Digital Commons Network^™

Monstrous Oil: Theorizing Petromodernity's Monsters, Madalynn Lee Madigar

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Petroleum, a primary global energy resource, serves as a foundation of our contemporary society. However, the pervasive influence of oil as substance, commodity, and industry in our petromodern lives often goes unrecognized. In the present moment of biogeocultural crisis surrounding fossil fuels, recognizing and understanding our multifaceted engagements with petroleum is critical. This thesis contributes to the growing field of Petrocultural Studies by considering the conceptualization of petroleum through the associated tropes and figure of the monster. Through the petromonstrous, a term that encapsulates the massive scale, haunting effects, and human-other entanglements of petroleum, cultural attitudes and anxieties about oil …

Blood And Oil: How Vampiric Literature Bolsters Big Oil’S Power, Sarah Marie Demond

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the relationship between blood and oil, that is, the multitude of ways in which the petromodernity industries harvests and threatens vitality. The introduction of this thesis is concerned tracking how petromodernity is a byproduct, offspring, or extension of colonialism. In this way, petromodernity can be thought about as “petro-colonialism.” Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” informs the argument that the way thay petro-colonialism came to be and also maintains itself is by utilizing the “killer story.” This thesis also employs autorheoretical techniques informed by Lauren Fournier to show how petro-colonialism or “oiliness” sticks to its …

Witch Pamphlets, Tsea M. Francisconi

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The witch hysteria that overtook Christian Europe during the Early Modern era inspired a mass paranoia over the conspiratorial belief that the Abrahamic religion’s personification of the world’s evils, also known as Satan, the Devil, demons, or Lucifer interchangeably, was attempting to rise up and cause harm to Christian communities during this time period. It was believed that in order to achieve this goal the Christian version of the Devil had been recruiting humans within Christian communities and turning these chosen humans into witches by granting them the ability to wield magical powers to spread their destruction, murder, and terror …

A Personal History Of Invasive Hands And Endangered Lovers, Samuel Paul Boudreau

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

I thought I could be ridden hard and put away wet, wet, wet. I thought death and rape and drunkenness and unrequited love were functions of a typical life, a this-is-how-it-goes kinda world. But, as I’ve emerged from hellish muck, there has been a realization: the way we treat each other and the soil, the aching earth, needs to change. “A Personal History of Invasive Hands and Endangered Lovers” explores the relationship between intimacy and pain through a history of ecology and consumption, a melancholy of sorts. It amplifies trauma as a call-to-action and refuses to sit and take it. …

Lifeglows Through The Anthropocene: Development Of The Radical Imagination And Response-Ability Within Superhero Comics, Reed G. Puc

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Scholars such as Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Clark, and Timothy Morton emphasize the importance of and challenge within the task of representing the power, scope, and scale of climate change in art and literature. These interrogations often emphasize the failures of extant works to animate their viewers towards action in a time of environmental crisis, but struggle to find any work that meets their expectations. This ‘game-over’ attitude, I argue, is the direct result of the cruel optimism present in the current scholarship’s attachment to ‘traditional’ forms of art and literature. By interrogating the conclusions Ghosh reaches about the novel’s function …

Intersectional Feminism And Diverse Perspectives In Contemporary Romance, Abigail L. Nordstrom

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The lack of intersectional feminism and diverse perspectives has long been a critique of the literary canon. While the Academy has shifted toward a more progressive course of literary study in recent decades, there are still some genres that are treated as undeserving of scholarly analysis in spite of their unique and diverse perspectives. The contemporary romance genre embodies the very intersectional feminism that the traditional literary canon lacks, yet it is still treated as unworthy of consideration. Contemporary romance novels such as The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang, Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert and The Bromance …

Reputation And Rurality: Using A Montana-Authored Text To Talk About Agency And Language In The Secondary English Classroom, Catherine Dorian

The Montana English Journal

This article offers curriculum as well as rationale for teaching Debra Magpie Earling’s Montana-based novel, Perma Red. I begin with my own experience teaching the novel as it stumbled into my lap as and meandered its way into my rural classroom, where Earling’s language challenges students to deconstruct and further understand issues in agency pertaining to sexual assault and consent. Then, I explain methods and strategies I use to teach language and close-reading to my twelfth grade students while they read this novel, my aim being to make teaching this unit as accessible as possible for all Montana teachers. …

The Holistic Power Of Young Adult Books, Donna Lynn Miller

The Montana English Journal

Young adult books like The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller carry a healing power when readers experience their pause and ponder moments. Because they impose reflection time, Pause and Ponder Moments reinforce reading as a deliberate and patient process. Imposing time to pause and think through points and concepts enables readers to truly grapple with content in meaningful ways. Pause and Ponder Moments also inspire attributional retraining and option awareness, an alternative to simply accepting the status quo. These moments carry promise for enriching how we read the world, how we respond to others, and how we live …

Gendered Melancholy In Lolita: Reading Into Humbert Humbert’S Dolorous Haze, Joseph D. Brookbank

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper argues that in Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert uses the subject-position of the great male melancholic in order to, at the discursive level, (re)perform violent acts of appropriation against Dolly’s body, subjectivity and representation. Humbert attempts to translate the loss and waste which he brings about into perverse sorts of gain; these gains relate to processes such as catharsis, compensation, redemption, regeneration, a sense of exceptionality, and aesthetic/erotic/artistic enjoyment. The project has an introduction and two sections. The introduction demonstrates how Humbert enters into the male melancholic subject-position in order to perform his sorrow in a way that …

“Out Of The Mother . . . And Home To The Mother”: Essays On Medieval Literature And Climate Crisis, Rachel Kuhr Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Environmental Imaginations Of Moby-Dick: Technology And Vulnerability In Human/More-Than-Human Relationships, Jensen A. Lillquist

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the human and the more-than-human is a problem of massive proportions, as we live in an age of climate change, mass-extinction, over-population, and resource depletion. Evaluating how we have arrived where we are and re-thinking the issues at play as we move forward is crucial for future adaptation of human/more-than-human relationships; this is the primary goal of my analysis of the environmental imaginations of Moby-Dick.

