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Being Together: Imaginaries Of Coexistence And Resistance In Contemporary South Asian Writings, Mahendran Thiruvarangan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Being Together is a critical inquiry into selected writings that produce a counter-hegemonic imagination of pluralism, coexistence and cultural resistance to the violence, dispossession and exclusions perpetuated by nationalist, racist and neoliberal forces in South Asian and South Asian diasporic contexts, primarily spaces within or associated with Sri Lanka. Due to the historical role the nation, homelands, native culture, sovereignty, and self-determination have played in liberating South Asia from the clutches of British colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, these ideas have enormous political valence to the socio-political lives of the communities that consider the region their homeland today. While this …

The Scientific Romances Of Jules Verne And H.G. Wells: Imperialism Disguised As Progress In The Early Days Of Science Fiction, Timothy Ferris

Theses and Dissertations

Frequently in their respective oeuvres, Verne and Wells write in a rhetoric of conquest that almost always translates to discovering a more efficient means of taming wild, non-European environments. These goals extend not only to the lands that their protagonists explore, but also to human beings and other life that may populate them. Indeed, the underlying focus—the one that is masked behind the thrill and adventure of both Wells and Verne—is none other than the march of progress as understood by middle-class Europeans in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Progress can produce positivistic optimism, and it can also …

Gender In Apocalyptic California: The Ecological Frontier, Marykate Eileen Messimer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is the consequence of ideologies that promote human reproduction and resource consumption by sacrificing human justice, nonhuman species, and the land. Both biology and queer ecologies resist this notion of human separation and supremacy by showing that no body is a singular, impermeable entity, that all beings are biologically and inexorably connected. My dissertation demonstrates that fiction writers use this knowledge to locate a utopian vision that can counteract the dystopian impotence of living within climate change. This argument is founded on novels written by women and set in California, a state that uniquely inhabits a utopian and …

Adapting Environmental Ethics And Behaviors: Toward A Posthuman Rhetoric Of Community Engagement, Beth J. Shirley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

What persuades people one way or another to accept or deny climate change? More importantly, what persuades people to act on, ignore, or even be defiant of climate change? We would like to think that people are motivated when they hear the science explained clearly and when they are presented with a clear understanding of how their actions have a lasting impact. Yet the science on climate change has been made clear for some time, and doubt in climate change science is rampant (at least in the United States).

This dissertation seeks to answer these questions and develop a new …

Spirit Don't Ever Die: Apocalypse And Denial In An Infinite Universe, Nathan Riggs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh catalogs contemporary fiction’s failure to adequately engage with catastrophic climate change. In this thesis, I argue the engagement problem has a century-old analogue in fiction’s approach to entropy. Entropy was among the first secular apocalyptic modes in mainstream discourse, and this investigation of authors’ approaches to its portrayal provides a model for understanding fiction’s denial or acceptance of apocalypse. I first examine William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land, a far-future tale set in a post-solar Earth. I contend that Hodgson’s centering of the human experience prevents him from portraying a true end …

Female Protagonist Mega-Archetypes: A Study In Medieval European Romances, Doaa Omran

English Language and Literature ETDs

Despite the claim that structuralism has sung its swan song, my research offers new insights in the field of structuralism through archetypal criticism by exploring four female hero mega-archetypes as narrative structures inspired by the Qur’an and the Bible. These scriptural narratives offer tenets, based on narratives and motifs, that, as structural units, create and identify mega-archetypes. This study posits how, rather than being extensions of existing structuralist taxonomies on the male hero monomyth, the female mega-archetypes enrich that monomythical narrative. This work details the structure of the mega-archetypes Zulaikhah (Potiphar’s wife), Sarah and Hagar, the Virgin Mary, and Queen …

No-Man's... Or Women's-Land, Sam Jacob

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …

Urban Landscape In Mcewan's Narrative Representation Of Berlin, Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Urban Landscape in McEwan's Narrative Representation of Berlin," Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz discusses the image of Berlin created in Ian McEwanﹸs novel The Innocent (1990) and the chapter titled "Berlin" in Black Dogs (1992). It starts from the hypothetical statement that while British literary fiction set in Berlin is rare after 1970 the genres of spy and detective novel, where crime and violence take center stage, shape the image of the city in highbrow narratives as well. The perspectivization of the cityscape, including its monuments, through the protagonists fundamentally influences its image. In The Innocent the limited view …

Mule Nation, Polina Konokh

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis project is a TV pilot and the second episode of the show. There is also a critical essay that serves as an explanation of the creative work.

There are multiple problems addressed in the text, such as growing up, living in the modern world, countries not working properly for their citizens and other important issues of our modern life, with a thorough explanation of some of them in the critical essay.

The screenplays are formatted according to the current industry standards.

The result of this thesis is two first episodes of a potential TV show.

