Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ambiguous Recognition: Recursion, Cognitive Blending, And The Problem Of Interpretation In Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Christopher David Kilgore

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses theories of cognitive conceptual integration (as outlined by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner) to propose a model of narrative reading that mediates between narratology and theories of reception. I use this model to demonstrate how new experimental narratives achieve a potent balance between a determinate and open story-form. Where the high postmodernists of the 1970s and 80s created ironic, undecidable story-worlds, the novels considered here allow readers to embrace seemingly opposite propositions without retreating into ironic suspension, trading the postmodernist “neither/nor” for a new “both/and.” This technique demands significant revision of both descriptions of radical experimentation in …

The Gendered Soul: Victorian Women Autobiographers And The Novel, Robbie E Spivey

Doctoral Dissertations

This project considers ways mid-Victorian fictional autobiographies created new models for women's spiritual formation, testing Nancy Armstrong's theory that novels are antecedent to the cultural conditions they describe. I pair three mid-Victorian fictional texts Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh, and The Mill on the Floss with three later non-fictional autobiographies written by women near the end of the Victorian Era: Annie Besant (1847- 1933), Mary Anne Hearn (1834-1909) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). These women came to spiritual maturity during the same time period in which the fictional heroines Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh and Maggie Tulliver became prominent in the popular …

Saint Oswald, Christ And The Dream Of The Rood: Mutable Signs At A Cultural Crossroad, Scott Hutcheson Mac Kenzie

Doctoral Dissertations

The first decades following a country’s conversion to Christianity are sometimes marked by experimentation with native expressions of piety. Out of the multicultural environment of early Christian Northumbria such experiments created an insular Germanic version of sanctity. In the mid-seventh century, Oswiu of Northumbria (642-670), the younger brother and successor to King Oswald, constructed an elaborate narrative of God’s plan for England (without consent or guidance from the Roman Church). His narrative would weave his family into the sacred fabric of his nascent, Christian kingdom. Through skillful manipulation of oral tradition, material culture and sacri loci he crafted a unique …

The Novel Mezclada: Subverting Colonialism’S Legacy In Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Emily A. Shifflette

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Battlefield: Direct And Prosthetic Memory Of The American War In Viet Nam, Susan L. Eastman

Doctoral Dissertations

“Beyond the Battlefield: Direct and Prosthetic Memory of the American War in Viet Nam” examines shifts in American, Viet Namese, and Philippine memorial, literary, and cinematic remembrance of the war through the cultural lenses of later wars: the Gulf War (1990-1991) and the “War on Terror” that began in 2001. As opposed to earlier portrayals of the American War in Viet Nam (1964-1975), turn-to-the-twenty-first-century representations engage in an ever-broadening collected cultural memory—a compilation of multifaceted, sometimes competing, individual and group memories—of the war. “Beyond the Battlefield” begins with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) because it serves as the impetus for …

Archaism, Or Textual Literalism In The Historical Novel, Linell B Wisner

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the technique of archaism as it has been practiced in the historical novel since that genre’s origins. By “archaism,” I refer to a variation of the strategy that Jerome McGann calls textual “literalism,” whereby literary texts use “thickly materialized” language and bibliographic forms to foreground their own “textuality as such” (Black Riders 74). Archaism is distinguished from Blake’s, Pound’s, or Robert Carlton Brown’s literalism by its imitation of older literary idioms, yet the specifically historical quality of its intertextuality also seems different from primarily formal imitations such as pastiche and parody.

Although archaism appears to have originated …

Welcome To Boomland, Cebrun Abe Gaustad

Doctoral Dissertations

Abe Gaustad's first collection of stories, Welcome to Boomland, explores the lives of disparate characters longing for some escape. Whether a paraplegic blues aficionado or a boy who finds a strange object in the woods, they are each searching for a way out of their stagnation. Yet each character is trapped by their own unique circumstance: some of them by their mistakes, some by ruthless dictators, some by the very notion of death. As they search for their freedom, they find out new things about themselves and manage to wage quiet rebellions against those that would control them. In the …

Hallo, Welt! Adolescent Angst Und Das Erwachsenwerden In Marisha Pessls Special Topics In Calamity Physics Und Zoe Jennys Das Blütenstaubzimmer, Franziska Ludemann

Masters Theses

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl and Das Blütenstaubzimmer (1997) by Zoё Jenny both feature strong female characters who go through difficult times because they experience genuine disillusionment with regard to their friends, the opposite sex, and, especially, their family.

