American Studies Commons^™

American Mythology: How Storytelling Shapes Modern Cultural Perceptions, Kristin Maynard

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis will examine the American storytelling tradition, paying particular attention to American folktales and legends that arose as the nation expanded westward, such as the stories of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Billy the Kid, etc. This text will utilize a lens of European narrative tradition (especially those which lent themselves to the written records of oral fairy tales and folktales) and trace the cultural significance and social purpose of these formative American stories. I will discuss the reasons why we so readily recognize the echoes of outside narrative traditions in American storytelling and the ethical implications of these narratives …

Be A Man: Childhood, Masculinity, Mental Hygiene, And The Asylum In The 1950'S, Emily Lonna Miller

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This project studies the use of mental hygiene films in the 1950s to understand the American ideal of gender, sex roles, and mental health. Focusing specifically on masculinity, this project shows that psychologists and psychiatrists of the mid-twentieth century helped to define what it meant to be a real man in America. Sources for this research included mental hygiene films, psychological studies and articles from the 1950s, and news broadcasts. Upon examination of these sources, it becomes clear that mental health specialists were concerned with the development of correct masculinity in male children and becoming the modern doctors that could …

The Cape Fear Ran Red: Memory Of The Wilmington Race Riot And Coup D'État Of 1898, Jacob Michael Thomas

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On November 10, 1898 the city of Wilmington erupted in racial violence as the members of the white population massacred anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred of the black citizenry. The result of the Wilmington Race Riot was the reassertion of white supremacy in North Carolina and a flip in Wilmington’s population, as whites became the majority. This paper will argue that the events of the Wilmington Race Riot and Coup D’état came about from the direct interference of Wilmington’s white elite along with outside interference from Democratic Party Leaders across the state of North Carolina as well as the …

The "Noble Savage" In American Music And Literature, 1790-1855, Jacob Mathew Somers

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, America entered a period of unprecedented territorial expansion, economic growth, and political unity. During this time American intellectuals, writers, and musicians began to contemplate the possibility of a national high culture to match the country’s glorious social and political achievements. Newly founded periodicals urged American authors and artists to adopt national themes and materials to replace those imported from abroad, and for the first time Americans began producing their own literary, artistic, and musical works on a previously inconceivable scale. Though American writers and composers explored a wide range of “national themes,” …

Missing Mother: The Female Protagonist's Regression To The Imaginary Order In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House, The Sundial, And We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Julie Ann Baker

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study examines the psyches of the female protagonists from three of Shirley Jackson’s Gothic novels: Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, Aunt Fanny Halloran in The Sundial, and Merricat Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A psychoanalytic and feminist reading is applied to the texts to elucidate the characters’ rejection of the Symbolic Order and regression to the Imaginary Order, and Lacan’s theories of the Desire of the Mother and objet petit a are also applied to the texts to further delineate this regression. Julia Kristeva’s work regarding the lost object of the mother …

The Power To Overcome: The Resistance And Resiliency Of Black Motherhood, Nathan Full

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Motherhood is not a monolithic experience. The intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class are integral facets that influence and control how one practices maternity, especially in a white hegemonic state. Further, control and choice serve as contributing factors, influencing the level of control women have over entering maternity and how a mother claims ties to her offspring. With these intersectional factors and control measures combined, motherhood is a complicated matter, one that influences how women practice maternity. The practice of motherhood is influenced by race, with black women experiencing a historical struggle in their relationships with motherhood. These difficulties …

"Or This Whole Affair Is A Failure": A Special Treasury Agent's Observations Of The Port Royal Experiment, Port Royal, South Carolina, April To May, 1862, Michael Edward Scott Emett

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis covers two critical months (April and May, 1862) during the Port Royal Experiment, which took place during the Civil War in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. This abolitionist-influenced experiment has been enriched by numerous primary sources from a range of people: military officials, General Superintendents of the Treasury, abolitionists and educators. However, this topic has been missing one important source: Special Treasury Agents. These men implemented the orders of various groups involved with the Experiment. The unpublished papers of one such agent, James Severance, provides a new depth in Port Royal analysis. This firsthand account shows the …

"Let Us Bury And Forget:" Civil War Memory And Identity In Cabell County, West Virginia, 1865-1915, Seth Adam Nichols

