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Picturesque Portraiture: The Composition Of Reality In Hawthorne, Melville, And James, Angela Michael Gattuso Densmore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the nineteenth century, American artists were tangled in debates regarding the representation of reality. The Hudson River School of picturesque landscape painters tackled this dilemma with a compromise formula which used the real objects of nature to create ideal scenes. This dissertation applies the same picturesque formula to select examples of literary portraiture, studied under the concept of “picturesque portraiture.” Whereas the Hudson River compromise resulted in an ideal perception of reality, however, the picturesque portraits composed by nineteenth-century authors Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James attempt to invoke a non-idealized “actual” reality of the portrait subject’s person …

The Untold Love Story Of Aphra Behn's The History Of The Nun, Anaclara Castro-Santana

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1688) is a complex narrative that challenges gender norms and moral conventions, while providing multifaceted illustrations of how restrictions of freedom engender rebellion. Erstwhile a critically neglected piece, this short novel has recently attracted renovated attention on account of its sophisticated narrative perspective, ambivalent moral, and general exploration of unconventional themes, including sexual nonconformity. Taking its cue from this critical landscape, this article explores the text’s queer dimensions, focusing on a crucial yet often overlooked scene depicting sapphic eroticism. Unpacking the internal dynamics and external implications of this passage, the essay argues for …

The Maternal Icon In Eleanor Sleath's The Orphan Of The Rhine, Esmeralda Orndorff, Joanne E. Myers

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In recent years, Eleanor Sleath’s long-neglected The Orphan of the Rhine has received attention as a valuable addition to the Gothic canon. In particular, critics have hailed the unconventionality of her worldly heroine Julie de Rubine. In this article, we resituate Julie’s exceptionalism in a specifically post-Reformation context, arguing that, in Julie, Sleath has created a powerful maternal icon whose mediating authority contests iconoclastic attacks on Marian devotion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Julie is, as critics have observed, the moral center of the text, and we show how that role is warranted specifically by her religiosity. Although partway through …

Ford Madox Ford’S Unusual War: Ongoing Worry And Modernity, Nur Karatas

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford approaches the experience of trauma in an unusual way—it is no longer just past experiences, but the expectancy of dismal events that become as traumatic. Ford chooses worry for such rendering. In order to make the correlation between suffering and sensibility, he places worry in the lives of his characters, which reflects on Ford’s own life. This discussion will introduce the idea that worry is going to be a major component of Ford’s psychologising of war. I explore this worry-driven sensibility and the ways it is reflected, especially in the characters’ obsession with the …

Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia, Jacob Elias Aplaca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bad Becomings surveys queer autobiographical works published over the last 30+ years to better understand the animosities and complicities of the queer and the so-called normative. While the limited scholarship on queer autobiographical writing has characterized this corpus of texts based on an edginess, a radicality, and a rejection of the liberal individual that both flies in the face of “traditional autobiography” and indulges queer theory’s persistent idealization of queer culture as radical and antinormative, this dissertation asks that we suspend our desire for so absolute a differentiation. Rather than assume that “queer” automatically makes “autobiography” radical and antinormative, I …

Towards More Inclusive Practices In Applied Linguistics: A Study Of Journal Editors’ Views On Using ‘Who’ With Nonhuman Animals With Implications For Language Education, Denise Dillon, George M. Jacobs, Meng Huat Chau

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Like racism or sexism, speciesism highlights how people fail to give due respect to nonhuman animals. After more than 20 years since the publication of Dunayer’s (2001) seminal work, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation, speciesism appears to remain a controversial issue. In this article, we explore the issue of speciesist language by considering the views of journal editors on one point raised in the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020): that the relative pronoun who should only be used with humans and not with other animals. The results of this study suggest that while …

Queer Impersonality: Compulsory Visibility And The Politics Of Form In Modernist Women's Life Writing, Margot Kotler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Modernist impersonality is an aesthetic practice typically associated with Anglo-European formalism and the doctrine of artistic autonomy. Although central to the modernist canon, impersonality has not been taken up by queer and feminist studies because critics have considered its implied evacuation of emotion and personal identity to be apolitical, and even dangerous. At its worst, impersonality reproduces an unmarked, white, and masculine subjectivity, yet it also questions the parameters of selfhood, posing a radical challenge to liberal-humanist conceptions of identity. Queer Impersonality moves beyond this critical impasse by tracing impersonality’s queer and feminist histories among modernist women writers whose engagement …

Shake Ya Ass, But Watch Yourself: An Intersectional And Decolonial Approach To Exploring The Sexualization Of Female Recording Artists And The Empowerment Of Women In The United States, H.B. Rebeka

Dissertations

This dissertation, titled Shake Ya Ass, But Watch Yourself: An Intersectional and Decolonial Approach to Exploring the Sexualization of Female Recording Artists and the Empowerment of Women in the United States, critically examines the phenomenon of sexualization of women in the music industry and its impact on female empowerment. Through an intersectional and decolonial feminist lens, the study delves into the historical and socio-cultural contexts that shape the portrayal and perception of female recording artists in the United States.

