Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Games And Time, Evelynn Kersting

Theses and Dissertations

Video games are a medium uniquely immersed in time. While the topic of time and games has been broached by many in the field of game studies, its centrality to both how games function and the experience of playing games remains underexamined. Reading games as literary texts, this holistic study uses queer and social theories to survey the myriad of ways games play with time. I argue games are time machines, each idiosyncratically allows players to experience time differently from traditional linear time. Beyond games with literal time machines, this dissertation examines games which structure themselves around labyrinthine and existential …

Peripheral Citizens: “Colonial Christians,” Caste, And The Politics Of Minoritization In Postcolonial Literature, Suchismita Banerjee

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation looks at the politics of minoritization of Christian communities in post-independent India. I use the term “colonial Christians” as a descriptive category to analyze the three Christian groups (Anglo-Indians or Eurasians, poor domiciled Europeans employed by the Raj, and lower-caste Christian converts) that were formed in the colonial period either by inter-racial mixing between the British and South-Asians or due to Christian missionary conversion. The communities are not united simply by the virtue of their faith. The internalized hierarchy based on class, gender, caste, skin color, European lineage, and access to the English language creates a crucial axis …

Agential Fantasy: A Copenhagen Approach To The Tabletop Role-Playing Game, Scott Michael Bruner

Theses and Dissertations

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published the world’s first commercial role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. The tabletop roleplaying game provoked a new form of textual engagement: it entangled the fantastic tales of early 20th Century pulp fiction with the practice of play. The tabletop role-playing game initiated new perspectives on how classic texts could not only be read but also played. Our contemporary world is becoming increasingly gamified: digital media applications (from mobile phones to the personal home computer) have embedded game elements, structures, processes, and lexicons in our modern lives. Tabletop role-playing was a herald for, and …

Hungry For More: American Food Writing And Globalization, Andrew Kleinke

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation, Hungry for More: American Food Writing and Globalization, investigates several food-focused texts including novels, travelogues, culinary memoirs, and TV shows. I take an interdisciplinary approach by incorporating literary theory into the field of food studies to argue that food texts from the United States reveal a growing anxiety towards what, how, and where we eat. As I show, food writing plays a prominent role in shaping many Americans' interactions with the world. More specifically, I argue that globalization has changed, and continues to transform, access and attachments to food. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I examine …

The Jeremiad In American Science Fiction Literature, 1890-1970, Matthew Schneider

Theses and Dissertations

Scholarship on the form of sermon known as the American jeremiad—a prophetic warning of national decline and the terms of promised renewal for a select remnant—draws heavily on the work of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch. A wealth of scholarship has critiqued Bercovitch’s formulation of the jeremiad, which he argues is a rhetorical form that holds sway in American culture by forcing political discourse to hold onto an “America” as its frame of reference. But most interlocutors still work with the jeremiad primarily in American studies or in terms of national discourse. Rooted in the legacy of Puritan rhetoric, the …

Issues With Reality: Defining And Exploring The Logics Of Alternate Reality Games, Jay Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), a genre of transmedia experiences, are a recent phenomenon, with the first recognized ARG being The Beast (2001), a promotion for the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). This dissertation seeks to more clearly define and investigate contexts of transmedia narratives and games, specifically ARGs. ARGs differ from more popular and well-known contemporary forms of gaming in several ways, perhaps most importantly by intensive use of multiple media. Whereas a player may experience most or all of a conventional video game through a single medium, participants in ARGs must navigate multiple media and technical platforms— networks of …

Landscapes Of Recovery: Belonging And Place In Post-Katrina Literatures, Lee Martin Abbott

Theses and Dissertations

In Landscapes of Recovery: Belonging and Place in Post-Katrina Literatures, I analyze narratives of physical and social change following the events of Hurricane Katrina while providing a critical reading of the representations of New Orleans’s and the Gulf Coast’s urban landscapes in works of urban planning, nonfiction literature, and activist writing. A general line of inquiry informs this project: how do narratives about the disaster landscape following Katrina make visible or invisible certain political subjects? I assert that, by telling stories about the post- and pre-disaster landscape and its urban development history, these narratives carry out the process of displacement. …

