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Three Screenplays, Geoffrey Abruzzi

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Three original screenplays set in a fictional southwestern town, dealing with subjects of hope, desire, truth and deception.

Motherhood:Portrayals In American Literature, Christine J. O'Leary

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this Thesis is to illustrate five categories of motherhood in American literature. The five categories chosen are: the self-absorbed mother, the self-martyred mother, the child-sacrificing mother, the self-sacrificing mother, and the substitute mother. I chose these five categories because they appear frequently in texts written by people of multiple ethnicities who represent several larger American cultures.

1. The self-absorbed mother lives for her personal pleasures. Her children are a burden. She prefers her happiness over the day to day care of the children.

2. The self-martyred mother believes that she is responsible for all the difficulties …

Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, And Resistance In The Regional Imaginary, Anthony Hoefer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project investigates manifestations of Apocalypse in selected works of southern fiction, each of which simultaneously draws upon the cosmology of southern evangelical Protestantism and disrupts that cosmology’s power to govern the discourses of race, class, and gender in the U.S. South. Apocalypse South proposes that invocations of the Apocalypse are signs of deferred meaning—of hidden histories of undifferentiation, hybridity, and contradiction which defy the prevailing discourses that configure social relationships in southern spaces and places. Southern religious culture maps Apocalypse onto the boundaries of race, class, and gender and imparts catastrophic consequences to their violations. However, the works investigated …

Elements Of Mythmaking In Witness Accounts Of Colonial Piracy, Plamen Ivanov Arnaudov

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Focusing on historical accounts (1684-1734) by English, French, and Spanish witnesses, this dissertation establishes a continuity in fictionalized representations of anti-heroic pirates from the buccaneering period to the Golden Age of Piracy. Informed by history, literary, myth, and performance theory, the analysis identifies significant distortions in reports by observers and participants. The distortions that pertain to mythmaking patterns are classified and analyzed further. Conflicting and ambivalent representations of the pirate as an anti-hero are resolved through the positing of a literary scapegoat hypothesis drawing from René Girard and Joseph Roach. While demonstrating mythical archetypes at work in the construction of …

The Perils And Empowerments Of Mountain Literacies: Reading Loss And Shifting Identities In Appalachian Memoirs And Novels, Erica Abrams Locklear

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the literary portrayal of literacy events in memoirs and novels written by Appalachian women during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing from contemporary literacy scholarship, my project engages several definitions of the term "literacy," including theories defining it as a technical skill, a social act, cultural knowledge, or a potent form of ideological power. In a region historically (and often inaccurately) stigmatized as illiterate, "literacy" is a loaded term, a concept doubly associated with cultural pride and with cultural loss. By applying literacy theories to Appalachian literature, I analyze the identity conflicts literacy attainment causes for several …

A Comparison Of The Portrayal Of Evil In Fairy Tales And Contemporary Fantasy Fiction, Donna Gwinnup

Graduate Research Papers

Writing and publishing literature for children and young adults has become a rhizomorphic entity. There are thousands of books published each year. When you compare that to the little over two hundred stories Perrault and the Grimm brothers recorded you can see how the market has substantially grown. With the use of literature as a teaching tool it is imperative we keep a close watch on trends. This study was designed to look at the changes from fairy tales to contemporary fiction in order to ascertain what changes have taken place in three particular areas: has the gender of the …

Buried : Unearthing The Secrets Of Oregon Truffles, Lucy Burningham

Dissertations and Theses

Heady, rich and mood-altering, truffles have inspired quixotic legends, bizarre crimes and gluttonous consumption for hundreds, even thousands of years. For as long as humans have known about the strange, bulbous fungi that grow underground, they have found truffles fascinating, mysterious and persuasive. Expert at the art of luring people and animals through scent alone, truffles beg to be found.

Heady, rich and mood-altering, truffles have inspired quixotic legends, bizarre crimes and gluttonous consumption for hundreds, even thousands of years. For as long as humans have known about the strange, bulbous fungi that grow underground, they have found truffles fascinating, …

Retelling The Composition-Literature Story, Laura Brady

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Songs Of Black (Women) Folk: Music, Politics, And Everyday Living, Rasheedah Quiett Jenkins

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The field of folklore in general, but specifically Africana folklore studies can be enriched by greater analyses of Black female contributions. In this study, I position folk music as the primary interest and chosen location to acknowledge Black women’s participation from beyond the margins. My inquiry reveals folk music as a lens into the myriad ways in which Black women have translated vernacular traditions into a means to deconstruct the master narrative as well as interrogate racist patriarchy. Specifically, this study examines how Nina Simone, Tracy Chapman, and Lauryn Hill have appropriated the folk aesthetic as a vehicle for social …

E. B. White’S Environmental Web, Lynn Overholt Wake

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

E. B. White called Walden his favorite book and found in it “an invitation to life’s dance.” To read White ecocritically is to accept a similar invitation to broaden our environmental imagination. Although one or two of his essays are often anthologized as nature writing, critics have not read White environmentally. While emphasizing White’s three books for children, this dissertation reads across genre lines to examine his lifelong work. Drawing on Laurence Buell’s prismatic term, the study explores how White’s engagement with the natural world contributes to the renewal of our collective environmental imagination. Examining White’s affinity for animals, evident …

The Home Tie, Christina Davenport

All Theses

The Home Tie is a collection of short fiction that utilizes place as a vital literary element by exploring the southern landscape and giving a candid rendering of the people who live in the region. Outsiders' conceptions of the South are varied, from the genteel southern belle strolling beneath the Spanish moss of her Savannah plantation to the unrefined redneck blaring country-western music from his oversized pick-up truck; from the clergyman greeting his long procession of faithful church-goers to the Klansman still calling his secret meetings somewhere in the backwoods of Appalachia. There is a feeling, both within and without, …

