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Discovering Caroline, Jon Meyers
Discovering Caroline, Jon Meyers
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
DISCOVERING CAROLINE is the script for an ensemble, a feature-length supernatural drama, set in 1899. Caroline, presumed dead at birth, returns forty years later to the scene of that tragedy, a university nursing school training hospital, where her birth mother still works as a lunch lady. Surrounded by a dozen other characters (thirteen if you count the pig), played against a backdrop of a handful of supernatural events, this script explores familiar love, romantic love, inappropriate love, truth, deceit, death, and the consequences on others when these life events intertwine throughout seventy-seven scenes. Included here is an introduction as well …
Countering Online Misinformation In The First-Year Composition Classroom, Samantha Sparrow Williams
Countering Online Misinformation In The First-Year Composition Classroom, Samantha Sparrow Williams
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
This thesis encourages the intentional and explicit integration of the best practices in media literacy education within the first-year composition classroom. The nature of FYC, which incorporates such content as research skills and source evaluation, provides an ideal opportunity to address the online misinformation and disinformation that have resulted in growing political polarization and cynicism. Recent findings suggest that these trends can be countered with the teaching of practices like lateral reading to verify a source’s veracity. After first demonstrating the challenges that university freshmen may bring with them to campus, this project makes suggestions for simple, consistent practices that …
To Romp The Sky, Katherine Elizabeth Curlee Hamblen
To Romp The Sky, Katherine Elizabeth Curlee Hamblen
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
This is a creative thesis consisting of a collection of poetry divided into three sections. The poems explore themes of womanhood, motherhood, mental health, loneliness, and healing. The first section deals with childhood and family of origin, the second section is about the move into adulthood, individuality, and loneliness. The third follows the narrator into having her own children, creating her own family, and finding healing.
I Love You, Go Away (A Novel), John Matthew Steinhafel
I Love You, Go Away (A Novel), John Matthew Steinhafel
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
I Love You, Go Away, a novel set in Milwaukee, tells the story of a twenty-two year-old nobody, Gabriel Driscoll, who meets and befriends a middle-aged, drug addicted, recluse actor, Beau Brooks. But less than six months into their friendship Beau commits suicide. At the funeral Gabriel meets a twenty-nine-year-old corporate executive, Michelle, the daughter of Beau’s long-time girlfriend. Gabriel and Michelle bond over their mutual grief and quickly strike up a romance. At the same time, Gabriel’s semi-estranged mother, Sadie, a recovering heroin addict, reaches out to him in an effort to rebuild their relationship. What follows for Gabriel …
The Memorialist, Lindsey Houchin
The Memorialist, Lindsey Houchin
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
The Memorialist is a work of creative nonfiction. In this long-form essay, the author digests the memories and secondhand stories unearthed while exploring the junked, rusted, and wrecked life of an eccentric uncle who was preceded in death by his sister, the author’s mother. Through its associative and slippery structure, it follows the author as she untangles two histories halted—connected, contrasting lives disrupted by death. Meditative and metaphorical, the narrative explores both the beauty and burden of death through the eulogy form in a quest to determine how to memorialize a life defined by what death leaves behind.
Sadie Jane, Esther French
Sadie Jane, Esther French
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Sadie Jane is a novella set in the town of Gypsum, a fictional location in rural Kentucky. The introduction covers the inspiration for the novella, which is based on Southern storytelling traditions and features the adventures of Sadie Jane, an independent octogenarian who returns to her hometown after many years. Sadie experiences the internal challenges of regrets and grief as well as the external challenges of busybodies and car thieves before finding her place in the community.
Kentuckiana, And A Dash Of Cambodia: A Collection Of Short Stories, Brodie Lee Gress
Kentuckiana, And A Dash Of Cambodia: A Collection Of Short Stories, Brodie Lee Gress
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
The following is a collection of five short stories set in regions familiar to me: “Dewberry Park,” “YouLead,” and “The Color Violet” in Indiana; “Mens Rea” in Kentucky; and “Tory Ride” in Cambodia. Gay identity plays a role in many of these stories, and other themes explored include family, region, socioeconomics, gender, mentality, and change. These stories are concerned with people on the brink, failing and surviving all the same. Some of them are intended to weigh, and some to satirize. I hope they all nick their readers.
Mule Nation, Polina Konokh
Mule Nation, Polina Konokh
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
This thesis project is a TV pilot and the second episode of the show. There is also a critical essay that serves as an explanation of the creative work.
There are multiple problems addressed in the text, such as growing up, living in the modern world, countries not working properly for their citizens and other important issues of our modern life, with a thorough explanation of some of them in the critical essay.
