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Articles 1 - 30 of 189
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
My Last Concussion, Shannon Valkr
My Last Concussion, Shannon Valkr
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
MY LAST CONCUSSION is a thesis consisting of a critical introduction, a number of poetic influences, and a collection of poems. The introduction touches on the themes of the collection, my personal history with my subject, my changing approach to poetry, and a brief evaluation of the work as a whole. It details my approach to Catholicism, paganism, transgender identity, and oppression. My work grapples with both my current understanding of myself and my inability to enunciate my reality in the past. I aim to view divinity and personal history through a lens of queerness.
Advisor: Kwame Dawes
Breaking The Rule Of Silence: Childbirth And Gendered Power In Efuru And The Joys Of Motherhood, Sunday Elliott Uguru
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 …
Lessons In Persistence, Syble Heffernan
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 …
Creative Writing Pedagogy: Building Curriculum For High School Students, Elizabeth Lengel
Creative Writing Pedagogy: Building Curriculum For High School Students, Elizabeth Lengel
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This thesis serves as a rationale for the creative writing pedagogy I use and how it serves my high school creative writing class. As my school district made the decision to overhaul our English curriculum, the English department decided to add Creative Writing as an English class elective.
The work for planning these new classes was spread around the English Department, and I was assigned to design the curriculum for the new Creative Writing class. Designing an entire class from scratch leaves a lot of room for creativity and innovation. However, as excited for this new course as I was, …
Booktok's Potentials And Possibilities In Composition Studies: An Interactive Digital Collection, Hanna Varilek
Booktok's Potentials And Possibilities In Composition Studies: An Interactive Digital Collection, Hanna Varilek
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The following thesis, “BookTok’s Potentials and Possibilities in Composition Studies: An Interactive Digital Collection,” explores the phenomenon of BookTok, a vibrant out-of-school literacy program on the social media platform TikTok centered around books, reading, and literary discussions. As digital platforms continue to shape contemporary cultural landscapes, BookTok emerges as a unique space where users engage with literature and participate in discussions that influence their reading habits and preferences. This thesis explores the possibilities of BookTok in reimagining the current landscape of first-year writing and composition classrooms by introducing an interactive digital collection of BookTok content and educational resources titled, The …
Between Pages And Politics: An Interdisciplinary Exploration Of Book Bans, Hannah Morrison
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 …
Ten Poems, Bianca Swift
Ten Poems, Bianca Swift
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
TEN POEMS is a thesis consisting of a critical introduction meditating on what it means to create joyful poetry and how community shapes a body of work, as well as a collection of poems. The essay discusses my background in poetry and the many voices responsible for the final body of work.
Advisor: Hope Wabuke
Adrian Wisnicki’S One More Voice: A Review, Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson
Adrian Wisnicki’S One More Voice: A Review, Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
A review of Adrian Wisnicki’s One More Voice.
Adrian Wisnicki's One More Voice website, accessible at https://onemorevoice.org/, is a valuable resource for scholars and students of digital humanities, particularly those interested in African studies. The website is designed to facilitate the exploration and analysis of texts related to African history and literature. As part of a digital humanities course in the spring of 2023, I had the opportunity to engage with the website, which serves both as a repository of information and as a platform for educational activities, such as text analysis and website creation. One More Voice …
The Chestnut Archives: A Review, Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson
The Chestnut Archives: A Review, Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
A review of the Charles W. Chestnutt Archives, available at https://chesnuttarchive.org/.