I argue that the four primary environmental imaginations—the providential, the utilitarian, the Romantic, and the ecological—that have influenced United States culture since European settlement are represented by Herman …

A Generation Of Katnisses: The New Power Of Female Protagonists In Young Adult Dystopian Literature, Mckenzie K. Watterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Considering emerging heroines in young adult dystopian fiction, this project first examines them in a literary review. Using feminist ethics of care as a baseline, the review considers their unique worlds, agency, and motivation

Enclosed From All Sides: Reading Contact And Ambivalence In The Imaginary Al-Andalus Of Hrotsvit's The Passion Of Pelagius And The Song Of Roland, Briana J. Wipf

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s The Passion of Pelagius and The Song of Roland have never been read together in terms of their shared engagement with the Muslim other in the Iberian Peninsula, known during the Middle Ages as Al-Andalus. This project is a comparative reading of the texts’ approach to the presentation of an imaginary Al-Andalus as a space of alterity. The texts’ emphasis on imaginative as opposed to accurate portrayals of Andalusian history and Islamic culture suggests their engagement with a process of Christian identity-building, where the “Christian,” as portrayed in each text, is defined against and in comparison to …

Queen Of Kings: Beyoncé Politics And Pedagogy In The Juvenile Detention Center Classroom, Sarah Kahn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In 2016, the cultural conversation around feminism and intersectionality has shifted towards new problems of inclusion and change. Feminists are beginning to ask whether the commodification of female sexuality and objectification are extricable, whether a hypersexualized mainstream identity and a feminist one are mutually exclusive, how to integrate female experiences of different socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and cultures into a new feminism, and how to define feminism as we begin to move away from binary gendering. Increased visibility of trans issues has brought genderqueerness and femmephobia into the feminist conversation, and technology and globalization have forced that conversation to open up …

What Do You Think I Am?: On Perceiving Unintelligibility In The Nonbinary Gender Experience, James Warwood

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What does it mean to be “retired from gender,” and what role does such an identity play in daily life? Engaging with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, this project attempts to elucidate the experience of nonbinary – that is, external to the male/female gender binary – gendered individuals, and the ultimate unintelligibility of that experience. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to perception allows for an exploration of the social norms and regulations that determine how gender is defined in Western culture; combined with Butler’s significant work on gender and its performativity, phenomenology proves a useful tool for revealing the …

Toward An Ontology Of Exhaustion: On The Affective Structures Of Masculinity In The American Oilfield, John W. Jepsen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What is the significance of the oil encounter in the lives of men living and working in the modern oilfields of the United States? Engaging with both literary examples of the lives of men in the Interior West and the personal experiences and reflections of the author, this essay seeks to examine the connections between ideology and place as it works to shape the identity and affect of men in America's oilfields, ultimately ending in them identifying with the very resources their activities seek to exploit and exhaust. Utilizing Theodore Adorno's Minima Moralia as its moral touchstone, this essay works …

Morphing Myths And Shedding Skins: Interconnectivity And The Subversion Of The Isolated Female Self In Angela Carter’S “The Tiger’S Bride” And Margaret Atwood’S Surfacing, Sara M. Laskoski

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project is an analysis of the utilization of mythmaking and human-animal relationships reflected in Angela Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride” and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. Carter and Atwood show how societal restrictions can devalue the connections between the body, the mind, and the natural world. Through the theoretical lenses of primarily post-structuralism and ecofeminism, this project seeks to show how these two authors subvert isolated female identities through the use of the fairy tale element of the human-animal transformation. This subversion rejects dualistic tendencies of the dominant, patriarchal society, opening new ways of identifying the self through interconnections otherwise rejected or …

The Bioscience-Industrial Complex, Radical Materialist Aesthetics, And Interspecies Political Ecologies: The Unforeseen Posthuman Future In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein And Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy, Sarah Sydney Lane

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project traces how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, science fiction novels from the Romantic and contemporary literary periods respectively, contest the problematic relationships between subjecthood, science, ecological health, and patriarchal, capitalist societies by crafting radical materialist alternatives to such a system and its dualistic and destructive interpersonal/interspecies relations. Through the theoretical framework of ecofeminism that recognizes the conceptual linkages between women and nature in Western systems of thought, as well as psychoanalytical feminist critiques of the masculinization of scientific epistemology, this project examines the developmental and ontological overlaps between literary “masculine” and “scientific” subjects socialized under …

Wasted Women: Modern Oppression In T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", James Warwood

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

T.S. Eliot has frequently been criticized for his misogynistic treatment of women in his poetry. Few, however, have considered the role his portrayal of women plays in supporting his poetic themes. The narrative space of “The Waste Land” is dominated primarily by women, both contemporary and mythical, who illustrate the brutal relationship between men and women. This intensely personal relationship, however, is analogous to the relationship of the individual and society; like the individual, the women must make the decision to either speak out against their oppressors or keep silent and accept their circumstances. Either option places women at risk …

The Return Of The Nightingale, James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

In Ecological Literary Criticism (1994), Karl Kroeber advocated a bold new approach to the study of literature. More than just another routine method of textual analysis, ecological literary criticism seeks to bridge the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities. Such an approach incorporates theoretical advances in the science of environmental biology while it adapts to the changing social and political circumstances of contemporary criticism.

Review Of Hardy's Literary Language And Victorian Philology. Dennis Taylor., James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

This is a book review of Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology by Dennis Taylor.