Of Ghosts And Spaceships: Reclaiming Chinese National Identity Through Science Fiction, Nicholas M. Stillman

Global Honors Theses

This paper examines the extent to which Chinese science fiction literature has played a role in the reframing of Chinese national identity as one that is based in scientific and technological development. Specifically, whether the recent push during a 2007 conference in Chengdu for increased science fiction consumption has resulted in more scientific development and more positivist science fictional literature.

The paper both evaluates the current state of science fiction in China and the potential impact of its narratives through an analysis of the historical context of the role of science fiction in China compared to the more modern usage …

Invincible: Legacy And Propaganda In Superhero Comics, Natalie R. Sheppard

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Captain America and Iron Man are both iconic American heroes, representing different American values. Captain America was created during the Golden Age of comics and represents a longing for the past, while Iron Man was created at the height of the Cold War and looks forward to a new America. This paper will first establish the historical and cultural relationship between comic books and propaganda, beginning with the first appearance of Superman. It will pay special attention to the similarities and differences of Captain America and Iron Man, focusing on their representation of American values over time, and discuss how …

Lisbeth Salander Lost In Translation - An Exploration Of The English Version Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Kajsa Paludan

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This thesis sets out to explore the cultural differences between Sweden and the United States by examining the substantial changes made to Men Who Hate Women, including the change in the book’s title in English to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. My thesis focuses in particular on changes in the depiction of the female protagonist: Lisbeth Salander. Unfortunately we do not have access to translator Steven T. Murray’s original translation, though we know that the English publisher and rights holder Christopher MacLehose chose to enhance Larsson’s work in order to make the novel more interesting for English-speaking …

"Rank Corpuscles": Soil And Identity In Eighteenth-Century Representations, Nina Patricia Budabin Mcquown

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I analyze scenes of encounter between human beings and human dust in eighteenth-century texts. Ploughmen exhume bones and armor in the arable, consumers taste other people’s excrement in their vegetables, and improvers lime the earth to break down ancient corpses. In process, I find that eighteenth-century British authors recognized the soil as an agent of continuity, with the capacity to preserve, mobilize, and disseminate the material constituents of identity from one body into another. At times, the soil’s powerful co-operative agency is threatening to the integrity of the human self, but I argue that authors negotiate between …

Gothic Literature And The Politics Of Indistinction, Nicholas Everett Miller

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I recover the Gothic as a literature of political possibility. While scholars have long associated the Gothic tradition with political fear, I argue that Gothic novels challenge liberal ideas of the self to produce a sometimes radically egalitarian politics of freedom in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Edmund Burke made much of the fearfulness of an egalitarian politics in the 1790s, and literary historians have relied on his influence to argue that Gothic fiction is primarily an expression of the fear that comes with the collapse of familial, social, and political distinctions. But fear is not all that accompanies such …

Telescopes And Spyglasses: Using Literary Theories In High School Classrooms, Danielle M. Rains

Honors Projects

This handbook is structured in a way that can be directly applied to the classroom. The theories are organized and ordered to build on one another; the skills that your students learn from one will help them complete the tasks of the next. Each chapter provides information about the theory, how to conduct a reading following the theory’s guidelines, and how to introduce the theory to your students.

(Un)Wrapping Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Relational Power And Contagious Wonderment Of Candy And Other Things, Brooke Clark

Honors Theses

Huddled in the corner of the cold, sterile floor of The Art Institute of Chicago, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991 is a mound of individually wrapped, multihued candy that can be possessed, consumed, and rearranged by the audience (artic.edu). The parenthetical remark within the title suggests the portrait is that of a human. In fact, Ross was the artist's lover, who died of AIDS in the year 1991. The candy spill memorializes Ross at his healthy weight of one hundred seventy-five pounds. Even as Ross's body is implicated in the candy, the candies themselves contain and …

'Precious Objects': Strange 'Things' In James And Wharton, John Kinard

Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I attempt to examine the importance of things, the strange agency of objects, which emerges in the literature of the late nineteenth century. To this end, I examine the economy of things in both Henry James and Edith Wharton. I attempt to connect this object agency with the emergent discourses and technologies of the time, and to link these both with media and queer theory.

