Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Secular Understanding And Shattering The Myth Of The American Dream: A Chronological Analysis Of Changing Attitudes And Depictions Of Murder Within The Twentieth-Century American Literary Canon, Tsipi Wagner

English Dissertations

Extreme violence, which often results in murder, is a prominent theme in the American literary canon; therefore, it deserves a wider and more focused lens in the study of Twentieth-Century American literature. Murder and entertainment seldom coexist in canonical literature, but the very nature of the murder, foreign to many readers, consequently piques one’s curiosity, and demands special attention.

The literary texts I have chosen to discuss are four novels and three plays. They all belong to the genre known in literature as ‘a crime novel or play.’ The murderers are easily identified, and their criminal acts have been carried …

Walker Percy And The Magic Of Naming: The Semeiotic Fabric Of Life, Karey L. Perkins

English Dissertations

Walker Percy thought a paradigm for the modern age, human beings, and life does not exist, and no paradigm vying for supremacy (religion, scientism, new age physics and philosophies) succeeds. He sought to create a “radical anthropology” to describe human beings and life. His anthropology has existential roots and culminates in the philosophy and semeiotic of American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Unlike any other creature, humans have symbolic capacity, first manifested in a child’s naming and demonstrated in human being’s unique language ability, the ability to communicate through symbol and not just sign. Percy conveyed his anthropology in his last …

Mothering And Surrogacy In Twentieth-Century American Literature: Promise Or Betrayal, Kimberly C. Weaver

English Dissertations

Twentieth-century American literature is filled with new images of motherhood. Long gone is the idealism of motherhood that flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in life and in writing. Long gone are the mother help books and guides on training mothers. The twentieth-century fiction writer ushers in new examples of motherhood described in novels that critique the bad mother and turn a critical eye towards the role of women and motherhood. This study examines the trauma surrounding twentieth-century motherhood and surrogacy; in particular, how abandonment, rape, incest, and negation often results in surrogacy; and how selected authors create characters …

The Spaces Of History: Francis Parkman's Literary Landscapes And The Formation Of The American Cosmos, Florian Schwieger

English Dissertations

It is the aim of this dissertation to discuss the creation of historiographic space in the works of Francis Parkman. More specifically, this dissertation intends to analyze Parkman’s The Oregon Trail and Montcalm and Wolfe as literary texts that examine geographies of cultural interaction and transnational empire building. Parkman’s historical narratives, this dissertation suggests, not only describe historically significant sites, such as the Oregon Trail and the Northern Frontier, but further create literary heterotopias. These textual counter geographies, as for instance his conceptualizations of the trading posts of the far West and the wilderness fortifications of the far North, …

Two New Heuristics In Response To Formulaic Writing: What Lies Beyond Oversimplified Composition Instruction, James T. Davis Ii

English Dissertations

Many high school and college composition students have misused formulaic organizational structures, most conspicuously the five-paragraph theme, as invention tools. This misappropriation comes from teacher and student tendencies to oversimplify both the processes of writing instruction and its practice into countable and inflexible forms. In order to help students move towards improved invention models that respond to the overall rhetorical situation, this dissertation offers two new models of invention, the x, y thesis and the argument guide models. Beginning at the invention stage and extending recursively to all stages of the writing process, these two heuristics help guide students towards …

The Sermonic Urge: Postsecular Sermons In Contemporary American Fiction, Peter W. Rorabaugh

English Dissertations

Contemporary American novels over the last forty years have developed a unique orientation toward religious and spiritual rhetoric that can best be understood within the multidisciplinary concept of the postsecular. In the morally-tinged discourse of their characters, several esteemed American novelists (John Updike, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy) since 1970 have used sermons or sermon-like artifacts to convey postsecular attitudes and motivations. These postsecular sermons express systems of belief that are hybrid, exploratory, and confessional in nature. Through rhetorical analysis of sermons in four contemporary American novels, this dissertation explores the performance of postsecularity in literature and defines …

From Orators To Cyborgs: The Evolution Of Delivery, Performativity, And Gender, Victoria E. Willis

English Dissertations

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The purpose of this project is to provide a thorough account of delivery by tracing the history and evolution of delivery from antiquity to the present day in order to expose the spread and transmission of proto-masculine ideologies through delivery. By looking at delivery from an evolutionary perspective, delivery no longer becomes a tool of rhetoric, but the technology of rhetoric, evolving over time in the same way the system of rhetoric itself has evolved. Contemporary scholarship …

Sensory Coding In William Faulkner's Novels: Investigating Class, Gender, Queerness, And Race Through A Non-Visual Paradigm, Laura R. Davis

English Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Although the title of William Faulkner’s famous novel The Sound and the Fury overtly references the senses, most critics have focused on the fury rather than on the sound. However, Faulkner’s stories, vividly and descriptively set in the U.S. South, contain not only characters and plot, but also depict a rich sensory world. To neglect the way Faulkner’s characters employ their senses is to miss subtle but important clues regarding societal codes that structure hierarchies of class, gender, queerness, and race in his novels. Thus, a more complete examination of the sensory world in Faulkner’s fiction across multiple texts …

The Function Of Religion In Selected Novels Of George Gissing, Lawton A. Brewer

English Dissertations

ABSTRACT George Gissing has experienced a fluctuating reputation among critics in the period of over one hundred years since his death in 1903. Curiously, during the last decade of his life, many critics put Gissing on a par with Thomas Hardy and George Meredith among writers living at that time. Early in his career, however, his reputation suffered from the notion that Gissing was simply a naturalist with a pessimistic, atheistic streak. To some extent, this appraisal has some merit. Gissing pronounced himself an unbeliever to family and to acquaintances such as Fredrick Harrison as early as 1880. Nonetheless, Gissing …

Human-Computer Interface Design For Online Tutoring: Visual Rhetoric, Pedagogy, And Writing Center Websites, Alice J. Myatt

English Dissertations

This dissertation examines the theory and praxis of taking an expanded concept of the human-computer interface (HCI) and working with the resulting concept to design a writing center website that facilitates online tutoring while fostering a conversational approach for online tutoring sessions. In order to foster a conversational approach, I explore the ways in which interactive digital technologies support the collaborative and communicative nature of online tutoring. I posit that my research will yield a deeper understanding of the visual rhetoric of human-designed computer interfaces in general and writing center online tutoring websites in particular, and will, at the same …

The Fashioning Of Fanny Fern: A Study Of Sara Willis Parton's Early Career, 1851-1854, Amy S. Porche

English Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to trace how Sara Willis Parton achieved unprecedented literary celebrity status as Fanny Fern during the first three years of her professional career, 1851-1853. While most critics point to her famously lucrative contract with the most popular newspaper of the 1850s, the New York Ledger, in 1854 as the beginning of her fame, I argue that she had already fully achieved that fame and had done so by writing for small Boston newspapers and publishing a highly successful collection of her articles by 1853. Further, Fern was able to achieve such a high level …

The Southern Gentleman And The Idea Of Masculinity: Figures And Aspects Of The Southern Beau In The Literary Tradition Of The American South, Emmeline Gros

English Dissertations

The American planter has mostly been presented as the epitome of the romantic cavalier legend that could be found in the fiction of John Pendleton Kennedy to Thomas Nelson Page: a man of chivalric manners and good breeding; a man of good social position; a man of wealth and leisure (Concise Oxford Dictionary). A closer scrutiny of the cavalier and genteel ethos of the time, however, reveals the inherent ideological inconsistencies with the idea of the gentleman itself, as the ideal came to be more and more perceived as an illusion and as challenges to traditional gender stereotypes came to …

Writing And Wellness, Emotion And Women: Highlighting The Contemporary Uses Of Expressive Writing In The Service Of Students, Cantice G. Greene

English Dissertations

In an effort to connect women’s spiritual development to the general call for professors to reconnect significantly with their students, this dissertation argues that expressive writing should remain a staple of the composition curriculum. It suggests that the uses of expressive writing should be expanded and explored by students and professors of composition and that each should become familiar with the link between writing and emotional wellness. In cancer centers, schools of medicine, and pregnancy care centers, writing is being used as a tool of therapy. More than just a technique for helping people cope with the stresses of loss, …

Early Medieval Rhetoric: Epideictic Underpinnings In Old English Homilies, Jennifer M. Randall

English Dissertations

Medieval rhetoric, as a field and as a subject, has largely been under-developed and under-emphasized within medieval and rhetorical studies for several reasons: the disconnect between Germanic, Anglo-Saxon society and the Greco-Roman tradition that defined rhetoric as an art; the problems associated with translating the Old and Middle English vernacular in light of rhetorical and, thereby, Greco-Latin precepts; and the complexities of the medieval period itself with the lack of surviving manuscripts, often indistinct and inconsistent political and legal structure, and widespread interspersion and interpolation of Christian doctrine. However, it was Christianity and its governance of medieval culture that preserved …

Liminal Resistances: Local Subjections In My Story, Vidheyan, And The God Of Small Things, Priya Menon

