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2023

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Articles 31 - 60 of 125

Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America

The Politics & Poetics Of Audience Creation In Contemporary Epistolary Memoir, Sarah M. Davis Jun 2023

The Politics & Poetics Of Audience Creation In Contemporary Epistolary Memoir, Sarah M. Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy as works of life writing that leverage the epistolary form to engage their direct maternal addressees and audiences beyond them in revision and reconstruction of identity. Secondary audiences are considered in light of Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics,” and the social affordances of the epistolary form and self-constructive affordances of life writing are analyzed in tandem as a hybrid epistolary memoir form. Specifically, this project explores how the epistolary memoir form affords Vuong and Laymon opportunities for the process of personal, relational, and communal identity construction, …

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Historical Realism And Stoic Heroes In The Work Of John Williams, Cameron Sepede Jun 2023

Historical Realism And Stoic Heroes In The Work Of John Williams, Cameron Sepede

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how John Williams’s three major works of fiction — Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus — are narratively structured around three main characters who embody the tenets of stoic and Emersonian transcendental philosophy, respectively. Williams uses these characters to promote and critique preconceived notions of heroic masculinity as structured within these philosophies. Through an analysis of form, this thesis will explore how Williams scaffolds his three main characters around the language and ideas present within each philosophical school. Williams’s portrayal of heroic masculinity, as seen through a feminist perspective, questions the ideal masculine hero, which will be …

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Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena Jun 2023

Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From childhood, Mary Hunter Austin resisted the social conformity expected of a young girl in 1850’s Carlinville, Illinois. Instead, causing her mother to “shed tears of vexation,” she was outspoken, opinionated, and read the “wrong” books, which, according to her mother, “was what made you queer so that people didn’t like you.” Young Mary had a rich inner life and was drawn in a spiritual, mystical way to the minutiae of the natural world. Also, she questioned the strict social structure that caused her mother to be outcast as a widow, while, at the same time, young women were beginning …

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International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera Jun 2023

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

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The Personal And The Planetal: Essaying The Ecological, Eric Dean Wilson Jun 2023

The Personal And The Planetal: Essaying The Ecological, Eric Dean Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological” investigates contemporary American personal essays in an environmental mode in order to illuminate the boundaries between “self” and “planet.” It does so with an eye toward ecological devastation—namely, the violent effects of global warming—because I sense that thinking about the essay can help us better understand the ethical problems of climate change. Part of our climate crisis is a failure to recognize the boundaries of the personal and what I call the “planetal” (in an attempt to defamiliarize it from the more common “planetary”). Using a method that I call “the ecological …

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Individualism And Nonconformity In Ralph Waldo Emerson's ‘Self-Reliance', Brendan Roof May 2023

Individualism And Nonconformity In Ralph Waldo Emerson's ‘Self-Reliance', Brendan Roof

2023 Symposium

My presentation utilizes the etymology of the word genius to explore Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Emerson would empower the individual in a conformist society to find harmony through nonconformity. The etymology of genius as a spiritual guide reinforces his stance on individualism, namely by qualifying the spirit, or the individual’s discretion, as all-powerful and constant. The word is rooted in the belief that a “spirit attendant” overlooks and guides the host body of each individual. Genius has also been defined as the “personification of a person’s natural appetites.” In terms of Emerson’s genius, man’s inherent appetite to belong to a collective reinforces …

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Reproduction: The Ultimate Enemy Of Racial Passing In Harlem Renaissance Literature, Veronica Kordmany May 2023

Reproduction: The Ultimate Enemy Of Racial Passing In Harlem Renaissance Literature, Veronica Kordmany

Student Theses

"In this essay, I examine three texts that consider the repercussions of passing for Black Americans. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) serves as a namesake for this general idea, as two light-skinned African American women represent the divisionary approach to racial passing. In George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) we see a passing Black man’s virility being tested as he enters an ‘alternate universe’, in which a scientific invention grants him full access to the wondrous white world he’d always dreamed of entering. Finally, in the middle of this textual spectrum is Angelina W. Grimké’s 1919 short story, “The Closing …

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Digitizing The American West: Analyzing Rhetoric In Red Dead Redemption 2, Amalia Mcevoy May 2023

Digitizing The American West: Analyzing Rhetoric In Red Dead Redemption 2, Amalia Mcevoy

