Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"A Changed Understanding Of Our Present": Moby-Dick As Prophetic Ecological Activism, Katie Ann Schini

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale is a classic of American literature, spanning multiple genres and remaining culturally relevant nearly 175 years after its original publication. Though on the surface Moby-Dick reads as an adventure story of a man who experiences the whaling industry firsthand, Herman Melville’s text continues to invite new generations of readership through the framework of the twenty-first century climate crisis.

In this thesis, I position Moby-Dick as a text that can be used to understand our modern society’s current dispositions of ecological grief. My thesis operates at the intersection of three main literary critical theories: ecocriticism, affect, and …

Nothing I Said Was Enough: Writing As Self-Validation, Michama M. Dorvile

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis explores the process of using writing as a coping mechanism to heal from trauma by portraying how personal narratives confront pain and reclaim agency. This thesis also explores how writing serves as a means of survival and sharing testimony. The thesis starts with a critical analysis essay, drawing on literary criticism and trauma theory. I explore how Roxane Gay, Kathryn Harrison, Bessel Van der Kolk, and Maya Angelou have used writing to challenge societal perceptions of trauma, and how through writing, they have resisted erasure.

The heart of this thesis is an original creative work, which involves an …

Heterogeneous Being: The Inhumanities And The Creative-Scientific Aesthetic, Steven L. Ogden

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Heterogeneous Being attempts to set the often-disunited aspects of the sciences and humanities in congruence and to extol and advance a hybrid creative-scientific aesthetic that moves beyond any restricted dimensions of its previously segregated fields of study. It likewise expresses the need to perpetuate that hybrid form of inquiry and representation to successfully address or convey the precarious realities of Earth’s ecological and environmental conditions. Heterogeneous Being asks readers to observe the inexhaustible proofs of our pluralized configurations with the nonhuman world, to recognize the agentic potentialities nonhuman subjects may hold both in and outside of those inhuman enmeshments, and …

Author-Centered Approaches In Ela Instruction: A Multiple Case Study Of Secondary English Teachers, Jennifer M. Lockhart Mchugh

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Literary authors are often neglected in secondary ELA (English Language Arts) literary instruction. Teachers are unsure how to teach about the author and how much time to spend on establishing the context for the text when the goal is to “cover” a variety of literary texts as part of a planned curriculum during the school year. Acknowledging the role of authors’ intentions as well as their experiences and aesthetic decisions in the production of literature may provide new entry points into literary texts for students. This multiple-case study of secondary English teachers and their high school students in a “bounded …

Investigating Pronunciation Teaching Practices And Teachers’ Beliefs About Pronunciation Instruction In Efl/Esl Classrooms, Barry Moussa

Graduate Research Papers

This literature review aims to explore existing research on pronunciation teaching practices and teachers’ beliefs about pronunciation instruction in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms. To achieve this, I will first delve into teacher cognition research, intending to find current reported and actual practices surrounding pronunciation teaching. The importance of pronunciation instruction has been widely discussed and acknowledged by scholars in applied linguistics and teacher education programs. Various studies have identified pronunciation instruction as a key component for fostering effective oral communication skills in second language acquisition, specifically enhancing intelligibility (i.e., accuracy …

Material Sins: A Novel Excerpt, Patrick Markovich

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This excerpt from Material Sins includes the first six chapters of the novel. The book is a supernatural crime thriller focused on the life of a young butcher’s apprentice, Charles, as he attempts to uncover his father’s criminal past. When Charles encounters his father’s childhood friend, Salo, he realizes his father had been involved in the mafia in his youth. As Charles learns the extent of his father’s sins, he fights to maintain his sanity and keep the demonic entity attached to him at bay. With the help of his best friend Sofia, Charles struggles to dispel the demon who …

Rural Girl Comedy Hour, Riley Mccall

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

No abstract provided.

