Madison Washington’S Journey To Freedom: Protagonist Development In Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave,
2018
CUNY Hunter College
Madison Washington’S Journey To Freedom: Protagonist Development In Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave, Hallie Rene Gleasman
Theses and Dissertations
This analysis of Frederick Douglass’ novella The Heroic Slave explores the manner by which said work of fiction employs, references, and reworks the formulaic conventions of the slave narrative. It additionally examines how The Heroic Slave promotes black revolutionary leadership and models respectful white support of emancipation.
We Love Big Brother: An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Orwell’S Nineteen Eighty-Four And Modern Politics In The United States And Europe,
2018
University of Connecticut
We Love Big Brother: An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Orwell’S Nineteen Eighty-Four And Modern Politics In The United States And Europe, Edward Pankowski
Honors Scholar Theses
In recent months since the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States in November 2016, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has seen a resurgence in sales, and terms invented by Orwell or brought about by his work, such as “Orwellian,” have re-entered the popular discourse. This is not a new phenomenon, however, as Nineteen Eighty-Four has had a unique impact on each of the generations that have read it, and the impact has stretched across racial, ethnic, political, and gender lines. This thesis project will examine the critical, popular, and scholarly reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four since its …
Becoming Your Broken Cisterns: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short-Fiction Treatment Of Religion,
2018
Winthrop University
Becoming Your Broken Cisterns: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short-Fiction Treatment Of Religion, Richard W. Halkyard
Graduate Theses
The intention of my thesis is to reorient the popular vantage points whereby the masses view — and pigeonhole — author F. Scott Fitzgerald. Literary critics and cursory readers alike oftentimes fail to see how the writer’s foundational Catholic upbringing, and therefore, a religious inclination informed his craft. While Fitzgerald was raised Catholic, few literary critics acknowledge the pattern of religious thematics and imagery Fitzgerald implemented throughout the course of his career. Among those select critics — including Joan Allen, Alice Hall Petry, and Edward Gillin — none argue for a positive relationship between Fitzgerald and the Christian God. I …
How Queer Came To Be: Deconstructing White Queerness In Melville's "Bartleby," Ginsberg's Howl, And Morrison's A Mercy,
2018
Winthrop University
How Queer Came To Be: Deconstructing White Queerness In Melville's "Bartleby," Ginsberg's Howl, And Morrison's A Mercy, Sara Elizabeth Parnell Wilcox
Graduate Theses
In American LGBTQ+ communities, questions continually arise about what it means to live in a post-gay marriage world. Is there still a need for a division between LGBTQ+ and heteronormative spaces, such as nightclubs or parades? What purpose does the ideological signification of a queer identity serve if, ostensibly, queer communities are now equal with their heteronormative counterparts? Rather than accepting the homonormative, post-gay marriage premise that underlies frequent, current representations of “queerness” in terms of white, male, gay bodies, I plan to explore the convergence of aesthetics and politics as a method of freeing queer theory from some of …
Introducing Godzilla To Marianne Moore's Octopus Of Ice At The Intersection Of Global Warming, Environmental Philosophy, And Poetry,
2018
Dominican University of California
Introducing Godzilla To Marianne Moore's Octopus Of Ice At The Intersection Of Global Warming, Environmental Philosophy, And Poetry, David Seter
Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects
This paper explores the question: how can a poet write an ecologically aware poem about global warming? Global warming impacts everything on earth, most visibly the glaciers melting away before our eyes. Adopting Aldo Leopold’s environmental philosophy of thinking like a mountain, the poet may describe the impact of global warming upon the mountain, glacier, flora and fauna, that form an interconnected web of life. A poem that thinks like a mountain already exists: Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus” (published in 1924), which takes its title from the system of glaciers (or octopus of ice) on Mt. Rainier. For a contemporary …
The Lost Artist: Biographical Fiction And The Identity Of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald,
2018
Dominican University of California
The Lost Artist: Biographical Fiction And The Identity Of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Alexandra Fradelizio
Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900-1948) is widely regarded as the first flapper of the Roaring 20s and is often recognized for her tumultuous marriage to acclaimed American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a female icon whose life was filled with salacious incidences and mental struggles, the image of Zelda continues to be reinterpreted in various movies, television series, and novels. However, very few center on her artistic pursuits of writing, painting, or dancing and how her desires to contribute to the art world were overshadowed and disrupted by her successful husband. Therese Anne Fowler’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013), …
“The Unwelcome Truth” : Arthur Miller’S The Crucible As Satirical Political Allegory,
2018
Montclair State University
“The Unwelcome Truth” : Arthur Miller’S The Crucible As Satirical Political Allegory, Deanna Marie Mattia
Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects
The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that while Arthur Miller’s 1952 play The Crucible is often cited as a political allegory of the McCarthy era, analyzing various instances of irony and how language itself becomes almost criminal shows the play can also be interpreted as satire. This thesis begins with a detailed analysis of Puritan life and religion to show how Spectral Evidence and an inherent fear of the Devil become the driving forces of the Salem Trials. From there, an examination of the political climate that inspires Miller to do a close-reading of human behavior shows how …
T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy,
2018
University of Southern Mississippi
T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy, Jessica Cloud
Master's Theses
While pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard, T.S. Eliot put a year into deep study of the Yoga Sutras with renowned scholar James Haughton Woods. Yoga, defined in the Sutras as the practice of stopping “the fluctuations of the mind-stuff” (Patañjali 8), provides the possibility of hope and equanimity in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), which depicts a world seemingly devoid of meaning. Not only can the influence of the Yoga Sutras be seen in the poetic form, style, and voice of The Waste Land and in the explanatory notes to the poem provided by Eliot, but classical yoga …
Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth,
2018
University of Southern Mississippi
Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno
Honors Theses
Proto-feminist novels have garnered great critical attention in recent decades, largely owing to the reclamation efforts of feminist scholars from the 1960s onwards. These feminist scholars have remarked the fin-de-siècle emergence of a recurring narrative archetype: the unabashed New Woman, whose exploits in what were traditionally male-dominated spheres distinguished her from the domesticated matrons and sentimental bachelorettes of past literary paradigms. While the New Woman is now a commonplace among feminist critics, the following thesis uniquely interprets this feministic archetype in conjunction with the concurrent movement of American literary naturalism—a genre that proffers a deterministic worldview and is often regarded …
There Is Water In The World For Us : The Environmental Theories Of Alice Walker.,
2018
University of Louisville
There Is Water In The World For Us : The Environmental Theories Of Alice Walker., Janae Lewis Hall
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The emergence of African-American Environmental thought responds to the ongoing erasure of Black experiences and their perspectives on nature. Mainstream environmentalism maintains a legacy of perceived innocence and incorruptibility towards the land, while Black Environmentalism demonstrates the limitations of that ideology. Limitations include the erasure of history in regards to stealing land from Indigenous people, the brutality of slavery, legalized lynching, forced removal from the land, exploitation in sharecropping, destruction of sacred lands, heavy pollution in urban centers, and harmful environmental policies. For Black and Indigenous peoples, it is impossible to view American soil as innocent. This project surveyed the …
Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions,
2018
CUNY Graduate Center
Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …
Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy And Pathology In American Women's Literature, 1866-1900,
2018
CUNY Graduate Center
Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy And Pathology In American Women's Literature, 1866-1900, Nicole Zeftel
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Sickly Sentimentalism: Pathology and Sympathy in American Women’s Literature, 1866-1900 examines the work of four American women novelists writing between 1866 and 1900 as responses to a dominant medical discourse that pathologized women’s emotions. The popular fiction of Metta Fuller Victor, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, and E.D.E.N. Southworth mobilized sentimental style and sympathetic affect to challenge the medical trend of treating female sentiment as a sickness. At the level of narrative, this challenge took the form of deviating from the domestic and marriage plots prevalent in women’s popular fiction of their period. Through forms of sentimental writing my …
Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862,
2018
CUNY Graduate Center
Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed …
Party Politics: Domestic Entertaining And The Reaches Of Sociability In Nineteenth-Century Literature,
2018
Southern Methodist University
Party Politics: Domestic Entertaining And The Reaches Of Sociability In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Andrew Forrester
English Theses and Dissertations
Literature in the nineteenth century often featured highly structured scenes of domestic entertaining. Party Politics makes a case for these parties as both literary devices and cultural touchstones, at once practices indicative of the period’s commitment to strict standards of etiquette and capacious arenas in which to test the already blurred boundary between the public and private spheres. Ultimately, this project contends that parties are staples of Victorian sociability and its depiction in literature; they therefore allow authors and their characters to register social, moral, economic, political, and even international developments of the period in the lives of middle- and …
Iarwain Ben-Adar On The Road To Faerie: Tom Bombadil's Recovery Of Premodern Fantasy Values,
2018
Liberty University
Iarwain Ben-Adar On The Road To Faerie: Tom Bombadil's Recovery Of Premodern Fantasy Values, Greta Rogers
Masters Theses
This thesis project discusses J. R. R. Tolkien's character Tom Bombadil as an agent of recovery of premodern fantasy values. Several premodern fantasy works espouse a sense of harmony with the world as God’s created order, a value that is missing from some postmodern fantasy works. Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil is examined as a means to recover that acceptance of the created order.
