Modern Literature Commons^™

How Philip K. Dick Used The Unreliable Narrator To Transport Unwitting Acolytes, Michael Barros, Jordi Smith

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay examines the use of the unreliable narrator to transport the reader into narrative worlds, specifically in Philip K. Dick's fiction. By exploring the phenomenon of narrative transportation and the role of emotions in engagement with fiction, we argue that Dick's use of the unreliable narrator significantly engages and transports readers into his narrative worlds. Subsequently, we contend that his belief in the fundamental reality of those worlds is effectively positioning himself as a gatekeeper and mediator between the narrative world and the real world, which sets him, in his mind, as a prophet, using fiction as a tool …

The Inimitable And Neologistical Dickens, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article traces the provenance of the adjective Dickensian and argues that Dickens both inaugurated new words, phrases, and idioms, and also popularized many obscure ones that are part of our common lexicon today.

Within My Glass Doors, Natsume Sōseki, Iwao Matsuhara, Edwin T. Iglehart

Zea E-Books Collection

During his last years (1915–1916) Natsume Sōseki was often troubled by the stomach ailment that eventually took his life at age 49. Constrained by his illness to remain at his home in Waseda, a Tokyo suburb, he nevertheless continued to work on his novels and to write columns for publication in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Within My Glass Doors collects those 39 columns; in them he discusses his visitors, his illness, memories of his childhood and family, and interactions with colleagues new and old. The most autobiographical and revealing of all his writings, this collection of essays displays his remarkable …

Heartbeat Of The Heartland: Sonic Engagement With Hip-Hop In The American Midwest, Lauren R. Millhorn

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This project analyzes Hip-Hop artists from the American Midwest through the context of the Midwest’s construction as a nostalgic, peaceful area where conflict seems nonexistent. This study applies Adam Ochonicky’s concept of nostalgic spatiality, or “instances in which nostalgia is projected onto a physical environment, thereby altering the perception, understanding, and/or experience of that space and its accompanying cultural sphere” (Ochonicky 29) to close readings on Midwest Hip-Hop texts. In the case of the Midwest, projected nostalgia is rooted in whiteness and propels the narrative that the Midwest is predominantly occupied by white people who maintain its peace and serenity …

Shakespeare’S Early Histories And The Construction Of Government, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Shakespeare’s first tetralogy has been treated as an account of the reinvention of government, especially a Hobbesian reinvention demonstrating how authoritarian government forces order out of chaos. This article argues that, though Hobbesian elements present themselves, Shakespeare employs subtexts available to his time and place to speak of how orderly government is constituted: that is, he relies on accounts of the Fall from perfection into chaos and the return from it through divinely blessed kingship that are present in syncretic readings of Ovid and the Bible. The two subtexts give order to the progress from Fall into chaos and back …

Chaucer’S Complaint To His Purse And Authority In The World, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Chaucer’s Complaint to His Purse concerns more than the poet’s financial need under the new Lancastrian administration. It speaks to the limits of Henry IV’s royal authority and, through irony, to the limitations of Chaucer’s purse’s power. Underlining royal limits, Chaucer petitions the king as one who holds office through election and line but not con-quest, which is Henry’s position on his office as well. In speaking iron-ically of the purse’s authority, the poet addresses the gold that the mon-arch might grant him as if it constituted a human or divine patron, but he does so in a hierarchy of …

On Province And Empire In My Ántonia And One Of Ours: Cather’S 1922 The Waste Land, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather profoundly alters her attitude towards the American experiment, World War I, and the prospect of cultural pluralism in America between her 1918 My Antonia and her 1922 One of Ours. In doing so, she addresses the issue of what kind of culture America should have: a monistic one such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson advocated or a pluralistic one. In My Antonia, set during the period of Great Plains settlement but extending up into World War I, she presents an intact American cultural pluralism: non-English speaking European cultures continuing their positive practices absent the monarchic repression …

Islas De Resistencia: Pensamiento Archipielágico En Las Poéticas Canarias Y Caribeñas Del Siglo Xxi, Laura García García

