Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Hardly Working: The Labor Concerns Of Graduate Student Assistants In Writing Programs, Lily Victoria Howard-Hill

Theses and Dissertations

The instructors of undergraduate writing courses are very often graduate students who exist in a space between student and teacher, subsequently shouldering a dual burden of responsibility. This is particularly the case in freshman writing and composition classes. Graduate students that hold assistantships and work in writing programs have a number of concerns related to their academic labor, specifically the benefits and compensation they receive in exchange for their work. To further illustrate these issues, this project offers the results of an IRB-approved study that highlights the tight connection between graduate student assistants’ working conditions, the financial and material benefits …

“Speak For Yourself”: Ovidian Women And The Suppression Of Voice And Complaint In Metamorphoses And Heroides, Grayson Elizabeth Newman

Theses and Dissertations

Ovid’s portrayal and attitude towards women is one that is particularly puzzling and contradictory throughout his Metamorphoses and Heroides. Recent scholarship on Ovidian literature is only divided on whether or not Ovid’s intentions within these two works were to sympathize with the Roman woman’s experience or to reinforce the lack of female representation in Roman society; however, I argue that Ovid fails to achieve empathy for the Roman woman. In Heroides, these women are pining and tragic, often meeting some terrible fate shortly after being abandoned by their suitors and putting forth a complaint. Conversely, women in Metamorphoses …

Nature As Culture: Ecofeminist Narratives Of Environmental And Colonial History, Sydney Leimbach

Theses and Dissertations

“Nature as Culture: Ecofeminist Narratives of Environmental and Colonial History” is a cross-cultural, comparative, feminist investigation of two films, The Nightingale and Wolfwalkers, and two books, The Giving Tree and The Overstory. The narratives are analyzed through a combination of ecofeminism and decolonial feminism, revealing the four narratives’ investment in the effects of colonization on the environment. The two chapters explore the association of women with nature, traditionally used as a subordinating position, instead as a condition of empathetic understanding with both the colonized and the environment. Further, these narratives use the association of women with nature as …

Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, And Cringe, Katherine Anne Schell

Theses and Dissertations

Cringe, the negative reflexive reaction we experience when we witness something embarrassing or awkward, has a bad reputation in the queer community. In online and physical queer spaces, there is a pervading belief that “cringe culture” must be antithetical to queerness, that no queer community could possibly achieve liberation until it has eradicated the threat of cringe. This thesis revises that cringe vs. queer positioning by reimagining cringe as its own rhythm of queerness and examining the productive aspects of cringe through engagement with thinkers like Karen Barad and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The thesis, formatted as a response to a …

Identity In Literacy Narratives: Toward Reflexive Pedagogy In First Year Writing, Laiken Elizabeth Harrigan

Theses and Dissertations

An ongoing discussion for composition pedagogues is the relation of individuals’ identities and discourse histories in relation to academic discourses. In this thesis, I argue that academic discourse cannot be entirely separated from personal discourse, as individuals are always in conversation with their discoursal histories and identities. In order to better understand how students perceive their relationships to academic discourse, I analyze how First Year Writing (FYW) students experience the discourse of FYW— where they either intertwine their identities or we see their personal identities collide with the academic space. I used open coding to conduct a textual analysis of …

Animal Representation Of Race In The Princess And The Frog, Tiffany Tyantyan Enoch

Theses and Dissertations

Disney’s 2009 film The Princess and the Frog was created in response to racial criticism. It features the first Black princess as a means of promoting racial equality. This film attempts to positively portray Black characters, who were depicted as violent and lazy in previous animations.

While the film showcases positive themes (e.g., internal beauty and virtuous work) and portrays Black characters in a more positive light than previous films, it still perpetuates the typical racism against people of color. The lack of accurate and equal representation of racial groups in recognizable and famous stories is a persistent issue, and …

Anthropocene Composition: Teaching Terminal Generations In The Pre-Apocalyptic Classroom, John Michael Purfield

Theses and Dissertations

The Anthropocene is an era characterized by human alteration of the planet at deep geological levels and permeation of anthropogenic damage across all biomes. The primary crisis of this era is climate change, which is understood broadly as the anthropogenic disruption in weather patterns and global temperature averages caused by carbon emissions and other pollutants, as well as extractivism and terraforming (deforestation, monoculture farming, desertification and alterations of waterways, for example). Though popular media tends to frame climate change as a looming but always future problem, it is currently producing casualties, both human and nonhuman. The ongoing great extinction correlates …

Literature As A Monument: Uncle Tom’S Cabin Reflecting The Morality Of A Nation, Shalane Parcenue Conrads

