English Language and Literature Commons^™

Invective Drag: Talking Dirty In Catullus, Cicero, Horace, And Ovid, Casey Catherine Moore

Theses and Dissertations

Invective Drag: Talking Dirty in Catullus, Cicero, Horace, and Ovid, studies the relationship between invective texts and masculine self-fashioning. Using gender theory, rhetorical theory, and philology, I examine how invective speech in these authors operates outside the normative social parameters of Roman masculinity.. I examine the invectives of Catullus, Cicero, Horace, and Ovid to argue that in the speaker’s aggressive articulation of masculinity, he often ends up effeminizing or queering himself as he attempts to make his opponents radically other. I show that the hypermasculine speaker of the invective genre utilizes a strategy I term “invective drag,” the adoption of …

Re: Publics: Woman Of Color Feminist Rhetorical Process Shaping Safe Spaces For A Rehumanizing Discourse, Eloisa E. Moreno

Theses and Dissertations

The discourse of women of color feminists over the last thirty years follows what I refer to as woman of color feminist rhetorical process in three recursive phases: location, deliberation, and restoration. The process is a significant contribution to rhetorical theory in the form of woman of color consciousness. This way of knowing considers complex identities at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual identity. The woman of color feminist rhetorician asks us to view self, community, and our notions of love as political constructs. By doing so, we are able to move beyond identity politics and build new …

Tyne Darling: A Novel, Thomas James Vollman

Theses and Dissertations

Tyne Darling spent most of his youth dreaming about the saints. They came 15 to a pack with a single stick of stale, pink bubble gum. Their posters hung on his walls, and their pictures—cut from the Sports Illustrated magazines he got from his uncle—were tacked to his cork board and taped above his desk. His saints were Hank Aaron and Oscar Gamble, Carlton Fisk and Tom Seaver. His saints had rocket arms and sweet, smooth swings. They played a game that existed out of time on a sacred square within a circle. His saints were baseball players.

Now, as …

"[B]Reaking Down The Walls, And Crying To The Mountains"--Isaiah 22:5: Dystopia And Ethics Of The Catcher In The Rye, Megan Marie Toone

Theses and Dissertations

Reading The Catcher in the Rye as dystopian fiction requires critical responsibility to evaluate the ethicality of the protagonist's sense of others and self, to assess the moral nature of the novel's dystopian world, and to evaluate the protagonist's agency or capacity to change his world or himself. The novel presents a multifaceted dystopia existing on multiple planes in the social dogma, the reality of the presented world, and Holden's mind before and after his paradigm shift. The dystopian aspects present in the novel highlight basic ideological systems as well as agency and action within the structure. The dystopian elements …

“I Take--No Less Than Skies”: Emily Dickinson And Nineteenth-Century Meteorology, Kjerstin Evans Ballard

Theses and Dissertations

Emily Dickinson's poetry functions where scientific attention to the physical world and abstract theorizing about the ineffable intersect. Critics who emphasize the poet's dedication to the scientific often take for granted how deeply the uncertainty that underlies all of Dickinson's poetry opposes scientific discussion of the day. Meteorology is an exceptional nineteenth-century science because it takes as its subject complex systems which are inexplicable in Newtonian terms. As such, meteorology can articulate the ways that Dickinson bridges the divide between the unknown and the known, particularly as she relates to the interplay of nature and culture, the role of careful …

What A Dream Was Here: An Ontological Approach To Love And Magic In Shakespeare’S A Midsummer Night’S Dream, Brittany May Rebarchik

Theses and Dissertations

This paper takes Heidegger’s notion of world disclosure and uses it for extended thematic analyses of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In contrast to the majority of Shakespeare critics who treat Shakespeare’s use of magic as an epistemological issue, I argue that the main action of the play develops through an inherent contradiction between the magical and non-magical ontological states of the characters and the love that results. Borrowing from German philosopher Martin Heidegger, I demonstrate magic’s role as a catalyst in giving certain kinds of love a “shift of existence.” I show that the characters come more fully into being, …

Evidences Of Critical Thinking In The Writing Of First-Year College Students, Shannon Bryn Soper

Theses and Dissertations

A healthy civil society depends on citizens who have mature critical thinking skills and a willingness to entertain opposing points of view. The development of critical thinking in young adults has long been studied, but there has been little agreement on what the attributes of critical thinking are and how to reliably assess them. While many studies have attempted to assess the critical thinking abilities of college students, none have yet measured critical thinking through using the Critical Thinking Analytic Rubric (CTAR) to assess first-year college students' writing. This study used a modified version of the CTAR rubric to investigate …

