Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Afro-Diasporic Literatures Of The United States And Brazil: Imaginaries, Counter-Narratives, And Black Feminism In The Americas, David E. S. Beek

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores contemporary Afro-diasporic literatures by black cultural producers in the United States and Brazil that resist, subvert, and dismantle the persistent myth of Brazilian racial democracy. From the US, I investigate John Keene’s 2015 collection of stories and novellas Counternarratives, in addition to Gayl Jones’ 2021 novel Palmares. Conversely, from Brazil, I examine Conceição Evaristo’s 2003 novel Ponciá Vicêncio, as well as the black trans musician and slam poet Bixarte’s social media performance art. Although these Afro-diasporic literatures deconstruct the myth of racial democracy in Brazil, at the same time, each is entangled with what …

Methodological Mutability: Shifting Research In The Rhetoric Of Health And Medicine, John Schuler Benson Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) is a growing body of scholarship that pulls from technical communication, rhetorical theory, and a number of other disciplines to inquire about the capacities of rhetoric at the intersection of medical practitioners and scholars, the medical humanities, and the publics they inform and treat. Among RHM scholars there is a consensus that the field’s methodological diversity is one of its greatest strengths; indeed, field leaders articulate one of RHM’s exigencies as “encouraging methodological collaboration and experimentation” (Melonçon and Scott, Methodologies 4). This dissertation takes up these calls with the introduction of shifting, a …

La Materialidad De Las Vivencias Femeninas: Cuerpos Discapacitados, Prostituidos Y Violados En Las Narrativas Mexicanas Escritas Por Las Mujeres, Hyanghee Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Esta disertación explora los temas específicamente vinculados a las vivencias de las mujeres mexicanas tales como la anormalidad, la discapacidad, la locura, la prostitución, la violencia de género y la madre mutilada que no pueden abordarse sin tener en cuenta el cuerpo femenino. En este proyecto se discuten estas temáticas aplicando el concepto de la corporeidad o la materialidad de las vivencias que experimentan las mujeres en dicho espacio geopolítico manifestadas en cuatro narrativas mexicanas producidas por las mujeres-escritoras en la época contemporánea del final del siglo XX y al comienzo del siglo XXI: Nadie me verá llorar (1999) de …

Wandering And Wondering: Mapping The Confines Of The Introspective Spaces Of Julio Cortázar, Sergio Chejfec, And Samanta Schweblin, Tamara Alisa Morgan

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the juxtaposition of time and space and how they affect the relationships of the protagonists with the people and places around them. I examine works by the Argentine writers Julio Cortázar, Sergio Chejfec, and Samanta Schweblin, to trace a genealogical connection of techniques and universal themes within their texts regarding place and the search for human identity and belonging in the globalized world. Engaging the theoretical notions of space, power, and subjectivity (Henri Lefebvre, Giuliana Bruno, Marc Augé), as well as flânerie and phantasmagoria (Walter Benjamin), I contend that the protagonists of these works are incomplete beings …

Cities Of God Under Occupation: Settler Colonial Practices And Pacification In The Favelas Of Rio De Janeiro And The Occupied Palestinian Territories, Amanda Pimenta Da Silva

Theses and Dissertations

The 2002 film ‘City of God’ tells an anecdotal story of violence in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and is a reminder that the societies we tend to take for granted can actually be a luxury. The film portrays the daily life of the peripheries of Rio and its relation with drug trafficking, crime, and poverty, and how it has deteriorated into a war zone so dangerous that anyone risk being shot to death. Thousands of miles away from the Brazilian slums there is another so-called city of God, or the city chosen by God to be the home’s …

War, Love, And Journeys: A Comparative Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphors In Political Speeches, Kelly N. Woods

Theses and Dissertations

In convention speeches and inaugural addresses, presidential candidates and newly-elected presidents attempt to persuade listeners to vote for and support them. One persuasive tool that they use in these speeches is metaphor, considered a fundamental form of reasoning (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The present study focuses on three conceptual metaphors (POLITICS IS WAR, POLITICS IS A JOURNEY, and POLITICS IS LOVE) used in 40 speeches given by American presidents from 1944 to 2021 in order to see if there are differences in metaphor usage across political party (i.e., Democrat and Republican) and across speech type (i.e., nomination acceptance and inaugural …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

Ethical Considerations Concerning The Dignity Of Patients With Terminal Disabling Illness, Hebatallah Rashed

Theses and Dissertations

Almost everyone agrees that they should be treated and treat others in a dignified manner; however, people have different views about dignity and what gives people honour and worth. There are different philosophical ideas about the meaning of this concept and its conditions. The concept of human dignity has been a fundamental yet controversial area in the field of bioethics, especially with the ongoing debate over euthanasia.

