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Theses/Dissertations

2022

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Stories Of Social Justice: How The Art Of Storytelling In Tristan Strong Can Heal Racial Trauma In The Unites States, Shaye Lynn Champ-Correll Dec 2022

Stories Of Social Justice: How The Art Of Storytelling In Tristan Strong Can Heal Racial Trauma In The Unites States, Shaye Lynn Champ-Correll

English Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

Storytelling is a vital part of the human experience. Stories can help heal trauma, help us all confront our monsters and inner demons, and can shape the way we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Kwame Mbalia’s Tristan Strong series are an example of the way stories can do all these things in themselves, and also address the ways stories do all of these things within Tristan Strong’s story. In the following thesis, I will examine the art and importance of storytelling, the ways in which stories can grow and change beyond their origins, and the ways in …

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Queen Academy, Hantian Zhnag Dec 2022

Queen Academy, Hantian Zhnag

Master's Theses

As an upmarket novel exploring immigration and racial dynamics, Queen Academy lies at the intersection of Kathryn Ma’s The Chinese Groove, Timothy Wang’s Slant, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in style and subject. The protagonist Kang comes to the US from China to study statistics, but finds himself becoming a “potato queen”—an Asian gay man interested in dating white men only—and locked in self-loathing. It will take a heartbreak and treading the line of illegality to see himself again. Overall, by engaging with themes of immigration, belonging, and racialized desire, the novel takes the stance that the …

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The Contemporary "White Trash" Memoir In Literary, Social And Political Contexts, Ursula Hansberry Dec 2022

The Contemporary "White Trash" Memoir In Literary, Social And Political Contexts, Ursula Hansberry

Student Theses and Dissertations

This senior thesis is about class in the United States, as expressed and represented in three critically and popularly successful memoirs published by white working-class writers between 2005 and 2018. My thesis explores how these memoirs and their critical and commercial reception demonstrate a profound shift in cultural and social representations of white working-class upbringings in the United States, although not in any simple or obvious way. While readers intuitively grasp that a memoir is not the truth in a directly literal sense, but rather a document that is constructed, edited, framed, shaped, and dramatized, readers and critics at the …

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Censorship In Schools: Reading's Position In The Landscape Of Policy Creation, Rachel Beckham Dec 2022

Censorship In Schools: Reading's Position In The Landscape Of Policy Creation, Rachel Beckham

Honors Theses

Censorship is not new to current issues. It has affected authors and speakers for centuries, but it is especially prevalent today, especially in schools. Teachers and librarians are often challenged for the materials they choose to provide to students. Concerned parents object to the materials for containing sexual content, profanity, or LGBTQ+ characters or themes. This study aims to answer the question, “What role, if any, do books containing controversial topics serve in the literature classrooms of today’s students?” To answer this question, the author of this study conducted a literary analysis on the top three most banned books of …

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Beyond All Worlds: George Macdonald, The Pre-Tolkienians, And The Forgotten Possibilities Of Fantasy, Ethan Patrick Stevens Dec 2022

Beyond All Worlds: George Macdonald, The Pre-Tolkienians, And The Forgotten Possibilities Of Fantasy, Ethan Patrick Stevens

Masters Theses

The history of modern fantasy has been powerfully shaped by the worldbuilding paradigm so successfully executed in J.R.R. Tolkien's 1954-55 trilogy The Lord of the Rings. However, there were nearly a hundred and fifty years of creative work between the birth of fantasy as a genre and Tolkien’s publication of The Lord of the Rings. By examining the pre-Tolkienian fantasists, we find that Tolkien's way of exhaustive consistency was not, and is not, the only way to write fantasy. Phantastes (1858), the first novel by the influential Victorian fantasist George MacDonald, defies contemporary worldbuilding standards almost constantly in …

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“The Ugly Truth”: Examining War Trauma And Therapeutic Storytelling Through The Works Of Tim O’Brien, Meredith Ivy Fedewa Dec 2022

“The Ugly Truth”: Examining War Trauma And Therapeutic Storytelling Through The Works Of Tim O’Brien, Meredith Ivy Fedewa

Masters Theses

Within this work, a close study on the relationship between trauma and storytelling is examined through three of Tim O’Brien’s works: The Things They Carried, Going After Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods. Through the application of psychoanalysis, specifically the work of Jacques Lacan, and modern trauma theory, the relationship between individual identity and the traumatizing encounter of the Real is examined through O’Brien’s concepts of Story Truth versus Happening Truth, as well as how those concepts work together to navigate one’s trauma story. Through weaving the aforementioned theory with each text, O’Brien is seen …

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Accepting The Monster Within: Addressing Mental Illness Through Young Adult Literature, Jenna Ellis Dec 2022