History And Main Components Of Content And Language Integrated Learning Approach (Clil), Munis Khusanova Techear Of Linguistics And Literary Studies Department

Philology Matters

The article is devoted to analysis of the development of CLIL approach which is gaining considerable attention of world educators because ofits dual aim: teaching a foreign language through content and teaching content through a foreign language. The material of the study was a theoretical framework offered by the founders of this approach. Objective: to identify the role of the main components of this approach called “4C”s– content, communication, cognition and culturewhich should be dwelled into every CLIL class-room. Along with it, it presents the principles and ways of integrating CLIL into the school’s educational program. The author focuses on …

Shale Play: Poems And Photographs From The Fracking Fields By Julia Spicher Kasdorf And Steven Rubin, Kelly Shepherd

The Goose

Review of Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin's Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields

Darkness, Depression, And Descent In Anglo-Saxon England, Ruth Wehlau

Richard Rawlinson Center Series

This collection of essays examines the motifs of darkness, depression, and descent in both literal and figurative manifestations within a variety of Anglo-Saxon texts, including the Old English Consolation of Philosophy, Beowulf, Life of Saint Guthlac, the Junius manuscript, the Wonders of the East, and the Battle of Maldon. Essays deal with such topics as cosmic emptiness, descent into the grave, and recurrent grief. In their analyses, the essays reveal the breadth of this imagery in Anglo-Saxon literature as it is used to describe thought and emotion, as well as the limits to knowledge and …

Racial Literacy Is Literacy: Locating Racial Literacy In The College Composition Classroom, Mara Lee Grayson

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

In order to develop pedagogies around racial literacy, we must first define the goals and bounds of racial literacy as praxis. In this paper, I synthesize the findings of a year-long teacher research project to explore the significance of racial literacy in the college composition classroom. Drawing from existing scholarship and my own research into racial literacy instruction, I offer four visions of racial literacy in the English classroom, the last of which is Racial Literacy as Literacy. I conclude by arguing that a racial literacy curriculum can teach students foundational concepts of textual analysis, audience awareness, authorial choice and …

“To Be Men, Not Destroyers”: Developing Dabrowskian Personalities In Ezra Pound’S The Cantos And Neil Gaiman’S American Gods, Michelle A. Nicholson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Kazimierz Dabrowski’s psychological theory of positive disintegration is a lesser known theory of personality development that offers an alternative critical perspective of literature. It provides a framework for the characterization of postmodern protagonists who move beyond heroic indoctrination to construct their own self-organized, autonomous identities. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos captures the speaker-poet’s extensive process of inner conflict, providing a unique opportunity to track the progress of the hero’s transformation into a personality, or a man. American Gods is a more fully realized portrayal of a character who undergoes the complete paradigmatic collapse of positive disintegration and deliberate self-derived self-revision …

Secret Selves: Surveillance And Twentieth-Century African American Literature, Kelsey Kiser

English Theses and Dissertations

Black writers, thinkers, and artists found themselves on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s watch list for radicalism and sedition as early as 1919. Secret Selves explores how twentieth-century African American writers, namely Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor responded to a surveillance state that monitored their lives and works for radicalism and sedition. By recrafting the African American künstlerroman—a genre that birthed the African American literary tradition—these writers embedded codes into their works that concealed personal details from Bureau agents and simultaneously articulated a new narrative: that to be black and to …

“We Carry These Conflicts, These Ruptures Of History:” The Hybridity Of The Self In The Conflict Between Tradition And Modernity In Laleh Khadivi’S The Age Of Orphans, Karwan Karim Abdalrahman

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This study presents a postcolonial reading of Laleh Khadivi’s The Age of Orphans based on the theories of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. The project offers specific answers to several questions: can this novel be read through the lens of Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, and, if so, what does such a reading reveal about culture and identity in The Age of Orphans? The hybrid self is an experience wherein the postcolonial self holds the shades of two identities and cultures, namely the colonizer and the colonized. In other words, the protagonist Reza lives in a space that represents the …

"Are You There, Dog? It's Me, Riley": Poems, Riley Christine O'Connell

Canterbury Scholars

The end product of Riley O'Connell's Canterbury Fellowship, these poems, ranging in topic from family and loss to love and dogs, were composed over the course of Riley's four years at SCU, included but not limited to her time at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University, where she taught creative writing therapy for her Canterbury.

Network Poetics: Studies In Early Modern Literary Collaboration, John Ladd

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Literature scholars often consider the seventeenth century to be the period in which the role of the individual author as we know it today was consolidated, strengthened, or even invented. Scholars of collaboration, most notably Jeffrey Masten in his book Textual Intercourse, tend to treat the phenomenon of joint literary work as limited to coauthorship and either to specific genres (usually drama) or specific periods in time (usually 1590 to 1620). In this model, collaborative environments give way to authorial ones, particularly in Restoration England as the position of the professional author was strengthened by changes in publishing practices. However …

Multilingual Writers And Online Writing Instruction: Expanding Our Theoretical And Instructional Frameworks, Mariya V. Tseptsura

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation is based on a year-long mixed-methods study of linguistically diverse students in one online composition program. It focuses on the experiences of students and instructors from 27 online sections of first and second-year college writing courses. Using student and instructor surveys and interviews, it analyzes how second language writers’ success was affected by the online environment, especially by the issues of technology and digital divide, students’ online identity construction, and the lack of authentic online classroom learning communities. The manuscript provides a broader overlook of students’ experiences across linguistic backgrounds and uses four case studies to offer a …

Teaching English As A Second Language In An Urban Public University In Sri Lanka : A Reflective Paper, Kasun Gajasinghe Maramba Liyanage

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The purpose of this Master of Arts (MA) thesis is threefold:

First, this reflective paper provides a critical literature review on English Language Teaching (ELT) in Sri Lanka.

