English Language and Literature Commons^™

Patsy Sings For Me: Stories, Brenna Elizabeth Womer

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction about the function of place in works of fiction and creative nonfiction. I use quotes from Joan Didion, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, and others to support the idea that, though many hold to the belief that people are shaped by place, really it is people who prescribe meaning to landscape and location, not the other way around. Place is at the mercy of memory and language. After the critical introduction, you will find short stories, flash fiction, essay, short memoir, and flash nonfiction. These works were not written with a specific theme in …

The Need For Neal: The Importance Of Neal Cassady In The Work Of Jack Kerouac, Sydney Anders Ingram

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Neal Cassady has not been given enough credit for his role in the Beat Generation. This paper discusses Cassady's importance on the life and work of Jack Kerouac, especially focusing on his most famous novel, On the Road. Cassady lent himself as the hero of On the Road and supplied Kerouac with the spontaneous prose style that made him famous. This look at Cassady puts him into the context of the time period in which he lived and in which On the Road was written. Cassady is compared to the ideal American male of the day and those traits are …

Snowy Sunrise, Gilbert K.D. Hu

Forces

No abstract provided.

Loving Couple, Gilbert K.D. Hu

Forces

No abstract provided.

2016 Forces, Scott Yarbrough

Forces

No abstract provided.

Water, Prestige, And Christianity: An Ecocritical Look At Medieval Literature, Cortney Nicole Lechmann

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis examines four medieval works, Beowulf, Pearl, The History of the Kings of Britain, and Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart from an ecocritical perspective. Specifically, it looks at how water affects the human culture described within each work, how the characters and their culture affect the water in return, and how they position themselves in regard to nature. This examination includes any relevant influences which affect the characters’ perception of the various bodies of water, such as the religion, technological advances, and historical background of the time period during which the authors wrote each work. It discusses each …

Tearing Up The Tallgrass, Brett Salsbury

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative thesis project is a culmination of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree at UNLV. The thesis—currently titled Tearing up the Tallgrass—was composed entirely during my graduate semesters at UNLV. As a book of poetry, it explores the dynamics of humans in nature, white privilege, objectivity, fact- and myth-making, and artistic practice. Written under the supervision of Claudia Keelan (committee chair) and Donald Revell (committee member), my committee further includes P. Jane Hafen (English) and Pierre Lienard (Anthropology). Their disparate subject and genre interests are meant to diversify the feedback received during this project’s composition. Some …

"Mother, I Will": Female Subjectivity And Religious Vision In The Brontës Novels, Amanda Scott

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë have long attracted sustained critical attention, in

large part because of their strong female protagonists. These strong-willed women self-assuredly reject oppression and model new paradigms for the Victorian woman to empower her subjectivity. This subjectivity serves, in turn, not only as the ability to form and express views counter to outworn social prescriptions, but it also serves as the centralized interior focus that allows their protagonists to think of themselves as the foremost subjects of their lives, rather than see themselves as pawns to be moved about in the games of patriarchal hierarchy. This study …

Consanguinity Protocols, Kinship And Incest In Literature Of The Anglo-Saxon Through Early Renaissance Periods, Richard J. Warren

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Incest appeared as a frequent motif of medieval literature. The tales ranged from inadvertent encounters, intentional acts and incest narrowly avoided through recognition. Stories served as cautionary tales warning the populous of one of the many sins of the flesh. Along with detailing the ecclesiastical and secular prohibitions against incest, I explore the reasons for the frequency of narratives and verse centered upon incest. Examining literature form the Anglo-Saxon period through the early Renaissance shows the popularity of the theme but also illustrates how the perceived consequences of incest changed from one period to the next. The genetic consequence of …

Mature Content, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

I Preferred, Much Preferred, My Version: Exploring The Female Voice And Feminine Identity Within Memoirs Of The 20th And 21st Centuries, Alexandra Fradelizio

Senior Theses

Memoirs have long been a valuable way in which individuals share and reflect on their past experiences. The genre of memoir writing especially had a tremendous impact on a range of American female writers. This thesis explores memoirs written by women throughout the 20^th century. With the shift in women’s roles during the 1900s and early 2000s, the memoirs examined emphasize the importance of feminine identity. The analysis provided within this thesis centers on each memoirist’s unique path in determining her sense of self. Moreover, the memoirists each use the process of writing to relay the value of personal …

Constructing Reality: The Role Of Mass Media In The Hunger Games Series, Jordan E. Nettles

Honors Theses

The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins is an incredibly popular Young Adult series that has had a large impact on both children and adults. The media environment within The Hunger Games trilogy can provide insight into our own world. This thesis seeks to discuss how governing structures in the trilogy, the Capitol and District 13, manipulate the media to secure their own power. Using contemporary research on media theories, media methods, and media effects, this thesis focuses primarily on the Capitol and District 13’s efforts to create and use the media image of Katniss Everdeen, the central character of …

