Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Touching Brains, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

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

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Why George Has To Die: Gloria Naylor’S Mama Day And The Myth Of The Goddess, Thomas R. Frosch

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Doubling And Multiplying The Self/Story In Catherynne M. Valente's The Ice Puzzle: Readers, Writers, And The Best Of All Girls, Veronica Schanoes

Publications and Research

Is there a difference between the doubled self and the multiplied self? Using Kelly Link’s “The Girl Detective,” a revision of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” and Catherynne M. Valente’s online novel The Ice Puzzle, a revision of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” I suggest that the joy taken in the multiplied self in these texts reflects the nontraditional approaches to publishing and their readers that these authors have taken.

Collecting To The Core: American Crime Fiction, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

Overview of key secondary works analyzing American crime fiction: general works, works dealing with specific periods, works dealing with crime fiction by women and African Americans.

Feminism, The Left, And Postwar Literary Culture By Kathlene Mcdonald (Review), Danica Savonick

Publications and Research

Reviews the book Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture by Kathlene McDonald,University of Mississippi Press, 2012.

Italian-American Literature And Working-Class Culture, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Creating Room For A Singularity Of Our Own: Reading Sue Lange's "We, Robots", Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

The accessibility of Lange’s text might mitigate against recognizing its importance. Lange’s simple sentence structure and direct communicative mode convey a presently overlooked logical moral assertion: the impending Singularity is not a male-dominated patriarchal domain. The Singularity, in other words, should not be construed in a manner which excludes women and feminism. This assertion is patently obvious. But, nonetheless, it is often ignored. Before I read Lange’s novella as a description of the Singularity which feminists can embrace, I include the following background information: 1) a discussion about why the discourse relating to the Singularity needs to be expanded and …

Into The Heart Of The Great Wilderness: Understanding Baldwin’S Quarrel With Négritude, Christopher Winks

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Bad Girls And Biopolitics: Abortion, Popular Fiction, And Population Control, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Science Fiction And Lyric Poetry, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This piece explores connections between science fiction and lyric poetry.

Going No Place?: Foreground Nostalgia And Psychological Spaces In Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Sean Scanlan

Publications and Research

This essay argues that the power of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth comes not from Lily Bart's function as a mere symptom of historical and economic pressures, but from the complex narrative and psychological process by which she negotiates a sequence of homes and their repeated collapse. Informing this process is nostalgia, a feeling that frames Lily Bart's step-by-step fall from riches to rags. Reading Lily via cognitive and family systems approaches suggests that Lily's rootlessness is predicated on a subtle transformation from her reliance upon simple “background” (aesthetic and monetary) nostalgia to a more complex and overwhelming “foreground” …

Purloined Voices: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay unfolds the complex intertextual relationship between the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of Edgar Allan Poe. References to and extended borrowings from Coleridge’s poetry and philosophical texts mark Poe’s œuvre throughout, but – as is only fitting for borrowings from the great borrower Coleridge – they are never anything as simple as plagiarisms or acts of intellectual theft. As this piece demonstrates through readings of Poe’s early poetological text “Letter to B–,” the Dupin story “The Purloined Letter,” and the late tour-de-force prose-poem Eureka, tracing the recurrence of Coleridgean poetry and prose in the work …

The Lgbtq Short Story, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

“The LGBTQ Short Story” is a lengthy entry in the three-volume encyclopedia LGBTQ America Today, edited by queer scholar John Hawley. The entry explores the characteristics of the genre and synthesizes the work of the top 25 living queer short story writers.

Science Fiction And Postmemory Han In Contemporary Korean American Literature, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this essay, Seo-Young Chu explores representations of a specifically Korean American type of postmemory that she calls "postmemory han."

Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity In Going To Meet The Man, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

"Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man" employs the conceit of “impossible” fatherhood to critique mutually reinforcing racist and heteronormative constructions of reproduction. It argues, first, that the white paternal fantasy of creating “pure” white sons is undermined by the homoerotic necessity of bring the phantasmatic black eunuch, castrated yet powerfully potent, into the procreative white bed. The “fact” of the “white” child produced in that marital bed, however, not only cloaks the failure of racial reproduction in the living proof of success but also occludes the male/male union that subtends the heteronormative fantasy of reproduction. …

How Much Does Chaos Scare You?: Politics, Religion, And Philosophy In The Fiction Of Philip K. Dick, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

"Certain themes appear with surprising consistency in Dick’s fiction. They crop up in the early short stories, called by some critics, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Dick’s “apprentice” fiction. They appear in the novels of Dick’s most productive period, the 1960s. And they are a part of the last novels, the VALIS trilogy and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer—written when Dick was, according to Eric Rabkin and others, insane. These themes fall into three inter-related categories: metaphysics, religion, and politics. The first concerns perception and the world, and the individual’s interaction with both. The second, the moralities of creator/creation relationships. The …

Sacco And Vanzetti: The Italian American Legacy, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Writing As A Reader: The Deserted Village Of Jay Parini, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

We Weren’T Always White: Race And Ethnicity In Italian/American Literature, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Invisible Can Or, Gendering Corporate Globalization Trouble: Technological Utopianism And The Language Of Erasure, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

In the following, noted science fiction scholar Marleen S. Barr argues for an increased attention to science fiction as a literature of the potentials of globalization, a genre that has largely been marginalized in discussions of the future of a globalized techno-culture. Further, Barr argues for greater attention being paid to feminist utopian fiction which helps to reimagine women's roles in the increasingly complex, and increasingly capitalistic, globalized techno-culture that has continued to marginalize the female body (and consciousness) in much the same way that scholars have denied the possibilities of utopian science fiction.

The Pitchman In Print: Oral Performance Art In Text And Context, Joseph Ugoretz

Publications and Research

Oral performance art, patterned performative speech for an audience, is perhaps the oldest and most ubiquitous human art form. Specific instances of this art include the performances of griots and guslars, troubadors and shamans, as well as rappers and riddlers, preachers and politicians. While this art form is by definition oral, it is also the case that, frequently, literary art has represented oral performance art. There is written art which depicts oral art, which describes it, appropriates it, criticizes and co‑opts it.

In this dissertation, I define oral performance art as constituting a separate and unique artistic genre, one which …

Disseminating Heterotopia, Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Publications and Research

Focuses on the motion picture The Passion of Remembrance by Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood, and the book Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delany. Highlights of the motion picture and the book; Author's argument that the tendency to ossify myths only leads to further confusion; Understanding of the mythic process.

Sin And Guilt In The Fiction Of John Gregory Dunne, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

John Gregory Dunne depicts his characters' obsession with guilt in his first two novels: True Confessions (1977) and Dutch Shea, Jr. (1982).

"How Come Everybody Down Here Has Three Names?": Martin Ritt's Southern Films, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

The treatment of the American South in six films by director Martin Ritt (1914-1990) from 1958 to 1979 reveals an emphasis on outsiders, family dynamics, and race relations.