English Language and Literature Commons^™

Drug Free America: The Ethics And Politics Of Drugs In Contemporary American Literature, Kevin Pickard

English Theses and Dissertations

The utopian vision behind the so-called War on Drugs was that, as with other wars, we might sacrifice some amount of individual freedom in order to gain a larger freedom. In this case, the larger freedom was what Nancy Reagan called a “drug free America.” Thus, the War on Drugs era (from roughly 1970 to the present) aligns historically yet exists in tension with what scholars have called the neoliberal era, wherein individual freedom is paramount, and moral, political, and economic responsibility is left to the individual. This dissertation asks what the depictions of drug use in literature from this …

The Face Of God: Imaginary Space In Pickle Green, Taylor Flickinger

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A foundational premise of adaptation theory is that novels, films, theater, and any other storytelling medium can tell the same story but must do so differently. That is, each medium has its own distinct “language” with varying strengths and weaknesses inherent to its form. However, adaptation theorists have recently started pushing back on the idea that a film “can’t” do the same things as a novel, for example, arguing instead that the language of film and literature is more a result of “habits that are grounded in the history of fashion, taste, and analysis rather than in any specific technical …

Stephen Dedalus And The Mind As Hypertext In Ulysses, Ariel Banayan

English (MA) Theses

While there has been a considerable effort to contextualize James Joyce’s Ulysses in a hypertext format for the internet and its users, this paper explores how the novel itself presents a prototypical form of hypertext for its readers.

Instead of using hypertext to elaborate the novel’s many references and difficult sections towards a coherent understanding of its plot, this paper argues that Ulysses suggests an early form of hypertext through the written presentation of the interior mind and described interactions with the physical world. Specifically, within Stephen Dedalus’ chapters, a physical or visual interaction with an object pushes him away …

Lessons From Hybridity: A Look Into The Coupling Of Image And Text In Karen Tei Yamashita’S Letters To Memory, Claudia Rankine’S Citizen: An American Lyric, And Ilya Kaminsky’S Deaf Republic, Elizabeth Chen

English (MA) Theses

The spoken and written word has always been a platform for voices to be heard, but being heard is not always enough. This thesis focuses on the use of hybrid forms in recent publications that address this issue, placing images alongside the written word, letting readers also personally visualize and interpret a perspective different from their own. Specifically, it will look into three examples of hybrid literary works: the placement of photographs beside epistolary writing in Karen Tei Yamashita‘s Letters to Memory (2017), the blend of visual art and lyric prose poetryfound in Citizen: An American Lyric(2014) by Claudia Rankine, …

Trauma Begetting Trauma: Fukú, Masks, And Implicit Forgiveness In The Works Of Junot Díaz, Jacob Vanwormer

English (MA) Theses

This essay began as an examination of Junot Díaz’s combination of “low” and “high” culture art and literature in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.In the wake of Díaz publishing “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” and the subsequent accusations of abuse against him, it seemed irresponsible to examine the text in such a way without considering this new information. It was both more topical and relevant to re-examine the portrayal of Díaz’s recurring tragic playboy narrator through two short story collections and a novel, making note of the character’s proximity to Díaz’s own life story as presented …

The Impact Of Occupational Self-Efficacy On Job Performance, Kaeley A. Tener

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From business-related literature, the occupational-self efficacy (OSE) theory has been used to explain employee confidence, motivation, success, or lack of success when used in conjunction with measurable training or evaluation. The presence and effects of OSE have been seen in various occupational sectors and industries. For Human Resources practitioners, utilizing the concepts of OSE in the workforce is more than just training or communication. The present study analyzed the presence and effects of OSE on an online student population at a technical college in a Midwestern University. The results from frequency, correlation, and cross-tabulation tests reveal that levels of OSE …

Literature And Psychoanalysis, Alyssa Yankwitt, Elisabeth Von Uhl

Open Educational Resources

This is the syllabus and schedule for CCNY's FIQWS course Literature and Psychoanalysis.

Through The Narrow Gate: Conduct, Conversion, And Community In Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Women's Novels, Katherine Lee Jones

English Dissertations - Archive

Conversion scenes and the theme of conversion are key in conduct fiction, a genre that developed from the medieval and early modern tradition of nonfiction conduct manuals. Conversion is a character’s entrance into the community being developed in and through each novel. The conversion scene gives clues to each author’s purpose, reveal’s the religious basis for each book’s instruction, and puts focus on inner piety, or pious thoughts and feelings rather than merely pious actions. Conversion provides a vehicle for authors to critique and/or intervene in broader social issues such as gender roles, racial inequality, and sexual assault. Nineteenth-century conduct …

Space Opera: The Aesthetics Of Personhood In The Works And Worlds Of Philip K. Dick, Gabriel Francis Mamola

English Dissertations - Archive

In this dissertation, I examine the major novels of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick in light of his non-fictional and speculatively mystical writings. After establishing an approach to science fiction in general and Dick in particular, grounded in the Aristotelian mimetic theory of Stephen Halliwell and the ambient rhetorical theory of Thomas Rickert, I argue that Dick came more and more, as his career progressed and his body of work developed, to understand his oeuvre as a unified art-work—unified not only by its themes but by the fictional world it portrayed. More to the point, I argue that Dick’s …

Wraiths And White Men: The Impact Of Privilege On Paranormal Reality Television, Antares Russell Leask

