Other Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Striking Tools Of Indigenous North America: Rethinking Their Representations In Media, Literature, And Collection Systems, Wesley Martin

University Research

The striking tool as a concept has existed since time immemorial. Once Europeans began colonizing the North American continent, Indigenous striking tools became conflated with the word “tomahawk.” The meaning of tomahawks and other striking tools is distorted in history, because western scholars and artists saw them from a limited worldview. This distortion made its way into archaeological reports, museum displays, and digital collections’ metadata. Some typologies that collectors and museum staff make for tomahawks continue to limit how the public may see them. Professionals working in the material culture fields should consider how this occurs. This article demonstrates these …

2026 Persimmon Creek - Full Journal, Beth Keefauver, Wayne C. Robbins

Persimmon Creek

Dear Readers: Literary journals are a common component of colleges and universities spanning across many continents. As many students experience the drastic transition from childhood to independence, emotions can feel overwhelming, and life can quickly become flooded with anxiety. Writing is an outlet for many; a place humanity turns to as a form of secure therapy.

In William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, Berowne muses, “Never durst poet touch a pen to write until his ink were temper’d with Love’s sighs” (Act 4, Scene 3).

Without emotion, writing has no depth. The words on the page might seem eloquent, but the …

I-25, Gabriel Reinhardt

Persimmon Creek

EF-S18-55mm ƒ3.5-5.6 IS II

5184x3456

ISO 400

24mm

ƒ8

4.0s

Meet Phoenix, Feng Jiang

Persimmon Creek

One act play

Roadkill, Kristi S. Miller

Persimmon Creek

Dear Beth Keefauver,

Thank you for considering my short story “Roadkill,” a 3371-word short story, for inclusion in Persimmon Creek. Below is my biography:

“Could you kill someone?” is Kristi Miller’s favorite question. It divides the keepers from the bores, and she can’t tolerate boredom. After growing tired of being a molecular biologist, she moved to Western North Carolina to teach kayaking and live in a van down by the river. Now she’s a professor of nursing. Her husband supports her need for drama – when their biological daughter was almost two, they adopted a sibling group of three. If …

Moths In The Closet, Brandi E. Shuler

Persimmon Creek

a Work of Flash Fiction
This is a personal reflection about clothing and what makes something important. Why do people hold onto things in a world where replacing them would be so easy?

The Tea Party, Adrienne D. Fuehrer

Persimmon Creek

Molly, Erika, Mauve, and Mr. Snuggles are having a tea party. With a focus on imagery and childhood whimsy, “The Tea Party” embraces the restraints of flash fiction to tell a story within a moment.

Built To Last, Jack Andrew Hines

Persimmon Creek

A young man embarks on a career as a carpenter in South Carolina's Lowcountry. He falls under the tutelage of a heavy drinking master carpenter and, together, they strive to master their craft while holding onto their pride in an environment where their culture is being degraded and appropriated.

Cellphone, Kasey Waters

Persimmon Creek

this work describes the toxic relationships that many of us have with our phones and technology.  i wrote this post hurricane helene.

Palace, Kelis D. Rodgers

Persimmon Creek

A poem written about a fallen empire.

Happy New Year, Delaney Brown

Persimmon Creek

"Happy New Year," following the poetic style of writers like Kaveh Akbar and Richard Siken, uses freestyle form and interpretive spacing to convey its narrative. The work explores the emotional recoil of a badly ended relationship and the self-doubt that often lingers when one questions their own actions and decisions.

Gravity Squared, Delaney Brown

Persimmon Creek

"Gravity Squared" explores cyclical themes of growth and spirituality. Inspired by Victoria Chang's The Trees Witness Everything, this poem loosely follows the tanka style of alternating 5 and 7-syllable lines.

The Echoes Of Anguish, Karis Del Toro

Persimmon Creek

This is a poem written about the self-inflicted, internal anguish that we feel and carry from pass regrets.

