Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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!

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 …

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 …

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, …

Timothy Yu, Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing In The United States, Canada, And Australia, Rei Magosaki

English Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Timothy Yu'sDiasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Constructing (Un)Situated Women: Situated Knowledges In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things (1997) And Balli K. Jaswal's Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows (2017), Necole T. Deloach

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis applies Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” to postcolonial feminist novels such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Balli K. Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows in order to illustrate why there needs to be a new framework for analyzing literary postcolonial women. Despite the applicability of Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” to postcolonial feminist literary studies, there has been little research published that analyzes not just the intersection of “situated knowledges” and postcolonial feminist literature, but also the problems that occur when Western scholars approach postcolonial texts without completely acknowledging their own worldview. I argue …

The Wh-Eye Of The Storm: How Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, And Arif Anwar Fictionalize Extreme Weather In Their Works, Elena Vedovello

Pomona Senior Theses

In this thesis, I used Robin Wall Kimmerer’s and James D. Rice’s ideas of “ecological imagination” to analyze three twentieth and twenty-first century works that feature historical extreme weather events. American Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston introduces her fictional characters to the historical force of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; British Modernist writer Virginia Woolf writes about the 1609 Great Frost in Orlando; and Bangladeshi author Arif Anwar sets his novel The Storm during and around the infamous Bhola Cyclone of 1970.

Although these authors and their novels stem …

Introduction: Pandemic And The Global South, Puspa Damai

Critical Humanities

In lieu of abstract: Critical Humanities is a child of the coronavirus pandemic. As paradoxical as it may sound, the journal was born of our desire for community, conviviality, and survival in a world ravaged by disease, despair and death.

Biopower, Biopolitics And Pandemic Vulnerabilities: Reading The Covid Chronicles Comics, Pramod K. Nayar Ph.D.

Critical Humanities

This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collective trauma of the pandemic; on the other hand, these comics draw attention to the role the state plays in regulating bodies to be monitored, governed and, in some cases, deemed disposable.

Migration And Displacement In Twenty-First Century Magical Realist Fiction, Laura Duncan Fontenot

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In “Migration and Displacement in Twenty-First Century Magical Realist Fiction” I discuss identity development and the search for belonging of displaced people within twenty-first century magical realist novels. In each instance, the characters undergo some form of change heralded by a magical moment or moments. The “magic” allows the authors to literalize underlying cultural tensions by physically altering some aspect of a character. The changes are not mere metaphors, they are literal, bodily transformations. The first stage of this process are magical thresholds that allow passage in space and time far beyond the conventions of reality. A magical threshold literalizes …

Leveraging Data Analytics To Study The Impacts Of State Budget Cuts On Public Higher Education Institutions In The United States, Praveen Kumar Guraja

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Public higher education in the United States (US) is funded through two primary forms: one is through state higher education appropriation funds, and the other is student financial aid that is directly given to students. Increasing postsecondary full-time equivalent (FTE) enrollment and graduation rate are becoming a crucial economic priority in the US. However, only a limited study is available about whether state investment in higher education and increasing tuition charges can impact FTE student enrollment (FTEE) and graduation rate (GR) at 4-year public universities in the US. A systematic literature review was conducted for the present research to comprehend …

Narrative Inquiry Of Opt Workers In Manufacturing Engineering Fields, Marietta Joleen Watson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Optional Practical Training (OPT) is a highly valued and highly underutilized program designed to offer international students an opportunity to work in the U.S. and train in their field of study. This qualitative study collected and analyzed the narratives of three alumni of a Midwest university who completed OPT in the manufacturing engineering field. Four themes were identified in the narratives. These themes were inextricable to the premise that OPT is a deeply appreciated opportunity for F-1 students. The first theme is viewing the OPT experience as a system which includes the university, USCIS, and the employer and moreover a …

Lack Of Affirmative Consent: Trauma In Jhumpa Lahiri’S “Interpreter Of Maladies”, Ansalee Morrison