The screenplays are formatted according to the current industry standards.
The result of this thesis is two first episodes of a potential TV show.
Cultural And Narrative Shifts Of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature In Hawthorne's Wonder Book For Girls And Boys, Kristen Clark Brandt
Cultural And Narrative Shifts Of Nineteenth Century Children's Literature In Hawthorne's Wonder Book For Girls And Boys, Kristen Clark Brandt
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century such as dominant …
Run Me Dusk, Zane Truman Dezeeuw
Run Me Dusk, Zane Truman Dezeeuw
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
This is a full-length novel with a critical afterward. Run Me Dusk is a falling-out of love narrative about twenty-seven-year-old Milo who, after being broken up with by his boyfriend Red, flees from Illinois back to his hometown in southwestern Colorado to meditate on his place and purpose in life. The themes covered in this book are gay relationships, family relationships, mortality, and the natural world.
Break Us Beautiful, Elizabeth Upshur
Break Us Beautiful, Elizabeth Upshur
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
The problem addressed in this thesis is cultivating an answer to the question: what creates or comprises the sum total of my Blackness as a modern American woman living in our current political climate? I primarily use a read/call and response methodology, responding to both lived and hypothetical experiences that explore or demonstrate the ways that identity, race, gender, sexuality, regionality, religion, and the historical thumbprint intersect. The results are this collection of poems that is at times mythological, at times irreverent, both abstract and formal as it seeks to fit these pieces into a singular mosaic. The conclusion drawn …
Arizhio: Tales Of Glorious Manifest Destiny, Clinton Craig
Arizhio: Tales Of Glorious Manifest Destiny, Clinton Craig
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
This is a book of short stories with a critical introduction. In theme, the stories seek to find the border between the Midwest and the Southwest of America by focusing on Ohio and Arizona. Some of the stories seek to exemplify “experimental” fiction, while the critical introduction seeks to define “experimental.” In addition, the introduction theorizes about the role of setting in linking collections and characterization.
Roasted: Coffee, Insult, Rhetoric, David Pharis Gifford
Roasted: Coffee, Insult, Rhetoric, David Pharis Gifford
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
While insult has been a frequent topic for rhetorical study in the past, little if any work has gone toward the formation of a systematic theory of insult. Karina Korostelina has proposed a theory of intergroup identity insults, which appears promising from a socio-cultural perspective. However, her theory does not address the particularly rhetorical characteristics of insults, preferring instead to analyze them with reference to their socio-historic context. While her theory proves sound under scrutiny, it does little to shed light on pejorative rhetoric as rhetoric.
In what follows, I would like to propose certain characteristics of pejorative rhetoric that …
Strange Things Keep Happening To Me: Postcolonial Identity And Henry James's Ghosts, Conor J. Scruton
Strange Things Keep Happening To Me: Postcolonial Identity And Henry James's Ghosts, Conor J. Scruton
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
While there have been many studies of Henry James's ghost stories, there has been surprisingly little scholarship written on postcolonial tensions in these works. In American literature, the figure of the Native American ghost is a common expression of Western settler guilt over native erasure and land seizure. In both his American and British ghost stories, though, James focuses more on the horror within the colonizer than the terrifying, ghostly other from the edge of the empire. As such, these ghost stories serve as a more significant critique of colonialism and imperialism than Gothic texts that merely demonstrate the colonizer’s …
Inexhaustible Magic: Folklore As World Building In Harry Potter, Samantha G. Castleman
Inexhaustible Magic: Folklore As World Building In Harry Potter, Samantha G. Castleman
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
The practice of secondary world building, the creation of a fantasy realm with its own unique laws and systems has long been a tradition within the genre of fantasy writing. In many notable cases, such as those publications by J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft, folklore exhibited in the world of the reader has been specifically used not only to construct these fantasy realms, but to add depth and believability to their presentation. The universe of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series demonstrates this same practice of folklore-as-world-building, yet her construction does much more than just create a fantasy realm. By using …
Come On In, The Writing's Fine: Preserving Voice And Generating Enthusiasm In My English 100 Syllabus, Elisa Leah Berry
Come On In, The Writing's Fine: Preserving Voice And Generating Enthusiasm In My English 100 Syllabus, Elisa Leah Berry
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
This thesis explores the potential for creating a composition syllabus that presents a model of good writing, is an enthusiastic invitation to the discipline, and provides a clear roadmap to success, not only for the course, but also for the students’ college career. This is especially useful for an increasingly diverse student community that arrives to college with a varying knowledge of the academic institution, with its specialized language and systems. The project explores the existing research on syllabus crafting, uses current composition studies and a survey of English 100 students to interrogate the rhetorical situation of the author’s own …
What Do You Mean, "Practice"? Theorizing The Writing-Music Connection, Callie Elise Compton
What Do You Mean, "Practice"? Theorizing The Writing-Music Connection, Callie Elise Compton
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Researchers in the field of composition studies have frequently made allusions to musicians when they’ve discussed the role of practice in gaining skill. In doing so, however, they’ve risked making speculative rather than testable claims and separating composition studies from recent insights on practice from other disciplines such as education and music psychology. These fields, I argue, offer testable frameworks with which composition instructors and scholars can teach and study writing practice. Such frameworks are necessary because composition researchers need to supplement qualitative studies of writers and writing with quantitative data to generate replicable tests of teaching methods that may …
Confessions Of An American Ginseng Addict, Addison Davis James
Confessions Of An American Ginseng Addict, Addison Davis James
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Confessions of an American Ginseng Addict uses the Lazy Branch Holler in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky as a setting for a creative nonfiction work, which uses history, confession, remembrances, and digressions to tell the story of a man dealing with loss, mental health issues, environmental sustainability, and the power of ginseng. In the style of Desert Solitaire and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the narrative is a discursive work of raw unadulterated gonzo writing.
