Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Story Of Identity: Narrative Self-Fashioning In Kazuo Ishiguro’S A Pale View Of Hills And When We Were Orphans, Hayley Angle

English Theses

The moments we remember from our lives are the foundation of the stories we tell about ourselves. I have spent many a night trying to fall asleep by running through my memories like the montage scene of a movie—clips of a funny moment with a friend, the smile of a loved one, a stupid thing I said to someone I was supposed to impress. These moments I remember portray, at the deepest level, who I want to be, who I am scared to be, and who I most understand myself to be. Intentional remembrance, as opposed to actual experience, tends …

Cognitive Borderlands: Understanding Marginalized Identity In The Work Of Ada Limón, Ashley Hope Pérez, And Carmen Maria Machado, Monica Barbay

English Theses

Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking theoretical and creative collection of essays entitled Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza provides foundational ideas and principles to consider the physical, mental, and emotional struggles of those living along the U.S.-Mexican border. This thesis furthers this discussion by contemplating what happens psychologically to those residing in physical and cognitive borderlands, including but not limited to the U.S.-Mexican border. Specifically, I develop a framework to conceptualize borderlands of the mind, focusing on people-groups who experience multiple kinds of marginalization. I argue that these layers of marginalization negatively impact one’s sense of self, fostering a cognitive divide …

Sacrifice And Emotional Communities In Early Modern Literature, Kathryn C. Patton

English Theses

The early modern period in England was a time of intense political, religious, and cultural upheaval. Between the Protestant Reformation and urbanization, England experienced significant ideological changes as well as the growing pains of overpopulation and plague in its major cities. The literature of the time illustrates the emotional complexity that many of the authors and citizens experienced firsthand as a result of the tumult in England. This thesis focuses specifically on the period during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and James I, using the works of Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne as structural buoys for the paper, …

Stomach And Womb: Early Modern Recipes For The Perinatal Woman, Grace E. Beacham

English Theses

Stomach and Womb examines the recipes from early modern obstetrical treatises and midwifery manuals, revealing an ontology of parturiency that winds through the concurrent Shakespearean plays, Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale. Gynecological and obstetrical texts from the era detail how pregnant women were to order themselves after conception with utmost concern for their diet, governing the outputs of their bodies by managing the inputs, the foods they ingested before, during, and after pregnancy and childbirth. Further, the associated images of the stomach and the womb during this time present an essential link between foodways and a construct of …

The Children’S Final Girl: Exploring Feminism, Horror, And Adolescence In Coraline, The Last Cuentista, And A Series Of Unfortunate Events, Hannah Rose Lussier

English Theses

The uses of femininity throughout the horror genre have been widely studied in order to identify the role of the woman within these works. This thesis works to apply Carol Clover’s trope of the Final Girl to contemporary children’s horror texts in order to unveil the underlying schematics that shape adolescent characters. Using Neill Gaiman’s Coraline, Donna Barba Higuera’s The Last Cuentista, and Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning, this thesis aims to position contemporary children’s protagonists as the Final Girl, which in turn attempts to explain the uses and misuses of common horror motifs such …

Recognizing Possibility: Reflections On The Messianic Dimensions Of Being, Language, And Space, Khalif M. Vernon

English Theses

This thesis seeks to reveal the messianic potentialities that inhere in the fundamental categories of experience. I analyze diverse sources in western intellectual history, from the classical period to our contemporary epoch, to discern techniques to think through our collective malaise, that is to both identify the dynamics that have produced our malaise and how to use thought and recognition as acts of generative resistance. I will argue throughout that the common modalities of experience: language, space, and historicity, even if they reveal themselves as lack, through their (dis)concealment gesture at messianic forms of life, and I will try to …

Invoking La Llorona: Abjection As A Site Of Power In Jovita González, Cherrie Moraga, And Jayro Bustamante, Samantha Donoso

English Theses

This thesis seeks to analyze how La Llorona’s abjection allows her and those who call on her to exist as specters, haunting the space of their personal, cultural, or historical trauma to make sense of their abuses and gain power to combat the oppressive structures that allowed for abuse to occur. I include both Historical and Literary contexts to locate La Llorona as a transcultural and hemispheric conduit that provides a space for the feminine collective to find the familiar in the grotesque and carve out a space for themselves in a society that would otherwise force them into silence. …

