Literature in English, North America Commons^™

The Fall Of The House Of Usher, And The Rise Of The Civil War, Richard E. Campbell Ii

2022 Symposium

Poe may have died before the Civil War began, but he was close to the politics of his time. He was also an astute observer of people. His writings often explore deep aspects of the human condition. Using his in depth understanding of people and his close proximity and personal interest it would make sense that he could see how the wheels were turning. In the end it is possible that Poe would predict and hide clues of his observations within this writings, specifically The Fall of the House of Usher.

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines …

Review Of: Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Small Histories During World War Ii, Letter Writing, And Family History Methodology—Suzanne Kesler Rumsey, G.C. Waldrep

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Suzanne Kesler Rumsey’s Blessed Are the Peacemakers is, on the surface, the reconstructed story of the author’s paternal grandparents during World War II. The saga of Benjamin and Miriam Kesler, members of the Dunkard Brethren Church in northern Indiana, in and out of the Civilian Public Service (CPS), is one that will be familiar to most readers of twentieth-century North American Anabaptist history: a young husband called into CPS service as a conscientious objector, the young wife he left behind. What makes it richer is the trove of letters back and forth between the young couple that the author has …

Review Of: Vignettes 2020: Anabaptist Women Writers—Sheila Petre And Gabriella Showalter, J.P. Miller

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Vignettes, compiled and edited by Sheila Petre and Gabriella Showalter, is a fascinating text. It is a book that was written by, and is intended for, Anabaptist women writers. The book is a collection of articles that profile around 400 Anabaptist women writers from more than 15 countries. The book provides many resources for aspiring writers; it recommends books on writing, such as The Elements of Style, and contains a directory of all the women profiled in this book. [First paragraph.]

Symposium Review: The Right Church: From A Seeker To A Finder—Peter Hoover, Sheila Petre, Osiah Horst

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

[...] Across 264 compelling pages of earnest semi-autobiographical work, Hoover sketches a poignant picture of many disintegrating organizations among which move small vibrant flames of living hope. He tells the story of a young man seeking for answers about Christianity, and the religious entities within it. He intersperses his narrative with glorious scripture passages and hymns, and includes wisdom borrowed from his uninhibited correspondence with the leaders of many different Anabaptist groups. The main character is part of “only a small group—a very small and shrinking group—of Old Order Mennonites trying to keep the ‘songs of Zion’ alive with all …

Engl 110: College Writing (Comedy, Satire, & Persuasion), Scott R. Kapuscinski

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus provides a themed approach to Freshman composition. Students are tasked with composing three essays in three distinct styles. Student engagement is high through the use of student-sourced primary sources (funny videos from YouTube, etc.) and the emphasis on thesis building and critical thinking.

Section 1: Comedy & the thesis-based essay

Section 2: Satire & writing to persuade

Section 3: Satire in Art & independent research

"The Personal Is The Political And The Political Is Personal:" Engendering Understanding Through Global Allegory In Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist And Exit West, Nicole Ordonez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West by British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. In both novels, Hamid uses the representational literary device of allegory to present what I will frame as works of “global allegory,” or novels of global literature that present the world as one interconnected space rather than as one divided by borders and nations. In doing so, I will be situating my argument as a rebuttal of Frederic Jameson’s “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson draws a distinction between works of third world and first world literature along the lines of allegory. …

Queer Horror, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

Master's Portfolio, Jennifer Cousino

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

I was a teacher at a high school in the Cabrini-Green complex in Chicago in the 1990s when the buildings were starting to be emptied. I saw firsthand the beginnings of the removal of nearly 15,000 people from their homes when the first building came down in 1995, three years after the first Candyman film. I wrote this academic paper as part of a graduate seminar with Dr. Piya Pal-Lapinski - Victorian Monsters: Fiction and Film 1837 to 2021 at Bowling Green State University in the United States. My paper examines the 2021 film and the sociopolitical and historical context …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

“We Talk, I Believe, All Day Long”: Forms Of Communication In Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre, Kara Vacalopoulos

