Digital Commons Network^™

Sex, Labor, And The American Way: Detroit Aesthetic In Mid-Twentieth-Century Literature, Jenna F. Gerds

Wayne State University Dissertations

The essay analyzes Sinclair Lewis short fiction in If I Were Boss, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. The primary literature is juxtaposed with a study of visual texts and historic research with a locational and thematic basis in Detroit. Ford Times and early automobile advertisements, Diego Rivera's mural Detroit Industry, photographs of the Sojourner Truth housing project riots, and the accounts of gay union workers comprise a framework for each of the central texts. Detroit aesthetic is gritty, realist, …

Communication And Identity: The Paternity Leave Decision, Scott Sellnow-Richmond

Wayne State University Dissertations

Paternity leave has remained an under-studied phenomenon in the United States. The US stands in contrast to countries such as Sweden and Norway, which have a history of government-regulated paid time off for fathers of new children. Therefore new fathers in the US face a unique situation regarding their decision of whether or not to take whatever form of paternity leave may be available to them. This study explores what aspects of new fathers’ identities are salient regarding the paternity leave decision. The Communication Theory of Identity (CTI) is used as a theoretical framework to explore how these identities correspond …

An Evaluation Of The Factor Structure, Reliability And Construct Validity Of The Male Role Norms Inventory-Revised For African American/Black Men, Wilfred Michael Allen

Wayne State University Dissertations

Background: In the United States, on average, men die nearly five years younger than women. Among men, the life expectancy for African American/Blacks is 72.1 years compared to 76.6 years for White/European Americans. African-American/Black men experience an earlier onset and more severe disease with higher rates of complications than White/European American men. Masculinity ideology has been identified by researchers as having an influence on health behaviors and ultimately health outcomes. Based on prior research literature, higher levels of masculinity ideology have been associated with fewer health promoting behaviors. As such, there is a need for a reliable and valid measure …

"If More Women Knew More Jokes...": The Comic Dramaturgy Of Sarah Ruhl And Sheila Callaghan, Jennifer Ann Goff

Wayne State University Dissertations

Conversations around women and comedy are few, and tend to swirl around the tired question of whether or not women are funny. Conclusions usually range from, "They're not" to a few token funny women whose exceptional wit proves the rule that, in fact, women are not funny. Or, if women are funny, they have a specific, feminine brand of humor that has an almost genetic set of differences from men's comedy. In this dissertation, rather than outlining an essentialized poetics of "women's comedy," I identify two prominent women writing comedy for the theatre today. Drawing on comic, dramatic and feminist …

An Argument For A Neutral Free Logic, Daniel Yeakel

Wayne State University Dissertations

I argue for a neutral free logic is a logic wherein sentences containing non-referring terms do not have truth value. The primary support for this conclusion comes by way of criticism of the alternatives. If every sentence of the form `a = a' is a logical truth and is consequently knowable a priori then it will follow absurdly that `a exists' is knowable a priori. There are several alternatives for avoiding this intolerable conclusion and I argue that, with the exception of neutral free logic which holds that `a = a' can lack truth value, their successes are not sufficient …

Adolescents' Characterization Of Their Neighborhood Through An Art-Based Community Project, Eileen Finnegan

Wayne State University Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to study adolescent participation in the development of a neighborhood mural as an art-based community project. I examined perceptions of the adolescents regarding the awareness of their community and neighborhoods. Additionally, I explored adolescents' perceptions of their own development in terms of building their self-confidence. To accomplish this, I facilitated the creation and design of a mural that depicts their perceptions of their neighborhoods, using art as a modality for expression. Fourteen seventh grade students attending a parochial school in a low socioeconomic area of a large metropolitan city participated in the study. They …

From Local To Global: Purpose, Process, And Product In The Narratives Of Eighth Grade Language Arts Students, Amira Saad Kassem

Wayne State University Dissertations

Using a convenience sampling of 10 eighth-grade language arts students, this exploratory case study examined in depth the literacy processes used by ten 8th grade students to generate various multimodal artifacts that comprise their final projects and the nature of the literacy transactions that fostered these processes over the course of one year in this language arts classroom. Following closely (via the case studies in Chapter Five) how four of the ten students used the literacy events of the classroom to claim spaces to perceive and perform their voices and visions, the study revealed how these students were able to …

