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University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

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How The World Turns Quietly, Dana N. Boyer Dec 2010

How The World Turns Quietly, Dana N. Boyer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is composed of original poems written while studying both writing and literature at the University of Nebraska. The introduction partially discusses the role that women have played in writing in the past century. It discusses the poetry of Elizabeth Spires, and the prose of Virginia Woolf and Tillie Olsen. More specifically, it focuses on the work that these authors have done on the subject of silence, focusing on whom and what have conspired to work against authors, specifically female ones. These obstacles include economic standing, gender, and emotional issues. The introduction then branches out to discuss the specific …


Keep Going, Jeff Lacey Nov 2010

Keep Going, Jeff Lacey

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Keep Going is a collection of poetry whose themes include life in modern America, man’s relationship with the natural world, and living in the Midwest. The collection includes both free verse and metric poetry and both narrative and lyric poetry.


A Revisionary Approach To Cross-Curricular Literacy Work, Sandra L. Tarabochia Jul 2010

A Revisionary Approach To Cross-Curricular Literacy Work, Sandra L. Tarabochia

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this dissertation, I use qualitative research methods to study relationships between compositionists and faculty in other disciplines in the context of cross-curricular literacy (CCL) work. Drawing on a two-year CCL project in the biology department, for which I was a participant observer, I argue that compositionists need to attend more carefully to issues that influence day-to-day interactions with disciplinary faculty in order to develop more meaningful CCL relationships. Toward that end, I offer a revisionary approach to cross-curricular literacy work that cultivates complex relationships by delaying consensus and embracing disconnection and disorientation. More specifically, I employ revisionary stance as …


Don Delillo And 9/11: A Question Of Response, Michael Jamieson May 2010

Don Delillo And 9/11: A Question Of Response, Michael Jamieson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In the wake of the attacks of September 11th, many artists struggled with how to respond to the horror. In literature, Don DeLillo was one of the first authors to pose a significant, fictionalized investigation of the day. In this thesis, Michael Jamieson argues that DeLillo’s post-9/11 work constitutes a new form of response to the tragedy. Drawing on the work of Marco Abel and his conception of maso-criticism, Jamieson argues that DeLillo works intensively into the attacks themselves as a way to avoid grand narratives that place them within a conventional story (the War on Terror, Islamic fundamentalism). His …


Inhabiting Modernism: Pernes, Portals, And Yeats’S Transitive Force, Daniel Gomes May 2010

Inhabiting Modernism: Pernes, Portals, And Yeats’S Transitive Force, Daniel Gomes

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

W.B. Yeats’s tentative entry into modernist poetics is often ascribed to his residence with Pound, to the dynamism of Vorticism, and to the turbulent social upheaval in Ireland and abroad during the early decades of the twentieth century. Without denying that such events contributed to Yeats’s marked stylistic shift in Responsibilities (1914), this thesis examines how Yeats’s antithetical impulse is heavily informed by Blake and Nietzsche and has direct bearing for how we read Yeats’s poetics through change and “transition.” Concurrent with his passive adjustment to, and resistance against, external forces and change, Yeats’s affirmation of pre-subjective forces, apocalyptic …


The Annie Prey Jorgensen Papers: Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction And Women's Rhetoric On The Plains, Renee Mcgill May 2010

The Annie Prey Jorgensen Papers: Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction And Women's Rhetoric On The Plains, Renee Mcgill

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the college and professional writing of Annie Prey Jorgensen, who attended the University of Nebraska during the 1890s as both an undergraduate and graduate student. Annie’s collection of papers, housed in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, offers composition and rhetoric significant insights about women college students’ rhetorical practices at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, Annie uses personal experience and narrative techniques to deploy a feminist rhetorical strategy that allows her to inscribe gendered experience into academic writing. Annie’s collection offers a cross-section of writing from three sites of inquiry—the papers …