Blood At The Root, April Schofield
Blood At The Root, April Schofield
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
This is a coming of age story about two very different boys – Jason, a Northerner who ends up stuck in a small Southern town and Billy, a Southern boy with an abusive father. The boys become friends and grow up learning the dark secrets that are allowed to fester in a tiny southern town ruled by the Good Ol’ Boy System of justice. The story chronicles how their shared experiences change them in ways they never imagined and ultimately destroys their friendship and their lives. Through a history of violence and prejudice, Billy and Jason learn who they really …
Babel, Anais Dorian Norman
Babel, Anais Dorian Norman
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
babel is a collection of nonfiction essays in which I explore a female twenty-something’s crossdimensional dilemma of spirituality, racism, art, and love in the wake of Bible-belt hipsterdom. I board the train that is human pride, that great metal snake by which we essayists craft our lives, and measure out my stories by cities and coffeespoons—dotted with dark roast, preferably. The train of my collection glides through the first ‘burg and its Godlike aspirations, Babel; travels a ways to Virginia, specifically Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and Prince Edward County, which was the hotbed of the Civil Rights in Education Movement; …
Prospects For Improving Bilingual Education: An Analysis Of Conditions Surrounding Bilingual Education Programs In U.S. Public Schools, Jennifer A. Gorman
Prospects For Improving Bilingual Education: An Analysis Of Conditions Surrounding Bilingual Education Programs In U.S. Public Schools, Jennifer A. Gorman
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Bilingual education is a subject of debate in education. Some claim that bilingual education programs are detrimental to students, but decades of research supports the benefits of bilingualism and bilingual education for both English Language Learners and monolingual English speakers. The U.S. does not have bilingual education programs in proportion to the needs that these programs could meet for students in public schools. If bilingualism is beneficial, then why do we not have more bilingual education programs? Research extensively covers the internal components of bilingual education programs but only touches on the effect of the external conditions necessary for program …
Between Two Worlds, Stephanie Tillman
Between Two Worlds, Stephanie Tillman
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
“Original Sin”—evocative and powerful words, but what if they were applied to one of the world’s most popular fairy tales? This thesis explores Snow White in the context of the Seven Deadly Sins and the grand fall of Adam and Eve. The forbidden fruit manifests itself in different ways, pulling the prim and proper princess into places she never could have imagined. But what of the Wicked Queen, here known as Lilith? She too feels the bite of the world’s sick sense of humor, exacting revenge on those who have wronged her. Are these poems about them? Or are they …
Finding The "T" In Lgbtq: Esl Educator Perceptions Of Transgender And Non-Binary Gender Topics In The Language Classroom, Teresa Lynn Witcher
Finding The "T" In Lgbtq: Esl Educator Perceptions Of Transgender And Non-Binary Gender Topics In The Language Classroom, Teresa Lynn Witcher
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
While there is a “T” in the acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ), the focus in both academia and the real world often shifts solely to sexuality. Even though the real world discussion of sexuality (and perhaps academia’s as well) is also much lacking in both attention to all sexualities (not simply heterosexual and homosexual), there is also a distinct lack of awareness about subtleties all along both the sexuality and gender spectrums. Although sexuality can depend on gender to some extent, particularly where limiting prefixes related to the preference for a specific binary gender (such as …
Isaac Watts And The Culture Of Dissent, Andrew Eli M. Yeater
Isaac Watts And The Culture Of Dissent, Andrew Eli M. Yeater
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Although Isaac Watts wrote hymns in the early eighteenth century, some of his hymns, such as “Joy to the World,” “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?,” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” survive today as well-known hymns. However, little has been written about the rhetorical effects of his hymns. This thesis demonstrates that, like any other literary work, Watts’ hymns can be analyzed rhetorically. This thesis analyzes Watts’ hymns with the aid of Louis Montrose’s New Historicism, showing how Watts’ hymns were impacted by the English culture in which he lived and how they impacted the religious culture to …
Variation Within Uniformity: The English Romantic Sonnet, Thomas Hamilton Cherry
