Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Brushfire, Ariel Gordon

The Goose

“Brushfire” concerns itself with how people use urban forests, from indecent exposure to poaching to teenage drinking party-bonfires that get out of control. Though it could be construed as a manifesto on walking-in-the-woods, it also touches on some of the conflicts inherent in urban/nature experiences.

A Companion To Australian Aboriginal Literature Edited By Belinda Wheeler, Jose-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla

The Goose

José-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla reviews A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, edited by Belinda Wheeler.

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, And Ecology In Canadian Literary Studies Edited By Smaro Kamboureli And Christl Verduyn, Chad Weidner

The Goose

Chad Weidner reviews Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn.

Merging: Contemplations On Farming & Ecology From Horseback By Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, Anna Banks

The Goose

Anna Banks reviews Merging: Contemplations on Farming & Ecology from Horseback, by Soren Bondrup-Nielsen.

The Stag Head Spoke By Erina Harris, Joel Deshaye

The Goose

Joel Deshaye reviews Erina Harris's book of poetry entitled The Stag Head Spoke.

Deadly Girls' Voices, Suspense, And The "Aesthetics Of Fear" In Joyce Carol Oates's "The Banshee" And "Doll: A Romance Of The Mississippi", Pascale Antolin

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Abstract: this article focuses on deadly girls’ voices in "The Banshee" and "Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi," two short stories taken from Joyce Carol Oates’s collection The Female of the Species, subtitled Tales of Mystery and Suspense. It shows that children are used as leading and focal characters not only to increase suspense but also to manipulate the readers’ traditional sets of ethical, semantic and literary references. Oates resorts to her favourite “aesthetics of fear” for it is a powerful means of putting horror and abjection at a distance, and it is associated with the question of meaning—"meaning is …

Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections With Other Animals And The Earth Edited By Carol J. Adams And Lori Gruen, Astrida Neimanis

The Goose

Astrida Neimanis reviews Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen.

The Cambridge Companion To Literature And The Environment Edited By Louise Westling, Randy Lee Cutler

The Goose

Randy Lee Cutler reviews The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, edited by Louise Westling

Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar By Brian Bartlett, Joel Deshaye

The Goose

Joel Deshaye reviews Brian Bartlett's Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar

Balance Of Fragile Things By Olivia Chadha, Nicole Bartley

The Goose

Nicole Bartley reviews Balance of Fragile Things by Olivia Chadha.

Who Speaks For The River?: The Oldman River Dam And The Search For Justice By Robert Girvan, Cory T. Shaman

The Goose

Cory T. Shaman reviews Who Speaks for the River?: The Oldman River Dam and the Search for Justice by Robert Girvan.

Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination Of James Joyce Edited By Robert Brazeau And Derek Gladwin, Rebekah A. Taylor

The Goose

Rebekah A. Taylor reviews Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce edited by Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin.

Living Oil: Petroleum Culture In The American Century By Stephanie Lemenager, Bart H. Welling

The Goose

Bart H. Welling reviews Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Cenutry by Stephanie LeMenager.

Light Light By Julie Joosten, Mathieu Aubin

The Goose

Mathieu Aubin's review of Light Light by Julie Joosten.

The Oxford Handbook Of Ecocriticism Edited By Greg Garrard, Camilla Nelson Dr

The Goose

Camilla Nelson reviews The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard

"Equal Partners In Crime": Narration In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Rebecca Mae Holder

Master's Theses

This reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao argues that narrator Yunior’s failure to capture the authentic speech of Beli illuminates the failure of narrative generally to speak authentically for the subaltern. The writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Gayatri Spivak, and Scott McCloud work together to uncover the political and ethical implications of Yunior’s willful erasure of Beli’s voice. In the sections detailing her early life, Yunior draws attention to the gaps in the information he gives readers and thus reminds them that all narrative excludes and distorts details to fulfill an objective. This reading argues that …

Return And Recovery: The Influence Of Place On Blues Murder Ballads And Laguna Ceremony Cycles, Tyler J. Dettloff

All NMU Master's Theses

The relationships between place, narrative, memory, and identity are integral in many oral traditions. This project considers place as actively shaping Sterling’s identity in Laguna author Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead and R.L. Burnside’s rendition of the popular murder ballad “Stack O’Lee and Billy Lyons.” Ethical and personal views of land and place offers a method for individual and cultural survivance. Comparing these two separate “return and recovery” narratives offer a clear illustration of how land impacts identity.

