Literature in English, North America Commons^™

An Exploratory Study On The Impact Of Mobile Wireless Technologies In A Teacher Education Classroom, Anupama Ghattu

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mobile technology is revolutionizing the American higher education system. Integrating mobile technology into college classrooms is changing the teaching and learning process. Today’s millennial generation students are tech savvy and using their mobile devices to learn and explore in many possible ways. Mobile technology devices can be used as effective tools to enhance teaching and learning. The ubiquitous nature of these mobile devices with wireless capabilities makes learning possible instantly anywhere and everywhere with easy access to information for everyone. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of integrating mobile wireless technologies (MWT) on preservice teachers’ attitudes …

The Experiences Of African-Born Women Faculty And Administrators At Colleges And Universities In The United States, Oyibo H. Afoaku

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to document the experiences of African-born women faculty and administrators at colleges and universities in the United States. The study explored the factors that motivated African-born women to immigrate to and extend their stay in the United States beyond completion of their education; factors they perceive as constraint on their quest for self-empowerment and identity as foreign students, college instructors, and/or administrators, and parents; and factors that have enabled them to adapt to their host culture and achieve their educational and professional goals even though they had to contend with multiple challenges associated with …

Exposing Narrative Ideologies Of Victimhood In Emma Donaghue’S Room And Gillian Flynn’S Gone Girl, Meredith Jeffers

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Stories about abducted women and murdered wives are sadly common on cable and network news programs, from Nancy Grace to Dateline. These at the center of Emma Donaghue’s Room (2010) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). These contemporary novels manipulate the narrative conventions of popular true-crime stories to expose the

In the each chapter, I examine the interesting narrative perspectives of Room and Gone Girl to understand the ways that these novels deconstruct mass media narratives of violence to reveal ideas about gender. In Room, Donaghue dislocates the narration by narrating the novel not from the perspective of …

Jess's Search For An Understanding Of Truth In Fred Chappell's Kirkman Tetralogy, Alex L. Blumenstock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Fred Chappell’s Kirkman tetralogy, narrator Jess Kirkman synthesizes a multiplicity of perspectives for understanding the nature of truth. Blurring the distinction between art and life, Jess's narrative structure mirrors the imaginative reconstruction of experience; the novels are largely non-chronological emotive interactions with and reflections of his most salient memories and imaginings. Synthesizing an impressive cacophony of voices, Jess's stories both describe and apply the wisdom and tales Jess acquires from and with his family members. Each story informs the prior and the next, and the rhizomatic interaction between language, narrative, and reader explores Jess's numerous identities and understandings as …

Multiplicity, Marianne Leslie Chan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This manuscript, Multiplicity, is a collection of poems that addresses the varying dimensions within human interactions and the multiple nature of the self. The speakers in these poems confront the “arbitrary constraints” and the categories that define our identities, as well as how these categories are almost always blurred by the complexities of the self and the differences between people. These categories include gender, sexuality, ethnicity, siblinghood, daughterhood, and religion. Two of these poems— “Really, It is All Arbitrary Constraint” and “Other Stories,” which appear in the second section—attempt to dismantle these constraints and/or categories by breaking from traditional poetic …

Wandering, Idleness, And The Nineteenth-Century Tales Novel, 1836-1895, Molly C. O'Donnell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In "The Late-Victorian Romance Revival" (2008) Anna Vaninskaya questions if "one [can] even speak of the mixing or hybridization of genres in a particular work if the genres themselves had not yet been conclusively defined" (60). This question serves as a warning to genre studies scholars seeking to tease out new observations from history. This dissertation, however, seeks to do just that. Employing multiple theoretical approaches, my study of what I dub the tales novel finds links between diverse Victorian works. Bearing a resemblance to a collection of stories, with seemingly disparate narratives, the tales novels also demonstrate plot interdependence. …

The Binding Of Abraham: Inverting The Akedah In Fail-Safe And Wargames, Hunter B. Dukes

Journal of Religion & Film

This article draws upon Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death to trace how two exemplars of atomic bomb cinema reinterpret the Binding of Isaac (Akedah). Released during the twin peaks of Cold War tension, Fail-Safe (1964) and WarGames (1983) invert the Akedah of Genesis 22. In both films, an act of sacrificial patricide accompanies or replaces the sacrifice of an Isaac-like son. When viewed in the context of Cold War cultural politics—events such as Norman Morrison’s Abrahamic self-immolation and Kent State’s rejection of George Segal’s sacrificial memorial— the inverted Akedah emerges as …

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Other Voices

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century.

