Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Otherworlds Of Men, Aaron Morris

English Theses & Dissertations

The Otherworlds of Men is a collection of short stories that draws equally from the traditions of speculative science fiction dystopias and western noir. The stories often have a plot grounded in gritty realism, similar to the stories of Annie Proulx, Daniel Woodrell, Cormac McCarthy, and Jim Harrison; however, the main character typically is typically injured by a psychic wound that leads to a speculative, otherworldly occurrence. The characters experience time travel, out of body experiences, wormholes to other worlds, spaceflight, distortions of relativistic physics, and, in one case, a character is haunted by Geronimo’s ghost. The characters experience these …

Algorithm Controls: An Examination Of Ethos, Agency, And Interfaces In The Fallout Series, Daniel Cox

English Theses & Dissertations

Presenting a framework for videogame agency based on relationships, the constraints on those relationships, and their context, an examination of the representations of ethos and karma, agency models, and interfaces in the Fallout series is shown. Reviewing ethos through its historical and quantifications across the games, the presentations of the Reputation and “Karma” systems across the games are examined as affecting player choice in different ways. Building across agency models and past scholarship, a temporal framework for agency is considered and applied to a case study of Fallout 3 (2008). Closing the framework through positioning actions as happening within layers …

Bbc News: Defining Britishness In The Early Twenty-First Century, Christine Gilroy-Reynolds

English Theses & Dissertations

According to the BBC’s 2006 Royal Charter, the BBC situations itself rhetorically within the notions of ‘public value’ and its commitment to, among other things, "d) representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities; e) bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK [...]"(2-3). In order to achieve these goals, the BBC must define that which it represents particularly when dealing with the news. While BBC News claims to be impartial, rhetorically, impartiality is impossible when committing to the pursuit of definition and representation. In defining “Britishness,” BBC News must negotiate Britain’s global position as post-colonial, …

Women’S Entrance Into The Fire Department: A Theory Of Collaboration And Crisis, Sarah Vee Moseley

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation builds on recent feminist rhetorical scholarship of women’s entrance into the workplace by considering women’s fire department contributions across the twentieth century, from ladies auxiliaries, to volunteer firefighting, to career firefighting, taking up the call to examine “larger histories of gender” to explore re/gendering in different times and places of professions, labor, and workspaces (Hallenback and Smith 201-202). Expanding Lindal Buchanan’s theory of collaboration by bringing in sociology research on crisis, I offer a framework for understanding gendering and women’s movement into and out of foreground fire department service: during the crisis of fire, if there are insufficient …

Unconditional Positive Regard, Tyler Beckett

English Theses & Dissertations

This collection of short stories brings together the work of Tyler Beckett for the first time, representing the breadth and depth of his skill in fiction. His stories largely focus on the small towns of the American South, and the identities that those towns' residents create for themselves. Through this investigation we see questions on community, belonging, outsiders, and the challenges of joining communities, as well as the question of whether those communities are worth joining. Throughout the collection, Mr. Beckett uses his clear, lucid prose to engage with his characters in a tender way, even as they commit their …

Mexican Bingo, Amanda Michelle Galvan Huynh

English Theses & Dissertations

This collection of poetry is an elegy for what I have lost and what I have left behind in order to reach this point in my education. These poems attempt to be a witness to the Latinx community who migrated across Texas for field work, for a better future, and for their children. The collection is meant to communicate the loss of culture, generational differences, familial struggles, assimilation, health, womanhood, and trauma. While these poems are not all encompassing, they are a beginning and a way for me to better understand my role as a poet.

New Elegies, Sarah Mccall

English Theses & Dissertations

This manuscript investigates a poetics of desire—how desire manifests in and around the self, the body, and the world. Bearing witness to desire has afforded me an opportunity to develop and refine my own sensibility in my poems, which are deeply personal and narrative by nature, and craft my work around these related themes: Spirituality, marriage, grief, home, identity, sobriety, love, and even racial and environmental concerns. In my work, desire represents a container for a broad consideration of yearning, and wanting—and how to manage such feelings every day, in the world.

Elegy motivates many of these poems, though like …

Healthy Living And Other Electives, Lamar Giles

English Theses & Dissertations

Healthy Living and Other Electives is an excerpt of a young adult novel that follows a sixteen-year-old boy, Del Rainey, as he pursues a romantic relationship with a member of his church’s Purity Pledge class. In addition to romance, Del also seeks a better understanding of manhood through interactions with his peers and father. Along the way, we discover how messily intertwined the church, school system, and lives of teenagers are in Del’s small Virginia town. The novel examines themes of religion, bureaucracy, and toxic masculinity.

Being Retained: Perspective Of The Online First-Year Composition Student, Catrina Marie Mitchum

English Theses & Dissertations

Keeping students in college classrooms can be a struggle, but keeping them in an online classroom is an even more difficult feat. While the field of retention research has expanded its focus beyond traditional four-year students to include a variety of non-traditional student situations, including online, it has yet to focus efforts on online first-year composition at the community college. The first-year of college has been shown to be the most critical in student retention at the institutional level, which puts first-year composition in a potentially influential position. The fact that fewer students are retained in online courses than face-to-face …

With Light, Emily Howell

English Theses & Dissertations

I am a photographer. I’ve spent years training myself to shut out 99.9% of the world, see things with one eye closed through the frame of my viewfinder and stop time for a single instant. With Light is a collection of lyrical nonfiction essays that explore those instants. Thematically, the essays focus largely on place, time and a search for a sense of belonging. In addition, they touch on grief, longing, fear, friendship, art and love. They are steeped in images. They are lyrical. In short, they are pieces from an album documenting my search for home.

Dead Cooks, Aaron David Lawhon

English Theses & Dissertations

Dead Cooks is a collection of short stories set in the cities of Austin and San Antonio Texas. Some recurring themes throughout the collection are class exploitation, addiction, and cycles of abuse. Characters often feel trapped in their lives as they try to resist the cycles in which they are trapped. They mostly fail, but sometimes find moments of strange grace, solidarity, and connection.

A Little Bit Of A Breakdown, Margaret Libby

English Theses & Dissertations

These stories have to do with a little bit of a breakdown. The characters are old, young, and in between. Some are men; some are women. Some are breaking, some are broken, and some are coming out on the other side.

This collection examines the lives of six people, their breakdowns, and what they do about it.

Intersexion, Cynthia Davis

English Theses & Dissertations

A combination of memoir, reportage, and opinion writing, Intersexion explores the realities of growing up intersex while also examining the conservative mindset that caused the narrator—a happily married suburban mother—to lose a tenure-track position at a Christian university for being unwilling to label Danny’s intersex condition as “repugnant” and “offensive to God.”