English Language and Literature Commons^™

Diagnoses By Gender: The Consequences Of Treatment Of The Mentally Ill In Virginia Woolf's The Waves And Mrs. Dalloway 2016, Erika Nichole Jackson

Master's Theses

“Insanity is purely a disease of the brain…The physician is now the responsible guardian of the lunatic, and must ever remain so.” Sir John Charles Bucknill (1897)

Mental illness has consistently been and continues to be a subject that is viewed as taboo by society, especially when it comes to diagnosing a patient. Instead of acknowledging a person’s actions, thoughts, and words, society continually disregards mental illness as something that is negative and to be feared. The fact that this area of medicine can be difficult and distressing makes it all the more important to continue research. It is true …

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster

Master's Theses

Historically, the issue of representation in postcolonial studies is one of some contention. While scholarship might recognize the necessity for highlighting the plights and struggles attendant to postcolonial societies, the primary literature being studied is most often written by natives of those societies themselves. This gap is especially evident with Indigenous cultures, because there are relatively few Indigenous scholars working in the academy. We are at the point now when we have a multiplicity (but not a plurality) of Indigenous voices writing literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, film, etc.) and academic criticism. However, there is value in non-Natives reading and writing …

Sufficient For Herself: Women & Silence In Wilkie Collins's Novels, Shannon Branfield

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Wilkie Collins is a major sensation author of the Victorian period, known for introducing the form of the novel to detective fiction. His novels contain biting social critique and dynamic, multidimensional characters, the majority of whom are women, making his novels rich material for an examination of gender norms, power dynamics, and difference in Victorian society. His major works include The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), the two novels on which I focus. Previous critics have focused on the anxious male narrators in these novels and their attempts to establish positions of authority by taking control of …

The Slash Between, Tori Winslow Fica

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In this Plan B thesis, I wrote a braided essay accompanied by a critical introduction. The essay moves between three different topics: Salt Lake Comic Con; the journal of James Holmes, the shooter in the Aurora theatre massacre; and my father’s incarceration. Through the interaction among these three topics, or strands, I explore the lines we construct as human beings as a way of defining and controlling our world. I investigate such dichotomies as normal/abnormal, inside/outside, good/bad, and fantasy/reality. By the end, the strands reveal the fragility of the lines we draw and the futility of attempting to construct them. …

Facing Our Future: An Examination Of Age And Gender In Margaret Atwood's The Stone Mattress, Makenzie Krause

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

This thesis examines the intersectionality of age and gender in Margaret Atwood's The Stone Mattress. Atwood is well known for her speculative fiction, and she uses this style of storytelling to create futuristic worlds that easily mirror what our own future will look like. I find that Atwood's characters are marginalized in these worlds, not solely because of their age and gender, but because of the interdependency of age and gender. The fact that Atwood's societies rely so heavily on these discourses causes the characters unnecessary suffering and thus prevents them from living to their fullest potential. Because Atwood's …

'The Letter Killeth': The Obscurity Of Language And Communication In Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure 2016, Victoria T. Corning

Master's Theses

While the epistolary novel is a genre closely associated with 18th century England, 19th century Victorian literature also incorporates letter writing as a significant form of communication. Written messages convey what can often not be said out loud, as it is easier to hide behind a pen and paper, write in solitude, and be absent when the letter is read by the recipient. Impulsive and emotional thoughts and feelings can be written down immediately and then later edited, which makes writing an unstable form of communication. Is the author conveying true feelings or concealing true feelings? Layering multiple modes of …

Suffering In The Human Experience: An Examination Of The Book Of Job And King Lear, Allison Denton

English Department Student Scholarship

This thesis uses the Old Testament figure of Job and the Shakespearean character King Lear to examine how suffering calls us to question life and its meaning. These works were chosen because of their authors' demonstrated value of life despite their protagonists' pain. This project originated from a desire to answer questions about the meaning of life that had arisen during four years of study at the College of the Holy Cross.

Close Reading Workshop, Nida Islam

Senior Honors Projects

Close reading is an in-depth analysis of a text’s features (e.g., syntax, punctuation, tone, and vocabulary) to acquire a comprehensive understanding of a piece of literature. At the National Council of Teachers of English Conference in 2001, Robert Scholes, a retired professor of English at Brown University, voiced his concern about the lack of ability in freshly enrolled college students to engage with the intricacy of texts. Jane Gallop, Professor of English at University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, further argues the interdisciplinary benefits of close reading and attests to the consequences of students’ inability to perform intense reading of literature. As a …

"Out Of The Dark Confinement!" Physical Containment In Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Protest Literature, Allison Lane Tharp

Dissertations

Most scholarship on American protest literature tends to focus on the protest literature of specific, politically marginalized groups, such as black protest, women’s protest, or working class protest. My project redefines how we read nineteenth-century American protest literature by investigating the connections between the protest texts of these three marginalized groups. In particular, I argue that mid-nineteenth-century protest authors incorporate images of physical confinement and entrapment within their texts to expose to privileged readers the physical and ideological containment and control marginalized subjects encounter in their daily lives. Drawing from rhetorical theories of argumentation and audience engagement, and incorporating historical …

The Scarlet Letter And Novel Structure, Cade S. Miller

Research in Literary Studies (ENG 321)

“The Scarlet Letter and Novel Structure” examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of narrative role and conflict in The Scarlet Letter. To start, the paper examines the novel’s opening chapter “The Custom-House” as a device utilized by Hawthorne to establish a narrator-reader relationship early in the work, and how this allows Hawthorne to influence the reader’s interpretations of the novel’s main trio: Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. The paper then moves on to examine the utilization of conflict throughout the novel, which is structured in a unique way, when compared to other novels of the time, thanks to …

Teaching Assistant Experience With English As A Second Language: Beginning Grammar, Listening, And Speaking In Spring 2016, Jessey Reed

Celebration of Student Scholarship Poster Sessions Archive

No abstract provided.

