Arts and Humanities Commons^™

American Mythology: How Storytelling Shapes Modern Cultural Perceptions, Kristin Maynard

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis will examine the American storytelling tradition, paying particular attention to American folktales and legends that arose as the nation expanded westward, such as the stories of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Billy the Kid, etc. This text will utilize a lens of European narrative tradition (especially those which lent themselves to the written records of oral fairy tales and folktales) and trace the cultural significance and social purpose of these formative American stories. I will discuss the reasons why we so readily recognize the echoes of outside narrative traditions in American storytelling and the ethical implications of these narratives …

The "Noble Savage" In American Music And Literature, 1790-1855, Jacob Mathew Somers

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, America entered a period of unprecedented territorial expansion, economic growth, and political unity. During this time American intellectuals, writers, and musicians began to contemplate the possibility of a national high culture to match the country’s glorious social and political achievements. Newly founded periodicals urged American authors and artists to adopt national themes and materials to replace those imported from abroad, and for the first time Americans began producing their own literary, artistic, and musical works on a previously inconceivable scale. Though American writers and composers explored a wide range of “national themes,” …

Missing Mother: The Female Protagonist's Regression To The Imaginary Order In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House, The Sundial, And We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Julie Ann Baker

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study examines the psyches of the female protagonists from three of Shirley Jackson’s Gothic novels: Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, Aunt Fanny Halloran in The Sundial, and Merricat Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A psychoanalytic and feminist reading is applied to the texts to elucidate the characters’ rejection of the Symbolic Order and regression to the Imaginary Order, and Lacan’s theories of the Desire of the Mother and objet petit a are also applied to the texts to further delineate this regression. Julia Kristeva’s work regarding the lost object of the mother …

The Power To Overcome: The Resistance And Resiliency Of Black Motherhood, Nathan Full

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Motherhood is not a monolithic experience. The intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class are integral facets that influence and control how one practices maternity, especially in a white hegemonic state. Further, control and choice serve as contributing factors, influencing the level of control women have over entering maternity and how a mother claims ties to her offspring. With these intersectional factors and control measures combined, motherhood is a complicated matter, one that influences how women practice maternity. The practice of motherhood is influenced by race, with black women experiencing a historical struggle in their relationships with motherhood. These difficulties …

Mothers At Work: Reconstruction And Deconstruction Of Patriarchy In Gone With The Wind, Catherine Willa Staley

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In this thesis, I explore the performances of motherhood in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and how those performances conflict with culturally constructed expectations of that role. An analysis of Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes, and how each woman compares to the South’s model for motherhood, reveals implications that extend beyond the novel’s Civil War setting to reveal the ongoing negotiation of modern readers still living within patriarchal conceptions of mothering. In Chapter 1, I outline the novel’s spectrum of motherhood, which is composed of characters who nurture and manage others. Each individual on that spectrum contributes to or …

After A Funeral, Before A Test; And Other Stories, David Stewart Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

After a Funeral, Before a Test; and Other Stories is a collection of nine fictional short stories. Their focus is diverse in regard to multiple aspects of creative fiction: subject matter, theme, style, setting and characters. Despite the array of material, one common method was to provide narration that would invite readers to make their own interpretation rather than to present overt, didactic stories. This narrative strategy was accomplished by using fictional concepts of setting, the objective correlative, and literary minimalism. Other elements include surrealism, Hemingway’s “iceberg effect,” and psychologically complex narrators. Literary influences include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great …

Literacy, Discourse, And Identity: The Working-Class Appalachian Woman Academic, Sarah Marie Mcconnell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Drawing on conversations about the politics surrounding literacy acquisition, I take a deeper look into the effects of obtaining membership within an academic discourse community on Appalachian women from the working class. The tensions that develop between the two opposing discourses promotes a sense of loss as they create distance between these women and their home community, alter relationships, and disrupt identity. Working-class Appalachian women occupy the borderlands between discourses: one foot in their Appalachian community; the other in their academic community. They negotiate their fragmented identities in order to play the appropriate role within the appropriate context. Their status …

Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis combines history, rhetoric, and feminist identity studies to discuss the subject of black lung disease and the Appalachian coal miner. The first chapter examines the "evolution of mentalities" in historical and popular discourse surrounding the miner, which reflects James V. Catano's subversive form of the self-making identity in Ragged Dicks. The second chapter uses the feminist theory of silence as a form of control and power to understand the absence of black lung disease from the literature of coal. The final chapter is a case study of the correspondence between Congressional Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and …

Storm Chaser, Samir Ali Abdel-Aziz

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Storm Chaser is a work of fiction that uses strange, almost supernatural occurrences to symbolically represent various meanings and truths for different characters. Works of fiction that influenced Storm Chaser include The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel. Reappearing themes include sacrifice, the desire to live a life of purpose, freewill, and the fear of becoming one’s parents.

