English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Broadsheet- Issue 8, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• Dr. Zackary Vernon
• Dr. Scherwatzky on Career Night
• Preparing for Advisement

Utopias Misplaced: The Cost Of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics To North Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I'm sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the "uncanny body politic," the uncanny valley, "dystopian poetics," what it means to outsource dystopian poetics, the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Authors/artists mentioned include: Thomas Hobbes, Mary Shelley, David Mitchell, Marjane Satrapi, Song Byeok, Sun Mu, Masahiro Mori, Andy Warhol. The talk also discusses the James Bond film Die Another Day.

“Their Song Filled The Whole Night”: Not Without Laughter, Hinterlands Jazz, And Rural Modernity, Andy Oler

Publications

This essay reads the rural Midwest as a modern space in which the sounds and material apparatus of early-twentieth-century jazz music compose the cultural field of Langston Hughes’s 1930 novel Not Without Laughter. It argues that Not Without Laughter does not attempt to supplant the more conventional urban modernities of Harlem and Chicago. Rather, the novel constructs a rural alternative that forms ambivalence through accumulation, both filling and exceeding the novel’s spaces and the experiences of its characters. Approaching Hughes’s novel through the sonic ambivalences of modern rurality evidences how some authors transgressed the supposed boundaries of the Harlem …

The Story Of My Art: A Study In Fiction Writing, Victoria J. Steelman

Senior Honors Theses

This creative thesis examines the several aspects of the author’s study and experience on the path to become a fiction writer. The author’s writing theory is addressed, utilizing research from a variety of authorities on the subject and focusing primarily on the nonexistence of rules for crafting fiction, the role of education in the life of the writer, and the importance of the practice of writing itself. The second section details the writer’s personal method of crafting fiction, focusing on the key elements of character, plot, and setting. The third section contains a full marketing plan for the author’s intended …

A Voice Full Of Money: Metaphor And The Art Of Meaning, Kathryn V. Mccracken

Senior Honors Theses

The common definition of metaphor as a “comparison between two things that does not include the words ‘like’ or ‘as’” has, in the recent decades, lost the respect of serious students of language. Originating in Aristotelian thought, this “Comparison Theory” of metaphor is oversimplifying and therefore inadequate. By using examples to outline these inadequacies, a more accurate, more robust view of metaphor emerges. Far from being a mere literary flourish, the concept of metaphor—especially as metaphor is identified as the means through which symbols function—is at the very base of the general process of meaning conveyance through language.

In order …

Unwrapping The Comfort Of Sameness With Spanish Immersion Elementary School, Christin N. Taylor

English Faculty Publications

I watched my 6-year-old hover around the periphery of the table, unable to find somewhere to sit. The cafeteria was a cacophony of little voices, Spanish and English, tumbling over each other, her classmates sitting close and waiting to be dismissed to homeroom.

I couldn’t help but notice how different Noelle looked from most of the children, with her liquid blond hair and saucerlike blue eyes. [excerpt]

Apocalyptic Mentalities In Late-Medieval England, Steven A. Hackbarth

Dissertations (1934 -)

Apocalypticism, defined by expectation of an imminent End, assumes many forms and proves influential in the second half of the Fourteenth Century in England. Throughout my study, I demonstrate that a rich apocalyptic environment emerges in works of the period, including those of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Pearl-poet. In this period, apocalypticism has provided explanations for plague, narratives that make evil more vivid, and arguments for urgent action. It gives contemporary phenomena special meaning. My study is organized around conspicuous centers of meaning that work reciprocally with the apocalyptic, simultaneously defining the End and defined by it. First, I …

The Creation Of Heaven In The Middle Ages, William Storm

Dissertations (1934 -)

My dissertation focuses on the intersection of the discourses of space and place, art, religion, and politics in poetical accounts of heaven. My study investigates how authors deploy these various traditions to create a heaven that accommodates the needs of a particular audience. Heaven is, according to Yi-Fu Tuan, a "mythical place," which cannot be located. To avoid the problems of a "mythical place," we represent that location with slightly-blurred experiential knowledge or communally-sanctioned practices. The creation of heaven, I argue, does not occur ex nihilo but through a refashioning of knowledge and practices to engage audiences with descriptions of …

Review Of The Face Of The Earth, Ann E. Lundberg

Faculty Publications

Review of SueEllen Campbell, et al. The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture. Published review is at Western American Literature.