English (MA) Theses

Most scholars who have published analyses of the title story of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, read Mina Das’s character as a woman who chose to be unfaithful to her husband with a friend who once stayed in their home, resulting in the conception of her second son, Bobby. This general consensus is likely influenced by how Mr. Kapasi, the story’s narrator and the tour guide in whom Mina confides her story, concludes that the “pain” Mina complains of is actually “guilt” (Lahiri 63). The work of Tzuhsiu Beryl Chiu, however, stands out …

An Analysis Of Charging Practices And Their Impact On Battery Degradation In North American Electric Vehicles Built Between 2010-2020, Douglas William Edward Ferrier

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electric vehicles (EVs) are emerging as a component of the global solution to combat climate change. However, in North America, particularly in the United States and Canada, the transition away from internal combustion engines (ICE) has been slow. North America faces unique challenges due to its geographical size and population in comparison to other continents. The good news is that EV adoption is increasing within North America. Along with increased EV adoption, governments and public companies are constructing charging infrastructure to support increased consumer EV purchases. Despite increased adoption, many future and current owners throughout North American society have concerns …

Preoperative Predictors For 30-Day Postoperative Emergency Department Visit After A Bariatric Surgery, Pawan Bhandari

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of US hospitals' widely used critical performance or quality outcome measures is the 30-day emergency department (ED) visit after a surgical procedure. Such ED visits add millions of dollars each year as a cost burden to US healthcare. This study aimed to identify key predictors known before the patient's surgery, contributing to undesirable ED visits within 30 days of a bariatric surgical procedure. The study was conducted in three phases. The first phase of the study engaged a panel of experts to narrow down important preoperative factors for patients undergoing bariatric surgery in the form of a Delphi study. …

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Tolkien, Cline, And The Quest For A Silmaril, Tom Ue, James Munday

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

J. R. R. Tolkien has had a significant influence on American writer Ernest Cline. In Ready Player One (2011), the character Ogden Morrow invites Wade and his friends to his mansion, which is modelled after Rivendell from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (2001- 03). Cline goes further in his sequel Ready Player Two (2021) by staging a part of Wade’s virtual quest on Arda I, the First Age of Middle Earth. In this paper, we focus on this episode and, in so doing, argue for Cline’s insights into how we approach fantasy. First, we attend to the …

Who’S His Daddy? Approaches To Merlin’S Father In Children’S And Ya Media, Michael Torregosa

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In the 1130s, Geoffrey of Monmouth originated the character of Merlin, setting him upon the world stage as a wonder-working youth fathered (in the tradition of Greek and Latin authors of the past) by a daemon. However, later writers of the Middle Ages, beginning with Robert de Boron, reconceived Merlin within a more Christianized world, altering his heritage and transforming his sire into a demon from Hell. This shift from benign daemon to malevolent demon has impacted the representation of the wizard of Camelot for centuries. Contemporary fiction for the page as well as for the screen has adopted and …

"Shivering Trees": Horror Monstrosity In Selected Stories From Tolkien’S The Silmarillion, Elise Mckenna

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien used conventions of horror within the setting of Arda. To begin with, the entire world, which is monstrous, is in upheaval with mountains being raised and valley being delved, lanterns of light created, and huge beings walking the land. Then, these landscapes are torn down, the lights are smashed and go out, and new creatures of horror prowl the world. The differences between the portrayals of monstrosity on a grand scale border the grotesque and the sublime. Monstrous beings, Valar and Maiar, command the elements of earth, air, fire, water. They have pre-ordained roles that …

The Story, The Narrator And The Reader: Mediated Horror In C.S. Lewis’S Narniad, William Thompson

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In her introduction to Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture, Jessica R. McCort defines horror for children and young adults as a hybrid genre, one having its roots in both the gothic and the nineteenth-century fairy tale. She explains that the exploration of dark forces in children’s books is often not limited to those tropes traditionally associated with the horror genre for adults: “Think of the books that are considered children’s classics. The best of them contain dark forces of one kind or another, as well as internal battles between the light and the dark: …

