Modern Literature Commons^™

Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Gregory E. Rutledge

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In his article "Race, Slavery, and the Revaluation of the T'ang Canon" Gregory E. Rutledge re-evaluates—from the purview of African Diaspora literary studies—historiography that considers the place of East African slave lore in T'ang Dynasty fiction. Julie Wilensky's "The Magical Kunlun and 'Devil Slaves': Chinese Perceptions of Dark-skinned People and Africa before 1500" (2002), a revision of Chang Hsing-lang's "The Importation of Negro Slaves to China Under the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618- 907)" (1930), is pivotal since it occupies the nexus between European-American, East-Asian, and African-Diasporic canons and policies. Rutledge situates Wilensky's and Chang's works in the context of Edward …

Veiled Movements In The Vale Of Esthwaite, Jack Vespa

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The Vale of Esthwaite (1787), Wordsworth's first sustained effort at original composition, was first 1940 by Ernest De Selincourt in Poetical Works of Wordsworth as an example of the juvenilia. Among scholars who have treated the De Selincourt version of the poem, Geoffrey Hartman's account in Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 is the fullest, which argues that The Vale of Esthwaite turns upon the mind of a poet enthralled by nature despite signs that his imagination may well be independent of nature (76-89). Other treatments of De Selincourt's edition appeared in F. W. Bateson, Paul Sheats, Thomas Weiskel, James Averill, Jonathan Wordsworth, …

Eye For The Gap: Frenzy, Liberty, And The Nietszchean Chorus In Conor Mcpherson's The Weir And Shining City, Frances Krieg

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This study situates The Weir and Shining City by Conor McPherson as embodying elements of Dionysian aesthetics as elucidated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Working through the lenses of Samuel Beckett’s linguistic philosophy and the premium of theater as established by Nietzsche, Artaud, and Brecht, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how McPherson pierces the boundaries of language in drama by establishing his audience as chorus. Background information on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and McPherson’s own comments on the plays are included with the research on the plays themselves. This work articulates the chorus itself but also the choral, …

An Understanding Of Deep Rivers Through An Analysis Of Three Of Its Main Symbols, Vincent Spina

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

The aim of"An Understanding of Deep Rivers" is to analyze some of the iconographic uses in the novel from the point of view of the Andean Cosmovision. Though many inroads have already been made in this direction, when the novel first appeared much of this cosmovision was not understood at all or considered part of Andean " folklore". In the present work, the use of the Quechua term " ilia" and and that of the Southern Cross (the Chakana in Quechua) are analyzed with respect to the symbolic role they play in the novel.

2013 Common Book Convocation: Conor Grennan, Author Of "Little Princes: One Man's Promise To Bring Home The Lost Children Of Nepal.", Conor Grennan

Common Book Program

Little Princes is the epic story of Conor Grennan’s battle to save the lost children of Nepal and how he found himself in the process. Part Three Cups of Tea, part Into Thin Air, Grennan’s remarkable memoir is at once gripping and inspirational, and it carries us deep into an exotic world that most readers know little about.

Willa Cather, Edith Lewis, And Collaboration: The Southwestern Novels Of The 1920s And Beyond, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In Willa Cather: A Memoir, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant makes Edith Lewis, with whom Cather shared a home for nearly four decades, a relatively minor character in Cather’s life, and yet occasionally, Lewis moves to the forefront. Describing Cather’s “personal life” in the 1920s, Sergeant notes that when she visited their Five Bank Street apartment,

Edith Lewis, who now worked at the J. Walter Thompson Company, was always at dinner. One realized how much her companionship meant to Willa. A captain, as Will White of Emporia said … must have a first officer, who does a lot the captain never knows …

Transference Vol. 1, Summer 2013

Transference

Transference is published by the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Dedicated to the celebration of poetry in translation, the journal publishes translations from Arabic, Chinese, French and Old French, German, Classical Greek and Latin, Japanese, and Russian into English verse. Transference contains translations as well as commentaries on the art and process of translating.