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis covers the events of the Civil War in Cabell County, West Virginia, and how those events were remembered by the county’s residents in the decades after the war. It provides a brief look at the early development of the county and how its inhabitants sought to exploit the county’s topography in order to facilitate commercial investment in the region. Cabell Countians were deeply divided and several skirmishes between Union and Confederate forces produced a time of terror and hardship. When the war was over, Cabell Countians sought a return to normality and to renew projects that might bring …

Mike & Molly -- An Other World, Maureen Elizabeth Johnson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis explores the impact of the television show Mike & Molly on the modern debate related to fat in America. The thesis uses the work of Michel Foucault as well as disability scholars such as Lennard Davis and feminist scholars such as bell hooks to examine how a comedy show like Mike & Molly can further disenfranchise fat people in society. The thesis shows that fat makes people an Other in society, and television shows and other forms of comedy that mock those who are fat just reinforce that Other status.

Mothers At Work: Reconstruction And Deconstruction Of Patriarchy In Gone With The Wind, Catherine Willa Staley

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In this thesis, I explore the performances of motherhood in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and how those performances conflict with culturally constructed expectations of that role. An analysis of Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes, and how each woman compares to the South’s model for motherhood, reveals implications that extend beyond the novel’s Civil War setting to reveal the ongoing negotiation of modern readers still living within patriarchal conceptions of mothering. In Chapter 1, I outline the novel’s spectrum of motherhood, which is composed of characters who nurture and manage others. Each individual on that spectrum contributes to or …

After A Funeral, Before A Test; And Other Stories, David Stewart Robinson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

After a Funeral, Before a Test; and Other Stories is a collection of nine fictional short stories. Their focus is diverse in regard to multiple aspects of creative fiction: subject matter, theme, style, setting and characters. Despite the array of material, one common method was to provide narration that would invite readers to make their own interpretation rather than to present overt, didactic stories. This narrative strategy was accomplished by using fictional concepts of setting, the objective correlative, and literary minimalism. Other elements include surrealism, Hemingway’s “iceberg effect,” and psychologically complex narrators. Literary influences include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great …

Literacy, Discourse, And Identity: The Working-Class Appalachian Woman Academic, Sarah Marie Mcconnell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Drawing on conversations about the politics surrounding literacy acquisition, I take a deeper look into the effects of obtaining membership within an academic discourse community on Appalachian women from the working class. The tensions that develop between the two opposing discourses promotes a sense of loss as they create distance between these women and their home community, alter relationships, and disrupt identity. Working-class Appalachian women occupy the borderlands between discourses: one foot in their Appalachian community; the other in their academic community. They negotiate their fragmented identities in order to play the appropriate role within the appropriate context. Their status …

Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis combines history, rhetoric, and feminist identity studies to discuss the subject of black lung disease and the Appalachian coal miner. The first chapter examines the "evolution of mentalities" in historical and popular discourse surrounding the miner, which reflects James V. Catano's subversive form of the self-making identity in Ragged Dicks. The second chapter uses the feminist theory of silence as a form of control and power to understand the absence of black lung disease from the literature of coal. The final chapter is a case study of the correspondence between Congressional Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and …

West Virginian Dancers: The Creation And Development Of The West Virginia Ballet Festival/West Virginia Dance Festival Community, Lauren Angel

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis examines the West Virginia Ballet Festival (WVBF), which began in 1968 and became the West Virginia Dance Festival (WVDF) in 1981. This work studies the four groups that made up the festival community, including the West Virginia performance dance teachers who founded the festival, the West Virginia performance dance students who attend the events, the out-of-state professional guest artists who taught and performed at the festivals, and the nonartistic professional administrators who organized the WVDF. The WVBF/WVDF was part of West Virginia regional culture and the national performance dance boom. I argue that performance dance must be incorporated …

Storm Chaser, Samir Ali Abdel-Aziz

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Storm Chaser is a work of fiction that uses strange, almost supernatural occurrences to symbolically represent various meanings and truths for different characters. Works of fiction that influenced Storm Chaser include The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel. Reappearing themes include sacrifice, the desire to live a life of purpose, freewill, and the fear of becoming one’s parents.

