Modern Literature Commons^™

Ursula K. Le Guin: An Anthropologist Of Other Worlds, Marleen S. Barr Remembers A Titan Of Science Fiction, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is Marleen S. Barr's obituary for Ursula K. Le Guin which was published in Nature magazine.

Shakespeare, Antony And Cleopatra, And The Nature Of Fame, Robert A. Logan

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame is a characterological study, presenting new perspectives on Antony and Cleopatra, the most ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays. It offers fresh insights into Shakespeare's understanding of the attributes of fame, the process by which it occurs, and the significance of being famous—and into the origins and nature of the playwright's own imperishable fame. Inclusive and enlarging, the study considers a fresh method of dealing with the longstanding difficulties theater-goers and readers have had in responding to the characters of Shakespeare's plays, the seventeenth-century contexts of the play that the playwright …

Memory In Memoir & Biography: Science, Place, And Agency, Johnathan E. Longo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores modern scientific understanding of memory in humans and how it affects works of life writing. Scientific research shows that memory is unreliable and often misunderstood by the general public, and this has implications for different forms of life writing. This paper uses biographies, memoirs, and hybrid forms of life writing to explore how memory, with all its limitations, is used in service of a life story. How do writers of these sub-genres use memory and why are those strategies different from one another? Questions of agency and authority over written and spoken material make the issues still …

"Not To Die, But To Survive": The Construction Of Female Voice In Isabel Allende's The House Of The Spirits, Emily Thomson

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Isabel Allende's debut novel The House of the Spirits follows three generations of a Chilean family, focusing primarily on the lives of the grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter. Living under a controlling patriarch and an oppressive government, these women strive to reclaim and maintain their identities in a world that denies and rejects their agency and experiences. This literary critical essay discusses the means through which Allende's characters, and Allende herself, create their own narratives: silence, speech, and writing. Through extensive close reading and analysis of Allende's text, I examine the individual and combined narratives constructed by these methods, and how …

"On That Day We Will Be Free": Reflecting Women's Real Experiences In Joanna Russ's The Female Man And Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Victoria A. League

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

The feminist speculative fiction novels The Female Man (1975) by Joanna Russ and The Handmaid's Tale(1986) by Margaret Atwood mirror the real world by reflecting women's experiences. Speculative fiction, an umbrella genre that includes science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism, explores our world by discussing other worlds. Themes and events in each novel's fictional world reveal aspects of today's world, and the depictions and conditions of women in the novels illuminate heterosexist norms. Specific and clear parallels can be drawn between reality and these science fiction stories, showing that the novels critique and comment on our world's treatment of …

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Victoria Sackville-West Materials., Victoria Sackville-West, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The collection contains 27 letters and 4 greeting cards of personal correspondence written between 1947-1961, from V. Sackville-West at her home at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, U.K., to Grace Mountcastle Martin in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Many of the letters convey the author's thanks for shipments of sugar and soap during times of rationing in the U.K.

V. [Victoria or "Vita"] Sackville-West, English poet, novelist, socialite and suffragette, was born in 1892 at her family's estate at Knole in Kent. Privately educated, she began writing poetry at age 11, and had produced 8 novels and 5 plays by the time of her …

Fading Landscapes: The Culture Of Exile And The Open Road, Marc T. Rentschler

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article seeks to analyze the complex relationship between material culture and hegemonic constructions of ideology along with their tendency to make their way into larger institutional apparatuses of society. For this study this interaction is explored through the symbolic construction of the american roadways and a selective. Drawing on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Baudrillard’s America, and William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, this work attempts to combine critical perspectives on the formation of public space with the events of these works in order to formulate how the ideological values which are subsumed by the representational space of ‘The …

Reading Carlos Bulosan/Documenting The Filipino Diaspora: An Editorial Introduction To Writer In Exile/Writer In Revolt: Critical Perspectives On Carlos Bulosan, Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

This editorial introduction to Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan (2016) sheds light on the diasporic scope of Bulosan’s literary imagination and the literary scholarship on his diverse body of writing. Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt gathers for the first time nearly sixty years of literary criticism by scholars in the United States and the Philippines on Bulosan, a pioneering twentieth-century Filipino writer in the United States. The editorial introduction highlights the ways in which Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt documents the unfolding of Bulosan’s radical literary imagination which straddles the colonial and neocolonial periods of …

