English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Rhetorical Event Of Modern Southern Humor: "A Requisite Element In Discourse", David Allen Wright

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the rhetorical nature and dynamics of Southern humor in the second half of the twentieth century by analyzing, from a distinctly rhetorical perspective, a selection of popular Southern humor texts. It seeks to understand how Southern humor happens--its methods and techniques--and it also seeks to understand, as much as possible, the implications of these events for the various interlocutors and participants involved. By investigating the stylistic, storytelling, and linguistic techniques of Southern humor, while relying on the scholarship of writers in a variety of academic disciplines, I hope to answer the following research question: how does Southern …

A Global Joyce: Early Sightings Of Cosmopolitan Ethics In Ulysses, Matthew Zeller

Theses and Dissertations

'Ulysses is like a great net let down upon the life of a microcosmic city-state, Dublin, wherein lie captured all sorts and conditions of men and minds,' wrote Stuart Gilbert, the famous literary scholar whose landmark 1930 book-length investigation into Joyce's magnum opus cemented his legacy as one of the first Joyceans. In saying so, Gilbert quietly proposes an early reading of Joyce's global ethics long before the study of humanities had developed the post-colonial focus necessary to more fully grasp the cosmopolitan ethics asserted in Ulysses. Gilbert was not alone. Because of his self-imposed exile and thematic insistence on …

Literacy Crisis, Technology, And The Radical Reversal Of Power, Erin Michelle Cromer

Theses and Dissertations

As new media is changing the way individuals communicate, efforts have already been made within universities to, once again, construct new literacy standards in the digital age, producing the appearance of a literacy crisis. I argue that rather than producing another literacy crisis, the fundamental reversal of the power structure concerning who dominates standard literacy places greater expectations on composition scholars and practitioners--rather than students--ultimately providing the conditions of possibility for using power productively to imagine a new pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity that reverses the role of expectations from standards to invention. Such a pedagogy offers rhetoric and composition a …

Fertility, Contraception, And Abortion And The Partnership Of Henry Miller And Anaïs Nin, Kathryn Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

During their creative and sexual relationship, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller together shaped their identities as artists. When they met, both were married and had tried writing before, but their partnership pushed them into a new kind of life in which writing took precedence. During this process, they described their relationship as literarily fertile; a few years later, Nin actually became pregnant with Miller's child and decided to have an abortion. In Nin's diary, metaphor and reality overlap as she anxiously makes sense of her decision that is informed by her belief that an artist cannot be a mother. In …

Ulysses In The Age Of Digital Remediation, Melissa Hart Higgins

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an in-depth study of the implications of digital technologies and information literacy for the reading and scholarly study of James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Because the reading experience of Ulysses depends heavily on both its physicality and the interaction of the reader with the text, the changes in reading practices and scholarly study brought about by digital adaptations and hypermediations of this novel can offer new modes of understanding and characterizing readers relationships with text, as well as how the readers' digital interactions with Ulysses might engender or inhibit potential interpretations.

Each of the three chapters in this …

Going Hard, Going Easy, Going Home: Death And Dying In 20th Century African American Literature, Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation answers the question: How can art represent the essential human experience of death, particularly when the creative context is one of extreme violence? And, what can be learned about the risks and rewards of the living's relationship with the dead by way of these artistic representations? Further, how do these aesthetic renderings of death construct the ethics of life for survivors? In the case of African America, discussion of, and responses to, these questions have been primarily explored in novelist and creative writing. This dissertation examines these novelistic treatments of death-tropes, or thanatropes in eight novels written by …

The Many Functions Of Taste: Aesthetics, Ethics, And Desire In Nineteenth-Century England, Julia Bninski

Dissertations

The starting point for my analysis of nineteenth-century criticism is the recognition that the word "aesthetic" was not commonly used in English until the early 1800s. For the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, English criticism still relied on an eighteenth-century vocabulary of "taste." For thinkers living in a world altered by social mobility, urbanization, technological change, and mass manufacturing, taste helped make sense of a bewildering array of relationships among individuals, objects, and social groups. As a category associated with consumption, taste foregrounds the charged interaction between aesthetic object and perceiving subject. It raises the question of how we …

Discovered By The Process: A Methodology For Twentieth-Century Moral Fiction, Sean Adriaan Labbe

Dissertations

One of the great ironies of the "ethical turn" that literary criticism has taken in the last several decades is that while we as literary critics strive to be ethical or moral, we usually feel embarrassed at actually taking about moral concepts, especially as they are manifested in literary texts. As I am interested in how to discuss moral issues depicted in literary texts without reading them naively and reductively for guidelines to live by or for a social program to implement, my dissertation is designed to model a method of inquiry that approaches literary texts of the twentieth century …