Theses and Dissertations

This essay studies the critical response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by studying the novel’s critical reception from publication and into contemporary America to understand how the novel remains an institution of Civil War remembrance. In accepting the polemical status of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as both a literary and historical document, I argue that the novel is a monument in American culture. In studying the wide spectrum of critical response to the novel since its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes a social barometer that reflects the controversial race relations in the United States from the Civil …

The Divine Consumptive: The Depiction Of Tuberculosis In Jane Eyre, Haley Highfield

Theses and Dissertations

Disease was a constant and unavoidable facet of life in British society during the Victorian Era. Despite the overwhelming prevalence of disease, the true cause of these illnesses remained mysterious until the turn of the century. With the origins of many of these diseases being either unknown or ascribed to mistaken sources, effective treatment was an impossibility. Tuberculosis is a prime example of this conundrum. Even with an estimated twenty-five percent of the British population dying from this particular disease during the nineteenth century, the actual provenance for infection was not discovered until 1882 with Robert Koch’s identification of the …

Embodied Participation In Digital Publics: Somnambulance, Surveillance, And The Construction Of Identity, Adam S. Padgett

Theses and Dissertations

In our current information landscape, routine surveillance has changed the nature of rhetorical engagement in public spheres. Scholarship in publics theory have done productive work to map out the complex field of discursive participation. Michael Warner has demonstrated how, through the circulation of common texts, people no longer have to be in public in order to participate in publics. However, in the wake of ubiquitous surveillance, this focus on publicness has offered little attention to privacy in publics theory. I argue that legal and postmodern theories of bodies-as-texts is problematic for reading and writing bodies online. Intersecting with embodiment and …

“The Time Has Not Been Wasted”: The Accounting Diaries Of Marian Evans And Louisa May Alcott, Ashley A. Alvarado

Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, the Victorian desire for utility, respectability, and self-improvement became deeply ingrained in daily life, and consequently, the diary grew to be a popular tool to measure and evaluate time management and personal development. Accounting diaries, in particular, set out to provide a record of activity and achievement (or conversely, inactivity and failure). This thesis performs a case study of the accounting diaries of Marian Evans (George Eliot) and Louisa May Alcott, exploring how they document progress towards their personal goals of utility, morality, and productivity. Specific diary-writing techniques—such as an efficient style, income tracking, illness recording, …

Trans-Atlantic Composition: The History Of British Academic Writing, Gareth George Rees-White

Theses and Dissertations

I author a revisionary comparative history of British Academic Writing and American Composition studies. My core argument is that the Composition story has always, ultimately, been a Trans-Atlantic one. This project serves two key goals: 1) it offers a comprehensive history of UK writing education; while 2) simultaneously offering a revisionist US history that fights the claim that uniquely American exigencies led to a uniquely American education system that therefore has little to learn from other global Compositions. This project tracks the history of university level writing education in the UK from the 1200s to the modern day, and follows …

‘Conspiring Together’: Woolf’S Investigations On ‘Party Consciousness’ And Interwar Instability In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Madeline Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Woolf has been generalized popularly as enthusiastic about parties, relishing their effervescence and conversation, and she had a particular bent for imagining a party’s vivacity while often remaining distanced from it. This imagination and duality would mark Woolf’s thoughts as is recorded in her diary entries, and they became especially apparent in her fiction. In an entry on April 27^th, 1925, less than one month from Mrs. Dalloway’s May 14^th publication, she declares that “people have any number of states of consciousness” and reports that she “should like to investigate the party consciousness” (A Writer’s …

Race And Technology In Southern Literature, Civil War To Civil Rights, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers the intersection of technology and race in the literature of the American South from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though narratives about technology in American literature often promise democracy, equality, improvement, and progress, the role of technology in southern literature is more complex and ambivalent. Literature from and about the South from the Civil War to the civil rights era, by Black and white southern authors like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty reveals technology’s ability to uphold and naturalize southern white supremacy, but also to subvert it. Southern literature traces a pattern …

Reimagining Prince Hall: Race, Freemasonry, And Material Culture In Boston, 1775-1870, Sueanna Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation revisits the subject of early black freemasonry and draws upon a new wealth of archival material to recontextualize it through the lens of social history and print and material culture. This study explores the way that freemasonry operated in the daily lives of black masons and presents a new social history of the formation of Boston’s first black masonic lodge. Turning specifically to print and material culture, it traces the way that the earliest black masons engaged in the broader print and material culture of the society, thus promoting interracial engagement. This study also traces how the Prince …

