Adventures With Animals Big And Small, 2017 Boise State University
Adventures With Animals Big And Small, Emily Allen, Marcus Blandford, Shannon Brennan, Brennen Keen, Amanda Timm, Tara Penry, Sarah Obendorf
English Literature Student Projects and Publications
The purpose of this project is to produce a short collection of out-of-print children’s stories that would be suitable for first grade level readers. Stories selected for the collection fit the theme of being seasonally themed and include animals as main protagonists. Under the guidance of Dr. Tara Penry, the class searched children’s magazines from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to find stories that would be relevant and interesting to today’s elementary schoolers.
The End Of Postmodernism, 2017 Boise State University
The End Of Postmodernism, Ralph Clare
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
Appearing at the start of the millennium, Percival Everett's Erasure (2001) features Monk Ellison, a writer who is questioning his one-time embrace of postmodern aesthetics and who raises the ire of "innovative" writer and fellow member of the Nouveau Roman Society after delivering a conference paper, F/V, part parody of and part homage to Roland Barthes's S/Z. Becoming belligerent, the writer proclaims to Ellison that postmodernists did not "have time to finish what we set out to accomplish" because any art which "opposes or rejects established systems of creation ... has to remain unfinished." His unsuccessful attempt to …
"It's [Not] Only Lines On Paper, Folks!": The Curious Literary Identity Of The Graphic Novel, 2017 Bard College
"It's [Not] Only Lines On Paper, Folks!": The Curious Literary Identity Of The Graphic Novel, Oona Blood Cullen
Senior Projects Spring 2017
Art Spiegelman's “Maus,” Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' “Watchmen,” and Frank Miller's “The Dark Knight Returns,” created waves in both the literary and comics communities upon their subsequent release in the year 1986. My project seeks to unpack the ways in which the “1986 Big Three” forge identities for themselves both within and without the designations of literature and comics, and ultimately to define the unique literary identity of each work. I examine the ways in which each of these works makes use of the history and traditions of the medium from which they emerge, including use of recognizable tropes …
A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, 2017 University of Mississippi
A “Human Endeavor”: Killing In Contemporary U.S. Combat Narratives, William Mackenzie
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This PH.D dissertation aims to develop a 3-D numerical model of dam-break flows on movable beds. Three tasks are defined to accomplish the goal of this study. The first task is developing a 3-D hydrodynamic model to simulate dam-break flow on fixed beds with simple geometry and test the water surface tracking technique. This model solves the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations using a finite-difference method on rectilinear, staggered grids. The volume-of-fluid (VOF) technique with SOLA-VOF advection scheme is used to capture the free surface motion. The developed model is tested using several experimental dam-break flows and the VOF technique is …
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, 2017 University of Mississippi
Cold War New York: Postmodernism, Lyricism, And Queer Aesthetics In 1970s New York Poetry, Jared James O'Connor
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the poetry of Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman, two poets of the critically neglected second-generation New York school. I argue that Brainard and Waldman help define the emerging discourse of postmodern poetry through their attention to cold war culture of the 1970s, countercultural ideologies, and poetic form. Both Brainard and Waldman enact a poetics of vulnerability in their work, situating themselves as wholly unique from their late-modernist predecessors. In doing so, they help engender a poetics concerned not only with the intellectual stakes but with the cultural environment they are forced to navigate. Chapter 1 explores Brainard's …
Reader's Guide: A Foray Into Violence, Trauma And Masculinity In In Our Time, 2017 Claremont McKenna College
Reader's Guide: A Foray Into Violence, Trauma And Masculinity In In Our Time, Sara-Rose Beatriz Bockian
CMC Senior Theses
Modernism has been called “a reaction to the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War and a search for a new mode of art that would rescue civilization from its state of crisis after the war” (Lewis, 109) Hemingway attempts this rescue by re-thinking aspects of the novel that were taken for granted in earlier periods, just as the conventions of modern life were taken for granted pre-WWI. Furthermore, his work tries to rectify the dissonance between a pre and post-war self through the exploration of social conventions relating to violence, trauma and masculinity.
