Literature in English, North America Commons^™

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …

'Wait, Twilight Is A Thing Again?': Examining The Ways In Which Different Social Groups Navigate The Complex Cultural Issues In Twilight, Veronica Buchanan

Undergraduate Research Symposium Podium Presentations

The four books and five movies in the extremely popular Twilight series give readers and viewers a lot to unpack, in both good ways and bad, and have led to fierce debates over the place the series should have in our culture, especially in regard to gender politics. However, most of the discussions of these texts and their cultural impact have tended to lack a robust, intersectional feminist perspective, one that attends to issues not only of gender, but also race, class, and sexuality. This research draws on both fan studies and feminist media studies to examine the various ways …

Teaching Challenging Texts And Encouraging Inquiry Remotely, Aisha Ratanapool

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Creating a culture of inquiry in non-research based courses helps students enhance their skills in critical thinking, reading, writing, collaboration, and argumentation. In English 101, some students feel like not having all of the answers about a text after a first read is unacceptable. This practice is designed to help college students understand and confidently discuss complex texts in a remote course.

Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter And The Bunker Hill Monument, John Hay

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

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 Influence Of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick On Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian, Ryan Joseph Tesar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While many works exert an influence on Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, I argue in this thesis that Herman Melville's Moby-Dick stands above them all in importance. I examine some areas where Melville's influence on McCarthy's work can be most notably located. I argue that Melville's importance to McCarthy can be seen in the latter's use of several characters from Moby-Dick in his own novel. I also examine the parallels that arise when one examines the confluences between the two novels' structures, vocabularies, and settings. I also consider how Melville's violent aesthetics …

Review Of Walden's Shore: Henry David Thoreau And Nineteenth-Century Science, By Robert M. Thorson, John Hay

English Faculty Research

With the rise of ecocriticism, many recent studies of Thoreau’s writings have favorably reconsidered the author’s strong relationship with science; this trend received much of its impetus from Laura Dassow Walls’s Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century NaturalScience (Madison, WI, 1995). Similarly subtitled, Walden’s Shore begins by explaining that such scholarship still lacks an engagement with hard science and that a solid understanding of Thoreau’s work, and especially of Walden (1854), requires more intimate knowledge of geological phenomena. Robert Thorson is a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut whose last book, Beyond Walden: The Hidden History …

Maps On The Backs Of Our Eyes, Joan Paulette Robinson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A collection of poems related to places in the Mojave Desert and the Las Vegas area or in rural central Michigan. Most poems deal with history and memory and the overlapping nature of experience.

Word~River Literary Review (2013), Ross Talarico, Anne Stark, Susan Evans, Gary Pullman, Andrew Madigan, Christin Taylor, Jerome Melancon, Jennie Evenson, Judith Mansour, Mary Didomenico, Annie Lampman, Maureen Foster, M. V. Montgomery, Rowan Johnson, James Hanley, Michael K. Brantley, Brooks P. Rexroat, Deborah Stark, Rachel Rinehart Johnson, Joan Crooks, Jefferson Navicky, Ed Higgins, Mike Bezemek, Leatha Fields-Carey, Maria Winfield

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction of adjunct, part-time and fulltime instructors teaching under a semester or yearly contract in our universities, colleges, and community colleges worldwide. Graduate student teachers who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program are also eligible.

We’re looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We do not accept simultaneous submissions.

Exploring The Morality Of Arthur Miller And Elia Kazan To Show How It Affected Their Work, Friendship And Society, Dale D. Parry

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this study is to explore the moral convictions, or the lack of same, in the personal character of Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan and to show how those convictions affected not only their work and personal friendship but society as well. They first met in 1946 when Harold Clurman of the Group Theater passed to Kazan a Miller play that he had read entitled All My Sons. With the success of the play, the two became fast friends and collaborators in profession and ideology. Each had in common the Great Depression, problem fathers, marital instability and Communism. …

Tiny Animals Made To Do Unnatural Things, Ashley Mary Siebels

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The stories in this collection revolve around a central theme which is expressed by my titleTiny Animals Made To Do Unnatural Things. All my characters feel guilt about decisions and experiences that haunt their past. In the present, they have come to a crossroads and are trying to decipher between what they were made to do as in vocation and evolution and what they are being made to do by the authorial pressures that loom over them (e.g. bosses, parents, loan officers, prison guards.)