Intersectionality And The Canon Of Romanticism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation discusses the origins of the canon and the place it has in British Romanticism studies both past and present. This research begins unpacking what has already been done in this sector of study and takes it steps further by the use of Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” theory. The “Introduction” unpacks past scholarly work and its role in the present studies and how we must move beyond the past. “Chapter I” serves as a historical breakdown of the canon’s role and impact in both literary studies and Romanticism studies in specific. “Chapter II” provides an in depth analysis of two major …

Love Me Or Else: Keats’S Impossible Desires In “I Cry Your Mercy”, Brian Rejack

Faculty Publications – English

No abstract provided.

Growing Through The Questions: Studying Sticking Points To Strengthen Commitments To Socially Just English Language Arts Teaching, Kaitlyn P. Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This teacher-research study explores sticking points that emerge in my high school English language arts (ELA) classroom as a way of aligning my practice with my socially just ELA teaching framework, especially in my early career years. Using qualitative methods to focus on my classroom interactions with students, two specific sticking points emerged as significant to my learning. Although I initially interpreted these sticking points as being between the students and me, my analysis revealed that the sticking points were actually a result of my socially just framework being challenged by my own enactment of it. Learning to reframe these …

The Devil In The Forest: How Le Guin Subverts A Tired Trope, Andrew Debella

UKL: The Journal of Ursula K. Le Guin Studies

Scholars understand Ursula K. Le Guin's 1972 The Word for World is Forest as a critique of settler-colonial history, but no academic interest has been given to how this novel also comments on the American religious imagination. This article reveals that Le Guin's allegory to Vietnam replicates the 'devil in the forest' trope to expose how a religiously inspired good/evil dichotomy shaped xenophobic attitudes toward the Vietnamese during the 1970s. By tracing the depictions of Native Americans through American fiction and Captivity Narratives, this article further demonstrates how Le Guin’s novel deploys similar tropes to expose and critique their influence …

A Story Of Oppression A Psychological And Creative Approach, Juan R. Morillo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The aim of this project is to survey the manner in which oppression is expressed in selected works of literature. It is a topic that not only am I familiar with through my studies of literature and psychology, but one that I, as well as every Venezuelan expatriate has witnessed and felt for their country. The project focuses on social and political oppression, using the current Venezuelan crisis as a focal point, and selected literary sources as a framework. I will analyze dystopian classics such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The …

Censorship: Through An Iowan’S Eyes, Erin Mcrae

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This is a collection of creative work prefaced by an introduction, which gives an overview of the development of these pieces. The pieces contained in this thesis are comprised of various genres, including creative nonfiction, poetry, and short fiction.

Creative Energies: Unearthing The Role Of Romantic Ecocriticism, Nicole Marie Chambers-Stahl

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The literary field of ecocriticism has transcended the boundaries of Academia: excited to connect to their physical environments, many of these scholars are focusing on genres like place-based writing, rhetoric of energy policy, and representations of the Earth in film and media. Interdisciplinary by nature, ecocriticism has demonstrated clear potential in its ability to intersect with concentrations like the history of science, animal studies, and environmental justice.

However, as the language around global crises is heating up —“Today it is scientists, not prophets,” writes Tobias Menely in “‘The Present Obfuscation,’” “who speak the language of apocalypse” (478)—ecocritical scholarship is at …

Addressing The Overemphasis And Impacts Of Academic Language In English Language Learner Instruction, Rebecca Pint

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Fangs And Phantasms: Vampire Fiction's Role In Shaping Victorian Gender And Sexual Ideals, Michele White

All Master's Theses

This thesis examines how Christabel (1816), Carmilla (1872), and Dracula (1897), three quintessential texts in the vampire literary genre, speak to the Victorian proliferation of sexual and gender discourses. These texts use the metaphor of the vampire to contradict and sustain 19th-century regulatory dialogues encompassing sexuality, gender, and desire. By investigating these vampire narratives by means of theories of sexuality and gender enumerated in Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, such as the ideas of “biopower” and “gender performativity,” I contend that these works do more than simply reproduce contemporary outlooks. Instead, these Gothic …

