Modern Literature Commons^™

“We Understand Each Other, Then”: Binaries At Play In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Christopher P. Jolivette

Endeavors: Mississippi State Undergraduate Research Journal

As the United States grappled with the fallout of the September 11th terrorist attacks, another, subtler conundrum was arising. As Mohsin Hamid writes in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a chasm of difference arose between the First World and the Third. In Derridian terms, the United States grew to center itself, forming its own complete national identity that defied the Third World's cultural realm. In his writing, Hamid viciously attacks this deepening realm of cultural difference by taking aim at the violent domineering and heteronormative American culture whose imposition in the Middle East served to severe any ties between the two cultures. …

Los Estudios Latinoamericanos Ante El Renacimiento Psicodélico, Alberto Ribas-Casasayas

Modern Languages & Literature

The chapter analyzes erasures and appropriations that the discourse of the psychedelic renaissance arising in the Global North imposes on long-standing practices in indigenous societies and countercultural environments. It also suggests ways in which a critical Humanities can, from a Latin American perspective, offer more inclusive understandings of the psychedelic experience.

Metamorphosis And Fairy Tale Tropes In Christa Wolf’S Patterns Of Childhood, B. E. Lara

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study is a sociohistorical analysis of East German writer Christa Wolf’s use of fairy tale tropes in her novel Patterns of Childhood, first published in German in 1976 in East Germany as Kindheitsmuster. Wolf uses fairy tale tropes to explore themes that she could not write about openly under East German censorship, which prohibited East German authors from exposing their culpability for prior acts committed under the Nazi Regime. Furthermore, Wolf introduces metamorphosis to explore the intrinsic evil and subsequent guilt of her child protagonist, and she uses the child’s capacity for evil to illustrate the German people’s similar …

Beyond Catharsis: The Evolution Of Popular Tragedy In Video Game Narratives, Nicole E. Chancey

Master’s Theses

“Beyond Catharsis: The Evolution of Popular Tragedy in Video Game Narratives,” establishes a connection between traditions of Tragedy and video game narratives, arguing that the ways in which tragedy manifests within interactive media is an extension and development of previous, more formal understandings of Tragedy. Using Oxenfree (2016), Elden Ring (2022), and Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), this thesis claims video games feature adaptations of traditional tragedy and catharsis that expand the genre. Through players directly instigating the action of the game, the allowances and limitations of the player’s agency, and the instances of misfortunate fates, interactive narratives translate tragic concepts—outlined …

Revelations: Spirituality As Privileged Perspectivism In Magical Realist Distortions, Isabella Scala-Kazanecki

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the role of spiritual beliefs in the literary mode now known as magical realism in Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949), Indian-Born British and American Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), and a lesser-known novel, Household Saints (1981) by Francine Prose, an American writer. The Kingdom of This World, itself the originator of the mode of magical realism, has allowed me to conclude with Carpentier that magical realism arises from “privileged revelations,” as he notes in the preface to his seminal book. But these revelations in magical realism are not necessarily always of the …

The Fiction Of Possibility: How Possible Worlds Theory Explains The Impossible Worlds Of Science Fiction, Jacob Burlingame

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways that science fiction texts convey to the reader the worlds in which they are set. It identifies four main strategies through which a science fiction text conveys its world: Neologisms, Secondary Texts, Actual-World Analogs, and Exposition. Neologisms include any words that are coined by the author to describe an entity that only exists in the text world, which creates a fuller world by creating a referent for them. Secondary Texts are any other documents alluded to by the primary text, whether created for the text world or imported from the actual world; these secondary texts …

"A Changed Understanding Of Our Present": Moby-Dick As Prophetic Ecological Activism, Katie Ann Schini

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale is a classic of American literature, spanning multiple genres and remaining culturally relevant nearly 175 years after its original publication. Though on the surface Moby-Dick reads as an adventure story of a man who experiences the whaling industry firsthand, Herman Melville’s text continues to invite new generations of readership through the framework of the twenty-first century climate crisis.

