Digital Commons Network^™

“Word Made Flesh”: Czech Women’S Writing From Communism To Post-Communism, Madelaine Hron

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article explores the changes in Czech women’s fiction from communism to post- communism, focusing in particular on Czech women writers’ relationship to literary discourse and feminism. It contends that women writers’ rapport to ideological discourse and literary production under communism is a determining factor in women’s relationship to both writing and feminism. It examines this literary legacy in terms of post-communism, surveying the differences between a totalitarian socialist regime and that of a materialist, capitalist economy, as exemplified in Czech women’s literature. The article offers a survey the major post-communist women writers, including Hodrová, Boučková, Kriseová, as well as …

Getting Into The Game: The Trickster In American Ethnic Fiction, Helen Lock

Ethnic Studies Review

Trickster novels, especially those by Gerald Vizenor and Maxine Hong Kingston, can be used to destabilize and undermine ethnic stereotypes. As many studies show, the trickster him/herself cannot be stable and thus resists the limitations of definition as the embodiment of ambiguity. Both insider and outsider, s/he plays with the whole concept of "sides" so as to erase the distinction between them. The trickster plays the game, including the game of language, in order to break and exploit its rules and thus destabilizes linguistic markers. Kingston and Vizenor use their novels to subvert the rules of the linguistic game and …

Using Literature Circles To Teach Comprehension Strategies To Low-Achieving Middle School Readers, Rachel Grace Gossett

All Graduate Projects

Discussion is an integral part of our society and a natural way for students to learn. When discussion is brought into the classroom, students are able to use their background knowledge to create their own meaning and take their thinking to a higher level. Because of these attributes, discussion of reading material in the classroom leads to a greater comprehension of what was read and opens more doors for learning more strategies to increase reading ability. The teacher's role changes from being the one with all of the answers to a member of the group looking for the meaning. Teachers …

Reticent Romans: Silence And Writing In La Vie De Saint Alexis, Le Conte Du Graal, And Le Roman De Silence, Evan J. Bibbee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Apart from discourse and yet somehow part of it, silence is a powerfully ambiguous linguistic phenomenon that blurs the lines between presence and absence. Eluding the material aspects of oral and written language, it is only perceptible as the gaps or spaces between words. Nonetheless, it plays a role in all linguistic productions: although silence itself cannot be directly communicated, it can influence communication. In a literary text, silence may takes on many different guises, including rhythmic hesitations, rhetorical omissions, and poetic oppositions that mimic the audible gaps of spoken language. The visual, aural, and fictional interaction of all these …

Decapitation And Disgorgement: The Female Body's Text In Early Modern English Literature, Melanie Ann Hanson

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on language and forms of expression for women in early modern English literature. In particular, William Shakespeare's character Lavinia from Titus Andronicus, Elizabeth Cary's character Mariam in The Tragedy of Mariam, and Isabella Whitney's narrative voice in her poem "The Manner of Her Will" are examined. French feminist Helene Cixous provides the theoretical framework for this project. Exploring manifestations of Cixous's crucial terms "decapitation" and "disgorgement" is the objective of the three core chapters. Privileging the female body's text and discussing the variety of means used to "speak" it is of central concern. The connection between silencing …

Indentity-In-Motion : The Narrative Duration Of The Dis/Continous Film Moment, Maria Walsh

Other Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Theses

The trajectorv of this thesis is set out like a journey upon which encounters are staged between two films. film theor), and philosophers. such as Slavoj Zizek. Gilles Deletize, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. An encounter with a moment of image suspension. a cut to the blank screen- in Tacita Dean's film, Disappearance atSea (1996). motivates the beginning of this journey's narrative. My reading of this moment counters the way that suspended film moments have been discussed in terms of non-narrative in 1970s film theory and in the contemporary psychoanalýlic filin theory of Slavoj Zizek. Using Gilles Deleuze's notion of narrativization as …

Perceptions Of Stereotypes In Hispanic Children's Literature, Nancy Gomez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study attempted to determine the accurateness of the representation of the Hispanic culture in children’s books. I interviewed ten people: five non-Hispanic and five Hispanic, and I found that the Hispanic people do not seem to pay as much attention to physical features as non-Hispanic people do. However, they were concerned about the portrayal of the Hispanic culture in traditional ways: the traditional roles of women, the traditional dress, the architecture of the houses and the portrayal of the Hispanic people living in rural areas and being extremely poor. It appears that from the timeline covered by the books, …

