Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Eco-Domestic Femininity: The Collapse Of Domestic And Wild In Southern Women’S Writing, Christina Xan

Theses and Dissertations

When the Agrarians set out to assert their definition of southern in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), they planted roots deep in the ground of the south that slowly wrapped its tendrils around its descendants. In the years that have followed, southern women have had to push back against these limiting boundaries. Their individual stories are linked by the communal lineage of the south, specifically the binary of domestic and wild. Traditionally, southern women have had to stay in the boundaries of the home, cultivating domesticity, ordering the space, and warming the hearth. The land itself, posed as opposite from …

The Disruption Of Kinship: Interracial Relationships, Displacement, And Marginalized Mixed-Race Families In Korean War Literature, Hyunwook Kim

Theses and Dissertations

The Korean War (1950–1953) left a profound mark on the Korean peninsula, its people, and their diaspora, with its impact still felt today. Korean War literature serves as a vital source for understanding the war's social and cultural ramifications, particularly for marginalized groups, including military sex workers, mixed-race children, and mixed Korean adoptees. Emphasizing the role of interraciality in their experiences, the dissertation delves into literary representations that depict encounters between Korean women and American soldiers, leading to the formation of novel mixed-race families both within military camp towns in Korea and domestic spaces in the United States. While much …

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Natural Law And Radical Autonomy In Antebellum American Literature, Andrew Urban

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the tension and conflict between conceptions of the natural law and the ideal of radical autonomy in the work of the antebellum American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. This tension and conflict was brought to the fore by the modernization of American society in the antebellum period. Modernization is here understood as the social process through which increasing recognition is given to individual autonomy, elevating the individual self, as the creator of meaning and value, above the standard provided by nature, including human nature, according to which one ought to live. This …

Nostalgia For The Never Was: Ideals Of Family, Nation, And Masculinity In The Blockbuster Films Of The Reagan Era, Patrick M. Zwosta

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers a cultural history of the symbiotic relationship between consumerism, nuclear war and the ideal of the nuclear family as these concepts are reflected in popular film franchises launched in the 1980s during the heyday of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Each chapter studies the strong correlation between blockbuster film and Reagan’s militarism, his invocations of family values, and most importantly, his investment in turning American politics into a nostalgic movie promising a happy Hollywood ending. Chapter One discusses James Cameron’s The Terminator as a warning for what can happen if a society is too reliant on technology and consumption …

“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati

Theses and Dissertations

Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary …

The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

While drawing on mythology and a literary history that associated women with death as well as creativity, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath experimented with binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, composition/decomposition, and death/(re)birth. They gained inspiration from the same source, the dead muse, but how do they transform traditions that derive from classical and medieval literary precedent, perhaps in ways that are inherently critical of patriarchal modes of gender dynamics? Why is Poe fixated on a feminine dead muse while Plath is inspired by what she calls her “father-sea-god muse”? How do both authors represent the female body, and how …

Palestine Without Borders: A Study Of Arab And Western Voices In Theater, Bassem Mohsen Ahmed El-Sayed Ahmed Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

Theater has always been perceived as a way to link different cultures together and bring them under one large domain. Regardless, the genre does not give the needed attention to works written in certain regions that may otherwise fall outside the consensus. One good example is Palestine and any works that deal with it as a setting. The first thing that comes to mind whenever the word “Palestine” is brought up is almost always of a political nature, having to do with the Palestinians’ national conflict with Israel. This thesis undertakes to amend this by probing into plays written by …

The Impact Of Slavery And Colonialism On The Black Consciousness: Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, The Confessions Of Nat Turner, And Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Mariam Badawi

Theses and Dissertations

According to the German author, essayist, and empirical psychologist Karl Philipp Moritz, to be able to analyze someone psychologically, we have to be able to analyze ourselves as one would know oneself better than one would know anyone else. Therefore, he proposed the study of autobiographies to be able to delve into a writer's "innermost soul"; through their knowledge of themselves" (qtd. in Schlumbohm 32). Moreover, "the psychological effect that the ideology of white supremacy and European imperialism, in the form of slavery and colonialism, has had on Africa and her people has never been fully addressed and understood" (Nobles …

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

Blacklash: Phenomenological Hermeneutics In Black Dance, Darvejon A. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

The horrors inflicted on Black bodies, souls, and spirits in the United States during the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and the current era (2023) have a lasting legacy of trauma metabolized through the body and transmuted generationally. Jones uses this data to contextualize the work of Black dance artists as hermeneutic phenomena in which the Black dance artist is a hermeneut tasked with delivering a message of the Black body/spirit complex: “I AM HUMAN. DO NOT KILL ME.” This paper examines how Black dance artists frequently petition for their survival — incessantly subjugated to the interpreter’s empathy, …

Negotiating Liberty: Fine Ceramics For The U.S. American Market Before 1860, Presley Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the rise of the consumer market toward the end of the eighteenth century led to the production of decorated fine ceramics that became powerful modes of popularizing new ideas in the United States regarding independence, national symbols, and abolitionism.

Children And The Cold War: Race & Hypocrisy Amid Fear Of Nuclear War, Richard D. Mctaggart Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

During the Cold War, American propaganda centered the wellbeing of the child in its messaging warning of atomic attack at the hands of the Soviet Union. However, despite American claims that all children were valued by the United States, this was proven untrue by its unequal treatment of Black children.

