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Articles 1 - 30 of 80
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“I Hope You Are Not Being Stupid About Children”: Transforming Literature Pedagogy Through Children’S Literature, Ashley Cheyenne Johnson
“I Hope You Are Not Being Stupid About Children”: Transforming Literature Pedagogy Through Children’S Literature, Ashley Cheyenne Johnson
English Dissertations
In this dissertation, I assert that children’s literature is particularly productive for making the literature classroom a more engaging space for students in any genre or historical period of literature taught because it 1) fosters equity; 2) creates confidence; 3) garners student engagement; 4) is valuable; and 5) is an effective, productive, and accessible conduit for studies of literary theory. This dissertation argues for a paired-texts methodology, and incorporates pedagogy theory and scholarship, as well as cultural studies and literary analysis to explore the productive intersections of themes, topics, and modes of writing found in children’s literature that align with …
Post-Factum Studies In Trans-Corporeal Rhetoric: Triangularities Of Genre, Ethics, And Aesthetics In Kenneth Burke And Michel Foucault, Hubert Woodson
Post-Factum Studies In Trans-Corporeal Rhetoric: Triangularities Of Genre, Ethics, And Aesthetics In Kenneth Burke And Michel Foucault, Hubert Woodson
English Dissertations
This dissertation gives an account of and expands upon Stacy Alaimo’s term, “trans-corporeality,” in order to reconsider the rhetorical situation, through conceptualizations of how rhetorical bodies become embodied and traverse one another in various humanities. From “trans-corporeality,” what arises is a “trans-corporeal rhetoric,” which becomes an interdisciplinary rhetoric that speaks to the futures of rhetoric within the boundaries of various humanities, involving notions of embodiment, materiality, corporeality, and what Alaimo calls “bodily natures.” These futures of rhetoric not only wrestle with what embodiment is and can be for rhetorical bodies in various humanities, and what sort of ethics and aesthetics …
Asian Modernities: The Historical Unconscious In Asian And Asian American Literatures, Amanda Brooke Monteleone
Asian Modernities: The Historical Unconscious In Asian And Asian American Literatures, Amanda Brooke Monteleone
English Dissertations
The question of modernity has been widely debated in postcolonial studies, with scholars such as Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo arguing that the emergence of alternate modernities unsettles the West as a cultural metropole. Dussel and Mignolo argue that the dominant narrative of modernity is rooted in Western colonialism, which situates the West as a cultural center. Thus, dominant modern ideology associates the height of human progress with Eurocentric culture. Transmodernity, according to Dussel, is a theory that focuses on the emergence of other modernities in the waning of Western colonization or influence. However, studies in transmodernity have not adequately …
(Re)Fashioning Gender: Dress As Embodied Feminist Critique In Modernist Women’S Writing, Lauren Elizabeth Sperandio Phelps
(Re)Fashioning Gender: Dress As Embodied Feminist Critique In Modernist Women’S Writing, Lauren Elizabeth Sperandio Phelps
English Dissertations
In this dissertation I examine early twentieth century women writers’ use of fashion as a mode of critiquing gender, race, and class oppression. Through close reading of the novels of Nella Larsen, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf, I explore how fashion in these works functions to emphasize elements of identity formation and conditioning. I argue that by taking up fashion as a tool for critique women writers were able to simultaneously challenge oppressive social structures as well as appraisals of women as unfit for serious analysis or literature. If fashion is considered trivial, then using it …
Making Selves As We Make Scholars: The Many Uses Of Life Writing In College English, Lindsey Rose Gendke
Making Selves As We Make Scholars: The Many Uses Of Life Writing In College English, Lindsey Rose Gendke
English Dissertations
This dissertation addresses the perennial question, for both new and more seasoned English professors, “What should we teach in English?” In composition, “What types of writing should we teach?” And in literature, “what literature, and which authors, should we read?” In the current age where teachers are concerned with promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, perhaps these questions are more relevant than ever. Thus, employing Wayne Booth’s rhetorical stance as my theoretical frame, I inquire 1) what are the most pressing needs of traditional-age college students, and 2) what theories and teaching strategies uncovered in recent English studies have the potential …
A Teacher Goes To School: A Retrospective Analysis Of Pedagogical Insights On Secondary Writing Instruction, Karen Stelter Otto
A Teacher Goes To School: A Retrospective Analysis Of Pedagogical Insights On Secondary Writing Instruction, Karen Stelter Otto
English Dissertations
High school English teachers are familiar with current masters in the field (Kittle, Burke, Gallagher), but are not familiar with the scholarly literature on the topics of composition. Although helpful, these professional development books offer examples of quality lessons for helping students become stronger and more confident writers, but rarely do these books address the research that supports these findings. This dissertation is a retrospective study and analysis of the pedagogical insights on secondary writing instruction that I learned through my doctoral journey. I examine five areas of interest: peer review, teacher review, service-learning, grammar, and grading. I analyze the …
