Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Queering The Family Space: Confronting The Child Figure And The Evolving Dynamics Of Intergenerational Relations In Don Delillo's White Noise, Joshua Little

English Theses

Criticism surrounding the children of the Gladney family in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise remains a contested issue. I argue the children and their social environment reflect Lee Edelman’s analysis of the Child figure and its bolstering of reproductive futurism. The Child figure upholds a heteronormative social order that precludes equal rights and social viability for non-normative family structures and those opposed to an inherently conservative ideology. I find the continually evolving family structure elicits new dynamics among its members, offering greater social independence for all, which institutes a stronger familial bond and ensures a greater chance for its vitality. …

Inside And Outside 1101: First-Year Student Perceptions Of Academic Writing, Laura E. Jones

English Theses

First-year undergraduate students have vastly different perceptions of academic writing, the writing process, and the value of writing within their specific academic disciplines. These perceptions differ not only from their instructors but also from their peers. Yet, while reams of literature discuss, debate, and decipher student perspectives of writing from a scholarly point of view, the first-year student voice is conspicuously absent from this discussion. This study followed 92 first-year students through their first college composition course, English 1101, in order to capture the student perspective of how writing fits in their academic careers. The results indicate that while most …

Willa Cather's O Pioneers!: Violence And Modernist Aesthetics, Jordan F. Hobson

English Theses

Willa Cather's 1913 novel, O Pioneers! concludes with an unexpected moment of extreme violence as two young lovers, Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata, are murdered by Marie's husband in a mulberry orchard. Cather's novel is almost wholly devoted to the psychological interior of the protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, thereby rendering this violent interruption more dynamic as it essentially undercuts the generally lulling interiority of the narration. My interest here is to examine this strange moment of violence and Alexandra's subsequent forgiveness of Frank for the murder of her brother and his own wife through the theoretical paradigms of René Girard, Jacques …

Reading 9/11 In 21st Century Apocalyptic Horror Films, Colby D. Williams

English Theses

The tragedy and aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are reflected in American apocalyptic horror films that have been produced since 2001. Because the attacks have occurred only within the past ten years, not much research has been conducted on the effects the attacks have had on the narrative and technological aspects of apocalyptic horror. A survey of American apocalyptic horror will include a brief synopsis of the films, commentary on dominant visual allusions to the 9/11 attacks, and discussion of how the attacks have thematically influenced the genre. The resulting study shows that the terrorist attacks of September 11, …

Hawthorne's Transcendental Ambivalence In Mosses From An Old Manse, Matthew S. Eisenman

English Theses

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, serves as his contribution to the philosophical discussions on Transcendentalism in Concord, MA in the early 1840s. While Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the other individuals involved in the Transcendental club often seem to readily accept the positions presented in Emerson’s work, it is never so simple for Hawthorne. Repeatedly, Hawthorne’s stories demonstrate his difficulty in trying to identify his own opinion on the subject. Though Hawthorne seems to want to believe in the optimistic potential of the spiritual and intellectual ideal presented in Emersonian Transcendentalism, …

Haunting The House, Haunting The Page: The Spectral Governess In Victorian Fiction, Shane G. Mcgowan

English Theses

The Victorian governess occupied a difficult position in Victorian society. Straddling the line between genteel and working-class femininity, the governess did not fit neatly into the rigid categories of gender and class according to which Victorian society organized itself. This troubling liminality caused the governess to become implicitly associated with another disturbing domestic presence caught between worlds: the Victorian literary ghost. Using Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw as a touchstone for each chapter, this thesis examines how the spectral mirrors the governess’s own spectrality – that is, her own discursive construction as a psychosocially unsettling force within …

A Critical Study Of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life Of Bees, Joy A. Hebert Ms.

English Theses

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2002) tells the story of a motherless fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, raised by a cruel father, who desperately searches for clues to unlock her mother’s past. Kidd’s bildungsroman reveals the incredible power of black women, particularly a group of beekeeping sisters and a black Mary, to create a safe haven where Lily can examine her fragmented life and develop psychologically, finally becoming a self-actualized young lady. Lily’s matriarchal world of influence both compares and contrasts with the patriarchal world represented in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exposing the matriarchy’s aptly structured ways …

For The Future: An Examination Of Conspiracy And Terror In The Works Of Don Delillo, Ashleigh Whelan

English Theses

This thesis is divided into two chapters, the first being an examination of conspiracy and paranoia in Libra, while the second focuses on the relationship between art and terror in Mao II, “In the Ruins of the Future,” Falling Man, and Point Omega. The study traces how DeLillo’s works have evolved over the years, focusing on the creation of counternarratives. Readers are given a glimpse of American culture and shown the power of narrative, ultimately shedding light on the future of our collective consciousness.