The focus of this thesis was to analyze if the authors depict their characters in such a way that one can see correlations between the emotional behavior of these characters and a phenomenon that is often referred to as adolescent angst. The theoretical foundation for defining adolescent angst and for understanding mechanisms that trigger adolescent angst was …

Uncelebrated Stylists: Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, And The Artist As Masochist, Chase Morgan Erwin

Masters Theses

This study presents an attempt to understand the political and aesthetic relationship between two of Modernism’s most enigmatic authors, Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford by examining their novelistic practice in light of their writings on politics and social criticism. A close look at the use of ironic distance, a hallmark feature in our understanding of modernist fiction, in Tarr (1918) and The Good Soldier (1915) reveals both authors conscious effort to distance themselves from their novel’s subjects, Fredric Tarr and John Dowell respectively. In light of both novels’ satirical element, a scathing attack on bourgeois narcissism caused by the …

"Not For An Age, But For All Time": Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies On Film, Kelly A. Rivers

Doctoral Dissertations

From Sam Taylor’s 1929 Taming of the Shrew to Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 Love’s Labour’s Lost, nine comedies have been filmed and released for the mainstream film market. Over the course of the twentieth century a filmic cycle developed. By the late 1990s, the films of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies included cinematic allusions to films produced and distributed in the 1930s. This cycle indicates an awareness of and appreciation for the earlier films. Such awareness proves that the contemporary films’ meaning and entertainment value are derived in part from the consciousness of belonging to a larger tradition of Shakespeare comedy on film. …

Into The Attic: A Novel, Laura E. Koons

Doctoral Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a novel titled Into the Attic. The novel tells the story of Sullivan Young, a junior at a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania in the mid-2000s, and James Shelley, a young literature professor at the college, with whom Sullivan initiates an affair. The narrative switches between the points of view of these two men, neither of whom is happy with the person he is becoming, and develops around the fears each has about the relationship.

The novel is concerned with character, sexuality, and power; in order to explore these issues fully within Sullivan and …

Becoming A Creatrix: Women’S Religious Roles In W. B. Yeats And Olivia Shakespear, Elaine Kathyryn Childs

Doctoral Dissertations

This project is the biography of a symbol: that of the holy woman motif in William Butler Yeats’s oeuvre. For most of Yeats’s writing life, beautiful women have a place of spurious privilege in his spiritual imagination because they have an intrinsic connection with the divine otherworld. In chapters on Yeats’s beauty-worship in his long fin de siecle, Olivia Shakespear’s critique of that beauty-worship in her fiction, and the role of A Vision in The Winding Stair and Other Poems, I argue that Yeats revised the holy woman motif from a limited and limiting goddess or helpmeet role in …

Too Much Horse: Fiction, Nonfiction, Prose Poetry, Andrew Otis Haschemeyer

Doctoral Dissertations

A collection of fiction, nonfiction, and prose poetry that explores imagination through different shapes in form, content, and genre. Includes award winning nonfiction, “The Storekeeper,” and award winning fiction, “The Fantôme of Fatma.”

“The Last Dear Drop Of Blood”: Revenge In Restoration Tragic Drama, Misty Sabrina Krueger

Doctoral Dissertations

Revenge on the English stage has long been associated with Elizabethan and Renaissance revenge tragedies, and has been all but ignored in Restoration theater history. While the shortage of scholarly work on revenge in Restoration drama might seem to indicate that revenge is not a vital part of Restoration drama, I argue that revenge on stage in the Restoration is connected with important late seventeenth-century anxieties about monarchy and political subjecthood in the period. This dissertation examines how Restoration tragic drama staged during Charles II’s reign (1660-1685) depicts revenge as a representation of an unrestrained passion that contributes to the …

Invisible Mink, Jessie L Janeshek

Doctoral Dissertations

Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Sarah Piatt render the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere” ironically Unheimliche while simultaneously conveying it as the “home sweet home” the sentimental tradition prescribes it should be. These American women poets turn the domestic milieu into, as Paula Bennett phrases it, “the gothic mise en scene par excellence…the displacements, doublings, and anxieties characterizing gothic experience are the direct consequence of domestic ideology’s impact on the lives and psyches of ordinary bourgeois women (121-122).”

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath continue to represent the Unheimliche home in their poetry through the middle of the twentieth century, specifically by …

Apt Renderings And Ingenious Designs: Eavan Boland's New Maps Of Ireland, Rebecca Elizabeth Helton

Masters Theses

Although many critics, and Eavan Boland herself, have written about how her poetry functions to reclaim the Irish feminine image from its static position as lyric representation of the nation, much remains to be said about how Boland represents and reimagines Ireland in her poetry. Using the metaphor of cartography, which Boland frequently refers to in her writing, I argue that she lyrically "maps" the nation across space, time, and language. Her palimpsestic poetic maps of Ireland include what a mere pictorial representation could never, and what prior male-written poetry never did, show: the space of a Dublin suburb, the …

Ragdoll, George Jarrard Pate

Masters Theses

Ragdoll is a play in two acts telling the story of Jeff Stiles and his children, Annie and Andy. Jeff’s wife is a life-sized rag doll, and Annie and Andy have both human and doll parts to their physiology. Much of the play revolves around Andy and Jeff’s debate over the nature of their family’s existence.