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation explores contemporary literary manifestations in the Canary Islands and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, with a stronger focus on the islands of Tenerife and Puerto Rico. Through an archipelagic approach, this study delves into the analysis of Los lenguas cortadas (2020) by Cirilo Leal, Boat People (2005) by Mayra Santos-Febres, Panza de burro (2020) by Andrea Abreu and PR3 Aguirre (2018) by Marta Aponte Alsina. The analysis states that these literary works build alternative forms of affective archives of archipelagic memory. In this sense, the objects of study participate into a sort of “poetics of resistance,” resignifying racial, ethnic, and …

Narratives Of Reproductive Control In The American Eugenics Movement, Cassandra M. Provost

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In this paper, I will explore the eugenics movement as a pseudo-scientific political, social, and legal phenomenon which had a devastating historical impact on America’s most vulnerable women, as well as briefly discuss its residual effects on contemporary reproductive rights conversations, through the lens of literature. Using an interdisciplinary discourse and narrative analysis approach, I identify two distinct themes within the explored narratives: (1) the importance of a government’s attempt to override a person’s autonomy by destroying the person’s ability to reproduce, and (2) the impropriety of actions based on a negative attitude toward disabled or undesirable persons. In my …

The American West, 1899–1936: Prose, Poetry & Drama, Harriet Monroe, Michael R. Hill, Lindsay Atnip

Zea E-Books Collection

This comprehensive volume presents Harriet Monroe’s (1860–1936) previously unexplored love affair with the American West, an infatuation that blossomed in three interrelated genres: prose, poetry, and drama. Known internationally as the founder and influential editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, here Monroe is revealed as a prolific author with a passion for the people, scenery, and environments she encountered during western escapes from her constricted urban life in Chicago. Monroe’s western travels were transformative. Originally schooled in the literary and artistic traditions of Europe, Monroe became increasingly convinced of the fundamental importance of the American West as the …

Harriet Monroe: An American Poet In Vevey. Her Diary Entries, May 16 – July 26, 1898, Harriet Monroe, Michael R. Hill, Deborah Anna Logan

Zea E-Books Collection

Since its inception in 1912, Poetry magazine has been widely regarded as a premier resource for modern poetry and poets. Published in Chicago as Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, its legacy continues today through the Poetry Foundation, a superlative online resource for seekers of poets, poems, and random lines needing identification. A less immediately recognizable legacy is that of its founder, Harriet Monroe (1860–1936), one of those fin de siècle “intellectual women” typically dismissed as a contradiction in terms. But Monroe was a force to be reckoned with, and this beautifully crafted volume participates in the recuperation of a life …

Pedagogical Alliances Among Writing Instructors And Teaching Librarians Through A Writing Information Literacy Community Of Practice, Zoe Mcdonald, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In this praxis piece, a WPA and a writing instructor describe a writing information literacy community of practice among writing instructors and teaching librarians. Through paying attention to one resulting assignment, a full class annotated bibliography, the co-authors argue this professional development program extended collaborations among the writing program and the library to center contextual notions of authority and metacognition that connect to composition’s democratic political commitments.

Interpretation And Ovidian Myth In Alexander’S Bridge And O Pioneers!, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay describes interpretive strategies widely applied to Ovidian mythic materials during the period of Cather’s early career, especially those operative in Alexander’s Bridge and O Pioneers! The article assumes that widely held conventional interpretations of myths, in this case Ovidian myths, in a specific time and area are part of their semantic content, or iconology, and are tools Cather used in communicating with her audience. The essay then looks at a passage in the 1912 Alexander’s Bridge and two disputed passages in the 1913 O Pioneers! along with extended Bacchic themes in the latter novel that employ conventional Ovidian …

Reflections On The Victorian(Ist) Impulse To Totalize Africa, Adrian S. Wisnicki

Department of English: Faculty Publications

IN this essay, I offer some reflections on how Victorianists might understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discursive practices for mapping Africa. In doing this, I respond to what Sukanya Banerjee, our panel organizer, asked us to do in determining the focus for our essays—namely, that we direct “attention to topics in Victorian studies that [we] feel might otherwise be overlooked or viewed differently.” In what follows I introduce and problematize a series of Victorian-era maps or, more specifically, problematize what such maps represent conceptually, then offer some alternate means by which Victorianists might critically engage with cultural and social reality …

The Politics Of Tools, Stephen Ramsay

Department of English: Faculty Publications

A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,” [Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.