English Dissertations

This project investigates various ways in which resistance is explored by Kamala Das, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Arundhati Roy in My Story, Vidheyan, and The God of Small Things respec-tively. “Liminal Resistances: Local Subjections in My Story, Vidheyan, and The God of Small Things” aims to examine the workings and creative subversions of hegemonic discourses of caste, class, gender and color within the local milieu of Kerala, India. By exploring the theoreti-cal apparatuses employed in three diverse texts set in Kerala, this project identifies: firstly, Das’s subversion of Nair Kerala’s sense of gendered and casted normativity in My Story; secondly, Adoor’s …

J. R. R. Tolkien, War, And Nationalism, Amanda J. Johnston

English Dissertations

Tolkien may not have intentionally created his fictive nations to mirror real nations, but his world certainly bears the scars of his experiences of war. The World Wars heightened his fear of losing everything that he loved about his local culture through literal obliteration or assimilation into another culture in the event of England’s losing. Tolkien saw the nation as a social construct that potentially could minimize losses, if not wholly protect local culture from the forces that threatened to destroy it. Yet he also perceived the nation’s limitations in its ability to protect culture. A nation could grow too …

Persistent Pasts: Historical Palimpsests In Nineteenth-Century British Prose, Tamara Gosta

English Dissertations

Persistent Pasts: Historical Palimpsests in Nineteenth-Century Prose traces Victorian historical discourse with specific attention to the works of Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot and their relation to historicism in earlier works by Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg. I argue that the Victorian response to the tense relation between the materialist Enlightenment and the idealist rhetoric of Romanticism marks a decidedly ethical turn in Victorian historical discourse. The writers introduce the dialectic of enlightened empiricism and romantic idealism to invoke the historical imagination as an ethical response to the call of the past. I read the dialectic and its invitation …

Ecocritical Theology Neo-Pastoral Themes In American Fiction From 1960 To The Present, Joan Anderson Ashford

English Dissertations

Ecocritical theology relates to American fiction as it connects nature and spirituality. In my development of the term “neo-pastoral” I begin with Virgil’s Eclogues to serve as examples for spiritual and nature related themes. Virgil’s characters in “The Dispossessed” represent people’s alienation from the land. Meliboeus must leave his homeland because the Roman government has reassigned it to their war veterans. As he leaves Meliboeus wonders why fate has rendered this judgment on him and yet has granted his friend Tityrus a reprieve. Typically, pastoral literature represents people’s longing to leave the city and return to the spiritual respite of …

Toward A Rhetoric Of Scholar-Fandom, Tanya R. Cochran

English Dissertations

Individuals who consider themselves both scholars and fans represent not only a subculture of fandom but also a subculture of academia. These liminal figures seem suspicious to many of their colleagues, yet they are particularly positioned not only to be conduits to engaged learning for students but also to transform the academy by chipping away at the stereotypes that support the symbolic walls of the Ivory Tower. Because they are growing in number and gaining influence in academia, the scholar-fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Buffy) and other texts by creator Joss Whedon are one focus of …

Literature As Prophecy: Toni Morrison As Prophetic Writer, Khalilah Tyri Watson

English Dissertations

From fourteenth century medieval literature to contemporary American and African American literature, researchers have singled out and analyzed writing from every genre that is prophetic in nature, predicting or warning about events, both revolutionary and dire, to come. One twentieth-century American whose work embodies the essence of warning and foretelling through history-laden literature is Toni Morrison. This modern-day literary prophet reinterprets eras gone by through what she calls “re-memory” in order to guide her readers, and her society, to a greater understanding of the consequences of slavery and racism in America and to prompt both races to escape the pernicious …

Mentor-Teaching In The English Classroom, Timothy R. Blue

English Dissertations

This dissertation is a rhetorical analysis of the theories and practices surrounding student-centered mentor-teaching. I examine textual representations of the teacher/student relationship as well as theories and practices involved in the discursive formation of teacher/student relationships, examining the intersection (or lack thereof) between the ways we as researchers talk about teacher/student relationship formation and the way(s) such relationships form in the “real world” of the English classroom. This institutional critique of teacher/student relationships draws on the works of ancient rhetorical scholars like Quintillian and Socrates, and on the post-1980 scholarship of Robert Connors, Lad Tobin, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Parker …

The Good Cut: The Barbershop In The African American Literary Tradition, Terry Sinclair Bozeman

English Dissertations

Few African American males do not have at least one memory of a barbershop. The barbershop is a space that finds a home in virtually every community in which you find Black males. To some degree, virtually all genres and periods of African American literary expression have situated the barbershop as a mediating space in the formulation of a Black masculine identity. The barbershop as mediating space allows Black males the opportunity to view themselves and also critique the ways in which they are gazed upon by the literary imagination. African American authors, through the use of the barbershop, bring …

