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Articles 1 - 30 of 206
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Religious Iconography, Expressionist Lighting, And The Antihero's Spiritual Journey In Marvel's Daredevil, Savannah L. Pruett
Religious Iconography, Expressionist Lighting, And The Antihero's Spiritual Journey In Marvel's Daredevil, Savannah L. Pruett
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In Marvel’s Daredevil (2015), Matthew Murdock undergoes different phases of an antiheroic spiritual journey as his faith in the judicial system and his Maker is tested by evil in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. This thesis will dig deeper to reveal how the Daredevil series uses purposefully designed religious iconography and expressionist lighting to tell the story of Matthew Murdock’s antiheroic spiritual journey across three seasons. This thesis aims to prove that Daredevil is a complex and thought-provoking franchise that analyzes what it means to be an antihero, including the moral and ethical lines one is willing to cross to …
"A Stranger In America": Queer Diasporic Writers And The American Politics Of Exclusion, Caitlin Stanfield
"A Stranger In America": Queer Diasporic Writers And The American Politics Of Exclusion, Caitlin Stanfield
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
While the academic concept of queer diasporic studies is relatively new, the epistemic future of this interdisciplinary, intersectional, and inclusive field is already imperiled. Throughout recent years, bills seeking to expunge critical race and queer theory from not only the public education sector, but from the legally-defined “general public” as well, have been proposed by legislators throughout the United States. To combat this assault upon marginalized educators, scholars, and authors, one must first understand what is at stake; the rich site of contemporary, queer diasporic poetry provides one such example. By situating these poems within their complex cultural, political, and …
The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow
The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …
The Well-Tempered Android: Philosophical Posthumanism In Science Fiction Cinema., Cody Gault
The Well-Tempered Android: Philosophical Posthumanism In Science Fiction Cinema., Cody Gault
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines philosophical posthumanism as a means for critical analysis of the interaction between humans and nonhuman androids in select science fiction cinematic universes. The interaction is analyzed through several facets, notably the interactions between humans and nonhuman androids, particularly as interactions between the human and nonhuman are often sites of violence. Chapter one is an introduction. Chapter two describes the development of philosophical posthumanism from humanism, also including an analysis of philosophical posthumanism, and how it can be used as a critical lens. Chapter three begins an analysis of science fiction cinema by examining the Blade Runner films …
Mankind Is Machine: A Monstrous Posthuman Reading Of Philip K. Dick’S Selected Works, Gabriel Davis
Mankind Is Machine: A Monstrous Posthuman Reading Of Philip K. Dick’S Selected Works, Gabriel Davis
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The works of Philip K. Dick act as an ideal template for readers to explore what it means to be human in a technologically dominated world. Dick’s emphasis on the usage of androids and artificial intelligence as literary monsters allows for a posthuman reading of the traditional literary monster, notably in how their uncanny nature and behavior helps reveal the synthetic tendencies of humanity. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “Imposter,” and “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” each narrative incorporates artificial intelligence and androids acting as others to reveal the machine-like qualities of Dick’s human characters. This …
The Portrayal Of Disability In 19th And 20th Century American Novels, Taylor Whittington
The Portrayal Of Disability In 19th And 20th Century American Novels, Taylor Whittington
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores the treatment of disabled characters by their family and communities in 19th and 20th - century American literature. The three works being evaluated are, The Monster (1898) by Stephen Crane, The Sound and The Fury (1928) by William Faulkner, and Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck. Although The Sound and The Fury and Of Mice and Men contain a white disabled character, The Monster details the disfiguration of an African American man. In The Monster, race exacerbates the community’s response to the disfigured Henry Johnson, compared to Lennie in Of Mice and Men, …
Nice Girls, Wild Women: The Call Of The American Wilderness And Feminine Rejection Of The American Dream, Alice Paige Dillard
Nice Girls, Wild Women: The Call Of The American Wilderness And Feminine Rejection Of The American Dream, Alice Paige Dillard
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Reflecting the inherently patriarchal nature of the colonization that birthed America as a nation, the American landscape English settlers sought to subjugate became connotated with the female gender through English colonial writing. American westward expansion gained greater allure than the overt appeal of conquest and agrarian industry when her untamed western landscape was likened to images of an unspent virginal bride or the breast of a nurturing mother. Thomas Morton likens the colonies of Maryland and Virginia to the Biblical figures of Leah and Rachel in his poem “New English Canaan” to demonstrate their equal worth as English colonies, though …
K-5 Elementary Alternative Program: A Case Study, William E. Scheuer Iv
K-5 Elementary Alternative Program: A Case Study, William E. Scheuer Iv