In this thesis, I position Moby-Dick as a text that can be used to understand our modern society’s current dispositions of ecological grief. My thesis operates at the intersection of three main literary critical theories: ecocriticism, affect, and …

Metalepsis And Mental Castration: Doki Doki Literature Club As The Cerebral Monstrous-Feminine, Hannah Graham

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Doki Doki Literature Club! is a horror visual novel masquerading as a dating simulation game. Behind the thin veneer of pretty girls in tiny skirts and tight uniforms lurk horrors, glitches, and metaleptic events that take the player’s battle for agency beyond mere point-and-click interactions. This fight breaches containment to the level of the physical, as the player must literally wrestle for control with an in-game character who has commandeered their entire computer system. Players are led to believe that they are making the decisions that further the plot, but come to learn that in this world, there is no …

The Benefit Of New Perspective: An Analysis Of Postcolonial Adaptation, Sara L. Tilbe

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

In our modern world, the concept of literary adaptation is not unheard of. Each release of a new, popular text comes with an underlying chance that it will likely be snatched up by Hollywood executives to be told through a cinematic setting. However, there is less fanfare when it comes to the topic of literary adaptation, particularly of famous texts that are deemed “classic” of the literary canon. Usually, any news of a literary adaptation of a classic book is meant with polarizing views from the general public. Some welcome the change, excited for what a new author can bring …

Heterogeneous Being: The Inhumanities And The Creative-Scientific Aesthetic, Steven L. Ogden

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Heterogeneous Being attempts to set the often-disunited aspects of the sciences and humanities in congruence and to extol and advance a hybrid creative-scientific aesthetic that moves beyond any restricted dimensions of its previously segregated fields of study. It likewise expresses the need to perpetuate that hybrid form of inquiry and representation to successfully address or convey the precarious realities of Earth’s ecological and environmental conditions. Heterogeneous Being asks readers to observe the inexhaustible proofs of our pluralized configurations with the nonhuman world, to recognize the agentic potentialities nonhuman subjects may hold both in and outside of those inhuman enmeshments, and …

Words And Stardom: Modernist Poetic Responses To Asta Nielsen, Karl E. Toepfer

Open Educational Resources

This essay discusses how four modernist poets portrayed the Danish movie star Asta Nilesen (1881-1972). German Hans Schiebelhuth (1895-1944) describes the "demonic" power of Nielsen's image to awaken dark aspects of his adolscent personality. For the Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896-1928), Nielsen's cinematic image provokes a radical shattering of language into extravagant "word-images." Danish writer Rudolf Broby-Johansen (1900-1987) linked Nielsen's image to a radical (Marxist) critique of oppressive sexual politics within a capitalist society. German Franz Behrens (1895-1977) composed a lengthy, expressionist ode to Nielsen from the perspective of one who actually worked as a screenwriter in the German …

Not The Absentminded Professor: Autistic Experience And Representation In Academia, Martin Brick

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

While there are many facets of a career in academia that may be amendable to autistics, the discipline also presents a number of challenges. These hardships can be exacerbated by misunderstandings or even discrimination from colleagues and administrator with pre-existing assumptions of autistic behavior erroneously based on media representations. This essay will examine literary and television representations of autistics working in university settings to argue that the nature of such portrayals negatively impacts the popular view of autistic scholars. Comedy is frequently used to highlight social awkwardness and other behavioral deviance, perpetuating Damian Milton’s double-empathy problem.

Looking Back To Old New York City In Herman Melville’S “Bartleby”, Shawn Thomson

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

Though “Bartleby, the Scrivener” takes place in the three-block area in and around the lawyer’s Wall Street offices, the uptown attitudes toward city life of the suburbs inform the lawyer’s relationships to his urban or downtown space. Wall Street stands as a central feature of the island city’s history, taking its name from a physical wall built to protect the Dutch from the British and the Indians. As a result, Wall Street served to differentiate the suburban from the urban confines of the city. Through the position of the lawyer in the Master Chancery office on Wall Street and his …

Good For Her: Catharsis And Empowerment In Contemporary Literature, Jessica Lynn Vaught

Online Theses and Dissertations

A recent trend in readership within online discourse communities is the emergence of the genre called “Good for Her,” which contains themes of transgression beyond traditional expectations of socially acceptable feminine behavior by situating revenge arcs to celebrate actions that otherwise would have been perceived as reprehensible. The emergence and popularity of the genre in the post-2016 sociopolitical climate in the United States reflects the demand for marginalized communities to see versions of themselves represented in texts in which the protagonist avenges herself in the face of patriarchal oppression. The genre stems from canonical literary tropes also created in the …

