Modern Literature Commons^™

Postmodern Poetry And Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics, David Hadbawnik

New Queer Medievalisms

This volume builds on recent scholarship on contemporary poetry in relation to medieval literature, focusing on postmodern poets who work with the medieval in a variety of ways. Such recent projects invert or “queer” the usual transactional nature of engagements with older forms of literature, in which readers are asked to exchange some small measure of bewilderment at archaic language or forms for a sense of having experienced a medieval text. The poets under consideration in this volume demand that readers grapple with the ways in which we are still “medieval” – in other words, the ways in which the …

Introduction, Amy C. Smith

Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers

No abstract provided.

Volume 31, Table Of Contents

Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers

No abstract provided.

Proyecto De Traducción: Compartiendo Cultura A Través De Historias De Latinoamérica, Diana P. Beas

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to cultivate awareness of ethical and professional perspectives that reflect linguistic and cultural heritage. In other words, creatively share the culture and history of Latin American countries. To achieve this, this project consists of two short stories I have translated. The stories were originally written in Spanish and I have translated them to English. Furthermore, each story is from a different Latin American country (one is from Argentina and the other is from Guatemala). To carry out this project, I began by researching simple background information of each country to which the stories belong to. Afterwards, I …

Jugando Sin Fronteras: Apoyando El Desarrollo Bilingüe A Través Del Juego, Michaela Henderson

World Languages and Cultures

Jugando sin fronteras is a website aimed at both speakers of Spanish and English within San Luis Obispo county. This project attempts to break down the cultural and linguistic gaps between students of bilingual education systems. Jugando sin fronteras is dedicated to uniting language groups and facilitating intercultural communication by demonstrating the use of both Spanish and English equally in bilingual spaces.

Pushing Understanding: Curriculum Resources For Digital Pedagogues, M. Rubin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Whether one wishes to admit it or not, the classroom is a distinct and separate space from the rest of the world with its own rules, expectations, and environment. Even when a class takes place outside of a classroom, the space takes on the role of a classroom, if not outright becoming a classroom in every form aside from shape. This is not unlike, for instance, a tabletop game: even if not played on a literal tabletop, a tabletop game remains identifiable as such, and its rules and expectations remain the same, as does even its environment. A course may …

Saving The Boys: Anticipating Moral Engagement In Lord Of The Flies, Tanya Alfaro

Theses and Dissertations

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) is a paradoxical novel that highlights a constant conflict stemming from the inner-self of human nature promoted by the setting. Because adults often resemble children in many aspects and most of the time they don’t know what to do or make poor decisions, Golding formed his characters to be pre-adolescent children as a means to subtly point at humanity’s self-destructive traits. Therefore, if readers recognize the state of the boys’ morality, if they understand that they, like people, are imperfect beings, and if they acknowledge that they are prone to immorality, could they …

The Sun Child And The Moon Child, Mateo Izan Luna

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Self-Published Novels By Autistic Authors As A Form Of Advocacy, Jennifer J. Nelson

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

The Autistic Representation Database (ARD) indexes nearly 1,000 works of fiction, auto-biographical non-fiction, film, and television that feature autistic representations. Robert Rozema and I created the ARD with the purpose of compiling all works of art with autistic representation in one place. In my work on the ARD, I recognized a key pattern: a higher ratio of autistic authors are self-published in comparison to neurotypical authors writing about autism. Autistic authors may self-publish because of barriers in the traditional publishing industry; however, I assert it is because self-publishing allows them to portray autism how they desire. In this way, autistic …

Review: The Anarchivist: History, Memory, And Archives, Greg Mcnamara

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

Book Review: The Anarchivist: History, Memory, and Archives. By Geof Huth (New York: AC Books, 2020. 145 pp.). Reviewed by Greg McNamara.

