Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The History Of -Eer In English: Suffix Competition Or Symbiosis?, Zachary Dukic, Chris C. Palmer

Graduate Publications – English

Ecological models of competition have provided great explanatory power regarding synonymy in derivational morphology. Competition models of this type have certainly shown their utility, as they have demonstrated, among other things, the relevance of frequency measures, productivity, compositionality and analyzability when comparing the development of morphological constructions. There has been less consideration of alternative models that could be used to describe the historical co-development of suffixes that produce words with sometimes similar forms or meanings but are not inevitably or solely in competition. The symbiotic model proposed in this article may help answer larger questions in linguistics, such as how …

Maps As Rhetorical Tools Of Colonial Power And Alternative Cartographies: The Americas’ Cartographic Invention, Eda Özyeşilpınar

Faculty Publications – English

This essay focuses on two historical maps as rhetorical artifacts: The Piri Reis Map of 1513 produced by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis in 1513, the Reis map, and the Map of the Island of Cuba and Surrounding Territories produced by the Cuban geographer, historian, and educator José María de la Torre y de la Torre in 1841, the de la Torre map. The Reis map demonstrates the colonial logic of Americas’ cartographic invention while the de la Torre Map is an alternative cartographic artifact disrupting the Reis map’s celebratory discourse and the settler-colonial legacy of the world heritage memory.

Dystopian Young Adult Literature As Waypoints To Censorship Across Time And Space, Shelby Boehm, Savannah Bean

Faculty Publications – English

We advocate for the reading of young adult literature (YAL) as a means for justice-oriented education, and we also recognize how the recent surge in challenges to youth-centered texts in the U.S. attempts to limit such work in classrooms. In response, we wondered about the ways in which YAL offers pathways for critically framing and situating global concerns, such as censorship, in time and space as a means of entering public conversations on issues. In this article, we offer waypoints as a critical reading framework for approaching sociopolitical issues in YAL as gateways for shifts in perspectives, orientations, and actions …

Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …

The Pedagogy Of Terror: Women's Education In The Gothic Novel, Faith Borland

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the distinction between terror and horror that Robert Hume first established in his 1969 article on categories of the gothic novel, a distinction that I redefine as a scholar working after the #Metoo movement and broader cultural recognition of the terror that women face in their everyday lives. “Terror” illustrates the sustained sensations produced in women’s lives as powerless and marginalized. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twenty-first-century women writers of the gothic, including Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, depict female characters who overcome terror through domestic, scientific and medical, familial, experiential, cultural, and academic education. Linking recent …

Hor Bouks: Or, Her Book: Finding Women Readers, Writers, & Producers In Early Modern Literature, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

The impact of women on the history of literature can be difficult to track, but they made important contributions to writing, publishing, and collecting. This short talk focuses on works in the Rare and Fine Book Collection in the Milner Library Special Collections department, with a particular emphasis on the writer Lady Mary Wroth and the collector Frances Wolfreston. Wroth was the first Englishwoman to publish a complete sonnet sequence and an original work of prose fiction and Wolfreston is considered one of the first notable women book collectors.

Material Witnesses: Deconstructing Networks Of Credibility And Objectivity In Medical Narratives From Mary Toft To The Contraceptive Pill, Krista Elizabeth Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that to better understand the tangled, embedded human and nonhuman subjects and how their testimonies function in western medical history, we need to first understand their erasure. By using relationality as a reading method, I break apart who and with whom individuals make medical decisions by considering what constitutes evidence. In the Mary Toft case, expert witnessing informs the ways in which a reader trusts what the narrator claims. The medicolegal conventions of courtroom testimony shape the ways in which medical men wrote their pamphlets. These men shore up their credibility through descriptions of nonhuman …

Peering At The Mirror Of Reflection: Agency And Design Thinking In The Development Of Writerly Identities, Elizabeth Louise Jones

Theses and Dissertations

I have always valued reflection highly — as a means of developing as a writer and as a life practice — but I have been disappointed by the lack of thought resembling reflection when asking students to write about their writing practices. This dissertation presents the results of a grounded theory study of student reflective assignments through a direct analysis of the themes which emerge from a set of reflections from a course designed around the topic of games – primarily board, card, and video games. This study differs from much of the previous scholarship on reflection in composition in …