Revising For Genre: Mary Robinson's Poetry From Newspaper Verse To Lyrical Tales, Shelley Aj Jones

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, not as the culminating point to which her writing inevitably led, as is frequently imagined in accounts of her life and work, but, instead, as the product of an intricate process of revision that highlights her investment in genre. Versions of many of the poems that Robinson included in Lyrical Tales originally were published in newspapers and periodicals. Rather than seeing the changes as a move toward a best or most mature or inspired version, I argue that Robinson revised to meet the requirements of her new genre, the lyrical tale. I …

Living On The Moon: Women, Home Making, And The House After World War Ii In Shirley Jackson’S We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Leslie Dennis

Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis, I concentrate on Shirley Jackson, her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and women’s place in post-World War II American society. To start, I introduce Jackson and her role in literary history, the housewife writer in the 1950s and 60s, and magazine culture. Then I move to a historical perspective of the 1950s and propaganda during the atomic war era. I focus my attention on how government literature worked to contain women in the home and control sexuality and gender roles. Following my discussion of domesticity, I concentrate on the history of the Gothic novel …

The Poetic Works Of Charlotte Smith: Philosophy, Sympathy, And Forging Community, Jessica Danielle Castillo

Theses and Dissertations

This work will focus on Charlotte Smith’s poetic works and how, over the course of her entire poetic career (the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century), she exhibits a concrete sense of a poetic ethos regarding sympathy in her writing. I seek to account for the overwhelming focus on suffering subjects by illuminating her view of the relation between poetry and sympathy for others. I will also place her within a history of writers and philosophers who examined the epistemological and practical nature of feeling, sympathy, and emotional connection among human beings. Smith feels that poetry renders suffering visible to others, …

Beyond Marriage And Motherhood: The Motifs Involved In The Portrayal Of Women In Literature, Hannah Hunter

Honors Theses

When I was in elementary school most of the books that I voluntarily read featured female characters. Part of the reason was that it was expected of me and those books (about girls/women) were the ones recommended to me. Another part was that female characters were the ones I could most closely relate to. They gave me ideas about what it is to be a woman, and subtly led me to approach the question of what kind of woman I wanted to be. It took me years to really pick up on the stereotypes and recurring female characters, and it …

English Language Learning Through Visual Arts Practices: A Curriculum For Conflict-Affected Youth In Secondary Education, Jenny Lemper

Master's Projects and Capstones

This field project summarizes recent research in conflict and education, and presents an English language learner curriculum designed to address the current gap in quality education for conflict-affected youth. The curriculum contains six modules and develops English language literacy through student visual arts projects using text and images. The purpose of the curriculum is to familiarize students to the various confidence-building and coping mechanisms available in creative expression and to develop valuable visual and verbal language related life skills, therefore equipping students with tools to support successful futures.

Fatal Attraction: The Fetishized Image Of The Fatal Woman As Gothic Double, Margaret Anne Young

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Gothic heroine is often doubled by an image – a painting, statue, costume, drawing, projection, or mental image – that is preternaturally powerful and endowed with an antagonistic sexual presence. This image of the fatal woman, unlike portraits of the heroine, is a representation without a referent: a fetish object, both for fictional characters and critics.

I argue that the simulacrum of dangerous femininity is a shifting signifier rather than a one-dimensional representation of – as previous critics have argued – ‘male fears and desires’ or female empowerment. Following the work of sociologist Bruno Latour and narratologist Mieke Bal, …

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Making The Past Present, Rebecca Hoevenaar

Honors Projects

Art has the unique ability to create new meaning from past events. As a work of literature, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has succeeded in doing this. Vonnegut took the bombing of Dresden and make it present and relevant in the minds of young Americans during the Vietnam War. Readers made connections between the two horrific events. In our contemporary world, Slaughterhouse-Five still remains an important work of literature. Violent conflicts and horrors continue to happen as with the recent Iraq War.