Review Of Janine Barchas, Matters Of Fact In Jane Austen: History, Location, And Celebrity, Laura White

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Janine Barchas’s thought-provoking study of Austen’s naming practices unearths a wealth of historical antecedents for Austen’s characters and posits an Austen whose gamesmanship with the names of persons and places rivals the knowingness and playfulness of James Joyce. In earlier decades, such a highly ambitious and wide-reaching work could not have been accomplished except through protracted antiquarian research. Web scholarship, however, has made it possible for Barchas to uncover in a relatively short time a remarkable array of the many interconnected historical figures bearing such names as Wentworth, Darcy, Vernon, Ferrars, Allen, and Dashwood whose heroic exploits, political machinations, tragic …

When Bird And Fish Fall In Love, Matthew C. Mackey

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A work of poetry that offers a new method of poetics. By examining translation as a means of understanding relationships, this work offers a nuanced manner for the writing and experience of poetry. When Bird and Fish Fall in Love is a close examination of language, relationships, translation, and the intimacy of conflation.

Science Fiction And Fantasy: The Cosmic Players, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker

Library Presentations, Posters, and Audiovisual Materials

This presentation gives an overview of science fiction and fantasy, including its origins, the prominent writers in each era, and its many subgenres and variations.

Unbreakable Glass Slippers: Hegemony In Ella Enchanted, Tori Shereen Mirsadjadi

Scripps Senior Theses

The way Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted simultaneously conforms to its late-20^th-century American standards and rebels against its Cinderella origins is analyzed in this thesis. As an analysis of a piece of literature written for children, the thesis works to defend the notion that playful literature produces a serious dialogue with its readers, and that young female readers are a particularly apropos group for the dialogue about hegemony that Ella Enchanted allows.

The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her first novel in 1822 and her last in 1857. Her productivity slackened in the 1850S, as aging weakened her eyesight and arthritis made it difficult to write clearly. However, from 1822 through the 1840s, she published multiple works of prose fiction (tales, sketches, novellas, or novels) nearly every year. Despite this extraordinary record of productivity, Sedgwick regularly appears in literary history as the author of a single work, Hope Leslie (I827), her historical novel about relations between the Puritans and the native inhabitants of New England. A few other women authors before and contemporary with …

Cold War Legacies In Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The editorial methods developed during the Cold War professionalized scholarly editing and appealed to new ideas about the relationship between American academics and the government by aligning with the supposedly value-neutral goals and methods of the behavioral sciences, much to the discomfort of many humanists. Some of the implicit assumptions underlying midcentury editorial methods persist in digital editing, and may risk positioning digital editions as marginalized scholarship within the digital era, just as print scholarly editions became widely considered second-rate scholarship in the twentieth century.

Uncle Tom’S Cabin In The National Era: Commentary On Chapter 1 And 2, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the first chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe warns her readers that the “indulgence” of slave owners and the “affectionate loyalty” of the slaves themselves towards their masters have misled some observers to believe the “poetic legend” of slavery as a benevolent “patriarchal institution.” She does not deny the genuineness of these emotions, but she warns that “the shadow of a Law” makes a mockery of the human relationships that develop between masters and slaves: “So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a …

Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma

Department of English: Faculty Publications

We were fishermen.

Father first called us so after he whipped us sore for fishing at the Ala stream in the summer of May 1995. Earlier that year, the bank had transferred him from our hometown of Akure to Yola, a volatile and violence-prone city in the north of Nigeria. Father wouldn't move us with him so he lived apart and visited only once in two weeks, always coming at midnight on Fri- days and disappearing at dawn on Sundays. Each time he returned, mother would detail how the house had fared in his absence - a breakdown of home …

Introduction: A Tale Of Our Own Times, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick and the American Novel of Manners

