Modern Literature Commons^™

Variation Theory And The Reception Of Chinese Literature In The English-Speaking World, Shunqing Cao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Variation Theory and Reception of Chinese Literature in the English-Speaking World" Shunqing Cao introduces "variation theory" he developed and suggests that the framework can be applied in studying the dissemination and reception of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world. Cao argues that cultural and literary differences produce variations in literary exchanges among different cultures and variation theory concentrates on these variations. With unique perspectives on variation in translation, cultural misreading, and domestication, variation theory is a useful theoretical framework and methodology for the study of the reception of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world.

Unicorns: Past, Present And In The Imagination, Jill A. Jablonski

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

In the last few thousand years, unicorn folklore has extensively evolved. In fact, the evolution of the mentioned above mythical creature has been so drastic, that the original unicorn lore of the Greek, Roman and early Christian people, would be unrecognizable to a modern day person. Consequently, to the historical figures (such as Julius Caesar and Ctesias) that contributed to the creation of the mythical creature, they would not recognize the unicorn as it is found in My Little Pony or any other pop culture sensation. To discover the cause of disconnect between the folkloric and pop culture unicorns, an …

Orphic Powers In J.R.R. Tolkien's Legend Of Beren And Lúthien, Jane Beal Phd

Journal of Tolkien Research

In “Orphic Powers in Tolkien’s Legend of Beren and Lúthien,” I consider three interrelated strands that influenced the development of Tolkien’s most precious story: Tolkien’s own life experience, sources from classical mythology and medieval literature, and the hope inherent to the Christian faith, especially for resurrection and eternal life, as symbolized in the Parable of the Pearl of Great Price. This study suggests that Tolkien’s relationship to his wife, Edith, inspires the legend and renders it a psychological allegory. Three Ovidian tales from classical mythology that were later re-told in medieval literature also influence it: the rape of Philomela, the …

Neurodiversity’S Lingua Franca?: The Wild Iris, Autobiography Of Red, And The Breakdown Of Cognitive Barriers Through Poetic Language, Dani Alexis Ryskamp

The Hilltop Review

Persons with mental and emotional disabilities, including self-advocates in the fledgling "neurodiversity" movement, often find themselves at a loss to communicate effectively with the "neurotypical," abled majority when experiences of language differ dramatically across typical and atypical populations. This paper explores the possibility of poetic language as a "lingua franca" permitting communication of neurodiverse experiences. It does so by examining examples of animism, synesthesia, and metonymy in Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red - poetic elements that also appear frequently in the writing of activists with depression, autism, and other neuroatypical conditions. I argue that, …

Finding Aid To The Bern Porter Collection Of Contemporary Letters, Bern Porter, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

Bern Porter (1911–2004) was an artist, writer, philosopher, and scientist who was involved in the development of the cathode ray tube, the Saturn V rocket, and the Manhattan Project, which he renounced upon learning of the bombing of Hiroshima. Also a pioneer in the arts, he is known for his landmark work as an author and publisher. He was an early practitioner of mail art and found and performance poetry and experimented with typography, sculpture, photography, artists’ books, and collage throughout his life. Porter lived and worked in New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, California, Guam, Alabama, and Tasmania. He finally …

European Treasure: A. H. Reed's French And Italian Autograph Letters, Valerio Cappozzo

Liberal Arts Faculty Books

This catalogue, published in conjunction with the exhibition “European Treasure: A. H. Reed’s French and Italian Autograph Letters,”aims to create a meaningful connection among disparate handwritings, which guide us through troubled times in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe, among two nations in search of their national identities. It includes letters by people who helped to make France and Italy the modern states they are today. Of particular interest are letters by Italy’s ‘father of the nation’ Giuseppe Garibaldi, which exemplify the rebellious spirit agitating European nations in search of stability, identity and peace. Certain letters evoke cultural aspects, …

Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, And The Historiography Of Lesbian Sexuality, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Since the publication of Surpassing the Love of Men in 1981 and Sharon O'Brien's biography Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice in 1987, Cather's fiction has been subjected to scores of queer readings. These readings are, in many respects, premised on a very different understanding of gender, sexuality, and identity than Faderman and O'Brien deploy in their biographical identifications of Cather as a lesbian. Nevertheless, these queer readings rest upon a biographical foundation, and in particular upon an understanding of Cather as secretive, private, and afflicted with shame. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in an influential reading of The Professor's House that inspired …

American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–57, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick had an unusually long career and her books were reprinted in Britain in a variety of circumstances and formats. Both her first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), and her last, Married or Single? (1857), appeared in London editions arranged by her or her American publishers, as did many of her books in between (including travel, children’s and conduct books). However, her works also appeared in unauthorized reprints. Sedgwick thus makes an interesting case study of how law and custom regulated the reprinting of American literary texts in Great Britain after 1820. Focusing on the British …

A Report On The Casual Vacancy By J.K. Rowling, Adam L. Cairns

MBA Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prince Myshkin As A Tragic Interpretation Of Don Quixote, Slav N. Gratchev Phd

Modern Languages Faculty Research

Surprisingly, although virtually no one doubts Dostoevsky’s profound and direct indebtedness to Cervantes, and the Quixote–Myshkin identity is obvious, no one has ever mentioned or analyzed how Myshkin, the character more dialogically elaborate and versatile, turned out to be more limited in literary expressivity than his more “monological” counterpart. The focus on this essay is the question of what weakened the realness of Dostoevsky’s favorite hero, and what negatively affected his literary answerability.

Haruki Murakami And Religion: The Nature Of Religion In 1q84 And Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage, Ronald S. Green

Philosophy and Religious Studies

This course focuses on underlying religious and philosophical assumptions in the most recent works of Haruki Murakami (1949-), 1Q84 in three volumes and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Murakami is the most popular and widely read novelist in Japan today and a major literary figure worldwide. He cites as his two sources for inspiration in writing 1Q84 George Orwell and the AUM religious cult, responsible for bombing Tokyo subways with sarin gas in the 1990s.

Goddess Of The Savannah: Beatrice As Achebe’S Sensible Solution, Gillian Renee Singler

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This paper argues that Beatrice in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah is a character whose democratic nature creates a place for voices typically excluded in the novel’s government. Functioning under the common assumption that Anthills of the Savannah is a political allegory, it is Beatrice’s democratic nature that makes her an ideal political leader. By blending change and tradition, Beatrice is able to form an inclusive and evolving solution to the novel’s leadership problem. The paper briefly reflects on colonialism’s role in destroying the socioeconomic and political systems already in place in African nations, specifically Nigeria, and the byproduct …

Pathos, Winter 2015, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Brook Horn

Volume 9 No.2

Darwin And Girard: Natural And Human Science, Andrew J. Mckenna

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Transoceanic Race: A Postcolonial Approach To Italian American Studies, Cristina Lombardi-Diop

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

Fifty Shades Of Fucked Up: On The Use And Abuse Of A Sexual Subculture To Sell Books, Viviane Panagiotis Linos

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In Fifty Shades of Grey, James masterfully utilizes a first person narrative to ease readers into unfamiliar sexual territory. However, while introducing relatively accurate terminology to enlighten her readers on BDSM practices, James further perpetuates the pseudo-acceptance of such sexual deviance by relying on mainstream, vanilla, or non- BDSM practitioning audience members to insert their own normative framework into the narrative (Weiss, 2006, p. 114). This literary approach allows readers to unknowingly utilize these fictional texts as an educational tool to understand BDSM. Fifty Shades of Grey utilized as a pedagogical tool is counterproductive to an accurate understanding of BDSM. …

Openings, 2015, Trinity Christian College

Openings

Literary Arts:  5 - Windowsill by Adam Krestan / 6 - In Silence I Sit by Jaclyn Feddes / 8 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Breaking Up by Anna Phillips / 11 - Night Bus by John Terpstra / 16 - Maybe Then (Explicit Catharsis) by B. S. Wegner / 18 - The Sacrament of Building Tree Forts by Bill Boerman-Cornell / 20 - Hearts In His Hands by Faith Lorenz / 26 - Chrysalis by Esther Sullivan / 27 - Least Weasel (Mustela nivalis) by Jeff Tigchelaar / 29 - Zombie by Kylla Pate / …

Exemplarity And Its Discontents In Michael Drayton's Englands Heroical Epistles, Andrew Fleck

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A House All White And Empty Against The Night Sky, Jesus J. Silveyra

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Not available.

