Digital Commons Network^™

Changing The World Through The Word: Developing Critical Consciousness Through Multicultural Children’S Literature With Critical Literacy In An Elementary Classroom, Hyekyoung Lee

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this study was to explore how fifth graders develop critical consciousness regarding the self and the world through critical literacy approaches using multicultural children’s literature. I employed Lewison, Flint, and Van Sluys’ four dimensions of critical literacy. I used a qualitative case study to design, frame and conduct this study in order to collect data and examine students’ cultural patterns including values, beliefs, behaviors, and language that they enacted in the critical literacy practices. I collected data through classroom observations, semi-structured students and teacher interviews, informal conversation, researcher’s reflective journal entries and field notes, and student-made artifacts. …

Alternative Biographies: (Re)Telling Feminine (Hi)Stories In Selected 20th-Century Texts By Québécois Women Writers, Jessica Mcbride

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to examine the tendency on the part of several québécois women authors from the 20^th century to create alternative feminine biographies for forgotten, undervalued, or misrepresented women from the past. Given the complex relationship the Québécois have with their provincial history, and the central role chauvinistic representations of women and the “Québec national text” play in safeguarding the québécois cultural identity, contemporary women writers from Québec are singularly poised to resurrect, recreate, revive, and rewrite the feminine historical experience into the traditional discourse of History. From Québec’s most famous woman writer, Anne Hébert, …

With Great Power: Examining The Representation And Empowerment Of Women In Dc And Marvel Comics, Kylee Kilbourne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and …

Novel Buildings: Architectural And Narrative Form In Victorian Fiction, Ashley R. Nadeau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, “Novel Buildings: Architectural and Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction,” offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the economic and social histories of built space and the Victorian literary imagination. At its most fundamental level, it claims that the spaces we inhabit shape the stories we tell. Reading Victorian literature through the architectural archive of the period, it argues that the nineteenth century’s rapidly evolving built environment resulted in a new set of narrative possibilities and laid the foundations for authorial innovations in genre, style, and form. Organized taxonomically around four architectural types reinvented in the nineteenth century—courthouses, …

An Antidote To War? An Examination Of The Success Of The Once And Future King By T.H. White, Emily L. Ward

HON499 projects

This paper seeks to evaluate the level of success of The Once and Future King by T.H. White. It examines the financial success of the book and its popularity among readers, both immediately upon publication and in later years. It also considers the book within its historical context, during and after World War II, and hypothesizes that the war negatively impacted the success of the book since it has a pacifist agenda. Finally, the paper examines White’s own goals and intentions while writing the book, and whether the book achieved those purposes. In order to study these matters, the text …

The E-Writing Experiences Of Literary Authors, Kathleen Schreurs

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The e-writing experience is new and not yet fully understood and there is a story to be told about the enigmatic term e-writing and its impact on authors in the e-paradigm. In this study I collected understandings of e-writing by exploring the experiences of literary authors through qualitative case studies. I set out to find answers amidst two interconnected plots of inquiry. The first plot examined e language, in particular the term e-writing, and asked how authors understand the term e-writing and how their experiences contributed to that meaning. The second storyline asked how the digital revolution and resulting e-culture …

Ecologies Of Embodied Minds Embedded: Radical Romantic Perspectives On Architectures Of Technology, Sharmaine Browne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Romantic responses to the role of architectural technologies in the development of material being, consciousness, and culture by applying a critical approach in which I combine radical embodied cognitive theory, ecocritical perspectives, and a phenomenological lens to select Romantic texts written from 1789 to 1884 in response to industrial modernity. While scholarship has thoroughly explored technology as a cultural force which inevitably shapes consciousness, I propose that a slight shift of emphasis from technology’s external influence to the material internalization of its influence allows for new perspectives—particularly in light of recent proposals in cognitive philosophy which assert …

The Children Of The Cuban Revolution In The Diaspora: From Internationalism To Transnational And Cosmopolitan Imaginaries, Marelys Valencia