“There Was That In Her Face And Form Which Made Him Loathe The Sight Of Her”: Disfiguration And Deformity Of Female Characters In 19th Century American Women’S Literature, 2017 Georgia Southern University
“There Was That In Her Face And Form Which Made Him Loathe The Sight Of Her”: Disfiguration And Deformity Of Female Characters In 19th Century American Women’S Literature, Kelsi E. Cunningham Miss
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman challenge the way that society treats and views the disabled and deformed. Through different representations of the disabled characters, the three short stories by these authors reveal the realities that women faced in the 19th century in response to rigid beauty standards and expectations. The authors in this study address the marginalized position of the disabled characters and show how society’s attempts to “normalize” the women confine them to a fixed identity. Analyzing the texts in relation to disability studies and the authors’ perceived effectiveness of social charity will …
“Report All Obscene Mail To Your Postmaster” Reading, Institutions, And The American Public, Post-Revolution And 1965, 2017 Bard College
“Report All Obscene Mail To Your Postmaster” Reading, Institutions, And The American Public, Post-Revolution And 1965, Connor Christopher Boehme
Senior Projects Spring 2017
This project attempts to understand how Americans are able to imagine themselves as a political public in two revolutionary moments: just after the American Revolution, and in 1965, at the heart of the Civil Rights era. The public, which the Constitution labels “We, the people,” is explored first in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which postulates the institutional conditions necessary for its readership, the first generation of Americans, to form a political public. The project then studies the “We,” of the Constitution’s preamble and considers how readers can interpret who is signified by that “We.” 1965 saw a cultural revolution in America …
Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, 2017 Scripps College
Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated …
Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, 2017 Wayne State University
Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, Judith Lakämper
Wayne State University Dissertations
In “Affective Dissonance: (Post)feminism and Popular Cultural Expressions of Motherhood,” I argue that motherhood in the so-called post-feminist age is structured by a conflicted relationship between affective expectations raised by public discourses of motherhood and the material, embodied experience of maternity, inflected by race, class, age, and sexuality. While recent feminist scholarship has engaged questions of (bodily) materiality, and popular medial discourses increasingly critique unrealistic ideals of motherhood, my dissertation considers these approaches together. Juxtaposing representations of motherhood from various sources – memoirs, digital media, art photography, and television – I demonstrate how the postfeminist rhetoric of female empowerment and …
(An) Unsettled Commons: Narrative And Trauma After 9/11, 2017 Wayne State University
(An) Unsettled Commons: Narrative And Trauma After 9/11, Chinmayi Kattemalavadi
Wayne State University Dissertations
This dissertation examines fictional responses to the events of September 11, 2001. It argues for the importance of one kind of fictional response, one which focuses on representing the feeling of "unsettledness" that can be one effect of trauma, with the aim of making that unsettledness itself a locus of a shared common experience. I posit that in articulating the events of 9/11 in the context of, in relation to, and as one in a series of traumas, violences, and histories, these narratives make the unsettlements shareable. Focusing on four works of fiction that were published after 9/11 – Joseph …
Weird Propaganda: Texts Of The Black Power And Women’S Liberation Movements, 2017 Wayne State University
Weird Propaganda: Texts Of The Black Power And Women’S Liberation Movements, Marie Buck
Wayne State University Dissertations
“Weird Propaganda: Texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements” examines texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements: the early Black Arts Movement anthology For Malcolm; the now-canonical texts Our Bodies, Ourselves; The Black Woman; and Sisterhood Is Powerful; a number of pamphlets and other small press works; and the Black Panthers’ newspaper. This project argues that writers and activists used senses of the uncanny, along with elements of science fiction and fantasy, to negotiate the day-to-day uncertainties of political organizing and, more broadly, political hope. The texts examined here convey particular political views in an explict …
An Echo Of Swelling Voices, A Meta-Fictional Novella, 2017 University of Texas at El Paso
An Echo Of Swelling Voices, A Meta-Fictional Novella, Adolfo Danilo Lopez
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
Horacio P. is an exiled Nicaraguan American poet living and teaching in Austin, Texas since the 1970s. Despite his enormous reputation and highly supportive wife, he feels incapable to write his last, and best, novel. This novel is about the life of Asdreni, an Albanian poet who was also exiled in Romania during the time before World War II, and his quest to find out who sent him a mysterious box containing the unpublished manuscripts of an unknown poet. One day, Horacio himself also receives a mysterious box containing the unpublished manuscripts of an unknown poet. His novel and his …
The American Hero In A Hawaiian Myth: Convergence Of Cultures In London’S “Koolau The Leper”, 2017 Brigham Young University
The American Hero In A Hawaiian Myth: Convergence Of Cultures In London’S “Koolau The Leper”, Morgan Daniels
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Jack London’s “Koolau the Leper” (1912) tells the story of a leprous Hawaiian who refuses to be reallocated to Molokai by the American government. During Koolau’s last stand, he keeps the American army at bay despite their superior weaponry. The story ends with Koolau dying from leprosy a free man on Kauai, his island home. Critics have long debated what this story reveals about London’s viewpoint on American imperialism and colonialism. I would like to augment this understanding by suggesting that London’s critique of American imperialism is in itself an act of imperialism. I propose that Jack London’s “Koolau the …
Adapting Skazki: How American Authors Reinvent Russian Fairy Tales, 2017 Scripps College
Adapting Skazki: How American Authors Reinvent Russian Fairy Tales, Sarah Krasner
Scripps Senior Theses
Adaptations of works have the potential to bring their subject matter to a new audience. This thesis explores the adaptation of Russian fairy tales into novels by authors Orson Scott Card and Joy Preble by looking at how they present Russian fairy tales, folkloric figures, and fairy tale structure to an American audience.
