Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Ethics Of Care On The Narrative Margins Of Willa Cather’S The Professor’S House And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Jeannette E. Schollaert

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Willa Cather’s Southwestern novels feature cultured male protagonists as the driving sources of action. The male characters explore the natural world and advance the plot, but Cather positions female figures, particularly spinster figures, on the sidelines of the protagonists’ plots to offer support and connection with the natural world. Using an ethic of care framework and ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s master model, this thesis examines the ways in which Cather marginalizes female figures even as they serve crucial roles in the male protagonists’ development. While the male protagonists link spinster figures and sexualized feminine bodies with the natural world, they imbue …

A City Room Of One's Own: Elizabeth Jordan, Henry James, And The New Woman Journalist, James Hunter Plummer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis considers the portrayal of the female journalist in the works of Elizabeth Jordan and Henry James. In 1898, Jordan, a journalist and editor herself, published Tales of the City Room, a collection of interconnected short stories that depict a close and supportive community of female journalists. It is, overall, a positive portrayal of female journalists by a female journalist. James, on the other hand, uses the female journalists in The Portrait of a Lady, “Flickerbridge,” and “The Papers” to show his discomfort toward New Journalism and the New Woman of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These …

Silence Emerging From Birds, Rebecca Macijeski

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation represents the culmination of five years of creative activity in poetry. Included within this document are three main components: 1.) a critical introduction to my book-length manuscript of original poems complete to satisfy the requirements of creative writing within the English Department; 2.) a description of my creative activity reflected in that book-length manuscript, and; 3.) a sample of previously published original poems from the manuscript. I will describe each of these components in greater detail below.

The critical introduction to the creative work seeks to explore and examine various aesthetic and theoretical influences on my poems. The …

Teaching Place: Heritage, Home And Community, The Heart Of Education, Judy Kay Lorenzen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the implementation of a Place-conscious pedagogy as a means to teach heritage and sense of place. This pedagogy is framed upon the premise that trying to understand our heritage and place—ourselves—are crucial elements in our ability to live well as individuals who are connected school/community members, who help our schools/communities thrive, becoming Place-conscious citizens. I argue that in teaching in such a culturally diverse community, tensions rise as immigration has become a main focus. Our school/community has experienced many ethnic groups with vast social differences for which Place-conscious education offers practical solutions. These students have a great …

White Paper, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), October 2016, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

With its Office of Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery (Aida) team set out to further develop image analysis as a methodology for the identification and retrieval of items of relevance within digitized collections of historic materials.1 Specifically, we sought to identify poetic content within historic newspapers, using Chronicling America's newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) as our test case. The project activities we undertook—both those completed and those in process—support this goal and align well with the activities proposed in our original funding application and as approved by NEH. To achieve our goal of creating an image processing-based system …

Final Report, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), October 2016, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

With its Office of Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery (Aida) team set out to further develop image analysis as a methodology for the identification and retrieval of items of relevance within digitized collections of historic materials. Specifically, we sought to identify poetic content within historic newspapers, using Chronicling America's newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) as our test case. The project activities we undertook—both those completed and those in process—support this goal and align well with the activities proposed in our original funding application and as approved by NEH. To achieve our goal of creating an image processing-based system …

Urgent News From The Front, Jennifer J. Gray

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative thesis is an original work in the genres of fiction and poetry. It consists of three short stories and a chapbook of poems. My work focuses on the ways we find to survive, to create meaning, and to connect to ourselves, to those around us, and to the world in which we live.