Mack Thomas: The Total Beat, James B. Welton

Theses and Dissertations

Mack Thomas enjoyed both an audience seat and a role in the Beat Generation. He lives the life that fits one of his mottos, “if at first you don’t succeed, quit”. Thomas was the author of two autobiographical novels Gumbo and The Total Beast, a jazz and literature columnist for Grove Press in the 1950s and 1960s. Thomas was also a jazz musician worthy to share the stage with Miles Davis, inventor, and entrepreneur among numerous other interests. His friendship with William S. Burroughs was forged by their Texas ties while they were neighbors living in Paris, France and offered …

Fan The Flames Of Discontent: Contemporary Labor Literature And Social Movements, Ericka Rae Wills

Theses and Dissertations

Fan the Flames of Discontent: Contemporary Labor Literature and Social Movements balances a literary approach to textual analysis with socially grounded reflections on diverse worker organizations. Chapters analyze Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus, and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day alongside worker-writers' texts and testimonies, such as Fran Leeper Buss and María Elena Lucas's Forged under the Sun / Forjada bajo el sol and The Heat: Steelworker Lives and Legends, a collection of United Steelworkers' Institute for Career Development writings. In each of five chapters, this dissertation respectively discusses how literature …

Living Between Dialectics: A Bakhtinian And Lacanian Reading Of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter And Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Xiaojun Luo

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation creates a dialogic web encompassing the sociocultural and psychological aspects of Jade Snow Wong's and Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographies Fifth Chinese Daughter and The Woman Warrior. The American mainstream society and Chinese patriarchal community have conceived insurmountable ethnic and gender differences that are inherent in Wong's and Kingston's growing-up environment. The dissertation argues that how the two authors perceive the way of how these differences have been conceived is central to our understanding of their representations of ethnic female consciousness when they are writing as both subjects and writers. The dissertation notes, to be more specific, Wong's and …

Ecological Humanist Mosaics: Dislocations And Relocations Of The Autobiographical Self In Terry Tempest Williams's Finding Beauty In A Broken World, Sharman Tullis Gill

Theses and Dissertations

Terry Tempest Williams, in Finding Beauty in a Broken World employs literary techniques that suggest dislocations and relocations of the human subject in ethical modes of being. Through narrative techniques, multidisciplinary language, and themes of conversation, gift-exchange, listening and response, Williams reflects ecological humanist mosaics, suggesting cooperative regeneration—an intersection of material beings facilitated by an ethical human imagination that listens, receives, and gives toward patterns of beauty, including, but not limited to, being human in a collective world. This eco-critical analysis of Williams’s work affirms the human being in post-humanist philosophy and repositions relational Romanticism for the 21st century.

"Peculiar Insanity": Hereditary Sympathy And The Nationalist Enterprise In Twain's The American Claiment, Jared M. Pence

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis identifies a claimant narrative tradition in nineteenth-century American literature and examines the role of that tradition in the formation of American national identity. Drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The American Claimant Manuscripts and Our Old Home (1863) as well as Mark Twain’s The American Claimant (1892), I argue that these writers confronted the paradoxical nature of claimant narratives—what Hawthorne called a “peculiar insanity”—which combined a hereditary sympathy between the United States and Britain with exceptionalist rhetoric about American republican values. Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward the claimant tradition identified the paradox, but his writing merely pointed out inconsistencies, while Twain censured …

The Storm Still Echoes: Suspense And Ambivalence As A Way Of Life, Shailen Mishra

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three interrelated components that inquire into two themes: the epistemological and aesthetic merit of narrative suspense, and the generative potential of constraint-based writing. In the opening chapter, titled "Doubt in Perpetuity: Rethinking Suspense as a Mode of Aesthetics, and an Epistemological Inquiry," I undertake a theoretical inquiry to prove that suspense can be a rich analytical device to study complex aesthetics of writers. I theorize suspense at its elemental level and from an epistemological standpoint to prove that suspense is not simply a plot-level concept of "what happens next." Instead, by analyzing particular scenes from …

Absolving The Sin: Redemptive Feminine Figures In Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife Of Bath's Prologue" And John Milton's Paradise Lost, Rory Griffiths

