English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Voice From The Fire: The Authority Of Experience, Colleen C. Bernhard

Theses and Dissertations

Over all, this thesis was written to be a "ramble" of its own around and through three issues that are central to the writing of the personal essay-voice, authority, and experience-and central to the emergence of this author's own sense of "self."
Drawing upon years of voluminous journals, this collection of six personal essays demonstrates what the scholarly introduction proposes: that the personal essay is both a valid genre and a magnificent bridge from informal life-writing to genuine literary accomplishment. Drawing on Phillip Lopate's differentiation of "memoiristic" essays from the more classic autobiographical form, this collection includes three of each …

The Vision Of London In Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent And Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, Iman Ibrahim Niazy El Rafee

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

No Boat, No Bridge, Gregory K. Coyle

Dissertations and Theses

In a world that devours one technological advance after another, the simple human questions persist. They endure despite the increased speed of the personal computer or the decreased size of the cellular phone. In a time ruled by measurements they remain elusive and undefined. The longing for love, the crisis of past versus present, the nagging hunger for meaning in the face of constant change--these questions manage to be both small and huge, both slow and fast, all at once. They are the inheritance of every generation; they are written on the very lining of our hearts. These stories are, …

James Baldwin's Search For A Homosexual Identity In His Novels, Nadia Abdel Fattah

Dissertations and Theses

James Arthur Baldwin (1924- 1987) is one of the two major writers who have dared write about black gay men and from a black gay perspective. However, his fame as a racial spokesman and his insightful analyses of race relations in America tend to distract attention from the fact that he has been one of the most important homosexual writers of the twentieth century. Intolerance and homophobia among black and white Americans often led to a misinterpretation or misevaluation of James Baldwin's novels. James Baldwin was very courageous to come out as a black homosexual writer during the period of …

Strength Within--Love: The Story Within The Story, Wanda T. Talbott

Theses & Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Morgan Le Fay As Other In English Medieval And Modern Texts, Sandra Elaine Capps

Doctoral Dissertations

In this study the presence and power of Morgan Ie Fay will be re-examined as an ever-shifting figure of alterity in both medieval and modern texts. Using cultural materialist studies, the character of Morgan will be examined against contemporary medieval culture in four medieval texts -- Vita Merlini, Layamon's Brut, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Le Morte Darthur -- that span the mid-twelfth to the late fifteenth-centuries. Her presence in the modern texts Gate of Ivrel and Mists of Avalon will be read against a feminist agenda, analyzing her increased visibility and voice in …

A Glorious Feast For The Eyes : The Roles Of Iconography And Sight In Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale And The Second Nun's Tale, Kelly Marie Bruce

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates Chaucer's use of iconography and sight in The Prioress's Tale and The Second Nun's Tale and how these elements symbiotically support and enhance the text so that the tales themselves become iconic. An overview of medieval religious practices and doctrines is followed by a discussion of The Prioress's Tale, in which Chaucer's direct reference to a Virgin icon is explored. Further, the analysis focuses on the way in which visual cues supplement the meaning of the written word. A discussion of The Second Nun's Tale follows, exploring the relationship between sight and faith. The importance of …

"Nothingness/ In Words Enclose" : Supplementarity And The "Veil" Of Language In Samuel Beckett's Murphy And Watt, Justin P. Jakovac

Master's Theses

Samuel Beckett has asserted that language is a "veil" in which he must "bore one hole after another..., until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through." This thesis employs Derrida's assertion that language involves the play of differance and the supplementarity of the sign. Since the supplement, in Derrida's words, "fills and marks a determined lack," language calls attention to the gap of nothingness already present in the play of differance. Murphy and Watt present both the desire for "semantic succour" of the veil and the awareness - more fully …

Willa Cather's Spirituality, Mary Ellen Scofield

Dissertations and Theses

Both overtly and subtly, the early twentieth century American author Willa Cather (1873-1947) gives her readers a sense of a spiritual realm in the world of her novels. '!'his study explores Cather's changing conceptions of spirituality and ways_in which she portrays them in three of her novels. I propose that though Cather is seldom considered a modernist, her interest in spirituality parallels Virginia Woolf's interest in moments of heightened consciousness, and that she invented ways to express ineffable connections with a spiritual dimension of life. In 0 Pioneers! (1913), Cather proposes that those who use their intuition to express themselves …