In this way, my thesis pivots on the word made. Made (or to make) has many …

On Our Way Out: And Other Stories, Benjamin Champlin Wright Morris

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

On Our Way Out and other stories is a collection of short fiction banded together with themes of the darkened strange, the missing and the moving, and a sense of place. The characters in these stories try to claw their way to newfound identities, whether it's through a financial transaction, saving a life, or putting a body in the ground. An action with a result is what's needed in these characters' lives. Though, often, the results are not intended. Despite the oddity inherent in these stories and characters, there is something familiar about their plight as ordinary people, something in …

James Jones's Codes Of Conduct, Matthew Samuel Ross

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Though his work was celebrated by his contemporaries and remains highly lauded by scholars of war fiction, James Jones's novels are already at risk of falling outside the mainstream canon of 20th Century American literature. My dissertation project proposes an intensive examination of James Jones' three volume war trilogy, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle, collectively considered by eminent critic Paul Fussell to be the finest work to emerge from the Second World War. Jones' trilogy is a mainstay within the overall genre of war fiction, yet it has been afforded relatively little critical attention by …

About A Yellow Ball, Shannon Alice Salter

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These are poems made from many things: color, eggs, oranges, many kinds of seeds, leaves, wind, California, the desert, birds. They are things alive in the world and alive in my heart. I cannot take them out of the world, but from my heart I can have whatever appears on its surface. The language of steam.

They are poems that like to be at home.

California is my home and so is the Mojave (and so is every desert). I live in a valley about four hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, in the city of Las Vegas. What better …

Word~River Literary Review (2012), Beth Mcdonald, John Hill, Micheline Mayor, Heather Duerre Humann, Ryan Leack, Anne Stark, John Baker, Lily I. Mackenzie, Judith Nichols, Meredith Devney, Marylouise Markle, Bill Bozzone, Tara Taylor, Tina Cabrera, Justin E. Kidd, Richard Foss, Kevin P. Keating, Justin P. Burnside, Matthew Swetnam, Sierra Jones-Yu, Kristen Conard, Star Goode, Andrew Madigan, K. W. Taylor, Allison S. Walker, Gary Pullman, Michael Zinkowski, Susan Nyikos

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction of adjunct, part-time and fulltime instructors teaching under a semester or yearly contract in our universities, colleges, and community colleges worldwide. Graduate student teachers who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program are also eligible.

We’re looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We do not accept simultaneous submissions.

The Watchmaker Series, Christopher Michael Seelie

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Watchmaker Series celebrates and inquires into time as a biproduct of consciousness and practices the application of this notion in poetry. The series begins with the numeral poems, all of which relate directly to the theoretical and polemical aspects. Along the way, other poems with individual titles are interspersed to reflect or redirect the abstract considerations to more concrete subjects. Gradually, as the series progresses, the interacting and recurring associations meld theory and practice into a compositional whole.

The central notion that contemporary poetry is not a machine made of words but rather, like the watch that gives itself …

Strike Out Across The Shoreless Ocean, Julia Claire Paajanen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

What happens between a reader and a poem is none of my business. The world has always been yours; find your own way.

(1) Every choice is correct.

(2) Everything is true.

(3) What is anything, unless so far as it is enjoyed?

All you have to do is see the course, and when you see it, go.

To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying And Alone, Kathryn Kruse

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Following is a collection of short fiction. The work comes out of the tradition of realism with influences from surrealism and the gothic grotesque.

While most of the work of creation centered around character and voice, several themes emerge in the final product. Death and its perception in American society play central roles in many pieces. Also, the collection explores the experience of intimacy in many types of interpersonal relationships. Several of the pieces focus on the effects environment and location have on individuals and how change of location impacts a character. In conjunction with these many themes, obsession as …

The Father Birth, Alissa Nutting

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative dissertation is a fabulist and satirical novel. The book follows the story of main character and narrator Earleen, an atypical and hyper-intelligent sixteen-year-old who continues to be traumatized by her sociopathic father even after he dies. A self-taught bookworm born in the early 1980s, her formative years were spent trapped inside her parents' rural methamphetamine cookhouse. When her parents blow up inside their house during a drug-manufacturing incident on the eve of Earleen's early adolescence, she finds herself in the arms of an affluent adoptive couple (Dennis Stark, a fertility specialist, and his homemaker wife Beverly) who have …

The Whiter Lotus: Asian Religions And Reform Movements In America, 1836-1933, Edgar A. Weir Jr.

