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Articles 181 - 210 of 1321

Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America

Re-Visioning Underland: C. S. Lewis’S The Silver Chair As Dystopian Fiction, William Thompson Aug 2023

Re-Visioning Underland: C. S. Lewis’S The Silver Chair As Dystopian Fiction, William Thompson

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum follow the four signs given to them by Aslan and descend into the underworld in order to rescue the lost prince. They find the enchanted Prince Rilian, along with thousands of Earthmen, enslaved to the Green Lady, who has a plan to subjugate the people and creatures of Narnia. Michael Ward, in Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens and the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, takes a primarily Christological approach to the Narnia series, but finds a further analogue to Underland of The Silver Chair in the underworld …

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Thinking Makes It So? Hell As A (Fixable) State Of Mind In The Good Place And Lucifer, Erin Giannini Aug 2023

Thinking Makes It So? Hell As A (Fixable) State Of Mind In The Good Place And Lucifer, Erin Giannini

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

While different in genre, sitcom The Good Place and drama Lucifer share a certain irreverent tone and a somewhat unique approach to the afterlife. In The Good Place, there is no mention of gods or devils, only demons, a Good Place committee, and a judge. Lucifer, loosely based on Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels, however, features angels, demons, God, and the Devil, providing its own spin on established cosmology with embodied versions of prominent figures such as the archangel Michael and biblical brothers Cain and Abel. Yet what ties The Good Place and Lucifer together is a focus on …

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Panel: “Hell Is Other People: Looking At The Political Rage Machine In Tolkien Fan Spaces And Media”, Alicia Fox-Lenz, Grace Moone, Cara Marta Messina Aug 2023

Panel: “Hell Is Other People: Looking At The Political Rage Machine In Tolkien Fan Spaces And Media”, Alicia Fox-Lenz, Grace Moone, Cara Marta Messina

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Following the backlash against the Tolkien Society’s “Tolkien and Diversity” seminar and the airing of the first season of Rings of Power, social media fan spaces for Tolkien remain politically charged and reactionary. Building on the foundation of Mythcon 51’s Roundtable “Race, Racisms, and Tolkien,” and Craig Franson’s work showcased there and on the podcast “American Id,” we will discuss the current state of Tolkien discourse on social media and how to navigate the landscape as safely as possible.

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Substance Abuse: C.S. Lewis And The Symbolic Geography Of Hell, Richard Angelo Bergen Aug 2023

Substance Abuse: C.S. Lewis And The Symbolic Geography Of Hell, Richard Angelo Bergen

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake the Romantic, proffers a Romantic vision of hell, and a geographical representation of capacity and scope with an energetic apology. On the other hand, C.S. Lewis’s vision of hell in The Great Divorce is that of a land without substance: a land of addiction to mental maladies, an endless mental substance abuse, an emptying of presence. As one surveys the conversations throughout the book, one gets an increasing sense of the importance of understanding place correctly, as a matter of eternal consequence. One chapter concerns a well-travelled ghost who repeats his …

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“Hell Is Only A Word. The Reality Is Much, Much Worse”: Black Holes As Fantasy Gateways To Hell, Kristine Larsen Aug 2023

“Hell Is Only A Word. The Reality Is Much, Much Worse”: Black Holes As Fantasy Gateways To Hell, Kristine Larsen

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Black holes are frequently described as the scariest objects in the universe, even by the normally staid scientists who study them. Like the warning on the gate of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, any (hu)man or matter that dares to cross the event horizon abandons all hope before literally being ripped to shreds by the object’s extreme tidal forces. As the heart of the beast is approached, the laws of physics break down, time loses its simple everyday meaning, and mathematical madness reigns supreme. It is no wonder that Hollywood has repeatedly adopted the black hole as more than merely …

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Hell On Earth In Garth Nix’S Old Kingdom, John Rosegrant Aug 2023

Hell On Earth In Garth Nix’S Old Kingdom, John Rosegrant

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

I explore psychological meanings embedded in the Old Kingdom. Its River of Death is a hell impinging on life: Like Dante’s Inferno it has nine sectors; the dead take hideous Boschian forms; and helped by necromancers wielding “free magic” they often return to life. On this metaphor Nix builds the insight that desiring to live deeply and joyously risks turning hellish if early life was loveless. Necromancers and Free Magic are battled by Abhorsens and others wielding “Charter magic,” Free Magic transformed by symbols. Immersion in the Charter gives a joyous experience of connection to all life. Symbolization must …

