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Framing Identity: Repudiating The Ideal In Chicana Literature, Michael A. Flores

All NMU Master's Theses

In the 1960s Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez penned his now canonical, epic poem “I Am Joaquin.” The poem chronicles the historic oppression of a transnational, Mexican people as well as revolutionary acts of their forefathers in resisting tyranny. Coinciding with a series of renewed, sociopolitical campaigns, collectively known as the Chicano Movement, Gonzales’ poem uses vivid imagery to present an idealized representation of Chicanos and encouraged his reader to engage in revolutionary action. Though the poem encourages strong leadership, upward mobility, and political engagement the representations of women in his text are misogynistic and limiting.

His presentation of the “black-shawled …

Tracing The Origins Of Success: Implications For Successful Aging, Nora M. Peterson, Peter Martin

French Language and Literature Papers

Purpose of the Study: This paper addresses the debate about the use of the term “successful aging” from a humanistic, rather than behavioral, perspective. It attempts to uncover what success, a term frequently associated with aging, is: how can it be defined and when did it first come into use? In this paper, we draw from a number of humanistic perspectives, including the historical and linguistic, in order to explore the evolution of the term “success.” We believe that words and concepts have deep implications for how concepts (such as aging) are culturally and historically perceived.

Design and Methods: We …

Becoming Nomadic: The Radical 'Demonic' Geographies Of M. Nourbese Philip’S Looking For Livingstone: An Odyssey Of Silence, Kate Siklosi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When the protagonist of M. NourbeSe Philip's novella Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) resolutely declares that she will "open a way to the interior or perish," (7) she is at once reappropriating a colonial expression of geographic domination while enacting a "demonic" respatialization of African cultural representation. The statement, taken originally from Scottish missionary and explorer Dr. David Livingstone's travel diary, (re)presents the colonial metaphor of Africa as the unknown "dark continent" and its embedded representation of the eroticized black female body. This "opening of the interior," a central motif of Philip's text, thus announces …

Rethinking The Beginning: Toni Morrison And The Dramatization Of Liminality, Michelle Dreiding

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Beginnings in Toni Morrison's novels enact an uncanny moment of disorientation. They are beginnings in medias res, and, more importantly, beginnings of spatial deictic uncertainties that leave a reader with the absence of a stable system of reference. They enact the predicament of a beginning that precludes the fantasy of an absolute point of origin. Morrison's beginnings self-consciously advocate an imperative to engage in a continual process of re-reading, of revisiting the initial disorientation so as to avoid a "conclusion to living." (Nietzsche) I want to argue that it is in these liminal moments of beginnings of novels that …

Beowulf: A Translation And Commentary, By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Christopher Tolkien. Reviewed By Janet Bennan Croft., Janet Brennan Croft

Mythprint Book Reviews

Mythprint is the quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local discussion groups.

Student Perceptions Of Strategies Used For Reading Hispanic Literature: A Case Study, Rebecca Leigh Brazzale

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study investigated the experiences of students during their reading tasks for their university Spanish courses during the Fall 2013 semester at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The purpose of this research was to explore what types of reading strategies university Spanish students use during literary readings tasks and their perceptions of the reading strategies they use. This case study employed stimulated recall protocol interviews, student reading logs and student notes in texts. Interviews were conducted within 24 hours of the reading, while reading logs and notes were completed during the reading. The data collected were analyzed for …

Effects Of Licensed And Unlicensed Negation On The Activation Of Negated Concepts, Kevin Autry

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research on the activation of negated concepts has demonstrated situations in which negated concepts are less active than non-negated concepts (e.g., MacDonald & Just, 1989) as well as situations where negated and non-negated concepts are equally active (e.g., Autry & Levine, 2012, in press). Based on the pragmatic inference hypothesis (Levine & Hagaman, 2008), the present experiments tested the hypothesis that the activation level of negated concepts is a function of the context in which they occur. In two experiments, the activation level of target concepts was measured following licensing or non-licensing contexts using lexical decision and reading times. Although …

Are They Over-Represented? Culturally Diverse Students In Special Education: A Meta-Synthesis, Lillian A. Dewilde

Special Education Masters Program Theses

This meta-synthesis of the literature on over-prevalence of culturally diverse students represented in special education examines the possible reasons why there are more non-white students receiving special education services then previous years. Specific areas researched include looking at culturally relevant educational practices. Additionally, addressing the identity and self-esteem issues that may occur from being placed in special education. This meta-synthesis meshes the author’s experiences as a special education teacher, parent, and an Alaskan Native woman. The author’s intent is to also explore preventative practices to insure that culturally diverse students are not placed in special education unnecessarily.

