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Articles 1 - 20 of 20
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Performing Passing: Theatricality In Zo‰ Wicomb's Playing In The Light And Nella Larsen's Passing, Jennifer L. Apgar
Performing Passing: Theatricality In Zo‰ Wicomb's Playing In The Light And Nella Larsen's Passing, Jennifer L. Apgar
English Theses
Acts of “passing” inform the plots of Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light and Nella Larsen’s Passing. Examples of contemporary South African fiction and Harlem Renaissance fiction respectively, these texts explore racial passing and its correlative, social passing. Social passing includes enactment of social relationships, responds to class anxieties, and requires repression of emotions as participating characters attempt to fix their performed roles into permanent identities. At issue are the texts’ multiple enactments of passing with special interest paid to these acts’ constitutive theatricality. Characters perform within narrative settings, locations subsequently deconstructed exposing both implicit and explicit theatrical functions. Threshold …
A Rhetorical Analysis Of An American University's Diversity Policy, Adam C. Faust
A Rhetorical Analysis Of An American University's Diversity Policy, Adam C. Faust
English Theses
This thesis focuses on the guidelines that university governing bodies have adopted in order to regulate the actions of its student population and the factors that influenced their decisions. The evaluation of these guidelines is not a judicial analysis, but an analysis of the rhetorical aspects associated with the guidelines. The thesis contends that the current rhetoric of diversity on American college campuses, while drafted with the best of intentions, fails due to the limitations that it places on its students, the morality argument in which it draws strength, and the increase in differences, not acceptance, that it creates. The …
By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Angela Marie Hall-Godsey
By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Angela Marie Hall-Godsey
English Dissertations
By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction explores the intentional methods of self-castration that lead to authorial empowerment. The project relies on the following self-castration formula: the author’s recognition of herself as a being defined by lack. This lack refers to the inability to signify within the phallocentric system of language. In addition to this initial recognition, the female author realizes writing for public consumption emulates the process of castration but, nevertheless, initiates the writing process as a way to resituate the origin of castration—placing it in her own hand. The female writer also recognizes …
The Morphic Orator: Transmogrified Delivery On The Audio-Enabled Web, Brian Johnson Snead
The Morphic Orator: Transmogrified Delivery On The Audio-Enabled Web, Brian Johnson Snead
English Theses
Audio is an effective but often overlooked component of World Wide Web delivery. Of the nearly twenty billion web pages estimated to exist, statistically few use sound. Those few using sound often use it poorly and with hardly any regard to theoretical and rhetorical issues. This thesis is an examination of the uses of audio on the World Wide Web, specifically focusing on how that use could be informed by current and historical rhetorical theory. A theoretical methodology is applied to suggest the concepts and disciplines required to make online audio more meaningful and useful. The thesis argues for the …
Can The Wound Be Taken At Its Word?: Performed Trauma In Don Delillo's The Body Artist And Falling Man, Brett Thomas Griffin
Can The Wound Be Taken At Its Word?: Performed Trauma In Don Delillo's The Body Artist And Falling Man, Brett Thomas Griffin
English Theses
Two of Don DeLillo’s recently published novels, The Body Artist (2001) and Falling Man (2007), feature performance artists performing trauma. Through the bodies of these performers, DeLillo restates the central concern of trauma studies: if trauma is that which denies mediation, how may we speak about traumatic experience? DeLillo’s stagings of traumatic (re)iterations illustrate how the missed originary moment of trauma precludes directly referential content in traumatic representation. But I propose that performed trauma – the knowledge of forgetting addressed to another – recapitulates the structure of traumatic experience itself, thereby revealing trauma to be wholly constituted in repetition, and …
Origins And Orthodoxy: Anthologies Of American Literature And American History, Daniel Richard Vollaro
Origins And Orthodoxy: Anthologies Of American Literature And American History, Daniel Richard Vollaro
English Dissertations
This dissertation examines how the new “multicultural phase” anthologies of American literature treat American history. Anthologies of American literature are more historical, more diverse, and more multidisciplinary than ever before, but they have over-extended themselves in both their historical and representational reach. They are not, despite their diversity and historicism, effective vehicles for promoting critical discussions of American history in the classroom. Chapter One outlines a brief history of anthologies of American literature, while also introducing the terminology and methodology used in this study. Chapter Two explores the role of the headnote as a vehicle for American history in anthologies …
Wees Gonna Tell It Like We Know It Tuh Be: Coded Language In The Works Of Julia Peterkin And Gloria Naylor, Crystal Margie Hills
Wees Gonna Tell It Like We Know It Tuh Be: Coded Language In The Works Of Julia Peterkin And Gloria Naylor, Crystal Margie Hills
English Theses
