Now showing items 1-20 of 22

    • The Flight of the Junky: Existential Posthumanism and Immanent Life in Early Burroughs

      Hoffman, Todd; Department of English and World Languages (e Open Library of Humanities, 2022-05)
      William Burroughs early book Junky is generally separated from his later experimental fiction. Stylistically it accords much more to realism than the postmodern aleatory method he later innovated. However, Burroughs’ preoccupation with resisting all forms of subjectification, his disenchantment with bourgeois life and his simultaneous literal and tropic use of addiction as a form of flight from powers of normalization and conformity are strongly present in this early work. This paper explores Junky on three fronts. First, it shows the novel as an elaboration of a posthumanist existentialism by emphasizing the materiality of the body through Burroughs’ explanation of the physiological mechanisms of addiction. Through this existentialist posthumanism, the novel critically responds to Sartrian existentialism, which was so fashionable at the time of Burroughs’ writing, and repudiates the Jeffersonian idealization of the transcendental subject and its middle class figurations. The emphasis on the material body simultaneously challenges post-structuralist renderings of Burroughsian readings. This leads to a conception of strategies of flight from all forms of conformity by utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs and immanent Life. Junk is a vehicle of flight and self-affirmation, a means of highly individualized, libertarian modes of subjective deterritorialization. Addiction and habitual use are not mere uncontrolled thirsts, but forms of actualizing a wholly detached social and independent individual. But the danger of junk lies in its reterritorializing of the body through new assemblages of need and dependence, leading the protagonist to ultimately seek a different mode of escape. Junk illuminates our posthuman existential condition and leads Burroughs to seek new experimental forms of aesthetic expression.
    • The New Realism: Seeking Alternative to Postmodern Pessimism

      Hoffman, Todd; Department of English and World Languages (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017-04)
      Postmodern pessimism has been newly expressed by Mark Fisher as capitalist realism: the sense that one can't even imagine an alternative to capitalism. Fisher's use of the term realism points to the subjective content of the contemporary capitalist life-world. In contrast, a new brand of realism as assemblage theory has become prominent through Manuel DeLanda: that is, a complex ontology of interwoven networks of immanent unfolding that operate on multiple scales of size. DeLanda supplies a basic ontology of society that, combined with Fisher's sense of realism, elaborates a new potential for socio-economic change. This paper will examine Fisher and DeLanda's views and add the speculative materialist economic work of Benjamin Lozano as a means of bringing the two together.
    • EWL Insights February 2021

      Wynn, Alice; Department of English and World Languages (Augusta University, 2021-02-15)
      Table of Contents: A Conversation with Kiese Layman and Jesmyn Ward (New Mississippi Project and The African American Read-In), Faculty Spotlight (Guirdex Masse), Upcoming events (EWL Scholarship Workshop, SWCA-GA Spring Forum, Speaking Shakespeare, National Poetry Month Virtual Open Mic, Engendering Emergencies: Gender Polities in Times of Crisis and, Sand Hills Magazine), 5 Questions with EWL's Danielle Wardell, Faculty and Student News, EWL Scholarships and Awards 2021 Deadlines
    • EWL Insights: November 2020

      Williams, Seretha; Department of English and World Languages (Augusta University, 2020-11-20)
      Table of Contents: Upcoming Events (An Evening with Michele Harper and Making Fiction Writing Sustainable), Current Students (Madison Brown, Mary lu Kuhl Scholarship), Alumni Highlights, Faculty Spotlight (Christina Heckman)
    • Delusional Disorder in the Narrator of Maud

      Ravula, Havilah; English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University Libraries, 2020-05-04)
      This item presents the abstract for an oral presentation at the 21st Annual Phi Kappa Phi Student Research and Fine Arts Conference.
    • Portrayal of Mental Illness in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”

      Shaikh, Arika; English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University Libraries, 2020-05-04)
      This item presents the abstract for a poster presentation at the 21st Annual Phi Kappa Phi Student Research and Fine Arts Conference.
    • Two Minute Poem

      Department of English and Foreign Languages
      The creation of two poems using techniques of sampling, mixing, transforming, and reinventing lines from previously written poems of others.
    • Sonnets and its History: A Digital Timeline

      Department of English and Foreign Languages
      A class assignment for HUMN 2010 in Spring 2019 presents the growth and shifts of sonnets through an interactive timeline using Timeline JS software and platform.
    • Chicago House Music: A Digital Timeline

      Department of English and Foreign Languages
      A class assignment for HUMN 2010 in Spring 2019 presents the growth and shifts of Chicago House Music through an interactive timeline using Timeline JS software and platform.
    • Berlin Wall: A Reese Library Environmental Scan Infographic

      Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University, Spr. 2019)
    • Reese Library Infographic

