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This collective of videos provides quick prompts for literature responses to springboard students into analytical thinking so they can avoid merely summarizing the material. This approach involves breaking down aspects of the readings through the points of civics, science, and culture to better understand how each piece of literature might affect readers and the world around them. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-oer/1010/thumbnail.jpg

The present study examines the figure of Mary Magdalene in the poetry of Lope de Vega and Richard Crashaw. I propose that while setting Mary Magdalene as the perfect example to convert, both authors could also express their conversion through the composition of two different poems: “Las Lágrimas de la Magdalena” by Lope de Vega and “Saint Mary Magdalene or, The Weeper” by Richard Crashaw. Each poem is centered on the idea of Mary Magdalene’s copious tears as the performative mark of her repentance which will effect her conversion. These two conversions are placed within two European literary traditions, Spain and England; as well as two different processes: on the one hand, Lope de Vega would go from a licentious life in his early years to becoming a priest at the end of his life, thus, devoting his life to religion. On the other hand, Richard Crashaw’s conversion would take place in between two conflicting religious beliefs, i.e., his transition from Protestantism to Catholicism. The other main goal of this work is studying these poems through the Baroque movement developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Hence, Lope de Vega’s poem is full of Baroque characteristics typical of the Spanish conceptism despite his reluctance consider his poetry Baroque. Crashaw, on his side, presents a poem which differs from the literary production in England in the first part of the seventeenth century. His Baroque sensibility would be, accordingly, influenced by his readings of the Spanish Golden Age authors. Therefore, anomaly, exaggeration, tempus fugit, conceptism, contradiction, paradox, and binary oppositions are Baroque characteristics both authors have in common in regard to their own particular description of both Mary Magdalene’s biblical stories and tears. Lastly, both poems will lead us to draw parallels with the Song of Songs in terms of spiritual conversation, and feminine identification.

In the dedicatory epistle to his 1660 translation of Diego de San Pedro’s sentimental romance Tractado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda (1491), Thomas Sydserf recounts the meandering linguistic transmission of the text to English: from the fictitious Greek source, to San Pedro’s Spanish, to Nicolas de Herberay’s French to Bartolomeo Maraffi’s Italian to four English translations and eight separate editions from 1543 to 1660. This convoluted transmission history leads Sydserf to lament that San Pedro’s romance has been “much castrated in its undergoing so many transmutations.” Yet mining the rich strata of intermediary translation proves to be its own kind of interlinguistic romance. This paper will focus on the process of intermediary transmutation, i.e., the textual-material encrustation of paratexts, polyglot formatting, typeface code-switching, and illustrations that framed the translations, particularly in the transformation of a popular Spanish novela sentimental to an Italian language-learning aid, The Italian Schoole-maister (1597).

This roundtable gathers scholars of early modern translation and book culture to investigate the various forms of mediation (textual, linguistic, material, interpretive etc.) that intervene in the production of indirect translations – that is translations based on previous translations – in the early modern period. Traditionally perceived as merely derivative, “second-hand” literary works, indirect translations have been given marginal attention (apart from a few famous examples) in early modern scholarship. Conversely, researchers in Translation Studies have recently started to address this phenomenon and to offer some theoretical and methodological tools towards its study, but with little attention to the early modern period. The objectives of the proposed roundtable are therefore to present some cases of early modern indirect translations, to explore conceptual, archival, and digital resources available to study them, and to highlight the critical relevance of examining the various mediations involved in their production and dissemination.

"The fact is that all writers create their precursors” (Borges). In his Englished Romance Epic The Faerie Queene (1590/96), Edmund Spenser transmutes his generic precursors: Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516/1532) and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Spenser so effectivelyacculturates the Italian Romance Epic for his Elizabethan audience that The Faerie Queen becomes a form of intermediary translation, surrogate source text, or interpretive overlay for contemporary translators like Sir John Harington (1591) and Edward Fairfax (1600). These translators read Ariosto and Tasso through The Faerie Queene: characters, episodes, and individual translation choices bear a Spenserian inflection. Particular attention will be given to the Bowers of Alcina, Armida, and Acrasia, as they morph from Ariosto and Tasso through Spenser the literary grafter. Analyzed intertextually, these Bowers are sites of metalinguistic transformation—locus amoenus as locus translatus.

