Digital Commons Network^™

The Rebellious Angel, Pamela Gannon Mazzuchelli

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Examines Virginia Woolf's writing and her anger in historical contexts, revealing that circumstances dictated that she deflect this volatile emotion. Focuses on the ways in which this deflection of anger illuminates the fictional dynamics of Woolf's autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse and analyzes the concept of the Angel in the House, posited to be at the root of Woolf's anger. Argues that anger exists on three levels in the novel and that the main character, Mrs. Ramsay, is a victim of the Angel in the House ideology.

Senderos De Mi Vida, Brooke Lindsey Alderman

World Languages and Cultures

For my senior project I will compose a book of poetry that depicts my life to date. The book will be divided into three sections: my childhood, adolescence, and college life. My objective is to show the progression of my life through the emotions of Spanish poetry. This project is a culmination of my knowledge as a MLL major and a Psychology minor. The first section will begin through the eyes of a four year-old child experiencing a tumultuous divorce. Pictures will be added to give the reader a more vivid description. The second section will be a candid view …

The Wart Fairy: Adventures In Writing Children's Literature, Lynelle M. Broeker

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

This project is about developing a piece of children’s literature, from start to finish. The

Running Toward The Apocalypse: John Updike’S New America, Bob Batchelor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores two critical points in understanding John Updike's recent career. First, I examine him from a perspective outside the heavily-studied Rabbit tetralogy. Focusing on Updike's novel Terrorist, I attempt to counter the misperception that he offers little beyond the chronicling of middle-class, suburban America. Instead, this work digs for a deeper understanding of Updike.

Next, I consider Updike's role as an artist, professional writer, and celebrity to draw out a sense of the writer's life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Using him as a case study enables the analysis to include his changing role as a …

Character Development In A Distance Education Literature Course: Perspectives On Independent Study English 395r-Christian Fantasy Literature, Michael C. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

The goals of higher education often entail the development of students' character. Rarely, however, are these character development goals connected to the unique design and delivery of distance education programs. Additionally, the research literature that explores the character development aspects of distance education is sparse. Thus the purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how character development may occur in a distance context. Taking a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, I examined instructor and student perceptions of character development in a fantasy literature independent study course. Findings indicate that students perceived development of traits and strengths in the …

The Mystery Of The Body: Embodiment In The Nancy Drew Mystery Series, Katie Still

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This thesis investigates the ways in which ideas about class, gender, and race are produced and articulated through the body in the Nancy Drew Mystery series in the 1930s. Physical descriptions and bodily movements, as well as material surroundings, work together to reify and contradict dominant ideas of normalcy and deviance being located on the body.

Till, Jonathan Peter Moore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

till is a collection of poetry exclusively composed while the poet was a graduate student in the Creative Writing International Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The manuscript includes ekphrastic reflections on William Eggleston's Guide and confronts regionalism, religion and past/present subjectivity.

Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Der Verlorene: Trans-Generational Trauma, Guilt And Shame, Anja Jennifer Riley

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The public and private discourse about Germany's past under Hitler has recently undergone a significant shift. Instead of focusing on Germans as perpetrators, the last two decades have been dominated by discussions about Germans as innocent civilians victimized by the victorious Allies during the last years of WWII. Against the backdrop of this shift in German memory politics, this thesis examines literary negotiations of the current 'victim debate', using Hans-Ulrich Treichel's prose text Der Verlorene (1998) as a primary example. Der Verlorene dramatizes a childhood dominated by an irrevocable loss. The parents of the child narrator have been traumatized by …

Dying Fish Have Poor Grammar, Ryan A. Hanson

Culminating Projects in English

No abstract provided.

The Horse And Chivalry In Arthurian Literature, Ryan A. Hanson

Culminating Projects in English

No abstract provided.

Architectural Chastity Belts: The Window Motif As Instrument Of Discipline In Fifteenth-Century Italian Conduct Manuals And Art, Jennifer Megan Orendorf

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Italian thirst for excellence and knowledge burgeoned throughout the Quattrocento, the genre of instructional literature responded accordingly to social demands. Offering advice on a wide range of experience from the quotidian to the extraordinary, from superstition to scientific, conduct manuals appealed to readers of all Italian social classes. Investigating the relationship between this body of literature and the lives of contemporary women, this paper will focus specifically on those manuals which prescribe behaviors for women, and will investigate the reception of these precepts and the extent in which these notions informed and transformed women's lives.