      Halder, Bithika; Department of English and Foreign Languages (Spr. 2019)
      A class assignment presents an infographic of Reese Library.
    • Survey and Visualization

      Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University, Spr. 2019)
      A group class assignment presents an investigation on how colors affect mood and mental health.
    • Racial Segregation as a Social Determinant of Health Outcomes: Evidence from Counties in the State of Georgia

      Lee, Divesia; Department of Finance and Economics, Department of English & Foreign Languages (Augusta University, 2019-05)
      Social determinants of health account for about 50 percent of health outcomes- more than any other category, yet is the most understudied, therefore warranting further investigation. We contend that within social determinants of health, analysis of racial segregation is of importance. Racial segregation is a structural form of racism, where people of similar race live in communities apart from people of other races. Prior studies have used a dissimilarity index to measure racial segregation and its impact on health outcomes, and has suggested that racial residential segregation has a negative impact on health outcomes, but none of these studies have focused on county level data or the State of Georgia in particular. Using a dataset from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, supplemented by other public health and demographic data for all counties in Georgia, we use regression analysis to model the relationship between segregation and various health outcomes. A variety of social determinants of health were analyzed ranging from factors of economic stability, neighborhood and physical environment, and education, to aspects of the healthcare system. Initial results suggest that racial segregation relates to health outcomes, but it depends on the health outcomes being measured. Conclusions are pending further quantitative analysis.
    • You Should Know: Writing about Sexuality as a Woman

      McCarty, Kirsten; Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University, 2018-12)
      This thesis is a culmination of both my research on the topic of female sexuality in writing and a sampling of my own creative work based on this research. I begin with an exploration of how the past has influenced the current landscape for women’s writing, especially related to female sexuality. While women today are afforded many opportunities in the field of writing, certain topics still remain taboo for these writers. Sexuality as a whole is one such topic – from a woman’s relationship with her body to her sexual desire to her experience with sexual abuse. While many modern movements are encouraging women to discuss their experiences with sexual abuse, many other aspects of female sexuality remain hidden behind shame. Realizing this has inspired me to write a series of letters to my younger sister on several aspects of femininity. My creative work consists of personal experiences with abuse, desire, and the female body. By writing about these experiences openly, without denying the details that make them distinctly feminine, I hope to further the discussion of female sexuality in more serious literature.
    • Christianity as a Coping Method for Post-Traumatic Stress Demonstrated Through 19th - and 20th -Century Literature

      Smith, Allyson; Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University, 2019-05)
      This project explores the validity of faith, specifically Christianity, as a coping mechanism for those suffering from PTSD. Rather than solely looking at the scientific side of this topic, I will use two works of fiction to represent the cultural attitudes toward Christianity as it relates to PTSD.The selected works are Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.I chose to approach the topic this way because works of art, including fictional writings, tend to reflect the state of society in which the author lived. By incorporating context from the cultural and medical knowledge of PTSD at the time the books were written, events in the author's lives, and events in the world at the time the authors were writing their books, I will explorewhether a return to faith as a coping mechanism can be an effective strategy for the modernindividual struggling with PTSD.
    • Rebecca Harding Davis: Spatial, Gender, and Labor Roles in Literary Realism

      Humphrey, Katie; Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University, 2017-05)
      Rebecca Harding Davis, a West Virginia writer, explores how conceptions of gender shifted in the United States, especially during the Industrial Revolution. Davis published her novel in six separate issues of The Atlantic literary magazine from October of 1861 until March of 1862 in monthly installments. These pieces were eventually published as a novel entitled Margret Howth in 1862. This story explores the life of the young woman after whom the book is named. Davis’s approach emphasizes the recording of daily life as it is happening, commenting especially on the relationship between women and labor during the early Civil War period in the United States. Davis’s focus on the daily details of life allows her to bring attention to gender and labor inequalities in the nineteenth century Midwest. Davis’s female characters depict how women felt unable to make decisions, especially if their decisions brought them out of their home and away from the family. She also brings light to women’s treatment from both men and the upper class, who marked them as unable to do work outside the home because they believed they were physically and emotionally built only for domestic life. [Introduction]
    • Techniques Used to Establish the First Person Narrator and Perspective in Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet

      Walton, Breana; Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University Libraries, 2017-05-11)
      Directed by Billy Wilder and Edward Dmytryk respectively, the films noir Double Indemnity (1944) and Murder, My Sweet (1944) each have a storyline that unfolds from a first person perspective as told by a narrator. The techniques used in the films establish this first person perspective through which the films are understood. Both films include voice over as a technique, which determines who the narrator is and the amount of information withheld or disclosed to the audience. Establishing the visual perspective of the narrator is portrayed through differently for each film. While, Double Indemnity utilizes camera angle, Murder, My Sweet uses camera filters and special effects. Lastly, to achieve the first person narration, the character narrating in each film must be present in every scene or give explanation of events that occur in his absence. The various techniques used in each film function cohesively to establish the narrator and achieve his perspective through which the plot is understood by the audience.
    • Sowing the Seeds of Its Own Destruction: The State's Deployment of the Panoptic Gaze and the Disturbance of State Ideological Functioning in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange

      McKew, Melinda; Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University, 2010-12)
      Upon its reception in the early 1970s, A Clockwork Orange (1971) generated controversy concerning Stanley Kubrick's excessive use of violence and, in particular, sexual violence. In fact, in its original release form, the United States placed an X-rating on the film because of its graphic scenes of violence (Dirks). In a variety of ways, the film is undeniably disturbing in its portrayals of Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his fellow "droogs" 1 violently attacking, raping, and murdering other people. Equally, if not more, disturbing, however, is the state's use of violence against Alex, especially in its scientific experimentation on him. In perhaps the most famous scene from the film, Alex becomes the object of the state's reformatory experiment to transform heinous criminals, like Alex, into moral citizens. The experiment takes place in a movie theater, wherein Alex is forced to watch a variety of violent episodes as he undergoes chemical treatment to alter his psychological experience as he looks at the images. Immobilized by a restraining jacket with his eyes pried apart with specula, the chemicals previously injected into Alex's body begin to take effect and convert his sadistic sexual pleasure at the sight of violence into physical illness as the images play across the screen. No longer is the movie theater a place for Alex to simply "viddy" 2 films with pleasure; rather, the state has transformed it into a laboratory for violent scientific experimentation, whereby to "viddy" the images presented on the screen becomes the state's primary mechanism in exercising control over both Alex's physical body and mental state. By deploying the image in the state's campaign to control, the state situates the image within a complex of socio-political power, the function of which is to regulate human behaviors and desires. Yet, the image only contributes to the efficacy of the state's scientific experiment through the gaze. In a general way, the gaze is understood as the process whereby an individual looks at other people or objects. For film studies, in particular, the gaze gained prominence in the 1970s as a theoretical term that applies to the ways in which people look at filmic images (Chandler). More recently, theorists understand the gaze as a complex process that "emphasize[s] the embeddedness of the gaze of the individual in a social and contextual field of looks, objects, and other sensory information. The gaze is to enter into a relational activity of looking (emphasis in original)" (Sturken et al. 94). As Alex's experiences suggest, his gaze places him in a relational field that subjects him to the mechanisms of the state's socio-political power and control. For Alex, to gaze is not simply to see or to watch, as the general definition of the gaze implies; to gaze is to enter into a relationship of power with the state's regulatory mechanism, rendering Alex a docile subject of state authority. Indeed, as Kubrick's cinematographic framing and placement of the scientists suggest, the image does not violently afflict all those in the theater. The image only affects Alex, the subject of the experiment. Kubrick's low-angle shot exaggerates the scientists' positions above Alex precisely as a way to emphasize their control and power over the image. It is little coincidence that this shot also reveals the scientists' close proximity to the projector, which controls the image. In this way, Kubrick's cinematographic framing implies that those who control the image seemingly control those who gaze at it, and, as such, the state's power over the image translates into power over Alex. Feminist film theorists, though, have claimed that the gaze is not a gender neutral construction, as the previous explications imply, but one predicated upon notions of gender difference in which males sadistically gaze at female subjects, thus enabling men to control and exercise power over women as objects of their patriarchal desire. Such thinking, however, is reductivist and fails to account for more nuanced constructions of the gaze and its relationship to socio-political models of power. Indeed, to claim that the relationship between the gaze and power is fundamentally reducible to the field of gender is an improper theoretical approach for analyzing A Clockwork Orange. On one hand, Alex's gaze is not the product of an active male power. While Alex's gaze is important as it is required in order forthe experiment's effectiveness, his gaze is fundamentally passive. The state forces Alex to gaze at the images, and he is completely powerless in the experiment. Moreover, Alex cannot even regulate his desires. Before the experiment, Alex enjoyed a sadistic pleasure from violence. During the experiment, however, Alex's sadistic pleasures are radically absent and transformed into physical sickness. According to the traditional feminist paradigm, Alex could only interact with the gaze as the active gazer, placed in a position of power that allows him a sadistic pleasure at the objectification of women. This is decisively not the case in this scene since Alex's gaze is a passive effect to the state's coercive demands and produces a markedly non-sadistic response, physical illness. Nevertheless, the aim of this paper is not to debate the gender identity politics of the gaze; rather, as the previous paragraphs suggest, the intention of this paper is to examine the gaze beyond the confines of gender and to connect the gaze to larger socio-political institutions, namely the state, and the exercise of institutional power. Specifically, this paper will use Kubrick's film to address the complex theoretical relationship between the individual, the gaze, and the state through the combination of three major concepts by three principal thinkers: ideology as defined by Louis Althusser, panopticism as conceived by Michel Foucault, and the gaze as formulated by Jacques Lacan. Very briefly, according to Althusser, ideology is a construct, usually discursive, that attempts to define individuals' relationships to reality; however, ideology never accurately reflects individuals' realities because it is "imaginary," never fully encapsulating the relationships people have with their real conditions of existence (162). 3 Since ideology is imaginary, it hides the real relationship of individuals to their realities-that is, ideologies are invariably false to greater or lesser degrees. The effect of this is to reproduce the existing status quo or the existing system of social relations governing the lives of individuals (Ngyugen). In the previously mentioned scene from A Clockwork Orange, ideology presents itself in two distinct but inevitably connected ways. First, the cinema operates through the ideology that the cinema is a place free from the violent coercion of the state. Second, the state operates through the ideology that its scientific experimentation on Alex is one of beneficence. Through the experiment, these two ideologies become enmeshed within each other because the state uses the movie theater as its laboratory to alter Alex's behaviors. The desired effect of the state's experiment is, as previously noted, Alex's docility. Such a desired effect requires that the state transform the movie theater into a cinematic panopticon that uses the regulatory ability of the gaze to ensure a constant mode of self-regulation in Alex. Foucault's notion ofpanopticism will be used as a way to map the state's creation of a cinematic panopticon in its experiment. Nevertheless, this is not a peaceful experiment, for the state's treatment in its newly created cinematic panopticon is fundamentally violent. While ideology attempts to disguise the violence operating within the cinematic panoptic experiment, the scene itself destroys the veneer of ideology and exposes the ideological functioning within both the cinema and, consequently, the state. On one hand, then, the panoptic gaze does, in fact, render Alex a docile subject of the state, thus solidifying the state's power. On the other hand, however, the gaze paradoxically acts as that which disrupts ideological functioning and, therefore, the state's claim to power. Indeed, by utilizing Jacques Lacan's conception of the gaze, the gaze also functions as a gap that disturbs ideological functioning and marks the failure of the state to ensure violent ideological coercion. Thus, by placing both Foucauldian and Lacanian constructions of the gaze within the context of state power and ideological functioning, this paper will ultimately demonstrate that the traditional feminist formulation of the gaze is oftentimes too inchoate and poorly equipped to fully account for more complex dynamics between the gaze, the individual, and the state, an intricate relationship that is not necessarily related or reducible to the field of gender identity politics. [Introduction]
    • Escape from a Life of Secrets and Emergence of Psychopathy from a Mask of Sanity

