Digital Commons Network^™

A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin

Theses and Dissertations--English

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …

Darwinian Evolutionary Theory And Constructions Of Race In Nazi Germany: A Literary And Cultural Analysis Of Darwin’S Works And Nazi Rhetoric, Emily M. Wollmuth

Departmental Honors Projects

First published in 1856, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is one of the most impactful scientific writings in history. While the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory on historical events has been widely studied, no single work of scholarship has previously combined close reading of Origin’s representations of “race” with analysis of how those constructions of “racial” difference are (mis)translated across the cultural discourses of the eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. Through comparative cultural studies and close literary analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Darwin’s works—including Origin, Descent of Man, and Voyage of the Beagle, this paper examines how evolutionary …

Strangers With Cameras: The Consequences Of Appalachian Representation In Pop Culture, Chelsea L. Brislin

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of the Appalachia region in literature, art and pop culture have historically shifted between hyperbolic, colorful caricatures to grotesque, sensationalized, black and white photography. This wide spectrum of depictions continually resonates within the North American psyche due to its shared commonality of Appalachia as the cultural “other.” This othering frequently leaves audiences with a kind of relief that this warped representation of backwards, rural poverty is not their own progressive, present-day reality. Countless artists have exploited the region in order to show the impoverished side of rural Appalachia and spin a failed capitalistic way of life into a romanticized, …

The Male Mentor Figure In Women's Fiction, 1778-1801, Jessica R. Evans

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation follows the development of the mentor figure from Frances Burney’s Evelina published in 1778 to Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda in 1801. The mentor becomes a key figure for exploring women’s revolutionary ideas on female education and women’s roles in society. My dissertation contributes to discussions on mentoring, development of the Gothic mode, and debates over sensibility and sentimental fiction. It considers how the female mentee paradoxically both desires and criticizes her male mentor and his authority. Each author under discussion employed the mentor figure in a way that addressed their contemporary society’s issues and prejudices toward the treatment of …

Post 9/11 American Dramas: A Postmodern Postcolonial Study Of Wajahat Ali’S The Domestic Crusaders And John Shanley’S Dirty Story, Shaimaa M. Saeed

English Language and Literature

The focal point of this study is the date 9/11 which history immortalized as it witnessed the sudden attacks on one of the world’s super powers, the United States of America. The repercussions of this date boomed in the world’s four corners leaving behind feelings of insecurity and fears from the unknown. Whereas 9/11 had many influences on the international and domestic economic, political and social arenas, such influences were reflected in the literary arena as well. Many American playwrights were influenced by the attacks to the extent that such attacks have become the raw material formulating the dramatic substance …

Mourning And Melancholy In Hisham Matar's In The Country Of Men And Anatomy Of A Disappearance, John C. Hawley

English

In a recent study of masculine identity in the fiction of the Arab East since 1967, Samira Aghacy analyzes those novels that "possess an underlying political awareness revealing the centrality of political life in the fiction of the Arab East and the precedence of collective over private issues" (Aghacy, 7). Hisham Matar, though, has chosen to work against the grain and to shrink the political down to the personal; politics remain almost unseen, ghost-like, something his protagonists cannot comprehend or fully see. 1 Muhammad Siddiq famously notes that "any writer can ill afford to remain uninvolved and merely watch history …

Female Art And Artisans In Edith Wharton’S The House Of Mirth, The Custom Of The Country, And “Roman Fever”, Julia B. Welch

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In early twentieth century old and new New York social circles, the marriage market’s commodification of women acted as the controlling factor for relationships, female power, and personal identity. When considering Wharton’s works for the first-hand viewpoint that she provided of the marriage market, it becomes clear that her interest in art plays heavily into the way women comport themselves within her novels. In order to discuss this relationship in Edith Wharton’s works, I’ve created terms that delineate the various ways female characters respond to the pressures of the marriage market. The best way to analyze Wharton’s women is by …

'Strange' Lands Of Opportunity - Representations Of Moral, Social, And Economic Profit In Late Medieval And Early Modern Literature, Lisa Marie Kanniainen

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

‘STRANGE’ LANDS OF OPPORTUNITY – REPRESENTATIONS OF MORAL, SOCIAL, AND ECONOMIC PROFIT IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN LITERATURE

By

LISA KANNIAINEN

MARCH 2017

Advisor: Dr. Jaime Goodrich

Major: English (British Literature)

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation pursues the link between late medieval and early modern texts and the thoughts of the developing middling class and the New Men. Adding to scholarship regarding travel literature, colonization, and propaganda, I claim that the selected texts offer insight into medieval and early modern concerns regarding moral, social, and economic profit. Employing contemporary economic constructs as a base, this enterprise investigates …

