My thesis explores the later work of author J.D. Salinger, including two narratives featured in Nine Stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and "Teddy," and Franny and Zooey, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," and "Seymour: an Introduction." Through my analysis I argue that the religious nature of Salinger's fiction...
Online fanfiction communities have received attention for providing spaces of creativity and individual empowerment. Yet as critics have sought to establish fanfiction as a worthy object of study, many have not grappled with the ways that fanfictions not only trouble, but also reinforce various discourses and ideas of gender and...
This thesis situates a discussion of Thoreau's later natural history essays in the context of the author's other writings. Beginning with an examination of the writings of Thoreau's friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, this paper examines Thoreau's relation to and departure from Emerson's understanding of time, place, and pattern...
In the early part of his philosophical career, Paul Ricoeur worked out a general theory of symbols which he illustrated with the symbols of evil. He subsequently explained this theory in several essays (his final major statement on symbols can be found in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of...
The Modern era, roughly the time between 1860-1930, brought about a significant restructuring of artistic mediums. From the canvas to the page, artists of the twentieth century turned towards collaboration as a means by which they could reconfigure their works. Painters, writers, and dancers, borrowed aesthetic techniques from one another...
Poet John Haines is best known for his first book of
poetry, Winter News, which was published in 1966. The book
contains poems about the Alaskan landscape that surrounded
Haines during his many years of living in Richardson,
Alaska. The recurring motifs in his poems include hunting,
trapping, the Arctic...
In This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and several of his short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald questions the importance of wealth as a factor in supporting happiness and fostering the American Dream on an individual basis. With these texts, Fitzgerald acknowledges that wealth is a factor and, simultaneously, a...
Many authorities state that the development of macabre images were a result of the plague that first swept through western Europe 1347-1350. However, many aspects of the macabre were already in place prior to the plague. A more realistic explanation for the macabre is in the modification of religious belief,...
Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the top ten best-selling children's picture books of 2006 reveals that these books contain elements of systematic privilege and oppression. Dominant group members are numerically overrepresented in the sample. Major emergent themes are the normalization of racism and white privilege, the stereotypical portrayal of the...
As the embodiment of the religiously unsettled Victorian Era in which she lived,
George Eliot sought to discover a system of belief that would allow her to reaffirm and
maintain her feelings of faith and morality. She believed that the subjective nature of
traditional Christianity needed to be replaced with...