English Language and Literature Commons^™

“Why, Marcus, So She Is”: An Examination Of The Father/Daughter Relationship In Shakespeare’S ‘Titus Andronicus’, Anna Elizabeth Cunningham

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is concerned with the father/daughter relationship between Titus and Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Scholarship on this relationship is sparse, and chapter two discusses the context that it is typically understood within, namely the father/daughter chastity pattern—in which fathers jealously protect their acquiescent daughters’ chastity from violation, ending in the daughter’s death. It is asserted that Titus and Lavinia fall outside of this pattern. Chapter three examines Titus and Lavinia’s relationship before her assault, asserting that Titus assumes the role of Roman first and father second, which guides his treatment of all his children. Lavinia is connected to …

Laughing Feminism: A Rhetoric Of Laughing Feminists, Heather Marie Buzbee

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops “laughing feminism” by providing frameworks for interpreting laughter within feminism. More specifically, I seek to understand laughter in feminism that is unexpected, out of tune, and oftentimes decoupled from humor and to analyze its rhetorical potentials in feminist practices, politics, and theories. I use both Cicero and Cixous as heuristics to lead my project. I adopt Cicero’s general rhetorical perspective – his focus on what laughter does rather than what it is – however, his model of laughter is ultimately a masculine one. Thus, I turn to Cixous for a feminist rhetorical model, using Medusa’s laughter as …

Reading The Criminal Mind: Victorian Pseudoscience And The Fear Of Degeneration In “The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde”, Abigail Jasa Sommer

Theses and Dissertations

This paper argues that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) functions as a gothic critique of late-Victorian pseudoscience and the cultural desire to make morality legible on the body. Situating the novella amid phrenology, physiognomy, criminal anthropology, degeneration theory, and evolutionary psychology, it shows how scientific discourse circulated beyond professional institutions to shape popular assumptions about deviance, identity, and social order. Through Jekyll’s experiment and Hyde’s emergence, Stevenson stages the collapse of the “scientific gaze”: Hyde appears to confirm the period’s criminal typologies, yet his deformity remains simultaneously undeniable and indescribable, exposing the …

The Framing Of Sherlock Holmes, William Charles Wren

Theses and Dissertations

In the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James offers a metaphor for how we should look at novels: a view that pictures a million windows in which we can see a million different stories. Through James’ thinking with a million windows comes a million frames, a narrative device that became popularized in the late Victorian novel. This narrative framework is used by Arthur Conan Doyle, William Morris, H.G. Wells, among others, which brough forth new self-reflexive developments in plot and character development. Arthur Conan Doyle uses narrative framing devices to great effect throughout The Adventures of Sherlock …

The Unstable Horizon Of Composition: The Demonstrations Of Expertise And Ethos By Freelance Composers Within Destabilized And Precarious Digital Environments, Mary Elizabeth A. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation centers the demonstrations of ethos and expertise by freelance composers operating within destabilized digital environments enabled by the gig economy. As labor, and particularly the labor of writing, increasingly grows more precarious, composers have adopted nonstandard forms of communication that entail financial, socioeconomic, and material precarity and that break from conventions in highly hierarchical and standardized professions. Because freelance composers exhibit an alternative to institutional and hierarchical structures, composition must account for these growing precarious forms and conditions of labor. These composers represent the unstable horizon of composition and the diverse and destabilized practices of knowledge and composing …

Dark Critiques Of Victorian Identity: The Picture Of Dorian Gray And The Turn Of The Screw, Shania T. Inshan

Student Theses and Dissertations

My thesis highlights the relationship between beauty, art, and identity through a gothic lens using The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I argue that beauty and art fail to sustain innocence and life itself through an exploration of the progressively corrupt identities of the central characters in each novel. Additionally, I find that both authors challenge common conventions of art, beauty, adolescence, and gender of 19th-century British society and expand the list of factors that comprise identity. James’s narrator diverges from the model of the ideal governess and Wilde’s …

Literary Colonization And Locating Avenues Of Subversion In Bobby Flores-Villasis' Suite Bergamasque, Michael Aaron C. Gomez

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This paper examines four short stories included in the collection titled Suite Bergamasque, written by multi-awarded Negrense playwright and fictionist Bobby Flores-Villasis. A materialist reading situates Villasis within the canon of Philippine literature in English and analyzes the way his stories formally render the class antagonisms of history through the interconnected narratives of Dumaguete City’s sugar elite. Finally, this paper also contends that the political imagination of Villasis’ work exhorts contemporary Dumaguete writers to critically examine inherited hagiographies in order to describe fully the conditions that have shaped the city into its contemporary formation, particularly the phenomena of gentrification …

Weather And The Question Of Human Agency In Medieval Texts, Kaleigh Bennett

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

During the Middle Ages, humans and the weather were believed to have an inherently adversarial relationship. Understanding how people operate within the natural world is a difficult topic, and this especially holds true for a time that lacked modern scientific knowledge. While there is greater appreciation for how the weather is formed today, understanding of the weather during the medieval period was largely superstitious, especially during the early medieval period when pagan and Christian beliefs towards the environment began to overlap. According to Gillian Rudd’s essay “Being Green In Late Medieval English Literature” found within The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism …

Reframing Risk And Resistance: Sexuality In The Fault In Our Stars, Megan Stiffler

