Digital Commons Network^™

"To The Latest Generation": Cold War And Post Cold War U.S. Civil War Novels In Their Social Contexts, Jeffrey Neal Smithpeters

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that readings of the Civil War novels published in America since 1955 should be informed by a consciousness of the social forces at work in each author’s time. Part One consists of a study of the popular Civil War novel, 1955’s Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor; part two, 1974’s The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Chapters One through Three explain that Kantor was especially fitted for the ideological work going on in Andersonville, then outlines the way that novel tried to contribute to the transition between World War II and the Cold War. The book attempted to aid …

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, …

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 …

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, …

After Scotland: Irvine Welsh And The Ethic Of Emergence, Benjamin George Lanier-Nabors

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In “After Scotland: Irvine Welsh and the Ethic of Emergence,” the author’s objective is to mirror what he argues is the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh’s objective: to chart out a future Scotland guided by a generative life ethic. In order to achieve this objective, the author lays open and reengages Scotland’s past, discovers and commits to neglected or submerged materials and energies in its past, demonstrates how Welsh’s work is faithful to those and newly produced materials and energies, and suggests that Welsh’s use of those materials and energies enables readers to envision a new Scotland that will be integral …

Conspiracy Culture In America After World War Ii, Valerie Rose Holliday

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Feminism has all too often been reified as a theoretical category. Specifically, Marxist critical categories fail to account for the integral importance of gender in any sociopolitical critique. This dissertation attempts to dereify gender and demonstrate a theoretical model that seamlessly integrates psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism. Conspiracy culture in America since World War II is an ideal aperture through which we may envision such a theoretical approach, and indeed see the critical need for such an approach. This dissertation looks at several post-war American conspiracy narratives, including Oliver Stone’s JFK and Nixon, Don DeLillo’s Libra, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, John …

Power, Money, And Sex(Uality): The Black Masculine Paradigm, Kendric Coleman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study develops the Black Masculine Paradigm (BMP), a construct used to trace historically specific components that inform black masculinity and explores the physical and psychological defensive strategies employed by black men in Richard Wright's Black Boy, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promisedland, Nathan McCall's Make Me Wanna Holler, and James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues. Specifically, this project offers that power, money, and sex(uality) are located at the core of the BMP, and these social objectives are negotiated through politicization, prescribed masculinity, and heterosexuality. This project reads the politicization of the black male body through its presence in literature and …

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 …

What's Really In Alaska?, Renata Perri Silberblatt

Honors Papers

It has often been remarked that the writings of early American nature writers have led to current day environmental protection, and individual nature writers (such as John Muir) have long been connected to American environmentalism. In Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement, Daniel J. Philippon points out, "In at least five separate cases, a nature writer was prominently involved in the formation and development of an environmental organization," and goes on to give the examples of Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, John Muir and the …

“Neither In Nor Out Of Blackwood's": The Marketing Of Edgar Allan Poe’S Prose Address, Jonathan Hartmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to help explain Poe's circulation of his journalism by performing close readings of both canonical works including "William Wilson" (1839) and "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) and lesser-known articles such as "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844) and "Loss of Breath" (1832/5). Chapter One describes Poe's involvement in the transatlantic literary marketplace prior to the enforcement of literary copyright. Chapters Two and Three treat his development of a literary brand in works including "Letter to B" (1831/6) and "A Reviewer Reviewed" by playing off his critical assertions against his practice as a critic. Chapters Four …

Dangerous Memories: Lynching And The U.S. Literary Imagination, Anne P. Rice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The terrorization of African Americans through lynching was a national cultural trauma producing a struggle over the meaning of suffering, victimization and moral responsibility. The lesson you were meant to learn from white supremacy and terror powerfully affected how you remembered lynching. My dissertation asks who remembered (and did not remember) what about lynching and how these habits of memory influenced literary and visual representations. I consider the impact of race, gender, class, and sexuality on how lynching was textualized and performed, avoided and blocked. While much recent scholarship has concentrated on the visual technologies of lynching, lynching was also …

Life Lessons In Shirley Jackson’S Late Fiction: Ethics, Cosmology, Eschatology, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Turn Of The Screw Metatextually, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Writing A Short Science Fiction Novel For Young Adults, Cheryl Robson

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this project is to write a dystopian science fiction short novel for young adults, in tum raising awareness of the genre among young people, as well as causing them to consider today's technology issues from a different viewpoint. Background research commenced on characteristics, history, and readership of science fiction. The sub genre of dystopian science fiction was reviewed through the examination of scholarly research in this particular area. After additional reading of science fiction books, the first chapter of the researcher's science fiction novel was written. Next, students in three sections of high school language arts classes …