Accepting The Monster Within: Addressing Mental Illness Through Young Adult Literature, Jenna Ellis

Honors Theses

This creative research project discusses the importance and practice of implementing a unit on mental health in young adult literature in secondary-level ELA curriculum. The first portion of this thesis is an original short story, entitled “Beneath the Surface,” which portrays a middle-schooler, Leith, whose anxiety manifests itself as a monster. “Beneath the Surface” explores mental illness through a metaphor of the ocean, utilizing water imagery to depict Leith’s experiences with and symptoms of anxiety. Following the short story is an annotated bibliography describing mental health texts for students to read in an ELA unit on mental health as well …

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An Astrological Look Into H.P. Lovecraft’S “The Call Of Cthulhu:”A Celestial Telescope For Literary Analysis, Arianna C. Mayorga Dec 2022

An Astrological Look Into H.P. Lovecraft’S “The Call Of Cthulhu:”A Celestial Telescope For Literary Analysis, Arianna C. Mayorga

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

University students often acquire a knowledge of a slew of literary criticisms for deeper exploration of compositions. Few, if any, literary criticisms can be applied with room for speculative scientific philosophical ways of thought. This brings the creative nature of analysis to a screeching halt– for what is more creative than a speculative-science? In this thesis I will give an introduction to key astrological ideologies. This paper will also work through how those ideologies could be applied analytically, academically, and professionally to literature. My aim will be to use one of H.P. Lovecraft’s main mystically- connotative works, “The Call of …

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No Canon We Die Like Men: The Oppositional Power Of Fanon On Different Social Media Platforms, Jamie Eason Dec 2022

No Canon We Die Like Men: The Oppositional Power Of Fanon On Different Social Media Platforms, Jamie Eason

English Honors Theses

No Canon We Die Like Men: The Oppositional Power of Fanon on Different Social Media Platforms examines the ways in which fans utilize the affordances of social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube as they interact with original works and construct a collaborative fanon. Fandom, and fanon in particular, holds a unique power over original works that resists capitalist efforts. As such, fanon models a structure for community building and collaboration which can be followed by other, non-fan groups.

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Shakespeare And The Supreme Court: How The Justices Reveal Their Ideologies By Referencing His Works, Rachel Anderson Dec 2022

Shakespeare And The Supreme Court: How The Justices Reveal Their Ideologies By Referencing His Works, Rachel Anderson

Honors Projects

The works of William Shakespeare have been referenced many times throughout history, even by Supreme Court justices. Building off of an observation of a mock trial by James Shapiro, this project puts the utilization of Shakespeare from three Court opinions in relation to its context within the play and the opinion to examine what the reference reveals about the authoring justices' ideology. In doing so, this project concludes that the justices utilize Shakespeare's works in their opinions for various reasons, including to infuse their beliefs into their argument. This implies that Supreme Court justices do not base their opinions on …

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Before Daughters And Amplifying Ambiguous Loss In Poetry: How The Line Break Functions As An Effect, Madison Smith Dec 2022

Before Daughters And Amplifying Ambiguous Loss In Poetry: How The Line Break Functions As An Effect, Madison Smith

English Creative Writing Theses

The line break is almost impossible to define by itself and more tangible to define as an effect that works with all aspects of language within a poem. Through analysis of the poetic line in both the works of others and my own poetry, I show how the line break as an effect works to amplify feelings of ambiguous loss within individual poems. Looking at how the line break functions in poems having to do with ambiguous loss accomplishes two things: it educates readers on the intricacies of loss and especially non-death losses, and it brings the line break to …

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Payton's Final Master's Portfolio, Payton Boshears Dec 2022

Payton's Final Master's Portfolio, Payton Boshears

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Here is my final Master's Portfolio. I did not have specialization for the English program, so for the portfolio I chose four different projects that represent the variety of courses I have taken during my time here at BGSU.

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Final Master's Portfolio, Carol V. Grinage Dec 2022

Final Master's Portfolio, Carol V. Grinage

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This is the final master's portfolio for a Master's in English with an emphasis on professional writing and rhetoric.