Experience As Counterpoint: A Qualitative Study Of Home, Happiness & Aging Amongst First-Generation South Asian Migrants In The U.S., Angela Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Susan Stanford Friedman writes that “Home comes into being most powerfully when it is gone, lost, left behind, desired and imagined” (202). My dissertation addresses notions of home, nostalgia, happiness and aging often found in South Asian diasporic fiction, and from the results of a qualitative study I conducted in which I interviewed five migrant couples who moved to the US from India for educational and professional purposes in the 1960s and 1970s. This project draws on and contributes toward the fields of Migration and Diaspora Studies, Transnational Studies and South Asian Studies. My research aims to explore more uncommonly …

False Spring, Tobias Wray

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores queer kinship and masculinity in an extended poetic sequence. The speakers of these poems attempt to understand the ways that family shapes our sense of gendered identity, particularly how masculinity is constructed and perpetuated through a history of gendered violence in western culture. Investigating the shame of failed masculinity and unsanctioned identity through a range of aesthetic positions, these poems interrogate the tradition of English language poetry as a space where masculinity is both blurred and reinscribed.

In three sections, the collection considers the relationship between paternity and patriarchy, and how queer identity offers alternative aesthetic positions …

Passbook, Mark Robert Brand

Theses and Dissertations

Passbook is a nostalgic novel that considers the meaning of love and family on the edge of a post-mortal near future. As the era of austerity enters its third decade, a social media platform—the eponymous Passbook—allows the living to interact with the dead, and changes the landscape of longevity forever. Wyatt Simmons, a young underemployed college graduate, finds himself locked out of the American Dream by suppressed wages, strangled career opportunities, and overwhelming debt. While coping with the un-deaths of his mother and sister, and estrangement from his financially-comfortable careerist father, Wyatt perseveres in a dissatisfying relationship of necessity with …

The Waiting House, Erika Marie Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

The poems in this collection, The Waiting House, use techniques associated with an evolving elegiac tradition in their portrayal of anticipatory grief born of terminal illness and impending loss. Like the melancholic mourning of modern elegies described by Jahan Ramazani, my poems often resist consolation even as they borrow from elegiac conventions like poetic substitution and repetition. Additionally, they utilize strategies and patterns of literary anger outlined by Alicia Suskin Ostriker as common in postwar American women’s poetry, to express anger that is also anticipatory grief. Finally, this collection uses illness metaphors to question the well being of a larger …

The Comedians: A Novel, Roswitha T. Both

Theses and Dissertations

In the spring of 1970, university campuses across the United States were roiled by the news that the Vietnam War had been escalated, through a bombing campaign, into the jungles of Laos and Cambodia. The protests at UW-Madison campus were among the largest. Frustration that, despite years of protests, the War not only continued but had expanded beyond Vietnam’s borders, led to the bombing of a physics research building on the UW campus later that summer. THE COMEDIANS begins a few weeks after that bombing. The novel’s primary setting is a student housing co-op near Langdon Street, formerly known as …

The Female Accomplice: Rape, Liberalism, And The Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Dawn Arendt Nawrot

Theses and Dissertations

Previous scholarship on rape narratives within the emerging eighteenth-century novel focuses on a dichotomous construction of the female agent struggling against the male rapist and against a biased patriarchal society. However, my project expands this gendered model by evaluating how the presence of colluding female accomplices complicate understandings of female agency and patriarchal violence. I argue that depictions of femes soles as treacherous and mercenary liberal subjects, who embody the corruption of the market, play a vital part in domesticating single women of the developing middle class. I analyze the ways in which female accomplices to rape represent a sizeable …

Granite And Rainbow: Queer Authority And Authorship In T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, And Virginia Woolf, Heejoung Shin