Ekphrasis And Avant-Garde Prose Of 1920s Spain, Brian M. Cole

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation analyzes the prose works of the “Nova Novorum,” a fiction series created and published by José Ortega y Gasset between 1926 and 1929. This collection included six works by four authors, five of which will be discussed in this dissertation. Pedro Salinas’ Víspera del gozo (1926) inaugurated the series. Benjamín Jarnés published two works: El profesor inútil (1926) and Paula y Paulita (1929). Antonio Espina is also responsible for two works: Pájaro pinto (1927) and Luna de copas (1929).

The dissertation is divided into five sections. The first chapter introduces the topic of avant-garde prose during the 1920s …

Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank

Theses and Dissertations--English

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …

Branded Cowboy, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

“Here is a moving story of a transgender man whose roots reach deeply into the dust of West Texas. He must choose between the woman he loves and the life he has made on his family’s ranch as a cowboy. I was impressed with how the writer chose to tell this story, with grace and nuance and heart." – Roxane Gay

[Introduction To] Red Star Tales: A Century Of Russian And Soviet Science Of Fiction, Yvonne H. Howell

Bookshelf

For over a century, most of the science fiction produced by the world’s largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection aims to change that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit.

A scientist keeps a severed head alive, and the head lives to tell the tale… An explorer experiences life on the moon, in a story written six decades before the first moon landing... Electrical appliances respond to human anxieties and threaten to crash the electrical grid… Archaeologists discover strange powers emanating from a Central Asian excavation site… A teleporting …

Philosophy's Rarified Air: On Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Germ Theory Of Dystopias: Fears Of Human Nature In 1984 And Brave New World, Clea D. Harris

Scripps Senior Theses

This project is an exploration of 20^th century dystopian literature through the lens of germ theory. This scientific principle, which emerged in the late 19^th century, asserts that microorganisms pervade the world; these invisible and omnipresent germs cause specific diseases which are often life threatening. Additionally, germ theory states that vaccines and antiseptics can prevent some of these afflictions and that antibiotics can treat others. This concept of a pervasive, invisible, infection-causing other is not just a biological principle, though; in this paper, I argue that one can interpret it as an ideological framework for understanding human existence …

Review Of Tu Casa Es Mi Casa, By Nylsa Martínez Morón, Traci Roberts-Camps

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Pura Belpré Award And The Portrayal Of Disability, Zoe Houser

Honors Program Theses

The Pura Belpré Award is one of the lesser known literary awards. Because other literary awards have been around longer and received a large amount of attention, there has been much research done over the other literary awards, including how the award books portray disabled characters within their pages. However, there is a lack of research about the portrayal of disability in books that have been awarded or honored by the Pura Belpré Award.

This paper will address the question of how many Pura Belpré Award winning books include prominent characters with disabilities and if they are portrayed positively or …

Sing Me A Song Of Sorrow: Analzying The Internal Dynamics Of Howl And Its Place As A Modern Epic, Anthony Hosey

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Mental [In]Stability: Isolation And Hallucination In The Horror Genre, Catherine Marshall Krafthefer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" and The Shining by Stephen King. Mental [in]stability is defined and then used to describe how the protagonist in these stories moves from a place of realism, to a world where they no longer understand their reality. This idea of mental [in]stability is also demonstrated in the three short stories I have written.

In Poe's "The Black Cat," his narrator tells the tale of how he lost his mental [in]stability. By moving away from his realistic world, the narrator lost his ability to reason as his mental …