Environmental Horror And Restoration: Tolkien And Today, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Caitlin Rottler

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

J.R.R. Tolkien never forgot the felling of a willow tree that had overlooked the mill-pool in Sarehole, nor how his former climbing companion had been left to rot in the grass. His horror at that small environmental violence bleeds through his works, from poems like “From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames” (1913) to the Party Tree in The Hobbit (1937) to a letter to The Daily Telegraph in 1972 when he decried the modern “torture and murder of trees.” This presentation will draw on the excellent foundations laid by Dinah Hazell, as well as the father-son pair of …

Nature And Horror In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Julia Bowers

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Tolkien incorporates horror in his legendarium through the twisting of the natural world in order to signal upcoming dangers to his characters. This creates a dichotomy between the idyllic natural world that represents good in his works and the twisted natural world that has been tampered with by evil. Most of the focus on Tolkien’s portrayal of nature looks at the conflict between nature and technology; the natural world of Middle-earth is portrayed as more complex than merely all nature being good. His natural settings take on an eerie tone to convey a sense of horror to the reader as …

Charles Williams' P'O- L'U - The Cthulhu Connection, Eric Rauscher

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

This presentation delineates the connections between horrific elements in the work of H.P. Lovecraft and the situation of P’o-L’u from Charles Williams.

Delight In Horror’: Charles Williams And Russell Kirk On Hell And The Supernatural, Camilo Peralta

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Charles Williams has always been one of the more overlooked members of the Inklings, and the continued neglect of his poetry and “supernatural thrillers” suggests that he is not likely to experience a dramatic increase in popularity anytime soon. Similarly, Russell Kirk is an American historian who will always be better known for writing The Conservative Mind in 1953 than for any of the dozens of short stories and novels he wrote, many of which deal with ghostly or supernatural themes. In fact, Kirk acknowledged Williams to be an important influence on his fiction; this influence is perhaps most evident …

White Shadows, Black Riders And Restless Wights: Undead Horror Monsters In The Fantasy Worlds Of J.R.R. Tolkien And George R.R. Martin, Franz Klug

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

The proposed essay aims at comparing J.R.R. Tolkien’s Nazgûl and barrow-wights with the white walkers (also known as “the Others”) and wights from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. To begin with, the folkloric/mythological templates for these sub-created monsters would be scrutinized. The introductory ascription of source material would be followed by an analysis of these creatures as horror monsters and gothic elements within the fantasy worlds of Tolkien and Martin. This analysis would also be linked to addressing the question of how the gothic/horror genre influenced the fantasy worlds of both authors, and as in …

Adoring The Head Of Alcasan: Posthuman Horror And Anticipatory Corpse In Lewis’S That Hideous Strength, Mark Brians

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

At the pinnacle of Lewis’ That Hideous Strength (2003) is the reanimation of the decapitated head of Francois Alcasan. The sheer biological persistence that is afforded to it by the biosynthetic technics of medicinal artifice, allows the head to be possessed by “macrobes”— maleficent spiritual beings imprisoned within the circle of the moon. The goal of this reanimation project is purportedly “the conquest of death […] to bring out of that cocoon of organic life […] the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick …

The Overlooked Vampire: Might Macdonald’S Lilith Be Repopularized?, A. J. Prufrock

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Lilith (1895) is George MacDonald’s premier work of symbolic fiction. W.H. Auden asserts that Lilith is “equal, if not superior, to the best of Poe." A cursory reading of the novel reveals much in Narnia can be traced directly to passages. Why has MacDonald’s Lilith received so little commentary and why is it picked up and then put down by even avid readers of fantasy? Universalist theology and chauvinism have been blamed, but literary style is unarguably the main stumbling block. C.S. Lewis, who says of MacDonald, “I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not …