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Bibliography, Print Culture, And What To Do With Comics In A Rare Books Library, Michael C. Weisenburg 2023 University of South Carolina - Columbia

Bibliography, Print Culture, And What To Do With Comics In A Rare Books Library, Michael C. Weisenburg

Faculty and Staff Publications

Comic books are among the rare books of the future. In fact, some comic books are scarcer and more valuable than many of the “old books” that fill special collections stacks. This essay proposes to answer the questions of “What do we do with comics in an academic library?” by analyzing comics as a popular phenomenon that is deeply rooted in book history and the developing print culture of the past 100 years. Using the traditional methods of bibliographic analysis, we might better situate comics within the mission of academic libraries as we work to foster learning, discovery, and inclusivity …


Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall 2023 University of Kentucky

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …


Myth, Mockery, & Misery: An Evolution Of Disillusion In Modern-War Expression, Richard W. Halkyard 2023 University of Kentucky

Myth, Mockery, & Misery: An Evolution Of Disillusion In Modern-War Expression, Richard W. Halkyard

Theses and Dissertations--English

Industrialization in 19th-Century America yielded a regrettable by-product: the modernization of warfare. Mass armies, technological innovation, and unprecedented rates of industrial productivity prompted the creation of machines designed to inspire fear, increase destructive capability, and inflict mass-death. The modernization of warfare altered forever the way war was experienced and represented literarily. Authors who attempted to represent the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, as well as World War I, articulated modernized warfare with a disillusionment which stems from the tragically dehumanizing effects of mechanical violence on an industrial scale. Myth, Mockery, & Misery argues that as far back as 1862, romantic idealization …


True Love Waits: A Barthesian Reading Of Desire And Delay In Flaubert And James, Yasmin Patel 2023 Claremont Colleges

True Love Waits: A Barthesian Reading Of Desire And Delay In Flaubert And James, Yasmin Patel

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the theme of amorous waiting in the literature of Gustave Flaubert and Henry James. Roland Barthes' definition of waiting, as articulated in A Lover's Discourse, is used as a tool to examine the waiting conditions of characters in Madame Bovary, The Beast in the Jungle, and The Ambassadors. By using the Barthesian framework, this thesis identifies and analyzes different forms of gender-based waiting and their distinctive consequences. However, it also notes that the primary texts further complicate the relationship between romantic waiting, gender, and autonomy. Ultimately, this analysis shows us that amorous waiting goes beyond a simple …


Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon 2023 Dominican University of California

Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

“Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden through the lens of Campbell’s Monomyth” is a comparative analysis of the anime television series Naruto (2002-2007 Japan, 2005-2009 USA) and its sequel Naruto: Shippuden (2007-2017 Japan, 2009-2019 USA) with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as delineated in his The Hero with the Thousand Faces. These Japanese anime television series that are considered one of the most popular worldwide, and yet the hero’s quest in each series is often overlooked. This study both compares and contrasts how the Campbellian stages of monomyth intersect with Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden animation narratives.


Whirlybird Island, Ernest Hebert 2023 Dartmouth College

Whirlybird Island, Ernest Hebert

Dartmouth Scholarship

Whirlybird Island is a novel in murder mystery format about the trauma of war and how such trauma suffered by soldiers is often transmitted to their offspring and society at large. The accompanying essay, The Sons and Daughters of War, is a personal essay that details my experience with the trauma my father suffered in World War II and how such experience led to the writing of the book and essay.


“I’Ll Tell You No Lies”: An Exploration Of Trauma, Memory, And Violence Against Women In North Carolina Murder Ballads, Madison Ava Helman 2023 West Virginia University

“I’Ll Tell You No Lies”: An Exploration Of Trauma, Memory, And Violence Against Women In North Carolina Murder Ballads, Madison Ava Helman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation explores trauma, memory and violence against women in Western North Carolina murder ballads “Tom Dooley,” “Poor Omie Wise,” “Poor Ellen Smith,” “The Ballad of the Lawson Family,” and “Frankie Silver.” I posit that these ballads were influenced by prescriptive societal conceptions of femininity, which in turn influenced societal ideations of violence against women. Using folklore performance theory, I analyze the text and context of these ballads and their subsequent histories, eventually arriving at a template for polyvocality that incorporates multiple ballad variants and encourages diverse performances.


"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel 2023 University of Kentucky

"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Love, broadly defined, needs space to grow. For love to materialize and sustain itself (in both literature and society), it must find hospitable geosocial, institutional, and psychic terrain. This is especially true for queer intimacies beyond heteronormative relationality, for the prospect of love’s radical––or reactionary––possibilities is contingent upon the more general sociality in which it develops. Yet love is often a worldmaking and, sometimes, historic mechanism unto itself. Love and its concomitant sexualities must therefore be understood within and without normative structures of hegemony; the workings of (neo)colonialism and capitalism––as well as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism––dictate to love, and …


Stick With Me: Essays, Clay Shields 2023 University of Kentucky

Stick With Me: Essays, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

A small-town Appalachian deviant confronts the frequent, recurrent grief of the opioid crisis and its mortal, psychological, and communal consequences. This collection endeavors to explore substance use, addiction, geopolitical exploitation of Kentucky, central Appalachia, and surrounding areas, while also celebrating the lives of individual loved ones lost to deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism. Here, the common narrative of depravity surrounding addiction is challenged through the rendering of full characters capable of love, trust, friendship, humor, mental health management, and personal growth. Time and place factor fundamentally into the stories told here—whether based in central Kentucky or central Appalachia, …


Ruptures In Indentures In Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter Of Maladies And Unaccustomed Earth, Prabal D. Gupta 2023 Georgia Southern University