482 Days, Catherine R. Downey

Persimmon Creek

A Valentine's Day present to my partner to let him know how appreciated and cared for he is.

Homeplace, Monica P. Greene

Persimmon Creek

Poetry - home, peace, mountains, rest, belonging

Fiesta Of Flowers, Blanca L. Ortega Moreno

Persimmon Creek

Celebrating the Latino & Hispanic community by creating a piece reflecting traditional woven shirts from Oaxaca & the Mexican culture. This piece is handmade to reflect the vibrant colors found in Mexican culture.

This piece was included in an art show that ran from October 12th to November 4th representing Hispanic Heritage Month. It was displayed at the City of Greer Center for the Arts.

Assessing The Relationship Between Housing Provision And State Legitimacy Through The Vision 2030 Plan In Saudi Arabia, Shovan Bala

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scholars have long evaluated the politicization of housing by examining the relationship between housing provision and legitimacy across democratic and authoritarian states. This thesis contributes to the scholarship on housing provision and state legitimacy by examining the Saudi state’s recent housing development efforts, and its role in shaping citizens’ housing aspirations and informing their understanding of housing as a state responsibility. Using the Vision 2030 Plan’s Sakani and Ejar initiatives, I examine the nexus between Saudi government’s housing development efforts and provision of financial incentives and citizens’ perceived reliance on the state for housing. I evaluate these housing initiatives through …

Trump's Rise: Will China Disrupt The Current Order Or Maintain It?, Ahmad Nurcholis, Wasisto Raharjo Jati

Global: Jurnal Politik Internasional

This paper examines the long-term likelihood of a US-China war, particularly in light of Donald Trump's US presidential win. The two nations have consistently experienced strained relations and intense rivalry, especially throughout the Trump and Biden presidencies. Both leaders are worried about China's growing assertiveness. While these nations are still battling over trade, this situation could easily escalate into an armed conflict later on. Due to China's increasing economic power and America's reduced influence in specific areas, there are predictions of a change in how the world is governed. This paper examines the question of whether China will become a …

On The Paces Of Artaud: An Attempt To Examine An Afro-Futurism Template Through The Lens Of Theatre Of Cruelty, Nihal Hassan Abdulla

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the scenic rationale of Baby Love, highlighting its poetic stage language and metaphoric choices. Referencing Artaud, it investigates how scenery challenges conventional theatre and demonstrates the feasibility of Afro-futurist aesthetics within the Theatre of Cruelty. The approach prioritizes sensory communication, following Artaud’s emphasis on stage techniques.

Referring to the influence of Artaud’s intense artistic milieu, which contributed to the crystallization of the concept of Cruelty, and identifying methodologies used in developing my design metaphor.

Tracing the emergence of the Afrocentric movement in America reveals that the literary roots of Afro-futurism were established in cyberculture a bit earlier …

Eschatological Echoes: Reading The Bible And The Harry Potter Series, Athira Mohan Dr

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Death has been a major topic in children’s and adolescent literature , which has invited scholarly discourse over different ages. While death was very commonly featured in the puritanical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was also deemed to be a subject too sensitive for the genre of children’s literature in the early twentieth century(Aries 1975), due to a combination of factors such as lowered child mortality rate and heightened concern for childhood as a special social category. However, contemporary children’s and adolescent literature focuses on death as an important part of human life, and invites discussions on …

Can An Ai System Be Creative? A Critical Perspective From Art And Engineering, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

This paper examines the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be creative, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who has also spent most of his life engaged in the arts as actor, stage and film director, writer, composer, and visual artist, and in philosophy. Drawing on Margaret Boden’s foundational framework — both her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational) — the paper argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in …

Post-Digital Creativity In Underacknowledged Communities, Tegan Pyke, Hannah Ackermans, Zahra Rizvi

ELO (un)supervised 2026

In a world marked by polarization and institutional censorship, what we pay attention to matters more than ever. We would almost forget that people, unsupervised, cannot help but be creative. Increasingly, this creativity takes the form of post-digital art and literature, often without awareness of “electronic literature” as a concept or the ELO as an institution. In this panel, we open up the conversation of researching post-digital creativity outside e-lit cultures to learn what role multimodality and participatory cultures (can) play inside e-lit cultures.