In his preface to his novel of manners Home as Found (1838), James Fenimore Cooper repeats what were already commonplaces about American society as the subject matter for fiction. Lamenting "that no attempt to delineate ordinary American life, either on the stage or in the pages of a novel, has been rewarded with successful he admits Home as Found is another such attempt but professes he has "scarcely a hope of success. It would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the way of a Roman de …

Inverting The Haiku Moment: Alienation, Objectification, And Mobility In Richard Wright’S ‘Haiku: This Other World’, Thomas Lewis Morgan

English Faculty Publications

Richard Wright’s haiku — both the 4,000 he wrote at the end of his life and the 817 he selected for inclusion in Haiku: This Other World (1998) — remain something of an enigma in his larger oeuvre; critics variously position them as a continuation of his earlier thematic concerns in a different literary form, an aesthetic departure from the racialized limitations imposed upon his earlier work, or one of several positions in between. Such arguments debate the formal construction as well as the strategic reinvention of Wright’s haiku. The present essay engages both sides of this conversation, arguing that …

Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0534-3 299 pages, bibliography, index. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents a framework of comparative literature based on a contextual (systemic and empirical) approach for the study of culture and literature and applies the framework in audience studies, film and literature, women's literature, translation studies, new media and scholarship in the humanities and in the analyses of English, French, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and English-Canadian modern, contemporary, and ethnic minority texts. Copyright release to the author in 2006.

Review Of Aguecheek’S Beef, Belch’S Hiccup, And Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, And Food Among The Early Moderns By Robert Appelbaum, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Histories of food have traditionally emerged out of the fields of structural anthropology, ethnology, and historical sociology. More recent scholarship has emphasized the idea of foodways, those networks by which foods are produced, prepared, and consumed within different food communities. Rather than seeing rituals of culture in food, such scholarship has instead sought to understand food in terms of a circulation of physical resources and values that involves questions of economics, ecology, biology, and ethnobotany. The first approach has tended, broadly speaking, to produce scholarship that is concerned with the ritual, symbolic, and social qualities to our acts of sustenance. …

Konsep Malu Orang Melayu Dalam Novel Saga : Satu Kajian Sosiolinguistik., Norazlina Mohd. Kiram

Student Works (2010-2019)

The concept of shyness is an important concept as it encompasses the principles, behaviors, beliefs and rules that should be observed by its society. In relation to this, the concept of shyness among Malays is regarded as peculiar and unique as it is based on the Holy Quran and as-Sunnah. Basically, it is considered as a character awareness concept for the Malays which is very much related to self  worth, dignity and maintenance of one’s face. This being the starting point, the research  tries to put forward an analysis of the concept of shyness among Malays which is  explored in …

Shakespeare And The Making Of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero's Art, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Some readers may ask what it means to use the term "science" in conjunction with Shakespeare. From a modern perspective, science may not seem to be able to tell us much about Shakespeare or Shakespeare about science. Looking backwards, it is fair to say that Aristotle would probably have agreed with such a perspective: what scholasticism came to call scientia has nothing to do with ars. In between Aristotle and Einstein, though, matters stood differently. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century saw the historic transition from Aristotelian models of scientia to modern "science." Both classic and modern epistemologies of …

Chaos Is The Poetry: From Outcomes To Inquiry In Service-Learning Pedagogy, Shari J. Stenberg, Darby Arant Whealy

Department of English: Faculty Publications

It is no secret that the contemporary university values a model of efficiency, of tangible, quantifiable outcomes. Jan Currie and Lesley Vidovich (qtd. in Downing, Hurlbert, Mathieu 9) contend that since the 1980s, the boundaries between higher education, government, and business have largely deteriorated, and business discourse of "excellence" has come to dominate university culture. Consequently, output, outcomes, and efficiency are valorized over and above process, inquiry, and the inevitable tensions of learning. Stanley Aronowitz puts it this way: "[A]cademic leaders chant the mantra of excellence . . . [which] means ... all parts of the university 'perform' and are …