Open Access Dissertations

My dissertation investigates the intermingling of discourses of migration and aesthetics within global market dynamics in the cultural production of late Cuban émigrés in the U.S. and Europe, to whom I refer as “the children of the revolution” —following Mette Louise Berg. I argue that this understudied migratory generation has replaced the diasporic teleology of return of the exile community with other imaginaries. As such, my dissertation sheds light not only on the varying ways of being Cuban in today’s world, but also on the different routes of the children of the revolution in the diaspora. By engaging in a …

Las Ciencias Y Las Letras: Pensamiento Tecno-Científico Y Cultura En España (1959-2016), Carlos Gamez-Perez

Open Access Dissertations

In my dissertation, I trace the dramatic change that Spanish society experienced around scientific and technological developments from the final decades of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) until now. I analyze how the recent changes and the emerging fascination with science and technology are borne out by the works of three different clusters of writers: a) the formal innovators of the 1960s; b) the pop writers of the 1990s; and c) a group of fiction writers of the 2000s imbued by techno-science (the so-called mutantes). I combine these analyses with a study of the efforts to popularize science developed by the Francoist …

Texas-Mexico Border Cultural Production: Ethnographic Aesthetics And Modernity In Folklore, Literature, And Film, Margie Montanez

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation develops the trope of an ethnographic aesthetic to dissect the cultural production of Jovita González, Américo Paredes, and more recent works by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Lourdes Portillo. The dissertation argues that Texas-Mexican cultural production actively produces knowledge. In other words, when understood within the framework of ethnographic aesthetics, Texas-Mexican border cultural anticipates and imagines local futures in a constant shifting colonial space. Texas-Mexico border cultural production is not passive or residual but is in fact active and emergent.

The dissertation situates Texas-Mexico border cultural production as responding to and within post-national American Studies discourse that “stresses …

Neither Surrogate Nor Complement: The Long Life Of Visual Narratives, Ann L. D'Orazio

English Language and Literature ETDs

Visual narratives are contested territory. They require tools from a variety of academic disciplines, and they defy the usual sets of interpretive strategies and systems of nomenclature in traditional humanities disciplines. This dissertation fills in one of the missing approaches to visual narratives; that is the long historical, interconnected view that renders visible significant connections among graphic narratives from the medieval manuscript to the contemporary comic book and graphic novel. The project articulates a theory of the long material and cultural life of visual narratives in a variety of media forms, including the manuscript, the early printed book, the lithograph …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

“The Abnihilization Of The Etym”: Finnegans Wake Ii.3 As Oral Poetry In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction, Joshua Brown

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that Finnegans Wake II.3 reveals a role for a dynamic kind of art to contest the dominant narratives in an age of seemingly static new-media technological saturation. By redeploying resources from ancient oral poetic tradition, Finnegans Wake creates a form of resistance to the totalizing effects of textualized mass culture. Technologically saturated media culture often attempts to encode stable, binary identities into the fabric of sociopolitical reality; Finnegans Wake II.3 contrasts two alternatives to escape this oppressively rigid encoding. Beginning with an extended description of the radio-televisual device in the background of Earwicker’s pub—“their tolvtubular high fidelity …

Graduate Piano Recital, Seth T. Ernst

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

GRADUATE PIANO RECITAL

An Abstract of the Thesis by

Seth Ernst

This thesis will include program notes for advanced piano repertoire representative of the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and 20th Century music style periods. For each work, there will be biographical information about the composer, a thorough analysis and a presentation of performance suggestions. The works to be discussed include the Prelude and Fugue in G minor, BWV 861, from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach; the Sonata in B-flat major, Op. 22, by Ludwig Van Beethoven; the Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 22, by Robert Schumann; …

“The Cracked Pots Of Humanity”: Post-World War Ii American Literary Perspectives On Psychiatric Treatment/Containment Of Mental Disorders, Jennifer Chichester

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which characters in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Bird’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces grapple with the concept of “madness” on individual and societal levels. Each of these Post-World War II novels question whether “madness” is a social construct. Is the person mad, or is society? These three novels, written in an era when inpatient psychiatric care was losing its prominence as a method for treating those deemed insane, reflect the growing trend of deinstitutionalization in the 1950s …

Who's He When He's At Home?, Bryan Perry

Art and Design Theses

Who’s He When He’s at Home? is an attempt to explore the expressive capabilities of language and design through a consideration of philosophical and theoretical notions of home. It is an attempt to see how an experience planned and created using tools, techniques and technology of the design disciplines can allow understanding of such an abstract and personal concept.