Nineteenth-century British authors, in particular, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Austen, often turned to orphaned children as a means to drive the plot of their novels. While struggles such as displacement were often accurately depicted, the abovementioned authors and their contemporaries often glossed over or completely disregarded the trauma and psychological implications felt by these orphans. As psychology gained prominence as a discipline through the works of Sigmund Freud and others, modern British literature saw a shift in its consideration of orphans and, additionally, emotionally absent mothers. This thesis will examine three modern British novels; Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and Graham Swift’s Waterland with respect to their exploration of the psychological and possible traumatic impact of their protagonists lives in a variety of disrupted family dynamics.

This thesis assesses the centrality of care relationships in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and, by doing so, seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of individual and collective morality. Using the ethics of care as a methodological framework to acknowledge the importance of care acts and successful care relations – especially those complicated by the presence of dichotomized socioeconomic hierarchies – will allow readers to engage more fully with this text, its author, her relations, her characters, and the community of readers; reading Eliot’s work from this lens will allow us to validate every interaction, every thread of connectedness, and every act of care to better understand Eliot’s webs of relation. This thesis argues that it is the atypical or unexpected social figure that arises as the most effective care practitioner, regardless of social class. In order to arrive at this point, it will provide a foundational understanding of both care ethics – from the work of Nel Noddings to that of more contemporary theorists like Talia Schaffer and Sandra Laugier – and the economic theories circulating during Eliot’s time – Smithian, Ruskinian, and Socialist. Through an assessment of Dorothea Brooke, Fred Vincy, Mary Garth, and others within the Middlemarch community, this thesis integrates varying notions of political economy, reciprocity, engrossment, and genuine care for both compensated or uncompensated care acts. By doing so, it strives to privilege the success of authentic care, thereby triumphing the value of relationships over personal gain or ambition.

In this dissertation, I analyze the 20th century text, A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf (2005), and I engage with Woolf's concept of a woman's need for a room of her own in which she can be free to think for herself, study, write, or pursue other interests away from the oppression of patriarchal societal expectations and demands. Through library-based research, I identify four screens in Woolf's work through which she viewed and critiqued culture, and I use these screens to reconceptualize "a room of one's own" in 21st Century terms. I determine that the new "room" is intimately and intricately technological and textual and it is reformulated in the digital spaces of blogs, social media, and Web sites. Further, I introduce the new concept of the technologized politically embodied cyborg, or TPEC, and examine the ways 21st Century TPECs are shaping U.S. culture in progressive ways.

The purpose of this thesis is to determine how guilt and shame act as engines of social control in two Gothic narratives of the 1790s, how they tie into the terror and horror modes of the genre, and how they give rise to two distinct narrative models, one centered on punishment and the other on rehabilitation. The premise of the paper is that both Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian harness radically different emotional responses, one that demands the punishment of the aberrant individual and the other that reveres the reformative power of domestic felicity. The purposes of both responses are to civilize readers and their respective representations of the Holy Office of the Inquisition are central to this process. I examine the role of the Inquisition in The Monk and contrast it with the depiction of the same institution in The Italian. Lewis's book subordinates the ecclesiastical world to the authority of the aristocracy and uses graphic scenes of torture to support conservative forms of social control based on shame. The Italian, on the other hand, depicted the Inquisition as a conspiratorial body that causes Radcliffe's protagonists, and by extension her readers, to question their complicity in oppressive systems of social control and look for alternative means to punishment. The result is a push toward rehabilitation that is socially progressive but questions the English Enlightenment's promotion of the carceral.