Postcapitalist Desert Visions From Earth To Anarres, David J. Goff

Theses and Dissertations

Human industrial and economic activity around the world—happening either directly in the global North (recall the coal-choked London of Dickens) or, increasingly, in (un)developing nations of the global South because of the North’s demand— has burned and pumped so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that climate has noticeably changed even over the span of a single generation. As long as the world and its people are held in the clutches of the hegemonic capitalist politico-economic system, the environment will continue to degrade, and so will life for all the people of Earth, especially those most vulnerable. …

“Everything Will Be As It Is Now, Just A Little Different”: Affectively Imagining Alternative Worlds In Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Grace Riley

Theses and Dissertations

One of the most crucial concerns of cultural criticism today is the question of how to grapple with what Mark Fisher refers to as the “malaise” of the present; the pervasive belief that capitalism is the only viable option, that there is no alternative ‘other.’ However, there remains a vibrant scholarship committed to resisting such pessimism that theorizes the possibility of alternative, utopian futures that lie athwart the apocalyptic present. This thesis explores the question of how one begins to imagine such alternative futures from within a capitalist order that constantly works to pre-emptively subsume any possibilities of resistance. Art …

Transgressive Migrations: Gender Roles, Space, And Place In American Novels, 1900-1999, Selena Gail Larkin

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine how gender roles combine with changes in space and place to affect women protagonists in twentieth-century American literature. I argue that as these characters migrate, the (self-)perception of their identities shift. Particularly, their outward performances as well as their internal awareness change. My analysis concentrates on the novel genre because of specific characteristics—plot, characterization, and narration. The chosen literary works on which I focus are The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Quicksand (1928), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Dollmaker (1954), and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996).

Concepts that I …

“What Can There Be But Witchcraft?”: History, Women, And Witches In Sylvia Townsend Warner’S Lolly Willowes And Graham Swift’S Waterland, Thomas Bedenbaugh

Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous relationship between history, women and witchcraft in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Graham Swift’s Waterland foregrounds the constructedness of historical narratives while also recuperating women’s marginalized positions within history. Both novels link historical narratives with the received ideas upon which norms of gender, sexuality, and the nation are constructed. In recognizing this, both authors challenge the monolithic male gaze of history, revealing it to be a story which, totalizing as it may be, is not in fact “natural.” While many women in both novels are configured as haunting figures - women who confuse the boundary separation presence …

Sanctuary Poetics And Contemporary Us Culture, Alex Howerton

Theses and Dissertations

Sanctuary Poetics and Contemporary US Culture argues that contemporary poets of color create spaces of safety, relation, and justice through the act of writing as resistance itself. Sanctuary Poetics discusses poetry responding to the myriad crises of our contemporary moment, and considers how poets, through formal techniques such as ekphrasis or synecdoche, envision moments of shelter and connection that provide necessary relief to imperiled populations. I introduce the idea of a sanctuary poetics through Amanda Gorman’s recent poem “The Hill We Climb,” performed at Joseph Biden’s inauguration. The first chapter covers citizenship and the work of the Undocupoets, a multiracial …

Creation’S Face In Moby-Dick, Richard Jackson Guignard Wells

Theses and Dissertations

In 1973, Gerhard T. Alexis published “Two Footnotes on a Faceless Whale” (AN&Q, vol. 11, pp. 99-100) to point out how Melville was alluding to an exchange between Yahweh and Moses in Exodus 33 during a commentary by Ishmael in Chapter 86 “The Tail” of Moby-Dick (1851). By using Ishmael’s allusion to the facelessness of Yahweh in relation to his hand in Exodus 33 as a window, I meditate on the relationship between the hand and face images more properly to propose how they are functioning in Melville’s epic in regard to the phenomenon of veiling. The corporeal body in …

“Where Beauty And Anguish Had Contended”: Eden, Gender, And Creativity In Melville’S Pierre, Kersey Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations

Much critical interest regarding incest in Pierre has been focused horizontally on the Glendinning family tree, in terms of the brother-sister relationship forged between Pierre Glendinning and Isabel Banford. But this thesis evaluates incest within Melville’s scheme of creativity and gender in the novel. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have established, to author a text is to become owner of its subjects—a father of one’s “brain-children” (Gilbert and Gubar 7). So, as Pierre writes Isabel into the Glendinning name, the incestuous relationship between Pierre and Isabel may be viewed through the lens of a father-daughter dynamic between the …

“Power And The Orientations Of Resistance In Twentieth-Century American Literature”, Victoria Eleanor Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

