Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Examining Early And Recent Criticism Of The Waste Land: A Reassessment, Tyler E. Anderson Mr.

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

My thesis will closely examine recent trends in criticism of "The Waste Land," namely the ideological rebuttal against the New Critics proposed by recent historicists such as Lawrence Rainey. I will show that Rainey has unfairly characterized the so-called New Critics as supporting a reading of the poem that only sees it for a work of order and unity while in fact they acknowledged many organizational inconsistencies within the text. A central tenet of my thesis will be that ideological characterizations of earlier critics should never substitute actual close readings of the texts themselves. My findings will lead to broader …

How The World Turns Quietly, Dana N. Boyer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is composed of original poems written while studying both writing and literature at the University of Nebraska. The introduction partially discusses the role that women have played in writing in the past century. It discusses the poetry of Elizabeth Spires, and the prose of Virginia Woolf and Tillie Olsen. More specifically, it focuses on the work that these authors have done on the subject of silence, focusing on whom and what have conspired to work against authors, specifically female ones. These obstacles include economic standing, gender, and emotional issues. The introduction then branches out to discuss the specific …

Keep Going, Jeff Lacey

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Keep Going is a collection of poetry whose themes include life in modern America, man’s relationship with the natural world, and living in the Midwest. The collection includes both free verse and metric poetry and both narrative and lyric poetry.

Handling The Perceptual Politics Of Identity In Great Expectations, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Historicizing hands in the context of contemporary discourse allows us to evaluate how this particular part of the body became a site where scientists and novelists alike could re-imagine “progress” and transformation. In the world of Great Expectations, those who fail to adapt and change never truly make any progress, and Dickens has some fun with this idea as he concludes the novel. While people like Pumblechook conspicuously offer “the same fat five fingers” in the text’s beginning and its end, Joe, over the same course of time, develops not only his laboring hand but his writing one as …

A Revisionary Approach To Cross-Curricular Literacy Work, Sandra L. Tarabochia

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this dissertation, I use qualitative research methods to study relationships between compositionists and faculty in other disciplines in the context of cross-curricular literacy (CCL) work. Drawing on a two-year CCL project in the biology department, for which I was a participant observer, I argue that compositionists need to attend more carefully to issues that influence day-to-day interactions with disciplinary faculty in order to develop more meaningful CCL relationships. Toward that end, I offer a revisionary approach to cross-curricular literacy work that cultivates complex relationships by delaying consensus and embracing disconnection and disorientation. More specifically, I employ revisionary stance as …

Two Kings: An Account Of The Preparation And Performance Of The Role Of Edgar In William Shakespeare's King Lear, Ryan Kathman

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Theses, Student Research, and Creative Work

This work is my graduate thesis documenting the creative process behind my performance of the role of Edgar in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s 2009 production of King Lear by William Shakespeare. It is comprised of five sections including an introduction, pre-rehearsal research, rehearsal and performance journal, post-production responses and conclusion. The introduction outlines my impressions of Edgar and King Lear prior to researching or rehearsing the role. In my research section, I attempt to better understand Shakespeare, his play and the role of Edgar by studying the playwright’s life and the history of the character and play, while also making …

Review Of Aguecheek’S Beef, Belch’S Hiccup, And Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, And Food Among The Early Moderns By Robert Appelbaum, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Histories of food have traditionally emerged out of the fields of structural anthropology, ethnology, and historical sociology. More recent scholarship has emphasized the idea of foodways, those networks by which foods are produced, prepared, and consumed within different food communities. Rather than seeing rituals of culture in food, such scholarship has instead sought to understand food in terms of a circulation of physical resources and values that involves questions of economics, ecology, biology, and ethnobotany. The first approach has tended, broadly speaking, to produce scholarship that is concerned with the ritual, symbolic, and social qualities to our acts of sustenance. …

Violets, Xu (Sherry) Wang

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Violets is a multi-genre work that explores the complex relationships of Chinese women from the 1980s to the present day as they move through different settings—from the countryside of Zhejiang province, to the metropolis of Jiaxing city, to the suburbia of Omaha, NE. It was inspired by a story heard by the author about a Chinese woman whose husband left her for a year because she had a daughter instead of a son. Half of Violets is made up of a sustained, imagined story about a woman named Xinling and the year she spent as a single mother. It explores …

Inhabiting Modernism: Pernes, Portals, And Yeats’S Transitive Force, Daniel Gomes

