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Articles 121 - 150 of 4119

Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America

"You Know The Rules": A Dramatic Experiment In Aromantic Literary Theory, April Chronowski May 2025

"You Know The Rules": A Dramatic Experiment In Aromantic Literary Theory, April Chronowski

English

This paper proposes a new literary theory framework based on the zine "an aromantic manifesto" by yingchen and yingtong, as well as the work of Erving Goffman, using theater as a device to examine romantic relationships. Blending English and sociology, I focus each chapter on a different literary period and examine two plays each: early modern (Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing), modern (Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Djuna Barnes' "To The Dogs"), and contemporary (Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 and Margaret Edson's W;t). In tandem with analysis of formal elements---like …

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“Already My Heart Misgave Me”: Doomed Fantasy And Children In James Joyce’S “Araby” And William Faulkner’S “Barn Burning”, Kathleen E. Conner May 2025

“Already My Heart Misgave Me”: Doomed Fantasy And Children In James Joyce’S “Araby” And William Faulkner’S “Barn Burning”, Kathleen E. Conner

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

While rarely put into conversation, William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” and James Joyce’s “Araby” have a remarkable amount to say to one another. These parallel portraits of childhood each follow a young boy, Sarty Snopes and a nameless narrator respectively, struggling to find emotional clarity within a repressive society. While far from either authors’ most blatant critique of Southern or Irish culture, both stories subtly weave in the confining forces of Catholicism, imperialism, patriarchy, and poverty. To cope with the drudgery and cruelty of their surroundings, the boys retreat into fantasies of love and heroism. These idealizations allow the boys to …

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“Bottom Nature”: Embodying History In Gertrude Stein’S The Making Of Americans, Yasmin Tehrani May 2025

“Bottom Nature”: Embodying History In Gertrude Stein’S The Making Of Americans, Yasmin Tehrani

Theses and Dissertations

This paper attempts to connect Gertrude Stein’s conception of being in The Making of Americans with her vision of the production of history. This paper then concludes that for Stein, historical subjects themselves, both individually and collectively, and the imbued qualities in their being, shape history.

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Deflecting Voyeurism: Elizabeth Keckley’S Indictment Of Capitalism And Rejection Of The Exploitative White Gaze, Laura Steel May 2025

Deflecting Voyeurism: Elizabeth Keckley’S Indictment Of Capitalism And Rejection Of The Exploitative White Gaze, Laura Steel

Theses and Dissertations

This paper analyzes the ex-slave narrative Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley through a Marxist and Romantic lens as a means to explore the impact of capitalism on Keckley while enslaved, as well as post-slavery. Through the paper, the author argues that Keckley successfully deflects the white voyeuristic gaze by replacing her physical form with clothing that she creates, as a means to both indict capitalism and reclaim ownership over her body. Further, the paper argues that Keckley employs Romanticism to highlight the unnatural capitalist roots and subsequent …

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A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena: Exploring Post-War Ethics, Claire Marshall Watkins May 2025

A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena: Exploring Post-War Ethics, Claire Marshall Watkins

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In my paper, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: Exploring Post-War Ethics, I explore the embodiment of care ethics and informed altruism through the novel’s protagonists, Akhmed and Sonja, respectively, who each care for a local girl Havaa whose home has been destroyed and whose father has been disappeared by the Russian Feds from their small Chechen village. Akhmed immediately takes her on as his own while Sonja is hesitant. As the novel progresses, Sonja and Akhmed each provide an even amount of time and effort into her care, though they approach it differently. Akhmed—Havaa’s neighbor and family friend—works together with …

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Transgressive Fiction And The Problem Of Negative Affect: A Case Study Of Samuel Delany’S Hogg, Brian Thornton May 2025

Transgressive Fiction And The Problem Of Negative Affect: A Case Study Of Samuel Delany’S Hogg, Brian Thornton

Master's Theses

Samuel Delany began drafting Hogg in March of 1969 and worked on it intermittently before completing the novel in October of 1973.1 Yet Hogg remained unpublished until 1995 before finally seeing the light of day “during the ‘transgressive turn’ in American literature” (Mitchell 1). As such, the novel is historically situated along what Jonathan Mitchell calls a “dual temporality,” which “allows the novel to be located as an intervention in two key moments in America’s LGBT+ history: first, the developments in identity politics coming out of the socio-political cultural shifts of the 1960s; and, second, the post-AIDS awareness 1990s”.

