Master's Portfolio, 2022 Bowling Green State University
Master's Portfolio, Jennifer Cousino
Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects
I was a teacher at a high school in the Cabrini-Green complex in Chicago in the 1990s when the buildings were starting to be emptied. I saw firsthand the beginnings of the removal of nearly 15,000 people from their homes when the first building came down in 1995, three years after the first Candyman film. I wrote this academic paper as part of a graduate seminar with Dr. Piya Pal-Lapinski - Victorian Monsters: Fiction and Film 1837 to 2021 at Bowling Green State University in the United States. My paper examines the 2021 film and the sociopolitical and historical context …
The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, 2022 University of Massachusetts Amherst
The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard
Doctoral Dissertations
The Burdens of Responsibility traces the emergence of moral responsibility as both a concept and problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, philosophy, domestic manuals, newspaper archives – I show how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Although ethicists today take this distinction for granted, it was an emergent and problematic space in the nineteenth-century United States, brought into being by historical forces, including the rise of market capitalism, abolition, changing women’s roles, and increasing concern …
“We Talk, I Believe, All Day Long”: Forms Of Communication In Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre, 2022 CUNY College of Staten Island
“We Talk, I Believe, All Day Long”: Forms Of Communication In Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre, Kara Vacalopoulos
Student Theses
Jane Eyre is a successful coming of age narrative where the title character’s development can be tracked through the way she communicates with other people. Dialogue and conversations constantly change as Jane herself changes and grows. This paper analyzes the different modes of communication that Jane experiences with the characters in the novel. As she gets older, Jane establishes her voice and seeks out a perfect conversational partner – someone who she could bear her soul to and have meaningful conversations with. This paper argues Rochester as Jane’s perfect conversational partner, even if he is not a perfect person. In …
Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, 2022 New York University
Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria
Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship
“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that …
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, 2022 The Graduate Center, City University of New York
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …
The Appalachian Nostos: Pastoralism And Returning Home In Appalachian Poetry, 2022 Wofford College
The Appalachian Nostos: Pastoralism And Returning Home In Appalachian Poetry, Henry David Thoreau Kilbourne
Student Scholarship
No abstract provided.
“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, 2022 University of Houston
“All The Modes Of Story”: Genre And The Gendering Of Authorship In The Year 1771, David Mazella, Claude Willan, David Bishop, Elizabeth Stravoski, Walter Barta, Max James
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of women’s participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory became the …
Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, 2022 Duquesne University
Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, Courtney Mullis
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation identifies and proposes a new subgenre of American literature, Cultural Trauma Fiction, that has arisen since the late 20th century in response to numerous large-scale traumatic events and their representation in the media. Cultural trauma occurs when a shocking, shared event fractures collective identity and initiates a discursive process to understand what took place, why it happened, and how the affected culture can heal. Cultural traumas differ from individual trauma because cultural traumas affect a culture, rather than an individual, and because they are mediated; many members of the culture experience the trauma of these events secondhand …
“The Un/Touchables:” Quest For Citizenship In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things And Indra Sinha’S Animal’S People, 2022 Seton Hall University
“The Un/Touchables:” Quest For Citizenship In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things And Indra Sinha’S Animal’S People, Mahreen Shahzadi
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
This paper argues that Ammu and Velutha, in The God of Small Things and Animal in Animal’s People are not seen as productive citizens of the nation because of their marginalization, which results in their status as second-class citizens. However, Ammu, Velutha, and Animal resist second-class status by challenging the heteropatriarchal nation, rejecting its limited definition of gender, caste, sexuality, and citizenship.
Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, 2022 University of Massachusetts Amherst
Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation, Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Restructuring of Blackness, examines Black speculative fiction as a site of theorization within worlds where Black existence has not already been pre-determined by the forces of slavery and ideologies of race and culture in a white supremacist world. In this sense, my dissertation models ways of reading Black literature that demonstrates how Blackness can disturb, rather than reproduce, notions of racial meaning and the Human. I argue that writers of Black speculative fiction go beyond the creation of alternative realities to produce sites that allow for nearly limitless …
Challenging White Fragility Through Black Feminist Political Poetry, 2022 Ouachita Baptist University
Challenging White Fragility Through Black Feminist Political Poetry, Langley Leverett
Honors Theses
Due to overwhelming patriarchal hegemonies that women – white women, rich women, young women, and cis women – continue to uphold, feminism struggles to serve all women justly. To combat this negligence in feminism’s fourth-wave movement, I will use this thesis to highlight ways that Black feminist poets have not only shaped feminist theory through their own contributions, but also have prolonged and saved the livelihood of both gender and racial equality. With a strong emphasis on Intersectional Feminism, I will explore the ways in which women can be united against tokenistic power, beginning with the inspiration from three voices: …
Finding Their Chrysanthemum: Linguistic Representation In Children's Literature, 2022 Kennesaw State University
Finding Their Chrysanthemum: Linguistic Representation In Children's Literature, Marielena Zajac
Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones
Children in America today struggle with finding themselves in the books they read due to societal expectations. From an early age, children are dictated on the correct way to speak and write in “American,” which can leave children and their home languages feeling unseen and dismissed. To help further the conversation and promotion of linguistic diversity in American society, this capstone analyzes dialectal representation in children’s books, with a heavy focus on attitudinal linguistic principles rather than prescriptive mechanics. The secondary research explores current literature and resources that discuss literacy acquisition in adolescents, trends in dialects in America, and childhood …
“Strumpet,” “Huswife,” “Whore”: Centering Othello’S Bianca, 2022 Chapman University
“Strumpet,” “Huswife,” “Whore”: Centering Othello’S Bianca, Phoebe Merten
English (MA) Theses
Is Bianca a sex worker? What meanings change if she is or isn’t? Not enough artistic or critical attention has been paid the character. It seems likely that the initial lack of attention stemmed from Bianca’s status as a purported sex worker, as though this makes her somehow categorically different from the other women in the play, or inherently less interesting. There has in the past decade or so been a marked increase in scholarship on sex work, but this too largely skims over Bianca, likely because of the ambiguity surrounding her profession.
In my introduction I go over some …
A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, 2022 East Tennessee State University
A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are …
A Pandemic Of Greed And A Disease Of Poverty In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque Of The Red Death", 2022 SUNY College Cortland
A Pandemic Of Greed And A Disease Of Poverty In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque Of The Red Death", Benjamin Herrick
Master's Theses
The breakers tripped. Again. The breakers, a mandatory halt to trading on the floor of the stock exchange in response to the S&P falling more than 7% from the previous close. This was instituted after the Crash of 1987 to calm the markets before trading is allowed to resume. They are supposed to mitigate a drastic crash. They have only ever triggered once before, in 1997. Not for the tech bubble. Not even in the crash of 2008. All trading stops for fifteen minutes when the Level One breaker trips. If it drops further in the same day, the Level …
A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, 2022 East Tennessee State University
A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White
Undergraduate Honors Theses
The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.
Textual Persuasion: Trauma Representation In Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves, 2022 State University of New York College at Buffalo - Buffalo State College
Textual Persuasion: Trauma Representation In Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves, Elizabeth A. Wall
English Theses
Textualization is the act of putting words on a page. Typography is the style and way in which the textualization of the text appears to the reader. Together, textualization and typography have the ability to coerce the reader into a specific reading pattern. Mark Z. Danielewski has combined textualization and typography in his complex novel House of Leaves as a unique attempt to represent trauma in the space between language and written language. Typical textual play becomes textual persuasion as the reader is guided through the labyrinth of text by typographical coercion. In this novel, these elements of play essentially …
Authors As Figures, Functions, And Persons: Theories On Intention, 2022 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Authors As Figures, Functions, And Persons: Theories On Intention, Tyler M. Preston
Honors Theses
My honors thesis is an exercise in which I approach a singular work with three different theories on authorial intent and analyze how the author figure exists along with the work through the lens of each theory. After providing background for the discourse on authorial intention, I explore the theories of Michel Foucault, Alexander Nehamas, and Reed Way Dasenbrock and then demonstrate what each theory looks like in practice by applying each theory to Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior. I consider how the different theories fit together, where they differ, and how practical they are as standards of …
Beheaded: An Alternate Look Into The Life Of England's Most Notorious Queen, 2022 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Beheaded: An Alternate Look Into The Life Of England's Most Notorious Queen, Marion Renee Burgess
Honors Theses
Beheaded: an alternate look into the life of England's most notorious queen is a craft paper and accompanying novel chapters. The craft paper focuses on dialogue and its use in historical fiction to build both character and setting. The novel Beheaded is a historical fiction that focuses on Anne Boleyn, queen of England and second wife of Henry VIII. Anne served as queen from 1533 until her execution on May 19, 1536. She is one of the most notorious royal women in history, and she was never formally charged, witchcraft is one of the many claims laid against her during …
Kurt Vonnegut, Modernity, And The Self: A Guide To The Good Life., 2022 University of Louisville
Kurt Vonnegut, Modernity, And The Self: A Guide To The Good Life., Josh Simpson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
What are people for? This is a question Kurt Vonnegut raises in his first novel, 1952’s Player Piano. Over five decades later, when he concludes a career with 2005’s A Man Without a Country, he is still asking, “What is life all about?” (66). These are the central questions for Vonnegut, and his novels, short stories, essays, interviews, correspondence, and commencement addresses offer a singular, life-long attempt at an answer. In this dissertation I offer a reading of Vonnegut not just as a writer concerned with philosophical questions, but rather, on a deeper, more personal level, as a …