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Comedy: Finding The Humor In Rasselas Through Ecclesiastes, Mary Katherine Mason

English Theses

For years, scholars have focused on the serious narrative of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and have been unable to reconcile the episodes of ironic humor within the larger serious narrative. By reading Rasselas as an imitation of Ecclesiastes rather than an Oriental tale, critics can begin to identify the humor in Rasselas through the embellishment of the story of Ecclesiastes. The failures of the character Koheleth in Ecclesiastes become the genesis for the failures of Rasselas and his companions; however, the failures of Rasselas and more elaborate and comedic. How Johnson embellishes these failures to create humorous irony in Rasselas becomes …

"Now There's No Difference": Artificial Subjectivity As A Posthuman Negotiation Of Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic, Casey J. Mccormick

English Theses

This thesis examines the theme of robot rebellion in SF narrative as an incarnation of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. Chapter one analyzes the depiction of robot rebellion in Karel Capek’s R.U.R. Chapter two surveys posthuman theory and offers close readings of two contemporary SF television series that exemplify ontologically progressive narratives. The thesis concludes that posthuman subjectivity sublates the Master/Slave dialectic and encourages practical posthuman ethics.

Palamedes, Paul A. Cantrell

English Theses

This thesis offers a syncretic, synoptic account of Palamedes from the Trojan War. It delineates three interpretive modes: (1) that Palamedes was present all along; (2) that later poets inserted him into the Trojan narrative, either as an archetypal intellectual figure, or as Odysseus’s double; (3) that Palamedes was present only as Odysseus’s imaginary Doppelgänger. The thesis accounts for Palamedes’s scarce attention in classical texts by way of Lacanian and—via Otto Rank—Freudian psychoanalytic theory, as well as by Slavoj Žižek’s adoption of the “vanishing mediator.” After tracing a potential textual genealogy from Palamedes to Malory’s Palomydes, the thesis concludes …

Sounds Carefully Crafted: Dionysius Of Halicarnassus And Literary Composition, Francisco Lopez

English Theses

Modern rhetoric takes many influences from the classical era, but aural components of rhetoric are not often included in rhetorical education. This paper examines the techniques used by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his essay On Literary Composition, where he explored the components of arrangement of words in clauses for greatest impact when read and spoken aloud. Dionysius utilized meter and aesthetic placement of words to create work that was technically skilled and appealing to the listener or reader.

Dionysius built on ideas from rhetoricians of 4^th and 5^th century BCE Athens for his definition of style. His writing …

"Born Every Minute": Reworking The Mythology Of The American Medicine Show, Owen C. Cantrell

English Theses

This thesis investigates the historical American medicine show of 1880-1900 through the lens of contemporaneous social and cultural debates, primarily regarding class and race relations. The medicine show pitchmen, the central figure of the medicine show, is the progeny of the confidence man of the mid to late-nineteenth century, best personified through the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and P.T. Barnum and novels of Herman Melville and Mark Twain. The confidence man utilized a performative identity directed towards the assumed needs and desires of his audience, which gave him a purely pragmatic orientation. As the confidence man filtered through emerging forms …

Initiation In The Novellas Of Henry James, Collyn E. Milsted

English Theses

This Master’s Thesis seeks to explain the process of initiation undergone by Henry James’s characters. Characters are chosen for initiation into forbidden knowledge, and, like the Biblical Adam and Eve, are exiled as a result. Though initiation is erotic, it is not sexual, and society falsely perceives a sexually charged relationship between the initiator and the initiate, also called the complementary pair. The initiate faces exile and death because of his forbidden knowledge. He no longer has a place in his society, which leads to his social death and eventually physical death. James’s reader is initiated along with the characters, …

Turning Back Time: Duration, Simultaneity, And The Timeless In Fitzgerald And Fincher's Benjamin Button, Nathan Wagner

English Theses

This MA thesis seeks to apply Henri Bergson’s theory of time to a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and David Fincher’s film adaptation of the text, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. By applying Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity, timeless moments will be seen to emerge in the text and the film. I place Fitzgerald’s text in context with other seminal modernist works in order to provide a study of the importance of the story within its time period. Through Deleuze’s application of Bergson to cinema, I analyze the evolution of the time-image …

Fish From Deep Water, Monica R. Burchfield

English Theses

These poems are lyrical narratives dealing primarily with the joys and sufferings of familial relationships in present and past generations, and how one is influenced and haunted by these interactions. There is a particular emphasis placed on the relationship between parent and child. Other poems deal with passion, both in the tangible and spiritual realms. The poems aim to use vivid figurative language to explore complex and sometimes distressing situations and emotions.