Dinner At Eight, Anastasia M. Berkovich

MSU Graduate Theses

This creative thesis is comprised of six short stories of fiction in various styles and lengths, as well as a critical introduction wherein I discuss the various influences on my work, ranging from Charles Baxter and Karen Joy Fowler to Doležel and John Gardner. All of these stories share a theme of family and loss. Each story also grapples in some way with changing times and places. I have endeavored, by using rhyming action, repeating images, and melodrama, to give each story a great sense of emotion, a feeling both specific to the story but connects to the wider reading …

My Books: Creating Bilingual Worlds For Children, Maria Gerasimchuk-Djordjevic

MSU Graduate Theses

In my fourth semester of graduate school, I wrote and illustrated my first, full, bilingual, 32-page children’s picture book – What do you like/ Що тобі подобається? I have since continued to explore and pursue the social aspects and influences of nationalistic conflict among the population of war-torn Ukraine. These books express my hope and confidence in a new generation, especially in the immigrant community. The cultural exposure from my youth, yielding autobiographic experiences, as well as observations of a new culture, are prominent in my work. The bilingual aspect of my books is central to my work in general …

Caressing Radical Alterity: For A Queer Ethic Of Embodiment In Contemporary Films And Literature, Marc Demont

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an analysis of the caress through the dual lens of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I argue that the caress reveals the queerness and ambiguities of perception and that this gesture must be understood as an ethical gesture of opening toward otherness. I discuss different accounts of the caress (Levinas, Irigaray) and expose the misogynistic and/or homophobic bias at work in these theories of the caress. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of touch and other notions that he develops (Flesh, intertwinement, intercorporeality, encroachment, etc.) allow a redefinition of the caress that avoids Levinas and Irigaray’s pitfalls. In a reading …

Racial Roots Of Romanticism: American And European Africanism Are The Creation Of Bio-Politics, James Flynn

Honors College Theses

The British Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the American Edgar Allan Poe shared a number of similarities in their writing styles. Both men came onto the scene early in their respective nation’s forays into Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was of the first generation of British literary Romantics, while Poe introduced his Gothic influences before the Renaissance of American Romanticism in the 1850s. In the work of both men there is an emphasis on color as it pertains to race, especially aspects of whiteness. This focus on race has been covered at length by authors such as Toni Morrison in her book …

Books And Bodies: A Collaborative Process Between Dance And Literature, Sarah Dexter Givens

Honors Theses

This senior choreographic project, Reading Response #6, was created and performed in the fall of 2016 in collaboration with five dancers, one apprentice, and the choreographer. The project was a collaboration of dance with literature by Emily Dickinson, Leo Tolstoy, Richard Wilbur, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman. The final product was performed in the Studio 115 Dance Concert in the University of Southern Mississippi’s Theatre and Dance Building in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. This paper investigates the relationship between dance and literature and explores methods of integration between the two art forms.

Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics Of Rhymes & Revolutions, A.D. Carson

All Dissertations

Hip-Hop Studies, while pushing boundaries in some respects, particularly the intersections of many different disciplines, reproduces certain forms of – and assumptions about – knowledge production. Additionally, some conventions in the discipline and certain types of scholarly performances of Hip-Hop scholarship render blackness pathological – even in the service of combating what is understood to be antiblackness, by virtue of attempts to combat the notion that Hip-Hop culture is, in fact, deviant or bad or unworthy of study – and are complicit in the denial of what P. Khalil Saucier and Tyron Woods describe as “black sentient humanity and the …

Literary Pedagogies At Umsl: Combining Case Study With Personal Narrative, Elizabeth Miller

Theses

Through traditional scholarship and an analysis of survey data collected from undergraduate literature students at the university, I investigate the ways in which pedagogies of composition and disability studies can be incorporated into the teaching of literature. Historically, literary scholarship has not focused on issues of pedagogy to the degree that other divisions within English Studies have done, and it is therefore necessary to determine what gaps exist, if any, and how they might be bridged. For example, composition pedagogies often emphasize active, student-based teaching paradigms that are rooted in students’ personal experiences and the kind of writing that interests …

