English Language and Literature Commons^™

Solitary, Anita Ellen Schuck

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This novella explores the themes of isolation and captivity. Millie Canfield feels isolated and held captive by her family. She dreams of freedom and beauty, only to see her attempts to achieve it repeatedly undone. She flees from family to marriage, only to experience isolation and captivity in a different form. She wants to be rescued, but she is oblivious to outside attempts to help. Millie also holds herself captive, torn between her perceived wants and obligations. She feels isolated, but she has isolated herself. When she at last achieves a measure of freedom, it is more a case of …

Milton And The Art Of Rhetoric, Jameela Lares

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe Of Paradise Lost, Jameela Lares

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Day In The Park: Emerging Genre For Readers Of Aboriginal English, Ian G. Malcolm

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Despite the fact that varieties of Aboriginal English are widely used in communication in Aboriginal communities across Australia, the use of Aboriginal English in writing has been limited. A significant genre for Aboriginal writers has been the autobiographical narrative. In most published narratives of this genre, Aboriginal English has not been widely used. This paper describes and discusses an autobiographical narrative composed by Aboriginal author Glenys Collard and published by the Western Australian Department of Training and Workforce Development in 2011 in which the only medium of narration (except for utterances by non-Aboriginal characters) is Aboriginal English. Analysis of this …

Precarious Positions: Toward A Theory And Analysis Of Rhetorical Vulnerability, David Riche

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I develop a framework for treating rhetoric as a system for managing vulnerabilities to and through discourse. I contend that, through rhetoric, we are all put into a fundamentally precarious position, an unavoidable state of exposure to material, social, institutional, and rhetorical forces that work to condition us as both agents and audiences. Rhetoric is not simply something we use; it is also something that we respond to, something to which we are continuously exposed, whether we like it or not. There is, in other words, a necessary concern for vulnerability at the heart of rhetorical theory …

Body Language: Pain In Victorian Literature, Laura Jane Faulk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature” argues that Victorian authors use the readable sign system of the body and pain to emphasize their characters’ physical features to the reader. As characters physically manifest emotions or experience violence, their appearances change, and these differences depend on physical descriptions. Marks on the body give it texture and depth, creating a layering that encourages the reader to envision and remember it. Character interactions, particularly when they read others’ somatic signs and experience or cause brutality, further flesh out characters, emphasizing their physical presences in the reader’s mind. The somatic sign system depends upon …

Intersections Of Race And Class In 1830s Othello Burlesques, Laura Michelle Keigan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In recent years, we have come to better understand how nineteenth-century burlesques critiqued and lampooned the respectable humbuggery of patent theater productions and middle-class culture. Their carnivalesque spectacle and low humor turned topsy-turvy what was falsely revered or pretentious in English society. This study, however, explores the extent to which some burlesques responded conservatively to social and legislative change, which supposedly weakened established hierarchies constituting English culture and society. My chapters examine how two burlesques of Shakespeare’s Othello—Charles M. Westmacott’s Othello, the Moor of Fleet Street (1833) and Maurice M. M. G. Dowling’s Othello Travestie (1834)—contributed to discourse surrounding debate …

The Visual Novel: Fictional Space And Print After 1900, Michael James Griffin Ii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, The Visual Novel: Fictional Space and Print After 1900, examines how and why the novel has assimilated visual mediums—film, art, and the digital—into the genre as a means of adapting to the proliferation of mass media and technology. This project connects a history of the novel (genre) with a history of the book (the genre’s physical form), thereby theorizing and narrating a history of the visual novel. I demonstrate that through fictional space, a critical term used by narratologists and textual studies scholars, visual writing emerges as a hybridized mode of creative composition where we can see most …

Diocletian’S Victory Column And The Rhetoric Of Spectacular Disruption, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

This essay explores how the powerful system of cultural references in the architecture of Alexandria is disrupted by Roman visual rhetoric. Specifically, the essay closely analyzes Diocletian’s Victory Column, a monument to the third-century Roman ruler who put down an Alexandrian uprising. The authors argue that Rome employed a visual rhetoric of spectacular disruption as a means to insert itself into the city’s historical identity even after its siege created widespread disease and starvation. The essay builds on the substantial scholarship on public memory by describing a kind of rhetoric that poses a political, existential challenge to a reigning cultural …

Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, through a closer examination of the controversies over Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), I seek to identify the elements of a defensible postcolonial vision. While postcolonialism is afflicted with many problematic assumptions, the exclusively liberal perspective which these authors seek to reaffirm in its place has its own plethora of defects. Ali, Hosseini and Nafisi merit a closer attention not only for their exposing some of the flawed views underlying postcolonialism but also for their demonstrating why an unqualified reversion to liberalism may …

Local Color's Finest Hour: Kentucky Literature At The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Brian Clay Johnson

Online Theses and Dissertations

This thesis takes into consideration literature created by various authors during the period 1890 to 1910, the turn of the twentieth century. This thesis looks specifically at the works produced during that time period by authors from Kentucky, living in Kentucky, or with strong ties to the state. The texts themselves illustrated these ties, as they all focused on or related to Kentucky at the time.