Exploring The Scp Wiki: Community, Digital Horror, And Apocalyptic Fiction, Justin M. Jones

English Theses

The SCP is a body of user-submitted fiction broadly classified as horror and often compared to other user-submitted horror such as Creepypasta. While these comparisons have been made in research and among the SCP community, the SCP seems to function differently than other such sites. Very little research has been done on the SCP and what exists examines it as a work of horror and as an example of emerging online folklore. This thesis further expands upon this research by examining how the unique community participating on the SCP Wiki shapes the text, how the SCP is not just a …

The Book - The Trauma, The Writing And The Healing, Hillorie S. Mclarty

English Theses

This is a trauma informed memoir based on letters that my 3 best friends and I wrote from September 1965 - May 1966. It is also a study of childhood verbal and sexual abuse, the effects of trauma on the brain, and the healing through writing.

Identifying Loss, Animating Melancholy: Asian-American Narratives In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Spirited Away, And Bao, Jered Connery Mabaquiao

English Theses

Animated film provides a complex illustration of the creativity behind constructing narratives. This thesis aims to explore the way that racial and cultural identity are displayed within animated film. The purpose of this thesis will be paying close attention to the intersections of psychoanalytic theories of loss that are placed on a spectrum with terms such as trauma, mourning and melancholia all within the scope of racial identification. These terms will be worked through from texts from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan as well as works that expand on these notions. These psychoanalytic texts will be applied to Nickelodeon's “Avatar: …

The Power Of Reading In The Comic Feminine Middlebrow Novel, Amy Rambo

English Theses

Often overlooked in critical discussions of British Literature produced in the early twentieth century, comic feminine middlebrow novels offer unique insights into the lives of middle-class women in the 1930s. The novels within this genre feature strong female characters negotiating issues of class and gender. However, comic feminine middlebrow novels also contain subtle conversations regarding the nature of reading and the importance of middlebrow texts in the lives of middle-class women. This thesis examines four such middlebrow novels: Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford, and Diary of a …

Pandemic Pedagogy: A Case Study Of Commenting Practices In A Pandemic, Nicholas G. Nicklin

English Theses

This thesis reviews best practices for commenting on student submission and reports the findings of a case study from the 2020 spring semester.

Accurate Or Aspirational? A Rhetorical Analysis Of One University's Representation Of Student Diversity, Kristen Coady Spaeth

English Theses

When approaching diversity within higher education, colleges and universities champion diversity initiatives as significant goals. Prospective students may choose colleges based on the aspirational role model, which inspires individuals who see themselves in visual representations (Allen & Collison, 2020). A 2013 Journal of Marketing for Higher Education study analyzed how 165 higher education institutions each portrayed racial and ethnic diversity of their student population. The study found that a majority of institutions presents inflated images of diversity to prospective students who were significantly different from the current student body (Pippert et al., 2013). This data is representative of findings from …

Textual Persuasion: Trauma Representation In Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves, Elizabeth A. Wall

English Theses

Textualization is the act of putting words on a page. Typography is the style and way in which the textualization of the text appears to the reader. Together, textualization and typography have the ability to coerce the reader into a specific reading pattern. Mark Z. Danielewski has combined textualization and typography in his complex novel House of Leaves as a unique attempt to represent trauma in the space between language and written language. Typical textual play becomes textual persuasion as the reader is guided through the labyrinth of text by typographical coercion. In this novel, these elements of play essentially …

Literary Needle Drops: The Use Of Music As A Postmodern Tool In Contemporary Fiction, Adan S. Alvarado

English Theses

An examination of musical references (“literary needle drops”) in contemporary literature: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. The novels are viewed through the various conceptual lens, literary and otherwise, such as Marcel Danesi’s Modal Flow Principle or “perceptual stimulations” as defined by Guillemette Bolens.