Student Theses

Jane Eyre is a successful coming of age narrative where the title character’s development can be tracked through the way she communicates with other people. Dialogue and conversations constantly change as Jane herself changes and grows. This paper analyzes the different modes of communication that Jane experiences with the characters in the novel. As she gets older, Jane establishes her voice and seeks out a perfect conversational partner – someone who she could bear her soul to and have meaningful conversations with. This paper argues Rochester as Jane’s perfect conversational partner, even if he is not a perfect person. In …

Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

The Appalachian Nostos: Pastoralism And Returning Home In Appalachian Poetry, Henry David Thoreau Kilbourne

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, David Mazella, Claude Willan, David Bishop, Elizabeth Stravoski, Walter Barta, Max James

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of women’s participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory became the …

Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, Courtney Mullis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and proposes a new subgenre of American literature, Cultural Trauma Fiction, that has arisen since the late 20^th century in response to numerous large-scale traumatic events and their representation in the media. Cultural trauma occurs when a shocking, shared event fractures collective identity and initiates a discursive process to understand what took place, why it happened, and how the affected culture can heal. Cultural traumas differ from individual trauma because cultural traumas affect a culture, rather than an individual, and because they are mediated; many members of the culture experience the trauma of these events secondhand …

“The Un/Touchables:” Quest For Citizenship In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things And Indra Sinha’S Animal’S People, Mahreen Shahzadi

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper argues that Ammu and Velutha, in The God of Small Things and Animal in Animal’s People are not seen as productive citizens of the nation because of their marginalization, which results in their status as second-class citizens. However, Ammu, Velutha, and Animal resist second-class status by challenging the heteropatriarchal nation, rejecting its limited definition of gender, caste, sexuality, and citizenship.

Finding Their Chrysanthemum: Linguistic Representation In Children's Literature, Marielena Zajac

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Children in America today struggle with finding themselves in the books they read due to societal expectations. From an early age, children are dictated on the correct way to speak and write in “American,” which can leave children and their home languages feeling unseen and dismissed. To help further the conversation and promotion of linguistic diversity in American society, this capstone analyzes dialectal representation in children’s books, with a heavy focus on attitudinal linguistic principles rather than prescriptive mechanics. The secondary research explores current literature and resources that discuss literacy acquisition in adolescents, trends in dialects in America, and childhood …

A Pandemic Of Greed And A Disease Of Poverty In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque Of The Red Death", Benjamin Herrick

Master's Theses

The breakers tripped. Again. The breakers, a mandatory halt to trading on the floor of the stock exchange in response to the S&P falling more than 7% from the previous close. This was instituted after the Crash of 1987 to calm the markets before trading is allowed to resume. They are supposed to mitigate a drastic crash. They have only ever triggered once before, in 1997. Not for the tech bubble. Not even in the crash of 2008. All trading stops for fifteen minutes when the Level One breaker trips. If it drops further in the same day, the Level …

“Strumpet,” “Huswife,” “Whore”: Centering Othello’S Bianca, Phoebe Merten

English (MA) Theses

Is Bianca a sex worker? What meanings change if she is or isn’t? Not enough artistic or critical attention has been paid the character. It seems likely that the initial lack of attention stemmed from Bianca’s status as a purported sex worker, as though this makes her somehow categorically different from the other women in the play, or inherently less interesting. There has in the past decade or so been a marked increase in scholarship on sex work, but this too largely skims over Bianca, likely because of the ambiguity surrounding her profession.

In my introduction I go over some …

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

Speaking Up For Generic Asians In Charles Yu’S Interior Chinatown, Orel Shilon

English (MA) Theses

In this project, I will explore the ways in which the critical race theory works in conjunction with film and literature to showcase the depths of the racial issues faced by Asian Americans. I will use Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown as a framework to express the major issues faced by the Asian American community and the concern brought up by implications made within the novel. Scholars such as Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham and their book, Asian Americans and the Media, will be used as a primary source to introduce the problematic ways of the Hollywood establishment. Through …

Beheaded: An Alternate Look Into The Life Of England's Most Notorious Queen, Marion Renee Burgess