The Appalachian Nostos: Pastoralism And Returning Home In Appalachian Poetry, Henry David Thoreau Kilbourne

Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pendulums Of Personhood? Exploring The Multitudes Of Immigrant Womanhood In Spanish-Maghrebi Literature, Kaitlyn C. Sisco

Honors Theses

Often considered articulations of in-between-ness and bearers of fraught selfhoods, the work of Spanish-Maghrebi authors has been widely debated in literary fields, with academics arguing that it constitutes a largely homogenous set of texts about the standard immigrant experience. However, by placing these texts in a single category, such arguments end up erasing the immensely varied identities expressed and represented by Spanish-Maghrebi authors. This thesis seeks to address this issue by paying particular attention to how Spanish-Maghrebi authors negotiate different types of immigrant subjectivities in their writing. Specifically, I analyze the works of three contemporary Spanish-Maghrebi writers, Najat El Hachmi, …

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

Traumas And Recovery In Takaya Natsuki's Fruits Basket, Vesper North

English (MA) Theses

This thesis examines the various traumas within Takaya Natsuki’s anime series Fruits Basket and how the act of transformation triggers the beginnings of recovery for numerous characters. Fruits Basket bears striking similarities to the French fairy tale Beauty and the Beast (as well as later adaptations) originated by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve. Throughout, I draw parallels between the “Beauty and the Beast”-genre with Fruits Basket and how the anime expands upon shared themes, specifically trauma. Additionally, I analyse the birth of and recovery from traumas (caused by bullying, loss, abuse, and feelings of otherness) for “Beauty and the Beast” archetypes within …

Poetry And Thought's Revealing, Evan Reardon

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Thinking has long been a topic of interest in both philosophy and poetry but the experience of it, the phenomenological reality of thinking, has remained understudied. Utilizing Martin Heidegger’s writings on thinking and poetry, as well as various literary scholars, this thesis argues that poetry may be read as revealing the phenomenality of thought, the what-is-it-like of thinking. Through an application of Heidegger’s concept of a thinker’s “fundamental experience” and close readings of the poetry and prose writings of George Oppen, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery, I argue that each poet uses different lenses in his work to reveal different …

Personhood And Objecthood: Examining The Speaker’S Interiority And Double Consciousness In Citizen: An American Lyric, Winnie Chak

English (MA) Theses

The interpersonal use of the “you” (the second person) in Citizen: An American Lyric commands the reader to not look away and bear witness to the interiority Black Americans’ consciousness. The essay examines the transformation of Rankine’s works that expands how double consciousness, found in Citizen, influences the creative writing space (the racial imaginary) and exposes the ongoing discrimination against Black Americans due to white privilege. Rankine’s other works Just US: An American Conversation and The Racial Imaginary compile viewpoints of both Black and white communities that remember moments that either they witnessed racist discrimination or experienced it in …

Narrating Madness: Building Narratives Against Privileged Identity, Kristin Santa Maria

All Dissertations

This dissertation examines how competing narratives related to madness and mental health can provide insight into the inconsistencies of preconceived biases that tie into privilege and power. These biases relate to identities associated with race, gender, class, and embodiment. By exploring madness narratives, we can see how madness often becomes a quality used to isolate and “other” people that act against typical societal and cultural norms. Works of fiction and nonfiction that pertain to madness narratives can either be used to perpetuate stereotypes of normalcy or as a vehicle to allow for a more open and frank discussion of madness …

A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are …

“Young Adult Books Don’T Realize They Have That Power”: Reader Response To Ideology In Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, Zane Emīlija Sarma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to find out how readers interact with novels in the Young Adult dystopian genre. I will examine the ways in which readers resist the dominant patriarchal ideological discourses in the YA dystopian novel and how readers submit to this ideology. Through an interaction with the text, the reader produces oppositional, negotiated, or preferred meanings. I will argue that readers’ response to ideology in the YA dystopian novel is affected by their active participation in reader communities such as the Bookish community online.

YA dystopian fiction was highly popular in the early 2010s, but the …

Revolutionary Road And Gone Girl: Undermining The Veneer Of Domestic Bliss, John T. Hoty

ETD Archive

Modern literature is rife with examples of authors dramatizing the various stressors suffered by families populating the American suburbs. Within this theme, two such authors, Richard Yates and Gillian Flynn, use their craft to explore not only the social orthodoxy expected by suburban residents, but also the performative aspects applied when that conformity is challenged by these inherent pressures. The presence of these social strains as it’s examined by each author, both of whom are writing 60 years apart, furthers the commentary on the toxicities of suburban living in post-WWII America (Yates) and the modern technological age (Flynn) by surveying …

First Person Narration In Postwar British Women’S Fiction, Julia Mccoy

English Student Scholarship

Julia McCoy ’22
Majors: English and Political Science
Faculty Mentor: Dr. William Hogan, English

A study of postwar English novelists Margaret Drabble and Jeannette Winterson, looking particularly at the way these writers use first person narration in their works. Both writers explore how women’s identity can be ‘written into being’ against external pressures and authorities that seek to define women’s ‘proper’ role.