Egan’s novel utilizes punk bands and tracks to construct her characters’ identities, and send them on a journey through lost time to reflect on who they once were, who they have become, and whether they have been able to …

Reformed Men: Alternative Masculinities In Experimental American Literature, Manuel Reza

English Theses

Gender is an integral aspect to one’s lived experience; however, the collective understanding of gender is constantly being redefined. Consequently, the expectations attached to a particular gender identity are also being questioned. Current gender discourse calls attention to the fluidity of gender and experiences which diverge from traditional representations of gender. This thesis discusses works of contemporary experimental American literature from the perspective of masculinity studies. As a whole, masculinity studies seeks to address issues related to traditional male depictions in literature. This thesis aims to show how authors utilize traditional and experimental narrative elements to present alternatives to prescribed …

Girlpwrd: Amplifying Silenced Voices Of Women Through Digital Storytelling, Brooke Schumann

English Theses

Drawing on data from a multi-month digital storytelling community project, this qualitative case study offers portraits of three marginalized women who re-author pivotal moments of silencing in their lives. The foundational framework blends scholarship on rhetorical silence, rhetorical listening, and semiotics of multimodal expression. These cases demonstrate how digital storytelling allows women a space to form and give voice to their silence, where they are the empowered agents of their own stories. The digital platform elevates these underrepresented narratives by creating new pathways for listening.

A Call To Create: Poetry As Healing And One Nurse’S Self-Discovery, Kim Cornett Henry, Kim Cornett Henry

English Theses

Florence Nightingale’s vision for nursing has changed greatly in the past one hundred and fifty years, with nursing’s identity replaced with an emphasis on science over caring. The fast-paced, technologically sophisticated environments, designed to meet the declining health of an American public, have resulted in nurses who are being pulled away from nurse-to-patient caring acts and the reasons they felt called to become nurses. These changes have had detrimental psychological and emotional effects on nurses and are especially evident in Intensive Care nurses. Expressive writing as poetry, autoethnography, and participation in vibrant writing communities offer nurses experiences for healing, voice, …

A Quantification Of Magnitude In The Writing Of James Baldwin: A Digital Recovery Work, Robert Tate Morrison

English Theses

This thesis seeks to utilize a distant reading of seventeen essays written by James Baldwin alongside sustained close readings of three topics within those essays in order to understand why Baldwin has maintained increased popularity when the original historical context of the essays resulted in fame and critical acclaim, but not major literary awards. The author ran these seventeen essays through topic modeling software, and then engaged with critical and scholarly close readings to establish qualitative and quantitative explanations of patterns that exist in Baldwin’s work. By connecting the findings of work under both the digital humanities as well as …

Procedural Rhetoric And Language: How The Orwell Videogames Series Emphasizes The Importance Of Context In Content, Jessica Kimber

English Theses

Procedural Rhetoric and Language: How the Orwell Videogames Series Emphasizes the Importance of Context in Content

Implementing Process Pedagogy In The High School Classroom: How To Improve Student Writing While Helping Students Enjoy Writing, Laura Mahaney

English Theses

Traditionally and currently, teachers also focus on the product and not the process in their own classroom. They will assign a paper with a final due date, students turn in their papers without having anyone else look at it beforehand, and students will get a final grade on what is their first draft. This way of teaching writing does not show students how to improve their writing. With this type of assessment, the natural processes of a person’s mind while writing is ignored; students are expected to have everything in their paper in the first draft and without support. Process …

Ontological (Free) Agency: The Erasure, Commodification, And Autonomy Of Black Athletes, Abraham Yabar Salinas

English Theses

The National Football League wields a powerful influence on American society and holds an authoritative sway over various sociopolitical discourses, each influencing the degrees of interaction between people of different origins, cultural backgrounds and identities. The purpose of this research is to examine how the NFL is product of a network of racial discrimination directed at Black people within the league. This research examines how the National Football League functions as a white-dominated structure of power in order to manipulate, exploit, and erase Black bodies for the benefit of multi-billion-dollar profits. This study focuses on how Black players are subject …

Race And Social Injustice: The Representations In Children's Picture Books, 2016-2020, Brittany Boisvert

English Theses

This project is an examination of race and representations of social injustice in children’s picture books from 2016-2020 and is informed by black feminist theory and children’s literary criticism. The objective is to examine through a critical race theory lens how these texts reflect concerns related to race and racism that surfaced during the Trump Administration, specifically police brutality. As these texts form and inform an accurate portrayal of the human experience (childhood to adulthood), the analysis will examine why there is a dearth of these kinds of representations in the Obama era, and the sudden influx of picture books …

