Modern Literature Commons^™

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 …

Universal Identities And Local Realities: Young Poland's (Mis)Readings Of Synge, John A. Merchant

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The problems Young Poland experienced in understanding the work of John Millington Synge were informed by precisely the same kind of behaviors that Daniel Corkery described in his argument for a truly native Irish national literature in the 1930s. Overcome by a strong sense of self, Poles were not fully able to appreciate the complexities and nuances of Synge's work and by extension, the Irish-Ireland movement. In the end, then, Young Poland was incapable of really understanding the Irish, and so the best they could do was to associate with them. As a result, Poles may have been able to …

Kindred And A Canticle For Leibowitz As Palimpsestic Novels, Sue Vander Hook

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis is an investigation of a possible new categorization under the speculative fiction umbrella—a genre called palimpsestic novels. Palimpsestic novels are characterized by layers of time in the past, the present, and sometimes the future. In a fantastical setting, often with nonscientific time travel, the layers illuminate and provide contemporary significance to eras of history that have either become blurred or forgotten through time. The formation of a palimpsestic genre will provide an appropriate categorization for some speculative fiction novels that currently are nebulous mixtures of several genres, have no genre classification at all, or would better fit in …

Openings, 2011, Trinity Christian College

Openings

Poetry:  2 - Easter Pantoum by John Terpstra / 2 - My Mother's Garden by Camille Villegas / 2 - Slipping by Monica Brands / 3 - Gift from a Guide Dog by Kathy Nimmer / 5 - Something by Something Else by Marissa Carpenter / 11 - Punctuating your life's sentence at retirement (for Nelvia Brady). Dr.Aron Reppmann / 12 - Untitled by Vanessa Noonan / 13 - Nerve by Teryn Leaper / 14 - Fran by Natalia Wegrzyniak / 15 -Anorexia by Libby Dykstra / 16 - Bacon Raised by Jeff Tigchelaar / 17 - Gino by Erika …

The Simms Initiatives - University Of South Carolina, Todd Hagstette

Digital Projects

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Gilmore Simms did more than any other writer and editor to frame white southern self-identity, nationalism, and historical consciousness. He also did more to foster the South’s literary life and place in America’s imagination.

The Simms Initiatives, generously funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the University of South Carolina Libraries, offers full access to this prolific author’s work. That comes through both digital and Print-on-Demand editions. Our digital holdings represent three categories of works: Printed Materials, Scrapbooks, and Scholarship.

We strive to enhance the value of these materials and grow the study of Simms and …

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

Pathos

Editor: Joel Eisenhower

Issue 14

Absurdity As Resistance In Arab Literature, Melissa Hammond

Undergraduate Research Awards

Examines the use of absurdity in literature written by Arab women, specifically Beirut Fragments by Jean Said Makdisi, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry, and the short story "Thirty-One Beautiful Green Trees," by Salwa Bakr. The PDF includes the author's entry submission essay for the 2011 Undergraduate Research Awards.

Nature In A Box: Ecocriticism, Goethe’S Ironic Werther, And Unbalanced Nature, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Ecocriticism emphasizes how our bodily and ecological boundaries are just as porous, inter-penetrable, and open as are our cultural and linguistic realms. As individual bodies and communities, we are fully immersed in our material environment and participating in constant exchanges of matter and energy. In this essay, I nevertheless advocate for a cautious approach to the ecocritical question of contested boundaries. After all, some boundaries and membranes are necessary to maintain living organisms. Regarding Timothy Morton’s assertion that we are “radically open,” I note the need for stable and healthy membranes to sustain life, such as our porous yet enclosed …

Affinity Studies And Open Systems: A Non-Equilibrium, Ecocritical Reading Of Goethe's Faust, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Ecocriticism’s contributions to the current rejection of dualistic thinking are noteworthy, particularly when this interdisciplinary field concentrates on hybridity and “relations” that preexist essences. In this mode, ecocriticism participates in a broader development of “affnity studies” that encompass the many efforts across the disciplines toward reconfiguring our “intraactions” with the world in terms that avoid dichotomies and Newtonian linearity and that utilize instead nonlinear, nondualistic forms of “hybridity.” Hybrids, in Steve Hinchliffe’s words, are “more or less durable bodies made up of similarly hybrid and impermanent relations.

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 …

The Legitimacy Of Children's And Young Adult Literature As Literature, Timothy Akers

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This article offers the idea that children's and young adult literature is true literature and not merely a sub genre of fiction. There are unique critical approaches that can be applied to children's literature which can be used in the teaching and promotion of such literature.

Ferdinand Oyono, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Ferdinand Oyono was a Cameroonian statesman and a Francophone novelist of the first generation of African writers who became active after World War II. He entered the literary scene at a time when writers such as his fellow Cameroonian Mongo Beti and the Senegalese Sembene Ousmane and Leopold Sedar Senghor were at their peak. Oyono and Mongo Beti are known as "the forefathers of modern African Identity" for their anticolonial novels.

Lights And Shadows - 2011, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

Nothing But A Pack Of Cards: Semi-Fictitious Persons And Flopping Jellyfish In Elizabeth Bowen, Renée C. Hoogland

English Faculty Research Publications

Taking the wildly conflicting critical evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1969) as its starting-point, this essay argues against 'interpreting' both the novel and its 'monstrous' heroine in conventional representational terms, to argue, instead, for an appreciation, or experience, of both novel and protagonist as instantiations of a process of becoming along Deleuzian lines. Rather than seeing Bowen's final novel as a (failed) attempt to do what the Anglo-Irish writer's previous work would have suggested this text to do as well, the novel and its eponymous heroine are approached as Bowen's rigorously ethical effort to, …

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.

Poema Of Lieutenant Schmidt’S End: Pasternak’S Dialogue With Tsvetaeva Through The Prism Of Genre., Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

Boris Pasternak’s poemy are acutely self-conscious of their place in the epic tradition. Lieutenant Schmidt (LS) represents one attempt at exploring the parameters of the poema itself as the poet makes a “difficult” transition from “lyric thinking” to “the epic.” In this article I examine this transition against a contemporaneous example in the genre, Tsvetaeva’s Poema of the End (PE). In LS, structural elements of the poema are counterposed to those of PE. While PE amplifies the individual voice, LS muffles what is personal for the sake of the public voice. While PE is atemporal, LS is historical. While PE …

Fractured Identity - The Jagged Path Of Diaspora In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress Of Spices, Lisa Lamor

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Representation of fractured identity issues is a thematic element powerfully present in the work of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Although identity is a commonly explored theme in general, it is through fragmentation in her novels that struggles are often identified and trauma is illustrated. Complex, fragmenting experiences of persons living in the Indian diaspora are frequently present in novels by Divakaruni along with continual employment of fracturing in terms of structure, imagery, plot, language, and character. In order to illustrate the presence of fracturization in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's literature, in this thesis I do an extensive textual examination of her first …