From Belle To Whore: Southern Stereotypes In John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn And William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, Sandra Compton Simmons

Theses & Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

The Female Ancestors Of Kate Chopin: The Silent Characters In Her Works, Mary Katherine Martin

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Creating Knowledge About The Literacy Needs Of Juvenile Offenders: Reflections On A Qualitative Research Project, Regina Nadia Eastman

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis attempts to problematize a collective silence around the concept of race that developed in a Research Methodology English 510 course taught by Dr. Gradin, the Director of Writing at Portland State University, during the Fall quarter of 1995. The members of ENG 510 created a qualitative research protocol that was intended to create knowledge about the literacy needs of juvenile offenders. This was done in partnership with the Juvenile Rights Project, a non-profit advocate for juveniles in the Multnomah county courts, and with Portland Youth Redirection, a program that offers detention alternatives to juvenile offenders. The research was …

Wandering Man, Sean R. Cowne

Dissertations and Theses

The Old West of stories, movies, and folklore is of course a time and place that never existed, yet, over a century, has bloomed into an elaborate, romantic, sometimes tragic fantasy firmly rooted in the collective mythic consciousness of Americans. Wandering Man is a novel that attempts to accentuate the mythic tendencies of the Western subgenre, even at the expense of realism. An attempt to recognize the American fascination with our nineteenth century westward expansion as a construction of myth is endeavored through deliberate parallels with stories universally deemed "mythic:" Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The protagonist of Wandering Man is …

All The Rest Is Literature: Stories By John Allison, John Allison

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Caudill College of Humanities at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by John Allison on May 6, 1996.

Dead Town Dreaming -- A Novella And Selected Poems, Caleb Dolan

Senior Scholar Papers

No abstract provided.

Dwelling In Possibility: Aestheticizing Identity In African American Women's Fiction, Whitney Glockner

Senior Scholar Papers

African American women writers define aesthetics through their negotiation of identity in the politicized loci of space, place and voice. In the balkanization of such issues of voice and space, we can see the ways that the emergent selfis embodied and aestheticized in literature. To do so creates a more tactile and "artfull" representation of the self rather than a representation of identity as a mere abstract concept. To use written language to express the self is to carry processes of selfdefinition for black women into the realm of creative production. For women, especially black women, who are a politically …

The Scientist As Protagonist In Christopher Marlowe's, Heba Hassan A El Abbadi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Going Home: The Relevance Of Philippine Folktale To Early Childhood Education, Eleanor A. Rivera

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This study focuses on the value of introducing Philippine folktales to children of Filipino heritage. The primary objective in this project is to demonstrate how Philippine folktales can serve as a potent vehicle for taking American-born Filipino children home, that is teaching them about their roots and celebrating their cultural identity. I believe that by recognizing their Filipino heritage the children gain a fuller appreciation of and pride in their uniqueness as well as the interest and ability to share aspects of their culture with other children. It is my hope that consideration of their own cultural identity will help …

Myth And Myth-Making In James Branch Cabell's Jurgen : A Comedy Of Justice, Christopher Carson Crenshaw

Master's Theses

Criticism extant on myth in Cabell's Jurgen has focused largely either on the presence of specific mythos in the text, or on the universal application of those myths to the modern world via the cultural-anthropological methods first described in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. The common thread in such criticism is that myth is always perceived as an authoritative structure for the transmission of the author's themes. This thesis proposes, however, that the satirical tone and self-conscious allegory of Jurgen systematically combine to strip myth of all authority, placing it in a role which conceals, rather than transmits, …

"Something For The Girls" : Demeter, Persephone, And Hecate In Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding And The Optimist's Daughter, Amy Davidson Grubb

Master's Theses

Eudora Welty's novels of Southern women and ritual reveal her desire to convey a woman's world and to imbue it with a prelapsarian power of feminine self-knowledge. To create this world, Welty draws upon the mythological signifiers of Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate. Utilizing natural imagery of food and flowers, Welty develops a fecund, spring-like landscape and explores the relationship between character, author, and myth. What begins in Delta Wedding as a search to reaffirm the existence of a world spirit concludes in The Optimist's Daughter as a triumphant rebirth of the feminine spirit. Laurel McKelva Hand, unlike her predecessor Laura …

