Modern Literature Commons^™

The Chess Players, Gerry A. Wolfson-Grande

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Originally conducted primarily as a game of war and strategy, chess has evolved to reflect historical developments in Western civilization as well as inspired literary and artistic endeavors in such a fashion as to provide comment, often as metaphor, on the human condition and our place in a cosmos influenced as frequently by chance as by order. The evolution of the game itself, particularly the promotion of a weak and relatively unimportant piece to the most powerful, at a time when a similar shift was taking place in the real world, ensured its survival as it served as an educational …

La Posthibdridez Fronteriza En La Narrativa De Heriberto Yépez, Alberto Ribas-Casasayas

Modern Languages & Literature

No abstract provided.

The Uncertainty Of National And Cultural Identity In Salman Rushdie’S East, West And Midnight’S Children, Tress Klassen

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This project involves the examination of two works by Salman Rushdie: a short story collection, East, West and a novel, Midnight’s Children. Looking at these texts through a postcolonial lens, I analyze Rushdie’s writing in terms of its relationship to the academic debates of the period and the historical context that grounds the works. Throughout the paper, I analyze Rushdie’s portrayal of the relationship between culture, nationhood, and identity, while also focusing on different aspects of the works in the project’s two chapters. In the first, I examine the relationship between postcolonialism and magical realism in East, West, …

After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears And The English Political Novel, 1950-2010, Jackson Ayres

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

After Orwell: Totalitarian Fears and the English Political Novel, 1950-2010 gives a coherent account of the English political novel after World War II, a critical narrative absent from current scholarship. I contend that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a touchstone for political fiction, is underwritten by Orwell's conflicted attitude toward politics: despite embracing politics as the necessary means to genuinely improve people's lives, he also remained suspicious of politics' apparently inherent potential to diminish or even eliminate autonomy. Orwell's simultaneous attraction and vigorous resistance to politics, I argue, is tied to broader contemporaneous anxieties over political and cultural totalization. Such …

Intersections In Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri, Abigail Lowe

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The connection between French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Italian political theorist Antonio Negri has drawn attention in academic publications over the last decade. For both thinkers, the philosophical concept of immanence is central to how both respectively conceptualize the world. However, in order to consider their work with regard to a metaphysical grounding, one may benefit from turning to each thinker’s engagement with Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose immanent ontology, or monism, was indeed his Ethics. This essay concentrates on drawing out an ontological distinction between the philosophical projects of Deleuze and Negri by way of a close reading …

No Greater Love: Recognition, Transformation, And Friendship In The Harry Potter Series, Stephen Parish

Masters Theses

Nobody today doubts the momentous influence the Harry Potter series has had on a generation of readers. Many scholars and critics assume Harry's place amongst other great works of children's literature, and indeed the series has brought about a revival in children's literature scholarship. Despite this popularity, many critics question the series' aesthetics, its attention to moral demeanor. Therefore, what element exists in Harry Potter that could enforce its aesthetic quality? Based on a rhetorical reading of the texts, my thesis upholds the aesthetic nature of the books through an analysis of the trio's friendship and and its impact on …

Life Inside The Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, And Storytelling In The Age Of Entertainment, John Hawkins

Masters Theses

This project explores George Saunders's In Persuasion Nation and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as interventionary literature. The thesis asserts that the two works confront the problems of isolation and dehumanization created by entertainment-based consumerism; they do so by depicting satirically exaggerated consumer societies and placing well-developed, sympathetic characters in those settings. The thesis includes a consideration of Jameson and deBord's theories of spectacle and Wallace's stated concerns with postmodern irony as an ineffective form of critique.

Spice Sisters: Religion, Freedom And Escape Of Women In African American And Indian Literatures, Lovely Koshy

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on women in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Rabindranath Tagore's three short stories. Hansberry writes during a period in America when racism, segregation, and black migration to the North weighed heavy upon the psyche of black women. Tagore writes during a time when British control, sati system, caste system, and dharma leave Indian women voiceless. Both express their disagreement with entrenched norms and institutions that have been in place for hundreds of years, a task that initially may seem to be an impossible undertaking, and unlikely to bring about expected change. This work reveals …

James Joyce And Post-Imperial Bildung: Influences On Salman Rushdie, Tayeb Salih, And Tsitsi Dangarembga, Robert Michael Kirschen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" functions as an axis around which writers from former British colonies--Salman Rushdie (India), Tayeb Salih (Sudan), and Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)--construct their own Bildungsromans. This nodal point is possible because Joyce's Bildungsroman represents a unique rendering of the genre which has proven useful for narratives of growth and development in newly independent nations. This dissertation focuses on a single narrative paradigm which acts as a common thread among the four authors. In each text (Rushdie's "Midnight's Children", Salih's "Season of Migration to the North", and Dangarembga's "Nervous Conditions"), the use of …

Making Connections: Applying The Ap French Language And Culture Scoring Guidelines To Student Samples, Brian Kennelly

World Languages and Cultures

No abstract provided.

Jest In Time: The Problems And Promises Of The Holy Fool In Francesco, Giullare Di Dio, Ordet, And Ikiru, Peter L. Doebler

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper is a study of Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis, 1950), Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), and Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (1955) through the theoretical lens of the religious figure of the holy fool. First, I assert that each film employs a foolish character in order to critique the contemporary culture, particularly resisting modern attempts to soften or ignore extreme elements of Christian teaching, such as sacrificial self-giving for others or the hope of bodily resurrection. Second, I argue that the content of a fool character affects the film’s form, creating a subversive …

Horizons, Volume 28, Spring 2013, Sacred Heart University

Vistas (Horizons)

No abstract provided.

2013 Spring Quiz & Quill Magazine, Otterbein English Department

Quiz and Quill

No abstract provided.