"Nam-Shub Versus The Big Other: Revising The Language That Binds Us In Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, And Chuck Palahniuk", Jason Michael Embry

English Dissertations

Within the science fiction genre, utopian as well as dystopian experiments have found equal representation. This balanced treatment of two diametrically opposed social constructs results from a focus on the future for which this particular genre is well known. Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, more aptly characterized as speculative fiction because of its use of magic against scientific social subjugation, each tackle dystopian qualities of contemporary society by analyzing the power that language possesses in the formation of the self and propagation of ideology. The utopian goals of these …

Feminist Online Writing Courses: Collaboration, Community Action, And Student Engagement, Letizia Guglielmo

English Dissertations

As fully online course offerings continue to grow at colleges and universities around the country, we are faced with the challenge of preserving what we value in first-year writing while making the affordances of online environments work for our students. This dissertation explores how the online writing instructor, guided by feminist pedagogy and civic rhetoric, can begin to shift the center of power within the course, allowing students to become co-teachers and promoting the social construction of knowledge central to first-year writing. Facilitated by computer-mediated communication technologies, this approach relies on online activities that invite ongoing contributions from students, promote …

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Angela Marie Hall-Godsey

English Dissertations

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction explores the intentional methods of self-castration that lead to authorial empowerment. The project relies on the following self-castration formula: the author’s recognition of herself as a being defined by lack. This lack refers to the inability to signify within the phallocentric system of language. In addition to this initial recognition, the female author realizes writing for public consumption emulates the process of castration but, nevertheless, initiates the writing process as a way to resituate the origin of castration—placing it in her own hand. The female writer also recognizes …

Origins And Orthodoxy: Anthologies Of American Literature And American History, Daniel Richard Vollaro

English Dissertations

This dissertation examines how the new “multicultural phase” anthologies of American literature treat American history. Anthologies of American literature are more historical, more diverse, and more multidisciplinary than ever before, but they have over-extended themselves in both their historical and representational reach. They are not, despite their diversity and historicism, effective vehicles for promoting critical discussions of American history in the classroom. Chapter One outlines a brief history of anthologies of American literature, while also introducing the terminology and methodology used in this study. Chapter Two explores the role of the headnote as a vehicle for American history in anthologies …

William Faulkner, His Eye For Archetypes, And America's Divided Legacy Of Medicine, Geraldine Mart Harmon

English Dissertations

The medical division between constitutional homeopathy and allopathic medicine shaped the culture in which William Faulkner grew up and wrote. Early 20th century America was daily subjected to a variety of conflicting approaches to maintaining or recovering physical, psychological, or spiritual health. The culture was discussing the role of vitalism for good health; the use and dosage of medicine to treat the individual or to treat the disease instead; the interaction of the mind, body, and spirit; the tendency of personality to emerge from inherent biology or acquired traits; the varied explanations for illness; and the legitimacy of doctors, their …

The Power Of Timelessness And The Contemporary Influence Of Modern Thought, Katie Reece Moss

English Dissertations

In this dissertation I examine a variety of modern and postmodern texts by applying the theories of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Specifically, I apply Bergson's theories of time, memory, and evolution to the texts in order to analyze the meaning of the poem and novels. I assert that all of the works disrupt conventional structure in order to question the linear nature of time. They do this because each must deal with the pressures of external chaos, and, as a result, they find timeless moments can create an internal resolution to the external chaos. I set out to create connections …

Resisting The Vortex: Abjection In The Early Works Of Herman Melville, Jennifer Mary Wing

English Dissertations

“Resisting the Vortex” examines the tenuous role of the abject in Melville’s early writings. While much psychoanalytic criticism on Melville and his works is driven by Freudian and Lacanian analyses, my study explores the role(s) of women, particularly that of the mother, through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of abjection. I suggest that Melville’s depiction of the abject evolves and becomes more apparent as his writing career progresses. I include Typee, Mardi, Moby-Dick and Pierre in my analysis since these texts demonstrate the evolution of Melville’s relationship to the abject mother. I argue that throughout each of these works, the …

Reading Autistic Experience, Natalie Collins Trice

English Dissertations

Within the field of Disability Studies, research on cognitive and developmental disabilities is relatively rare in comparison to other types of disabilities. Using Clifford Geertz's anthropological approach, "thick description," autism can be better understood by placing both fiction and non-fiction accounts of the disorder into a larger theoretical context. Applying concepts from existing works in Disability Studies to the major writings of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Donna Haraway also proves to be mutually enlightening. This ethnographic approach within the context of analysis of literary texts provides a model by which representations of individuals who are cognitively or …