The Sabbath In The First Creation Accounts, Jiri Moskala

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Gender And Development (Gad) Implementation Evaluation: Testimonios Reveal The Successes, Challenges, And Unpredicted Results For Women's Equality And Community Sustainability, Melinda Salazar

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a case study of a Gender and Development implementation evaluation in several rural, Baha'i communities in Andean Bolivian. "Traditional Media as Change Agent," funded by UNIFEM (UN International Fund for Women) and implemented by BIC (Baha'i International Community), was an innovative, non-economic approach to change gender attitudes and behaviors by including men in a consultative process using traditional media. This study responded to criticism that GAD ignored the environment, was lodged squarely in Western economic development thought and Western feminist values, and lacked the voices of the women and men for whom development aims to benefit.

This study …

Promoting Literacy Through Literature And Content-Based Radings In The Secondary English-As-A-Second-Language Classroom In Conjunction With The In Contact 1 Curriculum: A Handbook For Educators, Tanya Lynn Adamson

All Graduate Projects

The use of literature and content-based readings in the secondary ESL classroom was researched. The research suggests that providing second language learners with meaningful readings that provide for comprehensible input will build schema and background knowledge that will help them to be successful in their content area classes. A handbook for educators was created to supplement the existing curriculum, as well as to show readers that this type of supplemental reading handbook can be created by anyone to be used with any type of ESL curriculum. This handbook contains both literature and content-based resources that coincide with the themes and …

Word Is Born: Critical Gaps And The Poetics Of Hip-Hop, Kabir Hamid

Honors Papers

I grew up listening to hip-hop music. Although I lived across the country from its birthplace, I would immerse myself in its sounds during the day and especially at night when my brother would play tapes before we fell asleep in our bunk beds. At a certain point in high school, I became obsessed with the music's lyrics. I was continually astonished by the cleverness, rhyme ability and edginess of the emcees I listened to. My admiration for hip-hop music developed alongside my admiration for the great authors I was reading at that time: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Hesse and …

Review Of The Culture Of Lies And The Museum Of Unconditional Surrender By Dubravka Ugresic, Martha Kuhlman

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

In 1993, a Danish critic reviewing Dubravka Ugrešić's novel Fording the Stream of Consciousness, a clever satire of a literary conference, accused her of engaging in a crass form of literary escapism when she should have been writing about the"bloody war" raging at home in her native Yugoslavia. Since the novel was first published in 1988, this criticism was entirely misplaced. In fact, the war has been on her mind the entire time, as is evident from her two most recent books, The Culture of Lies (essays 1991-1998) and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1991-1996).

Alice In Legal Wonderland: A Cross-Examination Of Gender, Race And Empire In Victorian Law And Literature, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Lewis Carroll's 1865 scene of a recalcitrant Alice in the courtroom, defying the court's authority as she grows (literally) into a large and threatening presence, dramatizes what was becoming an increasingly common Victorian spectacle: a woman questioning and critiquing the law and claiming a place for herself within its institutions. Women have played a significant (but much overlooked) role in legal history and, in this paper, I argue for the importance of examining various narratives of the past (including literary accounts) that explored women's relationship to the law.

Against the backdrop of several legal cases in which women sought entry …

The Composition Of Anonymity: Toward A Theory, History, And Pedagogy, Timothy Thomas Dansdill

Doctoral Dissertations

In keeping with its recognized function of non-identity through the suppression of proper name recognition, anonymity is not recognized as "essential" to nominalist consciousness or to intersubjective action through language. The founding philosophical discourses of identity, authority, and community reveal an "anonymous function"---a transgressive discourse of impersonation, authenticity, and immunity---which this dissertation traces in phenomenology, discourse theory, poetics, rhetoric, and composition.