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

W.B. Yeats’s tentative entry into modernist poetics is often ascribed to his residence with Pound, to the dynamism of Vorticism, and to the turbulent social upheaval in Ireland and abroad during the early decades of the twentieth century. Without denying that such events contributed to Yeats’s marked stylistic shift in Responsibilities (1914), this thesis examines how Yeats’s antithetical impulse is heavily informed by Blake and Nietzsche and has direct bearing for how we read Yeats’s poetics through change and “transition.” Concurrent with his passive adjustment to, and resistance against, external forces and change, Yeats’s affirmation of pre-subjective forces, apocalyptic …

The Annie Prey Jorgensen Papers: Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction And Women's Rhetoric On The Plains, Renee Mcgill

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the college and professional writing of Annie Prey Jorgensen, who attended the University of Nebraska during the 1890s as both an undergraduate and graduate student. Annie’s collection of papers, housed in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, offers composition and rhetoric significant insights about women college students’ rhetorical practices at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, Annie uses personal experience and narrative techniques to deploy a feminist rhetorical strategy that allows her to inscribe gendered experience into academic writing. Annie’s collection offers a cross-section of writing from three sites of inquiry—the papers …

Don Delillo And 9/11: A Question Of Response, Michael Jamieson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In the wake of the attacks of September 11th, many artists struggled with how to respond to the horror. In literature, Don DeLillo was one of the first authors to pose a significant, fictionalized investigation of the day. In this thesis, Michael Jamieson argues that DeLillo’s post-9/11 work constitutes a new form of response to the tragedy. Drawing on the work of Marco Abel and his conception of maso-criticism, Jamieson argues that DeLillo works intensively into the attacks themselves as a way to avoid grand narratives that place them within a conventional story (the War on Terror, Islamic fundamentalism). His …

Why We Love Dusk, Scott C. Kratochvil

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a collection of original poems written at the University of Nebraska while studying literature. The introductory essay briefly explores what "truth" might mean at this time in history and whether or not we can do without it. The poems that follow are arranged like a chapbook so that they might influence each other and affect a reader together in ways that they could not otherwise.

Unravelling The Rebozo: The Effects Of Power On The Body In Sandra Cisneros’S Caramelo, Guadalupe V. Linares

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a literary, cultural, and theoretical analysis of Sandra Cisneros’s novel Caramelo. Caramelo traces the coming-of-age of its young protagonist, Celaya. Through this character, Cisneros reveals the impact of living between cultures. Born of a Mexican immigrant father and a working-class Mexican American mother, Celaya finds herself asked to choose sides. Celaya’s grandmother, Soledad, is the central secondary character on whom all others react. She embodies the effects of colonialism on this family. Through Soledad’s struggles, readers come to see the psychological damage caused by power relationships that privilege part of the self over the whole. In combination …

William Vollmann’S Burqa, Guy J. Reynolds

Department of English: Presentations, Talks, and Seminar Papers

William Vollmann’s career exemplifies the importance of the historical moment in the life of a writer. It is hard to imagine his writing temporally outside the very specific circumstances of the last thirty years, a context that has shaped his work’s hectic, cosmopolitan energy. Born in 1959, Vollmann is a writer of the 1980s and 1990s, an author who witnessed the emergence of a radically-globalized world. Vollmann’s fascination with central and eastern Europe (as in the 2005 fiction, Europe Central) looks back to the Cold War; but the insistent non-Western focus in much of his reportage and storytelling, as in …

Pragmatism, Disciplinarity And Making The Work Of Writing Visible In The 21st Century, Michael W. Kelly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation outlines how Pragmatism, as a philosophy richly conceived, can act as a useful intervention on three levels ranging from the pedagogical issues surrounding teaching writing teacher to labor issues Composition. In contemporary writing center scholarship, conversations about the utility of theory are hotly debated. Throughout much of its disciplinary history, much writing center scholarship has taken a decidedly best practices approach to its research. This emphasis on applicability is challenged by the trend in some pockets of the field that have incorporated a theoretical bent into their work. The effect of this work has been met with skepticism. …

Fearing The "Turban'd Turk": Socio-Economic Access To Genre And The "Turks" Of Early Modern English Dramas And Broadside Ballads, Katie S. Sisneros

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores an important means for the non-noble and non-gentry population of England to read and interpret the figure of the Turk as textually represented: the broadside ballad. Cheap to print and produced on an expansive scale, broadside ballads had access to economic and geographic segments of England beyond the reach of the drama. Aimed at a far more general audience than theater-goers (especially during the Restoration period), broadside ballads provide an alternative literary interpretation of the Turk, one long-neglected in Anglo-Ottoman studies. Current scholarship’s almost-exclusive focus on drama has led to a progress narrative positing an evolution in …