Variation Within Uniformity: The English Romantic Sonnet, Thomas Hamilton Cherry
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
The English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century wrote numerous poems from genres and styles all across the poetic spectrum. From the epics of ancient origin concerning kings and fanciful settings to the political odes on fallen leaders and even the anthropological histories of what it meant to live in their time, these poets stretched their stylistic legs in many ways. One of the most interesting is their use of the short and rule-bound sonnet form that enjoyed a reemergence during their time. Though stylized throughout its existence, the sonnet most often falls into a specific form with guidelines …
Conscious Reconstruction: The Effects Of Second Language Acquisition On Self-Perception Of Gender Identity, Geneva Ged
Conscious Reconstruction: The Effects Of Second Language Acquisition On Self-Perception Of Gender Identity, Geneva Ged
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Gender interacts with other facets of English Language Learners’ social identity like race and ethnicity to guide their learning experiences, desires, and outcomes; however, much of traditional Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) research has focused on how motivation and language learning beliefs differ between male and female English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) students with the intent to identify difference, if it exists. English Language Learners who are studying abroad or who have immigrated to the United States have already established a gender identity influenced and created by their experiences in their first language …
Clockwork Heroines: Female Characters In Steampunk Literature, Cassie N. Bergman
Clockwork Heroines: Female Characters In Steampunk Literature, Cassie N. Bergman
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Steampunk is a progressive literary genre that evokes, imitates, and re-imagines the nineteenth century and favors the Industrial Revolution ideals of science and technology. In a historical framework, it mixes nineteenth-century conventions and retrofuturistic machinery with science fiction and fantasy elements. Steampunk authors are able to radically redefine socio-cultural implications that affect both past and contemporary societies. The following study explores the multitude of characteristics that define Steampunk literature as an interdisciplinary study. Chapter 1 explores the definitions and literary genres that construct Steampunk and includes a brief literary history of Steampunk works. Chapter 2 focuses on Cherie Priest’s novel …
Foreclosure And Other Essays, Derick Brandon Strode
Foreclosure And Other Essays, Derick Brandon Strode
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
My dad had early onset Alzheimer’s disease. I first knew something was wrong with him in 1995. He was 49 then, and I was just about to start the eighth grade. That’s the summer his company backed him into a corner and told him to quit or be fired. He had worked there 14 years. They said his behavior was changing, and they thought he was doing it on purpose. It took seven years to get an actual diagnosis. The doctors looked for everything. They just thought he was too young.
I’ve relied on materials found in my parents’ house …
Reading Ineffability And Realizing Tragedy In Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, Michael E. Gray
Reading Ineffability And Realizing Tragedy In Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, Michael E. Gray
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
Victory Garden, Stuart Moulthrop’s 1991 classic hyperfiction, presents a nonlinear story of U. S. home front involvement in the First Gulf War in a way that facilitates confusion and mimics a "fog of war" sort of (un)awareness. Using Storyspace to build his complex narrative, Moulthrop incorporates poetry, fiction, historical references, and low-tech graphic novel type elements. Among the graphic components are all-black and all-white screens that function as variables. Overtly, these screens speak of closure and signify unconsciousness; however, their nonverbal role may also be linked to the ineffability trope as used by Dante Alighieri and re-interpreted by contemporary …
Discourse And Conflict: The President Barack H. Obama Birth Certificate Controversy And The New Media, Timothy Lee Adams
Discourse And Conflict: The President Barack H. Obama Birth Certificate Controversy And The New Media, Timothy Lee Adams
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
A creative exploration of the consequences of public speech in the era of freely accessible, social media, as the author, a former elections official, records and explores the consequences of public dissent in the case of President Barack Obama’s eligibility controversy. This non-fiction narrative culminates with the author’s analysis and observations on both his personal experiences and the state of public speech and political power in contemporary America.