Violets, Xu (Sherry) Wang May 2010

Violets, Xu (Sherry) Wang

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Violets is a multi-genre work that explores the complex relationships of Chinese women from the 1980s to the present day as they move through different settings—from the countryside of Zhejiang province, to the metropolis of Jiaxing city, to the suburbia of Omaha, NE. It was inspired by a story heard by the author about a Chinese woman whose husband left her for a year because she had a daughter instead of a son. Half of Violets is made up of a sustained, imagined story about a woman named Xinling and the year she spent as a single mother. It explores …


Why We Love Dusk, Scott C. Kratochvil Apr 2010

Why We Love Dusk, Scott C. Kratochvil

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a collection of original poems written at the University of Nebraska while studying literature. The introductory essay briefly explores what "truth" might mean at this time in history and whether or not we can do without it. The poems that follow are arranged like a chapbook so that they might influence each other and affect a reader together in ways that they could not otherwise.


Unravelling The Rebozo: The Effects Of Power On The Body In Sandra Cisneros’S Caramelo, Guadalupe V. Linares Apr 2010

Unravelling The Rebozo: The Effects Of Power On The Body In Sandra Cisneros’S Caramelo, Guadalupe V. Linares

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a literary, cultural, and theoretical analysis of Sandra Cisneros’s novel Caramelo. Caramelo traces the coming-of-age of its young protagonist, Celaya. Through this character, Cisneros reveals the impact of living between cultures. Born of a Mexican immigrant father and a working-class Mexican American mother, Celaya finds herself asked to choose sides. Celaya’s grandmother, Soledad, is the central secondary character on whom all others react. She embodies the effects of colonialism on this family. Through Soledad’s struggles, readers come to see the psychological damage caused by power relationships that privilege part of the self over the whole. In combination …


Pragmatism, Disciplinarity And Making The Work Of Writing Visible In The 21st Century, Michael W. Kelly Apr 2010

Pragmatism, Disciplinarity And Making The Work Of Writing Visible In The 21st Century, Michael W. Kelly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation outlines how Pragmatism, as a philosophy richly conceived, can act as a useful intervention on three levels ranging from the pedagogical issues surrounding teaching writing teacher to labor issues Composition. In contemporary writing center scholarship, conversations about the utility of theory are hotly debated. Throughout much of its disciplinary history, much writing center scholarship has taken a decidedly best practices approach to its research. This emphasis on applicability is challenged by the trend in some pockets of the field that have incorporated a theoretical bent into their work. The effect of this work has been met with skepticism. …


Fearing The "Turban'd Turk": Socio-Economic Access To Genre And The "Turks" Of Early Modern English Dramas And Broadside Ballads, Katie S. Sisneros Apr 2010

Fearing The "Turban'd Turk": Socio-Economic Access To Genre And The "Turks" Of Early Modern English Dramas And Broadside Ballads, Katie S. Sisneros

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores an important means for the non-noble and non-gentry population of England to read and interpret the figure of the Turk as textually represented: the broadside ballad. Cheap to print and produced on an expansive scale, broadside ballads had access to economic and geographic segments of England beyond the reach of the drama. Aimed at a far more general audience than theater-goers (especially during the Restoration period), broadside ballads provide an alternative literary interpretation of the Turk, one long-neglected in Anglo-Ottoman studies. Current scholarship’s almost-exclusive focus on drama has led to a progress narrative positing an evolution in …


Women Gathered On Flat Rooftops And Thumprints In Black Coffee, Sana M. Amoura-Patterson Apr 2010

Women Gathered On Flat Rooftops And Thumprints In Black Coffee, Sana M. Amoura-Patterson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops and Thumbprints in Black Coffee is a creative dissertation that examines the lives of Arab women living in Jordan and Arab immigrants living in the United States. The first portion of the dissertation, Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops is an excerpt from the early portion of the novel by the same name. These first 53 pages provide the background of the characters and highlights aspects that are culturally specific to the women of the stories. For example, issues of arranged marriages, funeral practices, women’s custody rights are all illustrated through these early stories. The early …