The Globalgothic Vampire: Application Of And Benefits For The English Studies Model, David Lawrence Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation utilizes canonical vampire texts interlaced with pop-culture story-worlds and international cultural remediations to demonstrate the flexibility of the Globalgothic as a viable and valuable research lens to facilitate skills-based learning in undergraduate students by utilizing each of the four branches of the English Studies Model; literature, linguistics, rhetoric, and pedagogy. For this dissertation, I will be using the term Globalgothic as suggested by Glennis Byron. The focus of this literary lens is not merely to look at the conventions traditionally associated with the gothic genre, such as crumbling houses, a sense of foreboding, dark omens, and damsels in …

By Your Powers Combined: Heroic Solutions To Climate Catastrophes In The Fifth Season, Avengers: Infinity War, And Horizon: Zero Daw N, Kematat Matthew Medrala

Theses and Dissertations

Popular entertainment has become concerned with addressing issues of climate catastrophe in order to reflect the real concerns of its audience. Because these media narratives are produced by wealthy institutions that reach millions of people, it is vital to understand what these stories say about the causes of existential crises and their presented solutions. This thesis applies an ecocritical approach informed by environmental justice theorists and Marxist theory in order to analyze what a contemporary popular film, videogame, and novel have to say about addressing an oncoming ecological crisis. This analysis reveals that mass death among the disempowered is considered …

Sleuths As Social Activists: Negotiations Of Power & Morality In Ya Sleuthing Stories, Heather Leigh Sanford

Theses and Dissertations

In “Sleuths as Social Activists: Negotiations of Power & Morality in YA Sleuthing Stories” I aim to explore how adolescent sleuthing stories intersect with negotiations of power, subjectivity, and relationality within the structures and confines of adolescent literature to challenge oppressive paradigms. This project will begin with a focus on gender dynamics, using ethics of care to compare Wendelin Van Draanen’s girl sleuth Sammy Keyes to Anthony Horowitz’s boy sleuth Alex Rider. This analysis of gender will then expand into an intersectional exploration of how age and race additionally implicate how Sammy Keyes and Alex Rider negotiate power and morality …

Minor Subjects: Power And Inequity In Children's And Adolescent Literature, Wesley Jacques

Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I examine theoretical parameters of what has historically been considered American children’s and adolescent literature to further complicate its subject matter. The importance of reconsidering subjects is upheld here as key to challenging longstanding cultural and political inequities in the reading and teaching of literature broadly. Nonetheless, as this project contends, children’s and adolescent literature as a discipline is uniquely positioned to examine political power and challenge major power structures, not in spite of its presumed minor position in academic and literary discourse, but largely because of it. Thus, what follows is an inquiry into contemporary theories …

( Dis ) Ability Discourse And The Mediation Of Disabled Identity In Young Adult Literature And Television, Daniel Freeman

Theses and Dissertations

The primary aim of literary (and media) disability studies scholarship has been to examine the rhetorical effects of the various representations of disability that are found throughout literature, television, and other cultural sites of inquiry. The Internet has helped to facilitate this aim, opening these types of discussions to the general public. Social media has given individuals the power, agency, and voice to assert their ideas about disability identity, and (dis)ability (as a system; see Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined) more broadly to the world, and in doing so, has radically altered the author-text-audience relationship. My project examines the authorial choices of …

Voice, Choice, And ( Material ) Agency: The Sexualized Feminine Body In Young Adult Literature, Tharini Viswanath

Theses and Dissertations

My study unites two disparate strands of feminist theory: the linguistic, which emphasizes the relationship between language and power, and the material, which argues that the human body has its own agency. I raise three main points. First, I contend that the sexualized feminine body is the site of neither the linguistic nor the material independent of one another, but both the linguistic and the material existing in a state of fluidity and interdependency, which combine to grant the young female character agency. Second, I contend that feminist novels should not only have strong female characters, but that they should …

Empowered Bleeders And Cranky Menstruators: Menstrual Positivity And The “Liberated” Era Of New Menstrual Product Advertisements, Ela Przybylo, Breanne Fahs

Faculty Publications – English

Przybylo and Fahs examine a series of new menstrual product advertisements, arguing that they push consumer capitalist goals of selling menstrual gear with an “empowered” message at the expense of co-opting feminist discourses of body and menstrual positivity. Drawing on feminist menstrual scholarship, they argue that menstrual positivity is thinned and transformed when commodified. They argue that “positivity”—while important to feminist menstrual activism, praxis, and theorizing—is easily co-optable within neoliberal marketing cultures. While the authors acknowledge the importance of affirmative messaging, they nevertheless develop a “menstrual crankiness” that draws on positivity but also holds it critically at bay. Aligned with …

Treading The Winepress; Or, A Mountain Of Misfortune, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, Jean Macdonald

Undiscovered Americas

“Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.”

