Digital Commons Network^™

A Study Of The Sublime In English Romantic Aesthetics, Derek T. Leuenberger

Student Work

The nature and role of sublime experience has been an enduring topic of discussion in the history of aesthetics, dating back nearly 2000 years to the rhetorical sublime of Longinus. The emergence of English romanticism at the juncture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrought substantial change on conceptions of the sublime, driven primarily by Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley each develop a theory of sublimity grounded in the expression of unified and universal experience in human consciousness. Naturally, certain philosophical differences arise within the theoretical discourse of the authors - most …

Lost In The Savage Garden: A Nihilistic Interpretation Of Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles"., Angela S. Mcmullen

Student Work

This study examines Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles in light of the nihilist tradition. Nihilism is defined in this study as the absence of meaning. Rice uses vampires to explore problems created through this philosophy that ultimately leaves a void in human existence. In a sense, this study is an exploration of the ways which humanity fails to find an adequate reason to live. Louis begins the exploration by searching for God. Unable to find supernatural answers in his animated state, he falls into spiritual decay. Lestat, however, takes an aggressive approach patterned on Fredrick Nietzsche. By killing God and giving …

Manifesting Individuality As A Heideggerian Approach To Toni Morrison's "Trilogy"., Thuy T. Tran

Student Work

Within our self-defining quest to create and uncreate ourselves and our place in the world is a discourse that encompasses both our life and our literature.

The Pronunciation Of English Vowels By Native Arabic Speakers: The Relationship Between Age Of Learning, Perception, And Production, Joel Ramez Atallah

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Research on immigrant communities has shown that age of first exposure to a language is strongly correlated with the learner's ultimate attainment in pronunciation. Flege's Speech Learning Model, which hypothesizes a relationship between the foreign accent of late learners and their ability to perceive non-native phonetic contrasts, is one attempt to explain this phenomenon. However, few studies have compared the perception and pronunciation of sounds directly, and there is a paucity of research on age and pronunciation in formal learning environments The present study focussed on the relationship between Age of Learning and the perception and pronunciation of English vowels …

Synthesizing An Understanding Of The Nature Of Culture With Literary Theories Sensitive To Culture's Presence In Texts., Janet L. Sutherland

Student Work

The selection of the theme "Cross-Cultural Criticism" for the 1990 Summer Institute of the National Council of Teachers of English signaled that "multiculturalism" had become more than a buzzword; it was a "prized awakening" (Burton 115), but not without its critics.

Memory And Remembrance In Selected Nonfiction Works Of Elie Wiesel, Jordana L. Nissen

Student Work

Although nonfictional writing provides critical insights into history in ways that fictional writing never could, it is very often relegated to a “second-class citizen” status in the realm of literary criticism and appreciation. Literacy tradition has created a hard line between literature, specifically novels and short stories and poetry, which we regard as created fictions and nonliterary test – journalism, biography, history, essays, and so on- which we think of as records of actuality. This distinction is what prevents us from applying to nonfiction the analytical tools we use to uncover the secrets of "literary art. (McCord 748)

Verboden: The Private Letters Of Ed Edson: An American Pioneer In A Dutch Community 1880-1944, Mollie Edson

All Graduate Projects

This is a senior project in History, English, and Political Science about the letters and correspondence of Ed Edson from 1880-1944. It includes letters, photos and scans of correspondence.

Seeing History Through Literature: An Interdisciplinary Unit On World War Ii, William White

All Graduate Projects

The purpose of this project was to design and develop a model interdisciplinary unit combining English and history at the junior year. To accomplish this purpose, current research and literature on integration was reviewed. Additionally, learning objectives, teaching strategies, educational activities and instructional materials were developed and adapted. The curriculum focuses on World War II. It should serve as a possible example of how integration might work to effectively facilitate an understanding of history through literature and literature through history.

Performing Dracula: A Critical Examination Of A Popular Text In Three Sites Of Performance., Jonathan Matthew Gray

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Dracula is a significant example of a popular phenomenon with a long and ongoing history of productive circulation in Anglo-American culture. While theorists of popular culture often use the term "performance" in their explanations of the popularity and meaningful operations of such phenomena in a culture, they do not always provide concrete definitions of what they mean by performance. This study provides an analysis of the roles performance plays in a specific popular culture phenomenon. Identifying Bram Stoker's Dracula as a nexus for a broader cultural activity, this study examines articulations of Dracula in performances and texts that both precede …

Expecting Women: Constructing The Pregnant Woman In Twentieth Century United States And British Dramatic Representation., Amelia Lynn Cuomo

