Digital Commons Network^™

Writing The Womb, Writing The Wound: The Function Of Vulnerability In Autotheory, Madison Weaver

Master’s Theses

This thesis frames autotheory, a genre and practice of writing based in autobiographical and theoretical work, in the feminist genealogies established by Lauren Fournier and as a study in vulnerability. I revisit and reconsider Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (1982) and Cherríe Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings: A Portrait of Queer Motherhood (1997) in terms of contemporary conversation on autotheory that center on Nelson’s popular memoir The Argonauts (2015), arguing that Lorde, Moraga, and Nelson practice autotheory by writing through physical and metaphorical wounds. This thesis considers how vulnerability is tied to the autotheoretical impulse by …

Enter Invisible: Atavistic Dualism In Shakespeare, Donne, And Milton, Andrew Scott

Master’s Theses

This thesis explores the different ways in which either dualistic or monistic points of view are represented in select works of William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton. I am relying principally on the broad definition of dualism Ioan Couliano utilizes in his book The Tree of Gnosis. Per Couliano, dualism is not necessarily a discrete tenet of a systematized belief; rather, he means by the word to indicate an intellectual tendency toward splitting certain complex ideas—body and soul, God and man, evil and its opposite, etc.—into separate, sometimes opposing parts. This in contrast to monism, which brings into …

Peeta’S Virtue In The Hunger Games Trilogy, Gabriel Ertsgaard

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Latin virtus literally means “manliness” (vir = man) and, by extension, the positive qualities that a man should have. During the transition from Latin to French to English, “virtue” lost its gender specificity, but retained its reference to positive qualities. Thus, by the Enlightenment period, separate standards of virtue had emerged for women and men. Suzanne Collins disrupts this gendered virtue dichotomy in her Hunger Games trilogy. Peeta Mellark is a natural diplomat and peacemaker, a gentle soul who fits the feminine model of virtue better than the masculine model. Although Peeta engages in violence when necessary, he …

African American Celebrity Auto/Biographies, Anthony S. Foy

English Literature Faculty Works

Anthony Foy’s chapter asks how do we approach the overdetermined narrative of the African American celebrity as a modern variant of African American autobiography, rather than simply dismissing it for its lack or artistry, activism, or authenticity? Foy observes that (1) the Black celebrity narrative recounts the emergence, circulation, reception, and transformation of the star’s image while also registering the synedcochic function of the star’s racialized body; (2) it features the sites, activities, practices, and products of consumer culture in order to ratify the star’s status as exemplary consumer and alluring commodity; and (3) it commodifies authenticity by promising to …

Diasporic Longings, Bakirathi Mani

English Literature Faculty Works

Using diaspora as a framework for reading Asian American literature expands the geographical and temporal contours of what it means to be Asian American. Although late-twentieth-century US popular culture was marked by multicultural ideologies of American citizenship, “diaspora” captures another way of thinking about Asian Americans: as immigrants who are subject to multiple projects of nationalism, and who embody diverse forms of citizenship. Whereas writers like Bharati Mukherjee reproduce dominant ideologies of US exceptionalism and multicultural citizenship, for writers such as Meena Alexander, the production of diasporic locality ripples across generations, as she ties together South Asia with North America, …

"I Don’T Want To Be A Priest. I’D Rather Be A God": An Interview With David Kirby, Alex Quinlan

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 30-49

Nelle 4 (Complete Issue), Nelle Staff

Nelle (literary magazine)

No abstract provided.

Ode To The Babies I Have Not Had, Ashley M. Jones

Nelle (literary magazine)

pp. 7-25

Wilderness Of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Captivity Narratives, And Genre Transformation In Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Hannah Gautsch

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a modiste well-versed in the social expectations of the domestic world, Elizabeth Keckley crafted an autobiography that would appeal to this wide variety of audiences. Throughout the 1850s, women across the nation negotiated the terms of True Womanhood and identified activism as a space where women could engage with national concerns. At the same time, literary production in the US was increasing exponentially, creating room for literature to be used as a means of social change. Contemporary scholars have devoted much attention to the ways Keckley’s Behind the Scenes combines elements of multiple genres to assure its long-term survival …

Intersectional Feminism And Diverse Perspectives In Contemporary Romance, Abigail L. Nordstrom

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The lack of intersectional feminism and diverse perspectives has long been a critique of the literary canon. While the Academy has shifted toward a more progressive course of literary study in recent decades, there are still some genres that are treated as undeserving of scholarly analysis in spite of their unique and diverse perspectives. The contemporary romance genre embodies the very intersectional feminism that the traditional literary canon lacks, yet it is still treated as unworthy of consideration. Contemporary romance novels such as The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang, Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert and The Bromance …

Into The Woods And Out Of The Woods And Home Before Dark: Beowulf, Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, And The Role Of The Monstrous Intruder In Upsetting Social Structures, Ellen Ulinski

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Review: A River Of Words: The Story Of William Carlos Williams (Revised), Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

