Modern Literature Commons^™

Plagiarism Of The Plates? The Validity Of Accusations Against Diderot's Encyclopédie (1751-1772), Ian Curtis

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

A literary monument of the eighteenth century, the French Encyclopédie (1751–1772) was a massive reference work written by a team of experts that aimed to depict arts and crafts in unprecedented detail. It eventually grew to contain twenty-eight large folio volumes but the journey there was filled with uncertainty due to royal suppressions from seditious and anti-religious ideas and accusations of plagiarism. Since 1951, scholars have studied one of these accusations, made by architect Pierre Patte against the plates, editor Denis Diderot, and the four publishers. This scandal, which is critical in the history of the Encyclopédie, has faded from …

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

A Survey Of The Epistolary Dimension In Peninsular Contemporary Women Poets [Panorama De Lo Epistolar En La Poesía Española Peninsular Contemporánea Escrita Por Mujeres], Elena Vega-Sampayo

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

This paper seeks to interpret the choice by some Peninsular women poets of what would initially seem to be mere traces, sheer remnants of the epistolary genre. To this end, a score of 20th and early 21st century works of Contemporary Peninsular Spanish women poets will be analyzed, bearing witness to a singular poetic reality, inasmuch they share an approach to the epistolary genre, and scrutinizing their connections with the literary tradition. By resorting to J. Culler's analysis of the apostrophe as a framework of reference, as well as to a specific analysis of the literary techniques and rhetorical figures …

A Potted History Of Fevers (The Just War Was Slow Weather), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The poem is a part of a sequence that loosely revolves around the Agoo apparitions in the early 1990s.

Queering The Metanarrative Of Domesticity: Chosen Families In Late Nineteenth- Century American Women's Literature, Sharla Rosenbaum

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My primary purpose in this project is to dispel the notion that the white, bourgeois, patriarchal, nuclear family believed by millions of US citizens to have once monopolized the United States’s cultural landscape through an examination of how women authors in the United States constructed families in literature immediately following the Civil War. Not only do the novels under examination reflect diverse representations of families, but they also reflect those images from diverse perspectives. I will use a Marxist lens to explore class and ideologic interpellation; a renegade global feminist lens to explore failure and differential consciousness; a queer and …

Demigods And Gender Roles: Non-Heteronormative Gender Expressions And The Works Of Rick Riordan, Lee M. Witkowski

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Gender serves as a powerful ideology to systematically oppress minorities, such as women and people within the LGBTQ+ community. This ideology is learned at a young age through media such as fantasy literature. By analyzing several fantasy texts through a lens of gender politics, I track the history of gender in the fantasy genre and posit that inclusive works such as those of Rick Riordan influence children and adolescents to become more accepting of sexual and gender minorities.

Coming-Of-Age And Parallel Worlds In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Reham Rabie

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Stigma And The Social Function Of Fate In The Story Of Túrin Turambar, Clare Moore

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper applies Erving Goffman's theories of stigma to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin in order to explore the social function of Túrin's fate throughout the narrative. Interpreting fate as a stigma reveals the role society plays in the tragedy of Túrin's story through the lens of a social model of disability.

The Ruse Of Reading: The Postcolonial Literary Marketplace And The Novels Of Gina Apostol, Maria Gabriela Martin

English Faculty Publications

This paper explores the politics of reading in the novelistic production of Gina Apostol in relation to Sarah Brouillette’s analysis of the postcolonial literary marketplace, Timothy Brennan’s critique of cosmopolitanism, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s tracking of the native informant in postcolonial discourse. In Brouillette’s work, postcolonial writers, unlike the Romantic author who disavows commercial popularity, are aware of the commodification of their work and interact with it, either through resistance or complicity. Cosmopolitanism for Brennan denotes an unequal flow of intellectual commodities between center and periphery instantiated in the consciousness of the migrant writer valorized in “international book markets because …

Strange Genre-Related Loops In A Novel-Short Story: The Tension Between The Genres And Their Cultural Context, Orna Levin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The goal of the current study was to examine the strange genre-related loops in the novel The Short Story Master, by Maya Arad (2009), through the tension between the two genres represented in the text and their cultural contexts. The plot of the novel tells of the professional and personal crisis of the master of the short story, who failed in his mission to write a novel. The text hints to the reader that the central conflict that moves the plot along is neither romantic nor existential, but rather genre-related, and thus the entire work is a manifestation of …

Pathos, Fall 2021, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Bret Steggell

Pathos, Fall 2021, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Bret Steggell

A Part Le Bonheur, Il N’Y A Rien D’Essentiel: The Transnational Narrative Model In Maryse Condé’S Desirada, Eliana Vāgālāu