The Evolution Of The Villain In American Cinema, Kelsey Mcclure

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

The villain character has evolved greatly throughout American cinema. Post World War II, the evolution is most striking by comparing films from the 1950s, 1970s, and 2000s. With a selection of four movies from each respective decade, the villains will be contrasted to identify any similarities and differences across decades to determine if the political environment has an impact on the way in which the villain character is portrayed.

Objective:

The purpose of this project was for me to determine if villains were constructed based on views of the American people at the times in which the films were created. …

Reflections On Reading Plato And Aristotle At Lancaster, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

While serving as a Visiting Fellow at Lancaster University, I was asked to lead an informal seminar on Classical Philosophy. It was to be a reading group of postgraduate students and staff, focusing on two foundational texts of Western civilization: Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I happily accepted. The resulting two-hour, weekly sessions over Michaelmas Term were lively times of philosophical effervescence, full of probative questions, interesting interpretations, diverse evaluations, vigorous debates, and shared insights. Postmodernists engaged in the holy act of Interpreting the Text, we nonetheless strained to grasp the “true meaning” of the texts, to extend our …

Dionysus Torn To Pieces: An Examination Of The Sound And The Fury In Light Of The Philosophy Of Friedrich Nietzsche, Scott R. Dubree

Student Publications

Over the course of this thesis the author considers the problem of truth in life as manifested in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury by means of the Nietzschean conception of the Dionysian. The examination unfolds in a sequential analysis of the novel’s four sections, an analysis framed by Nietzsche’s four theses on “‘Reason’ in Philosophy:” the author considers the first section (Ben) symbolic of man’s subversion to what is directly before his eyes, and yet discovers in Ben’s idiocy a refutation of that same apparent reality in a presently-realized past, personified in Ben’s sister, Caddy; the bounds and …

Embodied Cognition And The Grotesque In Calvino's La Giornata D'Uno Scrutatore And Sanguineti's Capriccio Italiano, Marco Caracciolo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Embodied Cognition and the Grotesque in Calvino's La giornata d'uno scrutatore and Sanguineti's Capriccio italiano" Marco Caracciolo analyzes the multiple dimensions of embodied experience and how they can be brought to bear on literary texts. Drawing on scholarship in cognitive science, he argues that the embodiment of people's engagement with the world emerges from the interaction between the physical structure of the body and socio-cultural practices. Caracciolo shows how such nexus of biological make-up and culture can give rise to particularly complex meanings in the representation of grotesque bodies. In order to illustrate his postulates, Caracciolo …

Analyzing To Live Through The Mediums Of Literature And Film: Two Vastly Contrasting Presentations Of Twentieth Century China’S Radical History, Abbie Doll

International ResearchScape Journal

This essay examines the acceptance and public interpretation of modern China’s rather turbulent past in light of Yu Hua’s novel To Live and Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation. It explores how fictionalized traumatic experiences have the ability to ultimately and effectively communicate social truth. Other aspects examined are the utilization of death as an effective political critique, the overall significance of and interpretive variances caused by the urban-rural divide in Chinese society, and also the particular molding of citizens’ lives that occurs due to either Mao’s overbearing presence or the conspicuous lack thereof. Types of sources referred to and used throughout …

The Mockingbird - 2014, Department Of Literature And Language, East Tennessee State University, Etsu Department Of Art And Design

The Mockingbird [magazine]