Simulation Genres And Student Uptake: The Patient Health Record In Clinical Nursing Simulations, Lillian Campbell

English Faculty Research and Publications

Drawing on fieldwork, this article examines nursing students’ design and use of a patient health record during clinical simulations, where small teams of students provide nursing care for a robotic patient. The student-designed patient health record provides a compelling example of how simulation genres can both authentically coordinate action within a classroom simulation and support professional genre uptake. First, the range of rhetorical choices available to students in designing their simulation health records are discussed. Then, the article draws on an extended example of how student uptake of the patient health record within a clinical simulation emphasized its intertextual relationship …

Enclosed From All Sides: Reading Contact And Ambivalence In The Imaginary Al-Andalus Of Hrotsvit's The Passion Of Pelagius And The Song Of Roland, Briana J. Wipf

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s The Passion of Pelagius and The Song of Roland have never been read together in terms of their shared engagement with the Muslim other in the Iberian Peninsula, known during the Middle Ages as Al-Andalus. This project is a comparative reading of the texts’ approach to the presentation of an imaginary Al-Andalus as a space of alterity. The texts’ emphasis on imaginative as opposed to accurate portrayals of Andalusian history and Islamic culture suggests their engagement with a process of Christian identity-building, where the “Christian,” as portrayed in each text, is defined against and in comparison to …

The Fooding Of Narrative In Contemporary Women's Transnational Fiction, Stacey Marie Amo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Fooding of Narrative in Contemporary Women’s Transnational Fiction examines how foodstuffs are strategically deployed in recent fiction about migration to the United States. The novels examined, all set in the period following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, depict the experience of resettlement from a diverse set of postcolonial sites: Haiti, Cuba, Vietnam, and India. The Fooding of Narrative argues that food is deployed as a structuring trope and acquires narrative significance in articulating the profound sense of identity crisis that frequently accompanies the immigration experience. By focusing on food’s narrative significance in a broad …

Disease, Bread, Efficiency: Rhetorics Of Victorian Education Reform, Vicki Jean Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Disease, Bread, Efficiency: Rhetorics of Victorian Education Reform arose from my observation that, historically speaking, Anglo-American schools have always been “in crisis.” I argue that the crisis of the “failing school” is a rhetorical problem rather than an economic problem as most scholarship suggests. Much like the cultural myth of “the One True Love,” education reform debates tend to position the school as an institution that can rescue the nation from all perceived social ills. Not only is this unrealistic, the patterns of language are inconsistent as ideas about the purpose of school are translated into policy. This causes further …

Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bowles's Up Above the World as Beatnik Murder Mystery" Greg Bevan discusses Paul Bowles's fourth and final novel, which at the time of its publication was met with mixed reactions from reviewers and its creator alike, and has seen relatively scanty critical attention in the years since. Gena Dagel Caponi perceives in the novel a reflection of Bowles's struggle for control, during the time of its writing, in the face of his wife Jane's terminal illness. Building on this insight, the current essay notes the same tension in the writings of the Beats—a movement with which Bowles …

Authorship In Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy And Bowles's Translation Of Moroccan Storytellers, Benjamin J. Heal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Authorship in Burroughs's Red Night Trilogy and Bowles's Translation of Moroccan Storytellers" Benjamin J. Heal discusses Paul Bowles's and William S. Burroughs's varying interrogation of the constructed nature of authorship. In his study Heal focuses on the publication history of Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night (1981), which was written with considerable collaborative influence and Bowles's translation of illiterate Moroccan storytellers, where his influence over the production and editing of the texts is blurred as are the roles of author and translator. Through an examination of Bowles's and Burroughs's authorship strategies in parallel with an explication of …

Burroughs's Re-Invention Of The Byronic Hero, Franca A. Bellarsi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Re-Invention of the Byronic Hero" Franca A. Bellarsi discusses George Gordon Byron's (1788-1824) and William S. Burroughs's (1914-1997) texts as masterful examples of irreverence which earned notoriety in their own days. Yet despite the scandalous aura of lawlessness, iconoclastic cynicism, and nomadic elusiveness which surrounds both authors' work, a parallel between them has never been attempted. Bellarsi argues that more than a hundred years after Burroughs's birth, assessing his work implies understanding that his enduring appeal across languages and cultures rests in part on how his writing pushes the transformation of the Byronic myth further in …

Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions in The Yage Letters" Melanie Keomany discusses the contents of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg's The Yage Letters which could be dismissed as openly bigoted and racist. Keomany posits that the text reveals valuable connections between the colonial expansion of the eighteenth century and 1950s USA and Latin America. By re-shaping Burroughs's lived experiences in the Amazon into a text where the narrator William Lee mimics sardonically and parodically the colonial scientific explorer, The Yage Letters provides valuable insight into the complex postcolonial context of the mid-twentieth century.

