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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Materializing Transfer: Writing Dispositions In A Culture Of Standardized Testing, Lisha Daniels Storey
Materializing Transfer: Writing Dispositions In A Culture Of Standardized Testing, Lisha Daniels Storey
Doctoral Dissertations
This research begins with questions about transition and transfer—about the dimensions of writing happening across and in between contexts. As a writing teacher and writing center worker, I endeavor to help students make their own writing experiences, values, and attitudes a site of inquiry as they move in and out of different educational spaces. Motivated by these interests, and informed by materialist perspectives that situate writing education in material conditions and relations, I conducted an interview study of thirteen college writers to explore their values, attitudes, and beliefs about writing within a culture of standardized testing. In doing so, I …
Dialogue And "Dialect": Character Speech In American Fiction, Carly Overfelt
Dialogue And "Dialect": Character Speech In American Fiction, Carly Overfelt
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the linguistic construction of race and place in turn-of-the-century American novels and short stories. Literary analyses of character speech continue to reinforce the old dichotomy of Standard versus nonstandard/dialectal English. I challenge the ideology of Standard English in my readings of works by Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, and little-known Cherokee author, Ora V. Eddleman Reed, among others. I argue that these texts create their own standards that interact with (and sometimes resist) the language ideology of their time. By analyzing all variation, rather than only what has been traditionally viewed as “dialect,” I reveal …
Novel Buildings: Architectural And Narrative Form In Victorian Fiction, Ashley R. Nadeau
Novel Buildings: Architectural And Narrative Form In Victorian Fiction, Ashley R. Nadeau
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation, “Novel Buildings: Architectural and Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction,” offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the economic and social histories of built space and the Victorian literary imagination. At its most fundamental level, it claims that the spaces we inhabit shape the stories we tell. Reading Victorian literature through the architectural archive of the period, it argues that the nineteenth century’s rapidly evolving built environment resulted in a new set of narrative possibilities and laid the foundations for authorial innovations in genre, style, and form. Organized taxonomically around four architectural types reinvented in the nineteenth century—courthouses, …
“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman
“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman
Doctoral Dissertations
The central claim in this dissertation is that much contemporary African American cultural expression would be better conceptualized not as “post-black,” as some would have it, but as what I call “meta-black.” I use the preface “meta-” because while this contemporary black identity also resists sometimes constrictive conceptions of “authentic” black identity from within the African American community, I diverge from theorists of “post-blackness” in observing the ways that, as Nicole Fleetwood observes, blackness necessarily “circulates” within a technologically-driven mediascape, and these postmodern black subjects work within and against the constraints of this aural-visual regime of blackness in order to …
Tragicomic Transpositions: The Influence Of Spanish Prose Romance On The Development Of Early Modern English Tragicomedy, Josefina Hardman
Tragicomic Transpositions: The Influence Of Spanish Prose Romance On The Development Of Early Modern English Tragicomedy, Josefina Hardman
Doctoral Dissertations
The critical origin story for early modern English stage tragicomedy has frequently centered around Italian playwright and theorist Giambattista Guarini, who offered a tragicomic model in his play Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd) and in his treatises on the genre. While Guarini’s impact on playwrights such as John Fletcher is undeniable, tragicomic critics have generally ignored the pervasive influence of Miguel de Cervantes’ work on seventeenth-century English playwrights. This project is the first sustained study of the influence of Cervantean prose romance on the development of early modern English tragicomedy. By looking at English tragicomedies with Spanish …
Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford
Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford
Doctoral Dissertations
Queer writers in Britain during the early twentieth century found themselves in a fraught geopolitical context formed by imperial violence and the First World War. In this dissertation, I argue that many queer modernist artists employed performative strategies in order to navigate the increasingly narrow vision of WWI-era British national culture that accompanied this historical context. While performance allowed them to express queer politics and desires without risking total exposure and persecution, their performative aesthetic depended on a problematic use of racial tropes through which these desires were channeled. By attending to moments of national and gendered performances in the …