"Good English": Literacy And Institutional Systems At A Community Literacy Organization, Charise G. Alexander Apr 2010

"Good English": Literacy And Institutional Systems At A Community Literacy Organization, Charise G. Alexander

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the impact of institutions and the systems and communities of which they are a part on literacy instruction, practices, and rhetoric at a community literacy organization in Lincoln, Nebraska. A majority of students served by this organization are adult English Language Learners, many of whom receive instruction from volunteer tutors. In this unique context, a number of factors affect literacy learning, particularly the perpetuation of conservative, hegemonic discourses about literacy by the organizations which fund literacy education programming at this site.

The power dynamics at work in these granting organizations and in larger systems that control and …


Razorback, Frank Wheeler Mar 2010

Razorback, Frank Wheeler

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis contains the first five chapters of the novel titled RAZORBACK, written by Frank Wheeler Jr. It is a crime drama, set in the Arkansas Ozark Mountains. The main character, Conrad, is a reclusive woodworker living in the back woods. His estranged wife, Jennifer, pays him a visit after five years with little contact between them, and asks him to kill someone for her. She claims it is a matter of personal safety; the man she has been seeing socially has become violent and threatening. After some consideration, Conrad agrees. He has his own agenda, however, and he finds …


"The Future In The Instant": Posthumanism(S) In Early Modern English Drama, Farrah Lehman Mar 2010

"The Future In The Instant": Posthumanism(S) In Early Modern English Drama, Farrah Lehman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines prominent points of intersection between early modern English theatrical practices and posthumanist, post-cybernetic new media theory as a means of interrogating assumptions about “media narratives” (here, the development of dramatic blank verse), proto-Brechtian anti-illusionism, and sensory encounter related to the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth century stage. The arguments presented here in part rely on the work of three present-day critics: Mark B.N. Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, and Brian Massumi, all of whom explore posthumanist theory while addressing possibilities for posthumanist practices within the humanities. Examining a wide range of texts, including plays and pro-and anti-theater tracts, initially …


"Just A Girl": The Community-Centered Cult Television Heroine, 1995-2007, Tamy Burnett Jan 2010

"Just A Girl": The Community-Centered Cult Television Heroine, 1995-2007, Tamy Burnett

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Found in the most recent group of cult heroines on television, community-centered cult heroines share two key characteristics. The first is their youth and the related coming-of-age narratives that result. The second is their emphasis on communal heroic action that challenges traditional understandings of the hero and previous constructions of the cult heroine on television. Through close readings of Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dark Angel, and Veronica Mars, this project engages feminist theories of community and heroism alongside critical approaches to genre and narrative technique, identity performance theory, and visual media …


A Catalogue Of Everything In The World: Nebraska Stories, Yelizaveta P. Renfro Jan 2010

A Catalogue Of Everything In The World: Nebraska Stories, Yelizaveta P. Renfro

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A CATALOGUE OF EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD: NEBRASKA STORIES is a collection of linked short stories, all set in Nebraska, that explore the ways in which the forces of geography—being from or choosing to live in a particular place—affect identity and influence the course of lives. They feature a wide range of characters, from a bus driver mourning the death of his infant daughter to an octogenarian former doctor preparing for her death, from a young girl trying to cope with her parents' divorce to a woman whose obsession with a decades-old crime has literally taken over her life. Just …


American Poetry And The Daily Newspaper From The Rise Of The Penny Press To The New Journalism, Elizabeth M. Lorang Jan 2010

American Poetry And The Daily Newspaper From The Rise Of The Penny Press To The New Journalism, Elizabeth M. Lorang

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the relationship of poetry and the U.S. daily newspaper in the nineteenth century and begins the process of recovering and reevaluating nineteenth-century newspaper poetry. In doing so, it draws on and participates in current discussions about the role of poetry and poets in society, the importance of periodicals in the development and dissemination of American literature in the nineteenth century, and the value of studying non-canonical texts. The appearance and function of poems in daily newspapers changed over the course of the nineteenth century, and these changes were part of larger shifts in the newspaper and its …