In order to …

Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: Honing The Hybridity Of The Graphic Novel, Dallas Dycus

English Dissertations

The genre of comics has had a tumultuous career throughout the twentieth century: it has careened from wildly popular to being perceived as the source of society’s ills. Despite having been relegated to the lowest rung of the artistic ladder for the better part of the twentieth century, comics has been gaining in quality and respectability over the last couple of decades. My introductory chapter provides a broad, basic introduction to the genre of comics––its historical development, its different forms, and a survey of comics criticism over the last thirty years. In chapter two I clarify the nature of comics …

El Arte De La Resistencia: Música, Literatura Y Tradición Oral En La Región Andina Desde El Período Pre Moderno Hasta El Siglo Xvii, Catalina Andrango-Walker

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation addresses the construction of Andean subjectivity through the use of musical depictions in 16th and 17th century texts in which European chroniclers characterize the natives based on aspects of sonority, on rudimentary instruments or on musical practices that they considered as paganistic. Music classified as diabolical does not pass out of the category of noise in order to express savagery and disorder. In the grip of a fervent desire for the evangelization of the Andeans the Spaniards translated many sermons into native languages, and adapted the indigenous melodies dedicated to local deities by changing the lyrics so as …

Harry Potter And The Evolving Hero Archetype, Kellynn Gates

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

My name is Kellynn, and I am a Harry Potter addict. I am not the only one with this affliction. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is one of the most widely published and read series of all time. Harry Potter does not remain limited to the world of literature; the Harry movies have made millions of dollars and will continue to do so throughout the last three films. While the books are technically "children's literature," children, young adults, and adults from all over the world read and view the Harry Potter world. The cultural impact is significant, not only …

Opium Use In Victorian England: The Works Of Gaskell, Eliot, And Dickens, Jessica Rae Henderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

England’s opium trade with China in the nineteenth century, often conjures up images of a powerful nation, for financial gain and heedless of the damage caused, nefariously thrusting addictive drugs on an unwitting Chinese people and unwilling Chinese government. But this image hides the English side of the story, i.e. England’s own problem with opium. The English imported thousands of pounds for domestic use each year in the 19^th century, and until the late 1860s its sale was completely unrestricted. It was used as a veritable cure-all for various diseases, as well as a relief for any kind of …

Race, Class, And Herman Melville, Joan A. De Santis

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Analyzes two of the short stories in Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales, "Bartleby the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street" and "Benito Cereno" and argues that these stories are highly critical of the bourgeois class structure of American society that inform Wall Street, as well as the slave trade, in mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Posits that in these works Melville addresses the questions of hierarchical power in the workplace and the effects of racism and slavery in the colonization of America.

Holy Fools, Liminality And The Visual In Dostoevsky And Dickens, Danielle Marie Lavendier

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Studies the themes and motifs of holy characters, spaces and places, and artwork in Dostoevsky and Dickens, highlighting connections between Russian and Western literature through these major authors. Primarily focuses on The Idiot and Bleak House.

Come Tomorrow, Annemarie C. Messier

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Collection of five short stories : Foo Foo, Like Father, Birthday Girl, Omens, and Come Tomorrow.

Speaking Of Myself: Independence, Self-Representation, And The Speeches Of Rudyard Kipling, Jacob M. Wilkes

Theses and Dissertations

Rudyard Kipling is a man of immense diversity. He successfully managed to write for over half a century in a variety of genres: short story, travelogue, ballad, personal narrative, and news reporting, to name only a few. While doing so, Kipling readily interacted with a range of subjects and created a multitude of ideas. Likewise, on a personal level, Kipling led an immensely diverse life. He could easily claim four separate continents as home, living variously in India, the United States, England, and South Africa. By profession he was a writer, but as an observer he was so skilled that …

Excavating The Landscapes Of American Literature: Archaeology, Antiquarianism, And The Landscape In American Women's Writing, 1820--1890, Christina Healey

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the ways that women writers made use of the discourses of antiquarianism and archaeology between the years 1820 and 1890. Focusing especially upon the writings of Sarah Josepha Hale, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, the project examines depictions of artifacts, ruins, relics, and other antiquities in literary landscapes. Each of these women presents a unique way of knowing the world that is manifested in the ways their texts join different ways of understanding the landscape, its occupants, the artifacts it contains, its strata and geological history, and its aesthetic value. …

Absent Meaning: Fascination, Narrative, And Trauma In The Holocaust Imaginary, Christopher Scott Massey

Doctoral Dissertations

Examining post-1970 representations of the Holocaust and Nazism along with critical responses to these representations, the dissertation demonstrates how a use of the term "fascination" has shaped contemporary understandings of how the Holocaust should and should not be represented and remembered. My argument is that despite its pervasive and influential usage in the discourse of Holocaust representation, no critical attention has been given to what the term means. In as much as the term's usage draws the historical and ethical boundaries across which representations of the Holocaust cannot pass, this dearth of critical attention given to the term means that …

Arresting Beauty, Framing Evidence: An Inquiry Into Photography And The Teaching Of Writing, Kuhio Walters

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the uses and conceptualizations of photography in college Composition. Composition has long been conflicted over the relation between form and content---and since the 1970s, between aesthetics and politics. Today, this disciplinary tension manifests in how the visual is brought into pedagogy: either it is approached aesthetically, as something to beautify a text, or politically, as a source of cultural critique. The field's uses of photography have been positioned within this aesthetics/politics binary, but to understand the medium as only one or the other is to miss its full practical and theoretical potential.

