Modern Literature Commons^™

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 …

Two Stories By Luay Hamza Abbas, Yasmeen S. Hanoosh

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Closing His Eyes (Ighmadh al-‘Aynayn) is a collection of seventeen short stories written between 2003-2007. It is the fourth and latest collection of short stories by Iraqi novelist, literary critic and short story writer Luay Hamza Abbas (published by Azmina, Amman, 2008). Through this collection, Luay Hamza Abbas’ talent as a storyteller has been acknowledged with national and international awards. The most recent of these is the Iraqi Ministry of Culture Award for Creative Short Story (2010) for his story bearing the title of the collection. “Closing His Eyes” has also won the Kikah Best Short Story Award in London …

Designing Thematic Instruction With Authentic Resources: Science And Technology, Brian G. Kennelly

World Languages and Cultures

No abstract provided.

Butterfly In The Dust, Bruce Fulton

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

A short story by Un Hui-gyong, translated by Jennifer Kyung.

The Canning Factory, Bruce Fulton

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

A short story by P'yon Hye-yong, translated by Soohyun Chang.

Workplace Requests In Spanish And English: A Case Study Of Email Communication Between Two Supervisors And A Subordinate, Laura Callahan

Modern Languages & Literature

This paper examines the mitigation in email communication between two supervisors and a subordinate, to investigate how this feature differs in requests written in English and Spanish by native speakers of each language. Forty-seven emails were harvested from a span of three and a half years. The Spanish-speaking supervisor's requests contained fewer mitigation devices of every type. Although the requests written in Spanish contained less mitigation, this does not mean that this supervisor's email communication was devoid of facework. On the contrary, his use of imperatives and other direct strategies may have been intended as a form of positive politeness. …

Three Stories By Munhak Tongne Writers, Bruce Fulton

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

Introduction to three stories by Munhak Tongne Writers, Un Hui-gyong, Kim Young-ha, and P'yon Hye-yong.

The Munhak Tongne Phenomenon: The Publication Of Literary Fiction In South Korea Today, Bruce Fulton

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

In this essay I outline some of the profound ways in which the literary culture of South Korea has changed since the mid-1990s, particularly with respect to the publication of literary fiction. I discuss four prominent publishers of literary fiction in South Korea. I argue that among these four publishers, Munhak Tongne has spearheaded a movement toward a more reader-friendly posture among publishers of literary fiction. I suggest in conclusion that Munhak Tongne has established a paradigm for the publication of literary fiction in South Korea in the new millennium.

Lightning Rod, Bruce Fulton

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

A short story by Kim Young-ha, translated by Jane Lee.

Fulfillment Of Woman And Poet In Elizabeth Barrett Brown's Aurora Leigh, Beth Leonardo

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Perpetual Creation And Provocation Of The Self, Krista Damico

Senior Honors Projects

The Perpetual Creation and Provocation of the Self

Krista D’Amico

Faculty Sponsor: Stephen Barber, English

This project consists of four related parts. The first part is a critical and creative work of prose in which I converse with the thought of two philosophers, namely Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze. This conversation enables me to present my own thought and subjectivity in relationship to a very important aspect of my life: music-making. The second part of my project is a critical essay in which I contemplate the work of another artist, Virginia Woolf, and the way that her credo Three Guineas (1938) …

Thrive Magazine, Kasey Panetta

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Thrive, a Central New York lifestyle magazine, explores the politics, science, culture, sex, social issues, dining and leisure for residents of the Syracuse area between the ages of 18 and 30. The purpose of the magazine is to inform and educate in an unpretentious way about the positive aspects of living in CNY by talking to young residents using departments like the “Best of CNY,” “Single in CNY,” “CNY Traveler,” “Bucket List,” and an assortment of feature stories. The demographics for the audience are educated men and women between the ages of 18 and 30, single or married …

The Pinochet Project: A Nation’S Search For Truth Memory Struggles In Post-Pinochet Chile, Christine Mehta

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Chile has fought for 21 years to overcome General Augusto Pinochet’s violent legacy, but moving past the pervasive influence of Pinochet’s 17-year reign is a difficult task, even today. The following work is an investigation on memory, and Chile’s struggle to come to terms with its memory of the dictatorship. The key questions asked are: How do Chileans remember the dictatorship? What does each individual’s memory mean to the collective whole? Why is confronting the past important to Chile’s future?

The investigation is divided into two parts: a journalistic portion in which individual accounts are highlighted, and an academic thesis …

Towards A Theory Of Comic Book Adaptation, Colin Beineke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary adaptation studies/theories have tended to focus singularly on the movement from the novel/short story to film – largely ignoring mediums such as the theater, music, visual art, video games, and the comic book.  Such a limited view of adaptation has led to an underdeveloped and misplaced understanding of the adaptation process, which has in turn culminated in a convoluted perception of the products of artistic adaptation.  The necessity of combating the consequences of these limited outlooks – particularly in the field of comics studies – is as vital as the difficulties are manifold. In opposition to this current stream …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

After The Fall: The Post-Apocalyptic Frontier In The Road And 28 Days Later, Jeffrey J. Lavigne

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Previous scholars have identified three scenes of the American frontier myth: the sea, the west, and space. This evolution of frontiers reflected key changes in the expression of America’s cultural identity. While Janice Hocker Rushing called space “the final frontier,” the prominent place in contemporary society held by zombies and other minions of the occult hint at the emergence of yet another scene of the American mythos: the post apocalypse. In contrast to previous frontiers, which are defined geographically, the post-apocalypse is much broader, for in the wake of a global cataclysm, everywhere is a potential frontier. This decentralization of …

