Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Reintegrating Human And Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology In Rachel Carson And Barbara Kingsolver, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Rachel Carson and Barbara Kingsolver were both trained as scientists and may be expected to embrace the rationalist, mechanical view of nature as something separate from, and perhaps even inferior to, the world of humans. Yet these two women both promoted a more complex approach to modernism's scientific paradigm in which nature is not merely a separate entity for dispassionate study but also an integral part of the human community. Both women display in their rhetorical choices a keen understanding of the language of community and interconnection, and their language and writing styles constantly promote the reintegration of humans and …

Wounded Women, Varied Voice, Kathryn Johnston

Undergraduate Review

Daphne du Maurier and Sylvia Plath both use voice as a tool in their respective pieces, “La Sainte-Vierge” and “Lesbos.” Through the implementation of varied voices, these women convey female interiors. Du Maurier’s use of a third-person narrative voice in her short story “La Sainte-Vierge” allows her to comment on the lives of the main characters through the eyes of an outsider. Du Maurier’s outsider reveals a naïve and delusional housewife, unhealthy in her denial within a failing relationship. Contrasting with du Maurier’s Marie is Plath’s first-person voice of a scorned, dissatisfied housewife in her poem, “Lesbos.” Plath’s use of …

The Assertion Of Identity: Storytelling And Testimony In The Works Of Edwidge Danticat, Michael R. Kurban

Honors Theses

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat evokes the Haitian tradition of storytelling in many of her novels and short story collections. A tradition formulated by vodou religion and the amalgamation of African cultures, storytelling acts to entertain, educate and enlighten the people of Haiti. Additionally, her novels are often written in the context of traumatic events in Haitian history. While Danticat's works have been studied with focus on their depiction of storytelling and of trauma, little has been done on the restorative power that storytelling provides. In this thesis, I seek to examine the potential for Danticat's characters and works to create …

The Shamanic Archetype In Robinson Jeffers Poetry, Steven B. Herrmann

Jeffers Studies

This essay pays homage to Robinson Jeffers’s totemic presence as a shaman-poet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the essay’s author was born in 1956. It views shamanism as a symbolic process of transformation that takes place at an emotional, instinctive, and spiritual level; as a method of ecstasy found throughout Jeffers’ poetry and prose from beginning to end of his career. The shamanic archetype takes on concrete form through Jeffers’ ritual enactments of his dreams, spirit visitations, visions, and shamanistic voices that sound to him from Native influences. Science gave Jeffers a vision to behold the world’s spiritual traditions from a vista …

Robinson Jeffers,W.B. Yeats, And Ecoprophecy, Deborah Fleming

Jeffers Studies

W. B. Yeats and Robinson Jeffers shared a vision of modernity which rejected contemporary values in favor of tradition. Both emphasized permanence in times of fragmentation and featured dramatic landscapes and cultural myth. Included among Modernist poets in spite of early Romantic influence and his commitment to formalist verse, Yeats fixed his gaze on the past, establishing the poetic terms of decolonization and interconnectedness of culture, place, and nature. Excluded from the circle of Modernist poets, Jeffers’s voiced what we call today ecocentrism—the earth or natural world rather than the human mind being the center of things. Jeffers’s ecoprophecy stems …

"What's That Noise?": Paying Attention To Perception, Excess, And Meta-Art In David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, Christopher Mccarthy

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In his graphic novel Asterios Polyp David Mazzucchelli is concerned with the nature of human perception. He highlights the limitations of perception through his title character's struggle to find a new way to filter information from the world around him. Mazzucchelli reminds us that no matter which method a person uses to look at the world there will always be excess details that he or she will ignore or simply not notice due to perceptual blind spots. I argue that, while Asterios gains a new method for perceiving the world, his true victory is in his acknowledgement that all perceptions …

Sacrificio, Violencia Y Nación En Lituma En Los Andes De Mario Vargas Llosa, Cesar Valverde

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Abraham Lincoln & The Colony On Ile-A-Vache, Robert Bray

Scholarship

Just after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect (1 Jan 1863) Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with two New York capitalists to transport 500 newly-freed ex-slaves to Ile-a-Vache, Haiti, where they would, under company supervision, found and maintain a colony. From the start, little went right. Failure was due largely to mismanagement and chicanery on the part of the company. The emigrants lived (and died) miserably on Ile-a-Vache for nearly a year, until they were returned to the U. S. on a government transport ship in March, 1864. The debacle seems to have cured Lincoln of his fascination with colonization.

Athenaïse, Calixta, And Creole Constraints: An In Depth Look At Chopin's Portrayal Of Women, Nicole Reichert

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Genetic Engineering As Literary Praxis: A Study In Contemporary Literature, Taylor Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis considers the understudied issue of genetic engineering as it has been deployed in the literature of the late 20th century. With reference to the concept of the enlightened gender hybridity of Cyborg theory and an eye to ecocritical implications, I read four texts: Joan Slonczewski's 1986 science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean, Octavia Butler's science fiction trilogy Lilith's Brood – originally released between 1987 and 1989 as Xenogenesis – Simon Mawer's 1997 literary novel Mendel's Dwarf, and the first two books in Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction MaddAddam series: 2003's Oryx and Crake and 2009's The Year Of …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 13, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Lights And Shadows - 2012, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …

Mother Of Three Drowns Children And Other Stories, Laura L. Stubbins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A collection of short stories depicting fictional characters facing what is absent from their lives.