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“More Than What [They] Made Us To Be”: From Passing To Perception In Victorian And Modern Vampire Media, Lauren Sieberg May 2025

“More Than What [They] Made Us To Be”: From Passing To Perception In Victorian And Modern Vampire Media, Lauren Sieberg

English (MA) Theses

Throughout Victorian Gothic horror fiction, vampires function as deviant figures, maneuvering within social confines of passing until their status quo-threatening identity is exposed. Of the popular vampires from this period, most gradually fail to maintain status as social insiders—as demonstrated with Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula or Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, who possess the temporary capacity to pass until their hidden monstrosity is revealed over time. Even if Gothic monsters are confined to a limited space and time far from society, this is still not enough; in accordance with the Victorian culture of morality policing by dominant groups, the vampiric Other …

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The Shame Of (Be)Longing In Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, Grace S. Miholic May 2025

The Shame Of (Be)Longing In Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, Grace S. Miholic

All Theses

This thesis examines the role of shame in Kincaid's Lucy. Separated into four separate sections, the thesis moves through Lucy’s relationship with her boss, Mariah, her Antiguan mother, and the shame that is identified at the end of the novel. In the introduction, I identify the passage that frames the novel around shame. I then identify my thesis, which centers around Lucy’s shame and her inability and refusal to situate herself with neither Mariah nor her mother’s expectations. The second section of the thesis revolves around Mariah and the form of feminism that skews her perception and expectations of …

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“How Close To The Edge We Are”: Ecologically Reading The Frontiers Of Joan Didion’S Early Nonfiction, Mia R. Speller May 2025

“How Close To The Edge We Are”: Ecologically Reading The Frontiers Of Joan Didion’S Early Nonfiction, Mia R. Speller

Honors Theses

Joan Didion’s work is heavily regional and rooted in place, whether that be the place about which she writes or, by contrast, the place she leaves in order to do her writing. This place-based context takes root in many American ideologies and mythos, like that of the frontier mentality and golden dream. For this reason, exploring Didion’s use of natural metaphor and description as she discusses various cultural phenomena is essential to understanding the layers of her social critiques of 1960’s and 1970’s American culture, especially as they reflect on the failures of the frontier ideology. Further, looking at her …

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Love Y Ganas; A Revolutionay Revelation, Thomas J. Salas May 2025

Love Y Ganas; A Revolutionay Revelation, Thomas J. Salas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis does not have an abstract.

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The Castle Is Still Here, And Yes, It's Still Scary: Reconstructing The Gothic Through Contemporary Short Story, Alyssa Kilroy May 2025

The Castle Is Still Here, And Yes, It's Still Scary: Reconstructing The Gothic Through Contemporary Short Story, Alyssa Kilroy

Undergraduate Theses

Since Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto published in 1764, the literary Gothic has grown and spread to include a multitude of subgenres in a variety of formats. Gothic literature has served as both a product and a showcase of its contextual influences, providing a deeper look at humanity's deepest flaws, fears, and passions that shape our societies. While the Gothic's historically fluid identity allows Frankenstein to exist in a literary realm alongside Wuthering Heights, something consistent in its core continues to appeal to modern audiences and remains relevant in contemporary literature and other media. This project offers a …

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James Baldwin's Classroom And What He Can Teach Educators About Queer Representation, Matthew Callahan May 2025

James Baldwin's Classroom And What He Can Teach Educators About Queer Representation, Matthew Callahan

Honors College Theses

This is an extended analysis of James Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers" about how to bring representation into the classroom. I use Baldwin's other essays and fiction along with educational research to look into the way Baldwin understands education and the importance of bringing healthy queer representation into the classroom. I provide both theoretical observations along with practical implications of what this means for educators in the classroom and what they can do to help all their students feel seen, represented, and welcome in the classroom.

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Double, Double, Toils And Troubles: Analyzing The “Magical” Relationships Between University Leaders’ Personality Traits And Their Self-Efficacy In Leadership Situations, Fay Ludvine Boudreaux May 2025

Double, Double, Toils And Troubles: Analyzing The “Magical” Relationships Between University Leaders’ Personality Traits And Their Self-Efficacy In Leadership Situations, Fay Ludvine Boudreaux

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This present study investigated the relationship between higher education leaders’ personality traits and their self-efficacy in leadership situations. A total of 151 leaders employed across the nine institutions within the University of Louisiana System completed a survey that prompted them to identify their personal values, traits, and skill sets, as derived from the online Pottermore quiz, the official Harry Potter Hogwarts House sorting instrument. This niche personality metric was chosen to cater to higher education’s evolving landscape, as it welcomes an influx of Millennials into leadership positions. Participants’ responses were eventually recoded to “sort” them into their respective Houses: Gryffindor, …