Persistence: "My Grandmother's Eyes" And Other Memories, Christine Fede Williams

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Persistence: “My Grandmother’s Eyes” and Other Memories is a collection of five essays based on the author’s life. “My Grandmother’s Eyes” depicts the difficult, but loving, communication between the author and her grandmother, who speaks Italian as a first language. “Christmas: A Journey” compares and contrasts the celebration of Christmas in the author’s Italian-American family and her celebration of Christmas as an adult. “Room in My Heart” describes the events leading up to a decision to adopt a child. “Renaming Oriental Avenue” follows three threads: the author’s relationship to the Monopoly game; the author’s study of the Japanese language and …

Bedtime Stories : How To Hope And Cope With The American Dream, Sabrina Jones

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

A multi-genre work combining New Journalism and literary analysis. The narrator (played by ―Girl in the bedtime stories) presents a critical essay exploring destabilized truths and dangers in an American dream that turns modern man into a machine. The goal is to show how the dream has evolved from the original Puritan dream set out by early American settlers/writers to the Postmodern vision of success (or failure) we read about today and what kind of effect this dream has on the average scholar. The thesis is broken up by reflections on her learning imbedded in dialogue with her always opinionated …

Metaphysics And The Charge Of Misanthropy : Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “Circles” As A Cipher For Understanding The Connection Between Robinson Jeffers And Herman Melville, Hunter Stark

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Herman Melville’s and Robinson Jeffers’s metaphysical thoughts reflect Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of looking towards Nature for discovery; all three writers’ observations of Nature influence how they see humanity’s place in existence. Both Melville and Jeffers observe Nature decentralizing humanity, which distinguishes their views from Emerson’s. Where Jeffers’s verse sternly voices this message, openly criticizing the anthropocentric viewpoint, Melville utilizes humor, subtly confronting the anthropocentric proponent and downplaying humanity’s power. Jeffers garners the label of misanthrope, whereas Melville’s metaphysical realm in Moby-Dick largely escapes this charge with the masking quality of his humor. Comparing both writers’ texts to an Emersonian …

Writing The Wrongs : A Comparison Of Two Female Slave Narratives, Miya Hunter-Willis

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis compares slave narratives written by Mattie J. Jackson and Kate Drumgoold. Both narrators recalled incidents that showed how slavery and the environment during the Reconstruction period created physical and psychological obstacles for women. Each narrator challenged the Cult of True Womanhood by showing that despite the stereotypes created to keep them subordinate there were African American women who successfully used their knowledge of white society to circumvent a system that tried to keep their race enslaved. Despite the 30 years that separate the publication of these two narratives, the legacy of education attainment emerges as a key part …

The Body Of Light : Poems, Alicia Matheny

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This creative thesis explores the different facets of Pink Floyd and their music, drawing inspiration from albums varying from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) to Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Using images drawn from nature, the cosmos, and Pagan mythology, this thesis also incorporates biographical details found in Nicholas Schaffner’s important biography, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (New York: Harmony Books, 1991). There are also experiments with form in the poems, in that in many of the poems, instead of commas, there are tab spaces. Each space expresses the silence between each word. …

Interrupting The Puppet Master: (Un)Reliability And Metatextuality In Dave Eggers’S You Shall Know Our Velocity, Suzanne R. Samples

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In 2002 Dave Eggers (who had just come off of the success of a Pulitzer Prize nominated memoir about the death of his parents and the influx of cash that ensued) published a novel titled You Shall Know Our Velocity. Within three years the novel underwent significant alterations that changed the plot’s original meaning. Most notably, some of the printings of the novel contain an additional section of text called “An Interruption” written by the best friend (Hand) of the original narrator (Will); this additional text destroys Will’s original plot and makes the reader question the reliability of the text. …

From Man To Meteor: Nineteenth Century American Writers And The Figure Of John Brown, Amanda Benigni

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On November 2, 1859, John Brown laid siege to the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, then Virginia, in an effort to seize weaponry which he planned to employ in a full scale slave insurrection. From the moment he entered the public eye during his brief trial and execution, John Brown and his legacy were figured and refigured by prominent writers and thinkers of the time. The result of this refiguring was an image under constant metamorphosis. As the image of John Brown cycled through the Civil War, it moved further and further from the actual man and became a metaphor …

Nothing Personal : A Collection Of Nonfiction Essays Exposing The Perverted Experiences Of Life, Interactions, And Responses, Benjamin P. Taylor

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Nothing Personal is a collection of nonfiction essays playfully written in response to subtle misunderstandings. Such misunderstandings, in this creative thesis, are fueled by an unexplained divorce, alcoholism, the new absence of love, and the difference between the personal and the traditional church. The essays also expose the science of conversation and other lighter occurrences and happenings in an esteemed pursuit to live life more humorously.