It's Alive! The Gothic (Dis)Embodiment Of The Logic Of Networks, Anna Katharine Bennion

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis draws connections between today's network society and the workings of gothic literature in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. Just as our society is formed and affected by the flow of information, the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility was formed by the merging and flow of scientific "technology" (or new scientific discoveries) and societal norms and rules. Gothic literature was born out of this science-society network, and in many ways embodies the ruptures implicit in it. Although gothic literature is not a network in the same sense as informationalism and the culture of sensibility are, gothic literature works according …

The Effects Of Background Music On The Reading Performance Of Taiwanese Esl Students, Peter Chou

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to see what kinds of effects classical music and hip hop music have on the performance of a second language reading comprehension test in Taiwanese college students. According to Kahneman' s ( 1973) capacity model for attention, one may fail to perfonn an activity because the supply of attention needed for multiple tasks does not meet the demand needed to perfom1 each of the tasks. This explains why students perform better or worse on different cognitive tasks with certain types of background media. An experiment involving 123 participants from a medium size college in …

A Virginia Woolf Of One's Own: Consequences Of Adaptation In Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Brooke Leora Grant

Theses and Dissertations

With a rising interest in visual media in academia, studies have overlapped at literary and film scholars' interest in adaptation. This interest has mainly focused on the examination of issues regarding adaptation of novel to novel or novel to film. Here I discuss both: Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours, which is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and the 2002 film adaptation of Cunningham's novel. However, my thesis also investigates a different kind of adaptation: the adaptation of a literary and historical figure. By including in The Hours a fictionalization of Virginia Woolf, Cunningham entrenches his adaptation with Virginia …

Wordsworth's Evolving Project: Nature, The Satanic School, And (Underline) The River Duddon (End Underline), Kimberly Jones May

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss Wordsworth's evolving nature project, particularly during the Regency, when his sonnet collection The River Duddon offered an alternative view of nature to that found in the works of Byron and Shelley. This thesis argues that The River Duddon deserves renewed critical attention not only because of the acclaim it received at its publication in 1820, but also because it marks yet another turn in Wordsworth's evolving nature project, and one that comes in opposition to the depiction of nature given during the Regency by Byron, and Shelley. Wordsworth's portrayal of nature dramatically …

The Play's The Thing: Investigating The Potential Of Performance Pedagogy, Tamara Lynn Scoville

Theses and Dissertations

In the last ten years there has been a resurgence of interest in teaching Shakespeare through performance. However, most literature on the topic continues to focus on the pragmatic selling points of how performance makes Shakespeare fun and understandable while remaining surprisingly silent on issues of theory and ethics. By investigating the ethical implications of performance pedagogy as it affects our students' construction of identity, empathy, and pluralistic tolerance we can better understand and discuss the potential of performance pedagogy in relation to the ethical goals of the Humanities. Performance Pedagogy has particular ethical potential due to the structure of …

Pagan Beliefs In The Serpent's Tooth, Joe R. Christopher

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

An examination of the pagan belief structure in The Serpent’s Tooth, Diana Paxson’s retelling of King Lear. Discusses her use of source material in Shakespeare, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and early pagan religious beliefs.

Review: Michael Chapman, Ed., "The Drum Decade: Stories From The 1950s" And Lindy Stiebel And Liz Gunner, Ed., "Still Beating The Drum: Critical Perspectives On Lewis Nkosi", Shane Graham

English Faculty Publications

The negritude movement had Présence Africaine; the Harlem Renaissance had Crisis and Opportunity; South African writers of the 1950s had Drum magazine. Paul Gready has written that Drum’s “flashy muck-raking journalistic style attempted to capture the vivid life of the townships. Drum became a symbol of a new urban South Africa” (146); for Rob Nixon, it “amplified the voices of a defiantly impure cosmopolitanism, projecting an urban look and ethos” (28). Lewis Nkosi, who went to work for the magazine in 1957, said that Drum “wasn’t so much a magazine as it was a symbol of the new African cut …

The Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 16, No. 1, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“It Can’t Happen Here Wins Libertarian Futurist Award”

“Sinclair Lewis and Ida K. Compton Conference”

“A Citizen of the Mirage,” by Sinclair Lewis, part 4 “

‘A novel filled with jackasses and jackals’: Animal Imagery in Elmer Gantry,” by Frederick Betz, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale

“The Tragedy of Martin Arrowsmith: A Physician’s Perspective,” by Russell Gollard, M.D.

“Parts of Lewis’s Library for Sale”

Messages In A Bottle: The 2007 Lion And The Unicorn Award For Excellence In North American Poetry, Angela Sorby, Joseph T. Thomas Jr., Richard Flynn

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Five Books To Read Before You Die, Rachel Hatch

News and Events (Discontinued Series)

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-062: The Simpsons And Composition, Barry Hudek

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-048: Composition And Language, Barry Hudek

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-050: Composition And Language, Rachel Heicher

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-038: Composition And Language, Mario Podeschi

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-056: Composition And Language, Rachel Heicher

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.

Eng 1002g-005: Composition And Literature, Zahlan

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.

Eng 3009-005: Myth And Culture, John Martone

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.

Eng 5006-001: Contemporary British Fiction, Zahlan

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.

Wst 2309g-003: Women, Men, And Culture, Rachel Heicher

Fall 2007

No abstract provided.