So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in 1885–1886 instead of serialized in The Boston Advocate, would have been the second novel published by a black woman in the United States. Instead, Allen has been mostly forgotten by literary history. Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of editors Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean …

Beyond The Words: Paratextual And Bibliographic Traces Of The Other Reader In British Literature, 1760-1897, Jeffrey Duane Rients

Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, compounding technological improvements and expanding education result in unprecedented growth of the reading audience in Britain. This expansion creates a new relationship with the author, opening the horizon of the authorial imagination beyond the discourse community from which the author and the text originate. The relational gap between the author and this new audience manifests as the Other Reader, an anxiety formation that the author reacts to and attempts to preempt. This dissertation tracks these reactions via several authorial strategies that address the alienation of the Other Reader, including …

Manifest Destiny Continued: The Reification And Colonization Of Time, Blake Reno

Theses and Dissertations

With the end of the settlement of what became the continental United States, capitalism and imperialism by nature needed to continue in their growth. In the late 19th and early 20th century up through World War I, history and the time of laborers were the sites of expansion for capitalism. There was a realization that public relations and journalism were in essence writing history as it was happening, and capitalists took note and moved into adjusting these spheres in their favor. In addition, capitalists began attempting to expand their influence over the time of their laborers in order to increase …

Conceiving A “Veneration For Clowns ”: Popular Amusement And Social Subversion In The Novels Of Charles Dickens, Abigail Palmisano

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the immense popularity of common street amusements in the Victorian era, the allocation of leisure time to the venue of ribald diversions was often deprecated by moralists. In argument that theatrics depicting bawdy and often violent scenes would invite undesirable

behavior into the habits of their audience, moralists decried the participation of such amusements amongst the common people. In the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, Peter Schlicke states that “in the anxious debates in much of Victorian middle-class and religious world about the moral legitimacy of this or that form of leisure the underlying assumption was that leisure should …

When Inexpressible Becomes Expressible: The Duality Of Narrative In Graphic Memoirs Of Growing Up And Trauma, Nina Hanee Jang

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines two graphic memoirs: Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (2002), and David Small’s Stitches (2009) to elucidate the connections between the duality of narrative in graphic memoirs and the subject of childhood trauma. I begin by observing how the inexpressible memories of childhood trauma become expressible through the platform of graphic narrative that allows the authors to illustrate rather than verbalize the memories. Following this analysis, I examine the aspects of embodiment and materiality in the two memoirs demonstrating how the form of graphic narrative enables the authors to effectively bring back their memories and become the witnesses …

Epic Stories: Sequence Fiction, Young Readers, And The Aesthetics Of World Building, Jordana Estelle Hall

Theses and Dissertations

This study theorizes the world building processes that sequence fiction engages within a framework of intratextual structuralism and cognitive aesthetic stage theory. The study begins with an interdisciplinary overview of fictional and possible worlds theory before proposing a structural adaptation of this lens that explains the developmental, aesthetic benefits of the genre for young readers. Chapter II is an application of the adapted lens to a canonical epic, the His Dark Materials sequence by Philip Pullman. I interpret the intentional structure of the story world across novels to discuss how these engage readers at different aesthetic milestones and encourage a …

“The Testing Served Its Purpose ”: High-Stakes Testing As A Method Of Categorization And Control In Young Adult Dystopian Novels, Rebecca Lorenzo

Theses and Dissertations

In “‘The Testing Served its Purpose’: High-Stakes Testing as a Method of Categorization and Control in Young Adult Dystopian Novels,” I examine representations of high-stakes testing in the Divergent, Legend, and Testing trilogies using educational, cultural studies, and dystopian/utopian scholarship. In chapters one and two, I examine each society’s system of high-stakes testing and the ideological indoctrination and physical repression used by those in power to maintain control of the citizenry, respectively. In the third chapter, I analyze the ways in which the state’s indoctrination, coupled with an exaggerated focus on the success or failure of specific individuals, creates competition …

From Borderlands To Border Islands: Intersections Between Anzaldúa's Chicana Feminist Theory And U.S. Latina Literature From The Hispanic Caribbean, Cristina Gonzalez Martin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies three texts by three U.S. Latina authors from the Hispanic Caribbean through the lens of Chicana feminist border theory. The works analyzed are How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) by Dominican author Julia Alvarez, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) by Cuban-American novelist Cristina García, and the memoir Almost a Woman (1998) by Puerto Rican author Esmeralda Santiago. The theoretical framework used is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The objective is to show how these texts manifest the formation of a hybrid, diasporic, in-between identity that corresponds with Anzaldúa’s definition of mestiza consciousness or la …