Theses and Dissertations

Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton have been ceaselessly studied in isolation to one another, but undergraduate students must begin to study them in conjunction. Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” serves as social critique of medieval misogynist practices that allows students to study social practices as they study his language. Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost reflects the religious and social instability that marked the Interregnum of the English Civil War, allowing Eve to embody the culture’s desire to return to a virtuous Church. Students will learn to examine the space of the authorial paradox, primarily the questions of authority that …

Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier

Theses and Dissertations

This project will attempt to provide an outline of some of the most salient constructions of present-day literary fiction, where those constructions might overlap or conflict, and how various contemporary authors and their works might usefully fit within those constructions. This project will argue that fiction-writers following postmodernism are presented with a unique problem of how to write fiction in a way that acknowledges the problems of using language as a primary meaning-making structure without falling down a linguistic rabbit hole where a text ceases to be about anything other than itself. Beginning with David Foster Wallace, this project will …

Influenza, Heritage, And Magical Realism In Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Stories, Katherine Snow Nelson

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the devastating scope of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918, curiously few references to the flu exist in literature. Katherine Anne Porter offered one of modernism's only extensive fictional treatments of the pandemic in her short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” decades after her own near-death encounter with the flu. Porter was able to give voice to an experience that had traumatized others into silence by drawing on an early form of magical realism. Magical realism's ghosts—everyday presences rather than otherworldly beings to be feared—are of particular relevance to “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” since ghosts “haunt” Porter's semi-autobiographical Miranda …

Visions Of The Past: Engagement And Avoidance Through Nostalgia In My Ántonia, Maren Mazzeo

Theses and Dissertations

In Willa Cather's My Ántonia, nostalgia marks both the ambience of the novel and its critical focus. This thesis illuminates Cather's self-aware deployment of nostalgia as an artistic tool and nostalgia's role in Jim Burden's agenda-driven narrative. Jim adopts nostalgic narrative as propaganda to justify and glorify his past and present life, presenting his past as a simplified and romanticized origin myth. However, through the novel's frame narrative and the frequent, jarring vignettes of violence and discord, Cather undermines Jim's authority as a narrator and prompts reconsideration of Cather's endorsement of his nostalgic creation. By appreciating the complex deployment of …

Sacred Things, Sacred Bodies: The Ethics Of Materiality And Female Spirituality In Purple Hibiscus, Kylie Mcquarrie

Theses and Dissertations

Thing theorist Bill Brown writes that “the thing names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” This article examines the subject-object relation between African things and African bodies in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus. While the main character, Kambili, eventually learns to assimilate Western Catholicism into her Nigerian reality, her Christian fundamentalist father, Eugene, uses Catholicism to justify his self-hating destruction of African things and bodies. This article argues that both reactions are rooted in the characters' ability or inability to see African material things, including both objects and bodies, as autonomous subjects. Adichie's …

“Healing A Hurting Heart”: Femrite's Use Of Narrative And Community As Catalysts For Traumatic Healing, Candice Taylor Stratford

Theses and Dissertations

FEMRITE, the Ugandan Women Writers Association, was created in 1996, and over the last twenty years, it has become the largest and most successful women's writing group in East Africa and one of the most influential literary communities on the African continent. It has become an essential element of Ugandan literary society, and a large proportion of its writings reflect various forms of trauma, begging an engagement with trauma theories. I will argue that through strategies of narrative recuperation and the establishment of communities, FEMRITE has created avenues for women writers, their subjects, and their readers to engender healing from …

Companionate And Pedagogic Marriage Models In Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility And Emma, Kandace Hansen Wheelwright

Theses and Dissertations

Jane Austen, seen by some as the mother of all chick-lit, is synonymous with tales of love and marriage. Generally, scholars have classified the types of marriages Austen writes about as either companionate (a marriage based on love) or pedagogic (a marriage based on an older man training a younger woman to be his ideal wife). In comparing the companionate and pedagogic marriage models in Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Emma, however, one finds that these traditional definitions and classifications of the companionate and pedagogic marriages prove to be complicated. The companionate marriage is not only a marriage based on …

We Heard Our Voices With The Hyenas And Other Stories: The Community Of Strangers, Rebekah Washburn Olson

Theses and Dissertations

Community is often defined by the familial or residential relationships we have, such as family, neighbors or coworkers. But there is another vital and often unobserved community among strangers. These relationships are often haphazard, temporary relationships formed in a moment of necessity—customers trapped in a convenience store by a storm, orphaned runaway teenagers who band together for safety on the streets, miners trapped in the rubble of a collapsed mine, etc. These communities are spontaneous and often undefined, but have the potential to reveal more about our insecurities, reflexes, and emotional capacities than almost any other relationship. For many, they …