The research traces the roots of feminism and the commodification of racial stereotypes through music, exploring how female empowerment has been …

“The Hero Of My Own Life”: The Purpose Of The Fictional Self In The Life Writings Of Mary Wollstonecraft And Charles Dickens, Jessica M. Day

Honors Projects

This paper looks at Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens as significant texts that combine fiction and life writing. Looking at fictional and autobiographical elements within each text, this paper argues that these authors manipulate genre to make significant claims about feminism and child activism. They participate in self-crafting—taking the self, something that is personal, and making it public and political. This paper argues that fiction allows the life writer to expand past the limitations of a single lifetime and speak to truths larger than the self. Letters written …

The Journey In Hisham Matar's The Return: Between Freedom And Confinement, Noha Hanafy

English Language and Literature

Abstract The paper explores Hisham Matar’s journey in his 2016 memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. In the book, Matar undertakes a journey back to his homeland in Libya to uncover the truth of what happened to his father, who was targeted by the Gaddafi regime during the sixties and was subsequently imprisoned for 20 years. While the memoir primarily focuses on the journey "back" to Matar's homeland in Libya, the memoir's depiction of "home" problematizes the concept, raising questions about its limitations beyond being merely geographical. Therefore, home becomes elusive and not necessarily at all …

Space For The Savant: An Update On Henry Higgins’S Autism, Abby Zwart

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Henry Higgins, one of the leads of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, has been retrospectively diagnosed as an autistic character by lay readers and two scholars (Rodelle Weintraub, 2006; Sonya Loftis Freeman, 2014). Weintraub’s work is accurate but outdated, and Loftis presents several valid concerns about labelling Higgins an autistic savant, but Henry Higgins should be embraced as a neurodivergent character because today, a decade after the last publication addressing his neurostatus, society has a much more nuanced understanding of autism that can easily make space for his inclusion in the retrospective canon of neurodivergent characters.

An Exploration Of Power Relations In Select Plays Of Girish Karnad A Foucauldian Perspective, Srinivasa Yogananda Rao Netrakanti

Theses and Dissertations

The present study, ‘An Exploration of Power Relations in Select Plays of Girish Karnad: A Foucauldian Perspective‘ aims to study power relations among the different characters in the three plays of Girish Karnad viz., Tughlaq, Naga-Mandala and Tale- Danda through Foucault's three modalities of power viz., bio-power, disciplinary power and sovereign power.

Chapter 1, Introduction gives a bird-eye view of Foucauldian concepts of power followed by the three modes of objectification and dividing practices, subjects and power relations, inter-connectedness between power and knowledge, panopticism, bio-power and discourses, the application of Foucauldian theories of the three major powers. Next, a Girish …

A Panoptic System And Social Control’S Influence On The Children In Henry James’S 'The Turn Of The Screw', Taylor Whittington

The Corinthian

This paper’s purpose is to offer a new reading of the children in Henry James’s novella The Turn of The Screw (1898). The paper argues that the characters are subjects of Foucault’s panopticon and social control, which results in Flora’s loss of social status and Miles’s death due to their lack of adherence to the social control. I also argue that the social control and the panoptic system integrate themselves into the Bly household and work alongside one another to reinforce the hierarchy. A panoptic system represents a type of surveillance based on Bentham’s architectural design that subject prisoners to …

She Has Green Eyes & Trauma: Problematic Depictions Of Mental Illness In Young Adult Novels, Diane G. Mcdonough

College Honors Program

This thesis discusses the problematic ways in which male authors write about female mental illness, and the damage that these portrayals can have on adolescent girls who read them. My first two chapters discuss, respectively, Looking for Alaska and Turtles All the Way Down, both by John Green, with reference to two of his other young adult novels, Paper Towns and The Fault in Our Stars. In these chapters, I explore Green’s depictions of female characters who suffer from mental illness. My third chapter focuses on It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini and The Perks of Being …

Reinvigorating The Post-Covid Gen Z English Major, Gaby Bedetti

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

Access the online Pressbooks version of this article here.