Transcorporeal Habitus: Adapting Sociological Embodiment To The Self-Conscious Anthropocene, Trevor Bleick
Transcorporeal Habitus: Adapting Sociological Embodiment To The Self-Conscious Anthropocene, Trevor Bleick
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The knowledge that humans have become a geological force necessitates a reimagining of what it means to be human. This thesis explores the ways in which bodies (both human and nonhuman) are represented within the self-conscious Anthropocene. This tripartite analysis, synthesized in the term ‘transcorporeal habitus,’ presents a framework through which we can better understand the ways bodies are entangled within a greater ecosystem. By drawing on the works of scholars in the fields of sociology, ecocriticism, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) this thesis provides the groundwork for reimaging humanness in a period of immense change. Pierre Bourdieu and Stacy …
Matters Of Argument: Materiality, Listening, And Practices Of Openness In First-Year Writing Classes, Mark Houston
Matters Of Argument: Materiality, Listening, And Practices Of Openness In First-Year Writing Classes, Mark Houston
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This dissertation argues for the value of increased focus on practices of listening in rhetorical education, especially in first-year writing courses. Building on research in listening rhetorics, new materialism, and contemplative pedagogy, the author presents a pedagogical and rhetorical vision for more open argument. Open arguments function with open-heartedness, an open-ethos, openness to listening to Others and the material world, openness to a multiplicity of viewpoints, open-endedness, and openness to productive conflict. The author argues that students can learn to write these more open arguments through a combination of listening to the material world around them, listening to their …
Gender And Colonialism: An Intergenerational Conversation In African Literature, Khadizatul Kubra
Gender And Colonialism: An Intergenerational Conversation In African Literature, Khadizatul Kubra
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
It is thought that African literature tends to be dominated by the masculine-oriented politics that also characterizes African public political life. In some cases, this is true, but there is a feminist movement in Africa, and many African women writers are using global feminist principles and global anti-colonial principles to write a different kind of literature. As a consequence, recent novels such as Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda (1993), set in Zimbabwe, and Petina Gappah’s Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2019), revise past, often male, African writers’ approaches to depicting the genders, even as they also criticize, implicitly or explicitly, still-widespread colonialist …
Defining And Transferring Digital Literacies: What Does This Mean For High School And College Educators?, Jocelyn Spoor
Defining And Transferring Digital Literacies: What Does This Mean For High School And College Educators?, Jocelyn Spoor
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This thesis aims to create a digital literacies transfer framework through a discussion regarding current conversations on transfer and digital literacies in the English field, including synthesizing the two ideas to think about the transfer of digital literacies as a concept. This digital literacies framework is made up of five components: the functional skills, critical skills, and rhetorical skills found in digital literacies scholarship and the genre awareness and meta-cognitive ideas found in transfer literature. This digital literacies transfer framework is then used to analyze information gleaned from four college and five high school English educators. The key findings from …
“The Queer, Lonely, Intense, Inner Lives Of Their Children”: Psychoanalysis, Mysticism, And Mabel Dodge Luhan’S Narrative Approach To The Story Of Her Childhood, Lauren Franken
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This thesis explores Mabel Dodge Luhan’s narrative approach to writing Background (1933), the first of her four published volumes of autobiography titled Intimate Memories. In the first section I lay the groundwork for this analysis with a brief examination of Background’s publication history. The succeeding two sections offer a historical framework for understanding late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American conceptualizations of childhood, Freudian psychoanalysis, and mysticism. Considering the various lenses through which Luhan analyzed her childhood memories provides a more complex awareness of her narrative approach. The fourth section engages in a close reading of the sections of …
You Never Really Leave, John Kuligowski
You Never Really Leave, John Kuligowski
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
YOU NEVER REALLY LEAVE is a thesis which consists in a critical introduction that broadly explores my experience of creating a short story collection, as well as the ensuing collection of five short stories. The critical introduction examines the form and content of the following stories, as well as the influences that have been instrumental to my writing. It furnishes details about themes and subject matter which have been consistent in my fiction thus far, and it depicts some of the motivations behind it. The stories themselves range from a realist mode to what has been labeled by other writers …
Three Thingness: A Critical Introduction To The Collection, Kasey Peters
Three Thingness: A Critical Introduction To The Collection, Kasey Peters
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The following project, "Three Thingness," consists of a critical introduction and craft essay on short story writing, and a sample of the collection Very Light in the End. The critical essay "Three Thingness" introduces a framework for evaluating short stories, and then evaluates a few key components undergirding the collection: gender, plot, and comic relief. Part postmodern realism and part absurst-litetm fiction, the collected stories depict characters as they navigate prescriptive narratives about bodies, gender, queerness, and illness.
