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Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority

Between Authenticity And Exploitation: Rethinking The Intended Audience Of Sean Baker's Tangerine, Ava Brandt May 2026

Between Authenticity And Exploitation: Rethinking The Intended Audience Of Sean Baker's Tangerine, Ava Brandt

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Sean Baker's Tangerine (2015) has generated genuinely divided responses among trans critics, and for good reason. This paper takes that division seriously, using two reviews published on Autostraddle within six weeks of each other to frame a central question: who is Tangerine actually for? Existing scholarship on trans cinema has tended to evaluate films on a spectrum from exploitative to affirming, but this paper argues that framework is insufficient for a film like Tangerine, which operates as both simultaneously. Through close reading of the film alongside its production history, paratexts, and reception, and drawing on Paige Macintosh's scholarship on trans …


The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism And Gentrification In Paula Fox’S Desperate Characters And Kali Fajardo-Anstine’S Sabrina And Corina, Miranda Roberts May 2024

The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism And Gentrification In Paula Fox’S Desperate Characters And Kali Fajardo-Anstine’S Sabrina And Corina, Miranda Roberts

English (MA) Theses

This thesis explores two underexplored works of gentrification literature—Paula Fox’s novel, Desperate Characters (1970) and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection, Sabrina & Corina (2019). Desperate Characters offers a nuanced and critical examination of characters with privilege who move into Brooklyn in the 1960s, which involves the displacement of Black and Latinx communities; Fajardo-Anstine’s collection introduces Denver as a site of dramatic gentrification in the new century, by portraying Latinx characters from older neighborhoods who must adjust to the disintegration and cohesiveness of their communities in the face of gentrification. In my discussion of these works, I draw from pre-existing scholarship …


Interior Chinatown: Chinatown As A Performative Space, Audrey Fong May 2024

Interior Chinatown: Chinatown As A Performative Space, Audrey Fong

English (MA) Theses

This thesis focuses on Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown: A Novel (2020), exploring the function of Chinatown in Los Angeles within the novel as a space of creation, that of “Asia” for Hollywood and home for Taiwanese immigrants. I argue that Interior Chinatown offers a unique look at the perception or notion of Chinatown, paying attention to the way Hollywood has shaped it and used it to create a sense of China and “Asia” in the cultural imagination. Through satire and the blurring of the reel and the real, Yu is able to criticize the inner workings of Hollywood’s relationship with …


Banned Books And Educational Censorship: The Necessity Of Keeping Queer Books In Schools, Rebecca Rhodes May 2024

Banned Books And Educational Censorship: The Necessity Of Keeping Queer Books In Schools, Rebecca Rhodes

English (MA) Theses

Despite most parents and students fundamentally disagreeing with the censorship of books, book banning has spiraled out of control in the United States. The number of new book bans rises almost exponentially every school year, and books with queer themes are targeted far more frequently. Pro-ban advocates use deliberately demeaning rhetoric to garner support for their cause, and in doing so, they’ve managed to take away an educational resource from millions of children in both classrooms and school libraries, because queer-themed books help foster a sense of community for queer children and teens, something that is looked down upon by …


Mirroring Financial Speculation And Late Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction: Worker Gullibility And Guilt As Re-Imagination Of Human Value, Ian Koh Dec 2023

Mirroring Financial Speculation And Late Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction: Worker Gullibility And Guilt As Re-Imagination Of Human Value, Ian Koh

English (MA) Theses

Charles Yu’s short story “Standard Loneliness Package” from the speculative fiction collection Sorry Please Thank You features a worker who conforms to the cultural logic of Wall Street and late capitalism. However, the privilege of working in a tech company in an up-and-coming industry does not shield him from experiencing the oftentimes destructive logic of financial speculation and in-built structural inequalities. This paper makes a case that a tragedy could be read into this worker’s seemingly stable situation in a way that can uncover the character’s truly sorry state from his illusion of privilege and choice. But first, readers must …


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, …


Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard May 2023

Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard

English (MA) Theses

Fantastical narratives such as fairy tales and magical realist literature utilizes fantastic and intangible spaces to unpack that which is often beyond the limitations imposed on our understanding by reality: the stunting experience of individual and generational traumas. This study aims to contribute to the current literary discourse’s understandings of fantastic literature and its subgenres as a tool for healing from trauma through the application of ontological notions of Selfhood and Otherness supplied by 20th century philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, and the notion of Orientalism by postcolonial scholar, Edward Said. The dialogue generated by these schools of thought provide a space …


Timothy Yu, Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing In The United States, Canada, And Australia, Rei Magosaki Feb 2023

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.


Bibliography For "Fiction Novels And Poetry By Hispanic Authors" Display, Isabella Piechota, Kalea Brown, Ruby Blakesleay Sep 2022

Bibliography For "Fiction Novels And Poetry By Hispanic Authors" Display, Isabella Piechota, Kalea Brown, Ruby Blakesleay

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about literature by Hispanic authors for Hispanic Heritage Month in September 2022 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University.


