Digital Commons Network^™

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

Enhancing The Campus Experience: Helping International Students To Adapt To North American Campus Life, Qiaoying Wang

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates how culture adaption topic can be applied to a design solution by enhancing international students experience on North American campus. Each year more than half a million international students enroll in American colleges and universities. Many will spend several years on a campus working toward their degree. Most of them arrive with clear academic goals, but they may have no clue what their social lives will be like. In that case, a common phenomenon that most of the international students need to get along with is called “Culture Shock”, which involves culture and academic adapting difficulties, limited …

An Unchained Analysis Of Racial Tension In America, Moriah Angott

Honors Projects

Modern race issues stem not only from the past but also from a lack of understanding and empathy for each other. How we talk about race will not only inform how we are able to move forward as a society, but it will also say a great deal about how we are evolving as human beings. It is important, and has been recognized as such, that black Americans have the freedom to grapple with that past, to understand it, and to feel connected to those ancestors who suffered in order for the foundation of this country to be built. Is …

Ad Hoc American Studies: Michigan And The Hidden History Of A Movement, Alexander I. Olson, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay uses the history of the American Culture program at the University of Michigan as an occasion for rethinking the early years of American Studies more generally. Our archival research has found that the program was founded in 1935—seventeen years earlier than previously thought—making it the oldest American Studies degree program in the world. These forgotten years challenge conventional genealogies tracing the field’s origins to the “myth and symbol” school at Harvard. Instead, Michigan’s history reveals a deep engagement with interdisciplinary movements in the 1930s that shared an interest in critiquing American democracy, particularly human ecology, institutionalist economics, and …

A Tourist Performance: Redefining The Tourist Attraction, Brandy Lee Kinkade

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to examine the intersection of tourism and memoirs in the United States specifically how specific travel memoirs function as tourist attractions. This investigation employs performer-centered analysis as a method of inquiry in order to gain insight on tourist experience as well as concepts of travel, imagination and embodiment. The paper also employs MacCannell’s Semiotics of Attraction as a framework to illustrate the presence of the following categories: tourist, sight, and marker. The presence and the relationships established between these categories establish Into Thin Air and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-eight Days on the John Muir Trail …

To Utopianize The Mundane: Sound And Image In Country Musicals, Siyuan Ma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many consider music, songs, and dance performance as utopian signifiers for cinema, but few has entered the utopian discourse of country musicals, a small genre of cinema usually known as country music films. By closely scrutinizing Pure Country (1992), this thesis aims to reveal how country music—as music numbers and as background cues— integrate and connect the fragmented on-screen world for the country musicals so as to offer audiences a fullness of utopian experience, and how this utopian effect are culturally significant for American audiences due to country music’s unique mechanism of constructing utopia and nostalgia in its past-orientations, sentimentalities, …

Constructing The West: The Hired Hand And Mccabe & Mrs. Miller And The Challenge Of Public Space, Eric Ward Ross

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Western has been an important and iconic part of American culture since the opening of the frontier. However, very few scholars have looked closely at the way the genre constructs the past through public and private spaces like frontier towns and settlements.

The 1971 films, The Hired Hand and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are two texts that revitalized, and in the process revised, the Western genre in the early 1970s. My paper examines the ways in which conflicts between public and private spaces in the films reflect the social and cultural conflicts in America at the time. Both films …

World War I And The Idea Of Progress In Powers's Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance, Karsten H. Piep

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "World War I and the Idea of Progress in Powers's Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" Karsten H. Piep reads Powers's 1985 novel as a critical reexamination of the dynamics and iconography of the early twentieth century that challenges the technological positivism espoused by many U.S. neoconservatives during the 1980s, while insisting on the individual's interpretive powers to discern and release the ever present transformative potentials of history. Situating Three Farmers in the postmodernism debates of the 1980s, Piep argues that the novel succeeds in challenging the idea of history conceived as linear progression, …

Digital Humanities And Publishing A Learned Journal, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Humanities and Publishing a Learned Journal" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses digital humanities and the publishing scholarship online in the context of the politics of publishing scholarship specifically as it pertains to humanities. Funding for the publishing of humanities scholarship remains constricted worldwide whether in print or digital and the standard remains to publish journals by subscription fees. Based on his argumentation against the "colonialism of knowledge," Tötösy de Zepetnek argues for the publishing of humanities scholarship against subscription-based or author-pay models. Further, he presents suggestions as to the how-s of the founding of a digital …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article Of Literature For Our Times & Reading Transcultural Cities, Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Animal Performance In Big-Time Vaudeville, Catherine M. Young

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Animal vaudevillians have been neglected by academic accounts of vaudeville. Drawing on the rapidly proliferating and highly interdisciplinary field of animal studies, this dissertation combines archival research and cultural theory to fill an important gap in our understanding of how animal bodies and images circulated during the vaudeville era. Taking up Nicole Shukin’s notion of animal capital as both animal “signs and substances” circulating in cultures of capital, I argue that vaudeville animal acts theatricalized animal capital for US citizen-consumers and often circulated animalized capital via racist ideologies and performance modes.