Early Modern Evil Genius: Hyperconformity And Objectivity In Sixteenth And Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Christine Hoffmann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the response among early modern and postmodern audiences to the experience of information overload, and suggests that the most appealing response to living in a communications network that appears both systematic and random is to use a rhetoric of struggle that is ambiguous in the same way. >The reasons for this appeal are twofold: firstly, the rhetoric of struggle is a way to cope with the difficulty of situating oneself within a system of circulating information that operates according to its own arbitrary rules. Mimicking that arbitrariness is a way of finding aesthetic synchronicity between how one's …

Narratives Of Fear And Shame: Jewish Childhood In Soviet And Post-Soviet Life Writing, Rosa Kleinman, Marina Balina, Faculty Advisor

John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Pathos, Spring 2011, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Joel Eisenhower

Issue 15

Scout's Daughters : Race And Creative Development In Contemporary Adolescent Literature, Amanda Malloy

Honors Theses

At the heart of what Roberta S. Trites titles ―adolescent literature‖ – works written both for and about young adults—is a question of agency (Disturbing 7). In Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, Trites asserts that adolescent novels attempt to answer the question of young adults who wonder if they ―should or even can affect the world in which they live‖ (1). Trites‘ argument is based on the idea that the distinguishing characteristic of adolescent literature is its focus on ―the social forces‖ that …

"Undone By Murmurs Of Love": Traumatic Legacies And The Struggle For Personal And Communal Identity Formation In Toni Morrison's Trilogy, Fida Yasin

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Implications of racial oppression on personal and collective African American identity formation in Toni Morrison’s trilogy are explored in this thesis. Morrison reconstructs African American history in her trilogy, but she also enacts a cultural healing through content and form. Impossible choices are made by characters in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise who are influenced by the racial trauma they experience and inherit. The legacies of oppression--traumatic memories, fragmentation, stereotypes and negative associations—distort the way these characters view themselves and one another. They are disoriented, isolated, and displaced. Characters recover from their past trauma— together—when they share their stories. …

“The Day Everything Became Nothing”: Finding Meaning In The Postapocalyptic, Joe Chellino

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Explored in this work are three texts: Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road; Douglas Coupland’s novel, Girlfriend in a Coma; and Robert Kirkman’s ongoing serialized comic book, The Walking Dead. After a discussion of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fictions and their ubiquity and popularity in contemporary culture, each work will be analyzed individually to explore each author’s message regarding postapocalyptic concerns. These three texts have been chosen as each represents a point along a loose continuum of high-to-low art. Primarily, this thesis will focus on how each author approaches systems of meaning-making and systems of understanding in postapocalyptic settings …

Vladimir Tumanov's Books, Vladimir Tumanov

Research Day (Arts & Humanities, FIMS, and Education)

Information about the books on the poster is available here.

Asking For A Letter Of Recommendation In Spanish And English: A Pilot Study Of Face Strategies, Laura Callahan

Modern Languages & Literature

Linguistic politeness plays an important role in the opinions people form of one another, especially when an individual has little other knowledge of an interlocutor, as is often the case in relationships between professors and students. Positive face refers to the desire to be liked and appreciated; negative face refers to the desire to be unimpeded. Positive and negative face are often characterized as corresponding to the dichotomies of involvement vs. independence, intimacy vs. distance, and solidarity vs. deference. An action or utterance that goes against one’s need for appreciation, in the case of positive face, or need for autonomy, …

"Emptiness About The Heart Of Life": A Reformed Approach To Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway And Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Mary Dengler

Pro Rege

Dr. Mary Dengler presented this paper at the Calvinism for the 21st Century Conference, at Dordt College, April 2010.

Hello And Goodbye?, Brian G. Kennelly

World Languages and Cultures

Opening remarks on the panel, "Why Can’t We Teach What We’re Trained to Teach? Program Consolidation, Elimination, Realignment” at the Modern Language Association Convention on 6 January 2011.

Transatlantic Fuentes: Between ‘The Two Shores’ Of Pluriculturality And Glossocentrism, Alberto Ribas-Casasayas

Modern Languages & Literature

The cultural program that Jerónimo de Aguilar pronounces at the end of Carlos Fuentes's short story “The Two Shores” appears to be inconsistent with the fundamentals of democratic liberalism and multiculturalism upon which they are ostensibly based. Furthermore, cultural visions like those in “The Two Shores” lend signifying imagery and empower cultural institutions, the media, and political authorities to exert symbolic violence upon minorities, thereby negating the multiculturalism that such visions claim to be promoting. El programa cultural que Jerónimo de Aguilar pronuncia al final del cuento “Las dos orillas” de Carlos Fuentes parece inconsistente con los fundamentos del liberalismo …

Science Fiction And Lyric Poetry, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This piece explores connections between science fiction and lyric poetry.

From Larva To Butterfly: Sophia In Ding Ling’S Miss Sophia’S Diary And Coco In Wei Hui’S Shanghai Baby, Xiaoqing Liu

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Sophia and Coco are two characters in Ding Ling's Miss Sophia's Diary (1928/1995) and Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby (1999), respectively. Like a larva, Sophia, who enters society in the early twentieth century, is weak and immobile. Coco, who lives at the end of the twentieth century, is like a butterfly leading an outlandish lifestyle. The differences between Sophia and Coco reflect the achievement of official feminism, which liberated Chinese women from traditional patriarchal control in the social sense. However, gender issues for women remain unresolved. To fight against traditional patriarchy and especially challenge gender oppression in official feminism, both Sophia …