Digital Commons Network^™

Passing As Modernism, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Passing has once again become a hot topic in contemporary popular culture and a major trope for our critical and professional activity. One thinks of Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998); Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and the 2003 film version directed by Robert Benton; and in literary and cultural criticism, Gayle Wald's Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2000), Kathleen Pfeiffer's Race Passing and American Individualism (2003), and Brooke Kroeger's Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are (2003), to name only a few examples. In Passing and Pedagogy I explore this concept largely in …

Mad Art And The Essential Image: Unearthing The Conversation Between Oscar Wilde’S The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Roland Barthes’S Camera Lucida, Sarah Joy Cowger

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Roland Barthes's notion of "mad art" (introduced in Camera Lucida)--that is, art which is compelling, arresting, and uncovering-serves as a useful lens through which the portrait in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray may be viewed. In doing so, Wilde's framed image, behaving as mad art, must expose Dorian's authentic self. Such an expose is, importantly, both the product of a spectator's engaged eye as it is the result of a piece which always already contains an essence. When both elements are present (that is, both the essentialness of the art and the engagement of the viewer), the "text" …

The Iconography Of Nationalism: Icons, Popular Culture, And American Nationalism, Dallas Hulsey

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Iconography of Nationalism: Icons, Popular Culture, and American Nationalism develops a model of cultural icons, defining icons as highly visible, culturally variable, and overdetermined auratic images. Situating icons within the context of mass reproduction technologies and American nationalism, this study seeks to demystify the simple images presented by infantile, national, and scapegoat icons in literature, film, and political rhetoric. This dissertation argues that icons participate in the American nationalist project by channeling citizens’ political and patriotic feelings through seemingly simple images. While acknowledging that icons are necessary to construct what Benedict Anderson calls “the imagined community” of the nation, …

"Let Me Play A While": Storytelling Characters And Voices In The Works Of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, And Lee Smith, Kenneth Mark Broyles

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the difference between narrators and characters in fiction who tell stories. It also argues that traditional orality persists in American culture and is a significant influence in the fiction of Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Lee Smith. In their work, they try to overcome what some perceive as a structural discrimination inherent in the novel and imbue their characters' speaking voices with authority that is determined by something other than their position in the structural hierarchy. All three authors attempt to give their characters speaking voices which are not necessarily inferior to the narrative or authorial …

Alice's Shadow: Childhood And Agency In Lewis Carroll's Photography, Illustrations, And Alice Texts, R. Nichole Rougeau

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The nineteenth century marks the emergence of a new literary market directed at the entertainment of children. However, a dichotomy exists concerning the image of childhood. Adults tended to idolize childhood in literature to reflect on their own lives ignoring the needs of children to possess an identity of their own. Essentially children are shadows of adults. Examinations of the shadows of childhood—children as shadows of adults, children shadowed by adults, the shadows as identifying children, and the shadows children themselves cast—lead to a discussion of agency over childhood. Lewis Carroll, entering this new literary market with his Alice series, …

The Literary Frontier: Creating An American Nation (1820-1840), Tena Lea Helton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it might be easy to dismiss frontier literature as a minor historical anomaly, as a descriptor limited to setting, or as an insignificant variation from a country struggling to reach the heights of British fictional “norms.” However, when American literature began to flourish in the 1820s, it was primarily a literature of the frontier. Examining what this frontier quality means for literary elements beyond setting, such as narrative voice, textual structure, and genre, more clearly explains the importance of the frontier to literary nation-building. After all, the literary frontier ranged across literary genres, …

When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead: The Poetry Of Bob Kaufman, Mona Lisa Saloy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation begins with the premise that critical attention to the work of Bob Kaufman is long overdue, and that Bob Kaufman is a significant American poet in the African American and Beat traditions. The purpose of this dissertation begins to rectify this need with a study of Bob Kaufman’s verse. My exploration of Kaufman necessitates some pointed attention to the cultural, social, and psychological influences that gave rise to his work, specifically his upbringing in the south, his travels, and the misrepresented times of his life in current biographical entries and some present scholarship. I will also address the …

Feminist Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction As Political Protest In The Tradition Of Women Proletarian Writers Of The 1930s, Laura Ellen Ng

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary feminist hard-boiled detective fiction has been studied as an adaptation of the traditional masculine hard-boiled detective genre. Writers such as Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Muller create compelling feminist protagonists to fill the role of detective. The successes and failures of these feminist detectives have then been measured against the standards created in the classic genre by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain. The classic hard-boiled masculine genre came of age in the 1930s and 1940s at the same time as proletarian literature. The two genres share many characteristics including reliance upon first person narrative, the …

Representations Of Anglo-Saxon England In Children's Literature, Kirsti A. Bobo

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis surveys the children's literary accounts of Anglo-Saxon history and literature that have been written since the mid-nineteenth century. Authors of different ages emphasize different aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture as societal need for and interpretation of the past change. In studying these changes, I show not only why children's authors would choose to depict the Saxons in their writing, but why medievalists would want to study the resulting literature.