Sterling’s home in Laguna Pueblo falls victim to the extraction industry and bares a scar that results in Sterling’s …

Tracing Appalachian Musical History Through Fiction: Representations Of Appalachian Music In Selected Works By Mildred Haun And Lee Smith, John C. Goad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research seeks to compare and contrast fictional Appalachian writings by Lee Smith and Mildred Haun to contemporary historical sources in an attempt to trace the development of Appalachian music between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century. The thesis examines two novels by Lee Smith (The Devil’s Dream and Oral History) and the collection The Hawk’s Done Gone by Mildred Haun, which includes a short novel and several short stories. Contemporary primary sources and scholarly secondary sources were used to compare the fictional works’ depictions of Appalachian music to their historical counterparts. Also included within the …

It-Clefts And Their Processing, Elisabeth S. Johnson

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Morehead State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by Elisabeth S. Johnson on July 21, 2015.

Who By Fire By Fred Stenson, Mary H. Scriver Rev. Or Bs, Mdiv, Ma

The Goose

Mary Scriver reviews Who by Fire by Fred Stenson.

Becoming Wild: Living The Primitive Life On A West Coast Island By Nikki Van Schyndel, Maureen Scott Harris

The Goose

Maureen Scott Harris reviews Becoming Wild: Living the Primitive Life on a West Coast Island, by Nikki Van Schyndel.

Ordinary Hours By Karen Enns And Lake Of Two Mountains By Arleen Paré, Lisa M. Giles

The Goose

A 'double' review of two new poetry publications from Brick Books: Ordinary Hours by Karen Enns and Lake of Two Mountains by Arleen Pare.

Subduction Zone By Emily Mcgiffin, Kelly Shepherd

The Goose

Kelly Shepherd's review of Subduction Zone by Emily McGiffin.

Facing The Change: Personal Encounters With Global Warming Edited By Steven Pavlos Holmes, Geoff R. Martin

The Goose

Geoff R. Martin reviews Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming.

Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

It took 28 years after Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 for Mary Hallock Foote to render drawings for one of the novel’s first illustrated editions, which was probably the first ever to be illustrated by a woman.(1) It took 130 years after the publication of Foote’s illustrated edition in 1878 for Project Gutenberg to digitize and disseminate Hawthorne’s novel with Foote’s illustrations.(2) It has taken seven years for Hawthorne scholarship to commence addressing and examining Foote’s edition, and theorize what her drawings suggest about the act of seeing, for the heroine’s audiences in the book, and for …

Touching Brains, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Dialogical Interspecies Ethics: Ataraxia, Desire And Hope In The Post-Human World Of Anne Carson's Pastoral, Thomas Bristow Dr

The Goose

This review essay implicitly revisits human and non-human power relations within a critical animal studies context that understands the affective conjunction between the manipulation of our worlds (action, partly through knowledge) and degrees of involvement with these others that live in our worlds (comportment via emotions). I take Louise Westling’s new study as the platform for an analysis of two book-length poems, The Autobiography of Red (1998) and red doc> (2013), which centre on the life of a shepherd, Geryon. Rather than revisit classical pastoral, these texts extract power-relations that classical myth and pastoral spatialise. In so doing, I argue, …

Where Do They Go: Christian Faith And Belonging In Gay Literature, Samuel D. J. Ernest

Honors Projects

This exploration of Christianity, family, homosexuality, and running away in twentieth-century literature is divided into two essays. In the first essay, G. K. Chesterton’s “twitch upon a thread” provides a way of understanding the flight of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and Jeanette in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. After they escape their mothers and home communities, Sebastian’s and Jeanette’s searches for a vocation eventually bring them back to where they started, in one sense or another. Sebastian finds his place within the Church, at a monastery; Jeanette travels back to her parents’ house …

There Will Be Violence: A Critical Analysis Of Violence In The Works Of Cormac Mccarthy, Matthew L. Robinson

Honors Projects

This discussion of McCarthy’s use of violence in his western novels will focus primarily on the books Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and No Country for Old Men.

Both novels feature antagonists who use war and violence to impose a new societal order. They fail in the end – they cannot succeed so long as there are individuals who refuse to conform to a widespread acceptance of violence that follows Judge Holden’s doctrine of war. In McCarthy’s novels, violence is used to impose a new order of existence. The opposition of individuals cause these imposed …

Isolation Of The Individual In The Novels Of Carson Mccullers, Adam Hutchinson

Honors Projects

A southern novelist of the mid twentieth century, Carson McCullers is often labeled as a Southern Gothic author, and her novels reflect the violence, grotesque characters, and dilapidated settings of the genre. However, while early interpretations of her work focused on the depravity of doomed characters, more recent analysis has opened up her work to a productive understanding of social change. Her characters are isolated from the rest of society, whether by race, religion, or sexuality, but rather than highlighting their own shortcomings, these isolating factors underscore a limitation within the social structures and the need for change. This essay …