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Sex And The Superman: Gender And The Superhero Monomyth, Christopher Maverick Dec 2022

Sex And The Superman: Gender And The Superhero Monomyth, Christopher Maverick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1938 introduction of Superman, superheroes have been ever-present in American popular culture. Indeed, with the modern preponderance of comic book movies dominating the American cinematic box-office, superhero fantasy is arguably the most important genre of fiction being produced in the contemporary moment. Peter Coogan, Kurt Busiek and many other scholars have discussed the prominence and relevance of the superhero fantasy as a genre. Still others, including Umberto Eco and Marco Arnaudo, have asserted that the superhero is not so much a genre and as it is the evolution of mythology. In Sex and the Superman, I argue …

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"I Need To Write About What I Believe": Journaling And Afrofuturism In Octavia E. Butler's Parable Of The Sower And Parable Of The Talents, Shlana E. Sims Dec 2022

"I Need To Write About What I Believe": Journaling And Afrofuturism In Octavia E. Butler's Parable Of The Sower And Parable Of The Talents, Shlana E. Sims

ETD Archive

Butler’s choice of using the diary of a young Black girl and of making that Black girl a leader is directly paralleled in real history via diaries, such as The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Butler’s use of the journaling technique via a Black woman ties the future to the past as the diaries of these influential Black women are read by later generations giving a glimpse of what dreams, hopes, and goals the women had for the Black Community. She further gives cautionary tales of “if-this-continues to-go-on” as a warning for the community to be on its guard, …

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Final Master's Portfolio, Marisa Mount Dec 2022

Final Master's Portfolio, Marisa Mount

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The following portfolio project contains four separate pieces of writing produced during the author's MA coursework.

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Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese Dec 2022

Girlhood And Engendered Alienation In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Lauren C. Dolese

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing a girls’ studies perspective and materialist feminist lens, this paper seeks to put Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in conversation with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Besides being published in the early 1940s, both works feature young girls navigating class struggles, exploring their identities, and struggling against dominant ideologies specific to their time and place. McCullers’ and Smith’s novels depict how a patriarchal, capitalist society imposes upon young women a narrow, misogynistic view of themselves and the women around them—facilitating the social reproduction of oppression and alienation. In depicting these realities of …

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A Discourse Analysis Of Cheers, Paul Wiesenborn Dec 2022

A Discourse Analysis Of Cheers, Paul Wiesenborn

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

This paper analyzes the pragmatics features of the language in an episode of the sitcom Cheers to find out what second language learners need to know about the language of the sitcom and about the background knowledge informing it for that episode to be understandable to them and for it thus to be an effective as an instruction tool. To answer this question, the researcher transcribed the speech in the episode and used a speech act theory-based approach to identify and categorize deixis, locutionary forms, illocutionary types, and instances of reduction and types of indirect speech. Categories in these areas …

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The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs Dec 2022

The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently …

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Defining Heroinism: Heartthrobs Refining Heroines In 18th And 19th Century Women's Literature, Grace M. Gibson Dec 2022

Defining Heroinism: Heartthrobs Refining Heroines In 18th And 19th Century Women's Literature, Grace M. Gibson

Honors College Theses

This project will explore the emergence of “heroinism,” a uniquely feminine way in which early female authors approached the heroine’s journey. Barred by male expectations of female conduct both in society and literature, eighteenth and nineteenth century women daring to “attempt the pen” forged stories of heroines with conventions and tropes distinctly, though not entirely, separate from those told of centuries of heroes. I intend to track the ways in which these early tales of heroines told by women strayed from the traditional heroic plot, with unique motivations, mentors, trials, and rewards, but also how they were shaped and confined …

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Hurricane Girls, Kallie Comardelle Dec 2022

Hurricane Girls, Kallie Comardelle

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

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Practicing Re-Enlightenment : Technology Revisited In The Age Of Climate Change, Gyuri Kang Dec 2022

Practicing Re-Enlightenment : Technology Revisited In The Age Of Climate Change, Gyuri Kang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In the age of climate change, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh asks whether humanity is prepared for the unthinkable nature of climate events. The Earth’s climate is changing faster than humans can expect and adapt. Ghosh warns that modern people are too deranged to imagine in what forms of changes are approaching. His term, derangement, suggests that humans are no longer able to imagine the future world shaped by climate change. The signals of the unexpectable realities of climate change, however, may be hidden in existing knowledge. Here, technology can help us access this hidden knowledge through its ability to …

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Contrapuntal Readings Of The Exilic Consciousness : Reading Yehuda Amichai And Mahmoud Darwish Together, Sarah Brooks Zahed Dec 2022

Contrapuntal Readings Of The Exilic Consciousness : Reading Yehuda Amichai And Mahmoud Darwish Together, Sarah Brooks Zahed

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

AbstractIn the essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” in Prisms, Theodor Adorno asserts that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34). In this study, I examine what it means to write poetry after the Catastrophe and the difficult relationship between historical genocides and their literary representations. My project “Contrapuntal Readings of the Exilic Consciousness: Reading Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish Together” explores the scope and character of poetry post-1940s to late 20th century in relation to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, at the margins of Arabic and Hebraic literary traditions. Both Shoah and Nakba mark a specific turning point in …

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Dismembering Monstrous Metaphors In Latinx Speculative Fiction, Danielle Garcia-Karr Dec 2022

Dismembering Monstrous Metaphors In Latinx Speculative Fiction, Danielle Garcia-Karr