Kafka In The Plague Years: Reinterpreting Absurdity In The 2020s, Chris Lownie

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

No word better encapsulates the confusion and inequality proliferating in the post-2020 global world than “absurd.” Absurdity consumes the way we interact with one another, going about life-as-usual in pocket worlds in which the individual is alienated from both oneself and others. Life is defined by a series of problems that regularly go ignored by both institution and general populace alike, but not by the human body: the effects of sustained illness and reinfection by recurrent viruses in a world that no longer acknowledges their severity nor their pervasiveness nor steps we may take towards personal safety. Daily life has …

Self-Preservation: Autobiography As A Form Of Archivization As Seen Through The Life And Poetic Works Of John Clare, Meghan J. Slaff

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This paper will look at how the processing efforts of an archivist mirror that of an autobiographer through the shared motivation of adding to the cultural memory or textual canon of a society. For archival purposes, the typical steps of ingesting, preparing, and presenting a collection are creation, capture, arrangement/description, and pluralization. To create an autobiography, writers take the memories that have been created and experienced due to events in their lives and capture those memories via recording in the literary form known as autobiography. These autobiographers then arrange and describe their memories in a way that shows vast similarities …

Alive For The Wake, Anna Kate Powell

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the year 2046, bacteria strain B. bibitor has rendered all petroleum hydrocarbon compounds unrefinable. Paramedic Amanda Bailey finds hope in the resilience of humanity but struggles when she learns the powers that be would rather concentrate their efforts on fighting B. bibitor—restoring infected hydrocarbons to their previously refinable (and profitable) nature—rather than investing in already-developed clean firm energies and renewable material manufacture.

Eros And The Sublime: Tools For Reaching Toward An Altered Ecological Consciousness, Aineka Carlson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis explores connections between the Kantian sublime and Anne Carson’s ideas regarding “eros.” Since Kant’s Critique of Judgement was published in 1790, the Kantian sublime has grown in popularity and been utilized by theorists and creative writers alike. While the Kantian sublime is often associated with nature in popular culture, there are certain egocentric and phallocentric elements of this mode of thinking that might inhibit a biocentric mindset. Through a character study of Oryx from Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, this thesis draws relations between the subjugation of women, nature, and the ways in which the popularized …

Mobilities, Migration, And Digital Humanities, Mayurakshi Chaudhuri, Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay, Nirmala Menon, Paul Longley Arthur, Sarah Kenderdine, Mattius Rischard, T. Shanmugapriya

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

No abstract provided.

Dystopian Fiction As Liberatory Practice: Dystopian Theory In The Classroom, Hailey C. Bowen

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Dystopian Fiction as Liberatory Practice, a title inspired by bell hooks’ “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” is a proposal for an English 2090 course that focuses on dystopian theory. This class is centered on The Nine Symptoms of Dystopian Theory, which I developed using multiple theoretical models including Afrofuturist Reading Practices, Marxist theory, and feminist, gender, and sexuality theories in conjunction with my own observations about the genre. Dystopian theory is a nine-step reading process that I have developed to reframe any text as dystopian. It is possible to argue that any text is dystopian using this process because, in any …

Children At The Heart Of Dialectical Tension In Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, Holly A. Garrett

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

As a product of its time, Ernest Hemingway’s short-story cycle In Our Time explores the modernist struggle for human connection in a post-World-War-I landscape. This search for meaningful connection is demonstrated through various forms of relationships, but specifically those of the romantic nature. These relationships are brought to the forefront by a series of marriage stories along with multiple Nick Adams stories that feature dysfunctional couples who are often alienated by their inability to properly communicate. The tension surrounding these imperfect unions often features a child at the center of the conflict, exacerbating the preexisting issue. If the short-story cycle …