Turning The Page: Fandoms, Multimodality, And The Transformation Of The 'Comic Book' Superhero, Matthew Alan Cicci

Wayne State University Dissertations

Superheroes are increasingly becoming more affiliated with film media than comic books. The amount of revenue generated, the formation of new fans, and the interests of comic publishers’ parent companies all suggest that superhero film adaptations are the medium most associated with the superhero character. Such a monumental shift in the distribution of superheroes—comic books were long the dominant medium of superhero characters—is indicative of ongoing media convergence practices; the success of these contemporary adaptations, from 1998 on, have not only caused the filmic superhero to eclipse the comic one, it has inevitably led to a rewriting of superhero comic …

Personal Identity, Survival And What Matters, James Alexander Gromak

Wayne State University Dissertations

Since the entire discussion of personal identity revolves around the identity of a person it is difficult to address these issues without presupposing that identity is maintained. In this dissertation, I propose an alternative approach to discussing the topic of personal identity (at least initially). This alternative approach is from the perspective of what I call ‘continuance’. I use ‘continuance’ to refer to some kind of ‘continuing life’ that is embodied in some person or persons. The term will be used as a neutral term for discussing the continuity of a person without any implications of identity. That is, in …

“Life Is A Luminous Halo”: Gender And Androgynous Time In Virginia Woolf, Ashley Whitmore

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the role of representations of time in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Orlando: A Biography, and The Waves to illustrate the development of an androgynous time that is located between the inner subjective time of each individual, inspired by Henri Bergson’s durée, and the stunted measured time of society.

The Introduction provides an overview of my argument and critical approach, as well as illustrates the background in which Woolf was writing. The Introduction also introduces the ideas of French philosopher Bergson, whose theories on time will be instrumental in forming Woolf’s androgynous time.

The remainder of the dissertation …

The Experiences Of Black American Older Adults Managing Pain: A Nursing Ethnography, Sheria Grice Robinson

Wayne State University Dissertations

Introduction: Pain can negatively affect quality of life for Black elders. They are less likely to report pain concerns and have voiced pain needs adequately met. To better understand the pain management experiences and concerns of Black elders, an ethnographic study was completed within an urban, low-income, elder housing facility. Methods: 106 participants completed a questionnaire comprised of a demographic tool, the PROMIS Global Health Scale (PROMIS), the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI), and the Psychological Stress Measure (PSM-9). Additionally, participant observation, informal interviews, and 20 formal recorded interviews with individuals identified as having pain were completed. Qualitative and frequency analysis …

Growing Up Tween: Femininity, Masculinity, And Coming Of Age, Victoria Velding

Wayne State University Dissertations

The construction and performance of gender reveal conceptions of femininity and masculinity that are exclusive to individuals and groups of individuals. As research suggests, societal gender norms are rooted in heteronormative ideologies suggesting that heterosexuality is ideal, and therefore to appropriately perform dominant femininity and masculinity is to perform heterosexuality. In this dissertation, I expand gender and sexuality knowledge by bridging the two in a population where sexuality studies are sparse: children, and more specifically, tweens. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 tweens (10 female and 10 male) between the ages of 8 and 12 and 15 mothers of tweens. …

Economic Revolution From Within: Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt And The Emergence Of The National Industrial Recovery Act Of 1933, Angella Lanette Smith

Wayne State University Dissertations

ECONOMIC REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN: HERBERT HOOVER, FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL RECOVERY ACT OF 1933

By

Angella LaNette Smith

August of 2015

Advisor: Dr. Elizabeth Faue

Major: History

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation seeks to place the National Recovery Administration (NRA), a central agency of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, in historical context. It explores the NRA’s origins in the political agendas and ideological arguments of presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as they reshaped the federal government’s role in bringing about an end to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The dissertation …

Transforming Motherhood: Single Parents' Liberation In The 1970s, Elizabeth Ryan

Wayne State University Dissertations

Transforming Motherhood examines the experiences of single mothers from the early 1970s until the mid-1980s. Because most accounts of single motherhood in these decades focused on single motherhood as the cause of social problems, most of the discourse about single motherhood is framed on the premise that single mothers are bad. The result of this assumption is to negate the single mother experience and uphold policies which try to limit single motherhood altogether. Transforming Motherhood seeks to redefine the problem of single motherhood by focusing on the issues from the perspective of single mothers. When single motherhood is examined through …