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The chapter contends that Maryse Condé’s novel Desirada has been repeatedly read as an identity quest novel, since the narrative impulse is determined by the protagonist’s search for her father’s identity. It argues, however, that Condé goes one step further by entirely subverting the identity quest narrative and presenting us with an excess, the production of fiction, which becomes something entirely different: a quest for an aesthetic truth rather than a filially determined identity. As such, by presenting us with a pastiche of the identity quest model, Condé’s transnationalism moves from minor to major, as her critique aims to dismantle …

Ciudad, Movimiento Y Transformación: "23 Segundos" En Dos Tiempos, Mariana Pensa

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

En este trabajo se realiza una lectura del film uruguayo 23 Segundos (2014, dirigido por Dimitry Rudakov). Un punto de entrada al mismo nos remite a los conceptos de acción/inacción, desde donde la intriga toma cuerpo y comienza a formarse. A partir de esto, se focaliza en el personaje principal de Emiliano, y en su recorrido por Montevideo, recorrido que se transforma a lo largo de la película en una forma de adquisición de conocimiento sobre sí mismo y los demás. Esto lo lleva ultimamente a un cambio de vida, a la superación de la alienación y la rutina. Es …

2021 Seccll Conference Program, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Conference program for the 2021 SECCLL.

Lost In Time And Lost In Space: Chronotopes In Thomas Pynchon’S Against The Day, Stephen Margavio

Poster Presentations

Honors thesis poster presentation.

In his 1937 essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin coins the term “chronotope” to discuss the inherently interconnected nature of time and space in narrative constructions. According to Bakhtin, there are a number of specific chronotopes (or space/time configurations) that help to define literary genres. Applying Bakhtin’s concepts to Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006), this thesis examines how the idea of narrative space/time can clarify Pynchon’s use of genre to make socio-political commentary. The first chapter of this thesis focuses on Bakhtin’s “road chronotope,” …

Lost In Time And Lost In Space: Chronotopes In Thomas Pynchon’S Against The Day, Stephen Margavio

Honors Theses

In his 1937 essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin coins the term “chronotope” to discuss the inherently interconnected nature of time and space in narrative constructions. According to Bakhtin, there are a number of specific chronotopes (or space/time configurations) that help to define literary genres. Applying Bakhtin’s concepts to Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006), this thesis examines how the idea of narrative space/time can clarify Pynchon’s use of genre to make socio-political commentary. The first chapter of this thesis focuses on Bakhtin’s “road chronotope,” which is characterized by …

Imagining Ancestors, David Bowles

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

The Musical Application Of Historical Literature, Yazmeen Mayes

Symposium of Student Scholars

This project combines history, literature, and newly composed music. The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, documents the age of “female hysteria,'' a catch-all “disease” for upper-class women acting outside of the social standard. The cure: solitary confinement. Any woman that showed signs of anxiety, creative passion, lack or abundance of sexual desire, or depression was sent to a remote, empty house for months at a time. Gilman describes these houses as exuberantly plain; thus, in confinement, the main character becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper. At the time, these women were considered insane, but the “treatment” …

Carry On My Wayward Sonne (And Moon): Common Cosmological Quirks In The Norse Fimbul-Winter And Tolkien’S Early Legendarium, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the 2021 International Medieval Congress sponsored by the University of Leeds, and is the third of three related works on Tolkien’s early cosmology.

The Walls Of The World And The Voyages Of The Evening Star: The Byzantine Borders Of Tolkien’S Biblical/Classical/Medieval/Geocentric/Heliocentric Complicated Cosmology, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper was delivered largely as is at the 2020 International Medieval Congress sponsored by the University of Leeds, and is the second of three related works on Tolkien’s early cosmology.

Cynewulf, Copernicus, And Conjunctions: The Problems Of Cytherean Motions In Tolkien’S Cosmology, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

An abridged version of this paper was presented at the 2019 International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University. It is the first of three related conference papers focusing on cosmological themes in Tolkien’s works.

‘Gilded Gravel In The Bowl’: Ireland’S Cuisine And Culinary Heritage In The Poetry Of Seamus Heaney, Anke Klitzing

Articles

Seamus Heaney’s poetry is rich in detail about agricultural and food practices in his native Northern Ireland from the 1950s onwards, such as cattle-trading, butter-churning, eel-fishing, blackberry-picking or home-baking. Often studied from an ecocritical perspective, the abundance of agricultural and culinary scenes in Heaney’s work makes a gastrocritical focus on food and foodways suitable. Food has been recognized as a highly condensed social fact, and writers have long tapped into its multi-layered meanings to illuminate socio-cultural circumstances, making literature a valuable ethnographic source. A gastrocritical reading of Heaney’s work from 1966 to 2010, drawing on Rozin’s Structure of Cuisine, shows …

Why Courageous Cuentos?

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Author Bios

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Artist Statements And Artwork

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

My Mother’S Roots Are From La Tierra De Huizaches, I Carry Her Roots Within Me, Selina Diaz Sumano

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Mí Gran Tatara Abuelo, Johanna Bonilla

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.