Orality In Joyce: Food, Famine, Feasts And Public Houses, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Some common themes within the history of food and literature include starvation, famine, gluttony, feasting, commensality, hospitality, religion, gender, and class, and indeed food also functions as a complex signifier of national, racial, and cultural identity. Despite the growing international scholarship of food in literature (Bevan 1988; Schofield 1989; Ellmann 1993; Applebaum 2006; Piatti-Farnell 2011; Gilbert and Porter 2015; Boyce and Fitzpatrick 2017; Piatti-Farnell and Lee Brien 2018), until recently, Ireland appeared “as only the smallest of dots on the map of high gastronomy” (Goldstein 2014, xi). Most international collections discuss the canonical Irish writings of James Joyce and of …

Fahnderwachtmeister Jakob Studer, Julia Karolle-Berg

2018 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

Willa Cather On A “New World Novelist”: A Newly-Discovered 1920 Vanity Fair Essay, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The ability to quote from and publish Willa Cather’s letters is a relatively recent development for scholars. However, the republication of her critical prose began shortly after her death, when Cather’s partner, Edith Lewis, appointed literary executor in her will, facilitated the publication of Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (1949). In line with Cather’s own approach to her early career, which she often dismissed or mischaracterized, this volume collected only her critical prose published from 1920 forward, including magazine essays, prefaces, and one previously unpublished fragment. This volume supplemented Cather’s own collection encompassing critical …

In Anthropocene Air: Deleuze's Encounter With Shakespeare, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Discourse, Structure And Linguistic Choice By T. Price Caldwell, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

The Sellout By Paul Beatty: “Unmitigated Blackness” In Obama's America, John E. Davies

ETD Archive

Visibility and invisibility are long-standing tropes in the African-American literary tradition. Frequently they are presented in satiric language. I argue that Paul Beatty's Mann Booker Award-winning novel The Sellout now holds an important role in this tradition. Specifically, The Sellout hearkens specifically to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and to Paul Beatty's earlier novel The White Boy Shuffle. Further, The Sellout exposes the ongoing presence and function of racism in an America that has elected its first African-American president, Barack Obama, and that now claims to be "post-racial," even as its spectral reproduction and commodification of blackness persist. By analyzing the …

Review Of Such Good Work, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pathos, Winter 2017-2018, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Sadie Jordan

Volume 12 No. 2

“Always Up Against”: A Study Of Veteran Wpas And Social Resilience, Shari J. Stenberg, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments.

Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the …

From A Distance “You Might Mistake Her For A Man”: A Closer Reading Of Gender And Character Action In Jane Eyre, The Law And The Lady, And A Brilliant Woman, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Peter J. Capuano, Julius Fredrick, Matthew L. Jockers

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This research examines and contributes to recent work by Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff on the relationship between gender and action in the nineteenth-century novel. Jockers and Kirilloff use dependency parsing to extract verb and gendered pronoun pairs (“he said,” “she walked,” etc.). They then build a classification model to predict the gender of a pronoun based on the verb being performed. This present study examines the novels that were categorized as outliers by the classification model to gain a better understanding of the way the observed trends function at the level of individual narratives. We argue that while the …

Eduard Dorsch And His Unpublished Poem On The Occasion Of Humboldt's 100th Birthday, Reinhard Andress

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 1869, the German-American medical doctor and poet, Eduard Dorsch, wrote a poem read in Detroit on the occasion of Humboldt’s 100th birthday. This article publishes the poem for the first time and explores its context within the life and times of its author.

Preserving Jeffers Country, Shelley Alden Brooks

Jeffers Studies

For more than one hundred years, writers and artists have interpreted the beauty and power of Big Sur. No artist has done so more enduringly than Robinson Jeffers, whose writing helped define a land ethic for this prized California coastline. To a degree greater than any other private individual, and arguably more than any single county, state, or federal land manager, Jeffers can be credited with shaping perceptions and attitudes regarding the appropriate treatment of the Big Sur landscape. The iconic beauty of Big Sur has long been celebrated in advertisements and portrayals of the California coast, luring millions of …

“¿Qué Coño Es Esto?”: Exploración De Identidad De Género Y De Orientación Sexual En La Mucama De Omicunlé, Vianny C. Lugo Aracena