Chivalric Lieux De Memoire: Nostalgia, Communal Memory, And The Burden Of Historical Consciousness In Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, Wilkie Collins

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to position Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur as a response to the anxieties of a turbulent social period. To start, I establish the political and social climate of fifteenth-century England, drawing on the work of historians to demonstrate the disequilibrium of communal institutions, particularly during the Wars of the Roses. Utilizing the work of Johan Huizinga I argue that the troubling political atmosphere of the period in question contributes to, and is reflected in, Malory's exploration of a narrative tradition that no longer maintains an authentic continuity to the past. Drawing on Pierre Nora's theoretical opposition between …

The Impact Of Voter Suppression Laws On African American Participation In Florida And North Carolina From 1988 To 2012, Anthony Lewis Daniels

Wayne State University Dissertations

A rich body of research presents conflicting accounts describing how contemporary voter suppression laws impact political participation. This study process traces the political development of North Carolina and Florida from 1988 to 2012 to assess four competing explanations of this process. This study compares three measures of participation that strongly support the discouraging voter hypothesis, which finds that voter suppression laws depress black participation.

This study finds that state officials in Florida adopted a much stricter voter suppression regime than those in North Carolina for the period under study. As a result, the two states developed differing levels of democratization. …

Espacios Literarios: Textos Y Contextos En La Escritura De Beatriz Sarlo Y Ricardo Piglia, Paula Oliva- Fiori

Wayne State University Dissertations

El propósito del presente trabajo es acercar la obra de Beatriz Sarlo y Ricardo Piglia en un análisis de contrastes y variaciones a partir de los núcleos que forman la política y la ficción dentro de las tradiciones literarias argentinas y la experiencia de la literatura como espacio de resistencia y debate. Para ello, analizo el contexto generacional de ambos autores -y su participación en la dirección de dos revistas emblemáticas de los años setenta del siglo pasado: Los libros y Punto de vista-, la relectura crítica que formulan del canon literario argentino y la presencia de la ciudad de …

London Calling: The London Corresponding Society And The Ascension Of Popular Politics, Frank L. Petersmark

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

LONDON CALLING: THE LONDON CORRESPONDING SOCIETY AND THE ASCENSION OF POPULAR POLITICS

by

FRANK L. PETERSMARK III

May 2015

Advisor: Dr. Eric H. Ash

Major: History

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

This proposed dissertation will focus on the short but historically important life of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) in Britain in the last decade of the eighteenth century, from 1792-1799. The intent of such a focus should serve as a way to better understand the spread of political participation in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and the key role that the London Corresponding Society played in …

Sowing Seeds Of Subversion: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers' Subversive Use Of Fairy Tales And Folklore, Shandi Lynne Wagner

Wayne State University Dissertations

"Sowing Seeds of Subversion: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers' Subversive Use of Fairy Tales and Folklore" focuses on the fictional works of nineteenth-century British women authors, analyzing their use of fairy-tale and folklore motifs to criticize social mores, in particular those surrounding domestic ideology and the institution of marriage. By situating texts within their sociocultural contexts, I explore how nineteenth-century women authors revised and adapted classic fairy tales to communicate subversive, proto-feminist social criticism to a variety of audiences. I examine fiction and poetry published in literary annuals, in fairy-tale collections, and in the more generally available collections of poetry and …

The Literary Representations And Interpretations Of La Matanza, Roxana Zuniga

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the literary representations and interpretations of La Matanza, a Salvadoran massacre that occurred in 1932. A peasant-led uprising resulted in the assassination of thousands of campesinos and indigenous people by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez's repressive military regime. As a result of government repression and censorship, the events surrounding La Matanza were intentionally omitted from Salvadoran history for many decades. Despite these censorship efforts, writers like Roque Dalton, Claribel Alegría, Salarrué and Manlio Argueta defied authoritarian government repression and incorporated the events of La Matanza into their writing. The literary texts that this dissertation analyzes are: Salarrué's "Mi …

Literacy Potentials: Agency, Embodiment, And Hybridity In Cesar Chavez's Discourse Practices, Clayton Walker

