English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Aesthetics Of Environmental Risk In Paolo Bacigalupi’S The Windup Girl And The Water Knife, David Schwartz

Theses and Dissertations--English

Any work of environmentally oriented fiction that seeks to represent the wide-reaching effects of climate change is faced with the problem of scale. These texts must render visible change which is at once ubiquitous and microscopic, along with the cascade of side-effects generated in the wake of rising temperature, rising sea levels, and winnowing biodiversity. In short order, these texts must fully imagine what it means to live within the modern global risk society. Borrowing this sociological model from the late Ulrich Beck, I analyze the literary work of Paolo Bacigalupi, one of the foremost authors in the growing genre …

Identifying Youth Appeals In Alcohol Alternative Social Media Content Through Framing, Melina Oneal

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Proposed regulations for alcohol advertising prevent beverage companies from targeting people under the legal drinking age. However, similar regulations for alcohol alternative beverages are less explored, which could allow alcohol alternative products to create awareness for alcoholic beverages among youth. Alcohol alternatives beverages, including no-alcohol and low-alcohol products, are increasing in popularity and can function as compliments to alcoholic products to decrease the total alcohol volume consumed or as substitutes for alcoholic products. Framing theory can be operationalized through the Content Appealing to Youth Index, an index of content elements found in research literature to be appealing to youth, to …

Mrs. Dalloway As A Window For Understanding Life, Kristen Venegas

English (MA) Theses

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway may be dismissed as fiction, and fiction consequently is dismissed as fantasy. However, the novel enables readers to practice an intellectual exercise of meta-awareness that extends beyond the pages and onto real world phenomena. Under a cognitive neuroscience perspective, Mrs. Dalloway is a literary masterpiece due to its hyper- realistic execution of the intimacies of life. Through the narrative style of free-indirect discourse, Woolf illustrates what occurs in the minds of characters as they develop their own perceptions of reality and identity, exposes the fear and inadequacies of mankind’s distress in times of chaos and disorder …

Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford

Masters Theses

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new …

Digitally Rural: Identifying How Technological Inequity Impacts Rural Students In First-Year Writing Courses, Jo Anna M. Nevada

English Language and Literature ETDs

To teach composition in this era means to engage students with technology; it is all but an unspoken requirement at the majority of universities. This dissertation theorizes, however, that the imbricated use of technology in first-year writing (FYW) classrooms places rural students at an inherent disadvantage, with issues of inadequate technological proficiency and inconsistent access causing a substantial learning disparity between this student population and their urban peers. Through mixed-methods data analysis of student survey responses and final FYW course portfolios, this study reveals that the expectation of technological access and presumption of digital literacy is detrimental to rural student …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay proposes the concept of mothering-as-feminism, with the intention of interrogating American ideals of mothering and caregiving. Reforming the way we view mothering, as it relates to feminism, requires a re-evaluation of the American role of women and mothers—and how they are portrayed (and therefore seen and understood), valued, and supported. Focusing on the evolution of feminist theory throughout the past 70 years, as well as personal and secondary experiences, I demonstrate how political and social change occurs generationally and is dependent on the education of our children. Ultimately, I show the important role children’s literature plays …

A Cultural History Of Anti-Feminism In Marvel's Scarlet Witch, Madison M. Kooba

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Marvel Comics character Wanda Maximoff, otherwise known as the Scarlet Witch, has received significant attention in popular culture due to her recent appearances as the primary protagonist and antagonist in television show WandaVision (2021) and film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). These depictions foregrounding Wanda’s struggles with mental health have made her an admirable character to many who see her drawing power from her emotions as a celebration of aspects of womanhood that have long been shamed by society. Sourcing these contemporary adaptations, however, lies decades of blatantly anti-feminist and sexist comics that villainize and ridicule Wanda’s …

A New Atticus Is Afoot: The Portrayal Of Lawyers In Popular Culture, Anna Thrush

Senior Theses

This project analyzes the stereotypical image of lawyers in popular culture, focusing on either overly demonic or unrealistically heroic. Both stereotypes that are common portrayals of attorneys in popular culture are unrealistic and deny society a true comprehension of the profession. Popular culture has molded the image of lawyers to the characteristics that sell, rather than focusing on a realistic portrayal. Therefore, popular culture creates a falsely dramatized image of attorneys to generate revenue, putting the reputation and future of the profession as risk. These stereotypes are exemplified in this project through a close literary analysis of lawyer characters from …

Gender Stereotypes And Representation Of Women In Roald Dahl's Books, Sarah Hunt

Senior Theses and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the role and representation of women in Roald Dahl’s children’s novels. To do this, I conducted a document analysis of five of Dahl’s books - “James and the Giant Peach” (1961), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964), “Danny, The Champion of the World” (1975), “The Witches” (1983), and “Matilda” (1988) - in order to answer the following questions: How does Roald Dahl portray women and girls in his novels? What gendered stereotypes are present, and how does this portrayal change over time? I was able to answer this question through utilizing …