All Things Loved And Unlovable: Discovering Southern Identity In Black Migration Novels, 2017 University of Mississippi. Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College
All Things Loved And Unlovable: Discovering Southern Identity In Black Migration Novels, Michael Holman
Honors Theses
This thesis traces the development of the ways that the South figures in the imaginations of black writers by examining Southern identity in three novels centered around migratory protagonists. The thesis examines the ways in which folk identity, urban landscapes, remigration, and gender shape the migration experience in each novel. The novels discussed here are Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Quicksand posits the South as a place of unique danger, especially for black women, Invisible Man characterizes it as a place defined by oppressive memory that may be utilized as a resource …
Gender Revolution Of The Jazz Age: The Source Of Disillusionment In The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald And Ernest Hemingway, 2017 Central Washington University
Gender Revolution Of The Jazz Age: The Source Of Disillusionment In The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald And Ernest Hemingway, Mary Killeen
All Master's Theses
The Lost Generation was forced to develop their own principles regarding gender identity in an environment of ever-shifting cultural norms, which called into question all of their predetermined ideas on femininity, masculinity, and the ways in which members of the opposite sex should interact with one another. Although much of their writing is set amid and seems to embrace the evolving social culture of the early twentieth-century, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway largely criticize the gender revolution of the 1920s and blame evolving gender roles for the collapse of their generation. Nevertheless, I argue that Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s cultural …
Metaphysics Of Mania: Edgar Allan Poe's And Herman Melville's Rebranding Of Madness During The American Asylum Movement, 2017 Central Washington University
Metaphysics Of Mania: Edgar Allan Poe's And Herman Melville's Rebranding Of Madness During The American Asylum Movement, Alexis Renfro
All Master's Theses
The “madman’s” place throughout history has tended to be a mystery on both ontological and epistemological levels. From the perception of the madman as a crazed oracle in the sixteenth century to the perception of the madman as a criminal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth-century madman was even more difficult to define. Because insanity was deemed the inverse of bourgeois normativity and conservative moral standards, those categorized as mad in America during mid-1800s were institutionalized in reformed mental asylums, establishments which sought to homogenize human behavior through moral treatment. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville drew …
"Goo-Prone And Generally Pathetic": Empathy And Irony In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, 2017 Georgia Southern University
"Goo-Prone And Generally Pathetic": Empathy And Irony In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Benjamin L. Peyton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Critical considerations of David Foster Wallace’s work have tended, on the whole, to use the framework that the author himself established in his essay “E Unibus Pluram” and in his interview with Larry McCaffery. Following his own lead, the critical consensus is that Wallace succeeds in overcoming the limits of postmodern irony. If we examine the formal trappings of his writing, however, we find that the critical assertion that Wallace manages to transcend the paralytic irony of his postmodern predecessors is made in the face of his frequent employment of postmodern techniques and devices. Thus, there arises a contradiction between …
Deceiving, Fraudulent, And Seductive: The Discourses Of Money In Us Novels Of The Early Republic, 2017 Eastern Illinois University
Deceiving, Fraudulent, And Seductive: The Discourses Of Money In Us Novels Of The Early Republic, Fabian Rempfer
Masters Theses
This thesis focuses on the importance of money and the representations of its various physical manifestations (such as coin, paper money) in American fiction of the 1790s. My project traces the transition from the colonies' financial dependency on Britain to their independency, relating to the monetary union created after the passage of the constitution. I argue that this shift from financial dependency to independency influences books such as Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson, Kelroy by Rebecca Rush, Ormond or the Secret Witness and Arthur Mervyn by Charles Brockden Brown. My project highlights, on the one hand, the importance of such …