Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Patriarchal Colonization Of The Female Body In Machinal And Clit Notes, Saide Harb-Ranero

The Graduate Review

Machinal written by Sophie Treadwell in 1928 and Clit Notes written by Holly Hughes in 1996 are two plays half a century apart yet bring forth the female body upstage and center. I see Machinal bringing attention to the societal machine that takes control of the focal character, Helen, from the first act. Clit Notes shows how a woman’s body could be removed from its first society, her parental home, simply for existing in a body that refuses to fit in a patriarchal box that is designed according to its perception of what that body should be doing. Regarding the …

Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism And The University, Andy Hines

Staff Scholarship

This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

Joanne Kyger And “The Kook Strain” In Olson: A Reading, Patrick James Dunagan

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

Jerome Rothenberg's "that dada strain" at once hilarious grandiose epic lyric historical and ever adventurous charts the highs discovered in his reading of the dada era. In like occurrence this writing seeks to poke around in the occult cupboards of Olson's mystical leanings. Looking not only at his work and assorted readings/engagements but delving also into the works of various others (Joanne Kyger, Jack Hirschman, Paul Blackburn, Gerrit Lansing, David Meltzer, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, Robin Blaser et al) who fell in alongside as well as after his work's star-eyed haul. Loquaciously gifted as a talker, how much (if …

The 1950 Anta Production Of The Tower Beyond Tragedy, A Facsimile Edition: Part I, Introduction, James Karman

Jeffers Studies

The introduction to this two-part study provides an account of the 1950 staging of The Tower Beyond Tragedy, starring Judith Anderson. It contains information about the friendship between Jeffers and Anderson that occasioned the production, a description of the script used for the ANTA Playhouse performance in New York, and a summary of the critical response.

Part II of this study contains a photographic reproduction of the final script used for the 1950 production of The Tower Beyond Tragedy. As the only surviving record of that failed production, the facsimile reveals the changes made by Anderson and others to …

The 1950 Anta Production Of The Tower Beyond Tragedy, A Facsimile Edition: Part Ii, Facsimile, Robinson Jeffers

Jeffers Studies

The introduction to this two-part study provides an account of the 1950 staging of The Tower Beyond Tragedy, starring Judith Anderson. It contains information about the friendship between Jeffers and Anderson that occasioned the production, a description of the script used for the ANTA Playhouse performance in New York, and a summary of the critical response.

Part II of this study contains a photographic reproduction of the final script used for the 1950 production of The Tower Beyond Tragedy. As the only surviving record of that failed production, the facsimile reveals the changes made by Anderson and others to …

"Comic"Ally Calling For Cultural Competency: Using Graphic Narratives To Teach Social Justice In The Writing Classroom, Travis Moody

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Front Matter - Jaepl Volume 27, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Front Matter

Genre Fluidity In Black Speculative Fiction As An Exploration Of Blackness, Jake Upton

English Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Countering Literary Antisemitism: The Figure Of The Jew In The Early Twentieth Century American Novel, Amanda Sanders

English Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Capitalocene Imaginations: Settler Colonialism, Capitalism, And The Environmental Crisis In Twenty-First-Century U.S. Literature, Zoe F. Pellegrino

English Honors Papers

This thesis, a study of climate fiction novels and Indigenous knowledge and poetry, argues that these texts use the power of imagination to open up alternative possibilities, otherwise foreclosed by the ideological hegemony of the capitalist climate crisis. I first explore the United States’ settler colonial history, and how the perpetuation of settler ideology over time justified the exploitative values of the capitalist system, resulting in the slow violence of our environmental crisis.

The central texts explored in this thesis are the climate fiction novels Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and The Ministry for the Future by Kim …

Middle American Gothic, Jordan Heisler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Though Gothicism has evolved since its inception in the eighteenth century, its most common tropes—such as deteriorating settings, supernatural figures, and foreboding atmospheres—have remained integral to the genre. While, the following fictional collection, Middle American Gothic, draws inspiration from these familiar Gothic tropes, it substitutes the grandeur of crumbling castles, monasteries, and sprawling estates for a common town within the rural Midwest. Similarly, while the collection nods to the existence of supernatural beings, none of its stories actually rely on anything otherworldly as a source of terror. Its setting, while not traditionally Gothic, features a series of decaying, outdated homes …

The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women And The Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America, By Cynthia Prendergast & Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, And Radicals In Twentieth-Century America, By Sherry L. Smith, Geneva Gano

Jeffers Studies

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note (Volume 22), Jim Baird

Jeffers Studies

No abstract provided.