Second, this reflective paper presents seven guiding principles which will steer my English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching in an urban public university in Sri Lanka.

Third, drawing from the seven guiding principles, this reflective paper presents a complete syllabus and three assignments as concrete examples (attached as appendixes) which will be implemented in a College of Humanities and Social Sciences in an urban public university in Sri Lanka.

The importance …

"We Are Strangers In This Life": Theology, Liminality, And The Exiled In Anglo-Saxon Literature, Nathan John Haydon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In “‘We Are Strangers in this Life’: Theology, Liminality, and the Exiled in Anglo-Saxon Literature,” I analyze the theme of exile in the theological literature of the Anglo-Saxon era as a way of conveying the spiritual condition of eschatological separation. The anthropological theory of liminality will be applied in this dissertation as a way of contextualizing the existence of the exiled, and the multiple ways in which exile is enacted. The intervention of the theory of liminality in this dissertation offers a methodology and vocabulary for assessing what exile means in terms of a spiritual identity, how it operates in …

Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In Cynewulf’s Old English poem Juliana, the saint frames her encounters with her adversaries as pedagogical confrontations, refusing the lessons they attempt to “teach” her and ultimately adopting the identity of a teacher herself. These confrontations depend on three key tropes in the poem: Juliana’s voice, as a material manifestation of language deployed by the saint; her body, both as living body and as relic; and place, especially the place of the saint’s martyrdom and/or burial. Viewed through theories of material feminism, these tropes reveal diverse forms of agency in the poem, as both human and non-human agents make …

North Of Ourselves: Identity And Place In Jim Wayne Miller’S Poetry, Micah Mccrotty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, …

Introspections Into Rational Fanatics And Thoughtful Deceivers: Examining The Use Of Memoirs In The Works Of James Hogg And Charles Brockden Brown, Tucker Foster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The memoir as a specific and unique literary genre has only recently been broached for in-depth critical study, with two major, book-length examinations of the genre appearing in the past decade. While the genre has been around in various formats with various conventions for as long as humans have written, only the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century called for a more sophisticated look at the genre. This thesis will use these recent observations on the memoir as a genre to shed new light on two classics of gothic literature: Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland and …

'A Dream Of Completion': The Journey Of American Working-Class Poetry, Lacy Snapp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings …

N: A Sea Monster Of A Research Project, Adrian Jay Thomson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Ever since time and the world began, dwarves have always fought cranes. Ever since ships set out on the northern sea, great sea monsters have risen to prey upon them. Such are the basics of life in medieval and Renaissance Scandinavia, Iceland, Scotland and Greenland, as detailed by Olaus Magnus' Description of the Northern Peoples (1555), its sea monster-heavy map, the Carta Marina (1539), and Abraham Ortelius' later map of Iceland, Islandia (1590).

I first learned of Olaus and Ortelius in the summer of 2013, and while drawing my own version of their sea monster maps a thought hit me: …

Losing Faith: Emily Brontë'S Revolutionized Religion, Emily Renee Holmes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Losing Faith: Emily Brontë’s Revolutionized Religion” discusses the role of religion in her novel Wuthering Heights and her poems set in the mythical world of Gondal. Through close readings of both her prose and poetry, this paper seeks to understand the relationship between the dark, vindictive nature of Brontë’s characters and their hopeful ending. The first chapter, Here’s The Situation, discusses the situation as set up by the novel, focusing specifically on Catherine and Heathcliff. I discuss the violence and codependence of their relationship, their Gondal predecessors, their fascination with each other as well as their torment when apart, and …

Place-Soul: The Sensory Perception Of Modern Travel Writing, Pilar Dipietro

Graduate Theses

Place is theorized through many lenses: geographical, sociological, political, and architectural, to name a few, and travel theorists study the economics and production of place. Yet sensory perception of places travelled are understudied. My thesis offers the determination of “place-soul” as an experiment in sensory perception of place, and the accompanying South Carolina travelogues exemplify case studies of place-soul’s revealing. By successfully ascertaining the essence of place by marrying objective and subjective lenses, and accurately describing the belongingness and connections uncovered, the reader will identify with me through words, and travel may be inspired by a shared sense of belonging. …

Affordances In The Work Of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Pedagogies Of Writing, Reading, And Making, T. Meyerhoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For many who have been transformed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick through reading her books and essays, by being a student of hers, or in friendship with her, the question "What does Eve do?" is often a mystery with no precise answer. These transformations can be highly varied in their manifestations. In his essay for the 30th Anniversary edition of Between Men, Wayne Koestenbaum discusses an "Eve effect" which makes "her listeners more curious, more intelligent, more consecrated to the vocation of being thrilled" (emphasis in original, xiv). This dissertation unravels some of these mysteries by tracing how the …