Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Fake Italian: An 83% True Autobiography With Pseudonyms And Some Tall Tales, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

In a city torn apart by racial tension, Damien Cavalieri is an adolescent without a tribe. His mother -who pines for the 1950s Brooklyn Italian community she grew up in- fears he lacks commitment to his heritage. Damien’s fellow Staten Islanders agree, dubbing him a “fake Italian” and bullying him for being artistic. Complicating matters, his efforts to make friends and date girls outside of the Italian community are thwarted time and again by circumstances beyond his control. When a tragic accident shakes Damien to his core, he begins a journey of self-discovery that will lead him to Italy, where …

Within The Shadow Of The Cowboy: Myths And Realities Of The Old American West, Katherine Lamb

Undergraduate Theses

It has been argued that the American cowboy is the most widely misunderstood and misinterpreted figure in American history. This mythic figure does not look like the real ranch hands who littered the American West throughout the nineteenth century, nor does he act like them. Instead, he is set apart, as a figurehead of masculinity and American ideals, determined to roam the frontier as a guardian of justice and stability. This version of the cowboy, however, is not bound within the pages of novels or within limitations of film. Instead, the cowboy’s ideals, persona, look, and code remain a vivid …

'Disembodied Bones': Recovering The Poetry And Prose Of Elinor Wylie 2021, Sarah R. Bullock

Master's Theses

Picking a book to read is like diving for a pearl, writes Elinor Wylie, a 20th Century American poet, novelist, essayist and prominent magazine literary editor. In her essay "The Pearl Diver", she writes that it is the diver that risks the unknown- unaided by diving equipment in the form of library indexes-who gains the greatest joy, Wylie states (Fugitive Prose, 869). Wylie explains:

I venture to perceive an analogy between the rebellious pearl diver and myself, in my slight experience with public libraries...how much more delightful, how much more stimulating, to abandon the paraphernalia of card indexes and mahogany …

Old Industries, Old Conflicts: The Significance Of American Epic Novels, Arturo Alcazar

Honors Projects

This essay focuses on three American epic novels: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and Underworld by Don DeLillo. More specifically, the essay examines the themes of ambiguity, redemption, good and evil, isolation, and violence as they are depicted in these three novels and what they indicate about America and its people and society.

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

The Neon Bible, From Page To Screen: John Kennedy Toole’S Portrait Of Small-Town Southern Life, Heather Duerre Humann

Study the South

Louisiana-born writer John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969) represents the South in such a way that stereotypes about the region are brought to bear, he also uses his novels -- his short novel, The Neon Bible (1989), and in his better-known tragicomic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) -- to question the culture of the South. In this manner, Toole offers a multifaceted portrait of the region while also raising questions about the nature of representation.

Problems With Perceptual And Cognitive Idiosyncrasies In Li Wenjun’S Translation Of The Benjy Section Of Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Aaron L. Moore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Problems with Perceptual and Cognitive Idiosyncrasies in Li Wenjun’s Translation of the Benjy Section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Aaron Lee Moore conducts a close explication of a 2014 English-Chinese edition of part of The Sound and the Fury. Li Wenjun’s translation of the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury is certainly admirable in its graceful rendering of Faulkner’s complex, idiosyncratic prose style into accessible Chinese—and particularly laudable in its meticulous tracking of the a-chronological sequence of Benjy’s stream of consciousness narrative. However, problems arise in the translation due to an …

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Using Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, this thesis outlines how to ethically and effectively teach literature that deals with trauma. My personal teaching philosophy as well as the current pedagogy surrounding trauma literature preface a detailed syllabus, lesson plans, assessments, and activities that would be useful in teaching a course centered around literature that deals with trauma. This thesis highlights the merits of teaching trauma fiction in the literature classroom.

Margaret Atwood’S The Testaments As A Dystopian Fairy Tale, Karla-Claudia Csürös

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 23, 2021, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Peace, Love And War: Venus As A Pacifist, Warmonger, And Powerful Woman In Venus And Adonis And The Faerie Queene, Maia J. Janssen

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Andersen’S Fairy Tales And The Bildungsroman, Joseph Torres

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Path To Piety In Anne Bradstreet’S “Here Follows Some Verses Upon The Burning Of Our House July 10, 1666”, Preston Thompson

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Seduction Novel’S Awakening, Julia Francis

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Fracturing The Mirror: Girls Made Of Snow And Glass, Abigael Good

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Henry Adams: An Education In Autobiography, Marcellus Richie

Dissertations and Theses

This essay will begin by breaking down Henry Adams’s starting sentence in his autobiography word by word, piece by piece – pondering its meanings and permutations in the context of subsequent chapters of this iconic memoir. The essay will then consider whether Adams’s Education should still be regarded as a classic of American autobiography or seen merely as an irrelevant and out-of-date artifact. In a nation radically transformed since Adams’s time, does the book still deserve its high flung reputation? In other words, which of the images cited above is most relevant to The Education: an image of optimistic youth …

"To Work Without Stopping": Masculinity And The Midwestern Farm Novel, Andy Oler

Publications

Ruth Suckow's Country People (1924) and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) feature hard-working young farmers who develop their land and gain the esteem of their community. As they age, however, their abilities decline and their reputation erodes, not only revealing their personal flaws but also exemplifying the harms of American masculinity on farmers and their families. By incorporating scholarship on aging farmers and farm economics, this chapter shows how, when August Kaetterhenry and Larry Cook attempt to hand over the farm to the next generation, they miss the sense of ownership and control they had as working farmers. The …

To Reach The Unreachable Stars: Reexamining The Shared Arthurian Vision Of C. S. Lewis's Science Fiction Trilogy And Raymond Chandler's Marlowe Novels, Hollis Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although Raymond Chandler and C. S. Lewis seem to be a rather strange pairing, the ways in which they both borrow from Arthurian literature and use the myth to speak to their cultural moment are strikingly similar. Following T. S. Eliot’s use of the Grail quest in The Waste Land (which set a standard for the use of such material in Modern literature), these authors use Arthurian elements as a means of exposing hidden connections between the fragments of the literary past and the present within Chandler’s Marlowe novels and Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Both men present Western identity as …

The Case Of Limbo: The Search For Identity In Sylvia Plath’S Short Fiction And The Bell Jar, Kristin Lyons

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Though Sylvia Plath’s poems and novel undergo frequent scholarly research, her short fiction is often overlooked. Plath’s journals influenced her short fiction writing, and her stories reflected Plath’s lived experiences. Plath’s short fiction, like her other works, explore themes of identity and detachment. Each of her protagonists exist in a personal limbo, and they strive to find their identities and to fit the roles in which they occupy. This thesis focuses on “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” stories from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and additional research from scholarly journals and biographies, with comparisons to identity struggles …

No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings On The Jetsons, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015).

Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past …

Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

In her classic 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry explores the impacts of generations of violence, exploitation, and discrimination on an African American family in Chicago’s Southside. Throughout the play, a family house plant comes to symbolize the matriarch's hopes for her children, and her ability to nourish the plant reflects on her ability to fulfil her own modest dreams and provide for the dreams of her progeny. Similarly, we see plants fulfilling the same role in another tale of American racial injustice, namely Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, an illustrated personal account of the artist’s experience …

Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, And Maternal Power In The Novels Of Toni Morrison, Jonathan Garren

South Carolina Libraries

Jonathan Garren reviews Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison by Geneva Cobb Moore.

Choke, Brooksie Harrington

English Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.