Ages 10-12

CHARACTER THEMES: Ambition, Caring, Compassion, Craftsmanship, Creativity, Dedication, Determination, Diligence, Discernment, Diversity, Duty, Flexibility, Friendliness, Hope, Imagination, initiative, Inspiration, Kindness, Originality, Patience, Perseverance, Resolve, Responsibility, Sacrifice, Steadfastness, Work ethic

The Garden In The Machine: Grace Lee Boggs’S Living For Change: An Autobiography And Detroit’S Urban-Agrarian Future, Jina B. Kim

English Language and Literature: Faculty Books

'The Garden in the Machine: Grace Lee Boggs’s Living for Change: An Autobiographyand Detroit’s Urban-Agrarian Future" is chapter two of part one: Neoimperialisms, Neoliberalisms, Necropolitics in Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996-2020: Volume 4, edited by Betsy Huang, Victor Román Mendoza

This volume examines the concerns of Asian American literature from 1996 to the present. This period was not only marked by civil unrest, terror and militarization, economic depression, and environmental abuse, but also unprecedented growth and visibility of Asian American literature. This volume is divided into four sections that plots the trajectories of, and tensions between, social challenges …

On Recovering Early Asian American Literature, Floyd Cheung

English Language and Literature: Faculty Books

Beginning in the early 1970s, scholars have been recovering an Asian American literary archive. The first anthologies of Asian American literature defined the field in divergent ways. Some focused on US-born writers and a politics of cultural nationalism. Others embraced a wider range of writers and a variety of political positions. The second wave of anthologies and scholarly discussions reacted against more limited views of Asian American literature and extended the field to encompass more women writers, genres such as poetry and drama, works written before the 1960s, and authors from beyond those of East Asian descent. Depending on the …

Midwest Memoir: Cole Carolan, Cole James Carolan

Honors Program Theses

A memoir

Roberto Bolaño’S 2666, The Funneling Effect Of Capitalism, And The Production, Consumption, And Proliferation Of Violence For Profit, John Timlin

Dissertations and Theses

Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 is a realist text, one that reflects the simple fact that in contemporary capitalism, the physical destruction of female bodies is a profitable enterprise; one that forces its readers to confront their complicity or outright participation in violence against women; and one that relates directly to violence against women as consumable entertainment in American mass culture.

Lexical Bundles In Mainstream Movie'and Noah Baumbach's Selected Film Scripts: A Corpus-Based Study Of Telecinematic Discourse, Runze Xu

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The present study aims to investigate and compare language use in film scripts of American mainstream movies and in Noah Baumbach's, focusing on lexical bundles and their functional contributions to meanings and aesthetic values of the given texts. Two corpora were compiled as the datasets: Mainstream Film Corpus (MFC), which consists of 100 screenplays of top Hollywood blockbusters during 2005-2019, and Noah Baumbach Corpus (NBC), which contains five film scripts written by Noah Baumbach alone. Frequent four-word lexical bundles were extracted and approached qualitatively in terms of their functions, following Biber et al. (2004) and Biber (2006) as analytical frameworks. …

Environmental Ethics, Survival And Apocalypse: An Analysis Of Margaret Atwood’S Maddaddam Trilogy, Sarawut Kururatphan

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This thesis examines the connection of ethics and survival in the pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy: Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). It investigates the author’s imaginings of a dystopian society marked by rampant technocratic capitalism and unchecked scientism in Oryx and Crake. Applying Murray Bookchin's social ecology to shed light on the root causes of the apocalypse, it argues that hierarchical ideology and diversiform inequality deeply rooted in society lead to warped ethics, affecting the crisis. This thesis also examines environmental ethics which is embedded in the belief …

Herlands: Imperial Feminisms From Charlotte Perkins Gilman To Wonder Woman, Anna Jankovsky

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The society of women is a trope of feminist utopian fiction in which a group of women live together in harmony without the influence of men to disrupt their society. This trope functions on five criteria: 1) The society must be able to defend itself and replenish itself without the assistance of men. 2) It must be fully isolated and nearly impenetrable from the outside world 3) It must have a utopic order of society untroubled by ambition. 4) It must be infiltrated and challenged by a man during the course of the story. 5) It must grapple with the …

Margins Of The City: Urban Masculinity And Identity Politics In British Social-Realist Queer Cinema, Yi Li

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and analyzes a history of queer politics and identities in British realist cinema from the early 1960s to the 2010s. Focusing primarily on filmmakers Sidney J. Furie, Stephen Frears, Hettie MacDonald, and Andrew Haigh, it traces British queer maleness of the working class by tracking its changing representations and demonstrates how urban cinematic realism proves central to British definitions of masculinity. The first chapter investigates how foundational films of the British New Wave address social inequalities as consequences of class and sexuality to consider how they embraced a sexual frankness and realism with coded and decoded homoeroticism. …

"I Think You Should Come Home": On Haunted Houses And Family Secrets, Sydni Masiello