Tres Visiones Rizomáticas En La Identidad Caribeña: Chamoiseau, Miller E Indiana, Marilyn Rivera-Olivieri

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Texaco (1992) del martiniqués Patrick Chamoiseau, Augustown (2016) del jamaiquino Kei Miller y La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) de Rita Indiana crean novelas filosóficas con una dimensión caribeña que conversan con teóricos como Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant y Aimée Césaire en la construcción de teorías de identidad caribeña enfocadas en sus respectivos países. Todas ellas pueden ser consideradas novelas fundacionales, que buscan crear una nueva identidad nacional caribeña, una identidad forjada a raíz del poscolonialismo y el capitalismo y el prejuicio racial. Éstas novelas afirman y resaltan la sociedad caribeña con una identidad plural e histórica que afirman la pertenencia …

Nationless States And Stateless Beings: The Politics Of Identity And Citizenship In Claudio Mir’S Mondongo Scam And Cheech Marin’S Born In East L.A., Rebecca A. Barnes

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

In the colloquial sense of the term, the word citizen refers to an individual who belongs to a nation, either by birthright or by naturalization. Therefore, citizenship denotes a political and a social belonging, an ideological home, and, in most cases, a strong foundation for the development of one’s personal identity. However, since nations are inherently artificial structures, made only tangible in the present day by a few centuries of recorded history, a philosophical approach to the term citizen complicates this definition. Based off critics including Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Fernando Ortiz, and Jacques Derrida, this essay seeks to explore …

Mephistopheles' Atopy, Allotry, Lottery. On Textual Proliferations In Goethe's Faust I And Ii, Pasqual Solass

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Combining a careful reading of selected passages from Goethe’s Faust I and II and of marginal but nevertheless revealing lines on maybe the actual protagonist of the “Tragödie”, Mephistopheles, this paper aims to present aspects of what one could call Goethe’s vision of a modern devil. Taking departure from etymological considerations on the root of “diabolus”, i.e. diabállein, meaning to cast apart, to scatter, but also to accuse, as well as from different beliefs of German “Aberglaube” (superstition), it will become clear that one if not the major feature of Goethe’s Mephistopheles-figure is movement, not just …

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …

The Rise Of Rome, The Fall Of Spain: Classical Reception In Leopoldo Alas, Galdós, And José Díaz Fernández, Meghan E. Hodges

LSU Master's Theses

The turn of the century was a period of rapid change and modernization. Spain, unlike neighboring European nations, was collapsing as an imperial force. The ensuing crisis of national identity fueled existing political tensions from the early nineteenth century which would lead to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This thesis examines various national crises from 1890 and the decade preceding the loss of Spain’s final colonies to 1929 and the decade preceding the Civil War. Both of these periods saw substantial acceleration of modernization and incredible resistance to it. Despite the hyper-presence of modernity within contemporary literary movements, there is …

Ghosts’ Stories: Addictive Behaviors And Complicated Grief In George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, Jc Leishman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

When experiencing the natural motions of the grieving process, some individuals encounter an inability to pass this process by a phenomenon known as complicated grief. To deal with the cyclical trauma this causes, the human mind seeks to engage in addictive behaviors (both substantive and behavioral) that work to artificially and momentarily circumvent grief. This process, as it appears in George Saunders' experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, reveals a depth of commentary on human attachments and grieving processes through the lives and narratives of ghosts found in the bardo.

Entropic Interactionist Theory: Reading Social Constructionism Through Thermodynamics And Samuel Beckett, Brie Barron

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay aims to explain the breakdown of social constructs through the concept of Entropic Interactionist Theory. EIT argues that it is the nature of creations to be vulnerable to the same forces as their creator, and that social constructions (like identity, for example) are subject to the very same physical forces that give rise to humanity’s creative impulse. At its core, EIT is informed by social constructionism and Nietzschean sociological theory, but it names the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy as the driving force behind societal disintegration. The complication with this theory is that it …

Victims Of Victims: The Concept Of Victimhood In Two War Memoirs Of The Sierra Leonean Civil War, Lauren R. Letizia

Student Publications

This research analyzes the portrayal and view of war victimhood in the genre of war stories and remembrance using two firsthand accounts of the Sierra Leonean Civil War.