Persistence: "My Grandmother's Eyes" And Other Memories, Christine Fede Williams

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Persistence: “My Grandmother’s Eyes” and Other Memories is a collection of five essays based on the author’s life. “My Grandmother’s Eyes” depicts the difficult, but loving, communication between the author and her grandmother, who speaks Italian as a first language. “Christmas: A Journey” compares and contrasts the celebration of Christmas in the author’s Italian-American family and her celebration of Christmas as an adult. “Room in My Heart” describes the events leading up to a decision to adopt a child. “Renaming Oriental Avenue” follows three threads: the author’s relationship to the Monopoly game; the author’s study of the Japanese language and …

Bedtime Stories : How To Hope And Cope With The American Dream, Sabrina Jones

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

A multi-genre work combining New Journalism and literary analysis. The narrator (played by ―Girl in the bedtime stories) presents a critical essay exploring destabilized truths and dangers in an American dream that turns modern man into a machine. The goal is to show how the dream has evolved from the original Puritan dream set out by early American settlers/writers to the Postmodern vision of success (or failure) we read about today and what kind of effect this dream has on the average scholar. The thesis is broken up by reflections on her learning imbedded in dialogue with her always opinionated …

Metaphysics And The Charge Of Misanthropy : Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “Circles” As A Cipher For Understanding The Connection Between Robinson Jeffers And Herman Melville, Hunter Stark

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Herman Melville’s and Robinson Jeffers’s metaphysical thoughts reflect Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of looking towards Nature for discovery; all three writers’ observations of Nature influence how they see humanity’s place in existence. Both Melville and Jeffers observe Nature decentralizing humanity, which distinguishes their views from Emerson’s. Where Jeffers’s verse sternly voices this message, openly criticizing the anthropocentric viewpoint, Melville utilizes humor, subtly confronting the anthropocentric proponent and downplaying humanity’s power. Jeffers garners the label of misanthrope, whereas Melville’s metaphysical realm in Moby-Dick largely escapes this charge with the masking quality of his humor. Comparing both writers’ texts to an Emersonian …

Writing The Wrongs : A Comparison Of Two Female Slave Narratives, Miya Hunter-Willis

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis compares slave narratives written by Mattie J. Jackson and Kate Drumgoold. Both narrators recalled incidents that showed how slavery and the environment during the Reconstruction period created physical and psychological obstacles for women. Each narrator challenged the Cult of True Womanhood by showing that despite the stereotypes created to keep them subordinate there were African American women who successfully used their knowledge of white society to circumvent a system that tried to keep their race enslaved. Despite the 30 years that separate the publication of these two narratives, the legacy of education attainment emerges as a key part …

The Body Of Light : Poems, Alicia Matheny

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This creative thesis explores the different facets of Pink Floyd and their music, drawing inspiration from albums varying from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) to Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Using images drawn from nature, the cosmos, and Pagan mythology, this thesis also incorporates biographical details found in Nicholas Schaffner’s important biography, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (New York: Harmony Books, 1991). There are also experiments with form in the poems, in that in many of the poems, instead of commas, there are tab spaces. Each space expresses the silence between each word. …

Interrupting The Puppet Master: (Un)Reliability And Metatextuality In Dave Eggers’S You Shall Know Our Velocity, Suzanne R. Samples

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In 2002 Dave Eggers (who had just come off of the success of a Pulitzer Prize nominated memoir about the death of his parents and the influx of cash that ensued) published a novel titled You Shall Know Our Velocity. Within three years the novel underwent significant alterations that changed the plot’s original meaning. Most notably, some of the printings of the novel contain an additional section of text called “An Interruption” written by the best friend (Hand) of the original narrator (Will); this additional text destroys Will’s original plot and makes the reader question the reliability of the text. …

From Man To Meteor: Nineteenth Century American Writers And The Figure Of John Brown, Amanda Benigni

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On November 2, 1859, John Brown laid siege to the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, then Virginia, in an effort to seize weaponry which he planned to employ in a full scale slave insurrection. From the moment he entered the public eye during his brief trial and execution, John Brown and his legacy were figured and refigured by prominent writers and thinkers of the time. The result of this refiguring was an image under constant metamorphosis. As the image of John Brown cycled through the Civil War, it moved further and further from the actual man and became a metaphor …

I Am Prosper, I Am Ariel, I Am Caliban: A Metatheatrical Approach To Neil Gaiman’S The Sandman, Leah E. Haydu

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In this paper, I use a primarily close-reading approach to examine the metatheatrical elements of William Shakespeare’s representation in Neil Gaiman’s comic book series The Sandman. This involves examinations of individual panels throughout three different issues of the series in order to uncover how Shakespeare is presented, as well as how he, in turn, affects the presentation of other characters, and how these both affect the view which the reader might form of not only Shakespeare, but of Gaiman himself. In doing so, I establish the existence of a new, related genre: metacomics. Similar to metatheatrics, this approach relates …

Nothing Personal : A Collection Of Nonfiction Essays Exposing The Perverted Experiences Of Life, Interactions, And Responses, Benjamin P. Taylor

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Nothing Personal is a collection of nonfiction essays playfully written in response to subtle misunderstandings. Such misunderstandings, in this creative thesis, are fueled by an unexplained divorce, alcoholism, the new absence of love, and the difference between the personal and the traditional church. The essays also expose the science of conversation and other lighter occurrences and happenings in an esteemed pursuit to live life more humorously.

