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Theses/Dissertations

2015

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Articles 421 - 438 of 438

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Paradoxical Agency: The Ethics Of Women's Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Rome, Catherine Riley Godbold Jan 2015

Paradoxical Agency: The Ethics Of Women's Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Rome, Catherine Riley Godbold

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I address the problems of ethics and agency for women’s speech in Shakepseare’s Roman plays—Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus—and the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Regardless of their rhetorical skill, virtue, or agency, it seems that the Roman women in these works are doomed to fail: either their lives become unlivable or they lose the people most important to them. This prompts the project’s initiating question: why do Shakespeare’s Roman women speak if their words have no long-term effect? For these characters, rhetorical success in Shakespeare’s Rome is dependent upon a particular …

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Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising The Region In The Twenty-First Century, Matthew Dischinger Jan 2015

Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising The Region In The Twenty-First Century, Matthew Dischinger

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Postsouthern Melancholia offers a new way of conceptualizing the elusive concept of melancholia through contemporary fiction, particularly fiction of or about the American South. Critics have long discussed national literature through the lens of melancholia: an unceasing attachment to a lost object or ideal that a subject or culture internalizes. My project positions melancholia as a literary strategy—one that contemporary southern fiction frequently contests and critiques. I read fiction that has been called “postsouthern,” a term applied to texts that reassess the bedrock concepts of southern literature such as community, storytelling, and sense of place. While much scholarship has focused …

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"Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction In Victorian Literature And Culture, Mary Timothy Wilson Jan 2015

"Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction In Victorian Literature And Culture, Mary Timothy Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Examining a broad range of texts,“‘Superbly Sterile:’ Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture,” argues that Thomas Hardy’s final naturalist novels, popular nineteenth-century vampire narratives, and the fiction of Oscar Wilde queered the bildungsroman (or novel of development) through characters who failed or refused to progress along sexual and maturational timelines. Where these texts’ critics have tended to read them as cautionary tales about homosexuality or predatory female sexuality, this dissertation contends that they also presented alternate forms of kinship and reproduction. They do so through the use of recursive, inverted, or otherwise backward relationships to time. Where Victorian sexology …

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Edna The Oblivious Oppressor: An Intersectional Analysis Of Privilege And Its Lack Thereof In The Awakening, Jessica L. Rosenthal Jan 2015

Edna The Oblivious Oppressor: An Intersectional Analysis Of Privilege And Its Lack Thereof In The Awakening, Jessica L. Rosenthal

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

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Modern American Myth-Making In Mass Media Texts, Kassandra Andreadis Jan 2015

Modern American Myth-Making In Mass Media Texts, Kassandra Andreadis

Honors Theses

What is an American myth? “Myth” can have many meanings and can refer to many different types of works. For example, Edwards and Klosa refer to Frankenstein as “an important mythic text” (Edwards and Klosa 34), which provides a middle point between ancient myths (e.g. the Odyssey) and current myths, showing that myths have continued to be produced and establishing myth-making as a continuous process. This process continues into the present, all over the world, so it stands to reason that the United States of America has its own myths. The identity of those myths is less certain. While ideas …

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Tactical Encounters:Material Rhetoric And The Politics Of Tactical Media, Anthony Michael Stagliano Jan 2015

Tactical Encounters:Material Rhetoric And The Politics Of Tactical Media, Anthony Michael Stagliano

Theses and Dissertations

Tactical Encounters: Material Rhetoric and the Politics of Tactical Media articulates the concept of material rhetorical tactics, discrete rhetorical moves effecting political and social change, however ephemeral. I argue that material rhetorical tactics do not necessarily originate or conclude with a human subject, and that to understand this, we must reorient our conceptions of rhetorical action, agency, and, ultimately, its relationship to the demos, to include actions, actors, agents, and events that are not, in themselves, human. I build on recent work in rhetorical theory that has conceptualized the function and nature of rhetoric as involving agents human and nonhuman, …

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A Taste For Things: Sensory Rhetoric Beyond The Human, Justine Beatrice Wells Jan 2015

A Taste For Things: Sensory Rhetoric Beyond The Human, Justine Beatrice Wells

Theses and Dissertations

Amidst rising agricultural pollution, poor conditions for livestock animals, and disparity between “high” and “low” food cultures, gustatory taste has entered contemporary public rhetoric as a significant modality of intervention. This dissertation considers the environmentalist and social potential of this public embrace of sensory rhetoric. To do so, I build a rhetorical theory of sensation through a sensory re-engagement of the rhetorical tradition. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, I argue, embraced aesthetic taste as a site where rhetoric and ethics mingle, and yet in promoting its cultivation, they fell into elitism. The subsequent, Marxist discourse on sensory emancipation developed rhetoric’s sensory and …