Ruptures In Indentures In Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter Of Maladies And Unaccustomed Earth, Prabal D. Gupta

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) is one of the prominent American writers of Bengali descent, contributing mainly to diaspora literature to depict the nuanced aspects of Bengalis in their immigrant lives. Lahiri’s stories in Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) illustrate the challenges of the Bengali diaspora due to their indentured identity, which I have used to refer to the Bengali people’s culturally-rooted identity. This study investigates how the diaspora’s native cultural identity fluctuates in connection with the host culture. The research renders a reconfigured image of “home” because the concept of home changes for these people after migration in …


Maternal & Spiritual Healing In J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, Emily Pittman Hoste 2023 Georgia Southern University

Maternal & Spiritual Healing In J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, Emily Pittman Hoste

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

After World War II, spiritual and emotional healing was needed in America, despite a dependence upon materialism and conspicuous consumption for success. J.D. Salinger’s short-story cycle, Nine Stories (1953), explores what loss and trauma look like from all sides of war—mother, child, soldier, lover—all are harmed by war. Nine Stories emphasizes the need for nationwide spiritual healing and suggests that mothers offer the necessary antidote to consumeristic America. In fact, eight of Salinger’s Nine Stories employ one of three types of mothers: the self-serving and ineffectual mother; the spiritual, often surrogate maternal guide; and the ideal mother. While the ineffectual …


Fascism In Sci-Fi: "Mobilizing Passions" In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Alton C. Ayers 2023 Virginia Commonwealth University

Fascism In Sci-Fi: "Mobilizing Passions" In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Alton C. Ayers

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis responds to criticism of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) as a “fascist” novel by further investigating the claim through a close reading of the novel that applies political theory scholarship on fascism. Chapters I and II introduce the novel along with its general reception and controversy. These chapters consider the accusations of “fascism” given to the novel while at the same time understanding that a clear, exact definition of “fascism” has long been grappled with by scholars since the rise of the regimes in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Chapters III and IV apply political theory to …


Make A Foreigner Of Yourself: An Analysis Of The Dueling Critical Utopias Of The Dispossessed And Trouble On Triton, Anthony Michael Lowe 2023 Cal Poly Humboldt

Make A Foreigner Of Yourself: An Analysis Of The Dueling Critical Utopias Of The Dispossessed And Trouble On Triton, Anthony Michael Lowe

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The purpose of this project is to analyze the critical utopias of two sci-fi novels: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin and Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) by Samuel R. Delany. Both novels were published within two years of each other, with Delany rewriting his novel to intentionally put it into direct dialogue with Le Guin’s. This project will attempt to establish the landscape of utopian fiction, draw out this dialogue between these two grandmasters of the science fiction genre, and answer this question: “As a result of Delany positioning his novel in …


“What Do Any Of Us Really Know About Love:” A Discussion Of Irony Within Raymond Carver’S Short Story Cycle What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, NiYonna Johnson 2023 Georgia Southern University

“What Do Any Of Us Really Know About Love:” A Discussion Of Irony Within Raymond Carver’S Short Story Cycle What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Niyonna Johnson

Honors College Theses

With minimalist technique, Raymond Carver manages to accurately depict a depressed working-class America. Current contemporary criticism has focused on the main themes of Carver’s work such as the struggle with identity, alcoholism, disconnection, and domesticity hardships; the one ideal that has seemed to be missing is the irony that lies within the lives of the characters. This paper will analyze, in depth, short stories from a short story cycle of Raymond Carver and detail how their current situations are directly juxtaposed by their occupations and how this benefits the currently discussed themes of his work.


Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov 2023 Dartmouth College

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …


Sinking Into My Skin: An Exploration Of The Mind And Body Through Multigenre Creative Writing, Ana Elizabeth Eagan 2023 University of Northern Iowa

Sinking Into My Skin: An Exploration Of The Mind And Body Through Multigenre Creative Writing, Ana Elizabeth Eagan

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.


"Variety": A Look At Several Genres, Ryan Dean Carlin 2023 University of Northern Iowa

"Variety": A Look At Several Genres, Ryan Dean Carlin

Honors Program Theses

This thesis was made to both explore the impact on a writer’s mind and thoughts that writing different genres could cause, as well as stretch the limits of creativity that any one writer can bring about. The following stories are the result of a single writer’s efforts. Following them will be the writer’s own observations about his approach as he wrote each, as well as any ways that the restrictions of the genre stumped his attempts at writing. Each work is no fewer than ten pages, and each story attempts to stretch the boundaries of writing and imagination through unique …


Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec 2023 Cal Poly Humboldt

Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores how the three umbrella models of disability (medical, functional, and social) are shown in several disabled characters from three novels published after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum. Through the utilization of literary analysis from a cultural studies perspective, this project shows that the models of disability, despite the various flaws in their respective designs, prove to be useful lenses to see disability through, both in these novels and in real life, …


From Art To Propaganda: The Shift In The Concept Of The “Most Dead” In True Crime Literature, Hannah McConkey 2023 University of Northern Iowa

From Art To Propaganda: The Shift In The Concept Of The “Most Dead” In True Crime Literature, Hannah Mcconkey

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This thesis studies the shift of the true crime genre from art to inescapable propaganda. This change is due, in part, to the politization of the genre by modern society. This includes the concept of the “most dead” seen within the true crime genre over the past several decades. The idea of the most dead is the belief that some victims of crimes are more or less dead depending on how marketable their demographic is. For instance, a blonde, Caucasian child would be considered the most dead while a woman of color in the sex work industry would be the …


A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey III 2023 Humboldt State University

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …


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