      Sivised, Vittika; Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University Libraries, 2016-10-11)
      This paper explores the progression of psychopathy within the main character of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Lou Ford hides behind a social mask depicting a kindhearted oaf to conceal the psychopathic and violent personality that lies beneath. Throughout the novel, Lou Ford’s psychopathic personality begins to surface as he progresses from mere verbal jabs to murder as he tries to escape from his past and his obligations to his father. These obligations that he has put upon himself keep him from leaving the town; however, as he destroys the chains that bind him to the town by murdering those who represents these chains, his psychopathic personality, which is his real personality, grows in strength, and soon, the truth of his violent nature is known by the rest of the characters. In the end, to truly escape from the town, Lou Ford commits his final act: suicide. This act of suicide frees him from the past and he was able to be who he always was, a psychopath.
    • The Chinese Dream: The Confluence of Realism and Confucianism

      Laufer, Brittney; Department of English and Foreign Languages (Augusta University, 2014-12)
      In 2012, Xi Jinping became General Secretary, President, and the Chairman of The Central Military Commission in China. Since his start as the head of China, Mr. Xi’s speeches have referenced a nebulous concept called the “Chinese Dream.” While the “Chinese Dream” is in the early stages of its development and realization, it still offers a glimpse of what China’s international relations will strive to become. Xi Jinping has said, “The Chinese spirit brings us together and builds our country together. To create the Chinese Dream we must unite all Chinese power. As long as we stay united, we will share the opportunity to make our dreams come true” (Moore 2013, para. 8-9). These words call to mind Confucian ideals of self-improvement, community, and cooperation; furthermore, the call for “Chinese power” brings to mind the theory of realism in international relations, which emphasizes power and strength on the international level.This thesis will argue that Xi’s “Chinese Dream” is a theme that aims to increase China’s economic and military power as a regional hegemon, to establish China’s prestige as a global power surpassing the United States, and to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state and Communist Party through Confucian-based nationalism. China’s dream will ultimately upset the current status quo, and other states need to recognize this.