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The King’S Cabinet Splintered: The Impact Of Digital Mediation On The Kings Cabinet Opened, Travis A. Mullen Jan 2015

The King’S Cabinet Splintered: The Impact Of Digital Mediation On The Kings Cabinet Opened, Travis A. Mullen

Theses and Dissertations

In June of 1645, the Parliamentarian New Model Army seized a packet of King Charles I’s private correspondence at the battle of Naseby. This seizure was a crucial propagandistic victory that enabled the Parliamentarians to do irreparable damage to Charles’ public image and, in contrast, to ingratiate themselves to the public. The Parliamentarians carefully selected, decoded, and arranged the letters in an effort to reveal Charles as a duplicitous ruler that cared more for his wife, Henrietta Maria, than his people. The collection is increasingly seen by critics as a case study in mediation through print—not just of private correspondence, …

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Revival Of The Fittest: A Return To Writer Subjectivity In Composition, Ashley Mcclary Jan 2015

Revival Of The Fittest: A Return To Writer Subjectivity In Composition, Ashley Mcclary

Theses and Dissertations

Writing can be unpleasant. And most examples of good writing start from early attempts to identify a partial understanding of complex, complicated concepts that emanated from a willingness to be honest and open and smart about the surrounding world. The inception of a good text—especially when paired with the strength to fulfill an incessant, ridiculous desire to tell a truth—can produce an affected writing sample, one of purpose and presence. In the field of Composition, when instructors ask students to write and suggest they do it well, it is easy to overlook the demand that students take new risks in …

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Mourning, Melancholia, And The Need For Grace In Sherwood Anderson's "Godliness", Victoria Chandler Jan 2015

Mourning, Melancholia, And The Need For Grace In Sherwood Anderson's "Godliness", Victoria Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

Published in 1919, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio engages in the modernist project of collective grieving for social losses. This thesis looks specifically to Seth Moglen’s Mourning Modernity, in which he articulates the various grieving strategies, mourning and melancholia, employed by modernists in order to process their rapidly changing world. I explore the various ways that “Godliness,” one of Anderson’s stories in Winesburg, engages in both mourning and melancholia, and I draw on Ruth Levitas’ notion of secular grace, from her book Utopia as Method, in order to suggest that modernist subjects need a form of secular grace in …

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Dystopian Cinderellas: "I Follow Him Into The Dark", Courtney Lear Jan 2015

Dystopian Cinderellas: "I Follow Him Into The Dark", Courtney Lear

All Master's Theses

Research indicates that adolescents use fiction as a template for mitigating problems in their own lives based on the ways that fictional characters handle conflict. Dystopic narratives extrapolate on the potential sociopolitical consequences of contemporary social issues that adolescents face. In recent years, authors of young adult fiction have proliferated dystopian novels about disciplinary societies that conform to Michel Foucault’s Panoptic frameworks. Using the novels Matched, Delirium, Uglies, The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, and The Knife of Never Letting Go, this project will demonstrate that the agency of female protagonists of young adult dystopian novels is curtailed by …

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The Lyric And The Lathe: Dreams Of Perfect Poetic Efficiency, 1800-1917, Steven A. Nathaniel Jan 2015

The Lyric And The Lathe: Dreams Of Perfect Poetic Efficiency, 1800-1917, Steven A. Nathaniel

Masters Theses

This study examines patterns of efficiency in the poetry and theory of William Wordsworth, Hilda Doolittle, and other figures from the Modernist and Romantic periods. I begin by defining perfect efficiency as occurring when energy transforms, without loss, inside a closed energy system, and I offer perpetual motion machines as hypothetical examples of this impossible state. I then demonstrate the process of efficiency in William Wordsworth's poetry, which begins with circumlocutory poetic cycles but contracts into terse repetitions. Since technical efficiency is calculated by the formula output/input, poetry's subjectivity makes poetic efficiency difficult to measure. However, I suggest that repetitions …

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The Problem Of Love And Codes Of Conduct For The Younger Courtiers In King Lear, Debora L. Pfeiffer Jan 2015