Women Gathered On Flat Rooftops And Thumprints In Black Coffee, Sana M. Amoura-Patterson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops and Thumbprints in Black Coffee is a creative dissertation that examines the lives of Arab women living in Jordan and Arab immigrants living in the United States. The first portion of the dissertation, Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops is an excerpt from the early portion of the novel by the same name. These first 53 pages provide the background of the characters and highlights aspects that are culturally specific to the women of the stories. For example, issues of arranged marriages, funeral practices, women’s custody rights are all illustrated through these early stories. The early …

"Good English": Literacy And Institutional Systems At A Community Literacy Organization, Charise G. Alexander

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the impact of institutions and the systems and communities of which they are a part on literacy instruction, practices, and rhetoric at a community literacy organization in Lincoln, Nebraska. A majority of students served by this organization are adult English Language Learners, many of whom receive instruction from volunteer tutors. In this unique context, a number of factors affect literacy learning, particularly the perpetuation of conservative, hegemonic discourses about literacy by the organizations which fund literacy education programming at this site.

The power dynamics at work in these granting organizations and in larger systems that control and …

"The Future In The Instant": Posthumanism(S) In Early Modern English Drama, Farrah Lehman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines prominent points of intersection between early modern English theatrical practices and posthumanist, post-cybernetic new media theory as a means of interrogating assumptions about “media narratives” (here, the development of dramatic blank verse), proto-Brechtian anti-illusionism, and sensory encounter related to the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth century stage. The arguments presented here in part rely on the work of three present-day critics: Mark B.N. Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, and Brian Massumi, all of whom explore posthumanist theory while addressing possibilities for posthumanist practices within the humanities. Examining a wide range of texts, including plays and pro-and anti-theater tracts, initially …

Razorback, Frank Wheeler

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis contains the first five chapters of the novel titled RAZORBACK, written by Frank Wheeler Jr. It is a crime drama, set in the Arkansas Ozark Mountains. The main character, Conrad, is a reclusive woodworker living in the back woods. His estranged wife, Jennifer, pays him a visit after five years with little contact between them, and asks him to kill someone for her. She claims it is a matter of personal safety; the man she has been seeing socially has become violent and threatening. After some consideration, Conrad agrees. He has his own agenda, however, and he finds …

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

American Poetry And The Daily Newspaper From The Rise Of The Penny Press To The New Journalism, Elizabeth M. Lorang

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the relationship of poetry and the U.S. daily newspaper in the nineteenth century and begins the process of recovering and reevaluating nineteenth-century newspaper poetry. In doing so, it draws on and participates in current discussions about the role of poetry and poets in society, the importance of periodicals in the development and dissemination of American literature in the nineteenth century, and the value of studying non-canonical texts. The appearance and function of poems in daily newspapers changed over the course of the nineteenth century, and these changes were part of larger shifts in the newspaper and its …

A Catalogue Of Everything In The World: Nebraska Stories, Yelizaveta P. Renfro

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A CATALOGUE OF EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD: NEBRASKA STORIES is a collection of linked short stories, all set in Nebraska, that explore the ways in which the forces of geography—being from or choosing to live in a particular place—affect identity and influence the course of lives. They feature a wide range of characters, from a bus driver mourning the death of his infant daughter to an octogenarian former doctor preparing for her death, from a young girl trying to cope with her parents' divorce to a woman whose obsession with a decades-old crime has literally taken over her life. Just …

"Just A Girl": The Community-Centered Cult Television Heroine, 1995-2007, Tamy Burnett

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Found in the most recent group of cult heroines on television, community-centered cult heroines share two key characteristics. The first is their youth and the related coming-of-age narratives that result. The second is their emphasis on communal heroic action that challenges traditional understandings of the hero and previous constructions of the cult heroine on television. Through close readings of Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dark Angel, and Veronica Mars, this project engages feminist theories of community and heroism alongside critical approaches to genre and narrative technique, identity performance theory, and visual media …

Rethinking Repair, Monica Rentfrow

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Rethinking Repair is a semi-autobiographical collection of serious and humorous poetic works that explores effects a body with dwarfism has had on one individual. Through personal experience, Rethinking Repair is a collection of poems that explores the effects a body with dwarfism has had on one person. Most of the poems lean on a precise moment when dwarfism—a rare medical condition present at birth—directly has influenced the emotion or outcome of a situation. Conversely, I illuminate moments when dwarfism has had absolutely no direct influence on my experiences; I do this to counterbalance the possible perception or belief that all …