Advisor: Chigozie Obioma
Fragments Of The Dark: Essays On Heritage, Anxiety, And Spirit, Nicholas Diaz
Fragments Of The Dark: Essays On Heritage, Anxiety, And Spirit, Nicholas Diaz
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
“I am the war my family forgot to mention.” With these words from my essay, “My Parents Never Taught Me About My Ancestors,” I stake my position in the struggle for happiness. In a series of five experimental essays, I aim to reflect upon my assimilated white, working-class upbringing in the US Midwest and the emptiness with which it has left me. Deploying fragmentary essay forms, elements of memoir, question-and-answer, quotation, prayer, and other devices, I hope to pose destabilizing questions about our understandings of whiteness, masculinity, ancestry, and faith. Questions which, I hope, can help us (particularly those of …
Women Of The Wolf, Rosemary Sekora
Women Of The Wolf, Rosemary Sekora
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This is a creative thesis that introduces the novel Women of the Wolf and discusses the writer’s influences and research progress. Themes within the novel will include women relationships, cult culture, religious influences, and Native American (mis)representation. The sample included is the first ten pages from the novel.
Advisor: Timothy Schaffert
College Slasher Novel, Jeff Hill
College Slasher Novel, Jeff Hill
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This project was completed in hopes of creating a new novel that combines the research and craft worlds of composition and creative writing while merging the social worlds of teaching and campus Greek life, as well as making relevant contemporary commentary on the genres of satire and horror. In preparation, beyond necessary course work completion and time to outline, write, workshop, and revise, I read numerous novels and articles and watched dozens of films and television episodes as well as conducted research regarding current campus demographic to compose the best novel I could write in my time within the program. …
135th Street Branch: Librarianship And The Passing Fictions Of Regina Anderson Andrews And Nella Larsen, Caitlin Matheis
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 …
Fifteen Poems, Caleb Petersen
Fifteen Poems, Caleb Petersen
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
FIFTEEN POEMS is a thesis consisting of a critical introduction on the development of my understanding of craft, the poetic influences which have shaped my poetry, as well as a collection of poems. The essay addresses both the form and content of the collection, as well as my history with poetry. It provides details about the process of creating this collection, and it portrays some of the vision that motivates it. The poetry which follows is a reflection on myself, my body, and my landscape, as I ask the question, who am I in this place? Situated in Lincoln, Nebraska, …
Dewey In The Digital Age: Experiential Composition And Reflection As Transformation, Danielle Page
Dewey In The Digital Age: Experiential Composition And Reflection As Transformation, Danielle Page
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This thesis explores the act of composing as a transformational, ongoing event and offers digital reflection as a tool for first-year writing students to evaluate their own writing practices. I analyze student vlogs produced in response to an assignment that asked students to produce digital reflections on their work as writers across the process of completing a final course project. My findings suggest that adapting experiential learning principles, digital and non-digital, into composition classroom design creates and facilitates writing experiences that are immersive and transformational. Crucial to designing learning occasions is the process of active reflection upon what the writer …
The Evans Family: Familial Relationships In George Eliot's Life And Fiction, Hailey S. Fischer
The Evans Family: Familial Relationships In George Eliot's Life And Fiction, Hailey S. Fischer
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Biographers of George Eliot, when writing about her childhood, have focused on her close and complicated relationships with two of the most important men in her life, her father Robert Evans and brother Isaac Evans. Less discussed are Eliot’s relationships with her immediate female family members, her mother Christiana Pearson Evans and her sister Christiana (Chrissey) Evans Clarke. This thesis reviews the predominant interpretations of Eliot’s relations with her father and brother. It also pulls together the known information about Christiana and Chrissey from several major biographies and adds new insights from Eliot's letters in combination with two of her …
Migration And Trauma: Memory And The Myths Of El Otro Lado, Elva Moreno Del Rio
Migration And Trauma: Memory And The Myths Of El Otro Lado, Elva Moreno Del Rio
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This thesis is composed of two parts that scrutinize the myth of the United States