A Dialogue Of The Seven Cardinal Virtues And The Seven Deadly Sins In British Library Ms Harley 2399, Edward Wheatley

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Seeds, Laura Goldstein

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

The New Normal: Black Psychic Subjectivity In Antwone Fisher, Badia Sahar Ahad

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Childish Figuring: The Child As Symbol And Actor In Lillian Smith's Killers Of The Dream And James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Katherine Eveline Upton

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I examine the presentation of the child in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream as part of a rhetoric of growth. Both Agee and Smith present southerners as psychologically immature due to their traumatic childhood experiences of sexism, racism and poverty. Childhood is a recurring theme in both texts. Agee and Smith present childhood as a biological, developmental stage and a metaphor for growth in their texts. The child is a real, contextually-specific figure, drawn from Agee's and Smith's observations of children in Depression-era society. Images of children's …

Making Historical Fiction Appealing To Young Adults Through Book Trailers, Chelsey Kolpin

Graduate Research Papers

The Hi-Fi for Wi-Fi website was developed to address the problem that many young adults do not select historical fiction for free reading because they view the genre negatively. The website can be used as an advisory and teaching tool for young adults, teachers, parents, and librarians to increase interest in historical fiction via book trailers. The website includes 15 books that were published in 2003 or after, and are included in the H.W. Wilson core or highly recommended collections. Book trailers and descriptions for all 15 books are embedded on the pages of the website, and are organized by …

An Examination Of The Criteria For The Iowa Children's Choice Award List, Jessica Zimmerman

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this study was to examine the Iowa Children's Choice Award lists for variety of reading levels, topics, and protagonists and compare this to the criteria set by the Iowa Association of School Librarians. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to allow comparison between the last four years of Iowa Children's Choice Award lists. Results showed that all of the texts chosen for the award lists in the last four years fell in the third through sixth grade level according to Fountas and Pinnell. The majority of the texts include a female protagonist making the award lists more …

"Of That Transfigured World" : Realism And Fantasy In Victorian Literature, Benjamin Jude Wright

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Of That Transfigured World" identifies a generally unremarked upon mode of nineteenth-century literature that intermingles realism and fantasy in order to address epistemological problems. I contend that works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde maintain a realist core overlaid by fantastic elements that come from the language used to characterize the core narrative or from metatexts or paratexts (such as stories that characters tell). The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation in texts concerned with the problems of representation and the ability of literature to produce knowledge. Paradoxically, each of these …

Evolving: Using Science Fiction To Engage Students In Evolutionary Theory, Chad Rohrbacher

Publications

Evolutionary biology is not well-understood by a majority of the population. Many misperceptions and misconceptions exist as well as outright resistance to the theory. Various teaching and learning strategies have been tried in an attempt to involve students in exploring the theory, with mixed results. The use of science fiction to engage students in this area has been sparse, and virtually no quantitative assessment of learning with the method has been done. Using Origins, an anthology based on evolution, we created an interdisciplinary teacher’s resource manual that will be offered free to teachers. This paper examines some of the difficulties …

John Manningham At The Blackfriars Theatre, Charles Edelman

Research outputs 2013

Although it covers a mere sixteen months, from January 1602 to April 1603, the Diary of John Manningham, written when he was a twenty-five year old law student at the Middle Temple, is a rich and entertaining source of information about life in Elizabethan London, especially at the Inns of Court where he resided. Along with lengthy discussions of the sermons heard each Sunday (usually one in the morning followed by another in the afternoon), we have jokes, gossip, poems, a fascinating account of Queen Elizabeth’s last days, and many witticisms he heard and enjoyed, sometimes mentioning the source, but …

Homing : Poetry ; &, An Essay On The Poetic Leap In The Late Work Of R.S. Thomas, Shevaun Cooley

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Homing, as a collection, speaks to the capacity and yearning to navigate our way towards something we might call home. In animal behaviour, this seems like an instinct, hard-wired to the body. It is something I envy. By comparison, the instinct, in human behaviour, feels muffled and complicated.

These poems move between two places in which I feel ‘at home’, whatever that means: the south-west of Western Australia, where I was born and raised, and the north-west of Wales, where I lived for a time, and find myself returning to, drawn not by blood, but by longing, and a deep …

Educating Ana: A Retrospective Diary Study Of Pre-Literate Refugee Students, Renee Black

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Poetry In Translation To Teach Esl Composition At The College Level, Peter M. Lacey

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"This thesis records the L1 to English poetry translations and subsequent self- reflections on the translation process by college level ESL composition students. It analyzes and codes the characteristics of their writing as well as the experiences and information reported in their reflective essays about the translation process. Poetry translation is discussed as a way to Honor the L1 and corresponding culture and as a way to facilitate writing skill development in ESL composition students. The final chapter makes recommendations for future poetry translation assignments in college level ESL composition courses"--Document.