The Good, The Bad And The Useless: The Perception Of Books In Ray Bradbury’S Fahrenheit 451, Markus Zusak’S The Book Thief, And Gary Shteyngart’S Super Sad True Love Story, Morgan Grace Milburn

Honors Theses

Literature acts as a thought experiment that allows authors to test out theoretical concepts. In dystopian literature, authors test their theories on what leads to a dystopian society, and therefore how to avoid it. In this thesis, I examine three dystopian novels, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story as well as the theories the authors engage with on how to avoid dystopian futures. All three of the novels suggest that wisdom is the way to avoid a dystopian future, but the ways they define wisdom are different. By examining …

Robert Frost’S Ulteriority: Saying One Thing In Terms Of Another – The Inexpressible, Nicolette S. Stackhouse

Honors Theses

Robert Frost’s poetry, which is famously rich in double meaning—saying one thing but meaning something else—is also concerned with pragmatism. Pragmatism implies that there is no one fundamental universal truth. I contend that Robert Frost’s poetry says that duplicity of meaning, or ulteriority, is something to be embraced. Frost wants the uncertainty of meaning to be understood by the reader as vital to life and the mind’s processes. The simple fact that so many readers search for the hidden meanings in his poetry justly proves this point. As a pragmatist, Frost was aware that the process of getting to a …

Toward A Phenomenological Poetics : The Interplay Of Philosophy And Poetry In William Butler Yeats’S “The Tower” And “Meditations In Time Of Civil War”, Peter Michael Lang

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the interplay of poetry and philosophy in the work of William Butler Yeats as it serves to ground a symbolic structure that challenges time. Yeats, like his contemporaries, was influenced by Walter Pater, who made it possible to articulate with passion a sense of being despite life’s tumult and upheaval, to instantiate and develop in a moment a complete, poetic soul. It is in this same spirit that, much later, Gaston Bachelard would approach poetic memory for its harmonizing value. The works of Pater and Bachelard thus ground a phenomenological reading of Yeats’s poetry, in particular “The …

Unusual Children: Queerishness And Strange Growth In A Wrinkle In Time And The Giver, Olivia Morris

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This project examines two different pieces of modern children’s literature, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Lois Lowry’s The Giver, in terms of their protagonists’ respective strange identities. I begin with Katherine Stockton’s theory of sideways growth, which outlines the unusualness often found in child protagonist. I use Stockton’s work as a jumping off point to examine the queerishness of two protagonists, L’Engle’s Meg Murray and Lowry’s Jonas. Meg is unfeminine, and her experiences with language and definitions defy gender binaries and easy definitions; throughout the course of the novel, she learns to embrace her “flaws” (her unfeminine, …

The Broadsheet- Issue 16, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• English Awards 2016
• Interview with Jamie Hayes
• Interview with Professor McWhorter
• Sigma Tau Delta Inductee Interviews
• Core Curriculum Standards (part 2)
• Bookish- WMCK radio show
• Inside "Nordic Noir"
• Go Set a Watchmen Review

Birth Family Search, Trauma, And Mel-Han-Cholia In Korean Adoptee Memoirs, Katelyn J. Hemmeke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Birth Family Search, Trauma, and Mel-han-cholia in Korean Adoptee Memoirs” analyzes the connections between adoption trauma and birth family search by examining three Korean-American adoptee memoirs: The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea, both by Jane Jeong Trenka; and Ghost of Sangju by Soojung Jo. I draw links between their work and studies on trauma by critical scholars Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Margaret Homans, and Jennifer Cho. According to Caruth, the pathology of a traumatic experience lies in the victim’s inability to fully experience the traumatic event as it happens; only …

Jazz Epidemics And Deep Set Diseases: The De-Pathologization Of The Black Body In The Work Of Three Harlem Renaissance Writers, Shane C. Hunter

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation argues that the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, a response to Victorian-era medical and scientific racism, and that the three writers on which it centers, Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Wallace Thurman (1902-1934), and Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), participated in subverting these racist discourses. I focus on elements of their creative work that de-pathologize the black body. Specifically, I consider how these writers undermine Victorian-era medical racism that had, by the 1920s, come to inform American racial politics. Hughes’s, Thurman’s, and Nugent’s work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s is at least partly concerned with undermining medically racist ideology …

In Absentia Parentis: The Orphan Figure In Latter Twentieth Century Anglo-American Children’S Fantasy, James Michael Curtis

Dissertations

Childhood development theory tells us that there are certain psychological processes that we all undergo during childhood, regardless of our national or cultural background. These developmental struggles can include some of the more ambivalent cycles—such as regression, which can be both a positive and negative phenomenon—but can also include some of the more beneficial processes like overcoming separation anxiety and creating and establishing a sense of self. One figure that is often marginalized in discussions of childhood development in children’s fantasy fiction is the orphan. In fact, book-length studies on the orphan figure in children’s literary fantasy are virtually non-existent; …