and el cuento of El Otro Lado. The first part titled, “The Illness Rooted in the American Myth” connects the U.S. myth to J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s piece Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782. In analyzing the writings of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Eden E. Torres, I indentify the impact that Crevecoeur’s myth had on Black, Indigenous and other people of color. This research illustrates the physical and psychological effects that these ideologies have on the mind and body of …
Getting Our Act(Ivism) Together: Understanding And Fostering Secondary And University Teacher Advocacy Collaborations, Nicole Green
Getting Our Act(Ivism) Together: Understanding And Fostering Secondary And University Teacher Advocacy Collaborations, Nicole Green
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Given the deleterious effects on students and teachers caused by ever-expanding neoliberal approaches to K-16 English Language Arts and literacy education policy, this dissertation argues effective policy advocacy and reform absolutely depends on collaborations among secondary ELA and postsecondary composition and English education teacher-scholars. Borrowing from the traditions of participant action research, this project traces the experiences of a small group of secondary and postsecondary English educators across the span of a 16-month collaborative advocacy project. By examining a range of data including recordings of group meetings, interviews, and written reflections through the lens of activity theory, this study seeks …
A Damn Good Time, Gabrielle Schenkelberg
A Damn Good Time, Gabrielle Schenkelberg
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
The creative thesis, "A Damned Good Time" is a mixed-genre fiction collection consisting of nine chapters. There are nine short stories, eighteen creative recipes, and eleven poems, all written while traveling and experiencing life like Hemingway. I'm inspired by the way Hem explains travel as a journey of self-discovery, writing deep friendships, tender love stories, and encapsulating his zest for life in his work. The creative sample I've included touches on all of these themes.
Advisor: Timothy Schaffert
Almost Speechless: Representations Of Womanhood And Female Voices In Turn-Of-The-Century American Novels, Carmen Sylvia Smith
Almost Speechless: Representations Of Womanhood And Female Voices In Turn-Of-The-Century American Novels, Carmen Sylvia Smith
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
In this dissertation, I close read four turn-of-the-century American novels by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and Willa Cather to analyze how the voices and silences of fictional women characters work to disrupt cultural ideals about womanhood. Examining which aspects of the characters’ identities are expressed in direct dialogue and which traits are conveyed to the reader through narrative devices reveals how cultural ideals about womanhood restrict women’s self-expressive autonomy and work to exclude female voices from the public sphere.
Chapter One examines Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) and how erotic rivals Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom compete to …
Critical Introduction To No Easy Way Out: A Memoir Of Interruption, Cameron S. Steele
Critical Introduction To No Easy Way Out: A Memoir Of Interruption, Cameron S. Steele
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
No Easy Way Out: A Memoir of Interruption is a collection of personal essays examining themes of race, the body, violence and desire as it seeks to examine and interrupt inherited, normative understandings of work, art, beauty, love, and belonging. An illness narrative that follows my experiences as a girl born into a family of white Southern wealth, as a young crime reporter in the Deep South, and as a mother, scholar, and writer in the Midwest, No Easy Way Out raises questions about the entanglement of privilege, illness, and access to care. The book considers the stories I covered …
Be More Than Human, Carson Schaefer
Be More Than Human, Carson Schaefer
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
This creative thesis is a collection of short stories involving humanoid androids and robots in positions of performance, art, creation, and employment. This collection works to imagine potential sentience within the field of technology and robotics and bring into question perceptions of agency, control, and, ultimately, humanness.
Advisor: Jonis Agee
From Starter To Finish: Learning The Literacy Of Sourdough, Molly Mcconnell
From Starter To Finish: Learning The Literacy Of Sourdough, Molly Mcconnell
Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Using the New Literacy Studies and the work of James Paul Gee, the process of making sourdough bread is conceptualized as a literacy, which is then located within food literacy. The literacy of sourdough offers an alternative to neoliberal discourse. The literacy is linked to the rise in popularity of sourdough during the COVID-19 pandemic and is used to explore Bourdieu’s cultural capital. It also connects, rhizomatically (Deleuze and Guattari), and is used to explore concepts of interdependence and time. After establishing this literacy, a pedagogically- focused essay draws upon ecocomposition to expand on what a composition process would look …