Advisor: Jonis Agee

Jazz Epidemics And Deep Set Diseases: The De-Pathologization Of The Black Body In The Work Of Three Harlem Renaissance Writers, Shane C. Hunter

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation argues that the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, a response to Victorian-era medical and scientific racism, and that the three writers on which it centers, Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Wallace Thurman (1902-1934), and Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), participated in subverting these racist discourses. I focus on elements of their creative work that de-pathologize the black body. Specifically, I consider how these writers undermine Victorian-era medical racism that had, by the 1920s, come to inform American racial politics. Hughes’s, Thurman’s, and Nugent’s work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s is at least partly concerned with undermining medically racist ideology …

“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …

Penelope’S Daughters, Barbara Dell`Abate-Çelebi

Zea E-Books Collection

A feminist perspective of the myth of Penelope in Annie Leclerc’s Toi, Pénélope, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Silvana La Spina’s Penelope.

At the origin of Western literature stands Queen Penelope—faithfully waiting for her husband to come home: keeping house, holding on to the throne, keeping the suitors at arm’s length, preserving Odysseus’ place and memory, deserted for the pursuit of war and adventures, and bringing up a son alone, but always keeping the marriage intact. Yet recently the character of Penelope, long the archetype of abandoned, faithful, submissive, passive wife, has been reinterpreted by feminist criticism and re-envisioned by …

Interim Report, Hd-51897-14, Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida), January 2016, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

CDRH Grant Reports

In the third six months of work on "Image Analysis for Archival Discovery," the project team has made progress toward the goals outlined in our report from June 2015. As we reported in June 2015, we realized that our original plan to analyze 7 million pages from Chronicling America was overly ambitious for the grant period, and we revised our goal to complete a thorough case study of our methodology and code for all newspaper images in Chronicling America from the period 1836-1840. Activities undertaken, toward this and other grant goals, from June 2015–December 2015:

• Publication of the article, "Developing …

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The Transatlantic Village: The Rise And Fall Of The Epistolary Friendship Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick And Mary Russell Mitford, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In June 1830, the American novelist and short-story writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick used the imminent London publication of her novel Clarence as a pretext for initiating a correspondence with the British author Mary Russell Mitford. In her first letter to Mitford, Sedgwick addressed her as “My dear Miss Mitford,” a violation of epistolary decorum in a letter to someone to whom she had not been introduced (FOMRM, 155).¹ As Sedgwick protested, however, “I cannot employ the formal address of a stranger towards one who has inspired the vivid feeling of intimate acquaintance, a deep and affectionate interest in …

An Awakened Woman With A Room Of Her Own, Erica Garcia

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

In the early 1900’s, women were obviously being oppressed considering they lacked the right to vote, to an education, and to freedom. Through bold women who spoke out against the said oppression, women were able to work together to fight for equality. By digging deeper into the literature of the time period, the point of view of an oppressed woman is more easily seen and can therefore be better understood. Women among Woolf and Chopin, for example, Carrie Chapman Catt helped move along the passing of the 19th Amendment with assistance from the NAWSA. Once women got the ball rolling …

Overcoming More Than Physical Borders: The Challenges Gender Creates For Hispanic Immigrants, Guadalupe Esquivel

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

An analysis of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain and Sandra Cisneros's “Woman Hollering Creek” shows the measures that Mexican women take to find their identity after immigrating. Facing discrimination on the basis of both race and gender, this task is more difficult for females than for their male counterparts. It is a challenge that continues for many women today as they balance two worlds and are expected to fully carry the roles of both. This is a focus on the main characters of the above texts, Americá Rincón and Cleofilas, respectively, as well as personal essays written by first …

Exploring Colonial Identity And A Growing Ecoconsciousness On The Great Plains, Charles Hiebner

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is an exploration of my journey from an unapologetic industrial agriculturalist to a more environmentally sensitive citizen. I now recognize the inescapable relationship between colonialism and environmental issues surrounding water resources on the Great Plains and how these intertwined issues affect both the planet and its inhabitants. Specifically, I look at literature as both the catalyst and sustainer of my still-growing environmental and social consciousness. From important literary works encountered as a youth to the ecocriticism and explorations of social justice of the readings I engage in today, I examine how these literary choices have led me to …