Openings, Spring 2013, Trinity Christian College

Openings

Visual Arts:  Infinitesimal by Sarah Jasperse - 3 / Greek Layouts by Melissa Conrad - 9 / Fruit Bowl by Jessica Timmermans - 12 / Vans Billboard by Danielle Truckenmiller - 16 / Spear Bearer and Aphrodite by Jonathan Engbers - 21

Literary Arts:  Conversations #1 (or planetary parallels) by Ethan Oliver Holmes - 1-2 / Luke by on composing a gospel by Bill Baerman-Cornell - 4-6 / Tiramisu by Vanessa Noonan - 6-8 / thoughts on a winter night by Sara Henreckson - 10 /  Journey to Heaven by Chad Westenbroek - 11 / A Picture is Worth a …

Pathos, Spring 2013, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Deena Anreise

Infanticide And The Anxious Silence Of “Language As Such”, Kevin Godbout

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

No abstract provided.

How Do You Build A Discipline From The Ground Up?, Robert H. Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the keynote address delivered to the 21^st Annual WV undergraduate literary symposium, hosted by Marshall University on March 2, 2013. It presents a kind of "wish list" for scholars in sermon studies: we still need "a clear sense of the canon," places to "interact and network" with colleagues, and a dedicated journal "where scholars can publish their work." People working in other fields are fortunate in that they can usually take these things for granted, but sermon scholars still have some work to do to bring them to fruition.

Embracing Popular Culture’S Fascination With Mythology, Jeremy Larson

Pro Rege

Jeremy Larson presented this paper in a session for the Popular Culture Conference at Dordt College, November 3, 2012.

David Foster Wallace To The Rescue, James K.A. Smith

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

The Poet Resigns: Poetry In A Difficult World, Robert Archambeau

University of Akron Press Publications

What are we really wishing for when we want poetry to have the prominence it had in the past? Why do American poets overwhelmingly identify with the political left? How do poems communicate? Is there an essential link between formal experimentation and political radicalism? What happens when poetic outsiders become academic insiders? Just what makes a poem a poem? If a poet gives up on her art, what reasons could she find for coming back to poetry? These are the large questions animating the essays of The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, a book that sets out to …

¡Viva La Vida!, Javier Villarreal

NACCS Annual Conference Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Américo Paredes And His Audiences, Lyon Rauthbun

NACCS Annual Conference Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Irony In Emmanuel Carrère’S La Moustache, Nina Ekstein

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

The subject of irony in film is a problematic one, in no small measure because of the assumption of referentiality in what is shown onscreen. I examine a form of irony that is tied to undecidability and use it to analyze La moustache (2005), which is a cinematic exploration of the possibilities for creating undecidability and its attendant tensions, exemplifying how irony may be visually communicated. Carrère's film moves into the domain of irony through a wide-ranging critique worked out through discordance.

Creating Knowledge, Volume 6, 2013

Creating Knowledge

It is my great pleasure to introduce the sixth volume of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences’ “Creating Knowledge,” our undergraduate student scholarship and research journal. First published in 2008, the journal is the outcome of an initiative to enhance and enrich the academic quality of the student experience within the college. Through this publication, the college seeks to encourage students to become actively engaged in creating scholarship and research and gives them a venue for the publication of their essays.

This sixth volume is, however, unlike the previous ones in one major respect: the papers in this …

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …

Nostalgia And Modernist Anxiety, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Here at the end of the collection I want to propose going back to the beginning—not to the beginning of nostalgic desire in the modernist era, but to the start of the anxiety over nostalgia in the modernist era. The discomfort has, I want to argue, two distinct periods: the early twentieth-century anxiety that various modernists had toward nostalgia, and the later uneasiness modernist critics have with nostalgia within the modernist period. Most eras, of course, experience at least some form of nostalgic longing, along with a corresponding distrust and uneasiness about such longing. The apprehension that nostalgia may provoke …

Pathos, Winter 2013, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Deena Anreise

No Se Puede Ser Cubano En Cualquier Parte: La Metáfora Del Derrumbe En La Fiesta Vigilada Y Cien Botellas En Una Pared, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

En el umbral del siglo XXI, las novelas de de Antonio José Ponte y Ena Lucía Portela representan una literatura de gran complejidad, cuya narrativa urbana produce ciertas cualidades estéticas distintivas y notables.

Preschool Language And Phonological Proficiencies In Predicting Stuttering Recovery Or Persistence, Caroline E. Spencer

Open Access Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between expressive and receptive language, phonological, and verbal working memory proficiencies in the preschool years and eventual recovery from or persistence in stuttering. Participants included 40 children who stutter (CWS). At ages 3-5 years, participants were administered the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language, 3rd edition (TACL-3), the Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test, 3rd edition (SPELT-3), Bankson-Bernthal Test of Phonology--Consonant Inventory subtest (BBTOP--CI), Test of Auditory Perceptual Skills--Revised (TAPS--R) auditory number memory and auditory word memory subtests, and the Dollaghan & Campbell Nonword Repetition Test (NRT). Stuttering behaviors were tracked …

Playing Games: Governmental Influence And Individual Assertion In Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" Series, Benjamin Jon Geistfeld

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the relationship between The Hunger Games protagonist Katniss Everdeen and the two governments, one led by President Snow and the other led by President Coin, with which she interacts. In my first chapter, I argue that Presidents Snow and Coin both try to influence Katniss to follow their own agendas by dictating certain social conditions to her through laws, educational curricula, and state-sponsored industries. Each President carefully designs these conditions to support their own agendas rather than the agendas of the citizens they govern. I use Louis Althusser's theory of ideology and ideological state apparatuses and Michel …