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examines the influence of Asian religions and thought on various reform movements in America, including anti-slavery, labor rights, the alleviation of poverty, women's rights, and the rights of immigrants. The interactions between these two forces will be uncovered and analyzed from 1836, the year Ralph Waldo Emerson's ground-breaking work Nature was published, until 1933, the year that Dyer Daniel Lum, the last individual discussed in this work, passed away. Previous studies have demonstrated that those who incorporated Asian religions and thought into their own lives and worldviews also affixed great importance on affecting society in a positive manner. …

Woman Or Warrior? How Believable Femininity Shapes Warrior Women, Jessica D. Mccall

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My dissertation is an exploration of how femininity is constructed in the characters of warrior women. I define and apply my theory of believable femininity: the notion that in order for characters gendered female to be accepted by an audience, specific textual markers must render them submissive to a dominating male figure. I examine the following warrior women at length: Britomart and Radigund from Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Christine de Pizan's treatment of Amazons in her Book of the City of Ladies and Hippolyta's specific portrayal by de Pizan in comparison to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and the …

“'You Done Cheat Mose Out O' De Job, Anyways; We All Knows Dat'”: Faith Healing In The Fiction Of Kate Chopin, Karen Kel Roop

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, the half-way mark of the century in which the country itself would be broken in two, Kate Chopin was destined to bear witness to the many divisions that have distinguished the United States. Especially noticeable in the post-Reconstruction period in which she wrote was the expanding chasm between the races. This dissertation argues that even Chopin's most seemingly orthodox Southern stories betray a quest for a theology capable of healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual ills omnipresent in the country and especially apparent in the post-Civil War South. The alternative to mainstream Protestantism …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Sew Speak! Needlework As The Voice Of Ideology Critique In The Scarlet Letter , "A New England Nun," And The Age Of Innocence, Laura L. Powell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the Nineteenth Century, needlework, and embroidery in particular, became a signifier of feminine identity. Needlework was such a significant part of women’s lives and so integral to the construction of femininity in nineteenth-century America that both pictoral and narrative art demonstrate numerous representations of women embroidering. The sheer volume of these representations in the Nineteenth Century suggests that the practice of embroidery provides a way of speaking for women—a representation of the voice of subjectivity silenced by patriarchal ideology. Because needlework serves as a signifier of ideal femininity, it provides uniquely fruitful and previously unexplored opportunities for investigating how …

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

A Montage In Its Leaves, Andrew S. Nicholson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation consists of a series of lyric poems preceded by an introduction to those poems. The introduction gives a background to the method of composition and historical precedents to the poems, connecting the lyric poems to the writing and thoughts of William Blake, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Creeley. The poems are presented in three parts, and cover a variety of subjects, frequently favoring the presentation of subjective experience over an imagined objectivity.

Word~River Literary Review (2011), John Quinn, Gary Pullman, Susan Nyikos, Steven Kunert, Denise M. Rogers, Bruce Wyse, Victoria Large, Kate Sweeney, Jeremy Beatson, Blase Drexler, Thea Cervone, Victor Hawk, Andrew Madigan, Ross Talarico, Akin Taiwo, Dianna Calareso, Jeffrey Arnett, Gail Radley, Gene Washington, Laurie Duesing, Brian R. Young, Anne Stark, I.M. Chapman, Natalie Ivnik Mount, Rebecca Leah Păpucaru, Katy E. Whittingham, Judy Shearer, Alex M. Frankel, Nina Schneider, Rosann Kozlowski, Norah Bowman-Broz, Maggie Wheeler, Jade Hidle, Susan Howard, Eddie Malone

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Our premier issue was published in Spring 2009. We are always looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published.

We define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching under part-time contracts during the summer or …

Must Pay Now, David C. Perkins

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

These poems attempt to stand amidst the towering shadows of Enlightenment. One of these pillars involves the newfound land from a collective western European vantage and these lands are called the Americas. This space is where these poems are located. They suckle at the monolithic breasts of Enlightened Romance as did Romulus and Remus to the She-Wolf. The poems in their own originality engage with writers such as Jonathan Edwards, Alice Notley, Susan Howe, Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti, William Blake, and John Cage. If there ever was such a thread in tradition, these people might …

History And Transnational Identities In Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Brian Joseph Flores

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of my thesis is to analyze Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and evaluate the role literature plays within the larger context of the relationship among the different countries and cultures in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the place historical events play within this understanding. In Díaz’s novel, there is an understanding of the presence of multiple cultural identities. This awareness of multiple cultural identities leads to the difficulty the characters encounter when trying understanding themselves as individuals. On a much larger scale, the characters also try to understand their cultural, social, and historical …