The Problem Of Love And Codes Of Conduct For The Younger Courtiers In King Lear, Debora L. Pfeiffer

Masters Theses

The courtiers Edmund and Edgar are critical to the action of King Lear, yet there has been little scholarship which has treated these characters in depth. I argue that one way to comprehend them and their significance in the play's action is to analyze their behavior according to the standards of the Renaissance conduct books that were circulating in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the play was written. Baldassare Castigligone's The Book of the Courtier, Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, and Desiderius Erasmus's The Education of a Christian Prince each sheds light on important themes …

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The Bioscience-Industrial Complex, Radical Materialist Aesthetics, And Interspecies Political Ecologies: The Unforeseen Posthuman Future In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein And Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy, Sarah Sydney Lane Jan 2015

The Bioscience-Industrial Complex, Radical Materialist Aesthetics, And Interspecies Political Ecologies: The Unforeseen Posthuman Future In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein And Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy, Sarah Sydney Lane

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project traces how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, science fiction novels from the Romantic and contemporary literary periods respectively, contest the problematic relationships between subjecthood, science, ecological health, and patriarchal, capitalist societies by crafting radical materialist alternatives to such a system and its dualistic and destructive interpersonal/interspecies relations. Through the theoretical framework of ecofeminism that recognizes the conceptual linkages between women and nature in Western systems of thought, as well as psychoanalytical feminist critiques of the masculinization of scientific epistemology, this project examines the developmental and ontological overlaps between literary “masculine” and “scientific” subjects socialized under …

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Functional Violence In Martin Mcdonagh's The Lieutenant Of Inishmore And The Pillowman, Lindsay Shalom Jan 2015

Functional Violence In Martin Mcdonagh's The Lieutenant Of Inishmore And The Pillowman, Lindsay Shalom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While Martin McDonagh’s plays have engendered laughter, disgust, and fear, he might be best known as part of a long line of Irish playwrights who faced controversy due to their art. Much like Synge, Shaw, and O’Casey, McDonagh has faced criticism and even outrage due to the violence and misunderstood portrayals of the Irish in his plays. Though the violence in plays like The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore has been labeled gratuitous, we might better understand the purpose of that violence by examining them in light of Michel Foucault’s concepts of knowledge and power. Foucault’s approaches best highlight …

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The Erotics Of Race Suicide: The Making Of Whiteness And The Death Drive In The Progressive Era, 1880-1920, Madoka Kishi Jan 2015

The Erotics Of Race Suicide: The Making Of Whiteness And The Death Drive In The Progressive Era, 1880-1920, Madoka Kishi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

"The Erotics of Race Suicide" examines the frequent representation of suicide in Progressive Era American literature in light of a widely proclaimed socio-political concept of the time: “race suicide.” Coined by the sociologist Edward Ross, the term “race suicide” nominates a nativist fear over the racial enervation of indigenous white Americans. Ross and other commentators on race suicide, most notably Theodore Roosevelt, proclaimed that the diminution of the indigenous white Americans was caused by their unwillingness to breed, signaling the self-destructive, “suicidal” tendency of the race. Consequently, through such means as the enactment of immigration restrictions, the reinforcement of anti-miscegenation …

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Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier Jan 2015

Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that out of postmodernity, subjectivity has seen distinct mutations inflected by consumer technology. As postmodern mediators of ordinary people, reality TV, Facebook, and YouTube are steeped in concerns about authenticity. Reality TV, for example, cannot escape its authenticity problem because of the conventional hierarchy of production it maintains, a hierarchy that prompts consumer skepticism regarding its truth value. However, seemingly democratic Internet platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, promise consumer engagement in which users can break down those hierarchical barriers preventing authentic expression. Under the guise of presumed mediational accuracy, the resulting feedback loop between …

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A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers And The Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910, Helana E. Brigman Jan 2015

A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers And The Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910, Helana E. Brigman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Until recently, critics have devalued the Victorian cookbook as an object of literary inquiry, regularly dismissing it as “Victoriana”—cultural, anthropological histories detailing bland culinary traditions. A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers and the Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910 seeks to provide a framework by which we can explore the Victorian cookbook as a literary text appropriated by writers responding to and advocating for cultural, educational, and artistic reform during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Looking specifically at how women used recipes to discuss food preparation, dining, and household management, I argue that British women writers participated in a collaborative tradition, borrowing and sharing …

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