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

None provided

Trouble Brewing: An Exploration In Parasocial Relationships With Fictional Characters, Isabelle Zeimetz

Honors Program Theses

In the 1940s and 1950s, television and radio had taken over as the dominant form of media (Understanding Media and Culture: an Introduction to Mass Communication). Anthropologist Donald Horton and sociologist R. Wohl noted a strange new relationship developing between the audiences and the hosts under this new dominant media. These relationships ranged from close friendships with radio hosts like Dave Garroway to people wanting to marry fictional characters such as the gal from the radio broadcast, Lonesome Gal. Horton and Wohl realized that these new relationships were not quite the same as interpersonal relationships as they could never be …

My Year With Digital Supremacists, Nick Baur

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Mental Illness Representation In Young Adult Literature, Ashley Aberle

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this qualitative content analysis is to study the portrayal of characters who have a mental illness in award-winning young adult books for teacher librarians to recommend for young adult readers and for teachers to use in teaching and curriculum for mental illness acceptance. The research questions asked the following: how does award-winning young adult literature that includes characters with mental illness portray interactions with peers and adults; This study used qualitative content analysis to examine 10 novels portraying multiple mental illnesses and that were published from 2013 to 2020. This research identified three themes: Theme 1 is …

Examining Diversity In The Iowa Goldfinch Award, Jill M. Doyle

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this quantitative content analysis was to evaluate the race/ethnicity of the main characters and authors in the picture books on the 2015-16 and 2020-21 Iowa Goldfinch Award lists, a student-nominated book list. The books were evaluated using coding that was adapted from earlier research. Then the statistics were compared to ascertain whether the portrayal of diverse cultures changed. Results indicated that the diversity of both the main characters and the authors increased by 25%, to include races other than White. The number of White main characters decreased from 6 to 3, while non-human characters decreased from 15 …

The Memory Of Mythmaking: Transgenerational Trauma And Disability As A Collective Experience In Afrofuturist Storytelling, Jessica Tapley

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This project closely examines the relationship between transgenerational trauma, disability, and myth, particularly within Black speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, and Africanfuturism. Through the lenses of critical race theory, trauma theory, disability studies, and feminist theory, I will closely analyze how myth functions across five Black speculative fiction novels. I argue that disability appears as a common thread throughout each of these novels as a unique part of Black history and experience. Disability culture specifically offers community interdependence, a rejection of body and mind binaries, and a rejection of hierarchies in the pursuit of accessibility. I further demonstrate how myth centers racial …

Witch Pamphlets, Tsea M. Francisconi

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The witch hysteria that overtook Christian Europe during the Early Modern era inspired a mass paranoia over the conspiratorial belief that the Abrahamic religion’s personification of the world’s evils, also known as Satan, the Devil, demons, or Lucifer interchangeably, was attempting to rise up and cause harm to Christian communities during this time period. It was believed that in order to achieve this goal the Christian version of the Devil had been recruiting humans within Christian communities and turning these chosen humans into witches by granting them the ability to wield magical powers to spread their destruction, murder, and terror …

Lifeglows Through The Anthropocene: Development Of The Radical Imagination And Response-Ability Within Superhero Comics, Reed G. Puc

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Scholars such as Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Clark, and Timothy Morton emphasize the importance of and challenge within the task of representing the power, scope, and scale of climate change in art and literature. These interrogations often emphasize the failures of extant works to animate their viewers towards action in a time of environmental crisis, but struggle to find any work that meets their expectations. This ‘game-over’ attitude, I argue, is the direct result of the cruel optimism present in the current scholarship’s attachment to ‘traditional’ forms of art and literature. By interrogating the conclusions Ghosh reaches about the novel’s function …

Hózhó, “To Walk In Beauty And Balance”: Indigenous Writers Decolonize Theories Of Myth, Aaron Laughlin

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In this project, I argue for an Indigenous theory of myth in order to reconsider popular and academic paradigms about myth and its function. My goal is to articulate how Indigenous understandings might revise these paradigms by emphasizing myth as a means to foster ethical relationships of health and balance within ourselves and in the world. Inspired by the Indigenous writers Leslie Marmon Silko, Thomas King, and Gerald Vizenor, I outline how these authors think, write, and talk about the concept of myth. I explain prevailing academic paradigms, including the term’s long history of associations with old-fashioned, “primitive,” superstitious stories …

Debilitating Publics: Reading Canlit's Investigations Into Psycho-Affective Pain And Social Change, Rebekah Ludolph

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The reception studies that comprise this dissertation take up contemporary depictions of psycho-affective pain from the field of Canadian literature that are embraced by prominent literary publics as an act of social responsibility. Each study contextualizes the publics that review these texts within the ongoing use of literary culture to justify the settler state’s land claim, nationally reparative reading practices, and trends in the therapeutic use of literature. Tracing the affective reactions documented within each text’s reception, this study finds that narratives that fail to locate the nation as a reparative project are susceptible to interpretive practices that pathologize, rather …