"Power and the Orientations of Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Literature” analyzes the intersections of space, power, and the possibility for alternatives to power structures. I argue that social power circumscribes the spatial possibilities of normative and non-normative subjectivities. In particular, power curtails the ability of marginalized subjects (such as women, queer people, and people of color) to forge alternatives to the current social order. In dialogue with recent scholars of race studies, feminism, and queer theory, this project reveals how dominated subjects employ their quotidian spaces as sites of resistance and survival. The literature I examine in this dissertation identifies …

Southern United States English As A Rhetorical Device In The Field Of Marketing: A Study And Implications For Business Writing Pedagogy, Megan Jacklynn Busch

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation project, I examine how professionals in the South use their Southern United States English (SUSE) to communicate in business situations. My goals are to (1) understand how regional language variety rhetorically shapes writtenprofessional communication and (2) establish a pedagogical framework for business writing that attunes to the nuances of language variation in the workplace. I hypothesize that speakers of SUSE implement regional dialects to form interpersonal business connections and build ethos and that SUSE has a significant rhetorical role to place in professional communications. To test this hypothesis, I develop a hybrid method of interviewing, discourse analysis, …

Calculating A Hero: Computational Analysis And Chivalry In Chaucer’S The Canterbury Tales, Alexander Handley Humphreys

Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to provide a basis by which distant reading techniques may be applied to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The critical corpus is oddly devoid of studies examining these techniques as tools for understanding Chaucer’s work. This paper endeavors to rectify this gap by demonstrating the kinds of insights made available by computational distant reading techniques as described by Johanna Drucker, Matthew Jockers and Jerome Bellegarda, among others. This study is founded on the belief that close reading and other forms of analysis needlessly exclude a broader view of the target work. It is not my intention in this …

Reviving Rhetoric Through Conversation: Feminist Rhetorical Pedagogies For A Deliberative Democracy, Sadie Suzanne Carr

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have long discussed the possibilities of a deliberative democracy in which the people of the nation engage in public dialogue and discuss the pressing political, social, and economic issues of the day, in order to encourage political participation (Gripsrud et al. xix). This thesis suggests that in order to achieve something resembling a deliberative democracy, there must be an increase in rhetorical education throughout a student’s schooling in order to foster the skills that young people need to participate in public deliberation once they leave the classroom. In order to achieve these educational goals, this thesis also proposes that …

Aesthetic Activisms: Language Politics And Inheritances In Recent Poetry From The U.S. South, Sunshine Dempsey

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation, Aesthetic Activisms: Language Politics and Inheritances in Recent Poetry from the U.S. South, is to illustrate how four contemporary poets incorporate and adapt literary forms and linguistic structures to emphasize the exclusionary systems of language that undergird accepted southern cultural practices. Aesthetic Activismslooks at four poets, Natasha Trethewey, Fred Moten, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and C.D. Wright, who challenge concepts of regional literary inheritances that refuses to recognize a broad plurality of voices and histories.

Aesthetic Activisms focuses on poets whose work re-orients, or centralizes, marginalized experience through form and content, resisting essentialist …

Beowulf : A Translation In Blank Verse, Alexander Jones

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a translation into modern English blank verse of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. The bulk of the thesis is the poem itself, which represents not only the academic work of Old English translation, literary interpretation, and the study of early Germanic culture, but also the artistic work of creating poetry and adapting the poem’s content to modern language and contexts. Included with the translation is an introduction placing it in conversation with other prominent modern translations of Beowulf, and analyzing the translation choices made at macro and micro levels. It is shown through this analysis that …

The Logic Of Capital And The Possibility Of Resistance In Chris Abani’S Graceland, Caleb Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This paper argues that Chris Abani’s GraceLand, in the structuring both of the novel’s diegetic and non-diegetic materials and of the presence of labor in the narrative, offers a model of how particularity can effect resistance to capital through iterative survival. The argument begins with a close explication of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s deconstructive reading of Capital, demonstrating how the phenomenon of capital operates and proliferates through a logical structure that simultaneously necessitates and must eradicate the particular labors and histories that ‘precede’ any given instance of capital. With this theoretical framework in hand, the argument looks to James. M. …

“That Confusion Of Who Is Who, Flesh And Flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, And The Body In Postwar And Contemporary American Literature, Jennifer Renee Blevins

Theses and Dissertations

In “That confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, and the Body in Postwar and Contemporary American Literature, I investigate how the body limits, disrupts, ruptures, or recuperates the mother/daughter relationship in postwar and contemporary texts by twentieth-century US women writers. These narratives portray the construction of female subjectivity when the feminine self seems insufficiently distinct from the mother (or daughter). In four chapters arranged chronologically by decade, I examine texts by Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat. On the one hand, mothers in these texts …