English Dissertations - Archive

Modern paranormal TV walks the fine line between infotainment and propaganda that older white men are rational while marginalized communities, such as youths, lower social classes, women, and minorities are hysterical and gullible. White privilege is performed and glorified in reality paranormal television at the expense of marginalized groups. This view is inherently classist/racist/sexist/homophobic and does not reflect prevailing cultural norms, but points to a reemergence of the prejudiced idea that belief in the supernatural is a mark of cultural inferiority. Throughout history, marginalized groups have been considered those more prone to superstition, so with the renewed rise in racist …

Happily-Ever-After: An Exploration Of Nineteenth-Century Laws, Marriage, And African-American Representation, Sarah Clayburn

English Theses - Archive

This thesis moves beyond the moral messages of true womanhood found in eighteenth century British-American sentimental novels to examine the alternative lessons taught in nineteenth century African-American literature. In doing so, I explore the relationship between laws, race, and literature to investigate complex questions such as: what moral lessons about the institution of marriage are conveyed in early African-American novels? How did early American laws and policies affect these moral lessons? Lastly, how have marriage, laws, and traditions affected the representation of African-American characters in novels and shaped identities within African-American communities? Through the lens of critical race theory, feminist …

Architecture Of The Mind : Narrative Time And Mental Space In The Graduate, Catch-22, And Carnal Knowledge, Monica Cecilia Winston

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis explores three of director Mike Nichols’s films produced during the New Hollywood period—The Graduate (1967), Catch-22 (1970), and Carnal Knowledge (1971)—in an effort to trace Nichols’s auteur signature as it relates to the depiction of the protagonist’s subjectivity and renders post-war male anxiety and existential dread. In addition to discussing formal film technique used to depict the mental space of the protagonist, how these subjective sequences are implemented in the film bears implications on the narrative form and situates Nichols alongside other New Hollywood directors who were influenced by art cinema. This analysis, like those posited by other …

"Gazing On Vacancy" : Charlotte Bronte's Critical Portrayal Of Church Life In Shirley, Emily Pataki Hamburger

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study endeavors to explore how the novelist Charlotte Brontë preferred inner religious experience to institutional religious conformity in her own life and how she promoted her own unique spiritual style in her novel Shirley (1849). Bronte was brought up in a religious home in an era obsessed with religion. Christianity seemed to have a stranglehold over small and large societal matters in Yorkshire, England where Shirley is set, but yet something within the spiritual community was lacking. The Luddite revolutions occurring in Yorkshire are a backdrop to the interior revolutions taking place in the minds of the characters Caroline …

A Quantitative Study Of Transformational Leadership And Safety Incidence In A Unionized Public Utility, Ronald D. Schoff

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Worker Safety is an area of high focus. Costs and impacts associated with incidents of workplace injury or fatality can have powerful effects on the organization. Workplace leadership style studies have shown statistically significant relationships between leadership style and rates of OSHA incidence and severity. One such example is transformational leadership. Studies have been completed in various industries, including high hazard industries that confirm this positive relationship. Organized labor offers many benefits of value to the employment sector. Such benefits as higher wages and better workplace safety practices contribute to society in economic and health related ways, among others. Transformational …

Preface To Ssl 46.1, Patrick Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introducing the issue, with brief tributes to three Scottish literature scholars who died in summer 2020: Colin Manlove, Aileen Christianson, and Douglas Gifford.

Performing Authenticity In The 19th-Century Short Story: Walter Benjamin, James Hogg, And The Spy, Duncan Hotchkiss

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses periodical short stories by the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835), and his periodical The Spy, arguing that these textually perform oral story-telling features within the print medium, problematize Walter Benjamin’s distinction between traditional oral storytelling and the printed short story as vanguard of modernity, and show the periodical short story as a form embodies modernity while performing tradition.

Paper Monuments: The Latin Elegies Of Thomas Chambers, Almoner To Cardinal Richelieu, Kelsey Jackson Williams

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the Latin poems by Thomas Chambers (or Chalmers), the younger, a well-connected mid-17th century Catholic priest who spent time in Rome and Scotland as well as in France, where he was almoner to Cardinal Richelieu, based on a manuscript collection of elegies Chalmers copied into George Strachan’s manuscript album amicorum, and on other elegies known from their use on monuments or tombs.

'You Must Fire On Them': Protest And Repression In Pulteneytown, Caithness, In 1847, James Hunter

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines based on contemporary accounts the protests in the small coastal town Pulteneytown, Caithness, on Wednesday, 24 February, 1847, against the export of grain; the circumstances in which a small detachment from the British Army’s 76th Regiment opened fire on the protesters; and local and London newspaper comments about the confrontation and the military response.

Bliadhna Nan Caorach/The Year Of The Sheep: Reading Highland Protest In The 1790s, Alexander Dick

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes Bliadhna nan Caorach, the Year of the Sheep, in Ross-shire in the summer of 1792 when about 200 Highland farmers from Strathrusdale and other communities drove as many as 10,000 cheviot and blackface sheep toward Inverness to protest their intrusion on to Highland lands; discusses the difference between protest, riot, and insurrection; and examines a poetic response by Ailean Dughallach (Allan MacDougall) and two sympathetic prose reactions, by Anne Grant, of Laggan, and a touring English clergyman John Lettice (who attended the subsequent trials, but took some of his information from the Statistical Account).

Debating Insurrection In Galt's Ringan Gilhaize, Padma Rangarajan

Studies in Scottish Literature

Argues that John Galt's novel Ringan Gilhaize (1823), answering Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816), a counternarrative about the Scottish Covenanters, their defeat at Bothwell Brig (1679), and the history of the Presbyterian establishment in Scotland, attempts a delicate dialectic, less imitative homage to Scott than "winking ventriloquism," presenting three generations of filial and social history filtered through the perspective of a single, idiosyncratic narrative voice,