Reopening The Temple School: Reforming Contemporary Education With The Transcendentalists, Richard Evan Miller

English Theses

A conversation surrounding reform in American education has been in play for two centuries. In 1834, Bronson Alcott’s Temple School challenged traditional modes of education with his conversational approach in the classroom. His methods encouraged students to self-reflect on their relationship to nature, rather than conform to a standardized knowledge system common in public schools. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, his Transcendentalist contemporary and teaching assistant, published her Record of a School in 1835 to record Alcott’s interactions with students and display to the public the effectiveness of their reformed approach to education. Fast-forward to the current climate in America, and one …

Justice For The Fallen Woman, Terri Weaver

English Theses

By analyzing the experiences of four different incidents of shaming women—Dallas police officers photographing partially nude prostitutes during booking, Anita Hill, Monica Lewinksky, and Christine Blasey-Ford—in contemporary American History in the same way as one would analyze literature, there becomes similarities between the archetype of the fallen woman and the treatment of the women. Each situation is paired with literary texts including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. This pairing helps to reveal that the archetype of the fallen woman may influence social praxis, …

The Case Of Nemo Nobody: A Lacanian Study Of The Traumatic And Neurotic Relationships Of The Man Who Doesn't Exist, Brittany N. Sanders

English Theses

Jaco Van Dormael’s 2009 film Mr. Nobody introduces us to Nemo Nobody, “the man who doesn’t exist.” Nemo is born with the impossible gift of omniscience and exercises this ability to know several of his possible lives before they occur. His childhood is characterized by ontological questions concerning time, existence, choices, and chance. Nemo’s inability to answer unanswerable questions sources the trauma that stems from the moment his life literally splits in two. Nemo’s parents separate when he is nine, and they leave it up to him to decide if he wants to leave with his mother or stay with …

Look At Her: The Subversive Spectacle Of Grande Dame Guignol Cinema, Michelle Smith

English Theses

While the Grande Dame Guignol films of the early 1960s served in their time to capitalize on the reputations of aging female stars and the growing popularity of the horror genre, an updated reading of this subgenre proves that it is rich with social critique regarding the feminine experience, social performance, and the tendencies of classical Hollywood cinema that promote a dominant, patriarchal social narrative. While many popular and critical responses diminish them as “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation” films, the Grande Dame Guignol tradition’s transformation of its actresses from glamorous icons to unrecognizable villains rejects such limiting appraisals by focusing on …

This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering The Feminine Voice In Nabokov's Lolita, Amanda Wulforst

English Theses

Sigmund Freud established psychoanalysis as an attempt to uncover the inner mechanics of the human mind and treat mental neuroses. With this theory, Freud asserts that intrapsychic tensions between the conscious and unconscious can produce psychological issues. For instance, Freud addresses two types of emotional responses to loss in “Mourning and Melancholia.” In this essay, Freud states that mourning is a normal, conscious reaction to the libido’s forced detachment from a loved object. Conversely, Freud classifies melancholia as the extreme anguish over a lost ideal deeply buried in the unconscious; without an object-cathexis, the newly freed libido forms an identification …

Happily-Ever-After: An Exploration Of Nineteenth-Century Laws, Marriage, And African-American Representation, Sarah Clayburn

English Theses

This thesis moves beyond the moral messages of true womanhood found in eighteenth century British-American sentimental novels to examine the alternative lessons taught in nineteenth century African-American literature. In doing so, I explore the relationship between laws, race, and literature to investigate complex questions such as: what moral lessons about the institution of marriage are conveyed in early African-American novels? How did early American laws and policies affect these moral lessons? Lastly, how have marriage, laws, and traditions affected the representation of African-American characters in novels and shaped identities within African-American communities? Through the lens of critical race theory, feminist …

Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres: Utilizing Genres To Explore Literary Themes Through Genre Fiction, Michael W. Rickard Ii

English Theses

Genre fiction can be used to explore literary themes found in marginalized literature such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo or Blood Money, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Each author uses the respective genres of hard-boiled detective fiction, American Western literature, and science fiction to explore the elements of borderland literature and the neo-slave narrative. These elements include hybrid identities, the clash between two cultures, disjunctive localities, and the marginalization of both ethnic groups and women. This thesis will show how each genre’s elements are used to further explore the elements of …