English Language and Literature Commons^™

Introducing The Hero Of Stasis: An Examination Of Heroism In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest And The Pale King, Gregory Robert Peterson

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Haitian Votes Matter: Haitian Immigrants In Florida In Local Politics And Government, Bobb Rousseau

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

This qualitative study investigated perceived barriers to the incorporation of Haitian immigrants in Florida into local politics and government. The theoretical framework for this study was Marschall and Mikulska's theory of minority political incorporation to better understand the political ambition of Haitian immigrants to emerge as candidates and voters toward achieving electoral success and a substantive representation. The research question addressed the lived experiences and perceptions of Haitian immigrants related to barriers to their political mobilization at district, state, and federal levels. A phenomenological study design was used with open-ended interviews of 10 Haitian Americans who lived in Florida for …

Writing In Graduate School: A Found Poem, Andrea R. Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The author presents and reflects on a found poem she composed from the final papers of students in her multidisciplinary graduate writing class.

Translinguality And Disciplinary Reinvention, Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Dominant narratives of disciplinarity that WAC/WID confronts conflate disciplines with departments and material institutional structures, such as departments and professional organizations—what is here called “departmentality.” The relative autonomy of disciplinarity from departmentality means that challenges to foundational concepts of disciplines are in fact normal to disciplinary work and do not threaten the material institutional structures associated with those disciplines, as illustrated by the history of challenges to foundational disciplinary concepts of basic writing and second language acquisition carried out in disciplinary writing. The relative autonomy of disciplinarity enables us to accept the legitimacy of the challenges translingual theory poses to …

The Significance Of The Game Of Pool In Ernest Hemingway’S “Soldier’S Home”, Molly J. Donehoo

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In his 1929 A Farewell to Arms, American Author Ernest Hemingway provides the thesis for all of American Modernism when he writes, “the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places” (216). If the world breaks everyone Hemingway’s focus becomes not in the breaking but in the solutions for becoming strong at the broken places. Throughout his canon Hemingway presents the healing rituals and therapeutic patterns that govern sports and game as a solution to becoming strong at the broken places. While critics have closely analyzed and scrutinized some of his most recognized short-stories, stories …

Lived Experience And Creative Praxis : A Critical Appraisal Of Raymond William's Fiction, Mingying Zhou

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Raymond Williams is known to the academic world as the pioneer and co-founder of the discipline of cultural studies, and his works on culture, society, democracy, hegemony, etc., have been widely read and cited. Yet, somewhat disappointingly, the fiction to which Williams devoted much of his life’s endeavor has been largely neglected and dismissed. Whenever Williams is mentioned, the salient labels attached to him are invariably “cultural critic”, “cultural materialist”, “critical theorist” and so on. This dissertation is not only designed to redress the balance with regard to Williams’s novels, read in parallel to his critical work, but also to …

Whispering Together In The Dark: Rereading Samuel Beckett's Homosociality Through Harold Pinter, Aaron Botwick

Publications and Research

In a 1960 letter to a friend, Harold Pinter wrote of Samuel Beckett, “I’ll buy his goods hook, line, and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty; his work is beautiful.” What do we learn if we take the word “beautiful” seriously? Rereading Waiting for Godot backward through Betrayal, this article argues that Beckett’s landscape, typically read as a realization of postwar angst, is in fact one released of the pressures of contemporary living and for Pinter a homosocial Eden. Jerry’s joke upon discovering the adultery—“Maybe I should …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 19, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Book Review - Cardinal Hill, Kelly Holt

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Representations Of García Lorca In American Poetry: Articulating And Floating Metaphor Of The Historical Connections Between Spain And The United States, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Building Community Within The Writing Center, Candace Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

Since their inception, Writing Centers have had the purpose of helping students with their writing, and they have met this goal by using collaborative learning and by talking to students about their writing. While the form of the center has changed over time, its purpose has not, and to better help Writing Centers achieve their purpose, they should focus on building community both amongst their tutors and between their tutors and tutees. A greater sense of community, welcome, and harmony will make the center a better place to work for the tutors, and it will make students/clients will feel more …

Fighting Rhetoric And Training Composition: Theory And Pedagogy Of Mixed Martial Arts Argument, Trevor C. Meyer

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the connections between martial arts training, rhetorical theory, and composition pedagogy. The central focus of this project is the common understanding of an argument as a “fight,” and by investigating the training practices of fighting arts, this project expands and complicates what an agonistic orientation can offer argument, teaching, and writing. This inquiry has two parts. Part one explores the importance and influence of ancient Greek martial arts practices in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Sophistic argumentation. By focusing on the “mixed” martial art of pankration, I challenge the pervasive binary of “open hand” and “closed fist” as a …

