English Language and Literature Commons^™

Airport, Alex Russo

Bryant Literary Review

a universe of utter transience connects people
moving in every direction like twelve thousand

Contributors

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

The Ballet Class, Kendall Klym

Bryant Literary Review

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert.

There Is Passion, There Is Not Love, Joseph Holt

Bryant Literary Review

The two of them met as co-panelists at a graduate economics forum in upstate New York.

Editor's Statement, Abby Stocker, Leah Patton, Brad Cox, Jacob Manning, Roberta Fultz, Jared Hedges, Stacie Lewis

Colloquy Undergraduate Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Female Resurrection In Poe's Tales, Laura Hardt (Class Of 2014)

English Undergraduate Publications

The female characters that populate the stories of Edgar Allan Poe are often ethereal creatures of great beauty, ghost-like figures that exist on the fringes of the narrative, very rarely taking part in the action of the plot. This, for the most part, is the case with regard to the female characters featured in Poe’s “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Both the eponymous Ligeia and Madeline Usher exist as virtual non-presences for the vast majority of these stories – at least until the point of their mysterious deaths. After these women pass away due to strange, …

Political Twittoric : The Rhetorical Use Of Twitter By The Obama 2012 Presidential Campaign, Kainat Najmi Abidi

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

With the entrance of the digital age, the Presidential campaign has begun accommodating the growing trend of new technologies. A campaign can reach an audience in person, on the radio, through the newspaper, on television, and on the Internet. In 2008, President Barack Obama broke the limitations of campaigning by going social, which he continued in his run for reelection in 2012. Obama tapped into the popular social network of Twitter to run a portion his 2012 campaign. By utilizing this new network, Obama’s campaign accessed the multimodal quality of Twitter to benefit their goal of winning the 2012 election …

Beneath The Frock And Beyond The Original Plumbing : A Visual Rhetorical Analysis Of Transgender Magazines, Dayna Arcurio

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis studies the rhetoric, visual rhetoric, and visual semiotic potential of the transgender and transsexual community by engaging with its signature rhetorical texts: its print and digital magazines. Designating the transgender/transsexual magazines, Original Plumbing and Frock Magazine as my primary texts for study, I provide three critical lenses through which to view the written and visual expression of the transgender community. The heart of this research seeks to understand how the transgender/transsexual community creates meaning by examining three aspects of its magazines: 1) the trans-rhetorical expression through articles and interviews; 2) each magazine’s aesthetic design through the lens of …

"No Preaching, I Say!" : A Rhetorical Analysis Of E.D.E.N. Southworth's Temperance Motives And Motifs, Janine Marie Butler

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

E.D.E.N. Southworth, while relatively unknown today, was a popular and successful American writer who published over fifty stories throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century, including The Hidden Hand, Cruel as the Grave, The Lost Lady o f Lone, Ishmael, and Self- Raised. This thesis brings together literary, sociocultural, and rhetorical studies to analyze how Southworth instilled her devout Christian morals and temperance messages in a number of sensational stories that were marketed to a general audience of American readers, including many drinkers. This paper primarily utilizes Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation (as detailed in "The Rhetorical Situation," published in Philosophy …

What Is Woman? : Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Ladies Almanack, And Woman's Search For Her Identity In The 1920s, Timothy Coyne

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In the introductory chapter of her book, The Gender o f Modernity, Rita Felski writes, “If our sense of the past is inevitably shaped by the explanatory logic of narrative, then the stories that we create in turn reveal the inescapable presence and power of gender symbolism” (1). Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack are two such stories; however, they both do more than simply reveal gender’s presence and power. These works of literature question the gender ideologies of the early twentieth century, challenging their power and inescapability by producing other, perhaps unknown, unthought of or …

"You Write Like A Girl" : Analyzing The Rhetoric Of Gender Bias In The Literary Establishment And Implications For Student Writing Development, Julie Robin Dalley

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Using Lloyd Bitzer’s model of the rhetorical situation, I have parsed current rhetorical statements made by prominent female authors, such as Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Weiner, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and Francine Prose, to examine their claim that the literary establishment practices gender bias against women’s writing. The main speakers argue that literary gatekeepers -such as critical review journals, editors, publishers, awards juries, and academic institutions - marginalize women’s writing through systemic patriarchal institutional mechanisms. Joanna Russ, in her 1985 book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, deconstructs the ways in which women’s writing is biased against by literary institutions: …