Rethinking Repair, Monica Rentfrow Jan 2010

Rethinking Repair, Monica Rentfrow

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Rethinking Repair is a semi-autobiographical collection of serious and humorous poetic works that explores effects a body with dwarfism has had on one individual. Through personal experience, Rethinking Repair is a collection of poems that explores the effects a body with dwarfism has had on one person. Most of the poems lean on a precise moment when dwarfism—a rare medical condition present at birth—directly has influenced the emotion or outcome of a situation. Conversely, I illuminate moments when dwarfism has had absolutely no direct influence on my experiences; I do this to counterbalance the possible perception or belief that all …


Transcultural Transformation: African American And Native American Relations, Barbara S. Tracy Jan 2009

Transcultural Transformation: African American And Native American Relations, Barbara S. Tracy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by …


A Hand Of Steel In A Velvet Glove: Purpose And Fulfillment Through The Gender Sphere, Sylvie A. Shires Dec 2008

A Hand Of Steel In A Velvet Glove: Purpose And Fulfillment Through The Gender Sphere, Sylvie A. Shires

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Modern audiences have come to believe that the nineteenth-century woman was oppressed by a patriarchal society and that until women obtained the vote, they had no voice, and could exert no influence to improve either their lot or that of others. While many scholarly secondary sources, as well as popular culture, strongly support this view, this research challenges it, and posits that this generally accepted interpretation echoes stereotypes that became strong with the second wave of feminism, in the 1960s, but is not representative of nineteenth-century middle-class women in the Anglo-Saxon world.

This research examines the British middle-class woman of …


Academic Cultural Guides: Sponsors Of Academic Literacy Development, Luis Balmore Rivas Apr 2008

Academic Cultural Guides: Sponsors Of Academic Literacy Development, Luis Balmore Rivas

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation explores Hispanic/Latino students’ perceptions about language association and identity, the institution, and white professors at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. Issues addressed include the origin of a stigmatized relationship between Euro-Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. and its spill into academia, negative perceptions that affect students’ performance and persistence in the university, discussing the culture of power of the institution with students as a form of sponsorship, and providing academic literacy sponsorship through an Academic Cultural Guide role. The dissertation concludes with examples of strategies I have used in the first-year writing classroom to establish transparency of …


The Scientific Management Of Writing And The Residue Of Reform, Eric Turley Apr 2008

The Scientific Management Of Writing And The Residue Of Reform, Eric Turley

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Working at the intersection of composition, writing assessment, and school reform, this dissertation draws on an archival study of Progressive Era educational journals and a year-long qualitative study in a small urban district to examine the ways standardize writing tests are implemented as tools in public school reform. In the first half of the dissertation, I argue that administratively-minded Progressive Era school reformers, in a response to a “writing problem” framed around teacher inefficiency, designed tools for teachers to measure writing “objectively” in their classrooms; however, these tools were quickly used against teachers by administrators interested in efficiently managing schools …


E. B. White’S Environmental Web, Lynn Overholt Wake Dec 2007

E. B. White’S Environmental Web, Lynn Overholt Wake

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

E. B. White called Walden his favorite book and found in it “an invitation to life’s dance.” To read White ecocritically is to accept a similar invitation to broaden our environmental imagination. Although one or two of his essays are often anthologized as nature writing, critics have not read White environmentally. While emphasizing White’s three books for children, this dissertation reads across genre lines to examine his lifelong work. Drawing on Laurence Buell’s prismatic term, the study explores how White’s engagement with the natural world contributes to the renewal of our collective environmental imagination. Examining White’s affinity for animals, evident …


Democratic Relationships: An Institutional Way Of Life With/In The Writing Center, Katie Hupp Stahlnecker Apr 2007

Democratic Relationships: An Institutional Way Of Life With/In The Writing Center, Katie Hupp Stahlnecker