The Readers Constructed By Shakespeare Anthologies And Pedagogical Scholarship, Andrea Berns

Theses and Dissertations

In my graduate thesis, I determine that modern Shakespeare anthologies provide features for an audience with specific learning needs that may not be representative of the students currently enrolled in undergraduate classrooms who are reading these anthologies. On the other hand, scholars of Shakespeare pedagogy also depict readers with certain learning needs their research, the results of which may have been influenced by bias and, therefore, also may not be representative of the “real” reader of Shakespeare. To determine where the two “constructed” readers depicted in modern Shakespeare anthologies and in pedagogical research overlap and where they diverge, I will …

Considering The Body: Sexual Agency And Material Selfhood In Alex As Well, Karlie Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I examine the tensions between intersex embodiment and trans* identity, intersex children and their parents, and the intimacies that come out of these relationships – which, I argue, are ultimately queer. Using queer, trans*, and intersex theory, as well as feminist new materialisms, I highlight the ways in which the imbrications of the material and the symbolic are presented in Alyssa Brugman’s contemporary Young Adult novel, Alex as Well. The goal of this analysis is to encourage a separation from binary thinking and explore the possibility of nonbinary identifications in literature – more specifically, literature with intersex …

Canvases Of Representation: Addressing The Cultural Politics Of Black Male Superhero Identity In Graphic Narratives, Danielle L. Cochran

Theses and Dissertations

Canvases of Representation: Addressing the Cultural Politics of Black Male Superheroes Identity in Graphic Narratives is an analytical literary mixtape dedicated to Black male superheroes Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Black Lightning. Cochran draws out how superheroes play a role in the socio-political, identity, and cultural representations Black identity. The work argues that what is not just the symbolic/cultural destruction of the Black image in popular culture but how such representations provide a template for how the Black body is actively managed, controlled, surveilled, and contained in the material world. Examining these figures through the blended genres of Afrofuturism, film, …

Believing Mary Karr, Stephanie Rae Guedet

Theses and Dissertations

Believing Mary Karr examines how belief, represented in the memoirs of Mary Karr, works in our contemporary moment. This examination is supported by the argument that our identities and the stories we tell about them are always constructions of belief, and that these beliefs are ultimately relational, enacted in the intersubjective relationship between writers and readers of autobiography. This dissertation provides the fields of both rhetoric and life writing studies not only an awareness of how ideas about belief—how beliefs about belief—have already shaped our scholarly imagination but also the possibilities a rhetoric of belief can offer to future conversations …

( Re ) Claiming History And Visibility Through Rhetorical Sovereignty: The Power Of Diné Rhetorics In The Works Of Laura Tohe, Jessica Marie Safran Hoover

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the intricate intersections of code switching, trickster discourse and rhetorical sovereignty in the scholarship of Diné author Laura Tohe, as Tohe operationalizes survivance and alliance in complex ways, ways that “actuate a presence” in the face of ongoing attempts to render American Indian peoples absent from American rhetorical, literary, and geographic landscapes. Existing research in American Indian literatures and rhetorics often focus on the need for reclaiming rhetorical sovereignty. Yet, little work has been done to emphasize connections between the use of code switching, translation, and trickster discourse in order to give visibility to past and contemporary …

She Wanted It? : Examining Young Adult Literature And Its Portrayals Of Rape Culture, Katy Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

At a time when discussions about rape culture appear throughout social media and the news, our ability to consider how literature addresses these social issues is critical. The recent work of scholars discussing rape culture emphasizes the crucial need to consider what many understand (though many also continue to dismiss or diminish) as a serious social issue. While these cultural critiques are worthwhile, my focus shifts these critiques from general (American) culture or society to a particular expression of culture: the young adult novel. In this thesis, I examine how this cultural discourse surrounding rape culture and its related myths …

Body Composition: Reading, Writing, And Resisting Weight Loss Autobiography As Biopolitical Pedagogy, Katherine Ann Browne

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that autobiographical narratives of body size function as lifestyle guides based on an interpretation of obesity as an undesirable bodily condition. These narratives are anchored by the “weight loss success story” narrative trope, which represents the result of extreme weight loss processes synthesized as “Before and After.” This dissertation serves the dual purpose of historicizing weight loss autobiography in the United States from the late 19th century to present, and arguing that these texts have been taken up as instructional guides for living, or biopedagogical tools. After outlining my methodology in the first chapter, the …