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The purpose of this case study was to examine how the K-5 elementary alternative program All Students Can Thrive (ASCT) used student-centered learning practices to influence the whole child. There is a lack of research on K-5 elementary alternative programs, such as ASCT, and specifically those that integrate student-centered learning practices to influence the whole child. Literature does not contain universally accepted interventions that are effective in the elementary alternative setting to help students return to the mainstream classroom setting better prepared to display appropriate behaviors when a student is removed from a mainstream classroom setting due to disruptive behaviors. …
Rendering Documentary Portraiture: An Interrogation Of Archival Discourse Through A Critical Exploration Of Nineteenth Century Stage Actress Charlotte Cushman’S Material Memory, Skyler Sunday
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Visual depictions of nineteenth century stage actress Charlotte Cushman, such as photographs, engravings, and painted portraits assist researchers in re-envisioning her both as an actress and as a person, but what do her remaining archival possessions further reveal to researchers about her memory? How do different objects operate as portraits that allow the researcher to tap into and remember specific moments and memory? How does the effort to preserve memory take different forms? This project argues that, when viewing the archive through its stored objects, our collective notion of portraiture can be expanded and used to interrogate existing methods of …
Isocrates's Place In Postmodern Advertising, Christopher Barkley
Isocrates's Place In Postmodern Advertising, Christopher Barkley
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This study in communication and rhetoric seeks to ascertain constructive applications for distinct advertising practices by examining Isocrates’s work and place in postmodern advertising. The focus uses 5 principles known to Isocrates which are: 1) commonwealths of households, 2) integration of reputation, elegance, substance and style, 3) education and public discourse, 4) phronesis and praxis, and 5) truth and verisimilitude. These 5 principles can form a constructive and practical advertising approach. This study is important. It examines Isocrates through the lens of advertising and extends the research done about him by leading Isocrates scholars who have looked primarily at his …
A Cleave Within The Piney Woods: Nacogdoches, Stephen F. Austin State University And How Racial Integration Divided The Town And Gown, Caitlin Hornback
A Cleave Within The Piney Woods: Nacogdoches, Stephen F. Austin State University And How Racial Integration Divided The Town And Gown, Caitlin Hornback
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Stephen F. Austin State University was once the pride and joy of the city of Nacogdoches, Texas. When the Texas State Legislature began to look for a location for their new state normal school, the people of the East Texas town fought to have it built there and the Stephen F. Austin Teacher’s College opened its doors in September 1923 to a proud community. Through the trials and tribulations of early twentieth century events, the school managed to stay afloat and grow in numbers. Dr. Ralph W. Steen became the president of the college in 1958 and he oversaw a …
“It Is Not Enough To Be In One Cage With One Self”: The Poetic Subject, Incarceration, And Envisioning Abolition, Emily Price
“It Is Not Enough To Be In One Cage With One Self”: The Poetic Subject, Incarceration, And Envisioning Abolition, Emily Price
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Beat poet Bob Kaufman was in many ways nearly destroyed by the state. Forcible electroshock therapy, repeated targeting by police, repeated brutalization by police, and frequent homelessness all threatened to snuff him out, but Kaufman refused to give in. He remained a political beacon of hope for his community throughout his life, asking those around him to envision a world where he could be free. Through his poems, through the poems of Etheridge Knight and Jimmy Santiago Baca, and through contemporary visions of abolition from Angela Davis and community organizers that become ever more relevant as the prison system …
The Glass Coffin: Gothic Adaptations And The Formation Of Sexual Subjectivity., Colton T. Wilson
The Glass Coffin: Gothic Adaptations And The Formation Of Sexual Subjectivity., Colton T. Wilson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
It is now an almost foregone conclusion that classic depictions of vampirism resonate with contemporary queer audiences. A sympathetic response to the monster’s persecution is often the key factor in these arguments, yet little attention is paid to the textual details that prompt such a process of identification. This study posits that the iconography used to establish a connection between monstrosity and non-normative sexuality has its origins in Victorian Gothic fiction, whose descriptions of vampirism were assimilated into the discourse of the fin-de-siècle medical field known as sexology. Theories that defined homosexuality as an illness with physical and psychological symptoms …
“I, Too, Am An Occupied Territory”: Border Crossings And Personal Sovereignty In Three Novels By Dominican American Women, Leia M. Lynn
“I, Too, Am An Occupied Territory”: Border Crossings And Personal Sovereignty In Three Novels By Dominican American Women, Leia M. Lynn
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Border crossing(s) and personal sovereignty are intimately and complexly connected in novels by and about Dominican American women. Through readings of In the Name of Salomé by Julia Alvarez, Dominicana by Angie Cruz, and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, I argue that patriarchal forms of authority remove female autonomy by trespassing on personal boundaries, and that the renegotiation of that power is achieved through formations of community, especially with other women, through nonheteronormative relationships that are present inside and extend outside the text. The interplay of patriarchal authority, violence, and alienation on the four protagonists is examined at length, …
Experiences Of Chinese American Psychology Trainees In Multicultural Education, Helen Weng-Ian Chao
