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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Lessons In Persistence, Syble Heffernan May 2024

Lessons In Persistence, Syble Heffernan

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

LESSONS IN PERSISTENCE is a thesis that operates within the tradition of writing about trauma and resilience, taking up themes of mental illness, class, colonialism, loss of a parent, navigating queerness in a conservative Christian context, and reckoning with gender-based violence and expectations directed toward people socialized as women. The use of ecopoetics highlights the relationship between traumas to the earth brought about by climate change, war, and worldwide suffering, and those brought upon the human body (specifically marginalized bodies) by grief, illness, abuse, and the loss of self. The collection ultimately aims to establish explicit connections between internal and …


Breaking The Rule Of Silence: Childbirth And Gendered Power In Efuru And The Joys Of Motherhood, Sunday Elliott Uguru May 2024

Breaking The Rule Of Silence: Childbirth And Gendered Power In Efuru And The Joys Of Motherhood, Sunday Elliott Uguru

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the thematic preoccupation of childbirth in the formative period of feminist discourse in African literature through a critical study of selected novels of Igbo women of southeastern Nigeria. The novels studied represent the earliest published African texts in English by women. The period under focus falls within the emerging stage of Nigerian literary tradition in its written form with a dominant presence of men. This study investigates the women novelists' perspective toward the failure of male authored works to represent women's childbirth experience. Through a critical reading of Flora Nwapa's Efuru and Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of …


Between Pages And Politics: An Interdisciplinary Exploration Of Book Bans, Hannah Morrison Apr 2024

Between Pages And Politics: An Interdisciplinary Exploration Of Book Bans, Hannah Morrison

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Across the United States, school boards are being inundated with requests to ban books. While these conversations are often localized, what the rise in censorship across the country suggests is that there is a fierce movement behind censoring young adult literature. What is frequently erased in these campaigns are stories of people of color and queer communities, alongside topics such as sexuality, drugs, or violence. The presiding conclusion within childhood studies on how we have reached a point where censorship is abundantly common in American schools is that public discourse views children as less than or not fully formed, thus …


135th Street Branch: Librarianship And The Passing Fictions Of Regina Anderson Andrews And Nella Larsen, Caitlin Matheis May 2022

135th Street Branch: Librarianship And The Passing Fictions Of Regina Anderson Andrews And Nella Larsen, Caitlin Matheis

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, I examine how two writer-librarians that worked in the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in the 1920's, Regina Anderson Andrews and Nella Larsen, grappled in their fiction writing with questions of classification, information, and knowledge that encompassed their daily work in the library. I begin by contextualizing the branch within the Harlem Renaissance and Arturo A. Schomburg's call for the preservation of Black history and literature at a time when the field of librarianship was being professionalized by implementing library schools and classification standards. I then provide readings of Andrews's one-act play …


Jerusalem’S Song: William Blake As Forerunner To Jung’S Feminist Psychology, Trudy D. Eblen Aug 2019

Jerusalem’S Song: William Blake As Forerunner To Jung’S Feminist Psychology, Trudy D. Eblen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

William Blake's final epic poem, The Song of Jerusalem, consists of two textual narratives: the verbal (let me call it the conscious state) and the visual (the unconscious). I primarily focus on the visual, where the eponymous heroine psychically matures along the trajectory of a Jungian process of individuation (somewhat similar to the ancient universal initiation rite of maturation, as most famously described by Joseph Campbell). Preceding in Blake's corpus is a succession of his other female poetic characters, who represent various stages of successful and failed individuation—Thel, Lyca, Oothoon, and Ahania; these culminate in Jerusalem, Blake’s apotheotic female. …


A City Room Of One's Own: Elizabeth Jordan, Henry James, And The New Woman Journalist, James Hunter Plummer May 2017

A City Room Of One's Own: Elizabeth Jordan, Henry James, And The New Woman Journalist, James Hunter Plummer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis considers the portrayal of the female journalist in the works of Elizabeth Jordan and Henry James. In 1898, Jordan, a journalist and editor herself, published Tales of the City Room, a collection of interconnected short stories that depict a close and supportive community of female journalists. It is, overall, a positive portrayal of female journalists by a female journalist. James, on the other hand, uses the female journalists in The Portrait of a Lady, “Flickerbridge,” and “The Papers” to show his discomfort toward New Journalism and the New Woman of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These …


Apologies For Cross-Posting: Composing Disciplinary Affects And Conflicts On The Wpa Listserv, Zachary Beare Mar 2017

Apologies For Cross-Posting: Composing Disciplinary Affects And Conflicts On The Wpa Listserv, Zachary Beare

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Drawing on theories of counterpublics, online communication, and affect, this dissertation argues that the Writing Program Administrators Listserv (WPA-L) functions as an important site of disciplinary knowledge-making and theory-building for the field of Composition and Rhetoric. The dissertation examines the WPA-L as a discursive space in which members of the discipline build community, debate pressing issues, and strategize how best to advocate for their individual and collective interests. At the same time that these qualities reveal how the listserv functions as counterpublic space for the discipline at large, the dissertation argues that sub-disciplinary counterpublics made up of individuals marginalized within …


"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal Apr 2016

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …


Using Textual Features To Predict Popular Content On Digg, Paul H. Miller Apr 2011

Using Textual Features To Predict Popular Content On Digg, Paul H. Miller

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Over the past few years, collaborative rating sites, such as Netflix, Digg and Stumble, have become increasingly prevalent sites for users to find trending content. I used various data mining techniques to study Digg, a social news site, to examine the influence of content on popularity. What influence does content have on popularity, and what influence does content have on users’ decisions? Overwhelmingly, prior studies have consistently shown that predicting popularity based on content is difficult and maybe even inherently impossible. The same submission can have multiple outcomes and content neither determines popularity, nor individual user decisions. My results show …