Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2016)

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The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

This year’s recipient is Samantha Dressel, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Rochester.

Front Matter

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No abstract provided.

Small Mid-Tudor Chronicles And Popular History: 1540-1560, Barrett L. Beer

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This essay examines twenty-two editions of little-studied small Mid-Tudor chronicles that were published by printers at Canterbury and London. They demonstrate the important role of printers in historical scholarship and offer a significantly different perspective on English history than the better-known, larger contemporary works of Robert Fabyan, Edward Hall, and Thomas Cooper. The chronicles also shed light on the readership of historical works by non-elite readers who presumably could not afford larger and more expensive chronicles. The short chronicles present a simplified view of the past, avoid propagating the well-known Tudor myths including the tyranny of Richard III, and demonstrate …

Master William’S Hamnet: A New Theory On Shakespeare’S Sonnets, Juan Daniel Millán

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This essay suggests the Fair Youth in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, to whom he later dedicated the cycle. Nevertheless, the larger claims of the essay are independent of the biographical details of Shakespeare’s life, and even independent of the particular ordering of the Sonnets as they have come down to us.

“The Man In The Shyppe That Showeth The Unstableness Of The World”: Social Memory And The Early Modern English Sailor, 1475-1650, Vincent V. Patarino Jr., Ph.D.

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Both medieval and early modern English writers described the tumultuous, raging sea as the epitome of chaos and evil. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both manuscript and print documents connected seething storms with the power and influence of evil, especially the devil. As the Reformation advanced, this link included Satan’s supposed minions, witches. In addition to these texts, woodcut illustrations confirmed in very stark terms, a direct association between the devil, the sea, and sailors’ supposedly anti-religious behavior and beliefs. One powerful image revealed “the man in the shyppe” tormented by the devil; others depicted the devil steering a …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2016)

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The Delno C. West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

This year’s recipient is Ruth Frost, Associate Professor of History, the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC.

Richard Iii: Beyond The Mystery, Daniel Hobbins

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He is not the likeliest theme for an American undergraduate classroom: his reign lasted barely two years; he contributed nothing of lasting significance to history; he is more memorable for his spectacular final defeat than for any victory; he was accused of murdering children; and he was after all an English king, as far removed as possible from the typical experience of an American undergraduate. Even the times he lived in are against him. In the immortal words of Mark Twain, his century was “the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages.”1 Yet he continues to …

“Like To My Soft Sex”: Female Revenge And Violence In The Fatal Contract, Samantha Dressel

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The Fatal Contract by William Heminge is not a good play. Its critical afterlife is essentially non-existent, with Fredson Thayer Bowers being one of the only critics to discuss it, criticizing its lack of “inspiration” and “ethical spirit.”1 I argue however, that the play is both inventive and moral, despite its many derivative aspects and narrative foibles. I suggest a new reading of the play as deeply innovative in terms of gender and revenge. Bowers criticizes the play’s morality because of the ultimate exoneration of Chrotilda, the central revengeress. The play can be reinterpreted and partially redeemed by understanding Chrotilda’s …

From Existentialism To Ecology: A Phlosophical Analysis Of Crisis In Samuel Beckett, Sean P. Collins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Hesse's Steppenwolf As Modern Ethical Fiction, Michał Koza

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Hesse's Steppenwolf as Modern Ethical Fiction" Michał Koza discusses the significance of "ethical fiction" in modern literature. Such fiction, according to Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, are not only milestones of ethical thinking, but more importantly offer a narrative for self-creation as an ethical subject. Harry Haller, the protagonist of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, is a man living on the border of modern subjectivity embodying a cultural and existential crisis. Koza argues that "ethical reading" enables one to see the relation between philosophy and literature that not only enter in a dialogue with each other, but also share …

Course Syllabus (Fa15) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Material Aesthetics", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

An examination of questions concerning aesthetic experience from the standpoint of the structural and functional logics of the capitalist mode of production