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

“The Battle Against Sameness”: Queer Marriages In Forster And Woolf, Lindsey Hatton

Student Research Submissions

The Bloomsbury Group was known for unconventionality, both in their lives and in their writing. This holds especially true for E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, whose novels uniquely depict queer relationships as an alternative to traditional, rigid, heterosexual marriages. This paper looks at Clarissa and Richard from Mrs. Dalloway, Margaret and Henry from Howards End, and Maurice and Alec from Maurice and how each of these couples subvert the societal conventions of the Victorian era in different ways. A close reading of these texts and characters allows for a nuanced understanding of Woolf and Forster’s revolutionary visions and demonstrates how …

The Great Resignation: A Content Analysis Of News Sources' Portrayals Of The Covid-19 Labor Shortage., Mackenzie Williams

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

When workers left the labor market in large numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, proclamations of a labor shortage emerged extensively throughout the news. In this study, I analyze the coverage of the worker shortage among three news sources with different political orientations. Several themes emerged from analyzing a total of 75 articles. The findings showed that the perspective shown in the article, the cause of the labor shortage, restaurant worker portrayal, support of solutions, and opinion of the labor shortage all differed based on the political identity of the news source. This research supports previous findings that show there is …

F. Scott Fitzgerald’S Homme Épuisé: Usurping The “Madwoman” In Tender Is The Night (1934) [2022], Emma Hill

Master's Theses

Nineteenth-century women writers commonly use themes of entrapment and madness in what are now classified as gothic novels. In texts such as Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, and The Yellow Wallpaper, confinement and madness are synchronous in developing the figure of “the madwoman.” These texts were written during a time when it was uncommon for female writers to seek publication, and many used pseudonyms to get their works published or to be taken seriously by critics. The “madwoman” emerged as a powerful trope to articulate what writing under a patriarchal system feels like. That is to say, confinement scenarios resulting from female …

The Effects Of Explicit Instruction Targeting Social-Emotional Learning Competencies On The Improvement Of Expressive And Receptive Vocabulary Development For First-Grade Students Identified With Speech-Language Deficits, Anna Perry

Rehabilitation, Human Resources and Communication Disorders Undergraduate Honors Theses

Background/Introduction: Studies have shown that both social-emotional and behavioral aspects are deeply intertwined with academic success (McClelland et al., 2007). This study was designed to examine the effects explicit instruction targeting social-emotional learning may have on the vocabulary skills of first-grade students identified with language deficits, behavioral disorders, and developmental disabilities. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of explicit instruction targeting social-emotional learning competencies on the improvement of expressive and receptive vocabulary development in children identified with language deficits, as well as behavioral disorders and developmental disabilities. By implementing and teaching social-emotional competencies through explicit …

Wilderness Is Not A Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used As A Form Of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History, Dorothy Irrera

English Honors Theses

This Capstone won Skidmore's Racial Justice Student Award. An analysis of literature, American history, and pop culture, Wilderness Is Not a Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used as a Form of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History uses a sociological lens to approach the inherent relationship between racism and wilderness.

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Vampire Narratives: Looking At Queer-Centric Experiences In Comparison To Hetero-Centric Norms In Order To Model A New Queer Vampiric Experience, Marah Heikkila

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines vampire narratives such as Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, From Dusk Till Dawn, The Gilda Stories, and Fledgling using queer and sexuality studies frameworks to look at salient patterns in the texts. The project focuses on how gender performances take place in the text, what the performances mean, and what the implications of them are. In addition to gender performance, in the thesis, I also look at how vampire narratives influence and transform binaries related to gender and sexuality. Furthermore, while popular narratives such as Twilight are fan favorites, there are …

“Have You Come Out?”: Refutation Of Segdwick’S Theorization Of The Closet In Another Country And Lot: Stories, Mary Ross

Honors Projects

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick outlined in her book entitled Epistemology of the Closet a paradigm of expressing queer sexuality when it is known and when it is not know. In response to Sedgwick closet paradigm, Marlon Ross wrote his essay entitled “Beyond the Closet as a Raceless Paradigm” in which he demonstrated that Sedgwick’s paradigm is not applicable to marginalized class and racial groups. He also made a call to action to change the necessity of the closet paradigm when discussing queer sexuality. In this paper, I put James Baldwin’s Another Country and Bryan Washington’s Lot: Stories in conversation with Sedgwick …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Connection, Compassion, And Honesty: Using Picture Books To Help Build A Healthier Relationship To Death In A Death-Denying Culture, Kami Sahalie Upshaw Gould

University Honors Theses

This paper explores the ways children are taught about death and dying and how children's picture books can be utilized in difficult conversations of this nature. I go into the historical advent of books specifically for children and research how different ways of explaining death can help or hurt a child. Through this research, I explore how our situationality in a death denying culture has shaped how we explain death to children and what steps can be taken to counter this denial.