The aim of this thesis was to evaluate different philosophical views about the concept of dignity, and how the evolution of this concept throughout history affected our understanding of the moral permissibility of …

Voicing Female Servitude In Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, And Taha Hussein, Muhammed Salem

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the literary portrayal of the female servant in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1816-1865), Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1890-1979), and The Call of the Curlew by Taha Hussein (1889-1973), within the theoretical framework of subaltern and gender studies. The study shows how three female subordinates in Victorian England, Postcolonial Caribbean Islands, in addition to Bedouin Egypt bargain while trying to dismantle their intersectional subordination within the patriarchal order. The problematic yet romanticized portrayal of governessing in Jane Eyre becomes a commoditized servitude, which requires active resistance in the postcolonial setting of Wide. As for The …

Marianismo And The Catholic Autobiographer: A Comparative Analysis, Nina Lee

Theses and Dissertations

As a version of femininity that derives from the figure of the Mother Mary, marianismo emphasizes the traditional roles of self-sacrifice, motherhood, spirituality, and nurturance. While marianismo is most often associated with Latin America, it can be traced back to Catholicism’s origins in Europe. Early and medieval Catholic theologians, such as Saint Augustine of Hippo and Peter Abelard, demonstrate marianista beliefs within their autobiographical writings. As autobiography is purported to be the most intimate window into both the personal and larger social situations of a given time and place, the autobiographies of such Catholic male theologians provide insight into the …

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

Literacy Identity And Motherhood: Implications Of Hermans' Dialogical Self Theory, Chelsea J. Ames

Theses and Dissertations

This multiple case study shows how motherhood works with and against two women's literacy identities, as interpreted through the theoretical lens of Herman's Dialogical Self Theory. The evidence of this is shown in the tension between their roles as mothers and their personal roles as readers and writers. In many ways, taking on a reader or writer role meant to deny other roles for these women, showing the clash between efforts to consolidate multiple I-positions. While their meta-positions helped them recognize the discrepancies in their I-positions, there was little evidence of mediating third positions to negotiate their roles. This descriptive …

"Newstead And I Stand Or Fall Together": Memorial Ecology And Multispecies Agency In Byron's Early Poetry, Taylore Ann Wintch

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars studying memory, literary tourism, and Byron all note the cooperation between author and audience at work in memorials--be it in terms of speech and response, hospitality and reception, or memory and forgetting. None, however, address the environment at Newstead as an agentic being involved with Byron's memorial legacy. Byron acknowledged multispecies beings as important actors in his eventual legacy. Through some of his early poems, we see the land under and around Newstead Abbey, as well as its nonhuman life, exercising agency and affecting Byron's memory. I limit my analysis to Byron's early poetry partly to trace how a …

Exclamation Marks In The Book Of Mormon: A Linguistic Analysis, Brooke Ellen Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

This paper employs Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory to analyze the affect the exclamation mark has on the readers' interpretation of five Book of Mormon editions. Each unique instance of exclamation was obtained with its accompanying verse and these were coded by three coders for the genre they appeared in, the syntactic structures of their utterances, and the rhetorical function of the exclaimed proposition. This made possible a comparison of the exclaimed themes both within and across each genre and across each of the five editions analyzed. While the 1830 edition was found to have many exclamations in the genres of conversation …

An Archive Of Poetry: Surviving Settlement, Upholding Feminine Virtue, And Practicing Narrative Discipline In Anne Bradstreet's And Eliza R. Snow's Poetry, Britta Karen Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Settlement is a frequent topic in scholarly conversations about early American literature. From studies about William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation to Anne Bradstreet's poetry, settlement is a consistent theme in texts written by early Americans and in scholarship written by experts about early American texts. Settlement is also a major theme in the poetry written by Eliza R. Snow after fleeing with the Latter-day Saints from Missouri and settling in Nauvoo, Illinois. Both Bradstreet and Snow lived through settlement crises, crises that incorporated and exacerbated religious tensions within their communities eventually taking the form of the Antinomian Controversy and the …

Affective Transfer In Writing: Utilizing Affect In Teaching For Transfer, Emily Morgan