The Impact Of Family Environment And Religion In Purple Hibiscus And Beloved, Thoa Phan

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the repercussions of slavery-induced dehumanization and trauma depicted in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and explores Kambili’s stifling home life characterized by her father’s rigid Catholicism in Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Morrison’s Beloved emphasizes the importance of personal engagement with the history of slavery so as to fully comprehend its horrors and overcome them. In Purple Hibiscus, the paper investigates the role religion plays in causing trauma, as Eugene’s strict adherence to Catholicism and dismissal of traditional rituals inflict both physical and psychological pain on his family. The complex and multifaceted depiction of religion in these novels …

“Slave Guys O Not Slave Guys:” Tracing Colonialism And Resistance In The Hawaiian Pidgin Bible, Aleena Jacob

Theses and Dissertations

On the one hand, colonial-era Bibles represented powerful rhetorical devices for imperialists; on the other hand, Bibles offered a voice of justice that baited hope in marginalized readers. During the U.S. settler colonial movement, Bibles equipped U.S. missionaries with the authority to force assimilation practices, including the extermination of indigenous languages with English-only laws. In Hawai'i, English-only policies functioned to not only dispossess indigenous populations of their native languages, land, and sense of belonging, but they also began a century-plus tradition of monolingualist policy in the U.S. that continues into the present day. Such policies, along with standardized English ideologies …

An Arbitrary Aesthetic: Cultural Reproduction And Hegemonic Canonical Formations In The Western Theatrical Academy, Sim C. Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre as an artistic practice has often been celebrated as an art of and for the people, being a modality that in theory the common person has access to learn, explore and experience. In recent years I have become preoccupied with the growing rarification and privileging of this art form, particularly in how it is cognized and taught in the academic world. As such, I set out to investigate the mechanisms at work at levels structural, artistic, and personal that determine how theatre is taught and understood within the western academy.

This thesis seeks to examine and unpack the perceived …

Printed And Bound: The Publishers' Case Binding And 19th-Century Women's Critique Of Marriage, Carolyn Suneja

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the coevolution of industrial book formats in the 19th century and women’s critique of marriage in fiction, arguing that the highly decorated case binding both reflected and shaped broader cultural anxieties engendered by the accessibility of new literary forms to mass audiences and the impact of that literature on the cultural logics by which women understood their roles and options. Given the reciprocal relationship between the mechanisms of industrial print and women’s writing, the material conditions of book production are important considerations for the literary scholar. The four novels examined in this dissertation—Fanny Fern’s Rose Clark, Harriet …

Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Christina Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the photographic archive of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II produced by the US government, arguing that these images “restage” the evacuation, incarceration, and resettlement periods through a settler colonial “pioneer” mythology, thereby obscuring the precarity of Japanese Americans' racial positionality between “settler” and “native.”

Bildung And Flânerie: Aesthetics, Genre, And Modes Of Development In The Moviegoer, Sean P. Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis frames Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1961) as a novel that pits the fading tradition of the Bildungsroman, aligned with what its protagonist calls the "vertical" throughout the text, against the supposed alternative of "the search", aligned with horizontal wandering. As the vast changes of modernity, namely technology and industrialization, transformed Western society throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, many novelists began to see the Bildungsideal as incompatible with their new world. Walker Percy's novel begins with a similar conclusion, and I track how The Moviegoer engages with the Bildungsideal and its supposed failure to sustain itself into the …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

The Quads, Elmer D. Guevara

Theses and Dissertations

My work attempts to reconcile my familial history. By reconstructing narratives, I am advancing a new sense of our family archive. My goal is to grant the viewer with autobiographical snippets delivered through the piecing and meshing of multiple scenarios and events that derive from family album photos and reimagining spaces.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the systematic biases embedded within this genre, highlighting the ongoing battle between tokenism and inclusive storytelling. Thesis will also emphasize the importance of this genre, its tight grasp on popular culture, and showcase positive representations introduced by new creators over the years.

“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interrogates the postponement of the Philip Guston Now exhibition, examining the justification for the postponement, the actions taken by the National Gallery of Art, and the effects of the postponement. My research examines the museum’s choice to cite social justice as the main context for understanding Philip Guston.

Hungry For More: American Food Writing And Globalization, Andrew Kleinke

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation, Hungry for More: American Food Writing and Globalization, investigates several food-focused texts including novels, travelogues, culinary memoirs, and TV shows. I take an interdisciplinary approach by incorporating literary theory into the field of food studies to argue that food texts from the United States reveal a growing anxiety towards what, how, and where we eat. As I show, food writing plays a prominent role in shaping many Americans' interactions with the world. More specifically, I argue that globalization has changed, and continues to transform, access and attachments to food. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I examine …

Campy Musical Black Queer Forms: Finding Utopia In Lil Nas X’S World Of Montero, Jaymi Leah Grullon

Theses and Dissertations

Lil Nas X, a breakout music star has broken into the mainstream and has stirred up controversy and moral panic among conservative Christians as well as those who are not in support of over Black queer representation in media. Moreover, I am interested in which ways he queers the forms of pop, hip hop and camp through his music videos, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” “Industry Baby,” featuring Jack Harlowe, and his performative skits. In my first chapter, I will be laying down the theoretical framework that I will be connecting from various scholars to define campy musical Black …

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Exploring Chinese Audience’S Responses Toward American Film Representations Of Chinese Culture And People, Yue Yu

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study focuses on the Chinese audience responses to Chinese media representations in American films. The goal of this project is to create a white paper that can be present to American film producers or potential movie investors who want to earn a bigger market share in China. Semi-structured focus groups were conducted among college students, addressing four research questions. Findings revealed that the participants in the focus group were able to identify and acknowledge the Chinese media representation and stereotypes in American feature films. Furthermore, most of the participants were positive towards Chinese elements incorporations and were capable …