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Fan Fiction And The Trojan War: Contemporary Euripidean Perspective On The Treatment Of Enslaved Women In The Silence Of The Girls, A Thousand Ships, And For The Most Beautiful, Richard K. Sheldon May 2021

Fan Fiction And The Trojan War: Contemporary Euripidean Perspective On The Treatment Of Enslaved Women In The Silence Of The Girls, A Thousand Ships, And For The Most Beautiful, Richard K. Sheldon

LSU Master's Theses

This study examines three contemporary novels of fan fiction, authored by women, that retell the Trojan War: Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful (2016), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018), and Nathalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019). This study offers a reading of contemporary Homeric reception by analyzing the conversations that the novels initiate between each other, Homer’s Iliad, and Euripides’ tragedies, Hecuba (424 BCE) and Trojan Women (415 BCE). The study establishes a connection between the three authors and Euripides by treating the novels as works of fan fiction. In so doing, the study identifies …


Identity Construction In The Yoruba Group Project Abroad: Discourse Analysis Of Language Use, Tawakalitu Odunayo Lasisi Mar 2021

Identity Construction In The Yoruba Group Project Abroad: Discourse Analysis Of Language Use, Tawakalitu Odunayo Lasisi

LSU Master's Theses

This research examines the experiences of five Nigerian Americans who participated in the Yoruba Group Project Abroad in the year 2018. After taking classes on Yoruba language at the basic, intermediate and advanced levels in their various universities here in the US, the students traveled to Nigeria in the summer of 2018 to immerse themselves in the native speakers’ environment in Ibadan, Nigeria. While in Ibadan, they were paired with Nigerian host families (Yoruba speakers) in order to have an overarching immersive experience. These students constitute the population of this research. Using a qualitative research method and an in-depth online …


Considering Blackness In George A. Romero's Night Of The Living Dead: An Historical Exploration, Jennifer Whitney Dotson Jan 2006

Considering Blackness In George A. Romero's Night Of The Living Dead: An Historical Exploration, Jennifer Whitney Dotson

LSU Master's Theses

When George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, the independent black and white zombie film stunned American moviegoers. Having assaulted the audience with a new level of violence-laden gore, Night of the Living Dead received much attention from both popular and critical audiences, with the former rushing to theaters to see the film over and over and the latter almost universally panning the film for its poor taste and gratuitous violence. Since its release, however, Night of the Living Dead has become one of the most written about horror films in American history, with critics …


The Manner Of Mystery: Free Indirect Discourse And Epiphany In The Stories Of Flannery O'Connor, Denise Hopkins Jan 2006

The Manner Of Mystery: Free Indirect Discourse And Epiphany In The Stories Of Flannery O'Connor, Denise Hopkins

LSU Master's Theses

This project addresses the narrative voice(s) in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, particularly in relation to her conception of art. O’Connor critics often polarize the cultural and religious worth of her stories. As a Catholic, O’Connor was convinced that the “the ultimate reality is the Incarnation” (HB 92). As an artist, O’Connor believed that fiction should begin with a writer’s attention to the natural world as she comprehends it through the senses. It is no wonder, then, that her fiction lends itself well to critics interested in both her theology and her presentation of issues of race, class, and gender. My …


Roving 'Twixt Land And Sea: Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, And The Maritime World-System', James W. Long Jan 2006

Roving 'Twixt Land And Sea: Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, And The Maritime World-System', James W. Long

LSU Master's Theses

Although Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad are generally regarded as sea writers, both wrote numerous works concerned primarily with events on land. But critical approaches to both writers display a tendency to prioritize one set of environments. A result of such approaches is to overlook the manner in which Melville and Conrad explore the relationship between land and sea. This paper argues that one way to analyze how both writers examine that relationship is by locating it within the space of the modern world-system. Immanuel Wallerstein defines the modern world-system as the capitalist world-economy that qualifies as the only historical …


The Abc's Of Hiv: When "Just Say No" Is Not Enough-Queer Critique Of Aids Policy, Lisa Laura Ladwig Jan 2006

The Abc's Of Hiv: When "Just Say No" Is Not Enough-Queer Critique Of Aids Policy, Lisa Laura Ladwig