Posthuman Nurturing In American Literary Futurities, Andrew Ryan Tolle
Posthuman Nurturing In American Literary Futurities, Andrew Ryan Tolle
English Dissertations
This dissertation applies posthuman theories to the concept of nurture in American literatures of 1880-1920 and 1980-2020 to explore how writers construct and imagine futurities that increasingly critique the liberal Cartesian human. While relationships between “subjects” and “objects” in Cartesian dualism can render the act of nurturing both problematic and violent, posthuman nurture decenters the nurturer, shifting focus onto the nurtured. This allows us to view nurture as an inherently mutual act that includes agencies beyond humans, including animals, plants, and other non-zoe. American literatures of 1880-1920, which often speculated futures taking place in 1980-2020, exhibit nascent strains of the …
Crip Mothering: Representation Of Disability And Motherhood In Post-1980 American Films, Mohammed Ali H. Sumili
Crip Mothering: Representation Of Disability And Motherhood In Post-1980 American Films, Mohammed Ali H. Sumili
English Dissertations
Most scholarship on the topic of disability and motherhood tends to be of an empirical nature common to social, education, and psychology studies (Landsman 2008; Wilson and Cellio 2011, Filax and Taylor 2014). Despite the appearance of movies, novels and especially memoirs that deal with the subject, disability as it engages with motherhood has received scarce attention by feminist, motherhood, and disability scholarship (Prilleltensky 2004; Landsman 2008). Existing literature indicates a gap in studying the joint representation of mothers and disability. This study aims to address this gap by analysis of a selection of post-1980 American movies. Concentrating on the …
Decentering White Space In The Two-Year College English Classroom: A Perspective Through Crt, Tribalcrit, And Latcrit, Kassandra Angela Ramirez Buck
Decentering White Space In The Two-Year College English Classroom: A Perspective Through Crt, Tribalcrit, And Latcrit, Kassandra Angela Ramirez Buck
English Dissertations
White space in the educational system is an attitude, environment, ideology dominated by the white dominant voice and creed. This white space intimidates and oppresses Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) students, not only physically but mentally and emotionally. This research provides solutions to help instructors decenter white space. In order to begin to decenter white space, instructors need to modify their curriculum and classroom policies, presence and environment, and execution. Using Latina/o Critical Theory, Tribal Critical Race Theory, and Critical Race Theory in Education, this research addresses structural facets of systemic racism BIPOC students in the two-year college English …
Sermonic Fugues Evaluated In A Thematic Collection Of African-American Homiletical Responses To The 9/11 Tragedy Using Distant Reading Analytics, Terrance Andrew Ford
Sermonic Fugues Evaluated In A Thematic Collection Of African-American Homiletical Responses To The 9/11 Tragedy Using Distant Reading Analytics, Terrance Andrew Ford
English Dissertations
This dissertation project introduces and evaluates the coined rhetorical/homiletical concept of the sermonic fugue. The term is an expanded adaptation of the musico-literary fugue principally in the context of thematic collections and homiletical analytics. It defines recurring—common or contrasting—rhetorical patterns presenting themselves particularly within multiple sermons. This research critiques the sermonic fugue against a select collection of African-American homiletical responses to the 9/11 tragedy. The evaluation is further conducted using distant reading and topic modeling analytics to identify the presence and notable patterns of sermonic fugues within the collection. The methodology of the research is performed in phases which involved …
Stronger Than Fiction: Literary And Cultural Merit Of Contemporary African American Christian Fiction, Shewanda Larue Riley
Stronger Than Fiction: Literary And Cultural Merit Of Contemporary African American Christian Fiction, Shewanda Larue Riley
English Dissertations
My primary goals with this dissertation are to take a close look at how contemporary African American Christian fiction performs important literary and cultural functions and explore how these works reinforce or subvert perceptions of the contemporary African American Christian woman. The specific texts that I analyze are chosen from 1997-2007, the earliest time period of publication of contemporary African American Christian fiction as they set the tone for African American Christian fiction literary works that have been published since that time. The primary research question driving this project is whether contemporary African American Christian fiction has literary and cultural …
Through The Narrow Gate: Conduct, Conversion, And Community In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Women's Novels, Katherine Lee Jones
Through The Narrow Gate: Conduct, Conversion, And Community In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Women's Novels, Katherine Lee Jones
English Dissertations