Experiences Of Chinese American Psychology Trainees In Multicultural Education, Helen Weng-Ian Chao
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Although research has established that students of color have unique experiences in their multicultural training, few studies have examined the experiences and needs of specific subgroups of students of color. This study examined Chinese American psychology trainees’ experiences in multicultural education. Qualitative data was collected from individual semi-structured interviews with Chinese American doctoral students (N = 6). Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to understand participants’ perceptions of their experiences in multicultural courses. Data analysis resulted in four themes: the (1) burden of being minoritized, (2) Chinese American identity inflection points, being (3) sidelined by whiteness, and (4) …
American Performance: Artistic Experience And The American Dream, Savannah M. Barrow
American Performance: Artistic Experience And The American Dream, Savannah M. Barrow
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The American Dream was first epitomized by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography (1791), in which he instructs his fellow citizens on how to procure the American promises of social mobility and economic prosperity. However, the moral and social performances reinforced by Franklin’s recipe-for-success promote an ideological system that prevents marginalized communities such as women, immigrants, and people of color, from procuring the Dream’s most foundational features. Inequitable access to the Dream is a theme revisited throughout American literature, wherein disenfranchised characters consume the aspirational narrative of American social mobility through art, media, and propaganda. This essay tracks the representation of …
Movies That Sell: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Product Placements In Marvel Movies, Andrew Nii Okai Okai
Movies That Sell: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Product Placements In Marvel Movies, Andrew Nii Okai Okai
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The advancement of digital entertainment media has given audiences the ability to skip ads that do not interest them. Consequently, brands face the challenge of creating ads that can compel audiences and finding media outlets that can effectively reach target audiences. Brands today use product placements to promote their products because movie audiences are generally attentive to ads when they are incorporated in a movie’s narrative. Marvel Cinematic Universe is a globally recognized entertainment franchise that uses product placements strategically to promote brands in their movies and TV shows. In this study, I conduct rhetorical analyses of select product placements …
Recommended Reading: Book List Books And Middlebrow Tastemaking, Cheryl Read
Recommended Reading: Book List Books And Middlebrow Tastemaking, Cheryl Read
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The term “middlebrow” has historically been hurled as a pejorative to signify cultural objects and consumers of them which are watered down, inauthentic, and invested in quick social gain. I argue that the literary middlebrow can be better understood if its definition expands to include a mode of reading characterized by being mediated by cultural arbiters and purposeful in that literature functions as an instrument for self-improvement. In this dissertation, I use book list books, lists of recommended reading published as standalone books themselves, to trace the history of a middlebrow mode of reading from the late nineteenth century to …
Out Of Time: Temporal Performativity And Resistance In Popular American Film, Television, And Theater, Meghan Johnston Aelabouni
Out Of Time: Temporal Performativity And Resistance In Popular American Film, Television, And Theater, Meghan Johnston Aelabouni
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation argues that religious world-making in popular culture can reveal and resist hegemonic times. Taking as my primary case study the United States in the 2010s, particularly the shift from the Obama to the Trump era, I analyze cultural constructions of time—as sacred history, destiny, and “the times”—that reflect and shape national identity and belonging in the American imagined community. In this context, such temporal constructions have privileged whiteness and heteronormative masculinity, positioning those who embody or approximate this norm as “of the times,” while also displacing BIPOC, women, and queer people as “out of time.” I posit time …
An American Pilgrimage: The 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train As Prophetic Social Performance, Cheston M. Bush
An American Pilgrimage: The 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train As Prophetic Social Performance, Cheston M. Bush
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In late spring of 1968, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched a nationwide demonstration known as the Poor People’s Campaign in an effort to overcome poverty. Nine caravans representing people from around the country converged in the Capitol to petition Congress for programs that would broaden opportunities for poor Americans. This work examines the Mississippi contingent of the campaign, the Mule Train caravan, that consisted of roughly 150 people who traveled in 15 covered wagons pulled by about 40 mules. The Mule Train left Marks, Mississippi on May 13 and arrived in Washington, D.C. in time for a June …
A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson
A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This study seeks to explore how Black Arkansans on college campuses in rural towns navigated their local circumstances while embracing tenets of Black Power. By 1968, public PWIs in Arkansas were contending with an influx of Black students due to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Even though many of the universities had been integrated years and even decades earlier, they were still ill-equipped for the number of Black students that would enroll and descend upon the towns during this period.
Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken
Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project explores Southern women writers during the latter half of the nineteenth-century who asserted and crafted a modernized identity by turning to various modes of transgressive performance and performance spaces. For women of the nineteenth-century, this meant extricating themselves from a domestic, sentimental identity and apprehending a more fluid, dynamic type of being. The modes of performance, such as spectatorship, orality, and gesture, allowed these women to express and articulate an alternative feminine identity while also engaging with an embodied epistemology. This thesis looks at three Southern women writers: Sherwood Bonner’s novel Like Unto Like and her travel letters …
What Remains: Telling The Story Of Irene Taylor's Murder, Christian Leus
What Remains: Telling The Story Of Irene Taylor's Murder, Christian Leus
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This written thesis serves as a companion piece to What Remains, a six-part audio podcast telling the story of Irene Taylor, a 19-year-old sharecropper’s daughter who was murdered in Altheimer, Arkansas, in 1939. The investigation of the murder, which garnered national press attention, ended with the conviction and execution of Sylvester Williams, a 22-year-old Black man also from Altheimer. This paper expands on the contextual research done in support of the podcast, including close readings of newspaper coverage and fictionalized magazine reports of the case; an examination of the Delta environment’s racialized history and its impact on the lives of …
"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker
"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project examines the historical memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster of April 27, 1865. The Sultana, ferrying recently-released federal prisoners, exploded north of Memphis, killing over 1,700 in the nation’s worst maritime disaster. Contemporaries interpreted the disaster through a variety of lenses, finding evidence of recalcitrant rebels, the heroism of Union soldiers, and critiques of Republican emancipationist wartime policy. Steamboat safety advocates deployed the disaster’s memory to successfully press Radical Republicans for the 1871 Steamboat Act, establishing the nation’s first maritime safety code. The disaster’s survivors gathered at reunions and published personal narratives to secure the Sultana, and the …
The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge
The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Meat of the Gothic: Animality and Social Justice in United States Fiction and Film of the Twenty-First Century— situates twenty-first century US gothic narratives in relation to animal studies, even as it illuminates how these narratives interrogate the effects of historic and ongoing global systems of human oppression: slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Instead of reacting to bias by asserting a claim to a humanity perpetually imbricated in divisions of class, race, and gender, present-day authors and filmmakers create characters who form communities that include nonhuman actors as a means of generating empowerment and critique. My approach to these narratives …
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis situates Zora Neale Hurston and the folk communities in her oeuvre within the context of modernity’s dependencies on fossil fuels. Such a disciplinary context provides an energy footing for our understandings of African American migrations in the twentieth century—which radically transformed the nation on multiple levels—and it illuminates the communal values that undergird Black approaches to petromodern forms of mobility. Furthermore, by engaging the Black spaces of the South, my argument begins filling a gap in the energy humanities. Few scholars in this field engage deeply those populations and regions that disproportionately experience the underbelly of petromodernity and …
Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood
Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the use of fairy-tale allusions to explore masculinity in four novels published during the Cold War period. This notable focus on men and masculinity held in common across these four novels from four different decades is interesting because it suggests that the shift in focus to women and feminist ideals in fairy-tale revisions of the 1970s and after is even more stark a shift than has yet been recognized by scholars. This dissertation finds that Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White (1967), and Ross Macdonald’s novel …
Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman
Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Using Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, this thesis outlines how to ethically and effectively teach literature that deals with trauma. My personal teaching philosophy as well as the current pedagogy surrounding trauma literature preface a detailed syllabus, lesson plans, assessments, and activities that would be useful in teaching a course centered around literature that deals with trauma. This thesis highlights the merits of teaching trauma fiction in the literature classroom.
The Significance Of The Automobile In 20th C. American Short Fiction, Megan M. Flanery
The Significance Of The Automobile In 20th C. American Short Fiction, Megan M. Flanery
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Midcentury American life featured a post-war economy that established a middle class in which disposable income and time for leisure were commonplace. In this socio-economic environment, consumerism flourished, ushering in the Golden Age of the automobile: from 1950 to 1960, Americans spent more time in their automobiles than ever before, and, by the end of the decade, the number of cars on the road had more than doubled. While much critical attention has been given to the role of the automobile in American novels, less has been given to its role in American short stories. The automobile has been featured …
Railspace: A Geocritical Study Of The Railroad Through American Literature And Culture, Michael A. Smith
Railspace: A Geocritical Study Of The Railroad Through American Literature And Culture, Michael A. Smith
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation uses geocriticism to argue that the American railroad is best understood as a set of discursively constructed railspaces formed through a variety of viewpoints, a polysensorial awareness of space, and stratified social relationships and power struggles. This study takes up four railspaces, the constituent texts of which demonstrate how intertextual discourse shapes and is shaped by the railroad. The observation car, charted through California Zephyr advertisements and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Campaign,” is an apparatus that produces perpetual spectacle. Three novels—Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, and Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith—and …