My second chapter looks at children's historical fiction and nonfiction, charting the trends which appear in the literature written between 1850 and the present day. I survey the changes made …

Cultural-Competency Training For School-Based Mental Health Service Providers, Natasha Lian Smith

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Literature on cultural competence has primarily developed in the fields of counseling psychology and counselor education. The field of school psychology has responded to the increased focus of cultural competency by providing recommended skills needed to provide psychological services in schools to diverse individuals and groups. Currently, research in effective cultural competency training has primarily focused on graduate training programs. This study extends the literature on cultural competency training by developing a training model that is appropriate for professionals who are already working in the field. This study first evaluated the impact of a needs assessment on the preparation of …

A Note On Charles Williams's Phillida, Joe R. Christopher

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Considers sources for William’s representation of Phyllis Jones in The Masques of Amen House under the name of Phillida.

The Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 13, No. 1, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Memories of the Sinclair Lewis Memorial Service,” by John Kleinschmidt

“Fay Wray, Lewis’s Theatrical Collaborator, Dies”

“Our Literary Diogenes”: rev. of Sinclair Lewis as Reader and Critic by Martin Bucco, by Frederick Betz, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale

Abstracts from Sinclair Lewis at the ALA Conference:

“Sinclair Lewis and Americans Abroad,” by Stephen L. Tanner, Brigham Young University

“From the Cultural Margin: Sinclair Lewis’s Quest for Symbolic Goods,” by Madeline Walker, University of Victoria, Canada

“Japanese Adventures with Sinclair Lewis,” by Rusty Allred

“Babbitt’s Mysterious Inscription,” by Ingrid Wilson

“Lewis and the Literary Immortality Polls of 1936 and 1948,” by Frederick Betz, …

An Essay On The Work Of Composition : Composing English Against The Order Of Fast Capitalism., Min-Zhan Lu

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This is an attempt to define what being a responsible and responsive user of English might mean in a world ordered by global capital, a world where all forms of intra- and international exchanges in all areas of life are increasingly under pressure to involve English. Turning to recent work in linguistics and education, I pose a set of alternative assumptions that might help us develop more responsible and responsive approaches to the relation between English and its users (both those labeled Native-Speaking, White or Middle Class, and those Othered by these labels), the language needs and purposes of individual …

Eng 4901-001: History Of The English Language, Buck

Fall 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 2901-001: The Structure Of English, Buck

Fall 2004

No abstract provided.

Mothers Of Us All: When Does Political Message Take Precedence Over Art In Some Modern And Contemporary Women’S Poetry, Shanda Hansma Blue Easterday

Dissertations

This dissertation contains an essay with the above title, as well as two sections of poems. The first section of poems is entitled Maria Sibylla Merian, Artist and Naturalist , and is a collection of poems about, and in the voice of, Merian. Many of these are what are known as personna poems. The second section of poems is entitled The Beekeeper's Wife , and uses autobiography as a framework for communicating the humor in human relationships, and for illustrating the surrealism in the human race's relationships with the natural world.

My research for my essay entailed the study of …

Mariguano, Juan Ochoa

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This book is in many ways autobiographical, but at the same time attempts to tell the story of the many silent characters that have long been omitted from most works on border life. By “silent characters” I am referring to those who operate on the margins of a marginalized society. The reader will be allowed to glimpse inside the life of a social group that values silence and indifference as basic survival skills.

It is this value on silence and indifference that have forced these stories to go unrecorded for so long. Aside from meeting my thesis requirements, it is …

Teaching Texts Materially: The Ends Of Nella Larsen’S Passing, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

The author suggests that attending to the publishing history of Larsen’s novel and the resulting indeterminacy of its ending(s) offers a concrete example of a materially oriented pedagogy that can illuminate the racial politics behind textual production and its relation to particular historical and cultural moments. He suggests that such a pedagogy offers both another way of understanding the textual contingency emphasized in contemporary theory and a way of further opening up questions of textuality and meaning for students.

In The Tout Court Of Shakespeare: Interdisciplinary Pedagogy In Law, Desmond Manderson

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The Writer's Journey Into Solitude : Self-Discovery In Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Robinson Crusoe And Friday, Rabia Abdul Salim Madhi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The idea of physical solitude often implies metaphysical solitude, and it is this spiritual state of detachment or self-enclosure that usually arouses the widest range of moral responses. Physical solitude is a metaphorical focus for an attitude that relates to self and society. In my thesis, however, I am primarily interested in the concept of solitude as a vehicle facilitating a journey of inward exploration into the mystifying labyrinth of the self in search of truth. In this sense, solitude becomes a condition enabling consciousness to achieve spiritual insight and truth with respect to the nature of self and world.

