Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Autoethnography Of Laughter: Transforming Identity By Teaching Composition And Linguistics Through Humor, Olya Cochran

Theses and Dissertations

The following dissertation is a story composed of humorous and humor-related experiences, lived by me as an immigrant student and instructor. I reflect on how those experiences influenced the transformation and performance of my teaching identity and shaped my humor-based pedagogy for Composition and Introductory Linguistics courses. The work is considering the effects of humor on my linguistic and cultural competences as well as my teaching practice. Along with that, the work provides an overview of scholarship on humor in education and the ways practicing academics utilize humor in their teaching and teaching identities. To reflect on how and why …

Collaboration In The Technical Communication Classroom: Negotiating Team Contracts In A Pwi, Alyssa Herman

Theses and Dissertations

As TPC teacher-scholars, we must acknowledge the overwhelming Whiteness of our field and the racism, ableism, and sexism inherent in our institutions. We must actively work toward inclusivity and socially just collaborations in our classrooms by encouraging dominant-identified students to confront their privileges and implicit biases in order to better engage with historically marginalized students. With that said, this thesis examines how teacher-scholars might take up a cultural-rhetorical approach to teaching TPC and how we might negotiate team contracts in PWIs. Firmly situated within the social justice turn, Herman draws from both feminist disability theory and critical race theory to …

The Uses, Understandings, And Values Of Student Strucutral Assisting Metatexts In College First Year Composition Courses, Joseph Ryan Dundovich

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis offers a look into the perceptions, views, and experiences of first-year composition students into being offered a large amount of choice/agency in their major summative writing projects, but also accountability and guidance during their process in the form of resources called ‘structural assisting metatexts’. The major question that guided this study is the following:

- How do first year composition students use, understand, and value forms of structural assisting metatexts during the writing/creation process?

The two parts of the writing process that were specifically researched in conjunction with their correlating metatexts are the topic selection (with the Proposal …

Beyond The Words: Paratextual And Bibliographic Traces Of The Other Reader In British Literature, 1760-1897, Jeffrey Duane Rients

Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, compounding technological improvements and expanding education result in unprecedented growth of the reading audience in Britain. This expansion creates a new relationship with the author, opening the horizon of the authorial imagination beyond the discourse community from which the author and the text originate. The relational gap between the author and this new audience manifests as the Other Reader, an anxiety formation that the author reacts to and attempts to preempt. This dissertation tracks these reactions via several authorial strategies that address the alienation of the Other Reader, including …

Seeing Reading In First-Year Composition, Matthew Felumlee

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on a study of reading-into-writing strategies employed by students in two sections of first-year-composition (FYC) that were paired with a support course as part of an accelerated learning program (ALP) at a community college. Each FYC course was comprised of 11 students whom the college had deemed college-ready without the ALP course, and 11 students who were deemed at remedial levels in reading and / or writing and who were subsequently required to enroll in the ALP course. The study employs grounded theory methodology to identify and consider the many factors that influenced how reading was portrayed, …

The Readers Constructed By Shakespeare Anthologies And Pedagogical Scholarship, Andrea Berns

Theses and Dissertations

In my graduate thesis, I determine that modern Shakespeare anthologies provide features for an audience with specific learning needs that may not be representative of the students currently enrolled in undergraduate classrooms who are reading these anthologies. On the other hand, scholars of Shakespeare pedagogy also depict readers with certain learning needs their research, the results of which may have been influenced by bias and, therefore, also may not be representative of the “real” reader of Shakespeare. To determine where the two “constructed” readers depicted in modern Shakespeare anthologies and in pedagogical research overlap and where they diverge, I will …

On My Grind: Freestyle Rap Practices In Experimental Creative Writing And Composition Pedagogy, Evan Nave

Theses and Dissertations

My work is always necessarily two-headed. Double-voiced. Call-and-response at once. Paranoid self-talk as dichotomous monologue to move the crowd. Part of this has to do with the deep cuts and scratches in my mind. Recorded and remixed across DNA double helixes. Structurally split. Generationally divided. A style and family history built on breaking down.

Evidence of how ill I am.

And then there’s the matter of skin. The material concerns of cultural cross-fertilization. Itching to plant seeds where the grass is always greener. Color collaborations and appropriations. Writing white/out with black art ink. Distinctions dangerously hidden behind backbeats or shamelessly …

The Storm Still Echoes: Suspense And Ambivalence As A Way Of Life, Shailen Mishra

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three interrelated components that inquire into two themes: the epistemological and aesthetic merit of narrative suspense, and the generative potential of constraint-based writing. In the opening chapter, titled "Doubt in Perpetuity: Rethinking Suspense as a Mode of Aesthetics, and an Epistemological Inquiry," I undertake a theoretical inquiry to prove that suspense can be a rich analytical device to study complex aesthetics of writers. I theorize suspense at its elemental level and from an epistemological standpoint to prove that suspense is not simply a plot-level concept of "what happens next." Instead, by analyzing particular scenes from …

Homophonic Translation, Appositional Writing, And The Monster, Ryan Landry Clark

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation features a combination of critical and creative work

exploring the ethics of appropriative writing and the reparative potential of homophonic translation. The opening essay examines the ethics of appropriation- based poetry and introduces the concept of what I call "appositional writing," a term to describe ethically-minded works of poetry that make use of appropriative writing methods. The next three parts of this dissertation are each appositional writing projects that make use of homophonic translation as the primary method of composition. "Arizona State Bill 1070: An Act" is a homophonic translation of the anti-immigration bill of the same name. …