Theatre bookers balanced their reliance on animal acts …

City Poems And Urban Crisis, 1945 - Present, Jeffrey Nathan Mickelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

City Poems proposes that twentieth-century American city poets hold important concerns, commitments, and strategies in common with urban theorists and city planners. The study situates canonical and lesser-read city poetry, including work by William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Wanda Coleman, among others, in relation to discourses of urban crisis. Following Raymond Williams, Henri Lefebvre, and James Scully, it approaches city poetry as a form of social action that holds particular value for practitioners of progressive city planning. Because poetic representations of cities influence public perceptions, City Poems suggests, they have the potential to …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Creating Knowledge, Volume 9, 2016

Creating Knowledge

Dear Students, Colleagues, Alumni and Friends,

Throughout my career as faculty and administrator in higher education I have been honored with the opportunity to introduce and celebrate the publication of scholarly work by colleagues and graduate students in many disciplines and institutions around the world. After more than three decades of doing so, this is the first time that I have the pleasure of introducing a formal publication of work created by a talented group of undergraduate scholars. This honor is further magnified by the fact that beyond its formal format, this is a reviewed publication of extraordinary rigor and …

Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness In American Fiction, 1980-2010, Eric E. Casero

Theses and Dissertations--English

Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing …

Transnationalism And Nostalgia: Gianfranco Pannone’S ‘Trilogy Of America’, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

The article examines Gianfranco Pannone’s ‘American Trilogy’ – Piccola America. Gente del Nord a Sud di Roma/‘Little America. People from the North to the South of Rome’ (1991), Lettere dall’America/‘Letters from America’ (1995) and L’America a Roma/‘America in Rome’ (1998) – showing how the trilogy employs the documentary genre not only as a way to inform the audience, but to question the way in which imagination shapes reality and vice versa. First, Lettere dall’America is examined in light of the topos of letter writing in other literary and cinematic works featuring the Italian emigration to the United States. Second, the …

Sookie's Place(S): New Roadways Into The South Of The Southern Vampire Mysteries, Sarah Holder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Charlaine Harris’ bestselling paranormal romance series, the Southern Vampire Mysteries is only beginning to be understood as more than a cultural phenomenon, but rather as a highly politicized and critical work of fiction that shines through genre designations such as romance, mystery, and fantasy. Much of this praise can be attributed to the series’ heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, who gracefully traverses boundaries that divide what are arguably racial and ethnic groups ever at odds with one another as they share political and social space. Her adventures therefore pose significant questions concerning diversity, equality, and nationalism, but more obviously they ask what …

If There Wasn’T Farming, Somebody Wouldn’T Eat: Small Scale Agriculture, Community Autonomy, And Food Sovereignty In Mississippi, Irene Van Riper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the historical context of small scale farming and grassroots social movements in Mississippi’s history, and investigates the ways small farmers and community advocates are drawing upon their land-based heritage and local knowledge systems to create community-controlled food systems in dialogue with broader national and global conversations about sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty. Employing a multi-scalar method of analysis, the research studies issues from the perspective of individuals, communities, institutions, as well as national and transnational systems. The work draws from previous scholarship in environmental studies, agroecology, critical race studies, rural sociology, critical historiography, agrifood studies, and regional …

Representation Of The American South In Marvel Comics, 1963-2016, Katherine Gill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work tracks the role of the American South and Southern characters in Marvel Comics, from 1963 to 2016. This thesis spring from a simple question: how stereotypical does this Northern industry portray the American South? To achieve this goal, I read a lot of comics, applying literary theory (such as Patricia Yeager and Tara McPherson) as well as American cultural studies (1980s televangelism and the history of human trafficking in America) to my findings. After reading multiple comic books from multiple sources, I settled on four different texts, each with a unique approach to portraying the South: the portrayal …

A Vehicle Of Expression, Cristian Garcia

CMC Senior Theses

This senior thesis studies the evolution and ideals of several populations in Los Angeles through the lens of car culture. The automobile is a symbol of expression and upon analyzing it, a great deal can be revealed about its owner. Los Angeles is home to the hot rodding, lowriding, and import tuning car movements. All three major car cultures were born from a marginalized youth population. The three movements shed light on the sentiments and assimilation process of the various ethnic communities that created the car culture. This essay will show how each movement not only influenced one another, but …