Reconciling Christianity And Paganism, Susanna L. Mills

Student Publications

In her novel "Jane Eyre," Charlotte Bronte works to bring opposing ideas of Christianity and Paganism together to strengthen her protagonist, Jane. Bronte uses symbols of supernaturalism, nature, and the moon to highlight Jane's complex spiritual growth. This essay explores those symbols in conjunction with Christianity and their influences on Jane Eyre as she becomes an empowered woman.

"Think Happy Thoughts": Peter Pan As A Tragic Hero, Sarah M. Connelly

Student Publications

Using Aristotle's definition of the "tragic hero," this work will explore J.M. Barrie's novel, Peter and Wendy, and how Peter is a tragic figure. In this paper I argue that Peter Pan is not only a tragic hero whose human frailty— in Peter’s case, his fear of growing old— causes him to make the terrible mistake of rejecting his own development of humanity and the opportunity for redemption through maternal love, but that Barrie uses Peter to emphasize that, contrary to the Romantic conception of childhood, children need the guidance of parents in order to live a fulfilling life.

History Abroad: How Do Denmark And The U.S. Measure Up?, Louis T. Gentilucci

Student Publications

By viewing bias itself as a product of history, educators and scholars can understand it better in their own times. By studying the historical path of the United States and Denmark, scholars can see that the nature of history can have subtle but important impacts on common education. Even when educators are aware of potential bias, history itself warps its dissemination.

Family Frontiers: The Spage Age Fiction Of Marge Piercy And Ursula K. Leguin, Sue Norton

Articles

This article considers the ways in which feminist writers of speculative fiction reinvent family forms in ways that disrupt conventional narratives of family in literature.

"Nobody With A Good Car Needs To Be Justified": Materialism And Commercialism In Flannery O'Connor's Fiction, Maria Vallas

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Flannery O’Connor was writing in a time of great transition for American society. The 1950s brought with them a post-war economy that was creating a middle class that suddenly had disposal income and leisure time. To O’Connor, this translated into a culture that was becoming increasingly more distracted by the secular and material, and moving farther and farther away from the Christian ideal. This was not simply a cultural phenomenon to her – it was a danger, and more to the point, as a Christian writer, it was a call to arms. O’Connor’s work can be seen as a series …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 23, No. 1, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Sinclair Lewis’s Former Greenwich Village Home Designated as Historic Literary Site,” by Dave Simpkins and Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

Remarks Given at the Lewis Medallion Ceremony, May 9, 2014, by Richard Lingeman

“Sinclair Lewis in New York City,” by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University “Pluralistic Narrative Strategies of ‘Modern Realism’ in Sinclair Lewis’s Novels,” by Haiou Yang, Huaihua University

Statement for the Sinclair Lewis Cultural Medallion Ceremony, by Anthony Di Renzo, Ithaca College

“Translating Lewis into English: Two Poems: ‘The Student’s Song’ and ‘To Twenty-One,'” by Joshua P. Preston, Baylor College

“Sinclair Lewis Locations in New York …

Upon The Plains Of The Soul .'. The Liberating Logos Of Joao Guimaraes Rosa In "Grande Sertao: Veredas", Jizelda Galvao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two drawings accompanied the novel Grande Sertão: veredas by João Guimarães Rosa in its second edition (1958). Not much attention has been given to them. In fact, their corners and ends have, in many editions, suffered "amputations." So many are the published editions that have simply discarded them. In my dissertation, I sustain that these "maps" are part of the text of the novel. They are the "Roteiro de Deus," Man's Path of Return to the "Paradisical Garden." I propose an esoteric reading of them along with an esoteric reading of the novel itself. Rosa's novel is an alchemical furnace, …

Beauty And The Beastly Prime Minister, John J. Su

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay examines the so-called “turn to beauty” in British fiction since the 1990s as a response to the political and social consequences of Thatcherism. Focusing primarily on four texts—Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994), Julian Barnes’s England, England, (1998), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005)—this essay argues that conceptions of beauty and beastliness delineate possible boundaries to the neoliberalism with which Thatcherism is associated. Two distinct phases of the beauty/beastliness rhetoric are identified: an ironized utopianism in the 1990s; an ambivalent embrace of global humanism in the 2000s.

“I’D Rather Be In Afghanistan”: Antinomies Of Battle: Los Angeles, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

This article reads Battle: Los Angeles (2011) against the grain to argue that the film possesses an antiwar undertow running unexpectedly counter to its surface-level pro-military politics. The article uses the antinomy structuring Battle: Los Angeles as the opportunity to explore the pro- and anti-war politics of science fiction alien invasion film more generally, as well as consider the role of cooperation with the military in Hollywood blockbusters. The article closes with a Jamesonian reading of “the army”: as a kind of utopia as registered by mainstream cultural texts like Battle: Los Angeles.