This study employs African American literary criticism and critical discourse analysis to evaluate Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988). These women write stories of African American life on the Sea Islands through different prisms that evoke cultural memory within and outside the texts. Peterkin, a white Southerner, writes as an "onlooker" and “pioneer” of fictional Gullah culture; Naylor, a black Northerner by birth, writes as an "outsider" to Gullah culture, although a veteran of African American Southern heritage. The authors' hybridity produce different literary voices. A close examination of their discourse conveys a coded …
Illuminating The Queer Subtext: The Unmentioned Affairs In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Nora Neill
Illuminating The Queer Subtext: The Unmentioned Affairs In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Nora Neill
English Theses
Willa Cather contests the contemporary notion that identification links to a natural or original order. For example, that man equals masculine and femininity comes from an essential connection to woman. Cather deconstructs normativity through her use of character relationships in order to redefine successful interpersonal alliances. Thus, Alexandra, the protagonist of O Pioneers! builds a home and friendships that exemplify alternatives to stasis. My readings of O Pioneers! display the places in the novel where Cather subtly contests the ideology of naturalization. I make lesbian erotic and queer social interactions visible through a discourse on Cather’s symbolism. I favor queer …
"You Done Lost Yo' Mind Ain't No Such Thang As Aave": Exploring African American Resistance To Aave, Tiffany Marquise' Jones
"You Done Lost Yo' Mind Ain't No Such Thang As Aave": Exploring African American Resistance To Aave, Tiffany Marquise' Jones
English Theses
John Rickford (1990) states that “80%-90% of African Americans speak some form of Black English”, also known as “Ebonics” or “African American Vernacular English” (AAVE). In 1996, when the Oakland School Board proposed its resolution designating Ebonics as their students’ primary language, many African Americans outright rejected the School Board’s reference and description of their language (Smitherman, 2000, 150). Among them were Baby boomers (1940-1960s), who participated in the debates, and the Generation X’ers, (1960s-1980s), who were informed by the debates. A recent interview of members from both groups show that there is continued skepticism regarding the legitimacy of Ebonics …
Dread Talk: The Rastafarians' Linguistic Response To Societal Oppression, Carol Anne Manget-Johnson
Dread Talk: The Rastafarians' Linguistic Response To Societal Oppression, Carol Anne Manget-Johnson
English Theses
Opposed to the repressive socio-economic political climate that resulted in the impoverishment of masses of Jamaicans, the Jamaican Rastafarians developed a language to resist societal oppression. This study examines that language--Dread Talk--as resistive language. Having determined that the other variations spoken in their community--Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole--were inadequate to express their dispossessed circumstances, the Rastafarians forged an identity through their language that represents a resistant philosophy, music and religion. This resistance not only articulates their socio-political state, but also commands global attention. This study scrutinizes the lexical, phonological, and syntactical structures of the poetic music discourse of Dread …
William Faulkner, His Eye For Archetypes, And America's Divided Legacy Of Medicine, Geraldine Mart Harmon
William Faulkner, His Eye For Archetypes, And America's Divided Legacy Of Medicine, Geraldine Mart Harmon
English Dissertations
The medical division between constitutional homeopathy and allopathic medicine shaped the culture in which William Faulkner grew up and wrote. Early 20th century America was daily subjected to a variety of conflicting approaches to maintaining or recovering physical, psychological, or spiritual health. The culture was discussing the role of vitalism for good health; the use and dosage of medicine to treat the individual or to treat the disease instead; the interaction of the mind, body, and spirit; the tendency of personality to emerge from inherent biology or acquired traits; the varied explanations for illness; and the legitimacy of doctors, their …
Thinking Back Through Our Fathers: Woolf Reading Shakespeare In Orlando And A Room Of One's Own, Maureen Gallagher
Thinking Back Through Our Fathers: Woolf Reading Shakespeare In Orlando And A Room Of One's Own, Maureen Gallagher
English Theses
This thesis is a feminist interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s treatment of Shakespeare in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. Although Woolf’s admiration of Shakespeare is evident in both texts, Woolf’s identification of Shakespeare as a gender-neutral or feminist-friendly writer must be qualified. Woolf presents Shakespeare as a worthy but incomplete artistic model, for his work does not explore women with adequate complexity. In these texts, Woolf partially “writes with” Shakespeare, but she also uses his literary works and his status as a cultural icon both to critique the conventional treatment of women as limited by the male perspective and …
The Power Of Timelessness And The Contemporary Influence Of Modern Thought, Katie Reece Moss
The Power Of Timelessness And The Contemporary Influence Of Modern Thought, Katie Reece Moss
English Dissertations
In this dissertation I examine a variety of modern and postmodern texts by applying the theories of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Specifically, I apply Bergson's theories of time, memory, and evolution to the texts in order to analyze the meaning of the poem and novels. I assert that all of the works disrupt conventional structure in order to question the linear nature of time. They do this because each must deal with the pressures of external chaos, and, as a result, they find timeless moments can create an internal resolution to the external chaos. I set out to create connections …
Resisting The Vortex: Abjection In The Early Works Of Herman Melville, Jennifer Mary Wing
Resisting The Vortex: Abjection In The Early Works Of Herman Melville, Jennifer Mary Wing
English Dissertations