Andrew Barnes [Good Stock]; Josh Blevins [Firebird]; Joseph Bowman [Epilogue]; Nikki Buckner-McCoy [Bargaining]; Andrew Butler [Octet and Sestet from an Asheville Balcony, Convalescent Haiku, Alchemy, Coming of Age Again and The Graduate]; Danielle Byington [Children until We Die]; Disconnected Rima Day [Quilt]; Ashley Fox [Baptism, Interview with Jane Hicks, His Girl]; Hannah Harper [Selkie]; Hunter Hines [Inward Spiral]; Mary Hunter [Learning Norn Iron]; Becca Irvin [Altered Vessel]; Storm Ketron [Origin: Johnson City, TN]; Derek Laurendeau [Pop-Up Book I , Metamorphosis]; Kimberly Leland [Empty Nest]; Caroline Lowery [Stella]; Freddie Lyle [Untitled II]; Kelly Meadows [Seek]; Andrea Menendez [Radio Children]; Shalam Minter …

“Am I Still Lost?”: Cultivating Complex Identities And Subjectivity In 20th-Century Women's Writing On Madness, Molly Mccormick

Theses & ETDs

This thesis examines the role “madness” plays in the works of three contemporary female writers: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Anne Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back, and Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal. I argue against reading these texts in such a way that would oversimplify portrayals of female madness as mere “metaphor” or else medicalizes them to the extent that text can be read as a symptom. I point to ways the three texts specifically address and resist such limiting readings in order to reclaim and maintain voice and control over experience. Insisting on the power of voice and …

From Behind The Mirror: Publishing The Works Of Anaïs Nin, Elizabeth Claire Sheehey

Theses & ETDs

This thesis explores the unique position of the literary persona of Anaïs Nin, a persona produced in her writing through the tension between autobiography and fiction. If Nin is best known for her erotic fiction, her reputation reflects the careful construction of her autobiographical voice in her diaries. My first chapter argues that the editing decisions made in the publication of Nin’s Childhood Diaries, some 40 years after their writing, shape the “Anaïs” of its pages toward the project and persona that brought her (and her editors) critical and financial success. My second chapter examines Nin’s erotic fiction in light …

Shots In The Dark: The Presence Of Absence In Imaginative Literature (Iw), Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

Western metaphysics and IW can be described as a search for "first" presences, not absences. With the exception of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Aristotle, writers like Lord Rochester (John Wilmot), Jonathan Swift and Philip Larkin, no one, to my knowledge, has taken absence as a "first" and consequently as also a "last." This essay is a modest attempt to open the door, if only a crack, for investigations into the metaphysics and meaning of absence as a means of creating, and understanding an interesting IW—from the perspective of the presence of absence as "first" and as "last."

Plotting Devices: Literary Darwinism In The Laboratory, John Hay

English Faculty Research

Critics of literary Darwinism like to point out the weaknesses of its scientific scaffolding, but the real flaw in this research program is its neglect of literary history and stylistic evolution. A full-fledged scientific approach to literary criticism should incorporate the kind of work being done by Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab—a quantitative analysis of the history of literary form. While Moretti and the literary Darwinists are almost never mentioned together, I contend that their work is not only compatible but also necessarily so for a more consilient literary criticism. The Darwinian aesthetics promoted by Denis Dutton can …

Review: The Meek One: A Fantastic Story: An Annotated Russian Reader, Cynthia L. Martin

Russian Language Journal

Both of these readers are excellent additions to available annotated readers for students of Russian that would be most appropriate after students have completed two full years of Russian.

Tickling The Palate: Gastronomy In Irish Literature And Culture, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Eamon Maher

Books

This volume of essays, which originated in the inaugural Dublin Gastronomy Symposium held in the Dublin Institute of Technology in June 2012, offers fascinating insights into the significant role played by gastronomy in Irish literature and culture. The book opens with an exploration of food in literature, covering figures as varied as Maria Edgeworth, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Enid Blyton, John McGahern and Sebastian Barry. Other chapters examine culinary practices among the Dublin working classes in the 1950s, offering a stark contrast to the haute cuisine served in the iconic Jammet's Restaurant; new trends among Ireland's 'foodie' generation; and the …