Opening The Window To Edward Whittemore: Systems That Govern Human Experience, Joseph L. Winland Jr.

English Theses

Edward Whittemore (1933-1995) is a now almost unknown American writer. This project seeks to bring Edward Whittemore to light. Though he has a simple voice and a subtle but vast knowledge of history, he writes with a fantastic imagination and dramatizes a timely but tragic message. In “Part One” of Sinai Tapestry, Whittemore explores the complex relationship between Chaos and Order through the extravagant lives of his major characters, Plantagenet Strongbow and Skanderbeg Wallenstein. Through a biography of Whittemore’s life and a close analysis of Strongbow’s and Wallenstein’s relationship, I will highlight Whittemore’s depth as an author and thinker, make …

The Visual Rhetoric Of Craftsmanship, Amalia K. Gonzales

English Theses

Within the existing research about communicative devices within visual rhetoric, most published research exists regarding two-dimensional design such as documents and media graphics. In this paper, I discuss the rhetorical value of handmade items and specifically speak to the ethos that three-dimensional, tangible handmade products inherently possess based upon their visual aesthetic.

"How Silence Best Can Speak": The Distrust Of Speech In George Meredith's Modern Love, Ellen J. Murray

English Theses

The scarcity of speech in George Meredith’s Modern Love creates a deeply psychological narrative, reflecting a distrust of speech and the effectiveness of language in general. The narrator of the poem exists in a space of ambiguity, both blaming and yearning for speech; in his confusion, he remains largely silent. His silence does not only emphasize the distance between husband and wife but also between language and meaning. Furthermore, the narrator’s distrust of language ultimately exposes a breakdown in his certainty of self and truth.

"Sugarman Done Fly Away": Kindred Threads Of Female Madness And Male Flight In The Novels Of Toni Morrison And Classical Greek Myth, Ebony O. Mcneal

English Theses

Madness in women exists as a trope within the literature from the earliest of civilizations. This theme is evident and appears to possess a link with male dysfunction in several of Toni Morrison’s texts. Lack of maternal accountability has long served as a symptom of female mental instability as imposed by patriarchal thought. Mothers who have neglected or harmed their young across cultures and time periods have been forcibly branded with the mark of madness. Female characters in five of Morrison’s novels bear a striking resemblance to the female archetypes of ancient Greece. This paper will demonstrate the kindred strands …

William Shakespeare's Parable Of "Is" And "Seems": Ironies Of God's Providence In Hamlet And Measure For Measure, Joseph L. Kelly

English Theses

This thesis examines Hamlet and Measure for Measure as related “problem plays.” In these plays, Shakespeare uniquely combines the genre of parable and the literary device of irony as a means to involve his audience in the experience of ordeal and deliverance that both reorients the protagonists’ personal, political, and ultimately theological assumptions and prompts spiritual insight in the spectator. As in a parable, a spiritual dimension opens subtly alongside each story to inform the play’s action and engage the spectator in the underlying theological discourse. Irony invites the audience to see the disparity between pretended or mistaken reality and …

Un-Fairytales: Realism And Black Feminist Rhetoric In The Works Of Jessie Fauset, Danielle L. Tillman

English Theses

I am baffled each time someone asks me, “Who is Jessie Fauset?” As I delved into critical work written on Fauset, I found her critics dismissed her work because they read them as bad fairytales that showcase the lives of middle-class Blacks. I respectfully disagree. It is true that her novels concentrate on the Black middle-class; they also focus on the realities of Black women, at a time when they were branching out of their homes and starting careers, not out of financial necessity but arising from their desire for working. They establish the start of what Patricia Hill Collins …

Guyon's Sensitive Appetite, Matthew J. Davis

English Theses

This Master’s Thesis seeks to explain the internal conflicts faced by Guyon, the titular hero of Book II of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Starting with Thomas Aquinas’ designations of the sensitive versus the intellectual appetite, I show that Guyon struggles to maintain the dominance of his intellectual appetite as he puts his vaunted temperance to a series of tests. The hero manages to appease his sensitive appetite through the vice of curiositas, yet the power of his sensitive appetite demands dramatic and violent acts of repression to quash it in Mammon’s Cave and in the Bower of Bliss. Guyon’s intellectual …