Conversion scenes and the theme of conversion are key in conduct fiction, a genre that developed from the medieval and early modern tradition of nonfiction conduct manuals. Conversion is a character’s entrance into the community being developed in and through each novel. The conversion scene gives clues to each author’s purpose, reveal’s the religious basis for each book’s instruction, and puts focus on inner piety, or pious thoughts and feelings rather than merely pious actions. Conversion provides a vehicle for authors to critique and/or intervene in broader social issues such as gender roles, racial inequality, and sexual assault. Nineteenth-century conduct …
Space Opera: The Aesthetics Of Personhood In The Works And Worlds Of Philip K. Dick, Gabriel Francis Mamola
Space Opera: The Aesthetics Of Personhood In The Works And Worlds Of Philip K. Dick, Gabriel Francis Mamola
English Dissertations
In this dissertation, I examine the major novels of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick in light of his non-fictional and speculatively mystical writings. After establishing an approach to science fiction in general and Dick in particular, grounded in the Aristotelian mimetic theory of Stephen Halliwell and the ambient rhetorical theory of Thomas Rickert, I argue that Dick came more and more, as his career progressed and his body of work developed, to understand his oeuvre as a unified art-work—unified not only by its themes but by the fictional world it portrayed. More to the point, I argue that Dick’s …
Wraiths And White Men: The Impact Of Privilege On Paranormal Reality Television, Antares Russell Leask
Wraiths And White Men: The Impact Of Privilege On Paranormal Reality Television, Antares Russell Leask
English Dissertations
Modern paranormal TV walks the fine line between infotainment and propaganda that older white men are rational while marginalized communities, such as youths, lower social classes, women, and minorities are hysterical and gullible. White privilege is performed and glorified in reality paranormal television at the expense of marginalized groups. This view is inherently classist/racist/sexist/homophobic and does not reflect prevailing cultural norms, but points to a reemergence of the prejudiced idea that belief in the supernatural is a mark of cultural inferiority. Throughout history, marginalized groups have been considered those more prone to superstition, so with the renewed rise in racist …
I, Gamer: Addressing Toxic Ludology And Narratology In The Gamer Discourse Community Through Reinterpreting Video Games As Hypertexts, Andrew S. Latham
I, Gamer: Addressing Toxic Ludology And Narratology In The Gamer Discourse Community Through Reinterpreting Video Games As Hypertexts, Andrew S. Latham
English Dissertations
My research examines two points crucial to the continuing discipline of video game rhetoric. First, it discusses the formation of toxic ludology and narratology in the gamer discourse community over the course of decades. I begin in the 1980s, showing how privilege in the gamer discourse community sowed toxicity that culminated in Gamergate in the 2010s, an event that is still ongoing and destructive to player discourse. In this half of the dissertation, I explore how uninviting gamers can be to new players and also provide examples where more progressive gamers are showing signs of being more inviting to new …
Material Intimacy: Bearing Witness, Listening, And Wandering The Ruins, Miriam R. Rowntree
Material Intimacy: Bearing Witness, Listening, And Wandering The Ruins, Miriam R. Rowntree
English Dissertations
In this dissertation, I consider the rhetorical ecology of architectural ruins, specifically those of natural disaster, as actors in a system of human and nonhuman intra-action that has rhetorical potential for material intimacy. I argue that ruins address the human in ways that elicit a response. The human response enacts a paratactic praxis, which I explore in my first chapter as a practice that creates series or lists that call on the reader or the listener to fill the gaps between entities and make meaning out of the resulting juxtaposition of words, phrases, or collections. In the second, third, and …
The Domestic Bible: William Tyndale's Vernacular Translation, Joul Layne Smith
The Domestic Bible: William Tyndale's Vernacular Translation, Joul Layne Smith
English Dissertations
This translation study of William Tyndale’s revised New Testament of 1534 identifies the translator’s motivations and strategies then explores the effect of the translation on the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) and Shakespeare’s plays. Tyndale’s primary motivation was to create a text for his would-be congregants during the Reformation and his strategy was largely one of domestication. However, his unique concern for his mother-tongue coupled with an insistence on his preferential theological material extends his domestication activity into an idiosyncratic attention to his lingua mater (English), resulting in a personalized translation project, a Tyndalian effect that influenced the …
Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root: Arboreal Ecocriticism And Shakespearean Drama, Jason Charles Hogue
Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root: Arboreal Ecocriticism And Shakespearean Drama, Jason Charles Hogue
English Dissertations
Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root traces the appearance of trees and their constituent parts in five Shakespearean plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and As You Like It. The dissertation shows how these plays reveal arboreal agencies intra-acting with the characters of the play-texts by assessing the mergings of human and arboreal bodies, as well as instances of hacking and hewing inflicted across these bodies. Taking a posthumanist approach informed by ecomaterialism, critical plant studies, and affect theory, I argue that these sites of painful human-arboreal encounter in Shakespeare’s plays initiate potentials for thinking-with and feeling-with, across not …