This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier

Theses and Dissertations

This project will attempt to provide an outline of some of the most salient constructions of present-day literary fiction, where those constructions might overlap or conflict, and how various contemporary authors and their works might usefully fit within those constructions. This project will argue that fiction-writers following postmodernism are presented with a unique problem of how to write fiction in a way that acknowledges the problems of using language as a primary meaning-making structure without falling down a linguistic rabbit hole where a text ceases to be about anything other than itself. Beginning with David Foster Wallace, this project will …

Empathic Encounters: Negotiating Identity In 9/11 Fiction And Translation, Kirsty A. Hemsworth

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Dominated by the polarized strategies of domestication and foreignization, conventional literary translation approaches tend to operate on the assumption that source and target cultures, and, by extension, their literary works, are fundamentally irreconcilable on the basis of linguistic, stylistic and ideological differences. Dislocated by the traumatic force of the event, only to be further uprooted by the translation process itself, the identities at stake in American works of 9/11 fiction cannot be so clearly differentiated and securely defined. Moreover, any attempt to fictionalize and translate this real-world trauma inevitably encounters the event as a visual singularity, whereby the image supersedes …

Whiteness As Cursed Property: An Interdisciplinary Intervention With Joyce Carol Oates’S Bellefleur And Cheryl Harris’S “Whiteness As Property”, Karen Gaffney

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This article begins with the assertion that now more than ever, in the aftermath of Ferguson and in a time when many believe our society to be post-racial, we need to bring together scholars and activists who care about racial justice, regardless of discipline, and build interdisciplinary tools for fighting racism. Furthermore, we need to understand and reveal how whiteness has been socially constructed because the power of whiteness lies in its invisibility, and that fuels the perpetuation of systemic racism. In making whiteness visible, we can see how it has been wielded as a weapon, which in turn will …

Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Instead of describing poetry as a set of constraints or history of practices, Muriel Rukeyser calls it "one kind of knowledge." Dark Matter heeds Rukeyser's call, theorizing a poetics of the "scholar's art," in which documentary investigation, autobiographical exploration, and formal innovation are mutual, interwoven concerns. The dissertation pairs American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), reading their hybrid works not through the received categories of American poetry, or through common generic and disciplinary divisions, but using an inductive methodology that takes its lead from the poets. Understanding Howe and Rukeyser's literary experiments as serious interventions in …

Loosening The Critical Corset: New Approaches To The Short Fiction Of Kate Chopin And Ruth Stuart, Kathryn Erin O'Donoghue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation uses the works and lives of two popular late-nineteenth-century writers, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin, as a heuristic to solve the literary mystery of how "fiction by women" became "women's fiction." While feminist scholars resuscitated Chopin, Stuart remains ignored. The realism and irony of Chopin's novel The Awakening resonate with modern readers, but the sentimental aspects of Stuart's work and Chopin's short fiction remain problematic. The aesthetic movements of realism and naturalism influenced literary taste to the extent that sentimentalism is anathema to contemporary critics. I participate in recent scholarship that explores how sentimentalism has been used …

The American Aspasia: The Woman Lecturer In American Women's Rights Fiction, 1839-1915, Angela Ridinger-Dotterman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the figure of the woman lecturer/speaker that appeared in American women's rights fiction in the period between 1839 and 1915. I argue that examining the figure of the woman lecturer/ speaker in a wide variety of texts and over an extended period of history reveals that the figure served as a dynamic vehicle for women writers to advance a broad range of social and political interests; writing in a social and historical context that discouraged women's participation in public speech, women authors used fiction as a rhetorical space to articulate different visions …