Theses and Dissertations

According to current scholarship in writing studies, students with a positive affect toward writing are more likely to transfer writing knowledge and skills. Yet my findings from an IRB-approved longitudinal study suggest that this is not always the case. This study was designed to see what students transfer from their first-year composition course, focusing especially on rhetoric, process, genre, and mindfulness. In annual semi-structured interviews that took place over the course of three years, two study participants described having positive writing affect but did not discuss transfer, even when prompted. These students express caring much more about a writing task …

A Tale Of Two And A Half Mummies: An Intrusive Burial From The Tomb Of Karabasken (Tt 391), Hayley Ruth Goddard

Theses and Dissertations

In 2014, the South Asasif Conservation Project, directed by Elena Pischikova, discovered a previously unknown side chamber in the tomb of Karabasken (TT 391), a proto-Kushite tomb located in the South Asasif. Designated as Side Chamber 1A, it contained an intact burial assemblage. The contents of the tomb, all of which had suffered damage caused by repeated flooding, included three coffins which each contained a mummy. One of the mummies was most unusual, consisting of just the upper half of the body of a young man which was truncated at the waist.

This study is the first to assess and …

Promoting Secure Attachment In Children Without Parental Care In Egypt, Manar Nada

Theses and Dissertations

In Egypt, if not living with extended family members, the majority of children without parental care are placed in care homes. Research shows that children without parental care, particularly those raised in care homes, generally receive low-quality care. This can lead to adverse effects on their mental health, physical health, developmental growth, sense of belonging, intimacy, social and behavioral competence, and academic performance. Studies also relate institutionalization to problems in attachment and caregiver-infant relationships. The Secure Base Model is a therapeutic caregiving framework that target children who were abused and neglected or experienced loss and separation. The model has five …

Carving Spaces Of An Otherwise Within Urban Uncertainties On Sudanese People On The Move Creating Own Possibilities In Cairo, Iman Mohamed

Theses and Dissertations

With the increased urbanization of the world since the 1940s, people continue to be increasingly moving to cities. People are attracted to the city to access services and opportunities. However, the increased presence of persons on the move in the city comes with heightened bordering, augmented policing, and the involvement of more actors in the governance of people on the move. Against this, there are debates around understanding the urban space, its risks, and opportunities for all people dealing with it, including those on the move. This thesis thus looks at the urban space in Cairo that is uncertain, wherein …

Teaching Arabic During A Pandemic: Investigating Challenges Facing Teachers Of Arabic And Their Beliefs In Online Classrooms, Gihan Hamdi Hussein Hanafi

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this study was to explore possible challenges and obstacles that teachers of Arabic as a foreign language faced when they transitioned to online remote teaching after the Coronavirus outbreak. The study looked into particular issues pertaining to technology use and language assessment issues. The paper further examined AFL teachers' beliefs and opinions of their own competence as teachers and the potential effects on students' language ability in distant classrooms. To this end, the study employed a mixed methodological approach for data collection that began with disseminating an online questionnaire and culminated with conducting a number of follow-up …

Assessing L2 Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (Eca) Learners’ Intercultural Communicative Competence, Ahmed Said Mohammed Elgebaly

Theses and Dissertations

This study assesses L2 Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) Learners' Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC). The study participants were 19 L2 (ECA) learners who completed one semester at least in Egypt. The participants were only from two proficiency levels; the advanced and high-intermediate levels. The current study used a mixed methodological approach for data collection, beginning with an ICC test and concluding with a series of follow-up semi-structured interviews with ten participants. The ICC test employed in the current study was created based on a model that includes ten features of the ICC. The current study's findings revealed that although high-intermediate learners …

Navigating The Cairene Table: Food And Family Between What Is Ideal And What Is Real, Iman Afify

Theses and Dissertations

Our daily encounters with food, especially during our childhood, play a crucial role in shaping and informing our identity and our habitus. In this research, by using multimodal and auto ethnography, I argue that due to the guiding path that our senses carve for us, we make sense and contextualise our surroundings through our senses, and not only the five senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, but also through our inner senses of time and temporality, and how time and memory play an important role in the registration of our surroundings through our bodies and senses. I am …