What The Fuck Is This?: Aesthetic Nature Of Being Or Ontology In The Poetry Of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alexis Stephenson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“What the Fuck is This?” examines the intersection of phenomenology and poetry arguing for an aesthetic nature of Being and focuses on how we know or experience the world instead of Cartesian absolutes. This subjective knowledge does not compete against objective knowledge but simply recognizes the use that poetic language has for communicating the subjective knowledge from experience of being as it unfolds for us. The major movements of the thesis focus on aesthetic objects, aesthetic intersubjectivity, and the aesthetic self. These are labeled “aesthetic” because a phenomenological methodology reveals a dialectic between that which is unfolding and that which …

Agency And Afro-Pessimism: Richard Wright And Ayi Kwei Armah, Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah

Honors Scholar Theses

Various scholars in Ethnic Studies have made the claim that people of color in the United States have constituted a colony within. That is to say, by virtue of the effects of institutional racism racialized bodies in the United States have experienced a form of colonialism unique to the American context. Examining the connections between forms of subjectivity in the United States and in Africa, this paper attempts to extend the concepts “social life” and “social death” to the literature of continental Africa. Through a close reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” and Richard …

Course Syllabus (Sp15) Coli 214 Literature & Society: "Societies Of Discipline And Control", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course description:

Optics is central to the arts of producing human subjects and governing our spatiotemporal deployment of vital forces. Yet, in the transition of societies from industrial to post-industrial modes of production, there seems to have occurred a parallel shift in governmental focus from merely producing and disciplining subjects at the material level to controlling them at the ideological. In this discussion-driven course, we will turn to works of theory and fiction in order to examine the basic tenets of discipline and control and consider the extent to which these social practices diverge and converge in our present era.

Delno C. West Award Winner (2015)

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Elizabeth Dolly Weber

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

De Syon Exierit Lex Et Verbum Domini De Iherusalem’: An Exegetical Discourse (C. 400-C. 1200) That Informed Crusaders’ Views Of Jews, Todd P. Upton

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This paper assesses how medieval Christian writers transformed encounters with Middle Eastern peoples such as the Jews into a complex theological discourse via the medium used by Pope Urban II in 1095 to launch the First Crusade, the Latin sermon. It argues that a hitherto unnoted homiletic tradition about Jews originated in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages based (1) on exegetical polemics that stretched back centuries in Christian theology, and (2) on a discernible chronicle and sermon tradition that depicted Jews in varying degrees of apologia based on a prophesied role as “witnesses” to the eschatological expectations of …

The Role Of Rumor And The Prodigal Son: Shakespeare’S Sources And Fathers And Sons In The Second Henriad, Steven Hrdlicka

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This article challenges traditional, critical interpretations of Shakespeare’s character Prince Hal by examining changes Shakespeare makes to sources he used, in particular the anonymous play Famous Victories of Henry V. Shakespeare does not portray a “prodigal” Prince Hal character as has often been argued by critics, but instead carefully follows Holinshed’s observations that the prince was virtuous in youth and that rumors about the prince’s supposed prodigal behavior were spread by those who were in the service of Henry IV. These rumors were aimed to cause conflict between father and son. Shakespeare’s inclusion of these two important details found in …

Specters Of Kurdish Nationalism: Governmentality And Counterinsurgent Translation In Turkey, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

This essay examines translations of the Kurdish epic poem Mem û Zîn into Turkish, tracing the logics behind these state-sponsored translations and examining how acts of translation are also efforts to regulate, translate, and erase Kurdish subjectivities. I argue that the state instrumentalizes Mem û Zîn’s potent nationalist currency in order to disarm present and future claims of Kurdish national autonomy. Using translation as a counterinsurgent governmental tool, the state attempts to domesticate Kurdish nationalist discourses even as it reproduces them, thereby transforming Kurdish nationalism into a specter of itself. Attending to this specter, however, allows us to see how …

The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

From Michel de Montainge’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship …

Philosophy's Rarified Air: On Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

I, Stereotype: Detained In The Uncanny Valley, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In "I, Stereotype," Seo-Young Chu applies Mori's theory of the uncanny valley not to robots but to a different species of humanoid artifact: stereotypes of the "yellow peril." Through analyses of stories by Sax Rohmer, World War Two propaganda, and films from the Bond franchise, Chu investigates ways in which the logic of the uncanny valley has interacted with and shaped Orientalist and techno-Orientalist stereotypes (as well as the stereotype-as-a-perceived-type-of-person more generally). In the process, Chu explores what it means to find one's ethnic group detained in the uncanny valley, what it means to use stereotyping as a time-saving technology …