The Enduring Enigma Of Tom Bombadil: From Riddlic Styling To Metaphorical Encounter, Derek Simon

Journal of Tolkien Research

Conversationalists and critics alike continue to take delight in Tom Bombadil, yet remain perplexed by his enduring enigma. Interpretive positioning appears to be determined by the semantics of the term enigma deployed and how it intersects with any of the several textual standpoints adopted. The primary contention of this article is that the enigma is intentionally both a riddle (noun) and a riddling (verb). Reading the enigma through literary features of the Old English riddle-song can yield an alternate interpretation of Tom Bombadil that has received scant attention in critical commentary. In support of this contention, I propose to read …

'Their Limbs Were Loosened In Listening Horror': The Sublime In The Lay Of The Children Of Hurin, Matthew Thompson-Handell

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien's unfinished Lay of the Children of Húrin, written primarily during the second half of the 1920s, is a distinctive and remarkable piece of writing whose style stands apart from much of his other writing. In particular, it demonstrates the aesthetic of the sublime as explained and described by Edmund Burke in his 1757 work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The Lay presents a range of scenes and images that portray the qualities which (for Burke) generate the sublime - such as terror, obscurity, power and vastness - and which …

Fictional And Historical Narratives Of African American Soldiers Of Wwii, Abigail Rae Stewart

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the experiences of African American soldiers during World War II through the dual lenses of oral histories and fictionalized accounts, arguing that both are essential to fully understanding their multifaceted journeys at home and abroad. Oral histories provide direct, personal narratives from veterans themselves, capturing their voices, emotions, and reflections on the discrimination, camaraderie, and resilience that defined their wartime and postwar lives. These firsthand accounts offer invaluable insights into the structural realities of systemic racism within the military and society, as well as the personal sacrifices these soldiers made in the name of a country that …

The Tomboys Of Cherry Lane, Morgan Flynn

Trade & Scholarly Monographs

You can pack a lot of friendship, feelings, and field hockey into 45 years. Playing on a field hockey team teaches you a lot about yourself and others—including some things you didn’t want to know. Friends who turn out to be as poisonous as toadstools may be the same ones who help you and become a part of who you are. They might even be the friends who will be with you for the rest of your life.

The Implications Of Jack Kerouac’S Modern Flâneur In On The Road, Jane Valente

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

­­­­Post-World War II society became increasingly reliant on automobiles as the primary mode of transportation in the United States, fostering conditions that gave birth to a modern reconceptualization of the flâneur. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road serves as a reference for character analysis, continuing and revising the Parisian origins of the concept. Drawing from literary works such as Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting and Sherman Young’s essay “Morphings and Ur-Forms,” this essay argues that the protagonist of On the Road, Sal Paradise, embodies a uniquely American flâneur.

Lo Que No Borró El Desierto (2020) De Diana López Zuleta Y Cómo Maté A Mi Padre (2020) De Sara Jaramillo Klinkert: Crónica Y Memoir, Las Voces De Las Hijas En El Duelo, Bertha Galvan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the works of two Colombian authors, Diana López Zuleta and Sara Jaramillo Klinkert, who, as indirect victims of their father's murder, address impunity and its psychological effects through two genres: the chronicle and memoir. López Zuleta describes the process of mourning through the search for justice, while Jaramillo Klinkert explores mourning and the symbolic process of "killing the father" in a context of impunity. Both authors use their work to address the violence in Colombia, the memory, and the search for the truth, emphasizing the importance of literature as an aesthetic expression and a therapeutic and ethical …

The Vision Of The Inklings: Mythopoeia And Modern Christian Literature, Emmalene Sotomayor

Senior Honors Theses

The Inklings wrote with the intention to convey truth through myth. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and their friends developed stories to point readers to something greater—very often God. Christian creators now can look to their example while writing their own works of art. Currently, Christian fiction is in a sad state, known for mediocre romance novels that hardly portray faith in a moving or truthful manner. Believers can use the wisdom of Tolkien and Lewis to develop their own excellent works. Lewis and Tolkien’s beliefs in myth pointing to God, hope against adversity, and good resisting …

