Digital Commons Network^™

Destroyed By Madness: Fighting Stigma And Building Empathy Through The Narrative Experience, Kelley N. Gladden Walker

English Dissertations

This dissertation challenges the stigma of mental illness by analyzing 20^th century American life narratives written by persons with mental disorders. Focusing on the writing and lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg, Mary Jane Ward, Kay Redfield Jamison, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Cameron West, and Susanna Kaysen, while applying the theories of Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Sigmund Freud, William C. Cockerham, and Otto F. Wahl, I contend mental illness life narratives fight stigmatization by questioning the common stereotypes perpetuated by dominant cultural narratives. Through a historical lens, the project explores a variety of sources from 20 …

Sound, Subjectivity, And Feminism: Victorian Novels And Their Twentieth- And Twenty-First-Century Adaptations, Calabria D. Turner

English Dissertations

Investigating how film and serialized adaptations interpret feminist Victorian novels for a more modern audience yields decades of cultural responses to feminist motifs presented by nineteenth-century authors Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, and twentieth-century writer Jean Rhys. Analyzing Northanger Abbey (1817) by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by Anne Brontë, and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys and their adaptations demonstrates the nonlinearity of feminism as a political movement. The novels and their film and television adaptations reveal an ongoing and recursive response to feminism’s development. I discuss adaptation, …

“Where—Am I?”: H.D.’S Search For Identity, Dianne D. Berger

English Dissertations

Hilda Doolittle is best known as the imagist poet H.D. In a career lasting a half-century, H.D. also penned essays, memoirs, fiction, and translations of classical Greek works. Regardless of the genre, H.D. reveals much of her self in her work. Immediately following World War 1, she confronted her traumatic experiences during the war years. During World War II, she concentrated on the relationships—primarily with males—that had formed her identity. In the last work published in her lifetime, she conveyed what she had learned in her lifelong quest for identity. I explore selections from H.D.’s work in these three categories. …

Adopting Home Language And Multimodality In Composition Courses, Mack Curry

English Dissertations

Over the years, language has been a major issue in teaching composition courses, specifically when discussing African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Standard English (SE). Concepts such as Students Right to their Own Language (SRTOL), culturally relevant pedagogy, and code-switching have been introduced as ways to be more receptive to home language in the classroom. However, many students still lack feeling confidence to expressing themselves in their natural voices. I conducted this study to examine and tests how well AAVE, SE, code-meshing, and multimodality work together to help students better understand linguistic and rhetorical principles. This study found that teacher …

The Rhetoric Of Refugees: Literacy, Narrative And Identity For Somali Women, Mary Helen O'Connor

English Dissertations

This dissertation is a project in the recovery of the subjugated voices of Somali women who are living in the United States as a result of forced migration. Using a transactional, reflective, and activist methodology, I interviewed Somali women in an effort to recognize how multiples discourses of power impact assimilation and identity formation in their lives. I hope to influence how members of dominant cultures, particularly western cultures, research and write about refugees. This study considers the aspects of being Somali, a refugee, and a woman in the United States. As a contribution to academic discourse, I hope the …

Between Tactics Of Hope And Tactics Of Power: Liminality, (Re)Invention, And The Atlanta Overlook, Jeremy Godfrey

English Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the potential empowerment writing has among a homeless community in Atlanta, Georgia. Through the participation in a newly created writing workshop and a street newspaper in that community, the narrative and communication among writing participants demonstrate negotiations of self-identification as public and private writers and the situational influence writing has on their lives.

The study adds to the “public turn” of writing instruction with the intention of helping to bridge the gap between traditional composition pedagogy in academia and such education in outside community. That participatory instruction reinforces the notion that writing and rhetorical performances can …

An Examination Of Secrecy In Twentieth-Century African American Literature, Tamalyn Peterson

English Dissertations

This dissertation examines the legacy of secrecy, silences, and the unspoken in twentieth century African American literary texts. Using a range of texts representing various eras within the genre of African American literature, this dissertation contends that secrecy is a trope and may be attributed to inherited, maintained traditional practices from West and West Central Africa. Having read a number of African American texts and connecting my personal experiences with these works, I noticed a pattern of withheld discourse throughout.

Most notably, Leslie Lewis’s Telling Narratives posits a reason for this trope by examining earlier narratives, specifically nineteenth-century African American …

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Angela Marie Hall-Godsey

English Dissertations

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction explores the intentional methods of self-castration that lead to authorial empowerment. The project relies on the following self-castration formula: the author’s recognition of herself as a being defined by lack. This lack refers to the inability to signify within the phallocentric system of language. In addition to this initial recognition, the female author realizes writing for public consumption emulates the process of castration but, nevertheless, initiates the writing process as a way to resituate the origin of castration—placing it in her own hand. The female writer also recognizes …