The Literary Legacy Of The Federal Writers' Project, Sara Rendene Rutkowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Established by President Roosevelt in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) put thousands of unemployed professionals to work documenting American life during the Depression. Federal writers--many of whom would become famous, including Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West--collected reams of oral histories and folklore, and produced hundreds of guides to cities and states across the country. Yet, despite both the Project's extraordinary volume of writing and its unprecedented support for writers, few critics have examined it from a literary perspective. Instead, the FWP has …

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Faculty Publications & Research

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

Features Of Independence: Teaching “Theresa - A Haytien Tale”, Michael P. Dean

Faculty Publications & Research

One of the core beliefs of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) states that we believe that “diverse perspectives enrich understanding and inspire discovery and creativity,” and in keeping with that aim, I chose to participate in the Just Teach One: Early African American Print project. As a school primarily focused on STEM subjects, IMSA still offers a robust English curriculum that values and supports a diverse literary canon, and our incoming sophomores are asked to complete a two-part Literary Explorations course that features America texts from colonial era up to the 21^st century.

Tale Of The Whale, Joel Schlaudt

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

In his critique of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, A.N. Deacon accurately captures one of the main tenets if not the central theme of the book; however, he also makes several claims about the novel that do not seem to fit with the evidence seen in the actual story. For example, Deacon holds that Melville is attempting to show that the power and attributes of Moby Dick are the source, symbolically, of truth and meaning. However, this is not the impression we get when we look closely at the work itself and note Melville’s treatment of the subject. Furthermore, Deacon …

I Would Prefer Not To Help You, Christen Dunn

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

Bartleby, the Scrivener recounts a story of a scrivener who would prefer not to do anything, whether that be parts of his job, changing his location, or eating his dinner. The narrator’s reaction to Bartleby’s lazy desires seem to be admirable, but his selfish motivation and false compassion are evident. The way the narrator views and treats Bartleby is consistent with the standards of philanthropy of the wealthy during the mid-nineteenth century. The narrator truly believes he has helped Bartleby to the best of his ability, yet fails to connect with Bartleby outside of offering him money and future assistance …

The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow: An Ambiguous Ghost Tale, Elisa R. Jacobs

Aidenn: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal of American Literature

Abstract

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Booth Tarkington Materials., Booth Tarkington, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

This collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, and other materials relating to the life and work of Booth Tarkington. Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was a writer from Indiana, well known for his novels of life in the midwest. Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to him for The Magnificent Ambersons and for Alice Adams. He attended Purdue University and Princeton, where he was a well-known literary and social figure. In later life he divided his time between Indiana and his estate, Seawood, in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he became friends with neighbor Kenneth Roberts.

Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating In Post-9/11 American War Literature, David Andrew Buchanan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A rhetorical approach to the fiction of war offers an appropriate vehicle by which one may encounter and interrogate such literature and the cultural metanarratives that exist therein. My project is a critical analysis—one that relies heavily upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method and his concepts of scapegoating, the comic corrective, and hierarchical psychosis—of three war novels published in 2012 (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, FOBBIT by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain). This analysis assumes a rhetorical screen in order to subvert and redirect the grand narratives the United States perpetuates in art …

Middle Eastern-American Literature: A Contemporary Turn In Emerson Studies, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Edna The Oblivious Oppressor: An Intersectional Analysis Of Privilege And Its Lack Thereof In The Awakening, Jessica L. Rosenthal

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …

El Paso Odyessy, Tafari Amin Nugent

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El Paso Odyssey not only attempts to give an accurate reflection of everyday American life within a particular timeframe but, also attempts to give characters the ability to speak for themselves. The audience must judge and interpret the authenticity and accuracy of the language throughout the text and if the veracity of the dialogue rings true, the narrative story has succeeded on some level.

In Defense Of Marianne Dashwood: A Categorization Of Language Into Principles Of Sense And Sensibility, Ashley Bonin

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

No abstract provided.

The Woman Warrior: The Silent Creation Of A Third Space, Hayley Struzik

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

No abstract provided.

Intergenerational Trauma: A Look At Sherman Alexie's Child Characters, Kiersten Sargent

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.