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Those Queer Devils: Queercoding Villains, Devils, And Demons In Mythopoeic Film And Media, Grace Moone Aug 2023

Those Queer Devils: Queercoding Villains, Devils, And Demons In Mythopoeic Film And Media, Grace Moone

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In the early years of Hollywood’s Golden Age, The Hays Code functioned as a rigid morality code designed to shape the norms of Western culture. Its far-reaching impacts remain visible even decades after its enforcement was no longer required. In this talk, we will explore one of the most pervasive elements of the code’s legacy: the prohibition against showing LGBTQ characters in a positive light, and the resulting phenomenon of “queer-coding” characters. The practice of portraying LGBT+ characters through a lens of villainy and stereotype to adhere to the Hays Code requirement that queerness be punished and depicted as undesirable …

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Animated Dancing To Hell And Back: Disney’S Fantasia, Matthew Elfenbein Aug 2023

Animated Dancing To Hell And Back: Disney’S Fantasia, Matthew Elfenbein

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Imaginative images of Heaven and Hell capture the sociocultural engagement with Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which demonstrates animated dancing bodies to represent the descent and passage of the hero’s journey. This journey is presented with many different forms of conflict and images that become unique through the qualities of the animated screendance. This form of dance on film is accentuated by the visualization of imaginative bodies, a conflict between knowledge and curiosity, and the spectacle of layering images on top of symbolic meanings to emphasize the power of identification with the audience. The spectators of this film are engaged with …

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From Hell (Or Not): Representations Of Merlin And His Origins In The Comics, Michael A. Torregrossa Aug 2023

From Hell (Or Not): Representations Of Merlin And His Origins In The Comics, Michael A. Torregrossa

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

The Arthurian figure of Merlin has a long literary history, but he never seems able to shake off the effects of his parentage. In medieval tradition, Merlin is sired by inhuman powers: first a seemingly benign dæmon and then a decidedly wicked demon. This preternatural aspect to his conception grants Merlin the skills and powers he uses to support the realm, yet it also taints him as someone potentially dangerous. Although Merlin’s background cannot be changed, creative artists often choose to ignore or alter his origins, especially when retelling his story for mass audiences. In contrast, other creators, usually those …

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Denethor’S Descent Into Hell, Craig Boyd Aug 2023

Denethor’S Descent Into Hell, Craig Boyd

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

One character in Tolkien’s Legendarium stands out as one of the more morally sad and complicated individuals: Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. Although he tries to defend the kingdom he cares for, his own significant moral weaknesses subvert even the best of his intentions. His despair, provoked by the death of his favorite son—and the apparent death of his other son—sends him into a spiral of self-destructive harm from which there is no return. What accounts for this are three factors. First, his self-imposed isolation from others cuts him off from the necessary fellowship that could sustain his character; his …

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Feasting At The Threshold: Transubstantiation, Queer Desire, And Homonationalism In Diane Duane’S The Tale Of The Five, Taylor Driggers Aug 2023

Feasting At The Threshold: Transubstantiation, Queer Desire, And Homonationalism In Diane Duane’S The Tale Of The Five, Taylor Driggers

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Diane Duane’s ongoing pulp fantasy series The Tale of the Five (1979- ) is set in a world marked by constant bodily transgressions and surprises, where a human and dragon can occupy the same body and become lovers and a one-night stand can bring one face-to-face with God. This essay will argue that Duane’s series articulates eroticism in a manner comparable to Linn Marie Tonstad’s (2016) queer re-visioning of transubstantiation and bodily and spiritual transformation through the Eucharist. Acts of eating and drinking serve to highlight how characters’ pansexual, polyamorous relations with each other and the love of the Goddess …

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The Underworld As The Heroine’S Journey Home: Marvel, Xena, And Mythic Reimaginings, Valerie Estelle Frankel Aug 2023

The Underworld As The Heroine’S Journey Home: Marvel, Xena, And Mythic Reimaginings, Valerie Estelle Frankel

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Hell is traditionally a place of torment, where the young heroine, like Persephone or Eurydice, is kidnapped by the patriarchy, leaving others to rescue her. The last few decades, however, have offered a model closer to Sumerian Inanna, in which the heroine is enlightened by hell or even conquers it. Angela, Queen of Hel: Journey to the Funderworld by Marguerite Bennett (2016) gives its heroine this path. Winning back her beloved, Angela, sister of Thor and Loki, becomes queen of the underworld but then prefers to bring Sera back to earth in a flip on Eurydice. The Xena episode “Fallen …

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Infernal Landscape In Jacob’S Ladder (1990) In Light Of Carl G. Jung’S Theory Of Individuation, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski Aug 2023