Literary Homeplace As A Site Of Knowing And Healing, Shamonique Hassell

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The concept of literary homeplace serves as a locus of rhetorical healing for Black women, emphasizing their lived experiences and creative expressions as forms of resistance and restoration (Collins, 1986; hooks, 1990; Nettles, 2001). The labor of Black women within families, churches, and artistic endeavors contributes to the cultivation of a collective consciousness surrounding oppression and healing (Edwards, 2010; Carey, 2016; Morrison, 1992). Building upon hooks’ (1990) notion of homeplace, this dissertation examines how Black women foster spaces characterized by care, dignity, and resilience (Hersey, 2022; Tate, 1984). Using personal narrative and articulating Black women’s voices, I position homeplace as …

“Broken Things: An Archive”, Kristen Mccallum

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This creative thesis starts from the idea that memory is shaped as much by the present as by the past. It explores the emotional and personal complexities of family estrangement, grief, survival, and love. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s idea that “every generation confronts the task of choosing its past,” the project moves away from more traditional storytelling and instead is constructed as a collection of archival elements, that includes prose. What originally intended to be a collection of short stories gradually became a fictional family archive—made up of letters, text messages, and other everyday items—that reflects the messy, often conflicting …

The Benefit Of New Perspective: An Analysis Of Postcolonial Adaptation, Sara L. Tilbe

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

In our modern world, the concept of literary adaptation is not unheard of. Each release of a new, popular text comes with an underlying chance that it will likely be snatched up by Hollywood executives to be told through a cinematic setting. However, there is less fanfare when it comes to the topic of literary adaptation, particularly of famous texts that are deemed “classic” of the literary canon. Usually, any news of a literary adaptation of a classic book is meant with polarizing views from the general public. Some welcome the change, excited for what a new author can bring …

Mythogenesis In As I Lay Dying: A Comparative Exploration Of Mythmaking And Counter-Myths, Allison K. Groupp

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis explores William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through the lens of comparative mythology, arguing that the novel constructs a counter-myth that challenges dominant Western narratives. By engaging with non-Western mythological traditions—particularly Proto-Indo European, Hindu, and Indigenous cosmologies—the study reveals how Faulkner embeds symbolic structures that transcend Christian and Greco-Roman frameworks. Using semiology and structuralist frameworks developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes, the analysis deciphers a mythopoetic narrative that refocuses marginalized myths to destabilize binary oppositions such as Christian/Pagan, civilized/uncivilized, and male creation myths with female creation myths. Each chapter examines a different mythic layer: …

Pseudo-Vampires In The Nineteenth-Century English Vampire Canon: Draining Life Force By Class, Matt Tanner

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Cultivating Empathy: A Content Analysis Of Empathic Themes In Best-Selling Children's Books, Elnaz J. Afousi

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study examines the presence and nature of empathic content in best-selling children’s picture books, with a focus on developmental relevance for preschool-aged readers. Using a modified version of the iEPIC empathy coding system, 10 titles from the New York Times best-seller list were analyzed to assess the frequency and complexity of three empathy-related constructs: Emotion or State Description (ESD), Exploring Emotion or State (EES), and Empathic Understanding or Concern (EUC). Results indicate that while all books contained some empathy-related content, ESD3 (self-reflective emotional descriptions) and EUC2/EUC4 (understanding and helping others) were most prevalent, suggesting an emphasis on both intrapersonal …

Mourning And Haunting In Irish Gothic Fiction From The Victorian Era To Modernism, Wenyu Kong

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation explores how three Irish modernist writers, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Macardle, and James Joyce, incorporate and reimagine tropes from the Victorian Gothic Revival to address Ireland’s uneven modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that the Irish Gothic tradition is essential for these writers to express their reflection and reaction to ongoing cultural and social turmoil in Ireland’s process of modernization during the foundation of the postcolonial Irish state. Extending Sheridan Le Fanu’s Big House Gothic legacy, Elizabeth Bowen creates haunted spaces in The Last September (1929) to describe Anglo-Ireland’s precarious situation during the War …