Directive/Facilitative Commenting In The Disciplines And Its Effects On Student Revision, Christina Montgomery
Directive/Facilitative Commenting In The Disciplines And Its Effects On Student Revision, Christina Montgomery
English Dissertations
The purpose of this study was to build on the findings by Patton and Taylor (2013) in faculty commenting so that administrators, researchers, and faculty can address how to improve writing pedagogy for students in their disciplinary courses, majors, and professional lives. The researcher interviewed six students enrolled in a graduate-level writing course at a large public university about their experiences with writing and revision decisions based on their response to directive/facilitative comments. Using grounded theory, the researcher found that directive/facilitative comments influenced students' revision practices, which resulted in improved writing in their final drafts and confidence in themselves as …
Born Or Made: Problems Of Prose Style & Stylistic Improvability At The Sentence Level, An Interdisciplinary Approach, Hope Petrash Mccarthy
Born Or Made: Problems Of Prose Style & Stylistic Improvability At The Sentence Level, An Interdisciplinary Approach, Hope Petrash Mccarthy
English Dissertations
In this interdisciplinary dissertation, I problematize the issue of style at the sentence level from a variety of perspectives, past and present, literary and compositional. My two-fold driving question throughout is, Can an adult significantly improve his/her sentence-level style, regardless of inborn linguistic talent, and if so, what methods will most effectively bring about such improvement? Put another way, to what extent is style learnable, a techne or craft, and to what extent is it simply a matter of gift? After its heyday fifty years ago, the study of style has all but disappeared from the academy in recent days. …
Italian American Literature And Food: A Match Made In The Kitchen A Handbook, Monica Marchi
Italian American Literature And Food: A Match Made In The Kitchen A Handbook, Monica Marchi
English Dissertations
Food is a recurrent theme in Italian American literature and authors have used it to highlight the importance of family, women, and the community at large and to teach about Italian customs to the U.S. public. Oftentimes, for the older Italian immigrants, food triggers fond memories of the Old country, while, for the younger generations, it might cause shame that leads to clashes with the older generations. Characters use food as a tool to express power and, later, status and to communicate. Food also defines relationships, gives an identity to the Italian immigrants on foreign soil, and allows them to …
Masculinity And Chivalry: The Tenuous Relationship Of The Sacred And Secular In Medieval Arthurian Literature, Kaci Mccourt
Masculinity And Chivalry: The Tenuous Relationship Of The Sacred And Secular In Medieval Arthurian Literature, Kaci Mccourt
English Dissertations
Concepts of masculinity and chivalry in the medieval period were socially constructed, within both the sacred and the secular realms. The different meanings of these concepts were not always easily compatible, causing tensions within the literature that attempted to portray them. The Arthurian world became a place that these concepts, and the issues that could arise when attempting to act upon them, could be explored. In this dissertation, I explore these concepts specifically through the characters of Lancelot, Galahad, and Gawain. Representative of earthly chivalry and heavenly chivalry, respectively, Lancelot and Galahad are juxtaposed in the ways in which they …
Teaching Elsewhere: Curating↔Calibrating Posthumanist Possibilities, Sarah Alice Shelton
Teaching Elsewhere: Curating↔Calibrating Posthumanist Possibilities, Sarah Alice Shelton
English Dissertations
Following the material and ontological turns and working within the recent conversation applying posthumanist theory to education and educational research, this dissertation argues that professors can materialize immediate, critical differences for our students—open up different possibilities for their knowing-in-being than the ones imposed on us by a humanist education system—by “teaching elsewhere” even while staying within the college classroom spaces (designed to be “anywhere”) we’re assigned. Such a posthumanist praxis or pedagogy relies on Karen Barad’s agential realism to see “the classroom” as the entire spacetimemattering of a particular phenomenon brought together through a mixture of choices and impositions into …
The Rhetoric Of Academic Discourse: A Qualitative, Phenomenological Study Of Students' Self-Investigation Of The Acquisition Of Academic Discourse In First-Year Writing Courses, Barbara E. Morgan
English Dissertations
Whether at a four-year university or a two-year community college, students who choose to pursue higher education will likely be required to demonstrate their eligibility to enroll in college-level writing courses. At a vast majority of colleges and universities in the United States, such eligibility is determined through various means that include college placement tests, like AccuPlacer®, or other standardized assessments and determinants. Once students are deemed prepared or eligible to enroll in college-level writing courses, their academic journeys often include some form of the compulsory first-year English classes. These courses, also known as freshman writing or composition courses, have …