Infernal Landscape In Jacob’S Ladder (1990) In Light Of Carl G. Jung’S Theory Of Individuation, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Carl G. Jung’s conception of the human psyche as an inner realm that gives access to profound, numinous experiences inspired many artists and popular culture authors to portray heaven and hell as symbolic expressions of the opposite forces within the human psyche rather than cosmological or supernatural regions. In my paper, I will concentrate on how the Hollywood film Jacob’s Ladder (1990) directed by Adrian Lyne, by portraying the main character’s descent into a deathbed vision depicted as hellish reality, reflects Jung’s theory of individuation, a process of self-realization that aims at reconciling various elements of the psyche and achieving …

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Hell On His Mind: Dean Winchester’S Journey To Hell And Back, Anna Caterino Aug 2023

Hell On His Mind: Dean Winchester’S Journey To Hell And Back, Anna Caterino

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Season three of Supernatural (2005-2020) closes with a shot of Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) in Hell. The place has no discernible features and resembles neither the long waiting line nor the gothic castle of later seasons. The few elements that do characterize it, however, make it look like a brain, the labyrinth of ropes reminiscent of neurons. This association introduces Hell as a place that exists first and foremost in Dean’s dead. The lack of establishing shots and the abstract terms used to discuss Hell, damnation, and Dean’s experience further support this claim, working in its favor. After all, the …

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The Righteousness Of The Damned In Jeffrey Konvitz’S The Sentinel, Raymond G. Falgui Aug 2023

The Righteousness Of The Damned In Jeffrey Konvitz’S The Sentinel, Raymond G. Falgui

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

The paper will examine the nature of the damned in Jeffrey Konvitz’s 1970s pulp horror novel The Sentinel by using a framework utilized by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, wherein damnation involves a species of spiritual blindness that masquerades as righteousness and shields the damned (for a time) from an awareness of their ultimate condition. Specifically, the paper will provide a character analysis of the co-protagonist Michael, arguably one of Konvitz’s more complex literary creations, and the role he plays in briefly elevating a generic genre-contrived plot into the realm of true spiritual horror. While making such a …

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Welcome And Announcements, Mythsoc Stewards Aug 2023

Welcome And Announcements, Mythsoc Stewards

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Welcome and Announcements

Join us for a screening of the Welcome and Announcements video, and have a cup of coffee before we get started!


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Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier Aug 2023

Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The focus of this thesis are two recent novels featuring witches: Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République(The Witches of the Republic, 2016) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies (2020). The first is a futuristic dystopia set in 2062, during the witch trial of the Sibyl of Cumae. The second is a work of historical fiction based on witch trial records and set in seventeenth-century Finnmark (Norway). Both are feminist novels, and both emphasize the political valence of the witch as a gendered figure. This figure emerged from the misogyny of early modern demonology but acquired its contemporary contours …

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The Power Of Storytelling: A Case Study Exploring Black Studies Through Nigerian Women Writers, Genesis Flores, Gaetan Jean Louis, Alexa Victor Jul 2023

The Power Of Storytelling: A Case Study Exploring Black Studies Through Nigerian Women Writers, Genesis Flores, Gaetan Jean Louis, Alexa Victor

McNair Scholars Program

No abstract provided.

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Introduction To The Special Issue: Multilingual And Multicultural English Education In Asia, Isabel Pefianco Martin, Marianne Rachel G. Perfecto, Wei Keong Too Jun 2023

Introduction To The Special Issue: Multilingual And Multicultural English Education In Asia, Isabel Pefianco Martin, Marianne Rachel G. Perfecto, Wei Keong Too

Educational Leadership and Management Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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Beast And Man In India: Undoing John Lockwood Kipling’S Imperial Citation, Oishani Sengupta Jun 2023

Beast And Man In India: Undoing John Lockwood Kipling’S Imperial Citation, Oishani Sengupta

Criticism

This article posits that John Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India (1891), the illustrated compendium on animals that mixes discussions of colonial cross-species entanglements with personal reflections on transforming local arts and crafts in India in the service of imperial power, is a multiauthored book. Centering the presence of Indian illustrators as central to Beast and Man’s texture, this essay uses the term “imperial citation” to highlight the range of strategies Kipling uses to overtly and covertly appropriate the labor of Indigenous creators within the fabric of this volume. By placing the material text within the context of colonial …

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Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar Jun 2023

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …

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Gaps Of Speculation: Refusing Representation In Queer And Postcolonial Fiction, Sarah Schwartz Jun 2023