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

High-budget, long-form storytelling games offer dozens of hours of content for audiences to explore and learn from. Although far different from sitting and reading a book, there is a distinct connection to be made between how literature is experienced and how audiences can experience a narrative-heavy video game. Based on this connection, there are bridges to be built between video games and literature, understanding how one field can benefit from the other as well as how one field can be informed by the other. An analysis of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 using reader response theory can illustrate …

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“Speechless, Placeless Power”: Affect And Trauma In Moby-Dick And “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, Lauren Colandro May 2023

“Speechless, Placeless Power”: Affect And Trauma In Moby-Dick And “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, Lauren Colandro

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” contain affectively unsound figures such as Captain Ahab and Bartleby that seem to disrupt larger narrative functions, both developing these characteristics in response to prior trauma. However, narrators are not privy to the extent of their feelings because of their idealistic attachments to the disruptive figures. This thesis examines the commonalities of Melville’s disruptive characters in both stories using affect theory, as well as how their disruptions illuminate the effects of repressed trauma in an increasingly capital-driven society.

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Recovering Pearl: Utopian Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Evan Weiss May 2023

Recovering Pearl: Utopian Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Evan Weiss

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Much of the recent scholarly criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter aims to demonstrate the novel’s function as an allegory for Hawthorne’s anti-reformist (and especially anti-abolitionist) views at the height of the antebellum crisis. This commitment to revealing Hawthorne’s conservatism tends to cast the novel’s major figures as pieces within a self-balancing paradigm of good (intentions) and evil (acts) that ultimately symbolizes the author’s preference for inaction on the major political and humanitarian issue of his time—slavery. Curiously, however, the character of Pearl, Hester Prynne’s “wild,” “bird-like” child who dominates nearly every scene in which she appears, is almost …

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“She Didn’T Know I Was In The Room”: The Effects Of Hatfield’S Illustrations On Readers’ Interpretations Of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Mason Repas May 2023

“She Didn’T Know I Was In The Room”: The Effects Of Hatfield’S Illustrations On Readers’ Interpretations Of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Mason Repas

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

When Charlotte Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," was first published in New England Magazine in 1892, staff illustrator Joseph Hatfield created three realistic-style images to accompany the text. Research suggests that Gilman had no control or influence over these images, which altered readers' perception of her story about the dangers of the rest cure for female hysteria. While Hatfield faced artistic limitations and his intentions are not discoverable today, the choices and details in his illustrations support interpretations of the short story as a piece of horror fiction in which his cohesive series of images is a more reliable …

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Sweat Equity: Lynn Nottage's Radical Dialectic Of Deindustrialization, Jocelyn L. Buckner May 2023

Sweat Equity: Lynn Nottage's Radical Dialectic Of Deindustrialization, Jocelyn L. Buckner

Theatre Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Lynn Nottage has devoted her career to researching and telling stories of Black individuals and communities with expressed interest in laborers, advocating for their agency, humanity, and legacy. In her second Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, Nottage dramatizes more recent US history, illuminating the lives of workers marginalized by the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt in the early 2000s. Sweat is emblematic of Nottage's sustained effort to deploy playwriting as activism and stand in solidarity with those whose stories she chooses to tell. As a constant theme in her works, Lynn Nottage's stories align with marginalized workers' efforts and histories, …

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Review Of Jack Lewis And His American Cousin, Nat Hawthorne: A Study Of Instructive Affinities, John Stanifer May 2023

Review Of Jack Lewis And His American Cousin, Nat Hawthorne: A Study Of Instructive Affinities, John Stanifer

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of D. G. Kehl, Jack Lewis and His American Cousin, Nat Hawthorne: A Study of Instructive Affinities (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2013). ix + 247 pages. $29.00. ISBN 9781610978361.

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Beyond Blackface: Minstrel Shows In Modern Day America, Cheyenne Burns May 2023

Beyond Blackface: Minstrel Shows In Modern Day America, Cheyenne Burns

The Confluence

This essay explores the history of Blackface in America and how not addressing or treating Blackface as a taboo has allowed for microaggressions within the media to continue.