The Eternal Hero: A Study Of The Evolution Of The Literary Character Throughout History, James Simms

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

The Literary character has always existed, and I intend to show how he or she has changed the times, and, in turn, been changed by the times. Literature is a powerful force of culture and morality, liberalism and conservatism, engines of fate, and forces of chaos. As each era has its own values, so each character reflects those values (and might even go against some in order to convey the authors’ understanding of them). The characters, if powerful enough, often cause social change, defining major thoughts of various eras. Literature can both define a period, but can also be the …

( Re ) Claiming History And Visibility Through Rhetorical Sovereignty: The Power Of Diné Rhetorics In The Works Of Laura Tohe, Jessica Marie Safran Hoover

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the intricate intersections of code switching, trickster discourse and rhetorical sovereignty in the scholarship of Diné author Laura Tohe, as Tohe operationalizes survivance and alliance in complex ways, ways that “actuate a presence” in the face of ongoing attempts to render American Indian peoples absent from American rhetorical, literary, and geographic landscapes. Existing research in American Indian literatures and rhetorics often focus on the need for reclaiming rhetorical sovereignty. Yet, little work has been done to emphasize connections between the use of code switching, translation, and trickster discourse in order to give visibility to past and contemporary …

Text Based Analysis In The Undergraduate Classroom, Katelyn Antolik

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project compromises of both a written and technical portion. I have created an interactive web source for teaches in the undergraduate literature classroom to encourage a dynamic experience with literary text in order to promote active engagement in literature for students at any level of technological experience. Students or teachers are able to input outside texts that utilize graphs, charts, and interactive web tools in order to promote learning skills transferable to both academic and non-academic career paths. By utilizing “The Story of an Hour”, I explore the uses of this software in order to demonstrate the potential of …

Wharton's Library: For Born Readers Only, Christine Primisch

ETD Archive

Edith Wharton is known for her depictions of the changing New York aristocracy and marriage market in the early twentieth-century. Critics have previously examined Wharton’s views on upper-class New York society and social climbers attempting to insert themselves into that society. What has not been studied as extensively in existing criticism is the way in which the exponential increases in the size of the reading public and the type of literature available at the time Wharton was publishing negatively impacted Wharton’s perception of the lower-class and nouveau riche readers and caused insecurities over her literary legacy. These insecurities influence her …

“Only A Sufficient Cause:" Bram Stoker's Dracula As A Tale Of Mad Science And Faustian Redemption, Leah Christiana Davydov

ETD Archive

While present Dracula scholarship has made an extensive examination of the ways in which the novel reflects apprehensions about late Victorian scientific advances, little work to date has been done to link these anxieties to fin de siecle fiction involving mad scientists or to Bram Stoker’s lifelong interest in the story of Dr. Faustus. In this work, I argue that the primary menace within Dracula is not actually the threat posed by the novel’s vampires but rather the threat posed by the biologically determined, materialist, and potentially “mad” science practiced by the characters of Dr. John Seward and his patient, …

Writing Through The Lower Frequencies: Interpreting The Unnaming And Naming Process Within Richard Wright's Native Son And Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sarah M. Lacy

ETD Archive

The search for identity within Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has long been analyzed, yet the fact that each protagonist’s search for self is brought to a point of crisis during an intimate interaction with a white woman has often been neglected. Here, I analyze each author’s strategic use of a nameless narrator by utilizing the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, arguing that the act of “literary unnaming” is used to critique the development of black American identity during the time of Jim Crow. The use of a nameless narrator is explored through …

"Tale As Old As Time": The "Beauty And The Beast" Narrative As Vehicle For Social Resistance, Monica Williams

ETD Archive

While current criticism has discussed various versions of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale individually, none have traced any particular trends that have emerged within the tale as it has been revised over the centuries. One particular trend began in the eighteenth century, when Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont streamlined the tale from the oral tradition in order to utilize it for the moral education of young French girls. Along with this pedagogical goal, Beaumont also managed to critique Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and the abuse Pamela often suffered at the hands of Mr. B by revising her Beast character to act …