“Resisting the Vortex” examines the tenuous role of the abject in Melville’s early writings. While much psychoanalytic criticism on Melville and his works is driven by Freudian and Lacanian analyses, my study explores the role(s) of women, particularly that of the mother, through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of abjection. I suggest that Melville’s depiction of the abject evolves and becomes more apparent as his writing career progresses. I include Typee, Mardi, Moby-Dick and Pierre in my analysis since these texts demonstrate the evolution of Melville’s relationship to the abject mother. I argue that throughout each of these works, the …
Reading Autistic Experience, Natalie Collins Trice
Reading Autistic Experience, Natalie Collins Trice
English Dissertations
Within the field of Disability Studies, research on cognitive and developmental disabilities is relatively rare in comparison to other types of disabilities. Using Clifford Geertz's anthropological approach, "thick description," autism can be better understood by placing both fiction and non-fiction accounts of the disorder into a larger theoretical context. Applying concepts from existing works in Disability Studies to the major writings of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Donna Haraway also proves to be mutually enlightening. This ethnographic approach within the context of analysis of literary texts provides a model by which representations of individuals who are cognitively or …
The Third Person In The Room: Servants And The Construction Of Identity In The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel, Jennifer Thomson Lawrence
The Third Person In The Room: Servants And The Construction Of Identity In The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel, Jennifer Thomson Lawrence
English Dissertations
“The Third Person in the Room: Servants and the Construction of Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel” explores the eighteenth-century Gothic novelists’ use of the stock servant character device to illustrate the tenuous nature of identity construction in a novelistic world torn between an admiration for its feudalistic past and a desire to embrace rising notions of individualism. I examine representations of real and literary servants to argue that the servant figure offers a convenient avenue for the discussion of class, social expectation, and economics, for as both family members and participants in the economy of the outside world, servants …
Clarice Lispector's An Apprenticeship, Or The Book Of Delights: The Role Of Silence In The Cultivation Of Intimacy", Susan Katherine Dulaney
Clarice Lispector's An Apprenticeship, Or The Book Of Delights: The Role Of Silence In The Cultivation Of Intimacy", Susan Katherine Dulaney
English Theses
This thesis undertakes to explore silence as it functions in relation to intimacy in Clarice Lispector’s last narrative. It asks how silence, when perceived as a generative force, may cultivate intimacy between men and women, opening up a horizon of equality and exchange between the sexes. Using Lispector’s work as a symbolic location for asking larger questions about the role of Eros in contemporary literature, the first chapter is dedicated to introducing her work as it relates to the critical canon. After examining silence and intimacy as each have been conceptualized by thinkers from various philosophical traditions, I incorporate the …
Divine Destiny Or Free Choice: Nietzsche's Strong Wills In The Harry Potter Series, Julia Rose Pond
Divine Destiny Or Free Choice: Nietzsche's Strong Wills In The Harry Potter Series, Julia Rose Pond
English Theses
This paper considers the influences of fate and free will in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Current scholarship on the topic generally agrees that Rowling champions free will by allowing her characters learning opportunities through their choices. By using Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy on fate and free will and by more closely examining the Harry Potter texts, this paper demonstrates fate’s stronger presence in Rowling’s fictional world. Certain strong-willed characters rise above their peers’ fated states by embracing their personal fates and exercising their wills to create themselves within fated destinies. The paper also explores the possibility of an authority directing …
The Great Gatsby And Its 1925 Contemporaries, Marjorie Ann Hollomon Faust
The Great Gatsby And Its 1925 Contemporaries, Marjorie Ann Hollomon Faust
English Dissertations
ABSTRACT This study focuses on twenty-one particular texts published in 1925 as contemporaries of The Great Gatsby. The manuscript is divided into four categories—The Impressionists, The Experimentalists, The Realists, and The Independents. Among The Impressionists are F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, Willa Cather (The Professor’s House), Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain), Elinor Wylie (The Venetian Glass Nephew), John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer), and William Faulkner (New Orleans Sketches). The Experimentalists are Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans), E. E. Cummings (& aka “Poems 48-96”), Ezra Pound (A Draft of XVI Cantos), T. S. Eliot (“The …
Cotton Mather's Relationship To Science, James Daniel Hudson
Cotton Mather's Relationship To Science, James Daniel Hudson
English Theses
The subject of this project is Cotton Mather's relationship to science. As a minister, Mather's desire to harmonize science with religion is an excellent medium for understanding the effects of the early Enlightenment upon traditional views of Scripture. Through "Biblia Americana" and The Christian Philosopher, I evaluate Mather's effort to relate Newtonian science to the six creative days as recorded in Genesis 1. Chapter One evaluates Mather's support for the scientific theories of Isaac Newton and his reception to natural philosophers who advocate Newton's theories. Chapter Two highlights Mather's treatment of the dominant cosmogonies preceding Isaac Newton. The Conclusion returns …