The Presentation Of Postmodern Sexuality In Short Fiction,
2018
Liberty University
The Presentation Of Postmodern Sexuality In Short Fiction, Allie J. Kapus
Senior Honors Theses
Shifting norms in twentieth century western society, coupled with emerging postmodern thought in the 1960s, radically changed the ways in which people viewed sexuality, gender roles, and the institutions of marriage and the family. The literature of the postmodern era, namely short fiction, also reflects such ideological shifts. Literature is a powerful communicator of the human condition as well as a crucial means for reflecting the customs, beliefs, and norms of a society at the time of its writing. Such evolving differences as were occurring in the realm of sexuality came to be represented in postmodern literature. This thesis aims …
Bertha Harris' Confessions Of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine To The Gothic South,
2018
East Tennessee State University
Bertha Harris' Confessions Of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine To The Gothic South, Kara Russell
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Inspired by her obsession with the South and informed by the liberating socio-political changes born from the 1970s lesbian feminist movement, North Carolinian author Bertha Harris (1937-2005) provides a poetic exploration of Southern Gothic Sapphism in her complex and tormented novel Confessions of Cherubino (1972). Despite fleeting second-wave era recognition as “one of the most stylistically innovative American fiction writers to emerge since Stonewall,” Harris’s innovation remains largely neglected by readers and cultural theorists alike. Nearly all academic engagements with her work, of which there are few, address her 1976 novel Lover. Instead, this thesis focuses on Confessions of Cherubino …
New Criticism—Not So New To Tennessee’S High School English Teachers,
2018
East Tennessee State University
New Criticism—Not So New To Tennessee’S High School English Teachers, Seth Grindstaff
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
When Tennessee Department of Education adopted Common Core in 2010, Tennessee implemented New Critical ideas associated with the college classroom, but did not present this connection to English teachers. Comparing high school education reforms like A Nation at Risk (1983) and TNCore to the New Critical works of Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, reveals that New Criticism is the literary method grounding current ELA education reform. Referencing Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015), Diana Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010), and …
Environmental Deterioration In Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis Of Serena And Strange As This Weather Has Been,
2018
East Tennessee State University
Environmental Deterioration In Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis Of Serena And Strange As This Weather Has Been, Alexandria C. Craft
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Ron Rash’s Serena and Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been are two contemporary Appalachian novels that have yet to be analyzed from a biblical ecocritical perspective. While some literary scholars acknowledge the environmental aspects of the novels, little of their research goes beyond examining the land and its resources as commodities or metaphorical extensions for the characters. In this thesis, I elaborate on those interpretations by scrutinizing the natural descriptions in both novels and comparing those findings to some of the landscapes and environmental verses located within the Bible. Unlike the pastoral ideal found in a portion of …
You Are What You Wear: Clothing And American Authors Of The Early 20th Century,
2018
Abilene Christian University
You Are What You Wear: Clothing And American Authors Of The Early 20th Century, Alyssa Quinn Johnson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Though clothes are often said to “make the man,” they are not frequently said to build a character. This thesis explores the ways in which clothing was a performative tool for those who wore it during the 1920s in America as well as for authors who wrote about this world in which they lived. This study’s theoretical framework is inspired by Judith Butler’s concept of the performative; it is also influenced by historical research into the clothing of the 1920s. Primary texts explored include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and …