Aporetic Rhetoric: The Use Of Uncertainty In Healthcare Contexts, Adam S. Lerner

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines how uncertainty is rhetorically deployed in healthcare contexts. Investigating four major healthcare contexts, I study how different forms of uncertainty produce distinct rhetorical effects and consequences. In Chapter 1, I explore how the haphazard use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war makes it difficult for veterans to prove their exposure to this deadly chemical. In Chapter 2, I examine the rhetorical strategies of mental illness skeptics and denialists, looking at how each deploys uncertainty in different and related ways. In Chapter 3, I investigate the intersection between design, emotion, and uncertainty as it appears in the …

Writing With Risk: Dangerous Discourses And Event-Based Pedagogies, Ben Harley

Theses and Dissertations

“Writing with Risk: Dangerous Discourses and Event-Based Pedagogies,” responds to the pedagogical work of scholars such as Susan Wells, Nancy Welch, and Linda Flower by arguing that the risks associated with public writing pedagogies stem from the transformative nature of the rhetorical event that implicates and rearticulates actors through co-production, subverting their assumed autonomy. I argue that each of the three primary vantages of publics scholarship is particularly vulnerable to a certain type of risk aligned to a specific element of the rhetorical situation: idealist scholarship to unintended consequences in which the meaning of the text transforms, activist scholarship to …

Bodies In Play: Female Athleticism In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Jillian Weber

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores depictions of athletic female characters in nineteenth-century American literature. I argue that there is a rich literary tradition of athletic women, whose origin I date to the 1840s, that has not been explored. To date, scholars have considered athletic women in literature anomalies, a case of a gender-bending female found in a single text, but not part of a longer genealogy of this character type. By examining athletic women over a period of decades and across several genres of American literature we see how this character type has been shaped by authors and culture alike. I illustrate …

Citizens And Kings: Dramatic Genre And Social Consciousness In Early Modern England, Anna Ullmann

Dissertations

This dissertation combines Marxist theories of class consciousness and literary genre with an understanding of sixteenth century historiography in order to examine early modern plays that contain elements of both the English history play and city comedy. From about 1589 to 1620, there is a marked shift in audience preference from the former to the latter which is indicative of the cultural and political shift from an aristocratic ideology to a proto-bourgeois one. Such changes were caused most significantly by the rise of Protestantism and capitalism over the course of the sixteenth century. The project argues that economic, political, and …

Sister Carrie---Theodore Dreiser, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1900, Elliot Gorn

History: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Facing the naturalistic, nonjudgmental rendering in Sister Carrie of the stresses of survival in Chicago and New York was seen by some as scandalous. Nonetheless, Theodore Dreiser’s first novel eventually became an American classic and has been published in countless editions. The Heritage edition (1937) includes illustrations by Reginald Marsh (1898– 1954), including one in which the main character, a country girl on a train bound for Chicago, is approached by a salesman whose mistress she will eventually become.

“As The Occasion Demands”: Constraint-Based Practice In Rhetoric And Composition, Erica Kerstin Fischer

Theses and Dissertations

In their 2010 Composition Studies article, Laurie Gries and Collin Brooke observe, “constrained writing has been underappreciated” in the composition classroom (21). Taking seriously the potential value of constraints in pedagogical practice, this project executes a cross-disciplinary examination (drawing from design theory, experimental poetry, literary theory, composition, and rhetorical theory) of the various occurrences of, and approaches to, constraints and their influences on the ways we think and write. This investigation reveals that constraints create the conditions under which students can become productively defamiliarized to their thinking and writing habits, encouraging them to encounter alternatives otherwise left unnoticed.

I suggest …

Embracing New Experiences: Young Adult Literature About The Immigrant Experience, Ashley Hoppenjan

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this study was to identify themes in quality young adult realistic fiction about the immigrant experience in the United States. The researcher questioned which themes are evident in young adult immigrant literature. To pursue this information, the researcher analyzed highly recommended young adult realistic fiction published from 2000 to 2017. Twelve novels were selected, read, and coded. After the first reading, two novels were eliminated; therefore, ten novels are reported. Analysis revealed six themes including: causes of immigration, assimilation, perseverance, identity, socioeconomic status, and stereotypes.

Weather, C. J. Hribal

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.