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Lovecraftian Queerness: Weird And Queer Temporalities In Lovecraft Country And Detransition, Baby, Eurydice Dye May 2023

Lovecraftian Queerness: Weird And Queer Temporalities In Lovecraft Country And Detransition, Baby, Eurydice Dye

English (MA) Theses

By analyzing H. P. Lovecraft’s work through the lens of queer temporality, I offer a queer perspective on Lovecraft, reading the monstrous outside in his work as a queer figure and casting the temporal conflict common to Lovecraftian horror as a conflict between dominant time and outside time. I argue that, by placing queerly-temporal protagonists in conflict with dominant temporalities, queer fiction is essentially an inversion of Lovecraftian horror. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope of the novel, I develop a theory of the queer chronotope in fiction to align with the queer temporalities that queer characters inhabit. …

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Through Her Eyes: Learning And Teaching About Racism Through "To Kill A Mockingbird" And "The Bluest Eye", Sloane Larsen May 2023

Through Her Eyes: Learning And Teaching About Racism Through "To Kill A Mockingbird" And "The Bluest Eye", Sloane Larsen

English Honors Theses

This thesis argues that Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird both merit a place in te United States’ secondary education systems by using use them in the classroom to encourage students to recognize and challenge their biases, perspectives, and choices. One of the many complex questions this thesis addresses is the efficacy of teaching students about racism using such novels. Teaching these novels through Critical Race Theory could help create a new generation of students who are more likely to address and challenge their biases and privilege. At the same time, this approach requires …

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What's That Word . . . : The Real Reverse Dictionary, Giacomo Wholey May 2023

What's That Word . . . : The Real Reverse Dictionary, Giacomo Wholey

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

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Oceans Of Literature - The Little Mermaid, Makena Metz May 2023

Oceans Of Literature - The Little Mermaid, Makena Metz

English (MA) Theses

Mermaid stories have existed for millennia, stemming back to the ancient cultures of the world. Influenced by the mythos established in books like The Iliad, sirens and mermaids were a part of European culture for centuries. The mermaid as chimera monster that represented the duality of danger and seduction was subverted in 1837, when Hans Christian Andersen wrote the seminal fairy tale “The Little Mermaid.” In our present day, we can find that this short story has created a canon of “mermaid” literature, especially in the fantasy canon, and has majorly impacted our pop culture and digital spheres. By tracing …

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Owning The Body: Bodily Autonomy And Consent In The Works Of Octavia Butler, Korryn Plantenberg May 2023

Owning The Body: Bodily Autonomy And Consent In The Works Of Octavia Butler, Korryn Plantenberg

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

During the 1980’s the Second Wave feminist movement provided more interest in interdisciplinary movements towards equity in the case of gender. One movement that slowly grew was Womanism, which included the intersection between race and gender. Specifically, the experiences of black women in the United States. Inspired by this movement authors such as Octavia Butler was a black science fiction author who wrote literature focused on black women. Alongside her preoccupation, with race in science fiction, Butler explores the nature of consent and bodily autonomy in utopian and dystopian futures. Within her novels, she uses Womanism to engage with futuristic …

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Media Analysis And Journalistic Applications, Jose Villasenor Cervantes May 2023

Media Analysis And Journalistic Applications, Jose Villasenor Cervantes

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Media has been a part of our lives now for a better part of over a century or more. From newspapers, radio, tv, film, music. All of these have impacted our lives since their creation and have influenced our society for better or worse for educational or not so educational purposes. Media in all of its aspects have been around for many years and that has translated to every part of our society. We see a film and we quickly talk about its whether it was good or bad but we analyze it. This goes for everyone from children to …

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The American Dream, The American Lie: An Examination Of Queerness, Disability And American Identity In Miss Lonelyhearts, Vivian Arias May 2023

The American Dream, The American Lie: An Examination Of Queerness, Disability And American Identity In Miss Lonelyhearts, Vivian Arias

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project, informed primarily by queer theory and disability studies, examines the ways in which queerness, disability, and marginality are central to Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and his critique of the American Dream. Nathanael West, Jewish American novelist and screenwriter, is remembered for his work critiquing the American Dream; however, one aspect that has remained understudied is how his novels feature non-normative outsiders, past and present. The primary analysis of this project is focused on the 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts. Other works by West are also referenced. From West’s perspective, the American Dream was the American nightmare for …

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“Too Good To Kill”: Literary Gerontology And Late Style In Margaret Atwood’S Gilead Novels, Serina Item May 2023

“Too Good To Kill”: Literary Gerontology And Late Style In Margaret Atwood’S Gilead Novels, Serina Item