Bibliography Of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing In English, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Anticipative Feminism In F. Scott Fitzgerald’S This Side Of Paradise And Flappers And Philosophers, Andrew Riccardo

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 14 Fall 2012

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Bibliography For The Study Of Text And Image In Modern European Culture, Natasha Grigorian

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Prose And Polarization: Environmental Literature And The Challenges To Constructive Discourse, Paige E. Costello

CMC Senior Theses

This work explores how authors employ literary modes to persuade readers towards one side or another of the environmental debate and whether the works promote constructive discourse on environmental issues. It uses two seminal works from each side of the environmental discourse, Silent Spring and The Population Bomb and The Ultimate Resource and The Skeptical Environmentalist, to analyze stylistic differences and similarities, to compare public reception, and to explain the increasing polarization of environmental discourse.

The Machine, The Victim, And The Third Thing: Navigating The Gender Spectrum In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake And The Year Of The Flood, Lindsay Mccoy Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Atwood's depiction of gender in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. In an interview from 1972, Margaret Atwood spoke on survival: "People see two alternatives. You can be part of the machine or you can be something that gets run over by it. And I think there has to be a third thing." I assert that Atwood depicts this "third thing" through her characters who navigate between the binaries of "masculine" and "feminine" in a third realm of gender. As the female characters—regardless of their passive or aggressive behavior—engage in a quest for agency, …

Harvesting The Seeds Of Early American Human And Nonhuman Animal Relationships In William Bartram's Travels, The Travel Diary Of Elizabeth House Trist, And Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, Leslie Blake Vives

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses ecofeminist and human-animal studies lenses to explore human animal and nonhuman animal relations in early America. Most ecocritical studies of American literature begin with nineteenth-century writers. This project, however, suggests that drawing on ecofeminist theories with a human-animal studies approach sheds light on eighteenth-century texts as well. Early American naturalist travel writing offers a site replete with human and nonhuman encounters. Specifically, naturalist William Bartram's travel journal features interactions with animals in the southern colonial American frontier. Amateur naturalist Elizabeth House Trist's travel diary includes interactions with frontier and domestic animals. Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, a conduct …

Frank And Gala, Heather M. Mcgrail

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through the gossip and rumors in a small town in Minnesota, the townspeople discuss and react to the Levison family's claimed perfection.

Wisteria And Other Stories, Michael Clayton

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

We are forever shaped by the worlds we live in. The following stories are musings on the importance of time and place and on the conflicts that arise for characters who are born into and who live with or rail against those forces. The stories are set in and around Laurel County, Georgia over a period of decades. They look at the people who are made there and the lessons they learn or fail to learn as they work to make their way there.

The Restinga, Valerie Harbolovic

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Restinga explores dysfunctional sexual relationships in the familiar context of a love triangle, but it is set in the exotic African landscape of pre-war colonial Angola in 1960, where the author spent her childhood. The Restinga evolved from a short story presented at a graduate fiction workshop led by Joseph and Amanda Boyden at the University of New Orleans’ Madrid campus in the summer of 2007.

Research for this project included:

• Many interviews with the author’s parents
• Compilation and review of family home movies made at the time
• Interview with Richard J. Houk, author of the article: “The Hotel …

Lines Of Communication: Uncovering War’S Reality Through Fictional Styles, Kelly Hoarty

English Student Scholarship

In looking at war literature, Word War I was a pivotal event in how many authors view the war and communicate its effects on society to their audiences. Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway are two novelists in the twentieth century, who wrote to portray the physical and psychological damage soldiers suffered in battle and upon returning home. All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque and The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway utilize different writing styles, but both effectively work within fiction to bridge the gap of understanding between the soldiers’ experiences and the civilians on the home front, …

Moral Performances: Melodrama And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Jeffrey Taylor Pusch

Dissertations

Despite a high number of ticket sales, theater reviews, and innumerable letters and diary entries detailing trips to the theater, the stereotype that theater in nineteenth-century America was almost culturally invisible continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century drama, even though figures like Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights. Just as it did in American life, theater exhibits a strong presence in the literature of the time. Considering theater’s pervasiveness, this dissertation seeks to restore it to its proper place in our study of …

“A Moral Wilderness”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’S The Scarlet Letter, Lehtie Chalise Thomson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter portrays his understanding of Puritan doctrines and culture. He addresses sin and redemption through his primary characters Hester Prynne and the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, whose adultery has resulted in the birth of Pearl and Hester’s scarlet A. He demonstrates Hester’s refusal to publically accept her sin as such. He also outlines the physical demise and spiritual indecision of the minister as Dimmesdale struggles to live two opposing lives. I call attention to how Hawthorne takes his knowledge of the New England Puritans and alters the historical context to emphasize his Romantic views of sin …