LSU Master's Theses

This paper will critique the United States' AIDS policy, both domestic and international. I demonstrate how queer theorists have used Jacques Lacan's concepts of "jouissance" and the "unconscious desire" to suggests ways in which the current policy has dangerous implications for real people, for public health, and human rights. I reveal how the problem of rising HIV infection is not due to the lack of availability of safer-sex information, but rather it is a problem of execution: the Religious Right's ideology inscribed in our public health policy. Finally, I wish to expose how people in this country and others are …


Feminism In Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners Of The Americans, The Vicar Of Wrexhill, The Life And Adventures Of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw And Jessie Phillips, Jessica S. Boulard Jan 2005

Feminism In Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners Of The Americans, The Vicar Of Wrexhill, The Life And Adventures Of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw And Jessie Phillips, Jessica S. Boulard

LSU Master's Theses

In The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), the travelogue that launched Trollope's career as a literary figure, she accounts the four years spent living in America with the majority of her children and without her husband. The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836), published fifteen years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, is the first anti-slavery novel written in English. Other novels, like The Vicar of Wrexhill (1834) and Jessie Phillips (1844) discuss legal matters. A common thread connects much of Trollope's work. That thread is feminism, which places her in the company of (and somewhere in between) Mary …


Castle To Condo, Country To Corporation: What Becomes Of Hamlet In Almereyda's Modern World, Melissa Trosclair Daigle Jan 2005

Castle To Condo, Country To Corporation: What Becomes Of Hamlet In Almereyda's Modern World, Melissa Trosclair Daigle

LSU Master's Theses

This paper looks into the inner workings of Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000). Even though Almereyda updates the setting and cuts many of the lines, sometimes entire scenes, from the source text, he is able to convey the some of the themes through his use of technology and media. While some themes do transfer into the postmodern setting, the places of discord are most interesting. Of particular interest is his use of modern technologies to display the corruption found in Shakespeare's play. These technologies, including speakerphone, surveillance equipment, wiring devices, handheld camcorders, and still photography, create an atmosphere of both continual …


Milton's "Covering Cherub": The Influence Of Stanley Fish's Surprised By Sin On Twentieth-Century Milton Criticism, Thomas Thoits Jan 2005

Milton's "Covering Cherub": The Influence Of Stanley Fish's Surprised By Sin On Twentieth-Century Milton Criticism, Thomas Thoits

LSU Master's Theses

During a time when ideological debates between Milton critics remained largely unresolved, Stanley Fish reconciled both sides of the “Milton Controversy” with Surprised by Sin, positing a theoretically sophisticated method that centers the poem’s meaning in the reader’s experience. Christian and non-Christian critics became enfranchised in critical debate since their reactions, according to Fish, were valid and intended by Milton. Borrowing his intentionalist approach from A.J.A. Waldock, Fish asserts his version of both author and text while implicitly employing a radically subjective hermeneutics. Fish focuses on the multiple and contradictory linguistic meanings within Paradise Lost, locating the source of these …


Mordred: Treachery, Transference, And Border Pressure In British Arthurian Romance, George Gregory Molchan Jan 2005

Mordred: Treachery, Transference, And Border Pressure In British Arthurian Romance, George Gregory Molchan

LSU Master's Theses

This study focuses on the question of how Mordred comes to be portrayed as a traitor within the British Arthurian context. Chapter 1 introduces the question of Mordred’s treachery. Chapter 2 charts Mordred’s origins and development in Welsh and British literature. Chapter 3 focuses on the themes of unity, kinship, loyalty, adultery, and incest that emerge in connection with Mordred’s character. Chapter 4 deals with the idea that Mordred’s treacherous characteristics have been transferred upon him in the course of the British Arthurian narrative’s development. Chapter 5 discusses the possibility that Mordred’s development is in part due to Geoffrey of …


Ethics And Literature: Love And Perception In Henry James, Sarah Hamilton Jan 2004

Ethics And Literature: Love And Perception In Henry James, Sarah Hamilton

LSU Master's Theses

In this paper I argue for the value of literature in ethical instruction. Following Martha Nussbaum, I argue that literature often promotes the kind of context-specific judgment, respect for the cognitive value of the emotions and empathy for others that are foundational to the kind of ethical judgment Nussbaum and I support. Like Nussbaum, I find that Henry James's novels evince these same ethical values and that his novels, especially the novels of the late phase, are therefore useful for ethical instruction. Unlike Nussbaum, however, I do not believe that James portrays erotic love as an emotion that is incompatible …