Honors Theses

La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) es una novela escrita por la autora dominicana Rita Indiana, que lidia con temas que son considerados tabúes dentro de la sociedad dominicana: sexualidad, identidad de género, y espiritualidad afrodescendiente. Indiana utiliza la espiritualidad afrodescendiente para facilitar la exploración de las respectivas identidades de género y de orientación sexual en los personajes principales, Acilde y Argenis. El utilizar la espiritualidad afrodescendiente también permite ver a la novela como un texto literario que utiliza el patakí, una narración que contiene conocimientos afrodescendientes, como elemento estructural principal. Los temas que normalmente caracterizan a los patakíes son abundantes …

The Biopolitical Elements In Yan Lianke's Fiction Worlds, Xiaoyu Gao

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Openings, 2018, Trinity Christian College

Openings

LITERATURE CONTENT: 1 - Running Away in Time for Dinner by Leah Taylor / 4 - Polar Opposites by Sarah Kliora / 12 - Waiting by Latifah Williams / 13 - For Good This Time by Kezia TenHaken 17 - Rude Recollections by Kailah Price / 28 - redemption by Bethany Dadisma 29 - Girl by Jessica Slinkman / 34 - In the Dusk of Addison and Leavitt Streets (one September night in traffic) by Curtis Taylor, In Memoriam

VISUAL CONTENT: Cover Photo by Pierce Cruz / 9 - Jade by Clarine Sukamto / 16 - Sweeties Don't do Sweets …

Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky

Theses and Dissertations--English

Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …

Dialogical Numbers: Counting Humanimal Pain In J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Mike Piero

English Faculty Publications

This essay argues that J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello stages numerical sequences strategically, dialogically, and parodically in order to call attention to the ideological weight involved in counting. Focusing on how one counts - and accounts for - human and nonhuman animal pain, I contend that the repetition of numbers in the novel works to subvert the neoliberal faith put in numbers, quantification, and data. Without succumbing to some religious-mystical numerology, this reading attempts to expose the fiction involved in the act of counting and the need to pay more attention to numerical discourse in literary fiction. In tracking these numbers …

Empowerment Of Isolated And Othered Young Adults Through Ya Dystopia, Lily Hunger

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The popularity and amount of dystopian novels oriented towards young adult readers has increased significantly in recent years, particularly since the release of The Hunger Games. While some literary critics do not consider the genre to be serious literature or have the same merits as more widely recognized and classic adult literature, factors and themes commonly found in this particular genre demonstrate its ability to be highly impactful on the lives of young adults. Adolescence is a tumultuous time of extreme emotions, which is reflected in dystopia by the exaggerated circumstances and danger. It is also a period of self-discovery …

Radical Black Drama-As-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic On The Protracted Event-Horizon, Jaye Austin Williams

Faculty Journal Articles

In this essay, I elaborate my present project, grounded in what I call drama theory, the critical theoretical dimensions of dramatic writing, and address the deeply troubling intramural tensions across Black Studies, between those who read blackness, and black cultural production, through largely futurist, celebratory lenses; and those who apply a structural analysis to blackness as the site against, upon, and through which the world coheres its soci(et)al apparatuses and machinations. I situate myself within the latter constellation, and sample here two plays by Suzan-Lori Parks to demonstrate how I translate the analyses of antiblack violence by black feminist …

An American Golem: Comic Books, Creation, And The Virtue Of Escape In Michael Chabon’S The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, Mary Mcallister

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis examines Michael Chabon’s defense of escapist stories as manifested in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). Through this work, Chabon traces the history of escapist stories and superheroes in Judaism through the anthropomorphic figure of Jewish folklore, the golem. Chabon explores the ways in which the creation of a golem overlaps with the creation of a comic book. Additionally, Chabon shows the ability of escapist stories—those that allow the reader to leave reality and enter into fantasy—to facilitate healing from deep emotional wounds. This healing is demonstrated through the journey …

Representations Of García Lorca In American Poetry: Articulating And Floating Metaphor Of The Historical Connections Between Spain And The United States, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Anthony Bukoski - An Outpost Of Polishness, John A. Merchant

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Isolated both geographically and psychologically, the Polish American writer Anthony Bukoski in his five collections of stories, Twelve Below Zero (1986, 2008), Children of Strangers (1993), Polonaise (1999), Time Between Trains (2003), and North of the Port (2008), as well as a collection of reissued stories Head of the Lakes (2018), assumes a variety of interrelated roles - chronicler, cultural archeologist, coastal guardsman, and spokesman - for the dwindling Polish community in his hometown of Superior , Wisconsin. Bukoski's stories capture the distinct relationship between people and place in Superior, situated as it is the periphery of American life in …