Gaps Of Speculation: Refusing Representation In Queer And Postcolonial Fiction, Sarah Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how queer and postcolonial novels respond to the archive as a determiner of what stories we can and cannot tell through formal experimentation that omits expected elements. Focusing on the subject- and object-making power and the tekhne of inclusion and exclusion that shape the modern archive, I analyze how novels spanning the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century refuse to mimetically reproduce bodies that were traditionally made the object of that knowledge in ways legible to the familiar archival forms. Instead, these novels turn the exclusion of the archive back on itself by manifesting lacunae …

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International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera Jun 2023

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

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Colonial Modernity And The Image Of The Gorkhaland Movement In Kiran Desai's The Inheritance Of Loss, Ubaraj Katawal May 2023

Colonial Modernity And The Image Of The Gorkhaland Movement In Kiran Desai's The Inheritance Of Loss, Ubaraj Katawal

Critical Humanities

This article examines some dynamics surrounding the Indian nation-state's treatment of its minority populations, and how Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss seems to abet the postcolonial nation-state's attempt to policing its own people. The article is interested in exploring the impact of colonial modernity in postcolonial human relations. As such, the novel successfully locates postcolonial literary violence in the character of the judge, whose replication of racist treatments on his victims highlights the destructive cycle of violence. At the same time, the novel reinforces ethnic stereotypes against certain ethnicities--at least it leaves much to be desired in countering racist …

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Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim May 2023

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

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Sweat Equity: Lynn Nottage's Radical Dialectic Of Deindustrialization, Jocelyn L. Buckner May 2023

Sweat Equity: Lynn Nottage's Radical Dialectic Of Deindustrialization, Jocelyn L. Buckner

Theatre Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Lynn Nottage has devoted her career to researching and telling stories of Black individuals and communities with expressed interest in laborers, advocating for their agency, humanity, and legacy. In her second Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, Nottage dramatizes more recent US history, illuminating the lives of workers marginalized by the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt in the early 2000s. Sweat is emblematic of Nottage's sustained effort to deploy playwriting as activism and stand in solidarity with those whose stories she chooses to tell. As a constant theme in her works, Lynn Nottage's stories align with marginalized workers' efforts and histories, …

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Beyond Blackface: Minstrel Shows In Modern Day America, Cheyenne Burns May 2023

Beyond Blackface: Minstrel Shows In Modern Day America, Cheyenne Burns

The Confluence

This essay explores the history of Blackface in America and how not addressing or treating Blackface as a taboo has allowed for microaggressions within the media to continue.

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Evaluating The Efficacy Of The Christian Reformational Transcendental Model Of Art Criticism As A Literary Theory Through Albert Camus’S The Stranger, Elizabeth Miller May 2023

Evaluating The Efficacy Of The Christian Reformational Transcendental Model Of Art Criticism As A Literary Theory Through Albert Camus’S The Stranger, Elizabeth Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The subfield of art criticism and theory within Christian reformational philosophy, a descendent of the neo-Calvinist theology developed through the work of Dutch Reformer Abraham Kuyper and others, is becoming increasingly diverse. Recently, scholars such as Leland Ryken, Glenda Faye Mathes, and Philip Graham Ryken have built upon twentieth-century theologian Francis Schaeffer’s worldview approach by popularizing a transcendental model of art criticism, an approach that applies the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty to works of art. However, the transcendentals, while widely discussed in the fields of philosophy, theology, and, to a lesser extent, art theory, have not been explicitly …

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Mythos Series (Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined, Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined, And Troy: The Greek Myths Reimagined) By Stephen Fry, Phillip Fitzsimmons May 2023

Mythos Series (Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined, Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined, And Troy: The Greek Myths Reimagined) By Stephen Fry, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

Book review of Stephen Fry's Mythos series, reviewed by Phillip Fitzsimmons.

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The De-Indigenisation Of The English Language: On Linguistic Idiosyncrasy, Fayssal Bensalah Apr 2023

The De-Indigenisation Of The English Language: On Linguistic Idiosyncrasy, Fayssal Bensalah

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper introduces and explains a fresh adaptation of linguistic hybridity. This creative strategy is common among postcolonial, transnational and transcultural writers, who would import linguistic features from their first languages to hybridise their prose and paint it with a distinctive identity. I aim, however, to demonstrate that my English text can be hybridised without looking outside the English language, but rather by looking within it. The English language, as I argue, is already a hybrid language, populated by thousands of words borrowed from various languages, including Arabic. The words of this latter, if used intelligently and selectively in my …

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