English Language and Literature Commons^™

Dear Students: Don't Let College Unplug Your Future, Gideon Burton

Faculty Publications

I'm about to say something a college professor shouldn't say to his students, but I care about you a lot so I'm prepared to break the code and say what needs to be said: Your college experience is likely to set back your education, your career, and your creative potential. Ironically, this will be done in the name of education. You deserve to know about this! You have what it takes to reclaim, reform, and remix your education. Don't let college unplug your future!

Witnessing From A Distance: Postwar Literary Representations Of The Holocaust, Miriam Carolin Raethel

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis concerns itself with the possibilities and limits of witnessing the Holocaust from a distance. It analyzes the ways in which the notion of distance—temporal, geographical, linguistic, and aesthetic—influences, shapes, and alters the act of bearing witness to a remote historical event, which, because of its enormity, seemingly defies the act ofwitnessing and thus ofrepresentation. This study investigates the long-lasting impact ofthe Holocaust on subsequent generations, particularly on third-generation descendants ofvictims and perpetrators, and explores how the traumatic legacy ofthe Holocaust locates new forms of representation within the context ofpostmodernism, which, because of its emphasis on fragmentation, on the …

Bajo La Lira De Dios, Manuel José Rincón Domí­Nguez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The novel is about William Walker, his dictature in Nicaragua, his dead and the American presence in latinoamerican countries.

Aterrizaje, Francisco Alejandro Tedeschi

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This work is a novella about Alejandro Tardelli, a character who struggles with life in his adolescence.

Monstrous Bodies: Femininity And Agency In Young Adult Horror Fiction, June Pulliam

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Young Adult horror fiction with female protagonists presents sympathetically the untenable situation of adolescent girls within society whereby they are increasingly pressured to embody a doll-like feminine ideal that deprives them of voice and agency. In Young Adult horror fiction, the monstrous Other problematizes what is presented to girls as “normal” and “natural” feminine behavior. As a double with a difference, the monstrous Other is an iteration of femininity whose similarity to the original implies the possibility of resisting restrictive gender roles. Because in Young Adult horror fiction the monstrous Other is nearly always a sympathetic character, it is fairly …

Writing About The South "In Her Own Way": Gender And Region In The Work Of Southern Women Playwrights, Casey Kayser

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how identity—gender, race, sexuality, regional affiliation—intersects with considerations of the dramatic genre, commercial and critical factors in the American theatre, and understandings about the American South to complicate how contemporary southern women playwrights represent region. In light of the always-already "performative" nature of the South, and geographical, commercial, and ideological factors that set the South in opposition to the North, southern women playwrights face additional difficulties in navigating issues of authenticity and simulacra, the universal versus the specific, ideas about southern "backwardness" versus northern sophistication, and audience participation in fetishizing or distancing the South. Using drama as …

Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies Of Collective Resistance, Jessica Ketcham Weber

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies of Collective Resistance, I argue that representations of contemporary activism against corporate globalization, as analyzed in three different sites of commercially-driven media texts—newspapers, film, and websites—teach people to move away from public forms of collective activism and towards privatized and institutionally-sponsored forms as part of the larger project of neoliberalism. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the representations of, and responses to the representations of, two events—the protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999 and the protests during the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York City—as …

Paths Of Most Resistance: Navigating The Culture Industry In William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, And Eudora Welty, Jason Dupuy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores how four modernist writers of the 1930s and 1940s—William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty—used their works to present ways to resist and navigate what they present as the frequently reductive worldview offered by the culture industry. Faulkner tends to show the culture industry as selling easy answers that focus on the end result, which allows his characters to approach the culture industry with a sense of fatalism. To resist this, Faulkner stresses a step-by-step, complex dialectical understanding of the culture industry, one that shows the fissures in its seemingly straightforward narratives and allows the …

Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Daniel R. Mangiavellano

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” argues that habit is a central characteristic of both Romantic and Victorian theories of imagination, originality, literary production, and subjectivity. Certainly, nineteenth-century culture often treats habit with suspicion, invoking language of bondage, slavery, and dangerous unconscious imitation to apply to everything from reading habits to opium use. However, by tracing a discourse of habit from association theory to pragmatism and drawing from philosophical, educational, medical, and psychological texts, I foreground how Romantic and Victorian texts redeploy habit as a paradoxical form of imaginative agency. In nineteenth-century culture, habit makes possible what …

Early American Self-Reflexive Writing: Revising The Tradition, Susie Scifres Kuilan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study focuses on self- reflexivity in early American texts. This self-reflexivity demonstrates that these early American authors were attempting to define “American fiction” and were participating in a new literary tradition that was developing simultaneously with the development of the new country. After the introduction, Chapter One lays the groundwork for my study by exploring current views of these texts and what led to these views. Chapter Two explores the difficulties facing post-Revolutionary authors and their reactions to these obstacles as reflected in their prefaces and their other writings. I show the way these authors self-consciously respond to the …

Other Tomorrows: Postcoloniality, Science Fiction And India, Suparno Banerjee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that science fiction as a genre intervenes in the history-oriented discourse of postcolonial Anglophone Indian literature and refocuses attention on the nation’s future—its position in global politics, its shifting religious and social values, its rapid industrialization, the clash between orthodoxy and modernity, and ultimately the dream of a multicultural nation. Anglophone Indian science fiction also indicates India’s movement away from a nation trying to negotiate the stigma of colonialism to a nation emerging as a new world power. Thus, this genre reconstructs the Indian identity not only in the domestic sphere, but also in a …

The Fiends That Plague Thee Thus: An Examination Of Gender And The Role It Plays In Coleridge’S Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Kathleen Tyer

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was, and remains today, one of the most important literary figures in history, and his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner continues to be one of the most widely read pieces of literature in schools across the world. When it was first published, the poem was ahead of its time and was widely misinterpreted. For the past two hundred years, even, critical examinations of the poem have tended to reveal discrepancies rather than attempt to explain them. This work examines the poem through the lens of queer theory in an attempt to explain those apparent inconsistencies. …

The Manifold Operations Of The Gothic Double, Brian Demars

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The gothic novel’s emergence as a dominant genre in the 19th century is illustrative of a shift in popular ideology taking place in Western Europe during this period. Competing viewpoints, particularly between opposing classes, directly reflect the uncertainties, anxieties, and aspirations of a continent undergoing a significant transition. Because the gothic draws upon the tension between contending attitudes—spiritualism and secularism, realism and romanticism, nationalism and imperialism, and aristocratic and bourgeois—it exposes how ideology embedded in these concepts either adds to or detracts from the greater good of the community.

The technique of doubling is utilized to locate divergent ideologies and …

The King At Kaamelott, Ahmed S. Bashi

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

French TV‘s M6 aired a ground-breaking television advance, known as Kaamelott, from 2005 to 2009, derived from a long tradition of Arthurian narrative form and a long tradition of that form‘s modernization. Spanning the split, therefore, between the Modern and the Medieval, Alexandre Astier‘s experimental Adventure-Comedy, adapting no single model, this Frankenstein, brought to life through canny theatrical bricolage, provokes the following concrete question: how have the dimensions of the exemplary human life of the King been updated by this installment of an eight centuries (and more) old tradition? Using the frame-work of Berne‘s Games People Play, …