Digital Commons Network^™

An Existentialist Approach To Teaching Writing: Anguish, Bad Faith, And Seriousness In Composition, Andreas Peter Herzog

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims at developing a model concept for the teaching of ethics in the composition classroom through the use of existentialism in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Overall, the gap I am trying to fill with my dissertation is a lack of awareness of how much Sartre actually fits rhetorical theory and composition. Ultimately, this dissertation is the attempt to develop an ethic that is universally applicable in the teaching of composition, without the need for a service learning environment or additional resources outside the university itself. To provide an overview of the project, the approach will be illustrated …

"This Dreadful Web": Alienation And Miscommunication In The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Debbie Clark

Senior Theses

Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame hinges on the idea of fate and characters being caught up in situations and fantasies that seem to be out of their control. Esmeralda is the fly caught in Frollo’s web, and yet her beauty and allure attracts and ensnares him in turn. Quasimodo is ensnared by Esmeralda’s beauty but also by society’s perceptions of him. The characters in Hunchback are so caught up in the webs of fantasies and perceptions spun by themselves or society that they can no longer communicate effectively with others, resulting in alienation from the very society …

Modern American Cover Art: The Great Gatsby Through Time, Jessica Harrell

Senior Theses

Book jackets and cover art are, more than anything, an advertising tool used to attract consumers, promote book sales, and establish company identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a staple in the canon of American literature whose cover art has drastically transformed in the ninety years since its original publication. This thesis traces these changes over time, focusing specifically on publishing history, art history, American culture, and thematic interpretations. In doing so, I found that the most substantial influences on these covers were publishing house identity, design trends, and available artistic techniques. Ultimately, The Great Gatsby’s cover …

The Ghosts Of Lucy Snowe: Queer Temporality In Villette, Lauren Schuldt

Theses and Dissertations

Though Lucy Snowe has been read as an agent of queer nonconformity and as a master of ambiguity, queer interpretations of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette have remained relatively scarce and limited in scope. This essay examines Lucy Snow’s unique model of queer experience that manifests not only in moments of openly subversive gender performance, homoerotic desire, or sexual identity, but also as an oppositional mode of organizing and articulating her life in terms of time. Using the temporally queer metaphor of the ghost, this essay explores Lucy’s resistance to frameworks of time which structure life narratives through logics of heterosexual development …

Backcountry Robbers, River Pirates, And Brawling Boatmen: Transnational Banditry In Antebellum U.S. Frontier Literature, Samuel M. Lackey

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that in the midst of an uncertain but formative period of continental expansion, a revolutionary brand of popular crime fiction appeared and flourished in the pages of cheap periodicals and paperback novels. It consisted of conventional adventure romances and pulpy proto-dime novels that focused on frontier violence and backwoods criminals. Often popular in their day but quickly forgotten, these texts have been given short shrift by scholars and critics due to their shoddiness or ostensibly minor role in literary history. I contend that this obscure brand of crime fiction in fact has much to offer in the …

Twisting Reality For A Cause: American Mythology, Early Surrealism, And Audience Empowerment In The Works Of George Lippard, Joseph Samuel Hall

Theses and Dissertations

This article examines Philadelphia writer George Lippard's often-overlooked usage of literary conventions more typical outside of the genre he is most famous for, socialreform city fiction. In particular, the article focuses on Lippard’s vision of an American mythology, proto-surrealistic imagery, and demands for audience response and interaction. Various works are analyzed, most prominently: stories from Washington and His Generals, The Rose of the Wissahikon, Adonai: The Pilgrim of Eternity, and The Killers. The article concludes that Lippard values the artfulness of historical romance over presenting historical fact, recognizing the ability of the romance to instigate a greater collective response in …

“Be Of Knightly Countenance”: Masculine Violence And Managing Affect In Late Medieval Alliterative Poetry And Batman: Under The Red Hood, Lisa D. Camp

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is concerned with the legacy of cultural representations of masculine violence as it manifests in late medieval alliterative poetry and contemporary superhero comics, and the ways in which those manifestations are inflected by a particular set of images, motifs, and cultural underpinnings which transcend sociohistorical boundaries and that illuminate the ways culture sanctions certain forms of masculine violence. To understand how, as Patricia Ingham suggests in Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain, imagination infuses history towards particular “regime[s] of truth,” I argue that late fourteenth century Arthurian alliterative poetry and contemporary superhero comics instruct a …

Rhetoric And Plants, Alana Hatley

Theses and Dissertations

Rhetoric and Plants asks what happens when we add plants to the various discussions currently developing within rhetorical theory. By taking up current botanical research and some of the rhetorical debates surrounding that research, I posit that plants are creatures and that the botanic engagement with the world has much to teach us about persuasion, communication, and encountering alterity. Specifically, I argue that the sessility of plants makes visible a tendency in our language to privilege the language of going elsewhere, which I term ambulocentrism. Further, the fact that plants engage in behaviors that we have previously thought only conscious …