Black Women Writing Black Mother Figures: Reading Black Motherhood In Their Eyes Were Watching God And Meridian, Alexis Durell Powe Jan 2004

Black Women Writing Black Mother Figures: Reading Black Motherhood In Their Eyes Were Watching God And Meridian, Alexis Durell Powe

LSU Master's Theses

This research explores connections between Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker's Meridian, two important novels in the African American canon rarely studied in conjunction. I examine the novels' portrayals of Black mothers, comparing and contrasting Nanny Crawford and Mrs. Hill as central mother figures. I also examine Leafy Crawford, Meridian Hill, and other minor Black mother/women characters. Though Hurston's and Walker's presentations of Black mothers differ, both authors work toward dismantling traditional stereotypes of Black motherhood, particularly the Black superwoman stereotype, and, thereby, ultimately redefining Black womanhood. In defending this claim, I explore Hurston's …


Robert Lowell's Life-Writing And Memory, Gye-Yu Kang Jan 2003

Robert Lowell's Life-Writing And Memory, Gye-Yu Kang

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis examines Robert Lowell's use of memory in such autobiographical works as Life Studies and Day by Day. In those volumes, Lowell returns to recollect his private past; his act of remembering becomes the poetic process by which Lowell is able to create the retrospective truth of his life. The most important feature of memory in his life-writing is in its role as an imaginative reconstruction. In the first chapter, I review recent models that regard memory as a reconstructive process. Memory involves more than fact, according to these investigations; it also represents a fictionalizing process of self. In …


"Baleful Weeds And Precious-Juiced Flowers": Romeo And Juliet And Renaissance Medical Discourse, Erica Nicole Daigle Jan 2003

"Baleful Weeds And Precious-Juiced Flowers": Romeo And Juliet And Renaissance Medical Discourse, Erica Nicole Daigle

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis claims that Shakespeare exaggerated the characterization of two figures in Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence and the apothecary, to make a statement about the conditions of medical treatment in sixteenth century London. These two figures represent two very different approaches to healing, one that is informed with ancient holistic medical theory and one that is driven by economics, and this work attempts to explain the cultural conditions that warranted such a discrepancy in the play. I address these two medical figures in the contexts of the events of the text, of the contemporary medical profession, and of materialism …


Pink Paper And The Composition Of Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds, Samuel Kauffman Anderson Jan 2002

Pink Paper And The Composition Of Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds, Samuel Kauffman Anderson

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis is an analysis of the two surviving typescripts of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. After a brief overview of both typescripts, the thesis focuses on the earlier of the two, especially its use of pink paper, and suggests (based on subject matter, pagination, and stylistic patterns) that the pink pages were written before the typescript's white pages, and therefore that they represent O'Brien's earliest conception of the novel.


Explaining The Explanation: Byron's Notes To Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cristina M. Caminita Jan 2002

Explaining The Explanation: Byron's Notes To Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cristina M. Caminita

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis, I show that Lord Byron's notes to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are an integral part of the poem itself, not to be read as added material, but to be read as material that comments upon and deconstructs the poem. I examine the first two cantos of the poem, reading the notes as Byron's own answers and questions to the stylistic and political ramifications of the romance verse. By scrutinizing Byron's use of the romantic hero, the romance verse, the romantic quest and the text of romance for his reading public, I show Byron's own subversion and questioning of …


"Of One Kind Or Another": Rape In The Fiction Of Eudora Welty, Nicole M. Donald Jan 2001

"Of One Kind Or Another": Rape In The Fiction Of Eudora Welty, Nicole M. Donald

LSU Master's Theses

"Of One Kind or Another:" Rape in the Fiction of Eudora Welty explores the ways in which Eudora Welty's repeated inclusion of rape in her fiction reveals and questions southern society and women's roles in it. Despite the vague, even confusing language with which she describes the incidents of rape. Welty offers a rich, forceful commentary upon the culture and women's roles in it. The ambiguity with which she describes rape reveals ambivalence toward the society that Welty may be said at once to protect and to expose. An examination of Welty's use of rape in her fiction reveals a …