Toward A Material History Of Epic Poetry, John Paul Hampstead

Masters Theses

Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any …

Snaps Of Eden, Michael J. Hudson

Masters Theses

The following poems are and attempt at reclamation and reconciliation. The first section wades through the delicate subject of personal history and is an attempt to show truth as a means of both self and communal healing. The second is plaintive, a brief effort to interlope into and understand worlds outside (but not foreign) to my own. The third is a poetic essay detailing the journey of a young woman facing the horrors of an undeclared, and seemingly eternal war. The fourth and final sections serve as a means of exploration of the self and place; tackling issues of sex, …

Live Ghosts, Patricia Anne Ireland

Masters Theses

In Live Ghosts, Patricia (Patty) Ireland offers a gathering of short stories based upon real life characters she encountered while growing up in the South. Exploring the diversity, complexity and moral ambiguity of those we might normally perceive as being stereotypically “Southern,” Ireland’s tales encompass a variety of time periods, settings, and characters, including: a modern-day family struggling to reconcile the reality of death, interracial lovers in the early 1950’s who are descended from masters and slaves, and an insane killer locked for life in a mental institution of the 1990’s. Live Ghosts is infused with tales of fear, love, …

Witness, Rebecca Warren

Masters Theses

The “Red Book” section of this work collects poems written with dream material. The “Couplings” poems investigate the mechanical and sexual implications of “coupling.” What is witnessed and how are the concerns of the poems in “Witness.”

Faith And Field: Christianity, The Environment, And Five Contemporary American Poets, Heather M. Hoover

Doctoral Dissertations

Many poets write about the earth or even about God using the language of nature. And many poets and contemporary authors concern themselves with the state of the environment. However, the poetry of Wendell Berry, James Still, Li-Young Lee, Mary Oliver, and Charles Wright seems to engage different kinds of questions about how humans creatively respond to the earth. Collectively, their responses seem influenced by their connections with Christianity rather than any specific ecological agenda. In all of their poetry lies a sensibility about how humans should interact with the earth. All five of the poets seem to acknowledge humanity’s …

Bharati Mukherjee And The American Immigrant: Reimaging The Nation In A Global Context, Leah Rang

Masters Theses

With its focus on immigration to the United States and development of American identity, Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction eludes literary categorization. It engages with the various contexts of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and globalization, yet Mukherjee adamantly positions herself as an American author writing American literature. In this essay, I investigate the intersections between Mukherjee’s focus on the American character, culture, and people and developing theories and critical debates on globalization. Through Mukherjee’s works, we can see American identity in a state of flux, made possible by the immigrant and the relationships established between the transnational individual and America. Mukherjee’s immigrant characters challenge …

Front Matter

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Editor's Message.

Jaepl, Vol. 16, Winter 2010-2011, Joonna Smitherman Trapp (Editor), Brad Peters (Editor)

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Essays

Louann Reid - Imagination and Representation in Graphic Narratives

Deborah F. Carrington & Chapman Hood Frazier - Transforming Tests: Finding the Poem Within

Sara K. Schneider - Teaching to Students’ Kinesthetic Intelligence: The Teacher as Surrogate, Guru, Foreshadower, Choreographer, or Expeditionist

Andrea Greenbaum - Nurturing Difference: The Autistic Student in Professional Writing Programs

Ruth Henderson - The Forgiveness Classroom: Bringing Together Students from Both Sides of the Wall

Julie Kearney - Writing as an Altered State of Consciousness: Process, Pedagogy, and Spirituality

Anthony T. Atkins - It’s Complicated: Using Facebook to Create Emotional Connections in Student-Professor Relationships

JoAnne Katzmarek …

Imagination And Representation In Graphic Novels, Louann Reid

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Graphic narratives are garnering both scholarly and pedagogical attention. These visual texts move readers imaginatively into what Maxine Greene calls “illusioned worlds,” and simultaneously make them conscious of the constructed nature of those worlds through the visual and verbal conventions of comics.

Nurturing Difference: The Autistic Student In Professional Writing Programs, Andrea Greenbaum

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

can assist autistic students by providing them with writing opportunities through the classroom, internships, and university publications. Aiding their personal and professional development also serves the university and the community-at-large.

The Forgiveness Classroom: Bringing Together Students From Both Sides Of The Walls Through Deep Listening, Ruth Henderson

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay describes a forgiveness course taught in prisons and on college campuses. The course served as a bridge for Endicott College students and inmates from the Maine Correctional Center at Windham, highlighting how deep listening may reduce violence and promote understanding.

Weaving A Song Of Self, Joanne Katzmarek

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Exploring the effectiveness of narrative as a mode for relationship building as well as a means to sustain and deliver content knowledge, this article explores the instructional settings of an undergraduate English class and an online environment for a teacher preparation course.

Book Reviews, Judy Halden-Sullivan, Ken Delucca, Brad Lucas, Timothy Shea, William Archibald

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Book Reviews

Judy Halden-Sullivan - Practices in Mindfulness

Ken DeLucca - Schoeberlein, Deborah and Suki Sheth. Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2009.

Brad Lucas - MacDonald, Elizabeth, and Dennis Shirley. The Mindful Teacher. New York: Teachers College Press, 2009.

Timothy Shea - VanDeWeghe, Richard. Engaged Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2009.

William Archibald - Cummings, Robert E. Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2009