Theses and Dissertations

“Granite and Rainbow” argues that queerness is an essential condition for normative creativity to properly function in literary Modernism. Specifically, for the three modernist authors I explore in this project, queerness is at the heart of their literary performances: the private, bawdy, scintillatingly homoerotic Eliot feigning an impersonal, cerebral voice in public; the wounded, traumatized, feminine Yeats desiring for a compelling, masculine mask; and the scared and unsatisfiable Woolf whose strong desire for the maternal and a female tradition of writing is almost always cut short by her simultaneously antithetical craving for a male tradition of writing. This dissertation approaches …

Madame Bandar's Theatre Of Love, Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine

Theses and Dissertations

Madame Bandar’s Theatre of Love, a comedic bildungsroman, follows the life of Omar Aladdine in the 1960s and ‘70s as he navigates the historic red-light district in downtown Beirut. At eighteen, Omar works at his father’s grocery store on Mutanabi Street, which is lined with brothels. He becomes enamored with the prostitutes at Madame Bandar’s Theatre of Love, where plays and musical performances are staged, and begins to write romantic plays for the brothel. But when civil war breaks out in the spring of 1975, Mutanabi Street is caught in the crossfire. The fate of Madame Bandar’s and all the …

The Small Disasters Lp, Lindsay Daigle

Theses and Dissertations

THE SMALL DISASTERS LP is a book of poems that respond to the visual and audible elements of musical albums. In this way, the ekphrastic method (traditionally, poetic representation of visual art) is simultaneously utilized and critiqued in order to explore an emotional landscape of melancholy, loss, death, and self-doubt. The poems navigate through their separate worlds as the speaker attempts to understand herself among these emotions. Three sections of poems, separated by standalone “intermezzo” poems, fluctuate through disorientation, deconstruction, and reorientation of voice and, therefore, self. The critical introduction to the book situates my investigation of ekphrasis’ value within …

Queer Literary Criticism And The Biographical Fallacy, Shawna Lipton

Theses and Dissertations

“Queer Literary Criticism and the Biographical Fallacy” engages with three fields of inquiry within literary studies: queer literary criticism, modernist studies, and author theory. By looking at the critical reception of four iconic queer modernist authors – Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf– this dissertation reinvestigates the relation between criticism and the figure of the author. Queer criticism-- despite its fundamental critique of identity—relies on the identity of the author when it blurs the distinction between the literary text and the author’s biography. Ultimately this work provides a deeper understanding of the queer relation to the modernist …

Romance Networks: Aspiration & Desire In Today’S Digital Culture, Katherine Morrissey

Theses and Dissertations

Genres like romance have long been seen as nodes of cultural conversation that negotiate broader social tensions around women’s lives and desires. As media industries increasingly design products to function across media platforms and serve as part of larger transmedia franchises, the technological and market structures which once helped to separate different areas of media production are becoming more porous. This project addresses the movement of audiences, texts, and creators across platforms and considers the ways popular genres and their various sub-categories work at both micro and macro levels.

This project focuses on four specific production networks for romantic content: …

Tyne Darling: A Novel, Thomas James Vollman

Theses and Dissertations

Tyne Darling spent most of his youth dreaming about the saints. They came 15 to a pack with a single stick of stale, pink bubble gum. Their posters hung on his walls, and their pictures—cut from the Sports Illustrated magazines he got from his uncle—were tacked to his cork board and taped above his desk. His saints were Hank Aaron and Oscar Gamble, Carlton Fisk and Tom Seaver. His saints had rocket arms and sweet, smooth swings. They played a game that existed out of time on a sacred square within a circle. His saints were baseball players.

Now, as …

The Highland Clearances And The Politics Of Memory, Daniel Guy Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways that the Highland Clearances of Scotland have entered into public consciousness through primary and secondary sources. My dissertation argues first that the Highland Clearances fall within the sphere of colonial intervention, and secondly that there exists a robust body of cultural production that reflects the postcolonial nature of the Highlands. This cultural production is the subject of my dissertation, which examines primary and secondary histories, historical novels, drama and public memorials that preserve and reconstruct the memory of the Clearances. The first chapter examines a number of primary and secondary histories of the Highland Clearances. …