Navigating The Labyrinth Of House Of Leaves Through A Postmodern Archetypal Literary Theory, Samuel K. Hval

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

“Their Eyes Met At The Same Instant”: The Queer Gothic And Triumphant Romance Of The Price Of Salt, Deirdre Price

Undergraduate Research Awards

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith is a seminal 20th century lesbian text famous for its suspenseful tone, slow burn romance, and narrow escape from the entrappings of the literary modes of mid-century lesbian pulp fiction. The novel provides its reader with a case study in the ways our dominant culture and narratives influence us and how we can push back against them, for it rejects the tendency held by much of English literature written prior to the last quarter of the twentieth century to punish the lesbian at the conclusion of her story for her deviance from the …

Pedagogies Of The “Irresistible”: Imaginative Elsewheres Of Black Feminist Learning., Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In her foreword to the groundbreaking anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Toni Cade Bambara (1983) famously argues that the great work of feminist writing is “to make revolution irresistible.” This statement is often read as a founding call of women-of-color feminism, and of feminist literary expression in particular. Yet Bambara’s notion of the “irresistible” extends beyond the page; throughout her works, she also uses the term as a key descriptor of her pedagogy, and her vision of the classroom. Bambara joins Audre Lorde and other Black feminist writer/teachers in insisting on a …

Religion, Reason And Reconciliation In Louise Gluck’S The Wild Iris, Vincent Sergiacomi

Capstone Showcase

In a world where reason is king, what is the role of faith? Louise Gluck does not claim to have an answer, but she does explore the question. The Wild Iris gives us a god who is utterly convinced of the singular appeal of faith, countered by a worshipper who finds their rational worldview too reasonable to abandon. Yet over the course of the text, neither is able to demonstrate the singular primacy of their point, both arguments leaving their arguers unsatisfied in one way or another. This paper will explore the debate between the human and divine speakers of …

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 24, 2022, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

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

No abstract provided.

Desperate, Exploited, And Abandoned: Laborers In "Life In The Iron-Mills" And Today, Danielle Durning

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

No abstract provided.

Beasts And Bestiality, Deities And Deification: Boethius’ The Consolation Of Philosophy In Milton's Comus, Bret Van Den Brink

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

No abstract provided.

Milton’S Cardinal Directions Symbolism In Paradise Lost, Micah Gill

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

No abstract provided.

"The Battle Trumpet Blown!": Whitman's Persian Imitations In Drum-Taps, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

While Walt Whitman’s thematic use of the Orient continues to receive critical attention based on his explicit foreign references, aside from observations of specific Persian signifiers in “A Persian Lesson,” his engagement with the poetry of Iran has remained especially speculative and therefore analogical, with studies like J. R. LeMaster and Sabahat Jahan’s Walt Whitman and the Persian Poets showing how his mystical relation to his own religious influences tends to resemble the Sufism of Rumi and Hafez. A new discovery emerging from an examination of his personal copy of William Alger’s The Poetry of the East along with his …

Femme Ex Machina: Sex Robots, Embodiment, And Posthuman Subjectivity, Julia A. Empey

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Andrea Dworkin warned in her 1974 book Woman Hating that men would soon develop the technology to “create the sex objects that will gratify them” (199). This dissertation investigates one of those technologies: sex robots, as mediated through science fiction film and literature. While the sex robot is still an emerging technology, its embodiment, particularly when female-rendered, has been imagined and negotiated for centuries. Men creating women in a specific, desired image is not new, but the sex robot is currently being transformed from imagined representation to embodied subject. This dissertation traces a pattern of representation that has allowed us …

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …

Colonial Prehistories Of Indigenous North America, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

One of the most common inquiries received by Filson Historical Society librarians concerns the myth of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Of the myth’s many versions, the one most familiar to Ohio Valley History readers goes like this: Madoc, a Welsh prince escaping an internecine conflict over political rule at home, supposedly sailed to North America in the twelfth century. His force either landed at the Falls of the Ohio or made it there after landing further south and being driven north by hostile locals, possibly Cherokee people. Madoc and his contingent intermixed with Indigenous populations, whose fair-haired, blue-eyed, …

“I Save Me”: Gender, Agency, And Power In Better Call Saul, Stephanie Kocer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Historically, women on television have been portrayed in wife and mother roles, making them a foil to their husbands, but never the main focal point of the show. These characters stay on the sidelines, without being given truly original storylines where they are allowed to drive their own narratives. During the first season of Better Call Saul, Kim Wexler is a supporting character, without any storylines that aren’t linked to Jimmy McGill. Jimmy often treats Kim as a damsel in distress. He thinks it’s his job to save her, and usually from the chaos that he’s created. In this thesis …