William Apess And Sherman Alexie: Imagining Indianness In (Non)Fiction, Gabriel M. Andrews

English Theses

This paper proposes the notion that early Native American autobiographical writings from such authors as William Apess provide rich sources for understanding syncretic authors and their engagement with dominant Anglo-Christian culture. Authors like William Apess construct an understanding of what constitutes Indianness in similar and different ways to the master narratives produced for Native peoples. By studying this nonfiction, critics can gain a broader understanding of contemporary Indian fiction like that of Sherman Alexie. The similarities and differences between the strategies of these two authors reveal entrenched stereotypes lasting centuries as well as instances of bold re-signification, a re-definition of …

From Rivers To Gardens: The Ambivalent Role Of Nature In My ?Ntonia, O Pioneers!, And Death Comes To The Archbishop, Graham Kirkland

English Theses

Though her early writing owes much to nineteenth-century American Realism, Willa Cather experiments with male and female literary traditions while finding her own modern literary voice. In the process Cather gives nature an ambivalent role in My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and Death Comes to the Archbishop. She produces a tension between rivers and gardens, places where nature and culture converge. Like Mary Austin and Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather confronts the boundaries between humans and nature.

The Pleiadic Age Of Stuart Poesie: Restoration Uranography, Dryden's Judicial Astrology, And The Fate Of Anne Killigrew, Morgan Alexander Brown

English Theses

The following Thesis is a survey of seventeenth-century uranography, with specific focus on the use of the Pleiades and Charles's Wain by English poets and pageant writers as astrological ciphers for the Stuart dynasty (1603-1649; 1660-1688). I then use that survey to address the problem of irony in John Dryden's 1685 Pindaric elegy, "To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew," since the longstanding notion of what the Pleiades signify in Dryden's ode is problematic from an astronomical and astrological perspective. In his elegiac ode, Dryden translates a young female artist to the Pleiades to actuate her apotheosis, not for …

The Presence Of Jacques Lacan's Mirror Stage And Gaze In Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde And In Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 Film, Enoch Shane Smith

English Theses

For many years, theorists have turned to popular movies and books to help interpret the difficult principles of Jacques Lacan. However, one story that has gotten very little attention is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its derivative body of film adaptations. Both the novella and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 film are a small part of an intertextual body of work which contains scenes that play out the Lacanian principles of the mirror stage and the gaze very well. Since art imitates life, an in depth exploration of the way that these scenes play out …

A Woman's Touch In F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night: Pulling The Women Out Of The Background, Merry B. Luong

English Theses

This is a critical study of F. Scott Fitzgerald‟s Tender Is the Night focusing primarily on the lack of examination and criticism surrounding the women characters. Included are reviews of Fitzgerald‟s personal and professional life from the publication of his critically acclaimed The Great Gatsby until the publication of his last complete novel, Tender Is the Night, discussion of the contemporary and current criticism of the novel, and a feminist reading of the novel in order to focus more significant critical attention upon the women characters in order to create a fuller understanding of Fitzgerald‟s novel.

Ford Madox Ford's Good Soldier In A Modern World, Constance Hinds

English Theses

Ford often wrote about virtuous gentlemen ruined by the modern society he saw developing around him. While Ford Madox Ford was writing The Good Soldier, ther was a sense of displacement in England and the class system was starting to crumble. Edward Ashburnham, one of the two male protagonists in The Good Soldier, is described as a Chevalier Bayard and there are definitely some similarities between Ashburnham and Bayard. For instance, both men lived during periods of great societal change and both faithfully served their countries. However, the feudal lifestyle that was appropriate for Bayard in the fifteenth-century is unavailable …

The Ministry Of Passion And Meditation: Robert Southwell's Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares And The Adaptation Of Continental Influences, Mark Russell Benedict

English Theses

In his most popular prose work, Mary Magdalens Funeral Teares (1591), English Jesuit Robert Southwell adapts the Mary Magdalene tradition by incorporating the meditative practices of St. Ignatius Loyola coupled with the Petrarchan language of poetry. Thus, he creates a prose work that ministered to Catholic souls, appealed to Protestant audiences, and initiated the literature of tears in England. Southwell readapts the traditional image of Mary Magdalene for a Catholic Early Modern audience by utilizing the techniques of Jesuit meditation, which later flourished in the weeper texts of Richard Crashaw and George Herbert. His vividly imagined scenes also employ the …