Burroughs's Folios As An Archival Machine For Artistic Creation, Tomasz D. Stompor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Burroughs's Folios as an Archival Machine for Artistic Creation" Tomasz D. Stompor discusses the significance of archival material as a scholarly resource for the analysis of William S. Burroughs's cut-up experiments. Stompor retraces the history of the author's filing system as both a referential repository and a device for documentation and investigates its function as an eperimental machine for the production of cut-up texts and layouts

Theories Of Opiate Addiction In The Early Works Of Burroughs And Trocchi, Richard English

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Theories of Opiate Addiction in the Early Works of Burroughs and Trocchi" Richard English discusses William S. Burroughs's and Alexander Trocchi's representations of opiate addiction with special reference to their early writings. English examines the concept of homo heroin that can be attributed to Burroughs and lists and expounds its qualities. Among these are: immorality, criminality, mono-objectuality, self- and other-indifference, and, most importantly, the radical physical transformation into a new species, which Burroughs extends in Naked Lunch. English shows how homo heroin relates to Trocchi's conception of a heroin addict, which serves to illustrate that homo …

Scotland And The Caribbean, Jo Durant

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses (and summarizes) Michael Morris's recent book Scotland and the Caribbean, c. 1740-1833, concluding that it should be welcomed, not only as an introduction to specific writers, but as a good introduction to recent debates on the legacy of Caribbean slavery, as seen from a Scottish perspective.

Pleasure In The Past: Queer Nostalgia In The Gay American Century, Elisabeth Windle

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I recover nostalgia—unpopular, too frequently dismissed, and presumptively conservative—as a generative emotional position from which to read queer texts. My archive assembles a group of post-Stonewall texts—literature, film, television, and advertising—that marshal the pre-Stonewall literary past to support reflection on the pressing issues of recent gay life: same-sex marriage, the myth of the down low, effemiphobia and anti-feminism, and HIV/AIDS. Shuttling critically between modernist literary history and contemporary culture, I propose nostalgia as a useful affective mode for negotiating our relationship to queer history. Against both the pervasive narrative of gay progress circulating in mainstream culture and …

English Drama For Critical Pedagogy : Adapting Caryl Churchill’S Dramas As A Methodological Tool For Community-Engaged Theatre Workshopping In Post-Umbrella Movement Hong Kong, Hsiao Min Yu

Lingnan Theses

Tertiary-level drama is often condescendingly perceived in Hong Kong as either vocational or leisure-related, and tends to be marginalized in many – though not all – curricula as an activity for extra-curricular inter-university competition. This research aims at re-imagining Drama and Community Theatre as a critical pedagogy in promoting community culture. The aim of the research project is to strengthen the social functions of drama as community experience and as a tool for empowerment in the ‘glocal’ sociopolitical context of today. The study examines the methodology of a semi-scripted, community-engaged, theatre workshopping initiative with scenes adapted from Caryl Churchill’s plays, …

The Revolution Of Bath: The Writing And Re-Writing Of Social History In Jane Austen's Persuasion, Erica L. Pratt

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

Being Together Subversively, Outside In The University Of Hegemonic Affirmation And Repressive Violence, As Things Heat Up (Again), Jodi Melamed

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Obey, Consume, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Immigrant And Irish Identities In Hand In The Fire And Hamilton's Writing Between 2003 And 2014, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Immigrant and Irish Identities in Hand in the Fire and Hamilton's Writing between 2003 and 2014" Dervila Cooke discusses the intertwining of Irish and immigrant identities. Cooke examines the connection between openness to memory and embracing migrant identities in Hamilton's writing both in the 2010 novel and as a whole. The empathetic and inclusive character of Helen in Hand in the Fire is analyzed in contrast to characters who have repressed memory including the Serbian Vid. Helen's ties to elsewhere, her openness to new influence, and her willingness to engage with traumatic elements of the past (Irish …

Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Topic Modeling And The Historical Geography Of Scotland, Michael Gavin, Eric Gidal

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents selected findings from a larger project using topic modeling for clusters of keywords from a defined corpus of 18th and 19th century Scottish topographical sources (including the Old and New Statistical Surveys), linked to GIS mapping, to explore such topics as Scottish industry, transport, antiquities, print culture, and religion, with 10 maps included in the article text.