To encourage active participation in this online panel, we intend to split our session into two …

(Un)Easily Writing The Future, Stuart Moulthrop, Judith Pintar, John G. Mcdaid

ELO (un)supervised 2026

General Abstract: This panel brings together three experienced digital writers who have recently begun to explore Language Models and transformers in creative and academic practice.  Each of us will comment on recent experience and projects, reflecting on how these technologies alter the way we think of ourselves as writers and teachers.

[1] Judith Pintar, "The Non-applicability of Wishing due to Lack of Capacity".

Pintar will discuss her experience of facilitating Gemini AI in a Rogerian therapy session with an Eliza bot written in the Inform programming language. The session is occasionally interrupted with a meta-conversation with Gemini regarding its responses. …

Regarding World(S): A Review Of Elisha Cohn’S Milieu: A Creaturely Theory Of The Contemporary Novel (2025) And Daniel Wright’S The Grounds Of The Novel (2024), Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

World Literature According To Its Poster Children, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Some of the most influential pronouncements on world literature have been made by the kind of authors who are most likely to emerge as representatives of world literature once we agree on a definition, including Goethe, the young Marx, Tagore, Gorky, Hesse, Kundera, and the distinguished signatories of the manifesto for a world-literature in French. Breaking out of this vicious circle by referring to the authority of pure theorists of world literature is not the solution, as this would only pull us into a new vicious circle where most of these theorists would mostly remind us of the names that …

A Crisis For Utopia: Jameson, The Collective, And The Future Of World Literature, Trevor Jackson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Working with Fredric Jameson’s influential discussions of utopia and world literature, the essay suggests that the prospect of utopia is frightening and also possibly boring insofar as it threatens to drain away the already waning possibility of experience in a postmodern, globalized world. In this world, resentment of the present seems to go hand in hand with a nostalgia for a fictitious past, underscoring the difficulty of conceptualizing new social, cultural, and economic arrangements. Viewing world literature as a possible source of a new utopian thought, a utopia unlimited to its contemporary dystopian guises, the essay retraces Jameson’s pronouncements on …

The Proletarian Moment In World Literature, Anna Björk Einarsdóttir

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

During the interwar period (1918–1939), an international literary movement emerged in relation to internationalist and socialist politics and political struggles. Writers around the world saw themselves as contributors to a new proletarian moment within the historical unfolding of world literature. This movement was international, and writers situated on the peripheries of both the capitalist core and the emerging socialist world looked toward revolutionary Russia and other centers of the socialist world. This paper focuses on three such authors, the American Richard Wright, the Argentinian Roberto Arlt, and the Icelander Halldór Laxness. During the interwar period, all three were involved in …

Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay investigates how Zheng Zhenduo (郑振铎 1898–1958) developed a theory of world literature in response to threats to China both politically from without and culturally from within. Centered on an analysis of his 1922 article “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀), the essay argues that although Zheng believed like many of his contemporaries in the transformative effects of reading world literature in translation, that does not constitute the entirety of his theorization of world literature. Instead, he accepted the first-move advantage of other national literatures in defining both world literary standards and literature …

An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Vsemirnaia Literatura publishing house was founded in Petrograd by Maxim Gorky less than a year after the October Revolution. Aligned with the objectives of the new regime, its mission was to translate and publish a substantial body of European and Asian poetry and prose, thereby contributing to the broad cultural education of the emerging Soviet generations. These ambitions clearly reflect a key element of Gorky’s conception of culture as well: for Gorky, culture in its broadest sense (encompassing literature, art, music, and science) had the potential to unite humanity under the ideals of peace and harmony. Within this new …

Introduction: World Literature As World Crisis, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.