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Culminating Projects in English

Theses/Dissertations

1995

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The Emergence Of Voice And Identity In The Context Of The Neocolonial Experience: The Writings Of Jamaica Kincaid, Kirstin Ruth Bratt Aug 1995

The Emergence Of Voice And Identity In The Context Of The Neocolonial Experience: The Writings Of Jamaica Kincaid, Kirstin Ruth Bratt

Culminating Projects in English

Jamaica Kincaid's novels Annie John and Lucy demonstrate a marked resistance to Western philosophy and the British literary canon. The writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Patricia Hill Collins provide useful frameworks for viewing Kincaid's work. Ngugi's metaphor of "moving the centre," combined with Hill Collins' theories of Black feminism are both useful in examining the issues of voice and identity in the neo-colonial experience.

Critics have attempted to identify Kincaid's work as either coming-of-age, pre-oedipal narrative, feminist, or autobiographical. While these categories can also be useful in reading Kincaid's work, they are also limited in their ability to define …


A Linguistic Study Of The Third Person Generic Pronoun: Singular They, Philip Roger Anderson Aug 1995

A Linguistic Study Of The Third Person Generic Pronoun: Singular They, Philip Roger Anderson

Culminating Projects in English

Societal change is apparent to us in every regard: from government to language. In the area of language, use of pronouns has changed over the centuries and continues to do so today. After decades of passive adherence to a prescriptive rule condemning the use of the pronoun they as a singular form, evidence suggests that this form is accepted by society, consciously or unconsciously, as an alternative for the generic pronoun he.

Prescriptivism has served to shape the English language through the intents, likes, and dislikes of grammarians who have sometimes formed grammar rules to their own liking rather than …