The decline in English majors has energized instructors to upskill for the post-COVID Gen Z student. Toward that end, this small-scale (n=20), one-semester study of an upper-division literature class identifies the preferred learning styles of English majors at a public comprehensive regional university in Kentucky. The participants represent national English major demographics. The research methods are quantitative and qualitative. Eight figures and an appendix are included. Three guidelines emerge for responding to the needs of Gen Z students: 1) keep communication brief, 2) co-create, and 3) interact in-person. The findings about …

Mythos And Meaning: Medieval Appropriations Of Mythological Types In The Consolation Of Philosophy And Later Western Literatures, Francis J. Hunter

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Often referred to as the last Roman and first medieval, Boethius, author of The Consolation of Philosophy, has been widely received as an unoriginal philosopher who sought to preserve Platonic thought as the Western Roman Empire fell. However, this essay features an investigation into the literary originality of Boethius who initiates a line of Christian and Platonic literatures to follow in the medieval European tradition. Boethius demonstrates himself to be a poet who makes great use of philosophy rather than as a philosopher writing poetry. Boethius’ poetic influence is felt most strongly in major aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy and …

Increasing The Accuracy Of The Military‟S Post-Deployment Mental Health Screening Strategies, Daniel Fass

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The author investigated the prevalence rates of mental health problems reported by college students and compared them with previously existing data on active duty, reserve, and National Guard Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans. Participants completed the mental health portion of the Post-Deployment Health Re-Assessment and an additional questionnaire in which the effect of a drug use screen was explored. Subjects were also asked about their intentions to seek mental health or substance abuse treatment and how anonymity affected their treatment seeking and reporting accuracy. Results indicate similar and at times higher rates of mental health problems in the sample of college …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Finding Liminality In Literature: The Decentered Voice And Its Power To Rewrite Cultural Narratives, Melissa M. Damico

Masters Theses

This thesis will dissect the flaws within the current Western culture narrative and how specific works of literature have the ability to challenge and subvert this outdated narrative, teaching society to embrace and empathize with both marginalized and oppressed human and non-human communities. It will address how the decentered voices within the literature I have selected create liminal experiences for readers, blurring subjectivity and eradicating the cultural boundaries and binary oppositions that have kept us trapped and blinded for decades. My first chapter will explore the psychological functions of the current cultural narrative, specifically Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal as …

Unruly Play In Picture Books, Danielle Groak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay defines unruly and imaginative play based on a variety of interdisciplinary sources. The study examines a selection of children’s picture books that showcase a kind of play that defies normative narrative pacing, power dynamics, and narrative sequence. Future research is recommended to further interdisciplinary discourse on the complexity of imaginative play in children’s literature in a way that honors children’s agency as storytellers.

Decolonizing Tutor And Writing Center Administrative Labor: An Autoethnography Of A South Asian Writing Center’S Personnel, Saurabh Anand

The Writing Center Journal

This piece informs my journey of thinking and contextualizing the validity of autoethnography as a decolonial qualitative research method in writing center scholarship. This piece provides the lilt of everyday writing center initiatives, labor, and workings using five email exchanges as data depicting my interactions with various writing center stakeholders as a transnational writing center studies student-tutor, administrator, and doctoral student from South Asia, specifically India. This piece also argues how I used my experiences as one of a writing center’s personnel as a tool of empowerment in my liminal position in my writing center and elaborates on those experiences, …

Cognitive Borderlands: Understanding Marginalized Identity In The Work Of Ada Limón, Ashley Hope Pérez, And Carmen Maria Machado, Monica Barbay

English Theses

Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking theoretical and creative collection of essays entitled Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza provides foundational ideas and principles to consider the physical, mental, and emotional struggles of those living along the U.S.-Mexican border. This thesis furthers this discussion by contemplating what happens psychologically to those residing in physical and cognitive borderlands, including but not limited to the U.S.-Mexican border. Specifically, I develop a framework to conceptualize borderlands of the mind, focusing on people-groups who experience multiple kinds of marginalization. I argue that these layers of marginalization negatively impact one’s sense of self, fostering a cognitive divide …

“Our Experience Is Fragmentary”: Partial Redemption In Marilynne Robinson’S Gilead Tetralogy, Zachary Stevenson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Although the characters and thematic throughlines vary across the four books in the Gilead series, each book takes an interest in the reality of division and considers ways of negotiating and healing that division. Whether the divisions are theological, familial, socioeconomic or racial, their presence haunts the text and the question of their resolution always hovers near the surface. Taken together, these considerations of difference across the four books demonstrate that Robinson populates her novels with chasms that her characters bridge, but only partially so. This coexistence of alienation and reconciliation allows Robinson to articulate a vision of Christian community …