9. Regionalism And The Realities Of Naming, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Complications seem inevitably to arise whenever one tries to define either regionalism in general or any specific region like the South or the Great Plains or to categorize the art and artifacts that come from or relate to that area by means of such language. Commentators occasionally try to take the easy way out of these taxonomic difficulties by simply declaring that “writing is writing,” by which reductive expression they apparently mean that all writing is “universal” in nature (the local manifestation of some “universal language”) and that, therefore, all that varies from “region” to “region” is the inflection. Inflection …

Review Of Back To Nature: The Green And The Real In The Late Renaissance, By Robert N. Watson, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Robert Watsons Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance identifies the Renaissance as the moment of an "absolutely fundamental change in its consensual interpretation of reality" (41). Fear that material reality obscures true knowledge ("things getting in the way of the Word") gave way to concern that words and other forms of human perception were key impediments to truth or knowledge ("words getting in the way of Things") (41). This decentering of medieval religious epistemology made itself felt across the arts and sciences of late Renaissance culture and brought with it a compensatory need to …

Review Of Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, And The Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, Henry Turner argues that English stage practice emerged out of practical geometry and related mechanical arts. The book is part of a new critical attention to the interconnections between literature and science, one that depends on the recognition that art involved the creation not just of aesthetic objects but also of knowledge itself. Stage practice drew from geometry to develop the concepts of plat-plot and to define its use of scenes as both spatial divisions and dramatic structures. Drama also provided audiences with forms of practical knowledge …

Handling And Preventing Journalistic Fraud: Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Kenneth Munson

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Fraud is a growing concern in the news business, especially in recent years where numerous journalism scandals rock its foundation. This paper examines the most prominent cases: Stephen Glass, the reporter for The New Republic newsmagazine who completely or partially fabricated 27 stories in the late ‘90s; Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was found to have plagiarized or made up his supposedly on-thescene reporting in 2003; and Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her Washington Post story about a child heroin addict who, in actuality, did not exist. This paper will examine flaws …

Liberation Theology And Liberatory Pedagogies: Renewing The Dialogue, Shari J. Stenberg

Department of English: Faculty Publications

recent Chronicle of Higher Education column, Stanley Fish describes a phone call he received after the death of Jacques Derrida from a reporter who was curious as to what would succeed high theory as the "center of energy in the academy." "I answered like a shot," Fish writes, "religion" (1). For many, Fish's prophecy might create a feeling of uneasiness; after all, in academic culture, religious ideologies are often considered hindrances to-not vehicles for-critical thought. This feeling may be especially true in regard to Christianity, which is often conflated with conservative politics and fundamentalism both in and outside of the …

“Plain Broad Narratives Of Substantial Facts”: Credibility, Narrative, And Hakluyt’S Principall Navigations, Julia Schleck

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article compares voyage narratives printed in Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 Principall Navigations to contemporaneous travel histories in an effort to contextualize the epistemological status of each group of texts and debunk the former’s reputation for greater factuality. It critiques the use commonly made of Hakluyt’s narratives in literary studies, arguing that the privileging of these texts over other sources results in postcolonial studies that ironically valorize a type of writing which promoted the colonial mindset these studies seek to expose.

Malory Meets Wagner In Madrid: Albéniz's Merlin And The Mythologizing Of Arthur, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Essay preapred for the Modern Language Association on Catalan composer Isaac Albéniz's opera Merlin and the mythologizing of Arthur.

Chronological Bibliography Of The Works Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, Allison J. Roepsch, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This two-part bibliography has been built by consulting the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) and the bibliographies compiled by Sister Mary Michael Welsh ("Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Her Position in the Literature and Thought of Her Time up to 1860," Ph.D. diss., Catholic Universiry of America, 1937) and Richard Banus Gidez ("A Study of the Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick," Ph.D. diss., Ohio State Universiry, 1958); library cataloging records; and the personal records of Lucinda Damon-Bach and Melissa J. Homestead. In most cases, entries have been confirmed through books, periodicals, photocopies, or microfilm received through interlibrary loan. We were not able …