month ago? Wine would be the obvious option, but she was now a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the letter was part of the ninth step, which required her to “make direct amends” to those she had harmed, and tonight she was attempting her amends to Gil, her soon-to-be ex-husband. A pumpkin spice latte, her regular order, seemed too saccharine and sentimental.

Reforming Sensory Disability In Early Modern England, Mary Lutze

Dissertations

Reforming Sensory Disability in Early Modern England traces early modern literary depictions of blindness and deafness during the Reformation. the project proposes an inherently dynamic early modern religious model of disabilities: first characterized by its initial rejection of England's prior faith tradition, then by doctrinal negotiation among reformed dissenters. It analyzes the shift in disability representation in popular literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century before culminating in an examination of seventeenth-century deaf education. Finally, the project proposes that the seventeenth-century advent of deaf education should be read as a concrete ideological shift in English society's perception of the disabled.

Too Young Or Too Old? Age And The Politics Of Performing King Lear - Successfully!, Jim B. Wallace

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

“It is sometimes said that the problem with the part of Lear is that by the time you are old enough to play it, you are too old to play it.” (Jonathan Bate)

Theatre critics rarely see an outstanding performance of King Lear. The thesis of this paper is that it is possible to successfully perform the role of Lear however it takes much more than excellent acting skills to do so. To successfully play Lear requires a visceral understanding of the profound psychological and physical changes that generally begin around age sixty-five. This paper demonstrates that what one learns …

Abjection In Fiction: A Study Of Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, Emily Jobe

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

Julia Kristeva’s focus on understanding what the abject is and how it is manifested plays a key role in this essay. This essay argues that abjection informs the representation of dual personality and addiction in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By determining what is an abject for Jekyll through an analysis of the characters and plot development, this essay argues that not only is abjection possible for an individual, but it is a necessity of fiction. Using literary and psychoanalytic scholarship and theory, this essay demonstrates key factors in figuring out what, how, …

"'In A Distant Unknown Country': A New Historicist Look At James Joyce’S “Eveline,” Argentina, And The Zwi Migdal In The Early 1900s.", M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This article analyzes James Joyce’s story “Eveline” (1904) looking at the moral panic about “white slavery” in Europe and the new continent, especially focusing on Argentina, the foremost recipient of trafficked women between 1880 and 1930 (and, of course, Joyce’s destination of choice for Eveline). It was precisely at the turn of the twentieth century that, along with the popularity of transatlantic migration, sex trafficking went fully global and news about international “dangers” for single white women reached the general public, provoking all kinds of repressive reactions through what became known as the “social purity” movement.

Audre Lorde & The Ontology Of Desire, Lauren Koenig

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis advances an understanding of the ontological impact of Western conceptions of sexuality guided by a model of reparative reading as outlined by Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick. Rather than multiply and magnify anti-patriarchal invective, I use deconstructive techniques as a means of analyzing selections from the poetry of Audre Lorde (including “Bloodbirth,” “Making it,” “Pirouette,” and “Therapy”) in order to explore how a consideration of lesbian sexuality can inform an understanding of the more widespread conflation between writing, creation, and birth of the self.

The investigation centers on a variety of paradoxes encountered in the felt sense-oriented language of desire …

Ride Of The Waelcyrges : Combating Notions Of Feminine Passivity And Monstrous Deviance In Anglo-Saxon Literature, Shaina Marie Strang-Wolf Tullo

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper endeavors to trace the Anglo-Saxon literary figure of the waelcyrge through all twelve references to her throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus, and culminates in an application of the waelcyrge trope to two problematic heroines in Beowulf, Modthryth and Hygd. Given the critical history associated with the waelcyrge, this paper attempts to write against the dominant assumption in Anglo-Saxon scholarship that the waelcyrge is a derivative of the Norse valkyrie. Instead, this paper is predicated on the notion that the waelcyrge represents uniquely Anglo-Saxon values that volley between the cultural shift that occurs in the mid-ninth century through the emergence …

Making Meaning : Death, Dignity, And Dasein In Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go, Angel Katrina Tuohy

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, with a focus on the way the novel considers large questions concerning the “meaning” of human life and the nature of “human condition” as Ishiguro calls it in interviews discussing his novel, using language and terminology provided by phenomenologist and philosopher Martin Heidegger in his seminal work Being and Time. This thesis builds on these questions to consider the complex ways that the concept of “dignity” as shown through the experiences of clones who have socially predetermined lifespans complicates issues surrounding the inevitability of death, the uncanniness of …