Withholding In Shakespeare: An Analysis Of King Lear And As You Like It, Nylene R. Ward

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Shakespeare is a name familiar to most people who have had the opportunity to study beyond the third grade. Withholding is a practice that isn’t as well known to us until we reach teenage and young adult years. This essay examines both of these topics, exploring the causes and effects of withholding in King Lear and As You Like It while comparing them to real-world definitions and findings. No concrete resolution is formed, instead leaving the outcome to readers as they consider the ethical, relational, and logical implications of the adult hide-and-seek that is withholding.

Blake’S Green Symbols Of Humanity, Society, And Spirituality, Angela J. Heagy

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

William Blake is an exemplar of Romantic poetry characterized by depictions of the occult, the divine, and human nature. Despite Blake’s reputation as a Romantic poet, many critics claim that there is not sufficient evidence to consider him a nature writer. As a result, Blake’s name is frequently omitted from ecological discussions; some scholars go so far as to claim that Blake’s poetry demonstrates a disregard for nature altogether. This article argues that an eco-critical analysis of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience reveals nature to be Blake’s continual source of inspiration. Within this collection, nature represents the struggles …

Navigating Identity Through Education In Literature And In The Classroom, Sofia Sakzlyan

English (MA) Theses

This thesis explores the intricate relationship between education, identity formation, and oppression, drawing from psychosocial and sociocultural perspectives. I delve into how education serves as a critical arena where individuals encounter various internal psychological conflicts and external social influences that shape their sense of self. By analyzing the perspectives of writers such as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Kate Chopin Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Erin Gruwell, the thesis seeks to answer how education impacts the self and how it intersects with systems of oppression. Furthermore, I explore the role of education in fostering critical consciousness and empowerment, particularly in the face …

Visibility In The Redacted Space: What Censored Poetry Reveals About Guantanamo Bay Prison And The Individuals Trapped Inside, Chase Portaro

English and Creative Writing Capstone Projects

This paper discusses what readers can understand about Guantanamo Bay and the larger setting of America's Islamophobic "War on Terror" through the poetry of individuals detained inside of Guantanamo Bay Military Prison. In 2002, Mark Falkoff, with the help of a team of lawyers, translators, and human rights advocates published a collection of twenty-two detainee-authored poems, titled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. This paper discusses the emerging neo-colonial subjectivity of America's War on Terror, as it analyzes the available writings of Guantanamo poets. The new language of subjectivity of victims of contemporary American empire is defined by suppression, as …

"Old Cod": The Power Of Storytelling In Conor Mcpherson's The Weir, Sarah Johnson

English (MA) Theses

This paper examines the representation of Irish storytelling in Conor McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir. Drawing on postcolonial theory as well as the historical context of Ireland during the play’s release, I argue that The Weir is uniquely positioned at the intersection of traditional and modern values. Further, I assert that fairy legend is a tool used by the play’s characters to both understand and escape a fluctuating cultural landscape, and ultimately, a way to articulate their own values. Using textual analysis, I examine the rhetorical choices of the play’s storytellers and compare it with established conventions of Irish …

The Affable Raphael: Milton's Surrogate Instructor In Paradise Lost., Beau Kilpatrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is a beautifully written epic that continues to be a stalwart text in the English literary canon, with unlimited potential for interpretation. In this dissertation I propose that Paradise Lost can be read as a pedagogical lesson for Milton’s “fit audience,” where the author implements his views on education in the context of heaven, hell, and Paradise. In the poem, Milton presents three pedagogical methodologies: first, the wrong way to knowledge is presented through Satan’s manipulations of the fallen angels and Eve; second, the divine way to knowledge is illustrated via Michael’s prophecy to Adam …

How Setting Impacts The Progression Of Male Queer Protagonists In Proxy And Aristotle And Dante Discover The Secrets Of The Universe, Cesar Negroni

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Alex London's novel Proxy explores the life of a male queer teenager named Sydney Carton, who resides in a Science Fiction dystopia, and is forced to evade punishment for crimes he did not commit. Benjamin Alire Saénz’ novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe explores the life of a male queer protagonist Ari Mendoza, who lives in an idealistic version of the 1980s, and struggles with coming to terms with his sexuality. In this essay, I assert that each male queer protagonist is shaped by their respective settings due to the nature of their constantly changing environments. …