Wayne State University Dissertations

This project examines César Chávez's writing during his work in the Community Service Organization in the 1950s to understand hybrid literacies and agency as an embodied aspect of literacy. Using a theoretical framework grounded in embodied cognition, this dissertation develops the concept of discursive readiness potential to describe agency as a capacity to act in discursive situations that emerges from one's embodied practice of literacies. The project explores Chávez's discourse genealogy through the first thirty-five years of his life in order to define lifeworld Discourse as an emergent hybridity that accounts for one's capacity to act based on one's history …

Detroit's Sport Spaces And The Rhetoric Of Consumption, Anthony C. Cavaiani

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation argues how Detroit’s spaces of sport consumption rhetorically configure the city’s identity. Specifically, this project interrogates the city’s sports spaces and argues how they anchor identity in the following ways: through the production of accessible discourses, through the emphasis on certain discourses and the de-emphasis of other discourses, through the regulation, control and biopower of the city’s sports spaces and their rhetorical effect on Detroit’s identity, and through the creation of distinct public memories produced from these discourses.

Code-Switching, Code-Mixing And Radical Bilingualism In U.S. Latino Texts, Roshawnda A. Derrick

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation, Code-switching, Code-mixing and Radical Bilingualism in U.S. Latino texts investigates the nature and significance of Spanish-English code-switching in U.S. Latino texts. I analyze fiction, creative non-fiction, journalistic texts, songs, and social media messages and I carry out a grammatical and sociolinguistic analyses of these texts. Although many of these texts would fall into Torres’ (2007) Radical Bilingualism category, I point out that there are in fact different ways in which a text can be radically bilingual and I show that some of these texts are approaching Auer’s (1999) notion of a fused lect. From a sociolinguistic point of …

Princess On The Margins: Toward A New Portrait Of Madame Élisabeth De France, Maria Spencer Wendeln

Wayne State University Dissertations

Princess on the Margins: Toward a New Biography of Madame Élisabeth de France, moves past the perpetuation of prior biographies on Louis XVI’s sister which make the princess out to be a “virgin martyr” and instead focuses on the princess’s political agency and place with the political culture of the French Revolution.

Rhetoric Of Young Non-Regular Workers In Post-Bubble Japan: A Genealogical Analysis, Noriaki Tajima

Wayne State University Dissertations

This work explores the development and struggle of a rhetorical subject of Japanese young non-regular workers against the recent slow economic trend. In Japan, the bubble-burst in 1991 invited a long economic recession, and companies started to adopt non-regular—low-wage, short-term and insecure—contracts from quintessential Fordist full-time seishain regular contract; yet, a large body of older seishain workers has retained this stable and affordable status. As a result, the vast majority of working forces enrolled in the job market since then has suffered from a low living standard, many on the verge of survival, while domestic mass media discourses have legitimated …

“A Lonely Wandering Refugee”: Displaced Whites In The Trans-Mississippi West During The American Civil War, 1861-1868, David Paul Hopkins, Jr.

Wayne State University Dissertations

Historians have written a great deal about the American Civil War and, until recently, much of that scholarly activity has focused on military battles and the effectiveness of the Union and Confederate armies on the war’s outcome. During the past few decades, social historians have tried to dig beneath that narrative to situate the war in the eyes of American citizens and how that war affected their lives. With this, there has been a focus on the Northern and Southern homefronts, African Americans, and soldiers’ motivations to fight – all rooted in the wartime experience. In this discussion, however, there …

A Recursive Service Learning Program: Empowering Students Of Color Traveling Within Community Borders, Cindy Lynn Mooty-Hoffmann

Wayne State University Dissertations

tbd

The Role Of Nostalgia In The Literature Of The Caribbean Diasporas – Linking Memory, Globalization And Homemaking, Lukasz Dominik Pawelek

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation, The Role of Nostalgia in the Literature of the Caribbean Diasporas – Linking Memory, Globalization and Homemaking, investigates diverse manifestations of nostalgia in the literature of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican diasporas. My study offers a comparative analysis of Esmeralda Santiago’s Cuando era puertorriqueña (1994), Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Next Year in Cuba (1995), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008).

My approach to the notion of nostalgia as a syndrome of globalization offers a valuable contribution to the Caribbean diasporic narrative and by extension to the canon of the U.S. Latino/a Literature. The …