Lack Of Affirmative Consent: Trauma In Jhumpa Lahiri’S “Interpreter Of Maladies”, Ansalee Morrison May 2022

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 …


Personhood And Objecthood: Examining The Speaker’S Interiority And Double Consciousness In Citizen: An American Lyric, Winnie Chak May 2022

Personhood And Objecthood: Examining The Speaker’S Interiority And Double Consciousness In Citizen: An American Lyric, Winnie Chak

English (MA) Theses

The interpersonal use of the “you” (the second person) in Citizen: An American Lyric commands the reader to not look away and bear witness to the interiority Black Americans’ consciousness. The essay examines the transformation of Rankine’s works that expands how double consciousness, found in Citizen, influences the creative writing space (the racial imaginary) and exposes the ongoing discrimination against Black Americans due to white privilege. Rankine’s other works Just US: An American Conversation and The Racial Imaginary compile viewpoints of both Black and white communities that remember moments that either they witnessed racist discrimination or experienced it in …


Partying Like It's 1925: A Comparison And Contrast Of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby And Azuela's The Underdogs, Sarah N. Valadez May 2021

Partying Like It's 1925: A Comparison And Contrast Of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby And Azuela's The Underdogs, Sarah N. Valadez

English (MA) Theses

This work is an assessment of themes, ideas, and structure between two iconic novels published during the nineteen-twenties: The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela (originally published in 1915, re-written and redistributed in the 1920s, and then given a final version in 1925 that was translated into many languages). Both novels were written during times of great change, cultural innovation, and revolution. Many characters from both works also comment, observe, or partake in the politics and the seemingly accepted or tolerated social interactions of their daily lives. For the sake of cross-cultural understanding …


Journeying To A Third Space Of Sovereignty: Explorations Of Land, Cultural Hybridity, And Sovereignty In Ceremony And There There, Jillian Eve Sanchez May 2021

Journeying To A Third Space Of Sovereignty: Explorations Of Land, Cultural Hybridity, And Sovereignty In Ceremony And There There, Jillian Eve Sanchez

English (MA) Theses

In Native American literature, there is a discourse that solely focuses on the relationship between Indigenous people and the land. This relationship is vital to understanding the traditions, rituals, storytelling, and practices of Native Americans. The presence of settler colonialism changes the relationship, effectively changing the nature of cultural and spiritual relationships as well. Indigenous literature provides examples of the modern relationship Native people have with their land; an example of this is Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Tommy Orange’s There There Despite modernity, assimilation, and ways of life introduced by settler colonialism, Native people maintain a relationship to the …


Lessons From Hybridity: A Look Into The Coupling Of Image And Text In Karen Tei Yamashita’S Letters To Memory, Claudia Rankine’S Citizen: An American Lyric, And Ilya Kaminsky’S Deaf Republic, Elizabeth Chen Aug 2020

Lessons From Hybridity: A Look Into The Coupling Of Image And Text In Karen Tei Yamashita’S Letters To Memory, Claudia Rankine’S Citizen: An American Lyric, And Ilya Kaminsky’S Deaf Republic, Elizabeth Chen

English (MA) Theses

The spoken and written word has always been a platform for voices to be heard, but being heard is not always enough. This thesis focuses on the use of hybrid forms in recent publications that address this issue, placing images alongside the written word, letting readers also personally visualize and interpret a perspective different from their own. Specifically, it will look into three examples of hybrid literary works: the placement of photographs beside epistolary writing in Karen Tei Yamashita‘s Letters to Memory (2017), the blend of visual art and lyric prose poetryfound in Citizen: An American Lyric(2014) by Claudia Rankine, …


Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon May 2019

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …


Nomadismos Lingüisticos Y Culturales En Yo-Yo Boing De Giannina Braschi (Linguistic And Cultural Monadisms In 'Yo-Yo Boing' By Giannina Braschi), Laura R. Loustau Jan 2005

Nomadismos Lingüisticos Y Culturales En Yo-Yo Boing De Giannina Braschi (Linguistic And Cultural Monadisms In 'Yo-Yo Boing' By Giannina Braschi), Laura R. Loustau

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

"En la novela Yo-Yo Boing Giannina Braschi plantea un bilingüismo e identidad nomádica. Huye del concepto de permanencia y arraigo, definiéndose en sus personajes como un ser errante y proponiendo una yuxtaposición lingüística propia. Braschi utiliza un code-switching para subrayar la complejidad de vivir simultáneamente en más de una cultura y una lengua. El concepto teórico que da impulso a este artículo es la definición sobre la conciencia nómada que plantea Rosi Braidotti. Para Braidotti lo que define el estado nomádico es la subversión de convenciones fijas y estáticas. Braschi, en Yo-Yo Boing subvierte las convenciones lingüísticas al incorporar un …