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, and her 2019 sequel, The Testaments, illuminate the author’s continued interest in the connection between a woman’s age and the notion of her usefulness and complicity within a hegemonically masculine society. Focusing on literary gerontology and the author’s late style, this essay highlights Atwood’s persistent rejection of patriarchal representations of older women in literature. I analyze the ways in which Atwood’s “ustopian” (Atwood’s literary genre invention, combining “dystopia” and “utopia”) novels develop older women characters beyond “old age as motif and metaphor” by removing age and gender as significant barriers to …

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Consuming The World: Poetic Appetite, Memory, And Identity In Li-Young Lee’S Food Poems, Claire Liszka May 2023

Consuming The World: Poetic Appetite, Memory, And Identity In Li-Young Lee’S Food Poems, Claire Liszka

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Food is a universal human necessity, yet food often serves more than a biological purpose as it informs individual and communal identities, and even facilitates memory. This thesis explores personal memory, the development of identity, and an almost reverential connection to nature in several food poems by Li-Young Lee in Rose (1986) and Behind My Eyes (2008). Born in 1957, Lee has been writing poetry since he was young, studying under Gerald Stern in the late 1970s, and he is known for writing sublime, transcendent yet incredibly accessible and expressive poetry. This thesis gives an overview of food studies and …

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Mankind Is Machine: A Monstrous Posthuman Reading Of Philip K. Dick’S Selected Works, Gabriel Davis May 2023

Mankind Is Machine: A Monstrous Posthuman Reading Of Philip K. Dick’S Selected Works, Gabriel Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The works of Philip K. Dick act as an ideal template for readers to explore what it means to be human in a technologically dominated world. Dick’s emphasis on the usage of androids and artificial intelligence as literary monsters allows for a posthuman reading of the traditional literary monster, notably in how their uncanny nature and behavior helps reveal the synthetic tendencies of humanity. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “Imposter,” and “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” each narrative incorporates artificial intelligence and androids acting as others to reveal the machine-like qualities of Dick’s human characters. This …

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Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard May 2023

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 …

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Führer And Father In Flux: Fascism And Desire In The Works Of George Saunders, Don Delillo, And David Foster Wallace, K. Tyler Wick May 2023

Führer And Father In Flux: Fascism And Desire In The Works Of George Saunders, Don Delillo, And David Foster Wallace, K. Tyler Wick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the end of World War II, the possibility of fascism and totalitarianism as a global threat continues to proliferate in American art and literature to the point that many individuals paradoxically desire the very things that seek to control them. Postmodern literature often portrays fascism and totalitarianism as it exists under contemporary capitalist systems as a multiplicity of discreet machines operating within objects of desire. These objects are complicated by the 24-hour news cycle and the popularity of solitary, on-demand entertainment that in turn mediates the desires and fears of a population through strict control of information. This thesis …

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“It’S Alive!” The Birth And Afterlife Of The Gothic Genre, Tanner Linkous May 2023

“It’S Alive!” The Birth And Afterlife Of The Gothic Genre, Tanner Linkous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the development of the Gothic novel in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis establishes the Gothic as a literary mode of middle-class terror by analyzing Gothic novels within the historical context of the Industrial and Democratic revolutions. This requires an in-depth understanding of politics throughout both centuries and this thesis engages with several sources such as Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel which adds important context to my claims. Additionally, I use several contemporary sources such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the writings of Edmund Burke, and On the Pleasure Derived from Objects …

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"Enlightened Motherhood": Frances Ellen Watkins Harper And The Conception Of Black Womanhood, Christina Rose Walcott May 2023

"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 …

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Sehnsucht And Eros In The Life And Work Of Sheldon Vanauken, Ralph C. Wood Apr 2023

Sehnsucht And Eros In The Life And Work Of Sheldon Vanauken, Ralph C. Wood

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review essay on Will Vaus, Sheldon Vanauken: The Man Who Received “A Severe Mercy” (Hamden, CT, 2013). 292 pages. $16.99. ISBN: 9781935688037.

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From Pedagogical To The Practical: A Study Linked By Japanese Themes, Kennedy Lomont Apr 2023

From Pedagogical To The Practical: A Study Linked By Japanese Themes, Kennedy Lomont

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio consists of three essays linked by Japanese themes and also includes a practical project. These papers delve into the subjects of Japenese incarceration, magical girl anime, and Noh theater. My practical portion contains the materials that I have created and refined for job search purposes.

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