Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

Angel Island Poetry: Reading And Writing Cultures, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Object of a darker chapter in American history, the Angel Island Poems (as they have become known) are a recently discovered body of over 135 poems, written primarily in Chinese. These were literally carved into the walls at the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese immigrants were detained, sometimes indefinitely, between approximately 1910-1940. This lesson demonstrates how history and culture can be integral to our understanding of poetry, even poetry that is deeply reflective and personal in nature; by requiring students to model and produce their own poetry, it also makes evident that writing poetry is a creative instinct and …

Who's Your Daddy?: Representations Of Masculinity And Coming Of Age In Television’S The Vampire Diaries, Kimberley Mcmahon-Coleman

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman

Fantasy narratives often use the metaphor of the werewolf for the adolescent identity-forming process. The Vampire Diaries goes one step further in the character of Tyler Lockwood, a teen wolf/vampire hybrid. An aggressive and abused teen, Tyler loses his father in Season 1 and his replacement father figure, a paternal uncle, in Season 2. In Season 3, he is “sired” by the Original hybrid, Klaus. In the face of these competing influences, Tyler struggles to come to terms with his own identity. The program uses the fictional township of Mystic Falls, populated by witches, werewolves, vampires and ghosts, to examine …

Angel Island Poetry: Reading And Writing Cultures, Adam Kotlarczyk

Understanding Poetry

Object of a darker chapter in American history, the Angel Island Poems (as they have become known) are a recently discovered body of over 135 poems, written primarily in Chinese. These were literally carved into the walls at the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese immigrants were detained, sometimes indefinitely, between approximately 1910-1940.

This lesson demonstrates how history and culture can be integral to our understanding of poetry, even poetry that is deeply reflective and personal in nature; by requiring students to model and produce their own poetry, it also makes evident that writing poetry is a creative instinct and …

Paradox Of The Abject: Postcolonial Subjectivity In Jamaica Kincaid’S The Autobiography Of My Mother And Cristina García’S Dreaming In Cuban, Allison Nicole Harris

Masters Theses

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines abjection as the seductive and destructive remainder of the process of entering the symbolic space of the father and leaving the pre-symbolic space of the mother, resulting in a desire to return to the jouissance of the pre-symbolic space. In this project, I read Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother as an attempt to link Xuela’s psychic abjection with the postcolonial identity. Xuela exists on the boundaries of the colonial dichotomy, embracing the space of the abject because she is haunted by her dead mother. She cannot return to her mother, …

Með Lögum Skal Land Vort Byggja: ‘With Law Shall The Land Be Built.’ Law-Speaking And Identity In The Medieval Norse Atlantic, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Gwyn Jones famously posited the notion of a cogent Norse identity as manifested by common language, culture, and mythology; further, as he clarified in his landmark work A History of the Vikings, law and the practice of law in local and national assemblies was a fundamental component of such a unifying cultural characteristic: "…for the Scandinavian peoples in general, their respect for law, their insistence upon its public and democratic exercise at the Thing, and its validity for all free men, together with their evolution of a primitive and exportable jury system, is one of the distinctive features of their …

Werewolves And Other Shapeshifters In Popular Culture: A Thematic Analysis Of Recent Depictions, Kimberley Mcmahon-Coleman, Roslyn Weaver

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman

In recent years, shapeshifting characters in literature, film and television have been on the rise. This has followed the increased use of such characters as metaphors, with novelists and critics identifying specific meanings and topics behind them. This book aims to unravel the shapeshifting trope. Rather than pursue a case-based study, the works are grouped around specific themes--adolescence, gender, sexuality, race, disability, addiction, and spirituality--that are explored through the metaphor of shapeshifting. Because of its transformative possibilities and its flexibility, the shapeshifter has the potential to change how we see our world. With coverage of iconic fantasy texts and a …