Voicing Manhood : Masculinity And Dialogue In Ernest J. Gaines's "The Sky Is Gray," "Three Men," And A Gathering Of Old Men, William T. Mallon

Master's Theses

Using concepts both from gender studies of literature and from discourse theory, this thesis explores the relationship between race, masculinity, and dialogue in Ernest Gaines's "The Sky is Gray," "Three Men," and A Gathering of Old Men. In these works, Gaines demonstrates that manhood can be achieved by a process of linguistic appropriation. His African-American male characters become men through the utterance, not the violent act. This thesis examines how Gaines's black men appropriate language among distinct groups: themselves, the extended black community, and the white community.

At The New Yorker, Therese Anderson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The following essays and letters grew from a notebook I kept while interning at The New Yorker last summer. Each night, in my room at the boardinghouse on 36th Street, I recorded the decorations of the day, like the conversation I had with a prominent writer in the lunchroom, or the sight of a startled shorebird on the front of the office building.

Going Back, To Begin, Ilena Starsun Coulbrooke

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This thesis project explores. in poetry, the effects of atomic testing and unrestrained pesticide use on the people who lived in or near Utah in the fifties and sixties.

Nuclear testing began in Nevada in 1951, the year I was born in south-east Idaho, where my family lived under radiation tainted clouds for a decade along with the Utah downwinders. My father died of lung cancer caused from breathing pesticide-laden air in 1962, the year Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. These two dates stand out in my mind as important markers in my quest to discover why I think and …

Articulation, Kendra Evans

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

As my major is Art with an emphasis in Graphic Design, and my minor is English, with Departmental Honors and a focus on poetry, my Honors Senior thesis, ARTiculation, exists as a link between these two arts. This collection of essays explores the similarities and relationships between painting and poetry, and the influences each has on the other. The format in which I have chosen to present my writing in is editorial layout of periodical publication, a medium of communication where the visual and written arts overlap in technique and style.

Schaller And Matthiessen Journey Through The Himalayas: Two Contemporary Nature Writers Synthesize Science And Spirituality, Audrie Jane Turner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Long before Charles Darwin's time, members of Western civilization viewed the sciences and spirituality as antithetical approaches to life. In the last 150 years, the argument for superiority of one over the other has continued, and Darwin's theories merely intensified the debate. However, American nature writing has evolved in a way that often synthesizes science and spirituality. This thesis will discuss this synthesis, and how two contemporary nature writers have dealt with the combination of science and spirituality in the natural and literary world. The merging of these two seemingly opposed subjects may be one of the most instructive and …

Twentieth-Century Allegories Of The Human Condition, Hala Mohamed Kamel Amin

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

(De)Construction Of Patriarchal Gendering In The Arabian Nights, Nadia R Wassef

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

James Joyce And His Other Language: The "Abnihilization Of The Etym", Lisa J. Fluet '96

Fenwick Scholar Program

This thesis proposes to say something new about Joyce's female characters that would in a sense redeem Joyce from the sharp criticism his texts encounter from feminist theorists. To achieve this, I have worked to dismantle the notion of literal, primary-word meanings to expose the etymon's origin from nothing. By tracing points in various works of Joyce where the word, the basis for most patriarchal literary representation, is not revered, but instead is dismantled, proven inadequate, and ultimately "abnihilizated," I attempt to demonstrate that female characters kept outside active participation with the word warrant serious consideration, as harbingers of a …

Figure, Ground, And Gender In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, Jennifer Mccay

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Ripple In Still Water, James Cosgrove

English Language and Literature ETDs

Ripple in Still Water is the story of the McGonigle family of Kansas City, MO, and the search for their son Frank who disappeared from their home in 1982. For nine years they searched with the help of police departments, sheriff's departments, private investigators, and the prayers of many friends.

In 1991 a Kansas City, KS, police detective happened upon Frank's case file tucked in the back of a drawer and asked permission to reopen it. Within days the detective discovered, with the aid of the national crime computer, that the body of a man fitting Frank's description had been …