IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks :: Browsing by Author "Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-"

Browsing by Author "Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-"

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And Just as Far as Ever from the End: A Textual Analysis of The Gunslinger by Stephen King
(2010-01-13T14:24:50Z) Kent, Sharmin T.M.; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-; Touponce, William F.; Rebein, Robert, 1964-
Beginning as a collection of short stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1978 and novelized in 1982, The Gunslinger is the first novel in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. This thesis explores the textual journey of the novel that serves as the foundation for a series that has left its mark throughout King’s broader fictional canon. After finishing the final three novels of the series, King revised The Gunslinger to bring it closer to the narrative essence of the series’ subsequent novels. Collation of all three versions of the text—the serialized Fantasy & Science Fiction stories, the 1982 novelization and the 2003 revised and expanded version—reveals a sometimes overlapping pattern of revisions to the novel. These revisions concentrate on character, the novel’s cosmological framework, and languages and dialects King uses later in the series. The impact of these revisions extends beyond the plot elements of the series itself, as a number of King’s most popular novels—The Stand, ’Salem’s Lot, and It among them—have plot arcs that bend toward the Dark Tower mythos. King returned to the novel’s three main characters—Roland, Jake, and the man in black—to refine their actions and clarify their motivations. This also gave him the opportunity to provide the reader with more of their interwoven histories, a strategy that established the background for the role each character plays later in the series. In addition to introducing details about the main characters of the series, King enhances and redefines the world of The Gunslinger; the revisions reveal connections both within and outside of the Dark Tower multiverse. King also uses revision to introduce a variety of languages and dialects Roland encounters on his journey through an endless path of worlds. Finally, the textual evolution of The Gunslinger documents King’s development of a theme central to his entire canon: the multifaceted theme of salvation and sacrifice. In controlling the evolution of the Dark Tower series, particularly with his return to revise The Gunslinger, Stephen King shows that he is capable of maintaining a complex saga with a great degree of literary vision and craftsmanship.
"Charity Never Faileth": Philanthropy in the Short Fiction of Herman Melville
(2014) Goldfarb, Nancy D.; Schultz, Jane E.; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-; Robertson, Nancy Marie, 1956-; Tilley, John J.
This dissertation analyzes the critique of charity and philanthropy implicit in Melville’s short fiction written for periodicals between 1853 and 1856. Melville utilized narrative and tone to conceal his opposition to prevailing ideologies and manipulated narrative structures to make the reader complicit in the problematic assumptions of a market economy. Integrating close readings with critical theory, I establish that Melville was challenging the new rhetoric of philanthropy that created a moral identity for wealthy men in industrial capitalist society. Through his short fiction, Melville exposed self-serving conduct and rationalizations when they masqueraded as civic-minded responses to the needs of the community. Melville was joining a public conversation about philanthropy and civic leadership in an American society that, in its pursuit of private wealth, he believed was losing touch with the democratic and civic ideals on which the nation had been founded. Melville’s objection was not with charitable giving; rather, he objected to its use as a diversion from honest reflection on one’s responsibilities to others.
Fahrenheit 451: A Descriptive Bibliography
(2011-10-10) Barrett, Amanda Kay; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-; Touponce, William F.; Coleman, Martin A.
This document offers scholarly researchers, students and general readers a reliable, genealogically-based descriptive bibliography of all U.S. and British publications of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). The driving force behind this thesis is the desire to preserve, catalog, describe and archive a work of literature that has stood the test of time and continues to be an influential milestone of American culture well into the twenty-first century.
The hard-boiled detective: personal relationships and the pursuit of redemption
(2010-07-19T17:10:19Z) Howard, David George; Rebein, Robert, 1964-; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-; Touponce, William F.
