Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Paul Bunyan Design Assemblage, Ashley Sickler

Art and Design

This project contains a design assemblage dedicated to the legendary figure, Paul Bunyan. The system includes, a typeface, a logo, a color palette, a pattern, and a poster.

Thaw: A Memoir, Diane Bush

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This collection of creative nonfiction essays is a hybrid text of visual and verbal narratives located broadly within the genres of memoir, research-based nonfiction, and history. Women's memoirs, including a number of non-traditional texts, historical narratives, and an archival collection of photographs, provided springboards for the exploration of and reflection on the emotional terrain of loss, the ache of remembrance, and the ultimate desire for peace.

Ultimately, this work is a search for solace amidst emotional upheaval, beginning in childhood, after the deaths of my father, mother, first husband, and beloved aunt. Unable to sit still with my grief, I …

Margaret Fuller's Lost Legacy: Literary Criticism, Donna Needham

All Theses

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) is best known as a Transcendentalist, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and first editor of the Transcendentalist publication, The Dial. She is considered a feminist by those familiar with her early work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller was also a literary critic and author of 'A Short Essay on Critics' the seminal American work on literary criticism. Her theory of criticism, like the criticism of Matthew Arnold twenty years later, was based on the philosophy of Goethe.
After stepping down as editor in 1842, Fuller continued to contribute criticisms and essays to The Dial until …

A Place, Near Water, Kaitlin Mcclanahan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis represents the crux of my goal in coming to UNLV: to begin and successfully complete the first half of a novel that I have spent years developing. I attribute much of my success to the dedication I have learned in pushing through the MFA program with the help of my advisors, and will leave the program with enough vision to complete the novel I have begun.

My novel tells the story of a fictional Pacific Northwest town circa WWII. The novel begins with the discovery of a body.It then goes back in time and follows the lives of …

The Sociology Of Scenes, The Sacramento Poetry Scene, Dana Nell Maher

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

For this ethnography, I use my feminist perspective, grounded theory, participant observation, and autoethnographic techniques to explore an urban poetry scene. I suggest that scene studies are a viable alternative to community studies and that we move our articulation of social experience to reflect it as it occurs, on a multitude of continuums. My goal with this project is to develop, use, and discuss the utility of a definition of scene that is intended to be useful to scene studies researchers. To this end, I both evaluate an outdated definition of scene (Irwin 1973 & 1977), and define the three …

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.

Confronting Environmental And Social Crises: Octavia E. Butler’S Critique Of The Spiritual Roots Of Environmental Injustice In Her Parable Novels, Melissa Vargas

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

We are living in the midst of environmental and social crises. This fact was not lost on late African-American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, whose 1993 Parable of the Sower and 1998 Nebula Award-winning Parable of the Talents depict and critique the current environmental and social crises in the United States. Speaking of Sower in an interview with Essence magazine, Butler says that all she “did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters” (“Brave New Worlds” 164). In another interview with Randall Kenan, Butler describes environmental …

"Divine William" And The Master: The Influence Of Shakespeare On The Novels Of Henry James, Amy M. Green

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Henry James's most sustained commentary on Shakespeare comes in the form of an introduction to an edition of The Tempest that was published in 1907. In it, he remarks that the play is a reflection of Shakespeare "consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imaged creative Expression...to show him as unresistingly aware" (1207). This praise ties unerringly back to James's praise of the artist as one who views the world through open eyes and can capture the nuance of experience. James himself worked at the craft of fiction, and writes extensively in his notebooks and …

Victims And Aggressors: Black And Jewish Interethnic Relationships In Contemporary American Literature, Jessica Martin

All Theses

Though blacks and Jews are often portrayed together in African-American and Jewish-American writing, the reasons for the juxtapositions are curious. Contemporary authors have created a close relationship between blacks and Jews that, perhaps with the exception of their cooperation during the Civil Rights movement, historically did not exist. But, the relationship between these two groups in literature offers a unique perspective on American racial and ethnic social structures because both blacks and Jews are considered minority groups, yet they also maintain a hierarchical relationship with one another. By employing black and Jewish characters, American writers, especially Jewish-American writers, create a …

The Dreamer Deepe: A Two-Act Play In The Lovecraft Horror Mythos, Nicholas Mazzuca

All Theses

One full-length, two-act play comprises this creative thesis, which has been submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Arts in English literature. This manuscript showcases a creative work that fuses two separate genres: literary horror and dramatic theory. I take my vocabulary from a preexisting body of work so that I may generate something vital and new. May the words I write honor those who have gone before me and inspire as I have been inspired.

"Blessed Are The Dead Which Die In The Lord": The Influence Of The American Tract Society On The Historical Evolution Of American Literary Sentimentalism, Joel Bridges Henderson

Dissertations

Studies of American literary sentimentalism usually focus on either the genre's origins in the novels of the early republic or its zenith as represented by the midnineteenth- century bestsellers. Such a focus reveals two distinctly different versions of sentimentalism. While the novels of Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, and William Brown evidence a genre influenced by Calvinism, the bestsellers of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Cummins, and Susan Warner represent a sentimentalism inextricably fused with nineteenth-century evangelicalism. The evolution of the genre is more clearly explained by the intervention of the American Tract Society (ATS). In its ongoing efforts to convert the …

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.

Templeton's Peace, Trent Devell Hudley

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This novel is a work of fiction.

Fatal Passion: The Early American Conspiracy Plot And Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Rebecca Bossie

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Using the Bavarian Illuminati scare of 1798, this work attempts to trace how Charles Brockden Brown uses these conspiracy narratives to plot other important eighteenth century narratives in his first novel, Wieland, and its companion piece Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. This Thesis covers a broad range of topic important to the eighteenth century, but focuses more specifically on eighteenth century politics, historiography, patriarchal and family values, and women's work and voices in literature.