Theoretically, photography is powerful and …

Fueling Small Explosions Of Conversation: A Reading Curriculum For Fourth Grade, Rebecca Blake Eisenberg

Graduate Student Independent Studies

The purpose of this fourth-grade reading curriculum is to teach students to become active readers who can articulate and communicate their thoughts about reading. By communicating about text, readers construct meaning and develop a rich understanding and appreciation of their reading. The curriculum uses the reading workshop framework (Atwell, 1998; Calkins, 2001; Rief, 1992) and the literature circle structure (Daniels, 2002). Process- and content-based mini-lessons provide explicit instruction for literature circle discussions. Comprehension strategy mini-lessons are provided to complement the literature circle instruction and provide support for students as needed.

The Sweetness Barrier, Sarah Berneche

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Sweetness Barrier is a collection of eight short stories representative of the impact the food industry has had on North America. Unlike other popular Canadian food writing, which focuses on the jovial and humorous aspects of food culture, this collection details the ways in which we, consumers and producers of food, have been eating, growing, buying, and distributing irresponsibly. While food may aid in emotional, mental and physical recovery, this thesis highlights the ways it also wreaks havoc, ravishes and destroys us. The convictions behind this work originate in Samuel de Champlain's Order of Good Cheer and in the …

Chinese Spirit, Russian Soul, And American Materialism: Images Of America In Twentieth-Century Chinese And Russian Travelogues, Rumyana Cholakova

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Chinese Spirit, Russian Soul, and American Materialism: Images of America in Twentieth-Century Chinese and Russian Travelogues This study is concerned with the process of understanding and representation of the Other in travel narratives and the role of the traveler's cultural tradition and ideological beliefs in this process. I explore the images of the United States in some of the most influential twentieth-century Chinese and Russian travelogues. There are deep cultural differences between China and Russia, yet their relationships with the West show certain similarities. The first important parallel is that the contacts with the West was a catalyst in the …

Representaciones E Imaginarios Sobre La Pobreza: Villa Miseria Y Subjetividad En La Literatura Argentina Del Siglo Xx Y Xxi, Maria Forcadell

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation studies the representation of shantytowns in Argentine narrative of the 20th and 21st century. The intellectual assumes the role of mediator and strengthens and or defies the social imagery about the poor and the space s/he inhabits. I argue that the socio-economic crisis of December 2001 affects the way in which writers imagine the subaltern and his/her urban spaces. As the narratives of progress and modernity enter in crisis, the villa miseria and poverty are reconfigured in new tales. This project is concentrated mainly in the post crisis fiction and on the emergency of social actors such piqueteros, …

Getting Out Of Wonderland: Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, And Anne Sexton, Jessica Mccort

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This project examines the appropriation of children's literature, particularly Grimm's and Andersen's fairy tales and Lewis Carroll's Alice books, by Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton. Influenced by the cultural fixation on the child and the increasing popularity of Freudian discourse in American culture, the rise of confessional poetry, and second-wave feminist interest in female socialization, Bishop, Plath, Rich, and Sexton pursued in their poetry and prose an investigation of self and social formation that was simultaneously rooted in the public exhumation of the personal past and the personalized exploration of the dominant narratives of girlhood purveyed …

Mandeville's Intolerance: The Contest For Souls And Sacred Sites In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Robert Patterson

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

As the first medieval text to combine the matter of the East with the matter of the Holy Land, The Travels circulated widely in over 300 manuscripts, making it an important text when studying medieval Christian attitudes toward non-Christians. Although many scholars point to The Travels as a tolerant text ahead of its time, a historicized approach reveals that Mandeville's project is better understood in terms of his intolerant universalism. I argue that in casting non-Christians as proto-Christians who stand as evidence of Christianity's global spiritual hegemony, the author appropriates and consumes them in service of his universalist agenda. I …

El Empalme De Fronteras Y Los Procesos De Identificación Como Métodos Para La Articulación De Subjetividades Fronterizas, Leticia Mcdoniel

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

2 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION El empalme de fronteras y los procesos de identificaci├│n como m├⌐todos para la articulaci├│n de subjetividades fronterizas by Leticia Trevi├▒o McDoniel Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures Washington University in Saint Louis, 2009 Professor John F. Garganigo, Chairperson This dissertation studies the representation of the US-Mexican borderland as represented in five novels written on either side of the border in different moments of the 20th Century. The three major components of the bordered space that emerge in these novels are: first, its geography -- both, the 2000 miles that divide the border and …

Nature And Environment In Nineteenth-Century Austrian Literature, Bartell Berg

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation illuminates the void of what Christopher Manes refers to in "Nature and Silence" as the "realm of silences, a world of "not saids" called nature, obscured in global claims of eternal truths about human difference, rationality, and transcendence." With the help of ecocriticism, my research explores the development of ecological themes in the writings of four nineteenth-century Austrians from deforestation to industrialization to the growth of gardening culture. In addition, I investigate the nexus between the philosophical and scientific origins of ecology as a discipline and its representation in Austrian literature.