Theses and Dissertations

U.S. public discourse and popular media are rife with monstrous metaphors of Latinxs. This thesis argues that these gothic monstrous metaphors construct an affective economy of fear, which results in material violence and the devastation of Latinx lives. I further argue that to intervene within this affective economy, Latinx authors write speculative fiction, employing critical race methodologies, to negotiate monstrosity in relation to citizenship. In other words, speculative Latinx authors disidentify with monsters and enact epistemic disobedience, problematizing the known and naturalized and delinking Latinx people from monstrous metaphors to interrupt cycles of fear and violence. In exploring this metaphoric …

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Intensa: Writings In English And Spanish From A Feminist Immigrant, Nubia Sarahi Reyna Melendez Dec 2022

Intensa: Writings In English And Spanish From A Feminist Immigrant, Nubia Sarahi Reyna Melendez

Theses and Dissertations

INTENSA: WRITINGS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH FROM A MEXICAN FEMINIST is a bilingual work written in hybrid literature. The writings, in both English and Spanish, are free prose poetry and tell the story of its narrator through a feminist and immigrant point of view coming from a overwhelmingly majority catholic country, religion that does not view men and women as equals. The thesis details the narrator's life through a feminist point of view as well as her relationship with her mother, her personal relationships, what it means to be an immigrant and what it is like for her, and many …

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Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton Dec 2022

Triumph In The Suburbs: Richard Ford And The Spaces Of New Capitalism, John Gorton

All Theses

In his 1986 book America, Baudrillard noted that “the most banal suburb…is more at the centre of the world than any of the cultural manifestations of old Europe.” My thesis argues that this monumental shift from the suburbs as enclaves at the outer edges of cultural urban centers to “the centre of the world” is at the heart of Richard Ford’s realist project in his Pulitzer Prize winning Bascombe series starting with The Sportswriter in 1986. Emergent twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature scholars have been interested in the schism between the fictionalized representation and the lived experience of suburbia — while …

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Hawthorne’S Human Nature And Sin: Criticisms Of Puritanism And Progressivism, Oscar Martinez Nov 2022

Hawthorne’S Human Nature And Sin: Criticisms Of Puritanism And Progressivism, Oscar Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

One of America’s greatest authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a time of rapid scientific, material, and intellectual advancement. However, unlike many of his peers who went all-in on utopian reform movements, Hawthorne took a cautious and reserved approach to progress even though he supported the idea abstractly. Using six tales written acrossHawthorne’s career, this work will examine what each has to say about Hawthorne’s belief in human nature and why he takes such a skeptical position against movements aiming to fundamentally reshape people and society. The tales from the 1830s, “The Gentle Boy,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Minister’s Black …

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Final Master's Portfolio, Anji Straayer Nov 2022

Final Master's Portfolio, Anji Straayer

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The following is a final portfolio for the Master's of English with a specialization in teaching. It is the culmination of my course of study and includes pieces reflective of the various courses I took and my various interests with literature and teaching. It opens with an analytical narrative overviewing my growth and learning at BGSU. The substantive research project is on multimodality and incorporating multimodal techniques into the secondary classroom. The second piece is a unit plan for the Greek play Antigone. The third and fourth pieces are literary analyses; one is a critique of the Victorian mindset as …

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Maneuvering Mestizaje In Shakespeare's Tragicomedies, Andrea Phiana Borunda Nov 2022

Maneuvering Mestizaje In Shakespeare's Tragicomedies, Andrea Phiana Borunda

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project explores and wades through the implications of mestizaje in the murky depths of Shakespeare’s oceans. Disguises and mistakes in identities and in gender and “race” draw on the hybridity and indeterminacy of the early modern stage and its fluidity and lack of order to reflect an unhomed and unmediated formation of nationhood, diaspora, and (trans)global identities. Drawing on ecocritical and critical race theories, I contend the tragicomic works of Shakespeare expose and dismantle ecoracial fantasies of white male supremacy to curate a space of mestizaje for a new generation of BIPOC scholars.

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A Ruff Day On The Road: How Relocation Affects Children Pre-K Through Third Grade And How A Picture Book Can Help, Bryant Miller Nov 2022

A Ruff Day On The Road: How Relocation Affects Children Pre-K Through Third Grade And How A Picture Book Can Help, Bryant Miller

Honors Projects

Moving their home from across town, a couple of states away, or overseas is something most will experience at least once in their lifetime. For all, moving is a big change, but for children, it can have lasting effects. Presumably, social skills, academic development, and family dynamics are all impacted when children move. But how and to what length are these factors influenced? This led to the original research question, how does relocation affect children and how can this transition during relocation be eased? After the first portion of the research was done to answer these questions, the research then …

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