Standing In The Night, Karin Jane Millhouse

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Standing in the Night has been completed under the influence of phenomenology with its curious regard towards reality. Yet it makes no claims to be anything other than what it is: really, we're just making it all up as we go along.

Gods R Us, Alivelu Nagamani

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Around Grecian orchards. On Trojan battlefields. In Siva's realm. Inside Hanuman's heart. Of gods, demons, and others who love us, hate us, serve us, interfere with us. Of humans larger than life. When gods were not in hiding. About a space not reached via explanations. Poems in Gods R Us come from Greek/Roman and Indic myths, they retell myths, comment on myths, and refer to myths - they could not have been without myths. Distillation and attentiveness create the time needed to be one in the spirit of the poem. I range from reverential to playful.

The Casaloma, Justin P. Burnside

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Casaloma was written to challenge held beliefs in what constitutes genre, what constitutes "selfhood," and what constitutes borders.

First, it is an examination of Rimbaud's famous line, "I is an other," which challenges the position of the "I" in relation not only to the self, but the self in relation to the world around it. This I call the poetics of the pre-positional, or prepositional relationship. This poetics is explored and tested through the voices, and the suigenerous nature of the material that constitutes the book.

Secondly, this book is meant to be an exploration of ideas that were …

Dancing In The Ashes, Vytautas Adolph Malesh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The following novel is the third draft of my creative thesis entitled Dancing in the Ashes . It is an exploration of the Detroit rave scene in its dying days, and it mixes real and imagined places and events in order to portray the essence of that time, if not the factuality. The bulk of the novel follows just over two weeks in the life of Thomas Kowalski, a drug dealer living with his parents in suburban Detroit. He parties constantly and seldom works except as necessary to keep his job at a local record store - an invaluable source …

"Taking It Out!": Jayne Cortez's Collaborations With The Firespitters, Renee Michelle Kingan

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

The Cultural And Literary Discourse Of War In 20th Century America, Robert Michael Ficociello

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In The Cultural and Literary Discourse of War in 2oth-century America, war is re-examined and re-historicized from an American perspective. First, war is contextualized in relation to urban studies, anthropology and literature. The dominant model, war is an extension of politics, for the analysis of war is decentered, and politics becomes the extension of war. In respect to America since the Revolutionary War, the nation is literally birthed from war, and the nation becomes an extension of that war. The perpetual re-writing of that war is seen through the discourses of history, politics, and literature. Therefore, the Cold War can …

Quiet Testimony : The Ethical Impulse Of Silence In Emerson, Douglass, Melville, And James, Shari Goldberg

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project proposes that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville and Henry James invoke silence in order to make evident, if not audible, the oppression of slaves and the absence of the dead. Challenging the opposition between advocacy and quietism that has largely structured scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature, I argue that these writers produce testimony by engaging voicelessness in their texts. In effect, their work revises the idea that testimony consists in a first-person report of past events. Quiet Testimony consequently suggests that, in signal American texts, political claims may not be explicitly argumentative, a testifying subject bears …

A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers drew on European natural science and philosophy - specifically in terms of concepts of form, perception, and experience - to open new possibilities for thinking the relationship between the mind and the physical world. In each of the moments of American intellectual history here considered - the natural theology of Calvinism, the idealistic natural history of Transcendentalism, and the movement towards an evolutionary process-philosophy of Pragmatism - "place" becomes not only geographical location, but a dynamic field of interactions of natural historical, literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge. I trace this through …

Specular Subjects : Technologies Of Vision In The Transatlantic Novel, 1719-1850, Matthew Henry Pangborn

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Scholars of the long eighteenth century have traced the rise in modern Anglophone culture of an observational, episto-factual standard of truth and value, new techniques of surveillance and disciplinarity, image-based and global networks of consumption and exchange, and a mass culture honing its ostensibly comprehensive power of sight through new media of text and image. While debate has occurred over the origins and meanings of the ascendancy of such an overwhelmingly visual mode of engagement with the world, scholars have tended to examine such topics in isolation, with little attention to the ethical and political consequences of the material practices …

From Feminism, Adam Strauss

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

From Feminism means to emphasize a world-view rather than an a-priori eye towards women; the manuscript does occasionally strike a generic feminist-didactic mode, but for the most part its concerns are with humanity/ecology and gender goes un-marked or people are altogether absent. The world is various, and in terms of form, the poems in this book are rangy: sonnets, prose poems, serial fragments, free verse tercets, measured and rhymed tercets, couplets, over-the-top monuments to generation by rhyme. Unconventional use of white-space occurs fairly frequently. My thought is that having breaks in articulation in two places, not just the end of …

It's Bigger And Hip-Hop: Richard Wright, Hip-Hop, And Masculinity, Marcos Julian Del Hierro

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In Native Son, Richard Wright presents a view of the impoverished, inner-city from an insider's perspective, which reflects the anger and hate brewing towards the rest of the nation as a result of living under harsh, isolating conditions. Wright's main character, Bigger Thomas serves as an archetypal ghetto figure both in his attitudes and the treatment he receives from Anglo Americans. Additionally, the reception of Native Son by a majority white reading audience also reflected the voyeuristic thrill of the bourgeoisie when consuming cultural products by African Americans. The selection of Wright's novel into the Book of the Month …

The First Thing Out The Window: Race, Radical Feminism, And Marge Piercy's "Woman On The Edge Of Time", Kimberly Lynn Mann

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.