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On Death And Disease: How Physicians’ Perspectives Compare Across Specialties Through Written Work, Stephanie Anne C. Alkonga May 2025

On Death And Disease: How Physicians’ Perspectives Compare Across Specialties Through Written Work, Stephanie Anne C. Alkonga

Honors Capstones

Narrative medicine is a tool that the medical field is increasingly utilizing to cultivate patient-centered and culturally competent doctors and to reflect on lived experiences through texts that focus on psychosocial best practices. This study aims to examine the language used in physician-written works that address how physicians in different medical specialties treat the aging and the terminally ill, and how they view the deceased. Qualitative data guided by thematic questions will primarily be used in the analysis and comparison of these texts’ tone, rhetoric, diction, and similar literary devices to uncover if certain patterns arise across such specialties. Findings …

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"Death Is The Fifth [Season], And Master Of All": Necropolitical Violence And/As Environmental Violence In The Fifth Season, Mason T. Goodrich May 2025

"Death Is The Fifth [Season], And Master Of All": Necropolitical Violence And/As Environmental Violence In The Fifth Season, Mason T. Goodrich

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

While many scholars have already described N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning speculative novel The Fifth Season as one that highlights intersections between race, settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, and, most frequently, climate change, I apply a necropolitical lens to The Fifth Season in order evaluate a relationship that exists between systemic violence and environmental degradation. The Fifth Season depicts a socially inscribed relationship between an othered race of humans, called orogenes, and the land, anthropomorphized as “Father” Earth. Orogenes have a paradoxical social status: they are simultaneously feared and revered for their ability to control the Earth. This paradox is the impetus for many …

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Transcendental Blooms: Margaret Fuller And The Radical Language Of Flowers, Jenna Mcclain May 2025

Transcendental Blooms: Margaret Fuller And The Radical Language Of Flowers, Jenna Mcclain

Honors Theses

Situated between the literary periods of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism, Margaret Fuller’s writings vary in their topic and medium, offering a unique fusion of literary style as well as a refined yet radical social perspective. Fuller’s work frequently employs flowers as tools for communication rather than as mere symbols, with flowers acting as transmitters of Fuller’s philosophical message in her many sketches and poems. In “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” one of her most famous prose sketches, Fuller explores flowers in a nuanced way that exemplifies how floral representations function more like characters than objects in her work. While scholars …

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Efecto De Soles, Natalia Soriano Moreno May 2025

Efecto De Soles, Natalia Soriano Moreno

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

En este texto quiero exponer cómo fue el proceso de creación de Efecto de soles, el cual se desarrolló entre los años 2022 y 2025. El libro presenta la cotidianidad de un barrio que un día se ve afectado por distintos cambios en la naturaleza cuando aparece un fenómeno particular: los soles de algunas casas se vuelven cuadrados y aumentan su nivel de alumbramiento. Esto hace que el entorno natural del barrio comience a cambiar: aparecen gusanos fosforescentes, las flores pierden su olor, la lluvia se vuelve negra, las mariposas se van y a los árboles les salen hojas de …

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The Masc Of Masculinity: Multimodal Analysis Of Contemporary Punk Music, James L. Stanfield Iii May 2025

The Masc Of Masculinity: Multimodal Analysis Of Contemporary Punk Music, James L. Stanfield Iii

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis establishes a multi-genre framework of various theories from different academic fields that is then used to view the multimodal elements of punk and hardcore music performances. The analyses are tailored towards the dissection of traditional masculinity with the goal of constructing masculine avatars that are prosocial and moral. Reworking traditional masculinity is a portion of the larger fight for social reform that is taken up within the field of the humanities. Existing critical approaches to masculinity often establish the need for a rewriting of normative masculinity in society but often do not provide methods for such a rewriting. …

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Unsettling Femininity In Ottessa Moshfegh’S My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, Audrianna Witcher May 2025

Unsettling Femininity In Ottessa Moshfegh’S My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, Audrianna Witcher

All Theses

This thesis covers how Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation critiques traditional understandings of femininity and the inadequacy of neoliberal feminism to address the systemic issues that women face. Using Lauren Berlant’s concept of femininity as a genre, this thesis traces how Moshfegh implements disgust and abjection to reject mandates of cleanliness and emotional labor that are central to traditional femininity. Moshfegh also utilizes disgust and the narrator’s attempt at a year-long sleep to resist the ideals of productivity and self-care that are central to neoliberal feminism. In employing these affects, Moshfegh resists the social structures that exploit …