Ephemeral Legacy, Allison Hall

Master's Theses

Recently, my thoughts have centered on the problem of legacy. How do we forge bonds with other humans? What happens on an interpersonal level when these humans pass away, or when we pass, and they continue in life? How do queer spaces consistently offer deeper phenomena of interpersonal legacies; how does death operate as generational catalyst? I am particularly interested in putting these questions in the context of queer spaces. In queer culture, kinship is formed in ways that break from typical western notions of kinship. Despite being incoherent to western notions of family, queer bonds are extremely strong (Bradway …

Cultural And Personal Inheritance: Generational Trauma In Madeline Miller's Circe, Emily Stucky

The Cardinal Edge

Madeline Miller’s Circe, Miller considers varying perspectives on a well-known character—one who has been vilified as a monster, recast as a feminist icon, and rewritten into a variety of spaces in between. As part of this continuous narrative, Miller draws on the inherently hybrid space of Circe’s character to construct her as a product of her multi-faceted lineage. A character with so many identities makes for a complicated subject, but Miller utilizes this plurality to her advantage, deliberately casting Circe as a product of multiple backgrounds—occupying both the space of oppressor and oppressed—to both compound her status as a …

Warrior Women And Trans Warriors: Performing Masculinities In Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature, Carolina Castellanos Gonella

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Latin American literature has depicted warrior woman and trans warrior characters in armed conflicts, but literary critics have not paid much attention to their empowerment. They also have critiqued these characters using traditional gender binary concepts or have viewed their access to power as evil or abnormal. Warrior Women and Trans Warriors: Performing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature introduces a new perspective by analyzing how one trans warrior and two warrior women from three canonical novels contest traditional codes of behavior and appearance. It examines Pintada in the Mexican novel Los de abajo (1915); doña Bárbara in the Venezuelan …

Hans Holbein's Portrait Of Henry Viii: England's Own Personal Jesus, Amy Pitsor

Best Integrated Writing

Pitsor explores the possibility that Holbein’s late-stage change in the composition of the portrait from a three-quarter view of Henry to a frontal view held a motive to present Henry as the head of the newly established Church of England and as equal to the pope, and possibly to Christ himself.

La Falta De Los Supermercados En El Oeste De Dayton: Cómo Obtienen Los Estudiantes Comida Fresca En Los Desiertos Alimentarios (Un Ensayo Expositivo-Argumentativo, Catherine Iacobacci

Best Integrated Writing

After having learned about how poverty can affect children’s educational outcomes in one of her classes, Iacobacci wanted to learn more about how the issue affected the area where she lived and went to school. What she found out was incredibly shocking, and only furthered the idea that students are struggling with opportunity gaps, not achievement ones. Unfortunately, due to discriminatory loan practices from long ago, children from the 21st century are suffering physically, emotionally, and academically.

The Journey Within: My Travel Journel, Devonique Jones

Best Integrated Writing

This project is a multigenre research exploration that delves into Jones's personal journey of self discovery and growth during her first solo trip.

Investigation Of Ndv In Southern African Waterfowl Reveal Insightful Geographic And Biodiversity Trends To Help Contain The Virus, Lauren Goodwill

Best Integrated Writing

This study assesses the infection rates and trends of Newcastle disease in southern African waterfowl, a project carried out by Emily Murphy in Dr. Jeffrey Peters’ laboratory

Analysis Of The Integration Of Race And Cultural Concordant Doulas Into The Birth Experience Of African American Women, Cherissa Garcia

Best Integrated Writing

Garcia's study looks at how integrating race and cultural-concordant doulas into the birth experience of African American women would impact outcomes. She found similar studies that provided strong evidence to support doula integration. However, most did not select study populations that appropriately reflected the African American women at increased risk of poor outcomes. As a result, Garcia designed a study that looked at race and cultural concordance between doulas and patients from a wide range of SES backgrounds and varying degrees of pregnancy risk.

The Foreigner In Our Midst: Jewish Rights Debates In Revolutionary France, William Evans

Best Integrated Writing

The debates surrounding Jewish rights during the French Revolution concerned many of the same subjects that divide the Western world today. The fear of the other, immigration as a political tool, and the disagreements over assimilation are all subjects which feature prominently today. In this essay Evans sets out to explore these debates while fairly assessing the historical informants.