Scenes From The Gaijin Life, Ian M. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Scenes from the Gaijin Life contains eight interconnected stories about foreigners (gaijin in Japanese) living and working as English teachers in urban Japan. It recounts their daily lives and initial struggles, their jobs and their nights out, their formal conversations and their personal ones. The first five stories use a detached, neutral narration that forces readers to interpret sensory details on their own, while the latter three use an omniscient narration that helps readers understand the characters’ interactions with Japan. Though the eight scenes are all different, they’re connected by estrangement, longing, uncertainty, and the characters’ ever-present dissatisfaction with …

Developing An Image-Based Classifier For Detecting Poetic Content In Historic Newspaper Collections, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Maanas Varma Datla, Spencer Kulwicki

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

"Developing an Image-Based Classifier for Detecting Poetic Content in Historic Newspaper Collections" details and analyzes the first stage of work of the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery project team. Our team is is investigating the use of image analysis to identify poetic content in historic newspapers. The project seeks both to augment the study of literary history by drawing attention to the magnitude of poetry published in newspapers and by making the poetry more readily available for study, as well as to advance work on the use of digital images in facilitating discovery in digital libraries and other digitized collections. …

Shelterbelt: Land That Speaks, Ryan Oberhelman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a collection of short stories drafted in between 2012 and 2014. The stories in this collection have been selected for their common themes of masculinity, work, fractured families, and rural decline. Many stories offer fragmented, non-linear approaches to narrative.

Note: This thesis deposited as hard copy only. There is no digital document associated with this record. beyond the title page and abstract.

"This World Must Touch The Other": Crossing The U.S.-Mexico Border In American Novels And Television, Guadalupe V. Linares

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation is a literary, cultural, and theoretical analysis of selected twentieth and twenty-first century novels and television in which characters cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The novels considered are: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory by Emma Pérez, Dancing with Butterflies by Reyna Grande, and Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea. In addition, I also examine the television series Breaking Bad created by Vince Gilligan. I use McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Gilligan’s Breaking Bad to balance Chicana/o perspectives of border crossings found in the other novels …

Zea E-Books: Open-Access Digital Imprint Of The University Of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Sue Ann Gardner, Paul Royster

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

Intended to complement, not compete with, the University of Nebraska Press, Zea E-Books gives a voice to scholars whose works would not meet the financial publication demands of a traditional press.

Symbolic Capital And The Performativity Of Authorship: The Construction And Commodification Of The Nineteenth-Century Authorial Celebrity, Whitney Helms

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Victorian and Antebellum writers were the first literary figures to construct and perform their authorship within the sphere of celebrity. Unlike their Romantic predecessors who endured fame as an unexpected consequence of their popularity, the Victorians and their contemporaries understood celebrity as a condition of authorship. This dissertation takes as its subject the origins and development of symbolic power for authors as it was expressed in the trappings of celebrity and mass culture and argues that authorship became no longer strictly a profession of writing, but rather a performative endeavor that could be presented through diverse commercial markets. Investigating the …

Material Memory: Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two]”, And The Colophon: A Book Collector’S Quarterly, Matthew J. Lavin

Digital Initiatives and Special Collections

Willa Cather's 1931 essay "My First Novels [There Were Two]" is an often-cited statement on place in the author's literary oeuvre. In the essay, Cather distances herself from her first novel 'Alexander's Bridge' (1912) and its imitative, Jamesian motifs and setting. Her second novel 'O Pioneers!', she writes, was a kind of second "first" novel, one written "entirely for myself" and preoccupied with the story of "Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska." As Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Robert Thacker and Emmy Stark Zitter have argued, "My First Novels [There Were …

Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno

Department of English: Faculty Publications

External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of "topics" from a corpus of 3,346 works of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes. External factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics to measure the evidence …