The Living Dead Austen : Exploring The Zombie Trope In American Culture, Film, And Literature, Katherine Godin

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis explores the origin, rise, and resonance of the zombie trope in American film and literature, focusing on three cinematic stages and culminating in an analysis of Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. While many critics have casually dismissed zombies as a trend, this thesis argues that these creatures reflect a variety of Western fears that have surpassed the obvious association with death and decay. Indeed, as this thesis argues, zombies have come to reflect a myriad of anxieties concerning the gendered and racial Others, as well as consumerism, technology, and even, as will be …

Charles Wright’S Seasonal Poetry : The Inscrutable, Spiritual Landscape And Ars Poetica, Marian Jeanette Kelleher

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis argues that several of Charles Wright’s poems use shifting natural images, fragmented form and metapoetics to comment on the uncertain nature of the metaphysical world. “China Traces” opens the thesis by exploring the adequacy of words to match nature’s completeness. “China Traces” specifically uses the natural image of light, calling on the poetic legacy of Emily Dickinson. Another poem, “Returned to Yaak Cabin, I Overhear an Old Greek Song,” seems to freeze a moment, calling upon mortality and the permanence of art. The final poem in Chapter 1 is “Local Journal,” which, set at the end of November, …

Reading War : Modern Warfare In The Age Of Terror And Recent American Literature, Kyle Anthony Kovacs

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

No abstract provided.

The Transformative Power Of Voice In George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Nicole L. Scimone

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is first and foremost a play about voice, particularly about the voice of flower-girl-tumed-lady Liza Doolittle. Though the voice is not Liza’s true self, it is the way the Liza’s identity can be expressed, and thus an important marker of identity transformations in the play. This work explores three different ways in which Shaw discusses voice in the play: as singing instruction, scientific methods for recording voice, and vocalizing automata and dolls.

First, the play is deeply influenced by Shaw’s background in singing instruction from his childhood. Shaw learned voice study from his mother’s beau, a …

Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies In Graphic Novels, Julie Ann Bingham

English

In “Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in the Graphic Novel,” I examine how graphic narratives have historically been used to express political concerns; I then rate the impact of two contemporary works which imagine planetary crisis in relation to this context. Working with Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead and Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing, I aim to illustrate that the violent worlds depicted in each fiction attest relevant social critique. As a frame for this analysis, I turn to the work of philosopher David Kellogg Lewis. Using his model of modal realism, I argue that engaging …

From Pulp To Webpage: Homestuck And Postmodern Digital Narrative, Austin Gunner Litwhiler

English

Homestuck by Andrew Hussie is a work developed entirely as an experiment in using the internet as a storytelling medium. In order to analyze this drastically new form of story, born and grown on the internet, I must initially analyze the two genres it best fuses; Homestuck is published serially and episodic, and largely contains media elements of the Graphic Novel. However, Homestuck also mixes into the story areas where reader choice and interactivity, animated cut scenes, and music in a fashion that imitates a video game. I’ll be examining Homestuck as a primary text, first inspecting its form and …

Social Media Fetishism: The Substitution Of Life, The Disavowal Of Death, And The Zombie Syndrome, Ian Andrew Lepkowsky

English

Title: Social Media Fetishism: The Substitution of Life, The Disavowal of Death, and The Zombie Syndrome Statement: I am studying social media as a symptom within a culture of fetishism, where social media has become a substitute for human interaction under the concepts of fetishism outlined by Marx, Freud, Kaplan, Debord, and Baudrillard because I want to find out why people have fetishized social media so that one can understand how to rectify the underlying issues causing the fetish. In the past decade, social media has become fetishized by a select group of users, characterized by hours a day spent …

Handling A Social Threat : The Fate Of Women Beyond Victorian Societal Definition., Alexandra Clifton

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Victorian Women And Their Working Roles, Kara L. Barrett

English Theses

Women during the Victorian Era did not have many rights. They were viewed as only supposed to be housewives and mothers to their children. The women during this era were only viewed as people that should only concern themselves with keeping a successful household. However, during this time women were forced into working positions outside of the household.

Women that were forced into working situations outside of their households were viewed negatively by society. Many women needed to have an income to support their families because the men in the household were not making enough money to survive. When the …