Honors Theses

Beheaded: an alternate look into the life of England's most notorious queen is a craft paper and accompanying novel chapters. The craft paper focuses on dialogue and its use in historical fiction to build both character and setting. The novel Beheaded is a historical fiction that focuses on Anne Boleyn, queen of England and second wife of Henry VIII. Anne served as queen from 1533 until her execution on May 19, 1536. She is one of the most notorious royal women in history, and she was never formally charged, witchcraft is one of the many claims laid against her during …

Textual Persuasion: Trauma Representation In Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves, Elizabeth A. Wall

English Theses

Textualization is the act of putting words on a page. Typography is the style and way in which the textualization of the text appears to the reader. Together, textualization and typography have the ability to coerce the reader into a specific reading pattern. Mark Z. Danielewski has combined textualization and typography in his complex novel House of Leaves as a unique attempt to represent trauma in the space between language and written language. Typical textual play becomes textual persuasion as the reader is guided through the labyrinth of text by typographical coercion. In this novel, these elements of play essentially …

#Metoo: The Literary And Social Impact Of Sexual Violence Narratives, Aura Comer

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

To fully understand the severity of sexual violence and its pervasiveness in America, I will present statistics of rape and sexual assault, as well as available legal court statistics of justice and punishment for offenders (or a lack thereof). However, there must be an acknowledgment of the disparity in information and representation pertaining to indigenous, LGBT+, immigrant, and minor communities. Note that these statistics do not speak to the complete pervasiveness of rape and sexual assault in the United States, given the negligent protection and lack of belief in victims, which results in victim silencing and a lack of reporting.

The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’S “The Vanishing Half” And Her Intent On Revealing The Unseen In The Tradition Of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue

All Theses

Throughout the trajectory of passing literature, there have been varying projections of racial identity as it is intertwined with choice and power. Despite the many commonalities between the archetypal passing novel, the differences in the way that passing is demarcated in various novels is indicative of the racial climate out of which it came. This paper considers Britt Bennett’s 2020 novel, The Vanishing Half, as a socio-political artifact of an allegedly post-racial era. In considering Bennett’s novel as a reflection of post-raciality, a comparative study incorporating Nella Larsen’s Passing, Douglas Sirk’s Adaptation of Imitation of Life, and Danzy …

Gender, Sexuality, And Class In Selected Works Of Kesey, Cunningham, And Woolf, Harper Savage

English and Creative Writing | Senior Theses

At its best, literature illuminates the issues facing society. In the works of Ken Kesey, Virginia Woolf, and Michael Cunningham, these authors hold a mirror up to the issues of class, sexuality, and gender. While it is apparent that the times in which One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Mrs, Dalloway, and The Hours were written heavily inform the individual character’s choices and their destinies, the themes presented are timeless. This essay explores how even today, years after these novels were written, society continues to struggle with these issues, and argues that, perhaps, through literature, a pathway to understanding can …

Authors As Figures, Functions, And Persons: Theories On Intention, Tyler M. Preston

Honors Theses

My honors thesis is an exercise in which I approach a singular work with three different theories on authorial intent and analyze how the author figure exists along with the work through the lens of each theory. After providing background for the discourse on authorial intention, I explore the theories of Michel Foucault, Alexander Nehamas, and Reed Way Dasenbrock and then demonstrate what each theory looks like in practice by applying each theory to Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior. I consider how the different theories fit together, where they differ, and how practical they are as standards of …

An Analysis Of Charging Practices And Their Impact On Battery Degradation In North American Electric Vehicles Built Between 2010-2020, Douglas William Edward Ferrier

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electric vehicles (EVs) are emerging as a component of the global solution to combat climate change. However, in North America, particularly in the United States and Canada, the transition away from internal combustion engines (ICE) has been slow. North America faces unique challenges due to its geographical size and population in comparison to other continents. The good news is that EV adoption is increasing within North America. Along with increased EV adoption, governments and public companies are constructing charging infrastructure to support increased consumer EV purchases. Despite increased adoption, many future and current owners throughout North American society have concerns …