Skunk Hammock, Britton Cody Lumpkin

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Skunk Hammock: Poems, a poetry collection by Cody Lumpkin, explores the confluence of man-made objects with the natural world. Lumpkin’s subject matter varies widely. From poems derived from the detritus of popular culture like Spam and Mr. Snuffleupagus to poems where prairie dogs and egging houses are the focus, Lumpkin works to render material poetic that is typically not seen as poetic. A number of his poems concern themselves with the perception of animals. Influenced by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, David Bottoms, Robert Hayden, and Claudia Emerson, Lumpkin seeks to show animals not as mere symbolic vessels, but …

Mobilizing Sentiment: Popular American Women's Fiction Of The Great War, 1914–1922, Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines American women’s popular novels about the Great War published between 1914 and 1922, and offers a perspective that complicates our understanding of the American experience of WWI. Drawing on a historical framework that illuminates the subtleties of the nation’s the ever-shifting political stance in response to the European War, this study demonstrates how American response to the war was neither monolithic nor static. This study contributes to current efforts to recover women’s voices in the male-dominated terrain of war writing, and promotes the value of studying noncanonical texts. Rarely considered in scholarship of American war literature, women’s …

Towards A Theory Of Comic Book Adaptation, Colin Beineke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary adaptation studies/theories have tended to focus singularly on the movement from the novel/short story to film – largely ignoring mediums such as the theater, music, visual art, video games, and the comic book.  Such a limited view of adaptation has led to an underdeveloped and misplaced understanding of the adaptation process, which has in turn culminated in a convoluted perception of the products of artistic adaptation.  The necessity of combating the consequences of these limited outlooks – particularly in the field of comics studies – is as vital as the difficulties are manifold. In opposition to this current stream …

City Of Slow Dissolve, John M. Chavez

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

City of Slow Dissolve examines identity, displacement, and construction of the self. Beginning with the persona’s root location of Colorado Springs, Colorado, moving to Detroit, Michigan and concluding with Las Cruces, New Mexico, the speaker of the included poems articulates the complexities of lived emotion (e.g., anxiety, anger, guilt, and eventual acceptance), of the critical evaluation of one’s surroundings, and of the fractures of the self as the result of elected displacement in the service of personal advancement. It is with this in mind that these poems avoid thematizing what it means to be a Latin@ living in the United …

My Secret Life In Film: A Memoir, Kelly Grey Carlisle

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative dissertation is an original work in the genre of memoir, and consists of the first two sections of my book, My Secret Life in Film. I believe that my book speaks to contemporary experiences of childhood, violence, sexuality, and faith, and complicates conceptions of a ‘normal’ family. When I was three weeks old, my mother, who worked as a prostitute, was murdered near downtown Los Angeles. Her case remains unsolved, and I do not know my father. Her own parents were unwed. At first I lived with my maternal grandmother and the woman I believe to have been …

"Introduction" To Conjuring The Real: The Role Of Architecture In Eighteenth- And Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Rumiko Handa, James Potter

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Buildings give an immediate presence to the historical or fictional world, which otherwise is unknown or unfamiliar to the audience. The portrayal of a building’s concrete and specific substance makes the world come alive, although the building itself is a mere segment of the world that it represents. This book will trace the genealogy of this representational role of architecture, going back through the history of film and then further in literature, art, and theater, and identify its pedigree in the nineteenth century, where authors, artists, and stage managers used thorough depictions of buildings to effectively feed the audience’s historical …

Examining Early And Recent Criticism Of The Waste Land: A Reassessment, Tyler E. Anderson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

My thesis will closely examine recent trends in criticism of "The Waste Land," namely the ideological rebuttal against the New Critics proposed by recent historicists such as Lawrence Rainey. I will show that Rainey has unfairly characterized the so-called New Critics as supporting a reading of the poem that only sees it for a work of order and unity while in fact they acknowledged many organizational inconsistencies within the text. A central tenet of my thesis will be that ideological characterizations of earlier critics should never substitute actual close readings of the texts themselves. My findings will lead to broader …