Spirits Of Defiance: National Prohibition And Jazz Age Literature, 1920-1933, Kathleen Morgan Drowne

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

National Prohibition (1920-1933) ranks as one of the most divisive political controversies of the twentieth century, and its reverberations echoed through nearly every facet of American popular culture. Not surprisingly, many novelists and short story writers added their voices to this contentious public debate by incorporating into their works their interpretations of the wildly controversial federal liquor laws. In Spirits of Defiance, the first book to examine how American writers responded to the far-reaching effects of the Eighteenth Amendment, Kathleen Drowne analyzes the literary portrayals of bootleggers, moonshiners, revenuers, speakeasies, cabarets, and other specifically Prohibition-era characters and settings in a …

Strategic Writing: Moving Beyond The Classroom Assignment, Deborah Dean

Faculty Publications

By focusing on specific strategies that they could apply to different stages of the writing process, Deborah Dean helped students acquire control over their writing in varying contexts.

I would never think of teaching a reading strategy that worked for only one text. And students do not consider predicting or summarizing to be strategies unique to a specific text, either. Why, then, do students so often look at writing strategies as practices useful for only one assignment? Why do they complete freewrites or webs after they have finished the paper? Or "mess up" a copy of a paper just to …

How Much Does Chaos Scare You?: Politics, Religion, And Philosophy In The Fiction Of Philip K. Dick, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

"Certain themes appear with surprising consistency in Dick’s fiction. They crop up in the early short stories, called by some critics, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Dick’s “apprentice” fiction. They appear in the novels of Dick’s most productive period, the 1960s. And they are a part of the last novels, the VALIS trilogy and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer—written when Dick was, according to Eric Rabkin and others, insane. These themes fall into three inter-related categories: metaphysics, religion, and politics. The first concerns perception and the world, and the individual’s interaction with both. The second, the moralities of creator/creation relationships. The …

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 …

V.S. Naipaul And A Journey To Trinidad, Arnold Girdharry

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Leaving Her Story: The Path To The Second Marriage In The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall And Middlemarch, Angela Myers Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

During the Victorian period marriage proved to be a dominant theme in fiction. Female writers especially focused on the topic of marriage and wrote stories of women whose first marriages were imperfect. Anne Brontë and George Eliot dedicated themselves to portraying in their stories realistic heroines who deal with their own flaws as well as those of the men they marry. Their heroines distance themselves from their expected roles, moving beyond their first failed marriages to wiser second marriages.

Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall follows Helen Huntingdon as she attempts to fulfill the self-appointed role of Savior to …

Poem No. 92, November 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 Young Perish And The Old Linger, Withering": J.R.R. Tolkien On World War Ii, Janet Brennan Croft

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

Discusses the impact of World War II on the themes and style of The Lord of the Rings, and particularly in Tolkien’s depiction of families affected by war.

A Charismatic Iranian American Engineer, Jane Meehan

English Faculty Publications

This is the story of Iranian engineer Mostafa Jamshidi and his twenty-five years in Nebraska: his student days, his experiences with the immigration department and his eventual citizenship, his work history, and his personal life as told by his English teacher and surrogate mother. His language skills, soccer playing, and personality enabled him to combat his homesickness and the harassment of the immigration officials. The University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Nebraska Department of Roads gave him a place to learn and grow despite the time and geography in which he was born. The Great Plains, with its friendliness, …

Small Town, Granville Hicks, Warren F. Broderick

Literature

Granville Hicks was one of America's most influential literary and social critics. Along with Malcolm Cowley, F. O. Matthiessen, Max Eastman, Alfred Kazin, and others, he shaped the cultural landscape of 20th-century America.

In 1946 Hicks published Small Town, a portrait of life in the rural crossroads of Grafton, N.Y., where he had moved after being fired from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for his left-wing political views. In this book, he combines a kind of hand-crafted ethnographic research with personal reflections on the qualities of small town life that were being threatened by spreading cities and suburbs. He eloquently tried to …

Eng 1001g-048-059-068: Composition And Language, Ned Huston

Fall 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 3800-001: Medieval English Literature, F Mcgregor

Fall 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 3504-001: Film And Literature: Science Fiction, Robin Murray

Fall 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 5009-001: Studies In Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Violence, Identity, And Community, John Allison

Fall 2004

No abstract provided.

Wst 2309-003: Women, Men, And Culture, Carol Stevens

Fall 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 3702-001: American Realism, John Allison

Fall 2004

No abstract provided.