One Man's Fakelore Is Another Man's Treasure: A Case Study Of Paul Bunyan And The Legend Of The Sleeping Bear, And The Value Of Fakelore In An Interconnected World., Kalani Bates

Honors Theses

The American academic study of folklore blossomed in the past hundred years. The tumultuous battle to define, collate and structure the new study of folklore raged in the academic world, especially in the 1950’s.[1] This obsession not only manifested itself in the academic study of it, but also in the popular culture of the 1900’s. The tradition of the tall tale and the legend exploded into the consumer world, becoming a commodity produced and consumed at will.[2] Richard Dorson classifies this explosion into two very separate studies of ‘folklore’ and ‘fakelore’. Folklore is the group of stories that …

The Representation Of Poverty In Great Depression American Literature, Cavel Austin

HIM 1990-2015

The objective of this thesis is to explore how American authors represented poverty across different states during the Depression Era. I have chosen to review social reform author John Steinbeck, and proletariat authors, Michael Gold, Meridel Le Sueur, and William Attaway. Before addressing the issues presented in the data collection tools (novels): The Grapes of Wrath, Jews Without Money, The Girl, and Blood on the Forge, I reviewed the fundamentals of the events leading up to the crash of the stock market, which spiraled the United States and the world at large in the greatest Depression ever known. In this …

Encountering Time: Selected Short Stories Of J.G. Ballard And Paul Ricoeur's Time And Narrative, Emily J. Duchaney

Master’s Theses and Projects

Contents:

• Introduction: Treatment of Time in J.G. Ballard’s Selected Short Stories
• Chapter I: The Illusion of Now
• Chapter II: Games With Time
• Chapter III: Capturing Time, Frozen Temporality, and The End of Time
• Chapter IV: Ricoeur’s “Third Time” or The Fictive Experience of Time

The Queer And The Bodily: Explorations Of Power In Women's Visionary Writing In The Book Of Margery Kempe 2014, Jayne Emerson Stacconi

Master's Theses

The provocative Book of Margery Kempe is a seminal text in the history of female authorship. Claiming to be the first written autobiography, The Book serves as a literary representation of womanhood during the late fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries when Margery was writing, and also speaks to circulating medieval discourses of religion, pilgrimage, and sexuality. Participating in medieval women’s visionary writing as a genre, Margery’s visionary power is a tool by which she is able to emancipate herself from the limiting roles of wife and mother. Additionally, by working within the conventions of visionary writing, Margery is able to …

Listening To Silence: A Rhetorical Examination Of Silence In The Tale Type The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers, Crystal Stephens

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Fairy tales are an integral part of our culture and have been for hundreds of years. Most of us grew up hearing certain stories, reading the Grimm brothers, watching Disney adaptations of classic tales, and passing these things on to the next generation. But even though we sometimes dismiss fairy tales as we get older as “stories for children,” that does not mean that fairy tales do not play an important role in our lives and cultures. Studying and understanding fairy tales can provide insight into our history, our cultures, and ourselves. As stated by Dan Ben-Amos, “The folktale has …

Transfer And Production Of The English System Of Articles: Replicating Crompton, Lyle A. Shumate

Culminating Projects in English

The teachability of the English language's system of articles has been researched many times over. It is widely known that for English language learners whose language does not have a system of articles, or is [-article], acquiring this system can be difficult, even problematic. Likewise, it is well-documented that even learners whose language is [+article] might encounter problems of their own while acquiring this system.

My study has in part attempted to replicate Crompton's 2011 study of native speakers of Arabic and the effects of transfer from their LI while producing English's system of articles. To facilitate his research, Crompton …

Zadie Smith's Nw And The Edwardian Roots Of The Contemporary Cosmopolitan Ethic, Laura Domenica Marostica

Theses and Dissertations

British contemporary writer Zadie Smith is often representative of cosmopolitan writers of the twenty-first century: in both her fiction and nonfiction, she joins a multicultural background and broad, varied interests to an ethic based on the importance of interpersonal relationships and empathetic respect for the other. But while Smith is often considered the poster child for the contemporary British cosmopolitan, her ethics are in fact rooted in the one rather staid member of the canon: EM Forster, whose emphatic call to ‘only connect’ grounds all of Smith's fiction. Her latest novel, 2012's NW, further expands her relationship to Forster in …

Inheriting The Library: The Archon And The Archive In George Macdonald's Lilith, Lauran Ray Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

George MacDonald's novel Lilith relates the story of a young man inheriting his deceased father's estate and coming in contact with its remarkable library and mysterious librarian. The protagonist's subsequent adventures in a fantastical world prepare the young Mr. Vane to assume authority over his inherited archive and become an archon. Jacques Derrida's exposition of the responsibilities of the archon including archival authority, domiciliation, and consignation illuminate the mentoring role of the elusive librarian Mr. Raven in Vane's adventures. By using Derrida's deconstruction of archives to unpack the intricacies of knowledge transfer in MacDonald's novel, the lasting impact of the …