Joining A Conversation Research Project, Nicole Green, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Description: This unit is a culminating (end-of-semester) project designed to have students bring together the knowledge they have developed throughout the semester in the service of purposefully joining a real-world conversation, addressing a specific audience (or related set of audiences) who are part of that conversation. This unit has a small number of texts that the whole class reads and/or analyzes together. Instead, a lot of the work happening in this unit is project-driven and process-oriented.

Time Frame: This unit was designed/paced as the last unit of the course (and it followed an earlier unit focused on rhetorical analysis of …

William Shakespeare’S All Is True, Lord Chamberlain’S “Truth,” And Civil Religion, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The first title for Shakespeare’s Henry VIII—All Is True—may reflect standard early modern usage signifying that all is an aspect of ‘troth’ or loyalty, all is common understanding, or all is received from a divine source. In the play, the Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare’s only character so named, serves the Henrician monarchy’s “truth” by serving Henry’s religious and monarchic goals as the Jacobean Lord Chamberlain similarly served James I’s goals, assuring audiences of the integrity, truth, and legitimacy of the monarchy and its faith. The play shows the Lord Chamberlain working to strengthen the loyalty of Henry’s realm …

Ten Nights' Dreams And Our Cat's Grave, Natsume Soseki

Zea E-Books Collection

Ten Nights’ Dreams (夢十夜, Yume Jūya) is a classic written work from the Japanese master Natsume Soseki. Originally published in 1908, it announced the emergence in Japanese literature of a modernist and impressionistic mode. Short ­vignettes with fantastic, tragic, or magical events convey an exquisite sensibility compounded with stark realism. Love, honor, duty, artistry, desire, despair, and regret all shape events in the dream-world. The stories themselves suggest echoes of meanings beyond the failures of rational sense-making. Ten dreams—each unique and arresting—form a panorama of life and feeling, at once universal and intensely present.

“Our Cat’s Grave” is a brief …

I Am A Cat, No. Ii, Natsume Sōseki, Kan-Ichi Ando

Zea E-Books Collection

What would the neighbors say about you if they didn’t know your cat was listening?

What if it was “The Cat With No Name”? The one who claims “I have, as a cat, attained the highest pitch of evolution imaginable. … My tail is filled with all sorts of wisdom and, above all, a secret art handed down in the cat family, which teaches how to make fools of mankind. … I am a cat, it is true, but remember I am one who keeps in the house of a scholar who reads the Moral Discourses of Epictetus and bangs …

Reminiscences Of Lafcadio Hearn, Setsuko Koizumi, Paul Kiyoshi Hisada, Frederick Johnson

Zea E-Books Collection

Setsuko Koizumi (1868–1932) was the daughter of a Japanese samurai family in Matsué. In 1891 she married a foreigner — Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) — and their union lasted 13 years and produced three children. Hearn adopted her family name, becoming Koizumi Yakumo 小泉八雲,and spent those years in Japan writing, teaching, and achieving international recognition. Setsuko’s Reminiscences tells something of the couple’s moves and travels, but focuses mostly on the character, habits, and eccentricities of her husband. The book is a heartfelt and intimate portrait of a marriage that brought Lafcadio the home and family he had never before enjoyed. This …

Creole Sketches, Lafcadio Hearn, Charles Woodward Hutson

Zea E-Books Collection

New Orleans in 1878 was the most exotic and cosmopolitan city in North America. An international port, with more than 200,000 inhabitants, it was open to French, Spanish, Mexican, South American, and West Indian cultural influences, and home to a thriving population descended from free African Americans. It was also a battleground in the fight against yellow fever (malaria) and in the political upheavals that followed the end of Reconstruction. The continued influx of Anglo-Americans and the renewed ascendancy of white supremacists threatened to overwhelm the local blend of languages, races, and cultures that enlivened the unique Creole character of …

Idiomatic Surrogacy And (Dis)Ability In Dombey And Son, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To assert that Charles Dickens possessed a mastery of language unique among nineteenth-century novelists for its vernacular inventiveness is hardly controversial. The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms lists Dickens among its most cited sources (others include the Bible and Shakespeare). Dickens’s use of ordinary, unembellished, and what Anthony Trollope termed vulgarly “ungrammatical” lower-class language sets his novels apart in style and tone from those of his famous peers (249). William Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy and others – despite their many differences – generally composed their fiction in higher, more formal linguistic registers than …