By start of the 1920s, the United States had seen nearly forty years of vast accumulations of wealth by a small group of people, substantial financial speculation and a mass change in the economic base from agricultural to industrial. All of this ended in 1929 in a crushing depression that spread not only across the country, but also around the world. Hard-Boiled detective fiction first reached the reading public early in the decade initially as adventure stories, but quickly became a way for authors to express the stresses these changes were causing on people and society. The detective is the center of the story with the task of reestablishing a certain degree of order or redemption. An important character hallmark of this genre is that he is seldom able to do this, or that the cost is so high a terrible burden remains. His decisions and judgments in this attempt are formed by his relationship with the people or community around him. The goal of this thesis is to look at the issues raised in the context of how the detective relates to a person or community in the story. For analysis, six books were chosen arranged from least level of personal relationship by the detective to the most intimate. The books are Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, The Galton Case, by Ross MacDonald, Cotton Comes to Harlem, by Chester Himes, Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley, and I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane. In the study of these books, a wide range of topics are presented including political ideologies, corruption, racial discrimination and family strife. Each book provided a wealth of views on these and other subjects that are as relevant today as when they were written.
Last Word in Art Shades: The Textual State of James Joyce's Ulysses
(2008-03-06T16:35:24Z) Tully-Needler, Kelly Lynn; Davis, Ken, 1945-; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-; Touponce, William F.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a work of art that engendered scandal in every stage of its production, dissemination, and reception. The work is now hailed as the prose monument of modernism, a twentieth-century masterpiece, and revolutionary in its stylistic technique, its foregrounding of language and psychological drama, and its ambiguity. Ulysses is, in truth, a simple tale, about a lifetime of one day, in a world of one place, in the lives of one people, played out on a stage of pages. The telling of the tale is far from simple—it is among the greatest literary artifacts of our cultural heritage. But the text of Ulysses continues to be entangled in the tension of its status as both a literary artifact, created by an artist, and a cultural artifact, influenced by the aspects of its currency. Among the many questions the novel begs is, who controls the meaning of a work of literary art? This thesis begins to answer that question. Chapter 1 surveys available materials and outlines four waves in the history of textual scholarship of Ulysses. This chapter reads like the prose version of a library catalogue. Sorry, it is a symptom of academese. Chapter 2 outlines the history of censorship and suppression of Ulysses. Chapter 3 gives a historical context to legalizing the work and discusses the implications of the ban upon the development and reliability of the text. Chapter 4 outlines the second scandal of Ulysses, at the close of the twentieth century, now commonly referred to as the Joyce Wars. Chapter 5 discusses the influences upon Gabler’s editorial method and the resultant text. Together, these chapters tell the story of the book's creation and life in print.
"Minds will grow perplexed": The Labyrinthine Short Fiction of Steven Millhauser
(2014-02-25) Andrews, Chad Michael; Rebein, Robert, 1964-; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-; Bourus, Terri
Steven Millhauser has been recognized for his abilities as both a novelist and a writer of short fiction. Yet, he has evaded definitive categorization because his fiction does not fit into any one category. Millhauser’s fiction has defied clean categorization specifically because of his regular oscillation between the modes of realism and fantasy. Much of Millhauser’s short fiction contains images of labyrinths: wandering narratives that appear to split off or come to a dead end, massive structures of branching, winding paths and complex mysteries that are as deep and impenetrable as the labyrinth itself. This project aims to specifically explore the presence of labyrinthine elements throughout Steven Millhauser’s short fiction. Millhauser’s labyrinths are either described spatially and/or suggested in his narrative form; they are, in other words, spatial and/or discursive. Millhauser’s spatial labyrinths (which I refer to as ‘architecture’ stories) involve the lengthy description of some immense or underground structure. The structures are fantastic in their size and often seem infinite in scale. These labyrinths are quite literal. Millhauser’s discursive labyrinths demonstrate the labyrinthine primarily through a forking, branching and repetitive narrative form. Millhauser’s use of the labyrinth is at once the same and different than preceding generations of short fiction. Postmodern short fiction in the 1960’s and 70’s used labyrinthine elements to draw the reader’s attention to the story’s textuality. Millhauser, too, writes in the experimental/fantastic mode, but to different ends. The devices of metafiction and realism are employed in his short fiction as agents of investigating and expressing two competing visions of reality. Using the ‘tricks’ and techniques of postmodern metafiction in tandem with realistic detail, Steven Millhauser’s labyrinthine fiction adjusts and reapplies the experimental short story to new ends: real-world applications and thematic expression.