The Description Of The Characters In Herman Melville's White-Jacket, Or The World In A Man-Of-War, Toru Nishiura

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Many characters who have various personalities app ear in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket . However, few critics have comprehensively examined the action and the characteristics of them in detail. In this thesis, I explore Melville’s depiction of the battleship world in this novel by clarifying the narrator ’s standard to judge ot her characters. In White-Jacket, the whole story is narrated by White-Jacket; therefore, the characteristics of his narrative clarify the theme of this novel. I start with an analysis of his narrative and examine whether he is a reliable narrator or not. Then, I explore the relationship between the battleship …

Accent, Linguistic Discrimination, Stereotyping, And West Virginia In Film, Teresa L. O’Cassidy

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study examines connections between accent, linguistic discrimination, and stereotyping in portrayals of West Virginia film characters. Ten films featuring West Virginia characters were examined for accent and stereotyping: The Right Stuff (Kaufman, 1983), Matewan (Sayles, 1987), Blaze (Shelton, 1989), The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), October Sky (Johnston, 1999), Hannibal (Scott, 2001), A Beautiful Mind (Howard, 2001), The Mothman Prophecies (Pellington, 2002), Wrong Turn (Schmidt, 2003), and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (Luketic, 2004). Coders were employed to score character accents. Stereotyping data was gathered by comparing portrayals with stereotypical traits associated with Appalachian and/or hillbilly characters. …

Linking Genesis To Modern Day Castaway Narratives, Shawndra Russell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis analyzes two castaway novels, Lord of the Flies and John Dollar, and compares these novels to segments of Genesis, focusing primarily on the story of Adam and Eve. To compare and contrast these three works, I pulled out eleven similar ideas found in each text which formed eleven different chapters. This project evolved into offering an alternative way to interpret these castaway narratives as retellings of the creation story. The characters in John Dollar and Lord of the Flies become Adam and Eve type figures as they try to survive on Edenlike islands. At the same time, this …

Canary In The Dark, Andrea Fekete

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

I began researching Appalachian culture in 1998. I wanted to tell a story about conflict and beauty while revealing my vision of who my people were/are. I strived to create a fiction not unlike poetry with realistic and minimalist features to give Appalachia the most accurate face possible as perceived by me through my own lens.

I wanted to explore the idea of beauty: Virginia’s (the main character) ideas about her beauty, her culture and other cultures. What is beauty? Who defines it? Can it be found everywhere? How? What does it look like when it is somewhere you wouldn’t …

Race For The Senate–A Content Analysis Of The Campaign Coverage Of West Virginia Senate Candidates Marie Redd And Tom Scott In 1998 And Marie Redd And Evan Jenkins In 2002, Lynne Marsh

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In the 1998 general election, Marie Redd became the first African American elected to the state senate in West Virginia. In the 5th District Senate race for her seat in the Legislature, Redd overcame the influence of opponent Tom Scott's incumbency, as well as his race and gender. Then, in the 2002 primary election, the freshman senator lost her seat to Evan Jenkins, also a caucasian male and a former member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. Previous research has shown that media treat candidates differently according to their race and gender and researchers have indicated the need for …

Billing Below Title : The Contested Autobiographies Of Frances Farmer And Louise Brooks, Karen M. Anderson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Today autobiography and memoir hold great interest for the average reader as well as the literary scholar. Some argue this form has replaced the novel as the dominant modern/postmodern narrative expression. Its study crosses departmental boundaries, surfacing in disciplines such as psychology, as well as English/literature. This thesis focuses on the autobiographies of two Euro-American actresses of the early twentieth century. Intersecting the study of film, narrative, autobiography (“female” or feminist, as well as canonical or “male”) and modernism, it focuses on text and subtext, analyzing reasons for both the works’ and actress/authors’ cultural marginalization. In art as well as …