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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
War Of Words: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Military's Sexual Assault Prevention Posters, Nancy Thurman Clemens
War Of Words: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Military's Sexual Assault Prevention Posters, Nancy Thurman Clemens
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Joining the expanding discourse surrounding language and its effects, specifically regarding the performance of gender in a hypermasculine environment, this dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the United States Department of Defense's sexual assault prevention and response training materials, particularly posters created between 2009 and 2012. This dissertation examines the context of sexual harassment and assault within the military from the late 1970s until the mid-2000s. Presenting scandals that led up to the development of the Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) program, I give a brief history of the establishment and scope of responsibility for the program in …
Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan
Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women’s clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how …
The Method In The Madwoman : Functions Of Female Madness And Feminized Liminality In Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, And "The Yellow Wallpaper", Ivy Elizabeth Poitras
The Method In The Madwoman : Functions Of Female Madness And Feminized Liminality In Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, And "The Yellow Wallpaper", Ivy Elizabeth Poitras
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This critical thesis explores how three literary portrayals of “madness” in female characters of the mid-to-late 19th century written by women writers (Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, and the Narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper”) operate as instruments within their work to provide commentary on the anxieties, fears, and ideological stereotypes of women and femininity of the era, as well as contradictions and concepts pertaining to confinement, the female body, gendered Gothic tropes, and societal oppression. The significance of this analysis lies in the consistency and endurance of these issues as they withstand modern development, making …
Why Study Language? Discussing Language And Its Influence On Gender Discrimination, Katelyn Eisenmann
Why Study Language? Discussing Language And Its Influence On Gender Discrimination, Katelyn Eisenmann
Honors Projects
An applied research project, with the culminating piece being a panel discussion that focused on the ways in which language use and structure contribute to attitudes and perceptions of gender within our society, and the politics that surround concepts of gender.
Remembrances Reconsidered: Site-Specific Affective Retellings, Melanie W. Lozier
Remembrances Reconsidered: Site-Specific Affective Retellings, Melanie W. Lozier
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is an examination of the ways in which strong affective feelings, trauma, and memories are written about by women through diverse narrative forms. Through storytelling, writers engage with the relationship between deep feelings, significant places, and language, such as the frequent employment of words containing the prefix "re."
The Madwoman Persists: Expression As Resistance In Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter Of Snow And H.D.'S Hermione, Spring Healy
The Madwoman Persists: Expression As Resistance In Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter Of Snow And H.D.'S Hermione, Spring Healy
Honors Projects
Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow and H.D.’s HERmione each feature a female narrator struggling to survive in a patriarchal society that confines them and polices the movement of their bodies through space in attempt to gain control. The characters Marthe Gail and Hermione Gart experience bouts of insanity in response to their confinement by the patriarchy. I explore the various ways these two women push against their confinement, and argue that despite their places in society, Marthe and Hermione are able to use expression—writing, language, voice, movement, sexuality—to successfully resist the patriarchy and create legitimate identities.
The Two-Sided Coin: Madness And Laughter As Subversion In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland And The Sandman, Tessa Starr Swehla
The Two-Sided Coin: Madness And Laughter As Subversion In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland And The Sandman, Tessa Starr Swehla
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Mad female characters in Western literature have traditionally represented attempts by dominant patriarchal discourse to subjugate women’s discourse: these characters are usually pathologized in both their dialogue with other characters and in their physical bodies. This subjugation by representation of mad female characters in dominant discourse parallels similar attempts to portray women as lacking in humor. This thesis studies the intersections between madness and humor and the ability of female characters that embody both to challenge and subvert dominant discourse. By examining the characters of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s novel and Delirium from Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series The Sandman …
"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor
"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also …
Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia
Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …
“Deliberate Voluptuousness”: The Monstrous Women Of Dracula And Carmilla, Judith Bell
“Deliberate Voluptuousness”: The Monstrous Women Of Dracula And Carmilla, Judith Bell
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Vampire women play a culturally significant role in films and literature by revealing the extent to which deviation from Socially accepted behavior is tolerated. In this thesis, I compare the vampire women of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla to their depictions in recent adaptations. In Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire sisters are representative of the shortcomings of 19th century gender roles, especially in regard to women’s communities. In recent adaptations, the vampire sisters’ revealing clothing, promiscuity, and lack of characterization are still closely connected with villainy, and as in Stoker’s novel, the women’s violent deaths in the …
A Band Of Sisters: Female Detectives, Authority, And Fiction From 1864 To The 1930s, Amanda Renee Schafer
A Band Of Sisters: Female Detectives, Authority, And Fiction From 1864 To The 1930s, Amanda Renee Schafer
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Because mystery and detective fiction have been classified as “popular” genres, the complex ideas and ideologies that the authors work with and within reach a wide and varied audience through formulaic and familiar ways. The perceived conservatism of the genre allows authors to present and pursue distinctly anti-conservative views in disguise. For fictional detectives and, especially female detectives, disguise is an effective tool for solving their cases. Often, these detectives will disguise themselves as someone infinitely more conservative than they are in order to gain access to their quarry. Similarly, mystery and detective fiction wear a cloak of conservatism to …
Dandy As Disease: Gender Hygiene And British Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sharon Louise Fox
Dandy As Disease: Gender Hygiene And British Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sharon Louise Fox
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
“Dandy as Disease: Gender Hygiene and British Nineteenth-century Literature” explores the link between the nineteenth-century dandy, ideas of hegemonic masculinity, and Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man, a dystopian text in which women have usurped all traditionally-masculine roles, while men are the caretakers and manual workers. The first chapter deals with the historical role of the dandy in the nineteenth-century and how he might be viewed as the cause of the fall of Britain. The second chapter revolves around Besant’s novel, exploring how men are shown to be at fault for Britain’s fall in the eyes of the rest of …
A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas
A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …
"That Flesh-Locked Sea Of Silence”: Language, Gender, And Sexuality In Beckett’S Short Fiction, Emily F. Oliver
"That Flesh-Locked Sea Of Silence”: Language, Gender, And Sexuality In Beckett’S Short Fiction, Emily F. Oliver
Honors College Theses
This paper asserts the interconnectedness of language, gender, and sexuality in the short prose of Samuel Beckett. “Assumption,” “First Love,” and “Enough,” are used as specific examples of Beckett’s fiction, selected because they assist in understanding Beckett’s participation in, and inversion of, the hegemonic privileging of the masculine. This interpretation focuses on the use of gendered language, verbalization as a sexual expression, and the manipulation of the “male” and “female” voice. The analysis is both informed by, and seeks to nuance, the linguistic criticism established by second-wave French feminists Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous.
Abandoning The Shadows And Seizing The Stage: A Perspective On A Feminine Discourse Of Resistance Theatre As Informed By The Work Of Susanna Centlivre, Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan, Hannah Cowley, And The Sistren Theatre Collective, Brianna A. Bleymaier
MA in English Theses
This thesis considers the development of a unique form of theatre - feminine resistance theatre. Through the process, this work will consider the true nature and power of theatre as an artform, the placement of the problematized female voice within society, literature, and theatre, and how the theatrical form can create a unique catalyst for the female voice to be considered and implemented. In order to fully comprehend the nature of this exploration, this thesis discusses the placement and relevancy of the foundation eighteenth century theatre provides, by examining four of the women who fought for the validity of the …