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this dissertation, I build upon the notion that for writing centers to thrive in the twenty-first century, they must reposition themselves not as marginal but as central to alliance building within the institution (Brannon and North). I tell the story of establishing one writing center’s mission that thrives on building democratic relationships within the institution and dissolving traditional academic hierarchies. At the core of our mission is the dialogical exchange that allows for student writers to be heard. The true work of establishing and preserving the integrity of the open forum we have created for student writers involves making …


Writing And Circulating Modern America: Journalism And The American Novelist, 1872-1938, Derek John Driedger Apr 2007

Writing And Circulating Modern America: Journalism And The American Novelist, 1872-1938, Derek John Driedger

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

My research began with the question, "How did former journalists depict aspects of the newspaper environment in late-nineteenth, early-twentieth-century fiction?" A historical reading of journalism and fiction places the emphasis on what historical moments or trends these writers documented, and how they presented their worldview. To present findings on how a journalism career proved beneficial for a novelist, I examine arguments debating the shared space between fact and fiction when writers tried to raise their readers' cultural awareness. My study pays particular attention to newspapers such as the New York Herald, the New York World, and the Atchison [Kansas] Globe. …


This Is My Idaho, Cynthia L. Struloeff May 2006

This Is My Idaho, Cynthia L. Struloeff

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This Is My Idaho is a collection of short stories set in or around the fictional town of Eagle City, Idaho, in southeast Idaho near the borders with Montana and Wyoming. There is a wildness in this part of the world, circled by high, unforgiving mountains, that resonates within the people there. The characters of this collection must hammer out their lives against this landscape. Some, like Mary in “What the Good Is,” and Ginny in “The Sugar Shell,” feel the mountains as a kind of barrier between them and the rest of the world and yearn to escape. Others, …


Identity And Authenticity: Explorations In Native American And Irish Literature And Culture, Drucilla M. Wall Apr 2006

Identity And Authenticity: Explorations In Native American And Irish Literature And Culture, Drucilla M. Wall

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This collection explores of some of the many ways in which Native American, Irish, and immigrant Irish-American cultures negotiate the complexities of how they are represented as "other," and how they represent themselves, through the literary and cultural practices and productions that define identity and construct meaning. The core issue that each chapter examines is one of authenticity and the means through which this often contested and vexed notion is performed. The Irish and American Indian points of view which I explore are certainly not the only ones that shed light on this issue, but these are the ones I …


Allusive Mechanics In Modern And Postmodern Fiction As Suggested By James Joyce In His Novel Dubliners, Kynan D. Connor Apr 2006

Allusive Mechanics In Modern And Postmodern Fiction As Suggested By James Joyce In His Novel Dubliners, Kynan D. Connor

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

James Joyce in his novel Dubliners conducts a series of narrative experiments with allusion, and in doing so suggests a new literary criticism based upon the allusive process. This new criticism of allusive mechanics considers the text in terms of its allusive potential for character—that is, the character is treated as capable of signification. Because Joyce can mimic the process of signification, it repositions the author to the act of writing and the reader to the act of reading. Character is greatly expanded through allusive mechanics because narrative elements like allusion in a text are treated as having a character-oriented …


At The Edge Of The Circle: Willa Cather And American Arts Communities, Andrew W. Jewell Aug 2004

At The Edge Of The Circle: Willa Cather And American Arts Communities, Andrew W. Jewell

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

During the pivotal years of Willa Cather's artistic development, she regularly engaged a variety of American arts communities that encouraged, challenged, and influenced her work and professional growth. Her interactions with these communities were an effort to locate a sustainable, meaningful relationship to her fellow artists. This dissertation explores her efforts by analyzing the character of the communities, chronicling Cather’s involvement within them, and interpreting the impact on Cather’s life and work.

After the Introduction, the chapters are organized to follow Cather as she experimented with various communal forms and developed her own relationship to the literary scene. Chapter one …