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Everything And Nothing Found In The House Of Leaves: A Multiliterate Analysis Of Multimodal Writing., Jennings Collins May 2025

Everything And Nothing Found In The House Of Leaves: A Multiliterate Analysis Of Multimodal Writing., Jennings Collins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The postmodern horror novel House of Leaves engages in a bevy of discourses across the humanities, a complex work that invites readers to engage with several multimodal forms of reading and writing to experience it fully. This thesis hopes to explore the novel’s place in various sites of discourse including film theory, philosophy, and horror genre theory; applying a multiliterate perspective to the work to study how the novel encourages multimodal and multiliterate thinking by applying studies of typography, experimental literature, and literary ontology. This thesis will emphasize a filmic analysis of text-within-text The Navidson Record, to address a …

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The Specter Of Body Horror Haunting Joyce Carol Oates’S “The Chair Of Tranquility” And Charlotte Perkins Gilman’S “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Tanya L. Tromble Apr 2025

The Specter Of Body Horror Haunting Joyce Carol Oates’S “The Chair Of Tranquility” And Charlotte Perkins Gilman’S “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, Tanya L. Tromble

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Joyce Carol Oates is the editor of a 2023 collection entitled A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers. Her own story in the collection, “The Chair of Tranquility (from the Diary of Mrs. Thomas Peele, Trenton, New Jersey, 1853),” takes on a fuller meaning when considered in a dialogic relationship to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” By first outlining how Gilman’s and Oates’s stories can be seen as sister stories, then analyzing some essential differences operated in Oates’s story, the author is finally able to discuss the dialogic effect of …

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Beyond “Do Not Disturb”: Alternatives And Possibilities Of Feminism In Joyce Carol Oates's Babysitter, Emilie Heude Apr 2025

Beyond “Do Not Disturb”: Alternatives And Possibilities Of Feminism In Joyce Carol Oates's Babysitter, Emilie Heude

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

“Sympathize/don’t rage” was Joyce Carol Oates’s call as she concluded a tweet on the rights of people who are transitioning (20 February 2023). This statement could well be considered a prism through which we might see her work. Indeed, the author depicts a variety of characters handling situations very differently – and readers are left dealing with their own sympathy with them. Babysitter (2022) is a case in point in this regard: Hannah, the main female character, appears as a submissive figure replete with gender and class prejudice and lacking agency. As Oyinkan Braithwaite wrote in a review for The …

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The Blinding Lights Of (Post)Feminist Empowerment In Joyce Carol Oates’S "Night, Neon”, Stéphanie Maerten Apr 2025

The Blinding Lights Of (Post)Feminist Empowerment In Joyce Carol Oates’S "Night, Neon”, Stéphanie Maerten

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Juliana, the protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates’s 2018 novella “Night, Neon,” is portrayed as a confident, empowered young woman who appears to embody the postfeminist ideal of “having it all”—autonomy, agency, and adherence to traditional feminine norms like marriage and motherhood. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes evident that Juliana’s sense of empowerment is largely performative, concealing deep-seated vulnerabilities and unresolved traumas. Through a series of flashbacks revealing Juliana’s troubled past, Oates critiques the postfeminist tendency to reinterpret traumatic experiences as tools for self-empowerment and resilience, suggesting that such a framework may obscure the systemic and pervasive nature of …

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The Mudwoman In The Academia: The Spectral Presence Of Jane Eyre And Antoinette Cosway In Joyce Carol Oates's Mudwoman, Stéphanie Durrans Apr 2025

The Mudwoman In The Academia: The Spectral Presence Of Jane Eyre And Antoinette Cosway In Joyce Carol Oates's Mudwoman, Stéphanie Durrans

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

While Jane Eyre has been lauded as a feminist novel, its modernist prequel Wide Sargasso Sea clearly aims at recovering the lost voice of the much-maligned Bertha Rochester from an altogether different feminist perspective. In her 1985 essay on these two novels, Joyce Carol Oates highlights their dual relationship in terms of romance and anti-romance, regarding Rhys’s novel as “a reverse mirror image of Jane Eyre’s and Rochester’s England.” Commenting upon the brief encounter between Jane and Rochester’s first wife as depicted by Jean Rhys, Oates also points out that, “[i]nhabiting contrary worlds, one woman is a savage to the …

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The 11-Year Itch: Exploitation As Sublimation In Blonde (Joyce Carol Oates, 2000; Andrew Dominik, 2022), Jocelyn R. Dupont Apr 2025