Japanese Fairy Tales, Lafcadio Hearn

Zea E-Books Collection

• Chin-Chin Kobakama • The Goblin-Spider • The Old Woman Who Lost Her Dumplings • The Boy Who Drew Cats • The Silly Jelly-Fish • The Hare of Inaba • Shippeitarō • The Matsuyama Mirror • My Lord Bag-o’-Rice • The Serpent with Eight Heads • The Old Man and the Devils • The Tongue-Cut Sparrow • The Wooden Bowl • The Tea-Kettle • Urashima • Green Willow • The Flute • Reflections • The Spring Lover and the Autumn Lover • Momotaro

The versions of the first four tales in this volume are by Lafcadio Hearn. The others are …

Shakespeare's Henriadic Monarchy And Chaucerian/Elizabethan Religion, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Shakespeare, interpreting late medieval English history from the ages of Geoffrey and Thomas Chaucer, gives us a second tetralogy (1595-99) that less defends the "Tudor myth" than creates a lens for viewing the formation of a unitary religious/political culture. Writing near the end of Elizabeth's reign, after serious Catholic insurrection had quieted, he examines how Act of Supremacy sacerdotal monarchy eschews rebellion and decadence, creating eidola paralleling Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ones. In the latter, Chaucer presented, to the court, narratives of Catholic clerical failure, Jovinian decadence and the possibility of reformed penance. However Shakespeare turns, for his salvific, from honest …

Teaching Persuasion In Multiple Contexts, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Teaching Persuasion in Multiple Contexts by Peter J. Capuano, a chapter in Approaches to Teaching Austen's Persuasion, edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire, published by the Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2021.

Introduction

Jane Austen's more well-known fiction has inspired strong attachments from many people (instructors and students alike), but Persuasion might be Austen's most dynamic and teachable novel. In fact, one of the many advantages of teaching Persuasion is that so many students-even the ones who come into my courses already professing their love for Austen's works-have never read the text before. They are …

Time And The Bibliographer: A Meditation On The Spirit Of Book Studies, Matt Cohen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with …

“What Do I Think Of Glory?”: On Middlemarch By George Eliot, Beverley Park Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?”1 This is the famous reply Emily Dickinson wrote to her bookish cousins in 1873 after her first reading of George Eliot’s novel. Dickinson’s sentiments were also my own when I completed my first reading of Middlemarch (1871–1872), about thirty-five years ago. Middlemarch is the book that made me realize literature could be more than a source of entertainment, that it could be Art with a capital A. Here was a text with fascinating and seemingly limitless possibilities for interpretation that would continue to reward scrutiny. Of course, …

Book Reviews- Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of Mind, 1770–1830, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Joanna Wharton’s Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830 is a recent addition to the interdisciplinary series Studies in the Eighteenth Century that Boydell Press (Boydell & Brewer Publishers) is publishing in association with the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of work that addresses the contributions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British women writers to areas of scientific, philosophical, and otherwise “learned” discourse that have historically been associated primarily—and in many cases exclusively—with male thinkers and writers. Wharton’s study therefore helps to flesh out the picture …

Review Of Early Women Filmmakers 1911–1940, Wheeler Winston Dixon

Department of English: Faculty Publications

After more than a half century of neglect, pioneering women filmmakers are finally getting some of the attention they deserve. Foremost among these women is the figure of Alice Guy Blaché—also known simply as Alice Guy, before she married Herbert Blaché in 1907—who was responsible for numerous “firsts” in cinema history: the first film with narrative La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Patch Fairy; 1896), as well as early experiments with color dye processes, synchronized sound recording, multi-reel films, and other cinematic advances. Gaumont put out a set of her French films for that company—she was the …

Feeling It: Toward Style As Culturally Structured Intuition, Keith Rhodes

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I have been moved to write a serious article about teaching style not because I have great and earth-shaking method to impart, but in some sense because I do not, even after years of study—including the small bit of empirical research at the core of this article. Style, as it turns out, remains as difficult, complex, and ultimately intuitive as most of the rest of writing. I hope, ultimately, to encourage writing teachers to focus more attention on style, basing approaches on what we already know rather than waiting and hoping for some flawless system to materialize. Indeed, by the …