The data that was gathered for this thesis came directly from the writings themselves. In order to research the appropriate authors and the works they produced, the author read all of the materials discussed …

Creating Socialization And Empathy Through Athletics In Chris Crutcher’S Fiction, Joseph P. Korwin

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis aims to highlight the ways participation in athletics promote greater physical, psychological, and social health for adolescents in Chris Crutcher’s fiction. In his novels, Ironman and Whale Talk, published in 1995 and 2001 respectively, Crutcher uses athletically minded protagonists and the teams which form around them to display the benefits of being involved in athletics, especially team sports. In Ironman, a mandatory high school anger management group embodies all the aspects of team support and camaraderie in their attempt to assist Bo in achieving his athletic goals. Crutcher’s Whale Talk depicts the ways that official team …

Transformative Pedagogy For Social Justice Education: Teaching Technical Communication Students To Bridge Anzalduan Theories Of Social Change, Carlos Munoz

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

This thesis discusses the growing challenge facing teachers of technical communication in preparing educators with the knowledge, skills, and perspectives to effectively work with an increasing diverse student population, especially with those students whose cultural, racial, language, professional, and ethnic backgrounds are different from the educator’s background. Therefore, Anzaldúan theory offers another productive way of bringing together theory and practice to address the challenge of seeing and practicing technical communication’s critical and civic aspects within diverse communities. This essay provides insight into how Anzaldúa theories for social change might fulfill civic objectives.

Lopsided, Scarred, And Squint-Eyed: Ugly Women In The Work Of Southern Women Writers, Monica C. Miller

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The ubiquity of ugly female characters in the work of southern women calls into question what W. J. Cash termed “gyneolatry,” the worship of the beautiful white woman upon which so much of southern ideology has been based. If the South functions as an internal other for the nation, then examining this fiction’s multiplicity of ugly women illuminates the ways in which women defy not only the norms of southern gender but also those of the larger American culture, in which the southern woman often acts as a representation of the South in general. By considering ugliness as a category …

The Imagined After: Re-Positioning Social Memory Through Twentieth-Century Post-Apocalyptic Literature And Film, Amanda Ashleigh Wicks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Maurice Halbwachs first proposed a collective approach to memory in the early twentieth century, but the vast majority of subsequent scholarship investigates memory’s social properties from a theoretical point of view. This project instead proposes that memory functions as a social phenomenon in significant and real ways, primarily understood through the social relations that arise within social frameworks, which provide a structure against which people’s memories come together to form important memory-narratives that configure individual and social consciousness. Once people transform memory from individual thought-image into socially structured language, memory takes on social properties. Memory relies upon social frameworks to …

“Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’S Essayistic Approach To Nothing, Dena Marks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, “Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’s Essayistic Approach to Nothing, responds to the dominant strand in Beckett criticism that figures the writer as a philosopher of “nothing” whether of Democritean, existentialist, or deconstructionist voids. In contrast, I argue that Beckett’s literary texts approximate philosophy in their essayistic style, characterized by the incorporation of multiple, contradictory sources in a fragmented form. While philosophical analyses are often designed to demonstrate that the literary texts are the equivalent of philosophical discourse, in the first chapter I argue that they actually serve to re-subordinate literature to philosophy since they depend on the pre-existing philosophical …

Clothing In An American Tragedy: A "True Picture Of Life", Rachel L. Flynn

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Using Media To Teach Grammar In Context And Unesco Values: A Case Study Of Two English Teachers And Students From Saudi Arabia, Sultan Albalawi

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Academic Reading And Writing At The College Level: Action Research In A Classroom Of A Homogeneous Group Of Male Students From Saudi Arabia, Margaret Mount

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

This thesis is the culmination of two years of working with and teaching English composition to primarily international students from Saudi Arabia whose first language is not English. For the purposes of this study, I will identify students whose first language is not English as English Language Learners (ELLs). I have decided to use this term because in many cases, English is not a student’s second language but their third or fourth. The research for this study uses a mixed methods and action research framework and was conducted in my English 101-SL (Second Language) class during the Winter of 2014 …

Written Corrective Feedback In The L2 Writing Classroom, Daniel Ducken

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

In 1996, a highly influential essay entitled “The Case against Grammar Correction in L2 Writing Class”, by John Truscott of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, appeared in the June edition of Language Learning. In his essay, Truscott argued that empirical research, second language acquisition (SLA) theory, and practical concerns show written grammar correction (WCF) in the L2 writing classroom to be both “ineffective” and “harmful,” and that, therefore, it “should be abandoned” (p. 327). Since the time that Truscott originally expressed his concerns, much recent SLA theory and empirical research have indicated the potential efficacy of written corrective feedback …