Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Ghosts Of Lucy Snowe: Queer Temporality In Villette, Lauren Schuldt

Theses and Dissertations

Though Lucy Snowe has been read as an agent of queer nonconformity and as a master of ambiguity, queer interpretations of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette have remained relatively scarce and limited in scope. This essay examines Lucy Snow’s unique model of queer experience that manifests not only in moments of openly subversive gender performance, homoerotic desire, or sexual identity, but also as an oppositional mode of organizing and articulating her life in terms of time. Using the temporally queer metaphor of the ghost, this essay explores Lucy’s resistance to frameworks of time which structure life narratives through logics of heterosexual development …

“As The Occasion Demands”: Constraint-Based Practice In Rhetoric And Composition, Erica Kerstin Fischer

Theses and Dissertations

In their 2010 Composition Studies article, Laurie Gries and Collin Brooke observe, “constrained writing has been underappreciated” in the composition classroom (21). Taking seriously the potential value of constraints in pedagogical practice, this project executes a cross-disciplinary examination (drawing from design theory, experimental poetry, literary theory, composition, and rhetorical theory) of the various occurrences of, and approaches to, constraints and their influences on the ways we think and write. This investigation reveals that constraints create the conditions under which students can become productively defamiliarized to their thinking and writing habits, encouraging them to encounter alternatives otherwise left unnoticed.

I suggest …

‘Held By Thy Voice’: Navigating Time In John Milton’S Poetry, Jessica Junqueira

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation, “‘Held by Thy Voice’: Navigating Time in John Milton’s Poetry” explores how and to what extent John Milton uses the formal device of suspension in “Lycidas,” Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. I argue that by using suspension, Milton negotiates between multiple categories of time. These moments are important because they highlight characters’ perspectives and expose the limitations of their viewpoints. Milton also employs suspension to introduce potential scenarios that reveal characters to be out of step with a providential framework. He uses suspension to connect two or more temporal categories and to reveal an individual’s position in relation …

Bodies In Play: Female Athleticism In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Jillian Weber

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores depictions of athletic female characters in nineteenth-century American literature. I argue that there is a rich literary tradition of athletic women, whose origin I date to the 1840s, that has not been explored. To date, scholars have considered athletic women in literature anomalies, a case of a gender-bending female found in a single text, but not part of a longer genealogy of this character type. By examining athletic women over a period of decades and across several genres of American literature we see how this character type has been shaped by authors and culture alike. I illustrate …

Twisting Reality For A Cause: American Mythology, Early Surrealism, And Audience Empowerment In The Works Of George Lippard, Joseph Samuel Hall

Theses and Dissertations

This article examines Philadelphia writer George Lippard's often-overlooked usage of literary conventions more typical outside of the genre he is most famous for, socialreform city fiction. In particular, the article focuses on Lippard’s vision of an American mythology, proto-surrealistic imagery, and demands for audience response and interaction. Various works are analyzed, most prominently: stories from Washington and His Generals, The Rose of the Wissahikon, Adonai: The Pilgrim of Eternity, and The Killers. The article concludes that Lippard values the artfulness of historical romance over presenting historical fact, recognizing the ability of the romance to instigate a greater collective response in …

Backcountry Robbers, River Pirates, And Brawling Boatmen: Transnational Banditry In Antebellum U.S. Frontier Literature, Samuel M. Lackey

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that in the midst of an uncertain but formative period of continental expansion, a revolutionary brand of popular crime fiction appeared and flourished in the pages of cheap periodicals and paperback novels. It consisted of conventional adventure romances and pulpy proto-dime novels that focused on frontier violence and backwoods criminals. Often popular in their day but quickly forgotten, these texts have been given short shrift by scholars and critics due to their shoddiness or ostensibly minor role in literary history. I contend that this obscure brand of crime fiction in fact has much to offer in the …

Temporal Collapse And Historical Erasure In David Mitchell’S Cloud Atlas, Amy Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Teleological historical “progress” disintegrates in the temporal disjunctures that structure David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas—disjunctures that collapse past dangers into present concerns and resonate in potential futures. The novel has conceptual resonances with Walter Benjamin’s formulations on historical method, as well as with Linda Hutcheon’s work on postmodern metahistories. Drawing on these theorists, my thesis focuses on “marked” historical agents in the novel. Throughout my analysis, I demonstrate how these marked agents work within the book’s interrupted narrative structure to communicate historical violence and memory from a moment of danger to another one in a temporal collapse. Such a process creates …

Aporetic Rhetoric: The Use Of Uncertainty In Healthcare Contexts, Adam S. Lerner

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines how uncertainty is rhetorically deployed in healthcare contexts. Investigating four major healthcare contexts, I study how different forms of uncertainty produce distinct rhetorical effects and consequences. In Chapter 1, I explore how the haphazard use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war makes it difficult for veterans to prove their exposure to this deadly chemical. In Chapter 2, I examine the rhetorical strategies of mental illness skeptics and denialists, looking at how each deploys uncertainty in different and related ways. In Chapter 3, I investigate the intersection between design, emotion, and uncertainty as it appears in the …

“Be Of Knightly Countenance”: Masculine Violence And Managing Affect In Late Medieval Alliterative Poetry And Batman: Under The Red Hood, Lisa D. Camp

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is concerned with the legacy of cultural representations of masculine violence as it manifests in late medieval alliterative poetry and contemporary superhero comics, and the ways in which those manifestations are inflected by a particular set of images, motifs, and cultural underpinnings which transcend sociohistorical boundaries and that illuminate the ways culture sanctions certain forms of masculine violence. To understand how, as Patricia Ingham suggests in Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain, imagination infuses history towards particular “regime[s] of truth,” I argue that late fourteenth century Arthurian alliterative poetry and contemporary superhero comics instruct a …

Writing With Risk: Dangerous Discourses And Event-Based Pedagogies, Ben Harley

Theses and Dissertations

“Writing with Risk: Dangerous Discourses and Event-Based Pedagogies,” responds to the pedagogical work of scholars such as Susan Wells, Nancy Welch, and Linda Flower by arguing that the risks associated with public writing pedagogies stem from the transformative nature of the rhetorical event that implicates and rearticulates actors through co-production, subverting their assumed autonomy. I argue that each of the three primary vantages of publics scholarship is particularly vulnerable to a certain type of risk aligned to a specific element of the rhetorical situation: idealist scholarship to unintended consequences in which the meaning of the text transforms, activist scholarship to …

Sir Walter Scott And Lady Anne Lindsay: New Light On Their Relationship, Sarah Flatt

Theses and Dissertations

While Sir Walter Scott is best known for his Waverly novels and Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, he also played an important role in helping lesser known writers publish their work. In particular, he was known for helping women writers. Scott’s relationship with Lady Anne Lindsay (later Barnard), however, is especially interesting. Lindsay is best known for her poem, “Auld Robin Gray.” There is far more to Sir Walter Scott’s relationship with Lady Anne Lindsay than first meets the eye. The two knew of each other through family and social connections, but they never met in person. They did, however, …

Rhetoric And Plants, Alana Hatley

Theses and Dissertations

Rhetoric and Plants asks what happens when we add plants to the various discussions currently developing within rhetorical theory. By taking up current botanical research and some of the rhetorical debates surrounding that research, I posit that plants are creatures and that the botanic engagement with the world has much to teach us about persuasion, communication, and encountering alterity. Specifically, I argue that the sessility of plants makes visible a tendency in our language to privilege the language of going elsewhere, which I term ambulocentrism. Further, the fact that plants engage in behaviors that we have previously thought only conscious …