The first two chapters draw from phenomenology (Schutz and Natanson), and discourse theory (Foucault), to propose a theory of anonymity as integral to any understanding of personal identity across the entire performative range of self/other orientations. Chapter three draws …

Semitic Discourse: English Identity And The Nineteenth -Century British Novel, Heidi Nan Kaufman

Doctoral Dissertations

The following study examines the manner in which nineteenth-century British novels use a Semitic discourse to imagine and construct Christian English people as racially pure. One result of the growing presence of assimilated Jewish people living in England in the nineteenth century was the fear that they might pass undetected and pollute the "purity" of English blood. In response to this phenomenon, the narratives in this study illuminate not only cultural anxiety about the historical lineage that links Judaism and Christianity, but the threat this link posed to the very idea of English Christian racial purity. My claim, that English …

Literature-Based Instruction And Post-Reading Activities To Enhance The Basal Reading Program, Susan J. Vertrees

All Graduate Projects

The focus ofthis project was to create a resource manual to use in the reading program with students learning a second language. The project implements a balanced reading curriculum with an emphasis on literature-based instruction. Trade books and post-reading activities are the highlights of the resource manual. Using literature in the classroom with literature-based instruction techniques has been shown to have a positive impact on students. The purpose of reading instruction is to increase reading skills as well as the joy ofreading.

Political Ramifications Of Gender Complementarity For Women In Native American Literature, Patrice Eunice Marie Hollrah

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores how a tribal construct of gender relations---gender complementarity---functions in the works of Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Sioux), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), and Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene). Gender complementarity, or balanced reciprocity, acknowledges that the worlds of men and women are different but not generally perceived as hierarchical. If gender roles are not seen as unequal but simply different, the resulting political relationships do not necessarily result in power struggles for equality. Examining the political ramifications of gender complementarity for women in Native American literature is approached through the historical and cultural contexts of each specific …

Translating Exile In Panait Istrati's "Mes Departs", Samuel Beckett's "Fin De Partie" And Selected Poems By Paul Celan., Ina Alice Pfitzner

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Translation and exile are two phenomena that marked life in the twentieth century, especially in Europe, and have therefore left their traces in French literature as well. Translation from one language to another is a heightened form of the translation process inherent in any writing. Exile in a foreign country, linguistic exile, is an aggravated form of the exile every human being experiences at some point. Parting from Lucian Blaga's concept of "mioritic space," which is based on the Romanian myth of Mioritza, as well as Walter Benjamin's essay "Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers" [The Task of the Translator], this study …

Privacy And Power: Computer Databases And Metaphors For Information Privacy, Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Journalists, politicians, jurists, and legal academics often describe the privacy problem created by the collection and use of personal information through computer databases and the Internet with the metaphor of Big Brother - the totalitarian government portrayed in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Professor Solove argues that this is the wrong metaphor. The Big Brother metaphor as well as much of the law that protects privacy emerges from a longstanding paradigm for conceptualizing privacy problems. Under this paradigm, privacy is invaded by uncovering one's hidden world, by surveillance, and by the disclosure of concealed information. The harm caused by such invasions …

The Postmodern Infiltration Of Legal Scholarship, Arthur Austin

Michigan Law Review

For legal scholars it is the best of times. We are inundated by an eclectic range of writing that pushes the envelope from analysis and synthesis to the upper reaches of theory. Mainstream topics face fierce competition from fresh ideological visions, a variety of genres, and spirited criticism of the status quo. Young professors have access to a burgeoning variety of journals to circulate their ideas and advice while the mass media covets them as public intellectuals. There is a less sanguine mood; an increasingly vocal group of scholars complain that it is the worst of times and refer to …

Law As Interpretation, Charles W. Collier

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, I shall trace out separate professional narratives in common law, constitutional law, and in legal cases turning on the distinction between community and society (Part III). But first I should like to situate these legal-professional narratives within a broader interdisciplinary framework (Part II).

Hearsay, Testimony And Conference: Citationality In The Works Of Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot And Jacques Derrida., Mary Carla Criner

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation involves an examination of the effects and implications of three modes of citationality: hearsay, testimony and conference. As a term coined by Jacques Derrida, citationality involves the problematization of questions related to borders and limits and to the attempt to re-present the originary event thought to lie beyond the performance of citational acts of bearing witness. In chapter one I situate my project theoretically through an examination of the principles of deconstruction. In particular, Jacques Derrida's work on the metaphysical concepts of presence and speech, in terms of repeatability or iterability, bears heavily on my study. As a …

Memory, Time And Identity In The Novels Of William Faulkner And Marcel Proust., John Stephen Larose

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation is a comparative study of first person narrative in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), and selected novels of William Faulkner, primarily those in which the character of Quentin Compson appears: The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This comparison is based upon the assumption that the attempts to represent the patterns of thought, memory, or consciousness in these novels is symptomatic of many twentieth-century novels, which dramatize an anxiety about the possibility of a solid ground for knowledge of the world or of the self. The language of these novels …