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Pregnancy and issues surrounding pregnancy such as paternity and legitimacy have been presented in Western Drama since its inception. Pregnancy in the modern era, however, has become a complex issue. Abortion, birth control, and the advent of new reproductive technologies (such as in vitro fertilization) alter understandings of reproduction. This study explores twentieth century British and U.S. dramatic representations of the pregnant woman and analyzes how pregnant women are constructed in drama. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter One explores four plays by male playwrights: Harley Granville Barker's Waste, Eugene O'Neill's "Abortion," and Sidney Kingsley's Men in White …

Motherwork, Artwork: The Mother/Artist In Fiction By Parton, Phelps, Chopin, Woolf, Drabble, And Walker, Nancy Hoyt Lecourt

Doctoral Dissertations

This study asks the question, What happens to a practicing (fictional) mother who also tries to be a practicing artist? How do literary texts represent such people? How do they represent the relationship between material and artistic work? The primary works studied are Sarah Parton's Ruth Hall, (1855), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story of Avis (1877), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), and Margaret Drabble's The Millstone (1965). The conclusion focuses on Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use."

Mother-artists finds themselves on the "wrong" side of the nature/culture binary, where ideologies about "true womanhood" and …

Class In Seventeenth-Century British Drama By Women, Erika Mae Olbricht

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that seventeenth-century drama by women should be analyzed as a public discursive practice rather than as privatized "closet drama." This study focuses on class in order to delineate the texts' participation in public modes of representation and offers post-marxist readings as an alternative to the gynocritical/biographical model that dominates criticism on literature by women of the early modern period.

Chapter one of this dissertation problematizes separate spheres ideology, lest texts by women become separated from the economic sites that inform them. I consider the ideological importance of generic conventions, arguing that conventions of tragedy and comedy are …

Uncertain Identities : Aristocratic Women Of English Renaissance Drama, Kimberly Ann Turner

Master's Theses

Often, women stand out as being some of the most interesting and ambiguous characters in English drama. In this study, I examine moments in five Renaissance plays in which female characters reject the extreme dichotomies that were used by society to describe women. In the first portion of the paper, I look at the ways in which malcontents are similar to unconventional female characters in that they both challenge existing patriarchal structures. Secondly, I explore the characters of Mellida, Sophonisba, and Desdemona who begin to assert their own desires, while at the same time, they continue to embody more traditional …

How The Villanelle's Form Got Fixed., Julie Ellen Kane

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This work debunks the myth of the villanelle as a "fixed poetic form" dating back to the sixteenth century or earlier and replaces it with a new-historical account of how a semi-improvisatory musico-poetic genre, the choral-dance lyric, was "translated" across ruptures in lyric technology between oral, manuscript, and print cultures. The "fixity" of the villanelle's written form is shown to be not a matter of long-standing "heritage" or "tradition," but the result of deliberate actions taken by one eighteenth- and one nineteenth-century individual who inserted less-than-truthful passages into otherwise "authoritative" prosodic treatises. Chapter 1 identifies the literary sources responsible for …

A Critical Edition Of The Passion And Advent Chapters Of The Pre-Caxtonian "Gilte Legende"., Rosary Jackman Crain

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation is a critical edition of the Passion and Advent chapters of the Middle English Gilte Legende based an MS Lambeth Palace 72 in collation with other manuscripts. Editions of the Legenda aurea, the original Latin text, and of the Legende doree, an intermediate French text, were also consulted. The introduction begins by reviewing the complete research on the Gilte Legende, describing the manuscripts, their handwritings and orthographies, presenting their affiliations in a stemma, and detailing the editorial process. The transmission of the text is traced from the Legenda aurea (c.1266), the Latin legendary of James Varagine, through the …

Unrestrained Women And Decadent Old Aristocrats: The Nineteenth-Century Middle Class Struggle For Cultural Hegemony., Ronald Hamilton May

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines three popular novels of the Victorian period: W. G. M. Reynolds's Wagner, the Wehr-wolf (1846-7), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Each work was written during distinct decades of the nineteenth century when certain popular novels were under attack for rotting the minds of their readers, promoting vice, and subverting cultural standards. During the 1840s, when Reynolds's wrote Wagner, the Wehr-wolf , novels that were published in cheap penny weeklies created a sensation among mass readers. In the 1860s, when Braddon wrote Lady Audley's Secret, the sensation novel became popular with …

Film Dialogue Translation And The Intonation Unit : Towards Equivalent Effect In English And Chinese, Jian Li

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis proposes a new approach to film dialogue translation (FDT) with special reference to the translation process and quality of English-to-Chinese dubbing. In response to the persistent translation failures that led to widespread criticism of dubbed films and TV plays in China for their artificial 'translation talk', this study provides a pragmatic methodology derived from the integration of the theories and analytical systems of information flow in the tradition of the functionalist approach to speech and writing with the relevant theoretical and empirical findings from TS and other related branches of linguistics. It has developed and validated a translation …