The 11-Year Itch: Exploitation As Sublimation In Blonde (Joyce Carol Oates, 2000; Andrew Dominik, 2022), Jocelyn R. Dupont

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

The goal of this article is to discuss Andrew Dominik’s much-criticized adaptation of Oates’ novel Blonde (2000), released on the Netflix streaming platform in September 2022. It aims at re-assessing the movie in the light of its literary hypotext, which appears to have been rather unfairly left out of much of the debate surrounding the release and critical reception of the film. In a first part, this article briefly addresses the stakes of Dominik’s adaptation, which are more complex than they might seem, notably on account of the extreme iconicity of its subject, even more so than its subject matter. …

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Is Love A “Pathological Condition Of The Soul”? Joyce Carol Oates's Beasts And Rape: A Love Story, Nicolas P. Boileau Apr 2025

Is Love A “Pathological Condition Of The Soul”? Joyce Carol Oates's Beasts And Rape: A Love Story, Nicolas P. Boileau

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This paper seeks to address the question of Oates’s relation to feminist and gender theories by looking at two novellas published consecutively, Beasts and Rape: A Love Story in the beginning of the 2000s. The short texts share a common storyline based on rape, which is far from uncommon in Oates’s fiction. However, I argue that there is something very specific in these two novellas in the way Oates chooses to handle the testimony of the rape, both overtly and covertly, both in graphic details and in repressed forms of expression, giving way to a reflection on women’s vulnerable position …

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Joyce Carol Oates And Feminism: Facts Found And Foundered, Gavin J. Cologne-Brookes Apr 2025

Joyce Carol Oates And Feminism: Facts Found And Foundered, Gavin J. Cologne-Brookes

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This essay explores the nuanced relationship between Joyce Carol Oates and feminism, distinguishing between Oates as an individual and “JCO” as the authorial process. Through analysis of novels like Babysitter, the essay argues that Oates’s fiction resists fixed labels, instead foregrounding ambiguity, interpretation, and the limitations of categorization. Drawing on philosophical and literary contexts, it contends that while Oates’s work invites feminist readings, her narrative style deliberately undermines definitive conclusions. Ultimately, the essay suggests that JCO’s writing stimulates inquiry and self-reflection, positioning art as a process of response rather than a vehicle for asserting categorical truths—including those of feminism.

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Exploring Specters Of Feminism In The Work Of Joyce Carol Oates, Nicolas P. Boileau, Tanya L. Tromble Apr 2025

Exploring Specters Of Feminism In The Work Of Joyce Carol Oates, Nicolas P. Boileau, Tanya L. Tromble

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This collection originates from the international conference “Specters of Feminism in the Work of Joyce Carol Oates,” held at Aix-Marseille Université in March 2024 as part of the broader project “Women and the F-Word: Thinking about Women’s Resistance to Feminism.” The introduction situates Oates’s vast and varied oeuvre within evolving feminist discourses, highlighting her ambivalent personal stance toward feminism and the critical consensus that her work engages deeply with feminist themes, especially sexual violence, trauma, and the complexities of gendered power. The essays gathered here explore how Oates’s stylistic experimentation, intertextuality, and representations of female agency and victimhood simultaneously reflect, …

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Human Dignity And Prostitution, Clara Kernodle Apr 2025

Human Dignity And Prostitution, Clara Kernodle

Harding Undergraduate Research Conference

In the twenty-first century, it is common to see feminists and pro-sex work voices lauding prostitution and other forms of the sex industry as viable expressions of women’s sexual and financial agency. As long as every participating party consents, they argue, sex work is not only tolerable, but admirable and positive – a form of transaction or service deserving license, protection, and respect in the name of individual freedom and female agency. Such voices argue that prostitution can even be dignified, as the sex industry supposedly allows participants full freedom to express their sexuality. In this paper, I offer an …

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Book Culture And Narrative In Martin’S A Song Of Fire And Ice, Maria Damkjær Apr 2025

Book Culture And Narrative In Martin’S A Song Of Fire And Ice, Maria Damkjær

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

What do books represent in G.R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire? This article examines their role as objects and their limitations within a narrative obsessed with loss of knowledge. Books, which are handled, lost, found, read, or destroyed, are both a shorthand for a fantasy world’s material culture, but also a metafictional nod to the reality of the reader. Contemporary fantasy authors, I posit, are both fascinated by texts, and also troubled by their limited chance of survival over the very long periods that the genre tends to sketch. Deep time is hostile to book knowledge, and …

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