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Like many contemporary Young Adult (YA) novels, particularly of the YA romance genre, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012) explores the complexities of teenage sexuality. The narrative follows familiar genre conventions: sixteen-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster’s routine life is disrupted when she meets seventeen-year-old Augustus (Gus) Waters. Their initial encounter is immediately charged with sexual attraction. Gus cannot seem to look away from her, while Hazel quickly addresses that he is “a hot boy” (Green 8-9). From this first meeting, the relationship develops much like a traditional YA romance, with their emotional connection and physical desires ultimately culminating in …

Icarus’S Fall: Villainization In Wicked, Star Wars, And The Untamed, Laura Renfroe

Honors Theses

When looking back on the most beloved, yet infamous, villains of popular culture, one can note an abundant rise of prequels and backstory-driven media exploring the paths that villain characters take that lead them to their tragic fall. Some of those stories include John M. Chu’s Wicked, George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and Chen Jialin and Zheng Weiwin’s The Untamed, each of which explores protagonists who are labeled as “wicked” and depicted as fallen to the “dark side.” While these characters are often studied in existing literary research, there have yet to be explicit ties …

Historic Shrouds: A New Voice For Shakespearean Women, Ashleigh E. Weinstock

Global Tides

This article presents, and seeks to remedy, the argument that Shakespeare’s female characters are deprived of equal representation as complex humans through narrative gaps, action relegated to offstage scenes, and reduced opportunities for direct-to-audience speech, mirroring the social hierarchies of early modern gender, which continue to be reflected in modern society.

While this critique is not new, this essay argues that the criticism of these theatrical inequalities is insufficient to remedy their harms. Instead, this author proposes a performance-based, generative model of restorative justice termed the Historic Shroud, which seeks to give voice to sidelined female characters by placing …

Acknowledgments And Author Biographies

Emerging Writers

An editorial note of acknowledgement along with author biographies.

Iraqi Students' Engagement With English In Indonesia: Language, Identity, And Adaptation, Nirwana Nirwana, Yanty Wirza, Mutakhirani Mustafa, Muhlis Muhlis

The Qualitative Report

English as a lingua franca in higher education enables international students to participate in the global academic community. However, for Iraqi students in Indonesia, the use of English is not just a means of communication, but also part of identity negotiation, social adaptation, and cultural integration. This study explores how Iraqi students experience acceptance, resistance, and adaptation in using English in academic and social environments in Indonesia. The three-dimensional narrative inquiry framework (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) is used as the primary analytical lens to explore how participants' experiences unfold over time, across relational contexts, and within specific physical and institutional …

“Where All Is Playtime And Pleasure”: Feeling The Otherworldly In Late Medieval Literature, Anna K. Mcgill

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present intra-, inter-, and extra-textual felt responses to encounters with the otherworldly as described in Late Medieval texts as a lens through which to consider personal, social, and national imaginative potential surrounding contemporary issues across genres and disciplines. I argue that the use of otherworlds and otherworldly agents as both personally and rhetorically compelling analogues through which contemporary issues can be explored. I start my discussion of the felt impacts of encounters with the Arthurian otherworldly, with a particular focus on Glastonbury and Arthur’s alleged grave there, and how they transmit affects of sovereign authority. Next, …

Rooted In Silence: Listening To Landscapes That Remember, Jaylen A. Wyatt

FUSION

For this American Literature assignment, the author responded to the question: “How do natural landscapes preserve memory?” To do so, he wrote a non-fiction personal essay featuring several course selections read during the semester. The author argues that ultimately we must take care of these natural landscapes, and the environment at large, so that their memory can live on.

Where Did Her Torch Glow Go?, Josephine Smith

FUSION

This project is a short video presentation with accompanying written reflection connecting the poem "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, a poem about immigration to the United States, to modern events regarding immigration in the country.

An Adaptation Of The Yellow Wallpaper, Carla M. Sanz

FUSION

This project includes a 3-dimensional adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," highlighting struggles with mental health and women’s empowerment amid patriarchal oppression. The use of a 3-D model of the story gives the viewer a visual representation of the narrator’s mental and physical decline. Representative elements of this decline include the use of a chest and a string stretched across the “ceiling” of the room, which visually convey the narrator’s feeling of being trapped. In addition, the room's tainted appearance and the visual of a woman in the walls allow the viewer to imagine the narrator's mental, emotional, …

The Human, Kaamilah Kabala

FUSION

“The Caterpillar” is a short story by American author Lydia Davis published in “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis” in 2009. In the story, the narrator wakes up to find a caterpillar in her bed, and decides to take it outside instead of killing it. However, she loses it somewhere in a dark staircase along the way. At first she looks for it and spends her time thinking about it, but eventually she forgets about the caterpillar and moves on with her life.

This article a re-writing of the short story. The author took the story and wrote it from …

The Chaotic Silence Of Youth, Stephen A. Gobourne

FUSION

The inspiration for "The Chaotic Silence of Youth" comes from the song "How Does It Feel?" by the band Citizen, off of their 2013 album titled "Youth." This project is the result of the author's personal interpretation of youth itself, transitional periods, and experiencing life, with all of its ups and downs, using musical rhetoric as the core.

To Be Buoyant, Jess T. Forte

FUSION

This is a poem of resistance and transformation, contradicting forces that work together to shape development. Inspired by “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros, "To Be Buoyant" is an exploration of human identity from a place of stuckness.