The Sin Eater: Confession And Ingestion In The Romance Of Renard, Elizabeth Dolly Weber

Quidditas

The “Confession of Renard,” Branch XIV of the twelfth-century animal epic Roman de Renart (Romance of Reynard the Fox) explores the potential risks of the rite of confession, including the danger of whetting the appetite of the sinner by having him recount and re-live his delicious past sins. The fact that Renard, the “repentant” sinner, actually eats his confessor, suggests not only that merely talking about sin, particularly sexual sin, is a perilous business, but also that confession, like digestion, is a transformational process for both the penitent and the confessor.

Full Issue

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No abstract provided.

Literary Docudrama In The Classroom: Teaching With John Hatcher’S The Black Death: A Personal History, Ginger Smoak, Jennifer Mcnabb

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John Hatcher’s The Black Death: A Personal History is an unconventional text. It recounts the experience of plague by a single, extraordinarily well-documented village in Suffolk, England: Walsham le Willows. While such a focus perhaps seems fairly standard of case studies or microhistory, Hatcher’s book is more than a narrow treatment of a corner of England. In a preface entitled “The Nature of This Book,” he opens with a discussion of both his journey toward the realization that he wanted to write a markedly different sort of treatment of the Black Death than present in extant scholarship and a rather …

Front Matter

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No abstract provided.

Symbiotic Werewolves And Cybernetic Anchoresses: Premodern Posthumans In Medieval Literature, Jennifer K. Cox

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This paper examines how individual agency in medieval society might be expanded through posthuman configurations; in so doing, it pushes the boundaries of traditional practices in medieval research to include more contemporary ideas. Although as scholars, we must avoid anachronistic readings of these texts, ignoring modern thinkers like N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman) and Donna Haraway (“A Cyborg Manifesto”) too easily disregards their valuable – and timeless – insights. While the term “posthuman” can evoke images of cyborgs or superhuman mutants using wormholes to traverse space and time, this pop culture perspective often overlooks less technoscientific examples of …

Domestic Cruelty: Saevitia And Separation In Medieval France, Kristi Diclemente

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This article examines the role cruelty played in marriage separation cases in fourteenth-century Paris. Cruelty was an effective and relatively successful means for women to initiate separation litigation. The archdeacon’s court regularly cited saevitia as a reason for its decision to legally separate marriages. Marital cruelty, however was a complicated issue and what constituted cruelty was not defined within the text. Through an examination of the use of saevitia in the legal cases,in conjunction with contemporary exempla of abusive marriages, such as the vita of Godelieve of Gistel, the author finds that it was a complicated term representing a variety …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2015)

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Alaina L. Bupp

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

“I Am I”: The Allegorical Bastard In Shakespeare’S King John, Alaina Bupp

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Shakespeare’s King John provides readers with a particularly interesting, though relatively unexamined character: Philip Falconbridge, the bastard. This character exists somewhere between the allegorical forbears of medieval morality plays and the intensely interior specificity of the likes of Hamlet. Philip begins the play with a specific, though fictional, identity, but consciously decides to become allegorical. We can see this transformation at the intersection of text and context, of the words spoken by Philip as he becomes Bastard (the allegorical figure) and the First Folio’s construction of that transformation. Bastard employs particular rhetoric to firstly shed his old, specific identity and …

Lisbeth Salander Lost In Translation - An Exploration Of The English Version Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Kajsa Paludan

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This thesis sets out to explore the cultural differences between Sweden and the United States by examining the substantial changes made to Men Who Hate Women, including the change in the book’s title in English to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. My thesis focuses in particular on changes in the depiction of the female protagonist: Lisbeth Salander. Unfortunately we do not have access to translator Steven T. Murray’s original translation, though we know that the English publisher and rights holder Christopher MacLehose chose to enhance Larsson’s work in order to make the novel more interesting for English-speaking …