Immigration And Identity Translation: Characters In Bharati Mukherjee’S Jasmine And Jhumpa Lahiri’S The Namesake As Translators And Translated Beings, Laura Traister

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Bharati Mukherjee’s 1989 novel Jasmine and Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake both feature immigrant protagonists, who experience name changes and identity transformations in the meeting space of Indian and American cultures. Using the theory of cultural translation to view translation as a metaphor for identity transformation, I argue that as these characters alter their identities to conform to cultural expectations, they act as both translators and translated texts. Although they struggle with the resistance of untranslatability via their inability to completely assimilate into American culture, Jasmine and Gogol ultimately gain the ability to bypass the limitations of a foreigner/native …

Strange And Unstable Bodies: Shifting Materialities In Early American Natural History Correspondence Networks, Julie Marie Mccown

English Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation fills a gap in the study of early American natural history literature by investigating the representation of animal bodies within early American natural history writing and attending to the role animal bodies play in shaping natural history knowledge and how natural history in turn shapes animal bodies. It also examines the effect the shifting materiality of animal bodies has on constructions of race and ethnicity in early America, as well as the ways non-white, non-male, and non-human persons exercise agency via natural history correspondence networks. Employing animal studies, posthumanism, and new materialism, I contend that, within natural history’s …

Rethinking Resistance: Race, Gender, And Place In The Fictive And Real Geographies Of The American West, Tracey Daniels Lerberg

English Dissertations - Archive

This project traces the history of the American West and its inhabitants through its literary, cinematic and cultural landscape, exploring the importance of public and private narratives of resistance, in their many iterations, to the perceived singular trajectory of white masculine progress in the American west. The project takes up the calls by feminist and minority scholars to broaden the literary history of the American West and to unsettle the narrative of conquest that has been taken up to enact a particular kind of imaginary perversely sustained across time and place. That the western heroic vision resonates today is perhaps …

Queering The Aftermath: Rethinking The Queer In Postcolonial And The (Post)Colonial In Queer, Robert Larue

English Dissertations - Archive

“Queering the Aftermath: Rethinking the Queer in Postcolonial and the (Post)colonial in Queer,” argues the necessity for a sustained dialogue between the fields of postcolonial studies and queer studies. The paucity of analysis of queerness within postcolonial discourse, along with dearth of analysis of systems of colonialism which undergird much of queer studies impedes both discourses’ aims for challenging the systems of normativity upon which Western hegemony is built. With a focus on sub-Saharan African queer narratives, this work finds that, contrary to common perception, queerness in Africa operates in a myriad of forms that are unrecognized in U.S. notions …

Quilting In Children's Literature: An Analysis Of Stereotypes, Megan Egbert

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

For many people, exposure to folk art happens at a young age; however, we may not realize what it is, see its value, or be aware of the terminology used by scholars. The lack of understanding the importance of folk art is especially true for children’s books. This project focuses on the analysis of children’s books about quilts or quilting, primarily because quilts are often found in books and relatable to a wide audience. While the choice in genre and topic may limit the scope of folk art analysis, there are still hundreds of books solely based on quilts or …

Satori 2016, Winona State University

Satori Literary Magazine

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970.

Master Buddha & The Jolly Golly Fun Time Gang., Todd Edward Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the first two chapters of a novel. The novel parodies the capitalist and consumerist United States of the 21st Century in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme.

Stories Of Single Mothers : Narrating The Sociomaterial Mechanisms Of Community Literacy., Kathryn Elizabeth Perry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In light of the increasing significance of community activist scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition and given the overwhelming nature of institutional educational inequity, this dissertation takes a close look at specific literacy practices and the corresponding networks that shape these literacy practices at a community literacy organization. Based on interviews with participants and staff at a local nonprofit called Family Scholar House (FSH), this project paints a complex picture of each stakeholder’s perspective on successful literacy. First, I employ Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to analyze three specific literacy moments at FSH: an application for government assistance, a financial aid appeal letter, …

Identifying Facebook-, Twitter-, And Instagram-Specific Rhetoric And Interaction: A Case Study, Sharon Kathleen Jones

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

A great deal of research has examined social media best practices; however, there has been a gap in looking at nonprofits to examine the efficacy of Facebook-, Twitter-, and Instagram-specific rhetoric to engage stakeholders. This study examined a small, local nonprofit's posts on each of the above platforms, and used surveys and interviews to find which types of rhetoric create the best dialogue between the nonprofit and stakeholders. This study found that for Facebook, the best rhetoric to use are pictures and videos; for Twitter, the best rhetoric to use are retweets; and Instagram, the best types of rhetoric are …