Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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

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

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

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

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

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-lite^tm 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

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 …