Theaters Of Voice, Body, And Page: Beckett, Sophocles, Homer, Joyce, Barry A. Spence
Theaters Of Voice, Body, And Page: Beckett, Sophocles, Homer, Joyce, Barry A. Spence
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation makes a comparative study of Homeric Greek, Classical Greek, Modernist, and late modern works of storytelling with particular attention to strategies and techniques that achieve an exceptional degree of performative immediacy. As such, theater (the dramatic mode) forms a central concern, viewed as the fulfillment of direct performative embodiment—building on Aristotle’s idea of mimesis. An analysis examining multiple media demonstrates how oral epic poetry, Athenian tragedy, modern theater, the short story, and the novel can make use of seemingly disparate storytelling methods that share underlying mechanisms whose effects are decidedly theatrical. Four authors—Sophocles, Samuel Beckett, Homer, and …
‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor
‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor
Doctoral Dissertations
Race-sex narratives that dominated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries permeated the political, scientific, and social fabric of the nation, but did not solely center on black bodies. These narratives demeaned and degraded a race of black citizens, characterizing them as sexually deviant social pariahs. Consequently, these same notions elevated whites to the highest rungs of society, marking them as moral and desirable. This crafting of racial identity acted as just one way to justify racial subordination through the creation of notions that proved detrimental to black life and worthiness. Writer-activists penning their tales of fiction after the Civil War …
The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki
The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki
Doctoral Dissertations
Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of …
Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo
Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …
Waiting For Now: Postcolonial Fiction And Colonial Time, Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji
Waiting For Now: Postcolonial Fiction And Colonial Time, Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines the temporalities of waiting in global Anglophone fiction, reinvigorating waiting as a modality that can be at turns debilitating, strategic, calculating, and meditative. By arguing for the centrality of waiting to the experience of postcoloniality, my dissertation challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time only of acceleration and movement.
In the introduction, I draw from social scientific studies of waiting, as well as philosophies of time, mobility studies, and history, to create a robust framework of waiting as a cultural practice and privileged analytical concept for scrutinizing colonial and postcolonial regimes of time. …
The Unreliable Narrator: Simplifying The Device And Exploring Its Role In Autobiography, James Ferry
The Unreliable Narrator: Simplifying The Device And Exploring Its Role In Autobiography, James Ferry
Masters Theses
The primary goal of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the unreliable narrator as a literary device. Furthermore, I argue that the distance between an author and narrator in realist fiction can be simulated in autobiographical prose. While previous studies have focused mainly on extra- and intertextual incongruities (factual inaccuracies; disparities between two nonfiction texts), the present study attempts to demonstrate that the memoirist can employ unreliable narration intratexually as a rhetorical tool. The paper begins with some examples of how the unreliable narrator is used, interpreted, misused and misinterpreted. The device’s troubled history is examined—Wayne Booth …
Texts And Subtexts In Performing Blackness: Vernacular Masking In Key And Peele As A Lens For Viewing Paul Laurence Dunbar’S Musical Comedy, Spencer Kuchle
Texts And Subtexts In Performing Blackness: Vernacular Masking In Key And Peele As A Lens For Viewing Paul Laurence Dunbar’S Musical Comedy, Spencer Kuchle
Doctoral Dissertations
When Kegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s sketch-comedy show Key & Peele took Comedy Central by storm in 2012, the perceived need by the comedians to “adjust their blackness” to gain social recognition became a recurring theme. Throughout their comedic performances, language becomes a proxy for identity, and Key and Peele’s parodic employment of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and linguistic variation serves to challenge notions of black authenticity, while emphasizing the absurdity of racial essentialism. An embodiment of Jonathan Rossing’s concept of emancipatory racial humor, Key and Peele’s comedy creates nonthreatening spaces that facilitate the contestation of cultural authority …
Symptoms Of A Cosmic Fluke, Shane Dupuy
Symptoms Of A Cosmic Fluke, Shane Dupuy
MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection
Symptoms of a Cosmic Fluke is a book of poems.