"A" Is For Ambivalence : Hester Prynne's Conflicted Response To Motherhood In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Stephanie Morecraft Carlson

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this paper the author discusses the protagonist Hester Prynne’s conflicted response to motherhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The author examines Hester’s behavior towards her daughter, Pearl, as well as her relationships with her husband Roger Chillingworth and Pearl’s father Arthur Dimmesdale. Hester’s changing role in the town is also explored as she continues to quietly rebel against the patriarchy by making unconventional choices.

Vertiginous Space And Blank Topographies : The Narrative Landscapes Of Possession And Annihilation In J. M. Coetzee's Early Novels, Leah Slocum

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis examines the first three novels published by the South African author J.M Coetzee: Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). My analyses is structured around how the narrators engage with a vast and threatening landscape in ways that seek to validate an illusion of spatial control and mastery and uphold the colonial metaphor of emptied landscapes. Although only Jacobus in Dusklands embodies the archetypal explorer that “penetrates” the heart of darkness, his counterparts in the next two novels uphold the same kind of self-mythologizing process in which their desire to …

The Nightingale Revisited : Adapting H.C. Andersen's Fairy Tale The Nightingale For Theatre For Young Audiences, Alyssa Fox

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Hans Christian Andersen has been intriguing audiences with his works for ages. These tales are enduring and being reimagined in many different ways today. To explore not only the power of these tales, but the power of theater as a visual storytelling medium, the author has adapted Andersen’s The Nightingale as a play for theatre for young audiences (TYA). This work incorporates not only adaptation theory, but the history of fairy tales, current culture, and trends in TYA in the United States.

"She Is Finally Free" : An Analysis Of Women's Pathologized Oppression And Reclamation Of The Abject In "The Yellow Wallpaper" And Midsommar, Diana Gem Schultz

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Women live and lead pathologized lives, as evidenced by past diagnoses of women’s disorders like “hysteria” and more modern issues surrounding beliefs in women’s hormones and biological inferiority. In analyzing women’s relationships with a wider male society and the role Kristevean abjection takes in patriarchal views on women’s minds and bodies, I aim to show how female characters in horror fiction – namely Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Ari Aster’s 2019 film, Midsommar – take that abject view and reclaim it for their own power. Through this reclamation, women are able to gain control from patriarchal …

Knowing Totality : Capitalism Across Consciousness And Community In Kim, Nostromo, Sons And Lovers, And Ulysses, Jessica Manry

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Knowing Totality reads literary portraits of consciousness at the level of capitalist totality. The largest level of the project argues that there is a formal discord in certain twentieth-century novels between “knowability,” or an accepted community narrative, and character “consciousness,” which reaches beyond it. I locate within these formal breaks social and historical contradictions that characterize capital, where seemingly content-based issues in the texts—Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and James Joyce’s Ulysses—manifest themselves at the level of form. The pairings place the novels in dialectical conversation, highlighting characters on the periphery of communities that …

The Method In The Madwoman : Functions Of Female Madness And Feminized Liminality In Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, And "The Yellow Wallpaper", Ivy Elizabeth Poitras

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This critical thesis explores how three literary portrayals of “madness” in female characters of the mid-to-late 19th century written by women writers (Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, and the Narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper”) operate as instruments within their work to provide commentary on the anxieties, fears, and ideological stereotypes of women and femininity of the era, as well as contradictions and concepts pertaining to confinement, the female body, gendered Gothic tropes, and societal oppression. The significance of this analysis lies in the consistency and endurance of these issues as they withstand modern development, making …

Idealist And Materialist Approaches To Abolition In Uncle Tom's Cabin And The Daughter Of Adoption, Jillian Shea

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Sentimentalism was a popular aesthetic, moral, political, and literary movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and England, and both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) use sentimentalism in their attempts to advocate for the abolition of slavery. Scholars such as Lauren Berlant critique sentimentalism, specifically Stowe’s use of sentimentalism, for its potential to make structural problems appear as if they can be assuaged by personal change, and I situate this understanding of sentimentalism within an idealist framework, or a framework that primarily emphasizes subjectivity’s role in …