Motivation Across Platforms, Mariia Shishmareva

Theses and Dissertations

Motivation in language learning has been studied for quite a long time. However, the main focus has been on motivation in face-to-face learning environments. Motivation in online learning can be different due to many factors. This study compared how a language instructor used motivational strategies in face to-face vs. Zoom classes; and how students reacted to these motivational strategies. For these purposes the Motivational Orientation of Language Teaching (MOLT) was used for observations. Results showed that while the teacher used many of the same motivational strategies in both sections, some categories like Social Chat, Referential Questions and Volunteering had significantly …

Being "Rightly Known": Otherness And The Ethics Of Reading In Charlotte Brontë'S Villette, Tin Yan Grace Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë's last novel, is famously riddled with ambiguity: its narrator-protagonist, Lucy Snowe, avoids disclosing details about her childhood, fails to reveal to readers the identity of characters she recognizes from her past, and, at the end of the novel, refuses to confirm if her love interest, M. Paul, has died at sea after a storm. Believing Lucy's ambiguous narrative style to be a tool she uses to train readers to better understand her, many critics have focused their efforts on trying to interpret Lucy's silences and evasions "correctly," thereby turning themselves into Lucy's or Brontë's "ideal" authorial …

"A Poem Is A Gesture Toward Home": Formal Plurality And Black/Queer Critical Hope In Jericho Brown's The Tradition, Kaitlin Hoelzer

Theses and Dissertations

Jericho Brown's The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, includes four duplexes, a poetic form of Brown's own invention that combines the sonnet and the blues. Made of fourteen lines separated into seven couplets, the duplex is a complex structure comprised of sets of indents and repeated lines. Brown's use of disparate source forms to create a new form altogether challenges the supremacy of a singular, white American literary tradition, putting it into conversation with other traditions in order to critique its historically racist and heterosexist boundaries. As he does so, Brown works not to abolish "the …

The Effect Of Family Language Policy On The Bilingual Accent Acquisition Of Spanish Heritage Speakers In The United States, Breeahna D. H. Harvey

Theses and Dissertations

“Family language policy” (FLP) is the accepted term for the field of study of the explicit planning and practices concerning language within a family unit in a home. Previous research has shown that FLP aids in the bilingual acquisition of a child (DeCapua & Wintergerst 2009; Kayam & Hirsch 2014; King, Fogle, & Logan‐Terry 2008; Li 1999; Oh; Schwartz 2008). However, there has been little research providing answers to whether FLP has a direct influence on language maintenance in adulthood, especially whether they acquire and maintain a native or native-like accent in both languages. The purpose of this study is …

Factors In Word-Final /T/ Reduction And Deletion In German, Kellie C. Busath

Theses and Dissertations

Sound reduction and deletion have been studied across many languages for some time. Usage-based approaches suggest that the more often a word is used, the more likely it is that some of the sounds are reduced. Phonetic environment, stress, and speech rate have all been studied as reasons for sound reduction or deletion. Most recently, frequency in reducing context (FRC) has been included when studying sound reduction and deletion. FRC in this thesis measures the portion of word tokens of a given word type that are followed by a reducing context. This thesis focuses on word-final /t/ reduction and deletion …

Ducks In The Pond: Elementary-School-Age Children's Perceptions Of Standard American English, African American English, And Spanish-Accented English On Scales Of Status And Solidarity, Heather Jill Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

The literature surrounding children's language attitudes has blossomed in recent years, but little is known about modern children's attitudes toward ethnic varieties of English. In addition, little is known about what factors may influence these attitudes. Here I investigate the language attitudes of children in kindergarten through third grade. These children in South Central Idaho have considerable experience with Spanish-accented English (SPE), but very little real-world experience with African American English (AAE). White, Latinx, and biracial participants were asked to evaluate samples of Standard American English (SAE), AAE, and SPE in relation to each other on scales of both status …

Sexual Exploration Of The Pastoral: Analyzing Queer Desire In “Goblin Market” And In Memoriam, Amanda Rajnauth

Theses and Dissertations

The term “queer pastoral” was coined by Vin Nardizzi to refer to the use of the pastoral setting to normalize homosexuality. While the queer pastoral has primarily remained within Renaissance studies, I seek to expand the reach of this concept by applying it to Victorian literature. This thesis argues that Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam both use the pastoral as a space to explore queer desire.

Bells Like Hooves, Elizabeth Mixter

Theses and Dissertations

BELLS LIKE HOOVES is an exploration of grief and love. This play wrestles with what it feels like when someone disappears, or “ghosts”, and the complexities of survivorship. The play delves into what it means to be the one who’s left behind, our need for stories, and the limits of language.