The Description Of The Characters In Herman Melville's White-Jacket, Or The World In A Man-Of-War, Toru Nishiura

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Many characters who have various personalities app ear in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket . However, few critics have comprehensively examined the action and the characteristics of them in detail. In this thesis, I explore Melville’s depiction of the battleship world in this novel by clarifying the narrator ’s standard to judge ot her characters. In White-Jacket, the whole story is narrated by White-Jacket; therefore, the characteristics of his narrative clarify the theme of this novel. I start with an analysis of his narrative and examine whether he is a reliable narrator or not. Then, I explore the relationship between the battleship …

Linking Genesis To Modern Day Castaway Narratives, Shawndra Russell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis analyzes two castaway novels, Lord of the Flies and John Dollar, and compares these novels to segments of Genesis, focusing primarily on the story of Adam and Eve. To compare and contrast these three works, I pulled out eleven similar ideas found in each text which formed eleven different chapters. This project evolved into offering an alternative way to interpret these castaway narratives as retellings of the creation story. The characters in John Dollar and Lord of the Flies become Adam and Eve type figures as they try to survive on Edenlike islands. At the same time, this …

Canary In The Dark, Andrea Fekete

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

I began researching Appalachian culture in 1998. I wanted to tell a story about conflict and beauty while revealing my vision of who my people were/are. I strived to create a fiction not unlike poetry with realistic and minimalist features to give Appalachia the most accurate face possible as perceived by me through my own lens.

I wanted to explore the idea of beauty: Virginia’s (the main character) ideas about her beauty, her culture and other cultures. What is beauty? Who defines it? Can it be found everywhere? How? What does it look like when it is somewhere you wouldn’t …

Billing Below Title : The Contested Autobiographies Of Frances Farmer And Louise Brooks, Karen M. Anderson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Today autobiography and memoir hold great interest for the average reader as well as the literary scholar. Some argue this form has replaced the novel as the dominant modern/postmodern narrative expression. Its study crosses departmental boundaries, surfacing in disciplines such as psychology, as well as English/literature. This thesis focuses on the autobiographies of two Euro-American actresses of the early twentieth century. Intersecting the study of film, narrative, autobiography (“female” or feminist, as well as canonical or “male”) and modernism, it focuses on text and subtext, analyzing reasons for both the works’ and actress/authors’ cultural marginalization. In art as well as …

Constance Cary Harrison, Refugitta Of Richmond : A Nineteenth-Century Southern Woman Writer's Critically Intriguing Antislavery Narrative Strategy, Gaillynn Marie Bowman

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Although often maligned by literary scholars, Constance Cary Harrison, nineteenth-century novelist, journalist, essayist, and short-story author, achieved popular success with her subtle, but often radical, explorations of gender, and slavery during the antebellum and post-Civil War years. Furthermore, Harrison developed innovative characterizations of African-Americans while seeking nineteenth-century southern and northern readership through conciliatory prose. In particular, Harrison characterized a slave who gained his freedom and maintained a successful, independent life, without white assistance. This unique perspective for a Southern writer of her era stemmed from the war time destruction of her homestead, Vaucluse, which compelled Harrison to recreate an idealized …

Hit The Ground Running: A Novella And Other Stories, Lisa Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This creative thesis contains a collection of short stories divided into two parts. The first half, a novella entitled Clothes on a Line, consists of a series of linked vignettes that depict the life of a young, unnamed Appalachian girl and her relationship with her promiscuous mother. Throughout the work, the narrator struggles to create and come to terms with her identity as she experiences the adversities of sexual abuse, death, alcoholism, and the looming “secret” of her unknown father. The second half, Consumed and Other Stories, features several short pieces that, while not inter-related like those in …

Thy Will Be Done, My Will Be Done: A Comparative Analysis Of The Diary Of Susanna Gordon Waddell, 1863-1867 And Selected Letters Of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, 1862-1864, Leann Elizabeth Ginther

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

“Renew my will from day to day.

Blend it with thine, and take away

all that new makes it hard to say

Thy will be done.”

December 17, 1863

Susanna Gordon Waddell transcribed the above passage in her diary to reflect her pervading belief and conviction: a resignation to God’s will. She does not indicate the author of the verse, and it so aptly describes the beliefs expressed in her diary she may have written it herself. Interestingly, this particular passage contains an inherent contradiction. The prayer asks God to renew my will while simultaneously asking that it be taken …

In The Fullness Of Time: The Literature Of Denise Giardina, Cathy Pleska

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Appalachia can lay claim to many authors who have written works worthy of critical analysis and scholarly research, as the literature they have produced warrants consideration. This consideration, however, is often not forthcoming, and it is the situation concerning West Virginia author Denise Giardina. To date there has been no definitive, full-length study on her and her literature. As an author of considerable talent, who by any measure has published literature of significant quality, she deserves serious scholarly study, not just as an author of regional literature, but also as a contemporary author of the late twentieth century.

The purpose …

Coyote Tracks: Examining The Trickster In The Works Of Leslie Marmon Silko, Jeffrey A. Green

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of the current work is to extrapolate an understanding of the trickster figure as it is used in the literary works of Leslie Marmon Silko, a contemporary Laguna Pueblo author. Trickster analysis in Native American literature is primarily relegated to the study of traditional myths and stories, and only a few scholars approach the topic in contemporary Native American literature. Of those who do, none have chosen Silko’s works as the primary focus of their analysis. An examination of this type will contribute to and expand the existing literary criticism of Silko’s writings. Leslie Silko utilizes the traditional …