The Leap In Place: Rethinking Key Concepts In The History Of Composition And The Return Of Lore., David Stubblefield

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to affirm a key set of practical terms in order to guide Composition Pedagogy. These terms include error, language, voice, teacher neutrality, and rationality. In recent years, many of these terms have been discredited theoretically; however, they remain dominant in textbooks and in our actual teaching practice. The result has been a significant divide between theory and practice, resulting in a cognitive dissonance between our classroom activities and our scholarly activity. However, by presenting each of these terms as dynamic and performative, this dissertation invites the field to find productive practical possibilities inside of them. Moreover, the …

Frontier Re-Imagined: The Mythic West In The Twentieth Century, Michael Craig Gibbs

Theses and Dissertations

T The author begins by reviewing Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “Frontier Thesis” and by surveying the twentieth-century consensus of the “New Western Historians.” The author then poses a question: even though the physical frontier “closed” in the late-nineteenth century, did American writers turn away from the imaginative frontier? To a great extent, the writers of literary fiction did turn to other material during the modernist period. Simultaneously, however, Westerns began to dominate popular fiction and film. More notably, writers such as Raymond Chandler began to transform the traditional Western. In Philip Marlowe, Chandler created an urban cowboy; this cowboy locates …

“Poetry Doesn’T Restore Ecosystems”: Garbage And Poetry In The Anthropocene, Joseph Russell Hendryx

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the representation of material garbage in American poetry, from the development of industrial waste management in the late nineteenth century to the present day ecological crises. In the early to mid-twentieth century, garbage serves as a new Romantic nature, allowing poems’ speakers to reflect on themselves and their society through this trashed landscape. The presence of the material garbage itself, however, was never a central concern and continued to be hidden behind its various metaphorical utilizations. A.R. Ammons’s poem Garbage opened up the poetic conversation by searching for a more nuanced and worldly treatment of garbage. The …

Fighting Rhetoric And Training Composition: Theory And Pedagogy Of Mixed Martial Arts Argument, Trevor C. Meyer

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the connections between martial arts training, rhetorical theory, and composition pedagogy. The central focus of this project is the common understanding of an argument as a “fight,” and by investigating the training practices of fighting arts, this project expands and complicates what an agonistic orientation can offer argument, teaching, and writing. This inquiry has two parts. Part one explores the importance and influence of ancient Greek martial arts practices in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Sophistic argumentation. By focusing on the “mixed” martial art of pankration, I challenge the pervasive binary of “open hand” and “closed fist” as a …

Sir Walter Scott And Lady Anne Lindsay: New Light On Their Relationship, Sarah Flatt

Theses and Dissertations

While Sir Walter Scott is best known for his Waverly novels and Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, he also played an important role in helping lesser known writers publish their work. In particular, he was known for helping women writers. Scott’s relationship with Lady Anne Lindsay (later Barnard), however, is especially interesting. Lindsay is best known for her poem, “Auld Robin Gray.” There is far more to Sir Walter Scott’s relationship with Lady Anne Lindsay than first meets the eye. The two knew of each other through family and social connections, but they never met in person. They did, however, …

Temporal Collapse And Historical Erasure In David Mitchell’S Cloud Atlas, Amy Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Teleological historical “progress” disintegrates in the temporal disjunctures that structure David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas—disjunctures that collapse past dangers into present concerns and resonate in potential futures. The novel has conceptual resonances with Walter Benjamin’s formulations on historical method, as well as with Linda Hutcheon’s work on postmodern metahistories. Drawing on these theorists, my thesis focuses on “marked” historical agents in the novel. Throughout my analysis, I demonstrate how these marked agents work within the book’s interrupted narrative structure to communicate historical violence and memory from a moment of danger to another one in a temporal collapse. Such a process creates …

Writing With Risk: Dangerous Discourses And Event-Based Pedagogies, Ben Harley

Theses and Dissertations

“Writing with Risk: Dangerous Discourses and Event-Based Pedagogies,” responds to the pedagogical work of scholars such as Susan Wells, Nancy Welch, and Linda Flower by arguing that the risks associated with public writing pedagogies stem from the transformative nature of the rhetorical event that implicates and rearticulates actors through co-production, subverting their assumed autonomy. I argue that each of the three primary vantages of publics scholarship is particularly vulnerable to a certain type of risk aligned to a specific element of the rhetorical situation: idealist scholarship to unintended consequences in which the meaning of the text transforms, activist scholarship to …