Somewhere Amongst The Ashes, Keith Rebec

All NMU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

SOMEWHERE AMONGST THE ASHES

By

Keith Rebec

This story collection explores how human beings deal with loss. Whether the loss stems from death, the loss of personal innocence, or the loss of love, the characters within are forced to make decisions that he or she wouldn't make if given the choice. Some of the characters, in an effort to prevent the same or a similar type of loss from reoccurring in their lives, desperately seek ways to avoid the issues altogether, which further complicates their troubles. Others, unbeknownst to their impending loss, must make split second decisions that will …

Libraries In Battle: An Analysis Of The Image Of The Library In Texts By Swift, Borges, And Sloan, Elyssa M. Gould

All NMU Master's Theses

This essay examines the image of the library in texts by Jonathan Swift, Jorge Luis Borges, and Robin Sloan. Libraries are prevalent institutions in many cultures throughout the world, often known through positive or negative stereotypes. By studying texts whose time periods, subject matter, and genre all differ, an image of the library appears that takes into account both positive and negative aspects to create a holistic image. The methods used to evaluate the texts include close reading, Frye’s archetypal theory, and approaches to the semiotic method championed by both Tancheva and Stelmakh. This study found that each story reveals …

Online Credibility Testing In Small Organizations: A Case Study Of The Global Village Gifts Website, Natalie Cheney Homan

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

A visitor's perception of the credibility of a website and the organization behind it is a matter of great importance to any business. A theory known as prominence-interpretation theory suggests that users make credibility judgments through a two-step process: "1. The user notices something (Prominence), and 2. The user makes a judgment about it (Interpretation)" (Fogg, et al., 2003). With this theory as a basis for support, Heidi Everett (2012) developed a credibility test for small businesses to assess the credibility of their website through a focus group.

Global Village Gifts (GVG) is a not-for-profit fair trade store in Logan, …

The Complexity Of Common Core: Teaching Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince As A 7th Grade Complex Text, Allyson R. Jones

Honors Theses

With the implementation of the Common Core State Standards occurring across the country, schools and students are seeing changes in the organization of education. These standards, grounded in English Language Arts and Mathematics, are designed to push students’ critical thinking skills, writing ability, and methods of communication to prepare them for their life beyond secondary education. For English Language Arts, there is an emphasis on teaching complex texts. In this study, I examined the qualities of complex texts to determine if Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince could be considered a teaching tool for seventh grade students. To do this, …

Reforming The Performance Of Masculinity: Stephen Crane's Critiques Of Riis's And Roosevelt's Civic Militarism, Cambri Mcdonald Spear

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The Progressive Era (1890-1920) marks a unique period of social change in American history not only because of reformists' muckraking attacks against political machines and other corrupt social practices, but also because gender permeated every aspect of reform. The doctrine of separate spheres, which had been such a mainstay of Industrial Revolution-era America, was blurring rapidly, as many reformists, like suffragists, pressed for greater gender equality. However, an extremely fascinating characteristic of this period that is often overlooked is the inevitable way in which the performance of gender became essential for reformists to be successful.

Was Gawain A Gamer?, Gus Forester

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Describes a theory of gaming inspired primarily by Jean Baudrillard’s claim that gaming is characterized by a “passion for rules.” Key elements of the theory include that games are an attempt to create a new reality, that games create a space for individuality even in an otherwise homogenized world, and that pain and happiness are not diametrically opposed concepts to the gamer. The theory also emphasizes the importance of the player’s meeting with the “superplayer,” the player’s own constructed ideal that he tries to imitate within the game world. This theory of gaming is then applied to the 14^{th …}

"We Can't Reclaim What We Don't Understand": Teachers' Perceptions Of Advocacy And Voice In A Rural Institute Of The National Writing Project, James Anthony Anderson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines teachers' perceptions of advocacy and voice in a summer institute of the National Writing Project. The Rural Advocacy Institute, a first-time initiative through the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project, offered three weeks of professional development centered on rural education and teaching English language arts in rural public schools. The study is a grounded theory study; grounded theory forces the researcher to stay "close to the data," compare data sets, and use reflective writing to identify conceptual categories in the data. Data collection in the study included semi-structured interviews with six K-12 teachers participating in the Institute and twenty-seven …