Francis Hayman: An Artist Reading British Literature In The 1740s., Stephen Alan Raynie

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The on-going comparison of the sister arts (poetry and painting) in the eighteenth century recommends a reassessment of Francis Hayman's role as an artist reading and interpreting literary texts. A founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768, Francis Hayman began his artistic career as a scene painter at the Goodman's Fields and Drury Lane theaters. Although Hayman was one of the most prolific book illustrators in mid eighteenth century Britain, relatively little critical attention has been devoted to his work. Moreover, his circle of friends included such Old Slaughter's and St. Martin's Lane Academy regulars as Henry Fielding, William …

Kate Chopin's Contribution To Realism And Naturalism: Reconsiderations Of W. D. Howells, Maupassant, And Flaubert., Jean Ann Witherow

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

No one has previously undertaken a detailed examination of Kate Chopin's documented intertextuality with writers such as W. D. Howells, Hamlin Garland, Maupassant, and Flaubert. My purpose is to examine Chopin's works in the context of writers with whom she interacts and so to reveal her impact on the development of literary realism and naturalism. My study reveals that, though her mature writing eliminates sentimentalism, she never abandons romance elements residual from her youth. Her typically subjective narrator removes narrative authority, intensifies our involvement with characters, and validates the marginalized voice. Darwin and the philosophers temper her Catholicism, yet she …

Metametascience Towards Reconciliation, John P. Kennedy

Honors Papers

The ideal of consilience - the inductive concurrence of seemingly disparate ways of thinking into a single, unified, all-encompassing intellectual system - or more simply put, "unified learning" - has been largely set aside since the rise of the industrial age and the championing of the industrious, better-be it individualized mind of the enlightenment. The Catholic Church was the last western world-dominant institution to actively perpetuate and work according to the rubric of a unified field of knowledge. Our thoughts and everything else were under God and indivisible: our ethics and our physics alike were the immaterial idea-stuff of the …

Rights Of Passage: A Cross -Cultural Study Of Maroon Novels By Black Women., Randi Gray Kristensen

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study investigates the use and implications of the trope of marronage, the African-American practice of self-emancipation to forge alternative New World communities, in selected novels by Black women writers of North America and the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. It draws on theories of liminality to posit a theory of liberatory practice that deconstructs hegemonic narratives, both personal and historical. Postmodern approaches are deferred in favor of locating these texts and their concerns as deriving from the epistemological consequences of modernity. Cross-cultural Black women's texts were chosen to illuminate the recognition of shared subjugations across national and linguistic borders, as …

Slain In The Spirit: A Vodun Aesthetic In Selected Works Of Simone Schwarz -Bart, Zora Neale Hurston, And Paule Marshall., Maria Thecla Smith

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study, focusing on select novels by women writers of the African diaspora, discovers a surprising commonality among works with obvious geographical, cultural and linguistic differences---an affirmation of the philosophical essence of the Vodun religion as an antidote to Western spiritual and cultural moribundity. Each of the novels---Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle, and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow---alludes to the Vodun pantheon, ancestor veneration and/or rituals in order to valorize the holistic Vodun worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness of all living things and the fluidity of boundaries between …

A Matter Of Life And Death: Jose Maria Arguedas, Mario Vargas Llosa, And The Postmodern Condition., Lynn Marie Walford

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Despite all that has been written in recent years on the subject of literary postmodernism, theorists and critics have yet to arrive at a consensus about the meaning of the term. In the context of Latin America, the theoretical disagreement is given an added dimension by an ongoing debate over whether the notion of postmodernism, in any of its manifestations, is relevant to contemporary Latin American letters. This study maintains that at least some of the issues raised in the debate over postmodernism are not only relevant, but crucial to an understanding of the many complex worlds of Latin America …

Ernest Renan And The Question Of Race., Jane Victoria Dagon

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Racism in France can be traced back to the 1560's when the nobles claimed to be of a separate race in order to obtain special rights and privileges. Soon after in the seventeenth century, scientists started to classify humans according to physical features. With the increase in travel, the slave trade, the fear of the unknown and the fear of contamination, these factors along with physiognomy and phrenology encouraged "biological racism." During the second half of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan (1823--1892) denounces biological racism and the existence of the so-called "pure races." He is also the first dramatist to …