Interdisciplinary Collaboration And Metacognitive Reflection: A Case Study Of Faculty Teaching In Learning Communities, Melissa Perry
Interdisciplinary Collaboration And Metacognitive Reflection: A Case Study Of Faculty Teaching In Learning Communities, Melissa Perry
English Dissertations
This qualitative case study examines the nature of faculty collaboration within the context of academic learning communities using third generation activity theory as an organizing framework. First, this study investigates how faculty collaborate across disciplinary lines to create and implement curriculum for paired and team-taught interdisciplinary learning community courses. Furthermore, this study seeks to understand whether these collaborative practices provide opportunities for discipline-based metacognitive reflection. Through the analysis of semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and course documents, the study findings confirm that learning communities do, in fact, create opportunities for faculty to become more self-aware of their own disciplinary conventions and …
The Many Masks Of A Writer: A Dramaturgical Approach To Composition Pedagogy And Literature Analysis, Kathryn Quesenbury
The Many Masks Of A Writer: A Dramaturgical Approach To Composition Pedagogy And Literature Analysis, Kathryn Quesenbury
English Dissertations
Audience theories discuss many aspects of the entity of audience, from specific, concrete individuals to general, abstract readers. Composition pedagogical approaches to audience, however, seem limited. Writers, at times, are directed to have a concrete reader in mind, and other times, writers hold certain expectations for those readers and provide textual clues for them to follow. Which approach to take varies on the situation, but teaching writers this type of discernment can be challenging. Erving Goffman provides a possible solution in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.Goffman analyzes how individuals portray themselves differently depending on the social situation, and …
Disabling Sex Education: Science, Narrative, And The Female Body In Feminist Medical Fiction, 1874-1916, Stephanie P. Tavera
Disabling Sex Education: Science, Narrative, And The Female Body In Feminist Medical Fiction, 1874-1916, Stephanie P. Tavera
English Dissertations
This dissertation offers a feminist disability theory approach to women’s medical fiction during the Comstock Law Era. I argue that, in responding to Comstockian censorship, women authors of medical fiction resisted sexed and gendered narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sex education discourses, but in so doing, they recast the female body within disability rhetoric. Using feminist body theorists such as Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Emily Martin, and Elizabeth Grosz, I frame each work of feminist medical fiction within a specific historical nexus before discussing how the authors–Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Charlotte Perkins …
"A Shot In The Dark": Post-9/11 One-Off Speculative Fiction, Michael Lynn Brittain
"A Shot In The Dark": Post-9/11 One-Off Speculative Fiction, Michael Lynn Brittain
English Dissertations
The cultural, political, and historical impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as an event, continues to be questioned. For this project, I will examine six “one-off” or “one-time” works of speculative fiction from highly-acclaimed and award-winning writers— Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), and Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012) —who, prior to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, all worked predominantly in creating works in the genre of realist …
Colonial Shame And Its Effect On Puerto Rican Culture, Alison Torres Ramos
Colonial Shame And Its Effect On Puerto Rican Culture, Alison Torres Ramos
English Dissertations
I explore how American influence affects Puerto Rican culture through colonial shame. My dissertation is informed by the following questions: (1) In what ways does Puerto Rican culture attempt to move away from colonial shame? (2) What underlying desires and fears are present in Puerto Rican cultural productions? (3) How does colonial shame create agency in the struggle to achieve cultural currency within the wider American society? (4) How does colonial shame affect transculturation between Puerto Rico and the United States? The second chapter of my dissertation explores Puerto Rican attempts at moving away their colonial shame to subvert it. …
Practical Magic: Magical Realism And The Possibilities Of Representation In Twenty-First Century Fiction And Film, Rachael Mariboho
Practical Magic: Magical Realism And The Possibilities Of Representation In Twenty-First Century Fiction And Film, Rachael Mariboho
English Dissertations
Reflecting the paradoxical nature of its title, magical realism is a complicated term to define and to apply to works of art. Some writers and critics argue that classifying texts as magical realism essentializes and exoticizes works by marginalized authors from the latter part of the twentieth-century, particularly Latin American and postcolonial writers, while others consider magical realism to be nothing more than a marketing label used by publishers. These criticisms along with conflicting definitions of the term have made classifying contemporary works that employ techniques of magical realism a challenge. My dissertation counters these criticisms by elucidating the value …