Burke's Poetic Metaphor And Obama As Poet, Devon S. Cook

Theses and Dissertations

At the end of Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke calls for a new orientation toward life and social action which he refers to as “the poetic metaphor” (261). This essay connects Burke's briefly used poetic metaphor with his theories on the use of “poetic” language in the essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning.” What results from this synthesis is a critical tool for rhetorical analysis which allows for the discussion of style as a vehicle for communication about ethics and morals in public discourse. Obama's The Audacity of Hope is used as the example of a text which uses “poetic” …

Shakespeare's Art And Artifice: Passing For Real In As You Like It, Kristen Nicole Cardon

Theses and Dissertations

Gender performativity, detailed by Judith Butler and accepted by most contemporary queer theorists, rests on an agentive model of gender wherein “genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done” (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination” 716). This academic orthodoxy is challenged, however, by the increasing presence of transgender persons joining the theoretical discourse, many of whom experience an essential gender as a central facet of their identity. I respond to Katie R. Horowitz’s recent modification of Butler’s theories—a theory of omniperformance to dissolve the distinction between performance and performativity, and thereby between artifice and “real life.” I argue that gender-as-art, a schema that …

Dr. Frankenstein's Hideous Progeny: A Typology Of The Mad Scientist In Contemporary Young Adult Novels And Computer Animated Film, Farran Leanne Norris Sands

Theses and Dissertations

The following study explores representations of mad scientists in a variety of novels for young adults, and in computer animated film for adolescents. Building from their typologies and furthering the work of scholars such as Glen S. Allen, Roslyn D. Haynes, and Sven Wagner, all of whom focus on texts for adult audiences, this study proposes and presents a typology of mad scientists as they are represented in texts for adolescents and young adults. Expanding the work of these scholars, this study aims to show where children's mad scientist texts both follow and deviate from current mad scientist typologies in …

The Editorial Double Vision Of Maxwell Perkins: How The Editor Of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, And Wolfe Plied His Craft, Rachel F. Van Hart

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day …

Tropes Of Blood, Body And The Ground Of The Law: Becoming, Being And Beyond Wife On The Early Modern Stage, Emily Faye Murray

Theses and Dissertations

This project focuses on the representation of women on the early modern stage in three exemplary texts: the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, and two city comedies, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. Whether playing the role of adulterous wife, performing the role socially striving wife, or resisting the role of laboring wife, these female characters were on stage not only for entertainment, but also for examination and scrutiny by an early modern audience. Playwrights used characterizations of women and wives and their relationships to the economy as vehicles through …

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, …

Anarchic Wills: De Factoism And Its Discontents In Shakespeare And Milton, William Dean Clement

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores the literary origins of de factoism – the political philosophy which considers any “right” to rule inconsequential to political legitimacy. My work introduces the concept of the “anarchic will,” my term for a literary character that recognizes the growing distance between an authority’s claim to power and the material fact of that power. I locate these figures in early modern drama and epic to demonstrate how their existence threatens the traditional power structures, both on the stage and in the streets of London. I argue that anarchic wills jeopardize political order at the most basic level, in …

And Have Not Mercy, I Am Waiting: Conscious Inaction As Postcolonial Resistance In Patrick Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger" And Derek Walcott's "The Fortunate Traveller", Christopher Lowell Stuck

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” and Derek Walcott’s “The Fortunate Traveller” as sites of postcolonial resistance. As presented in these poems, the main characters are caught between the memories of the colonial and anti-colonial pasts and the faltering promises of postcolonial independence. Instead of choosing between being defined solely by the past or accepting an independence under contrived terms, or attempting to reconcile the two, Walcott’s and Kavanagh’s poems propose conscious inaction in order to resist the apparent inevitability of the choice. Written at similar moments in their respective postcolonial regions, placing these two poems together for …

Historical Violence And Modernist Form In Zoe Wicomb's David's Story, Kaelie Rianne Giffel

Theses and Dissertations

The essay brings together Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story with Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and (less centrally) Julia Kristeva’s work on “Women’s Time.” I argue that, while Derek Attridge claims that the novel’s modernism emerges from its interrogation of historical crisis, David’s Story is modernist because of its experimentation with nonlinear narrative and an engagement with modern intertexts such as Heart of Darkness and Ulysses. Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” illuminates the structure of Wicomb’s novel, which creates what Benjamin calls a “constellation” of stories that are non-causally yet historically related to each other. …