Navigating through "a nightmare of meaninglessness without end": a semi-structural reading of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan
(2009-06-23T13:54:49Z) Cook, Joshua; Marvin, Thomas F.; Rudy, John; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-
In Vonnegut's second novel, the author sets up distinct character-based binaries that represent methods of looking for meaning in the universe. This paper attempts to show that outward-focused searches for purpose, i.e. those that are directed toward a "higher power," bring only division and harm into the world. As the novel's characters operate within their assigned binaries, most of them are able to abandon their nocuous philosophies in favor of an inward-focused search for meaning, which allows them to embrace a radically humbled humanistic perspective that places equal importance upon all creatures.
Orwell's Unmediated Hand: The Compositional Stages of Nineteen Eighty-Four
(2012-02-29) Wilzbacher, Melisa Katharine; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-; Touponce, William F.; Fox, Stephen L.
Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a hallmark example of the first, great cautionary sociological and political dystopias of the postwar era. Over the last sixty years, literary critics have thoroughly studied the plot, setting, characters, themes, scenes, subliminal meanings, and overt meanings of this text. However, very few critics have utilized one of the most precious resources available for analysis of Orwell’s creative process – the surviving, but fragmented, stages of early composition. In order to understand the full significance of these pages, it is necessary to illuminate the presubmission history of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the point at which George Orwell began composition to the date of press submission – a span of roughly twenty-nine months, from the summer of 1946 to November 1948, when Orwell’s British publisher, Secker and Warburg, received the typesetting copy. Nineteen Eighty-Four, his final work, is also the sole Orwell novel where manuscript stages are known to survive. The submitted typescript survives in the Orwell Archives at University College in London, and its underlayer reflects the fullest development of Nineteen Eighty-Four under Orwell’s unmediated hand. Although the 1947 manuscript is a conglomeration of hand written pages, typed pages, hand corrected pages, and type corrected pages, it is vital that literary and textual criticism focus on what the manuscript reveals about Orwell’s development of the narrative structure and text.
Prelude to Fame: Trauma Theory in the Early Short Fiction of Ernest Hemingway
(2012-03-19) Moss, Margaret Loughery; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-; Touponce, William F.; Coleman, Martin A.
While it is commonly acknowledged that the primal traumatic events of Hemingway’s time as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I had a profound influence on his works of fiction, there has been relatively little exploration of the notion that the “working through” which occurred in the recovery from his own personal trauma manifests a complex and interwoven relationship with the writing process. This is certainly not unknown territory for scholars; when Hemingway first embarked upon the earliest fiction writing of his professional career, biographical research indicates he was once again enduring a traumatic experience of sorts. Yet formal trauma theory has rarely been applied to the study of Hemingway’s most intensely autobiographical short fiction. It is my contention that the “working through” of Hemingway’s writing process demonstrated in his published and unpublished Nick Adams stories was prompted by both his defining war-time trauma experience and his later, more private hardships.
"Quiet as it's Kept": Secrecy and Silence in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Jazz, and Paradise
(2011-11-18) Smith, Whitney Renee; Johnson, Karen Ramsay; Kubitschek, Missy Dehn; Eller, Jonathan R., 1952-
Secrets and silence appear frequently in the work of Toni Morrison. In three novels, The Bluest Eye, Jazz, and Paradise, she repeats a specific phrase that acts as a signal to the reader. Morrison three times writes, “Quiet as it’s kept” in her novels to alert readers to the particular significance secrets and silence play in these novels. Morrison portrays this secrecy and silence as a barrier to building strong communities and even a strong self-identity. While the phrase appears in the same form, with each subsequent appearance, Morrison takes the idea a step further. In each novel she demonstrates how breaking the silence and refusing to keep quiet is an act of healing or salvation and she expands this healing to be increasingly inclusive. What begins as a single voice breaking the silence in The Bluest Eye becomes a group of people sharing their secrets in Jazz, and finally an entire town coming to terms with the power of speaking up. This thesis looks at the secrets and their impact on characters in each novel and explores the progression of the power in refusing to keep quiet.

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