No More Mind Games: Content Analysis Of In-Game Commentary Of The National Football League’S Concussion Problem, Jeffrey Parker

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

American (gridiron) football played at the professional level in the National Football League (NFL) is an inherently physical spectator sport, in which players frequently engage in significant contact to the head and upper body. Until recently, the long-term health consequences associated with on the field head trauma were not fully disclosed to players or the public, potentially misrepresenting the dangers involved in gameplay. Crucial to the dissemination of this information to the public are in-game televised commentators of NFL games, regarded as the primary conduits for mediating in-game narratives to the viewing audience. Using a social constructionist theoretical lens, this …

Thrill Of A Billion Eyes: The Prancing J-Settes, Mary Paige Blessey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The “Prancing J-Settes” is the official name of the dance line for the Sonic Boom of the South marching band at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. The popular form of dance termed “J-Setting” sources its name from the Prancing J-Settes. The Sonic Boom of the South and the Prancing J-Settes have a loyal fan following and have had a lasting and widespread influence on popular culture. This is an oral history interview project focusing on the current Prancing J-Settes themselves to hear their thoughts and definitions of the form of dance they perform and its significance. The primary interviews …

Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar

Theses and Dissertations--English

While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …

The Radical South: Grassroots Activism, Ethnicity, And Literary Form, 1960-1980, Elizabeth Fielder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Radical South” examines the art and writings of Civil-Rights-era social movements and locates U.S. based political structures in a hemispheric and global network. I reveal that the Civil Rights Movement, ethnic nationalism, and second-wave feminism were not separate entities; rather, the cultural work of activists was an intersectional effort that defied national strategies, such as non-violent protest and race-based separatism, that were often determined by their urban counterparts. Thus, I argue that new political aesthetics emerged from grassroots activism and set in motion ethnic and racial cultural expressions that embraced multiple, even conflicting, identities. As much as this art …

Ethical Discourse And Narrative Strategies In Yan's老师，好美 (To My Teacher, With Love), Zhuo Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Ethical Discourse and Narrative Strategies in Yan's老师，好美 (To My Teacher, with Love)" Zhuo Wang discusses the way in which narrative converges with ethics at the site of a radical "ethical environment" in Geling Yan's novel. Wang focuses on how the novel's first-person confessional narration, third-person reflective narration, and online narration dialogue with and interrogate one another working together to bring forth Yan's reconsideration of the ethical dimensions of her text. Wang argues that the novel's personal and social ethics are embodied multiple narrative voices which altogether reflect on the close relationship between novels and ethical discourse …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Fiction And Ethics, Wenying Jiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Human Cloning As The Other In Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Wen Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Human Cloning as the Other in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go" Wen Guo analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's novel with focus on Ishiguro's analogy between human cloning and people of marginality in contemporary society. Guo discusses the novel's ambience of doubt and suspense and elaborates on how the theme of otherness is addressed by Ishiguro's mock-realism in a landscape of science fiction. Further, Guo analyses the "unhomely" Hailsham of the novel, the clones' self-pursuit, and their ethical attitudes. Guo argues that in Ishiguro's novel a person's ethical choices are determined by his/her situation which confirms Ishiguro's beliefs with …

Introduction To Fiction And Ethics In The Twenty-First Century, Zhenzhao Nie, Biwu Shang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Mccarthy's The Road And Ethical Choice In A Post-Apocalyptic World, Jingjing Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "McCarthy's The Road and Ethical Choice in a Post-Apocalyptic World" Jingjing Guo analyses ethical choice and its implications in McCarthy's The Road. After examining the deterioration of the ethical context and the prevalence of evil reflected in cannibalism, Guo highlights the father's ethical choice and dilemma. Different from most others, the father chooses to keep alive to protect his son, and to stay man and stay good in a physically devastated and morally bankrupted world. Through discussing the meaning of the metaphor "fire" and "carrying the fire," Guo further explores the significance of the father's choice …

Perspectives Of Ethical Identity In Ng's Steer Toward Rock And Jen's Mona In The Promised Land, Hui Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Perspectives of Ethical Identity in Ng's Steer toward Rock and Jen's Mona in the Promised Land" Hui Su examines Fae Myenne Ng's and Gish Jen's novels. In the novels, the protagonists make different decisions: in Steer Toward Rock Jack after displacement in China adopts US-American identity and in Mona in the Promised Land Mona, a second generation Chinese American, selects Jewish identity. Owing to their different situations, the two protagonists reflect challenges of identity building in the case of the "Other" in US-American culture and society. Su argues that Ng and Jen, although varying in their …