Review Of Rhetoric Of Respect: Recognizing Change At A Community Writing Center By Tiffany Rousculp, Beth Godbee

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, And The Challenge Of Middle Ground By Jessica Restaino, Margaret Briggs-Dineen, Wendy Fall, Beth Godbee, Danielle Klein, Laura Linder-Scholer, Alyssa Mcgrath, Michael Stock, Sarah Thompson

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Precarious Wife: Narratives Of Marital Instability In Medieval And Early Modern Literature, Emily G. Sherwood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Precarious Wife intervenes in the propagation of the binary--of privilege and marginalization--inherent in discussions of the institutional identity of wife in the medieval and early modern periods by exposing the vulnerability and malleability of the category often ignored or minimized in discussions of pre-modern women. Drawing on Judith Butler's work on vulnerability, this dissertation questions the normative trajectory of daughter, wife, widow for medieval and early modern women that excludes people with alternate narratives or identities. While men's subjectivity spanned multiple identities based on their class, rank, career, religious practices, community, and networks of kinship, women were almost exclusively defined …

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.

All At One Point: The New Physics Of Italo Calvino And Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Thomas Rinaldi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work of comparative literary criticism focuses on the presence of mathematical and scientific concepts and imagery in the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, beginning with an historical overview of scientific philosophy and an introduction to the most significant scientific concepts of the last several centuries, before shifting to deep, scientifically-driven analyses of numerous individual fictions, and finally concluding with a meditation on the unexpectedly fictive aspects of science and mathematics. The close readings of these authors' fictions are contextualized with thorough explanations of the potential literary implications of theories from physics, mathematics, neuroscience and chaos theory. …

Straight Record And The Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters To Foreign Correspondents, Magdalena Bogacka-Rode

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Straight Record and the Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters to Foreign Correspondents engages with Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War (1959), Virginia Cowles' Looking for Trouble (1941) and Josephine Herbst's The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (1991) as documentaries of struggle. Documentary as a mode of writing and image making reveals dissonance, contradictions and varied perspectives which undermine the official historical record. The three writers, I argue, by republishing their Spanish Civil War (SCW) journalism in book form intended to set their record straight. This was motivated by their commitment to the 1930s struggle and the need …

The Gawain-Poet And The Textual Environment Of Fourteenth-Century English Anticlericalism, Ethan Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 14th-century Middle English poems Cleanness and Patience, homiletic retellings of biblical stories which appear in the same manuscript as Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, offer moral lessons to a general Christian audience, but the introduction to Cleanness, with its reference to men whom "prestez arn called," suggests that a central feature of their rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Priests do not appear as exemplars but as potentially filthy hypocrites who inspire God's harshest wrath, since their sins may contaminate Christ's body in the Eucharist.

Using Cleanness's opening lines as a guide, this dissertation …

Jean Sénac, Poet Of The Algerian Revolution, Kai G. Krienke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The work presented here is an exploration of the poetry and life of Jean Sénac, and through Sénac, of the larger role of poetry in the political and social movements of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, mainly in Algeria and America. While Sénac was part of the European community in Algeria, his position regarding French rule changed dramatically over the course of the Algerian War, (between 1954 and 1962) and upon independence, he became one the rare French to return to his adopted homeland. I will argue, sometimes polemically, that Sénac was and should be considered a properly Algerian …

"Fits Of Vulgar Joy": Play Anxiety In The Romantic Poets, Alison Powell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"Fits of Vulgar Joy": Play Anxiety in the Romantic Poets considers the crucial but neglected role of play as a component of the imaginative faculty and as related to the development of moral sensibility in the Romantic era. It examines the Spieltrieb ("play drive") in the works of Coleridge, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, and John Clare to explore the tension between what is explicitly stated about the relationship between play, intersubjectivity, and aesthetics, and how play is actually depicted in the poetry and essays of the Romantic era. It works to identify how and with what objective the Romantics differentiated so …

September 29, 2014: Steam Working Group, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

We Are Cowboys In The Boat Of Ra: Sonny Rollins And Ishmael Reed's Black Cowboy, Brian Flota

Libraries

No abstract provided.

"A Simple Tale Told Simply": The Cultural Importance Of R. D. Blackmore's Neglected Novel "Lorna Doone", John Stanifer

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Morehead State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English by John Stanifer on September 18, 2014.