Literature in English, North America Commons^™

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 …

"Enlightened Motherhood": Frances Ellen Watkins Harper And The Conception Of Black Womanhood, Christina Rose Walcott

History

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an influential nineteenth-century activist and writer. She was active in the antislavery lecture circuit and the suffrage movement. She developed a conception of Black womanhood through her writing that culminated in a richer understanding of equal rights in the United States. This thesis reexamines her work from an interdisciplinary standpoint. She developed her vision of Black womanhood over time through the character of the enslaved mother in the Antebellum era, the nuances of freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction era, and finally through home as a personal space and as a nation in the …

Disrupted Ambitions And Unmasked Identities: An Analysis Of Doubleness In Sylvia Plath’S The Bell Jar And Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man In Cold War America, Laura Anderson

English Language and Literature ETDs

This thesis conducts a literary analysis on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) with a primary investigation on the protagonists and their convergence of identity in Cold War America. One of the critical discourses evaluated throughout the project’s literary analysis includes the protagonists’ complications of doubleness. This essay argues that since these two texts sit between W.E.B DuBois’s “Double Consciousness” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1988 theory on intersectionality, these protagonists are forced to contend with an identity crossroads. Secondary to the context of this analysis is the use of “post-war” and “Cold War,”; neither are …

The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin

Munn Scholars Awards

Aria Da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1919 play, has thus far been largely ignored in literary criticism. This essay, through a historical survey of Millay’s previous critical reception followed by a close reading of Aria Da Capo, attempts to explain and then bridge this gap in academic scholarship. A postmodernist reading of the play will then illustrate why Millay’s work still confounds scholars today and how Aria Da Capo specifically continues to be relevant more than 100 years after it was first produced.

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

Novelizing The Feminist Biography, From Nancy Milford's Zelda To The Present: What Are The Ethics Of Sourcing?, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This presentation arose out of two parallel tracks: the desire to novelize my own feminist biography of Elizabeth Robins and the awareness -- especially made acute in the essay on Emma Tennant's two treatments of the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes material by Diane Middlebrook, "Misremembering Ted Hughes" -- that for a novelist to base fiction on historical subjects risks not merely critical exposure; it also has its ethical and sometimes legal complications.

Anyone of a certain age remembers or can mark the impact of Milford's study of Zelda Fitzgerald, published 1970, the finalist in several book awards and scores …

"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Love, broadly defined, needs space to grow. For love to materialize and sustain itself (in both literature and society), it must find hospitable geosocial, institutional, and psychic terrain. This is especially true for queer intimacies beyond heteronormative relationality, for the prospect of love’s radical––or reactionary––possibilities is contingent upon the more general sociality in which it develops. Yet love is often a worldmaking and, sometimes, historic mechanism unto itself. Love and its concomitant sexualities must therefore be understood within and without normative structures of hegemony; the workings of (neo)colonialism and capitalism––as well as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism––dictate to love, and …

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …

“I’Ll Tell You No Lies”: An Exploration Of Trauma, Memory, And Violence Against Women In North Carolina Murder Ballads, Madison Ava Helman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation explores trauma, memory and violence against women in Western North Carolina murder ballads “Tom Dooley,” “Poor Omie Wise,” “Poor Ellen Smith,” “The Ballad of the Lawson Family,” and “Frankie Silver.” I posit that these ballads were influenced by prescriptive societal conceptions of femininity, which in turn influenced societal ideations of violence against women. Using folklore performance theory, I analyze the text and context of these ballads and their subsequent histories, eventually arriving at a template for polyvocality that incorporates multiple ballad variants and encourages diverse performances.

Stories, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Roxanne Harde , Editor

Zea E-Books Collection

Today, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) is best known for a handful of her novels: The Gates Ajar (1868), The Silent Partner (1871), and The Story of Avis (1877). During her life, however, the short story was a hugely popular genre in which she was fully invested and where she made a good deal of her living. Stories were her earliest and latest publications, and they were work that she both enjoyed and employed to greater ends. From 1864 to her death in 1911, she published almost one hundred and fifty short stories in the leading periodicals of the day. This …