Body Language: Pain In Victorian Literature, Laura Jane Faulk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature” argues that Victorian authors use the readable sign system of the body and pain to emphasize their characters’ physical features to the reader. As characters physically manifest emotions or experience violence, their appearances change, and these differences depend on physical descriptions. Marks on the body give it texture and depth, creating a layering that encourages the reader to envision and remember it. Character interactions, particularly when they read others’ somatic signs and experience or cause brutality, further flesh out characters, emphasizing their physical presences in the reader’s mind. The somatic sign system depends upon …

Find Deliberative Features At Abu Sa'eed Seraphic, Latif Hatim, Amar Ahsaan

Uruk Journal of Human Sciences

Pragmatic linguistics had been deliberatively used when considering the language, through pools of communicative process, so it was concerned with the speaker and his purposes considering him as an engine to communication process, and taking into account the case of presentation during the speech, also it was concerned with the circumstances and conditions of contextual and social surroundings of the interactive process; to guarantee for communication on the one hand, and to make use of the opportunity to reach a sense on the other hand, the seraphic speech in our hands is not free from that we're talking about, in …

Language, Science, Society, And The Line Between Human And Animal In Swift's Gulliver's Travels And Wells's The Island Of Doctor Moreau, Adam Schultheiss

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This thesis examines line between human and non-human animals in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau. Both Gulliver's Travels and The Island of Doctor Moreau examine this separation through the prism of language, societal views of animality, and biology. Looking back at the history surrounding the idea that man is separate from, and superior to, animals, one finds that it can be traced back in western tradition to the Bible, and is so ingrained in our language that it is difficult for narrators such as Lemuel Gulliver and Edward Prendick to recount their experiences …

"Dae Scotsmen Dream O 'Lectric Leids?" Robert Crawford's Cyborg Scotland, Alexander Burke

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies a Cybernetic interpretation to a selection of poetry by the Scottish Informationist poet Robert Crawford, drawn mostly from two collections: A Scottish Assembly (1990) and Sharawaggi: Poems in Scots (1990). Crawford is contextualized by observing the poetic influences of Robert Burns, John Davidson, and Hugh MacDiarmid, as well as the philosophical influence of George Elder Davie’s The Democratic Intellect. This paper argues that, in response to the Two Cultures hypothesis put forth by C. P. Snow and the widely-held belief that Scotland is irrevocably fractured, the shifting boundaries of the many disparate Scottish cultures are mediated by …

Fundamentals Of Modern Belarusian, Christian Marchant, Dr. Michael Kelly

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Republic of Belarus, located in the very heart of Europe, is a relatively unknown country to many westerners. Belarus has an important role in the political future of Europe. Belarus is located in the geographic center of Europe and is a major corridor for energy transport. The country is the only dictatorship remaining in Europe, and with the recent expansion of the European Union, it will now lie directly on its eastern border. Any traveler visiting Belarus would benefit greatly from a knowledge of Belarusian, yet there is a striking absence of any material in English about the Belarusian …

‘There’S A Lot More To Ogres Than People Think’: Shrek As Ethical Fairy Tale, Eugene O'Brien

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Automatic Identification Of Metaphoric Utterances, Jonathan Edwin Dunn

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the problem of metaphor identification in linguistic and computational semantics, considering both manual and automatic approaches. It describes a manual approach to metaphor identification, the Metaphoricity Measurement Procedure (MMP), and compares this approach with other manual approaches. The dissertation then describes an implemented and simplified version of the procedure, Measuring and Identifiying Metaphor-in-Language (MIMIL), and compares the premises of this system with other automatic metaphor identification systems. MIMIL and three existing metaphor identification systems are then evaluated on a common data set. Finally, the dissertation looks at difficulties which face attempts to automatically identify metaphors caused by …

The Temporality Of Modernist Life Writing In The Era Of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’S Orlando And Einar Wegener’S Man Into Woman, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Lntertextual Identities: The Crisis Of Voice And Location In Jane Eyre And Wide Sargasso Sea, Kristy Butler

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Emaciated Identities In William Trevor's Short Story "Lost Ground" And Charlotte Brontë'S Jane Eyre, Catherine O'Brien

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

No abstract provided.