Showing One’S Manhood: The Social Performance Of Masculinity, Fayaz Kabani

Theses and Dissertations

Contrary to much criticism of the past thirty years that regards Shakespeare’s Prince Hal as the epitome of unfettered Machiavellian subjectivity, Hal should be regarded as a teenaged male navigating the contradictory discourses of early modern masculinity in order to perform an integrated, consistent masculinity for his audience. His acceptance of hegemonic masculinity is complicated by his father Henry IV’s usurpation of the throne. The resulting ambivalence in Hal results in his participation in the countermasculine world of Eastcheap. However, once Hal “chooses” his role as Prince of Wales, he finds it difficult to sacrifice his personal self, or body …

Reading Engagement: The Impact On Student Identities And Achievement, Tara Lyn Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

Across one school year, in which I coached a fourth-grade teacher, she and I took an inquiry stance investigating how we could come to understand the reading identities kids held relative to Stephens’ (2013) list of characteristics of effective and efficient readers. We also sought to understand how we could help kids develop, sustain, or extend their reading identities and how those identities relate to a generative theory of reading. What impact would our actions have on the kids? What shift, if any, would there be in their ability to comprehend grade level text? There were 11 students in the …

Print On Demand: Stereotyping And Electrotyping In The United States Printing Trades And Publishing Industry, 1812-1860, Jeffrey Michael Makala

Theses and Dissertations

Print on Demand explores the role and significance of stereotyping and electrotyping in the United States printing trades and publishing industry during the early nineteenth century. Stereotyping—the creation of solid printing plates cast from moveable type—fundamentally changed the ways in which books (and later, periodicals) were printed. The commissioning of plates altered shop practices, distribution methods, and the author/publisher relationship. Because of this new embodiment of capital and texts in the form of printing plates, a secondhand market for stereotyped works prolonged and complicated the production and distribution of material texts. The primary focus of this study is the ways …

Aporetic Rhetoric: The Use Of Uncertainty In Healthcare Contexts, Adam S. Lerner

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines how uncertainty is rhetorically deployed in healthcare contexts. Investigating four major healthcare contexts, I study how different forms of uncertainty produce distinct rhetorical effects and consequences. In Chapter 1, I explore how the haphazard use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war makes it difficult for veterans to prove their exposure to this deadly chemical. In Chapter 2, I examine the rhetorical strategies of mental illness skeptics and denialists, looking at how each deploys uncertainty in different and related ways. In Chapter 3, I investigate the intersection between design, emotion, and uncertainty as it appears in the …

“As The Occasion Demands”: Constraint-Based Practice In Rhetoric And Composition, Erica Kerstin Fischer

Theses and Dissertations

In their 2010 Composition Studies article, Laurie Gries and Collin Brooke observe, “constrained writing has been underappreciated” in the composition classroom (21). Taking seriously the potential value of constraints in pedagogical practice, this project executes a cross-disciplinary examination (drawing from design theory, experimental poetry, literary theory, composition, and rhetorical theory) of the various occurrences of, and approaches to, constraints and their influences on the ways we think and write. This investigation reveals that constraints create the conditions under which students can become productively defamiliarized to their thinking and writing habits, encouraging them to encounter alternatives otherwise left unnoticed.

I suggest …

‘Held By Thy Voice’: Navigating Time In John Milton’S Poetry, Jessica Junqueira

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation, “‘Held by Thy Voice’: Navigating Time in John Milton’s Poetry” explores how and to what extent John Milton uses the formal device of suspension in “Lycidas,” Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. I argue that by using suspension, Milton negotiates between multiple categories of time. These moments are important because they highlight characters’ perspectives and expose the limitations of their viewpoints. Milton also employs suspension to introduce potential scenarios that reveal characters to be out of step with a providential framework. He uses suspension to connect two or more temporal categories and to reveal an individual’s position in relation …

Bodies In Play: Female Athleticism In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Jillian Weber

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores depictions of athletic female characters in nineteenth-century American literature. I argue that there is a rich literary tradition of athletic women, whose origin I date to the 1840s, that has not been explored. To date, scholars have considered athletic women in literature anomalies, a case of a gender-bending female found in a single text, but not part of a longer genealogy of this character type. By examining athletic women over a period of decades and across several genres of American literature we see how this character type has been shaped by authors and culture alike. I illustrate …

Building Community Within The Writing Center, Candace Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

Since their inception, Writing Centers have had the purpose of helping students with their writing, and they have met this goal by using collaborative learning and by talking to students about their writing. While the form of the center has changed over time, its purpose has not, and to better help Writing Centers achieve their purpose, they should focus on building community both amongst their tutors and between their tutors and tutees. A greater sense of community, welcome, and harmony will make the center a better place to work for the tutors, and it will make students/clients will feel more …