Susannah And Cold Mountain: Examining The Portrayal Of Appalachian Culture In Opera, Savannah Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies qualitative literary analysis and ethnographic methods to examine the portrayal of Appalachia in the operas Susannah and Cold Mountain. The operas were premiered almost 60 years apart, yet they share many themes that epitomize roles, patterns, and stereotypes within the Appalachian region. One theme observed is the role and expectations of Appalachian women and how they have developed over time, as the plots are placed roughly a century apart. The depictions of Appalachian religious traditions and representations of violence are also explored as these themes play a considerable role in Susannah and Cold Mountain. By analyzing …

Queer Horror, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, David Mazella, Claude Willan, David Bishop, Elizabeth Stravoski, Walter Barta, Max James

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of women’s participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory became the …

#Metoo: The Literary And Social Impact Of Sexual Violence Narratives, Aura Comer

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

To fully understand the severity of sexual violence and its pervasiveness in America, I will present statistics of rape and sexual assault, as well as available legal court statistics of justice and punishment for offenders (or a lack thereof). However, there must be an acknowledgment of the disparity in information and representation pertaining to indigenous, LGBT+, immigrant, and minor communities. Note that these statistics do not speak to the complete pervasiveness of rape and sexual assault in the United States, given the negligent protection and lack of belief in victims, which results in victim silencing and a lack of reporting.

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 …

She Speaks Her Truth: Black Female Self-Empowerment In African-American Centric Texts, Britt N. Seese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

A Master's Portfolio that looks into African-American Women in African-American literature and theatrical works.

Little Women, Little Houses: Authorship And Authority In Louisa May Alcott And Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katia Savelyeva

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, share a place in the canon of American children’s literature as novels centered on female protagonists coming of age within an emblematic period in American history, respectively the duration and aftermath of the Civil War and the post-Homestead Act settlement of the Western frontier. Each text portrays the intertwined processes of girlhood and nationhood through the eyes of rebellious, gender-nonconforming protagonists, Jo and Laura, who each undergo an arc towards starting a traditional family and immersing themselves in normative national projects (respectively a philanthropic school for the poor, …

Rhetorical Resistance To Assimilation Among Cherokee Female Seminary Students, Kaelyn Ireland

Symposium of Student Scholars

Throughout the nineteenth century, Cherokees invited American missionaries into their territory to establish schools where children and youth could learn the ways of Euroamericans, particularly Christianity and spoken and written English. Although mission schools contributed to acculturation, they also provided means for Cherokees to resist assimilation. Cherokees cited school attendance as evidence they were becoming “civilized” in hopes they could demonstrate to Euroamericans that they were sufficiently like them, thus preventing Removal from their homelands, and students employed what they learned as leverage in dealing with the United States in political matters that affected their tribe. Only a small minority …

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 …

How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’S And Fitzgerald’S Portrayals Of Mental Illness, Cryslin A. Ledbetter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Cryslin Ledbetter's essay, "How Gender Affects Writing: Jackson’s and Fitzgerald’s Portrayals of Mental Illness" examines the similarities and differences between Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Through a careful comparison of male and female writers, the author analyzes defining factors that effect the final product of each novel.

Review: Comics And The Body, Chase Gregory

Other Faculty Research and Publications

Comics and the body: drawing, reading, and vulnerability. Studies in comics and cartoons by Szép, Eszter, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5772-2.

Link to original version published in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, volume 14 issue 1

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

"Comic"Ally Calling For Cultural Competency: Using Graphic Narratives To Teach Social Justice In The Writing Classroom, Travis Moody

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Pedagogies Of The “Irresistible”: Imaginative Elsewheres Of Black Feminist Learning., Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In her foreword to the groundbreaking anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Toni Cade Bambara (1983) famously argues that the great work of feminist writing is “to make revolution irresistible.” This statement is often read as a founding call of women-of-color feminism, and of feminist literary expression in particular. Yet Bambara’s notion of the “irresistible” extends beyond the page; throughout her works, she also uses the term as a key descriptor of her pedagogy, and her vision of the classroom. Bambara joins Audre Lorde and other Black feminist writer/teachers in insisting on a …

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …

“I Save Me”: Gender, Agency, And Power In Better Call Saul, Stephanie Kocer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Historically, women on television have been portrayed in wife and mother roles, making them a foil to their husbands, but never the main focal point of the show. These characters stay on the sidelines, without being given truly original storylines where they are allowed to drive their own narratives. During the first season of Better Call Saul, Kim Wexler is a supporting character, without any storylines that aren’t linked to Jimmy McGill. Jimmy often treats Kim as a damsel in distress. He thinks it’s his job to save her, and usually from the chaos that he’s created. In this thesis …