Othering: An Analysis Of Expression In Hip-Hop And South Asian Literature Through Post-9/11 Discourse, Syed Tareq Alam

English Honors Theses

The critical question this thesis seeks to answer is how a relationship between hip-hop and South Asian literature can be developed in such a way that one is able understand and address both the present and future state of America in a post 9/11 context. To answer this question, three hip-hop songs will be analyzed through their lyrics and instrumentation with a specific focus on their expression of the other: “Cops Shot the Kid” by Nas, “Flag Shopping” and “Patriot Act” by Heems. One novel and play will be analyzed in similar form: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid and …

Remaking Divinity In Aldous Huxley’S Brave New World 2021, Sebastian Vignone

Master's Theses

Humanity is an experience. Shaped through both individual and collective encounters, we understand the self and the world around us as an amalgamation of interactions over the course of our lives. Arguably, one of the most common experiential archetypes is religion, and more specifically the relationship one has with a divine being as it has been framed by a religious institution. While the United States does not have an official religion, there is a host of people who refer to the U.S. as a “Christian nation,” and it is therefore irresponsible to elide the panoply of inequities that run through …

'Disembodied Bones': Recovering The Poetry And Prose Of Elinor Wylie 2021, Sarah R. Bullock

Master's Theses

Picking a book to read is like diving for a pearl, writes Elinor Wylie, a 20th Century American poet, novelist, essayist and prominent magazine literary editor. In her essay "The Pearl Diver", she writes that it is the diver that risks the unknown- unaided by diving equipment in the form of library indexes-who gains the greatest joy, Wylie states (Fugitive Prose, 869). Wylie explains:

I venture to perceive an analogy between the rebellious pearl diver and myself, in my slight experience with public libraries...how much more delightful, how much more stimulating, to abandon the paraphernalia of card indexes and mahogany …

Laurence Sterne: A Different Way Of Approaching The Notion Of Life In The Early Novel, Robert Metaxatos

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis employs the later philosophy of Michel Foucault to think through the unique set of socio-cultural problems that emerged alongside the early novel. I endeavor to explain the development of “biopower” and the concomitant (yet historically grounded) concept of a mass population in order to round off a nettlesome tendency among historicist rise-of-the-novel critics to focus on the creation of a bourgeois individual at this time. To that end, the texts of Anglo-Irish author Laurence Sterne bear out a unique narratorial response to biopower that begins with the ‘body’ of his work: i.e., Shandeism. Signaling the importance of the …

Grappling With The Aftereffects Of Modernism In American Literature And Culture: Spiritual, Political, And Ecological, Joseph Neary

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Joe Neary examines various texts within contemporary American culture, including David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon,” Harmony Korine’s film, Spring Breakers, Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory, and Bruce Holsinger’s book of criticism, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror.

Sustainable Community In Literature And Lancaster County: Finding A Way Forward On Small Farms, Christine Bye

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

"There are very few things that will motivate a thirteen-year-old child who has grown up comfortably and surrounded by supermarkets to pick green beans and to pick them joyfully. Dusty bean plants covered in yellow beetle larvae and located beneath a glaring sun do not exactly inspire an adolescent (or any sane person, really) to caper and sing. Neither do interestingly mottled rashes on the forearms - which appear after extensive rummaging through bean leaves - encourage the picker to return readily to the task. When my parents bought the family farm from my grandparents, they had some idea (as …

Madres, Hijas, Y La Frontera: An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Mexican Mothers And Mexican-American Daughters, Arianna Gabriela Razo

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the role Mexican mothers play in raising their children and how the border affects their abilities as mothers, looking specifically into the Mother-Daughter relationship, broken down even further into the Mexican mother versus the Mexican-American daughter. To explore this concept, I examine Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo, looking at all the mothers, but specifically into the Reyes matriarchs, and Aaron Bobrow-Strain, The Life and Death of Aida Hernandez, to show how the border has influenced Mexican mothering styles, along with juxtaposing how Mexican immigrants were treated in the 20th century to how politicization of …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

A Social Change-Maker And A Dreamer: Olive Schreiner’S Figures For An Ideal Future, Jessica Ampel

Periclean Honors Forum Scholar Award Winners

Social activist, theorist, and author Olive Schreiner dreamed and demanded that others dream as well. Living in the Victorian era, a time of extreme change but also rigid cultural values, she dreamed about an ideal future characterized by gender equality, sexual equality, and racial equality not just in her own “homes” of England and South Africa, but globally. However, for Schreiner, dreaming was not enough; we must act on our dreams in order to make the necessary social change to reach an ideal future. Schreiner acted on her own dreams for social change throughout her life by theorizing, joining important …