Semantic Changes In Present-Day English (Pde), Marva A. Banks

McCabe Thesis Collection

Before the printing press was invented, there was no recognized Standard English. There was no need for an English standard because most important public writing was in either French or Latin. "English was used primarily for oral and informal purposes and varied quite a bit from place to place" (Barry 2002). Mechanized printing, introduced into England in the late fifteenth century, made standardization a necessity. Later, in the eighteenth century, a small group of influential people decided that there needed to be a fixed standard for the English language. The group was appalled at the chaos in English and believed …

The Role Of Ethnography In The Post-Process Writing Classroom, Jennifer Sinor, Michael Huston

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Poem No. 91, May 2004, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

The Politics Of Theater And The Theater Of Law: The Legal And Cultural Implications In Langston Hughes And John Wexley's Dramatizations Of The Scottsboro Trials, Mosby Garland Perrow Iv

Master's Theses

Collectively, the charges and convictions of nine black youths in Scottsboro in 1931 became a symbol of corruption and oppression for those interested in reshaping America's political and legal landscapes. Scottsboro instigated a decade of trials and retrials, two landmark United States Supreme Court opinions, countless dramatic interpretations, and various artistic responses. In particular, Scottsboro, Limited by Langston Hughes and They Shall Not Die by John Wexley were cultural revisions of the trials in 1931 and 1933, respectively. While both works supported the defendants, they were distinguished by their form, production and ultimate statement about the meaning of Scottsboro. These …

Shakespeare Under Arrest: The Construction And Idea Of The Constable In Loves Labour's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing And Measure For Measure, Robert T. Mcgovern

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

"Shakespeare Under Arrest: The Construction and Idea of the Constable in Love Labour's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, and Measure for Measure"' examines the comedic constables, Dull, Dogberry and Elbow respectively. The constables are constructed from the historical frame work that formed and informed their office. In order to properly construct the comedic constables that appear in these comedies. William Shakespeare had to have a historical frame in order to place them in the proper historical framework before his Elizabethan audiences. This work uses such sources as T.A. Critchley's, A History of Police in England and Wales and Joan R. …

The Real World Of Language Instruction: Cache Valley Teachers Speak Out On The Challenges They Face While Teaching Grammar, Shauna Wight

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

"Discussing grammar in the teachers' lounge is a little like stepping in between two opposing 350-pound NFL linemen just after the ball is snapped," says Harry Noden, veteran English teacher and author of Image Grammar (Noden vii). With this statement, Noden captures the intensity and hostility that has characterized departmental meetings, university classrooms, and scholarly articles in which the issue of grammar has been disputed. Relying upon this football metaphor, Noden aptly describes the precarious situation language arts teachers face when they enter the profession and one of its greatest debates-grammar instruction-an issue in which all English teachers inevitably become …

Attitudes Of Mexican Nationals Toward The Use Of Code Switching In The Rio Grande Valley, Jennifer M. Vojtko

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The purpose of this study is to establish the beliefs and attitudes of Mexican Nationals living in the Rio Grande Valley toward the use of code switching, or the use of two or more languages during a speech act. Because of the high influence of the Spanish language in the Rio Grande Valley, code switching is more commonly referred to as Spanglish. Researchers have been studying code switching since the early fifties; however, limited research has been conducted on attitudes toward code switching. The goal of this study is to offer a comprehensive look at the attitudes demonstrated by Mexican …

Medieval Nominalism And The Literary Questions: Selected Studies, Richard Utz, Terry Barakat

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

Like few other topics in the academic study of medieval literature, the search for the possible parallels between philosophical and literary texts reveals the not always peaceful coexistence among the three basic approaches to the study of medieval literature and culture: While hard-core medieval philologists would not accept any claims for a “literary nominalism” unless direct textual dependence can be demonstrated, scholars in medieval studies and the comparative study of medieval literature have shown themselves more accepting of investigations which diagnose a certain nominalistic Zeitgeist, mentality, or milieu especially in late medieval culture; and scholars preferring presentist/postmodern approaches have wholeheartedly …

Conversational Performance And The Poetic Construction Of An Ideology, Gail Shuck

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study places conversational performance, or speakers’ attempts during everyday talk to draw attention to the aesthetic form of their utterances, at the center of an analysis of linguistic ideology. It examines, in particular, the ways in which two white, middle-class, U.S. university students use performance strategies to construct as Other an English-speaking man whom one student encounters on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Drawing on a socially and ideologically situated theory of verbal art, this article proposes five interconnected relations between performance and ideology. Together, these relations constitute a step toward an integrated theory of an inextricable link between …

Shaping A Body Of One’S Own: Rebecca Harding Davis’S Life In The Iron Mills And Waiting For The Verdict, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.