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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Trans-Atlantic Composition: The History Of British Academic Writing, Gareth George Rees-White
Trans-Atlantic Composition: The History Of British Academic Writing, Gareth George Rees-White
Theses and Dissertations
I author a revisionary comparative history of British Academic Writing and American Composition studies. My core argument is that the Composition story has always, ultimately, been a Trans-Atlantic one. This project serves two key goals: 1) it offers a comprehensive history of UK writing education; while 2) simultaneously offering a revisionist US history that fights the claim that uniquely American exigencies led to a uniquely American education system that therefore has little to learn from other global Compositions. This project tracks the history of university level writing education in the UK from the 1200s to the modern day, and follows …
Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari
Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari
Theses and Dissertations
In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.
Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau
Theses and Dissertations
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Things They Carried subvert dominating historical narratives by challenging the frameworks that construct them through introducing alternate narratives. By reframing the ethics of truth, they rupture central narrative space with marginal perspectives, rewriting History in service of their own truths.
The Leap In Place: Rethinking Key Concepts In The History Of Composition And The Return Of Lore., David Stubblefield
The Leap In Place: Rethinking Key Concepts In The History Of Composition And The Return Of Lore., David Stubblefield
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation attempts to affirm a key set of practical terms in order to guide Composition Pedagogy. These terms include error, language, voice, teacher neutrality, and rationality. In recent years, many of these terms have been discredited theoretically; however, they remain dominant in textbooks and in our actual teaching practice. The result has been a significant divide between theory and practice, resulting in a cognitive dissonance between our classroom activities and our scholarly activity. However, by presenting each of these terms as dynamic and performative, this dissertation invites the field to find productive practical possibilities inside of them. Moreover, the …
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Theses and Dissertations
This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …
"History Real Or Feigned": Tolkien, Scott, And Poetry's Place In Fashioning History, Kaleigh Jean Spooner
"History Real Or Feigned": Tolkien, Scott, And Poetry's Place In Fashioning History, Kaleigh Jean Spooner
Theses and Dissertations
Most critics of The Lord of the Rings correlate Tolkien's work to ancient texts, like Beowulf, the Elder Edda, and medieval romances. While the connection between these traditional materials and Tolkien is valid, it neglects a key feature of Tolkien's work and one of the author's desires, which was to fashion a sort of history that felt as real as any other old story. Moreover, it glosses over the rather obvious point that Tolkien is writing a novel, or at any rate a long work of prose fiction that owes a good deal to the novel tradition. …
The Highland Clearances And The Politics Of Memory, Daniel Guy Brown
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. …
Interrogating History Or Making History? Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Delillo's Libra, And The Shaping Of Collective Memory, Mark Spencer Mills
Interrogating History Or Making History? Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Delillo's Libra, And The Shaping Of Collective Memory, Mark Spencer Mills
Theses and Dissertations
In the wake of the post-structuralist skepticism of language and language's ability to represent reality, the philosophy of history has likewise been questioned, since we gain our knowledge and understanding of the past primarily through language—through written and spoken testimony, and through subsequent historiography. Various post-structuralist critics have pointed out that history is never entirely recoverable, but accessible only indirectly through what is written and documented about it. What is written and documented is in turn determined by the contents and the nature of the archive. What we know about history is largely mediated and limited by the problems inherent …
Telling History Through The Stories Of Women: Julia Alvarez's In The Time Of The Butterflies And In The Name Of Salomé, Nicole Marie Carlson
Telling History Through The Stories Of Women: Julia Alvarez's In The Time Of The Butterflies And In The Name Of Salomé, Nicole Marie Carlson
Theses and Dissertations
My thesis discusses the ways in which Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and In the Name of Salomé (2000) are revolutionary texts contesting traditional, male dominated history and redirecting historical and communal foci to the lives of Dominican women. I employ Walter Benjamin's theories found in his essays "The Storyteller" (1936) and "On the Concept of History" (1940) to assist my exploration of Alvarez's questions concerning the power and effect of storytelling, and the importance of reconstructing various historical voices and images, specifically, the importance of reconstructing female voices in male dominated cultures. I discuss the …
Sandra Cisneros As Chicana Storyteller: Fictional Family (Hi)Stories In Caramelo, Sally Marie Giles
Sandra Cisneros As Chicana Storyteller: Fictional Family (Hi)Stories In Caramelo, Sally Marie Giles
Theses and Dissertations
My thesis discusses the ways in which Sandra Cisneros makes historical claims from a Chicana perspective by telling fictional family stories in Caramelo. Not only have Chicanas traditionally been marginalized ethnically by the Anglo mainstream, they have also suffered disenfranchisement as women in their own male-dominated cultural community. Both elements have contributed to the cultural silencing of Chicanas outside of domestic spaces, and particularly in historical discourse. Cisneros introduces storytelling as a means of empowering Chicanas through language that allows them to speak historically and still signify culturally. By telling stories from the site of the family, she ingeniously utilizes …
Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates And The Cultural Work Of Home Literature, Lisa Olsen Tait
Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates And The Cultural Work Of Home Literature, Lisa Olsen Tait
Theses and Dissertations
The few studies of Mormon home literature that have been published to date dismiss it as inferior artistry, an embarrassing if necessary step in the progression towards true Mormon literature. These studies are inadequate, however, because they divorce the texts from their context, holding them up to standards that did not exist for their original audience. Jane Tompkins' theory of texts as cultural work provides a more satisfactory way of looking at these narratives.
Home literature is thoroughly enmeshed in the cultural discourse of its day. Beneath the surface, these didactic stories about young Mormons finding love with their foreordained …
A Voice From The Fire: The Authority Of Experience, Colleen C. Bernhard
A Voice From The Fire: The Authority Of Experience, Colleen C. Bernhard
Theses and Dissertations
Over all, this thesis was written to be a "ramble" of its own around and through three issues that are central to the writing of the personal essay-voice, authority, and experience-and central to the emergence of this author's own sense of "self."
Drawing upon years of voluminous journals, this collection of six personal essays demonstrates what the scholarly introduction proposes: that the personal essay is both a valid genre and a magnificent bridge from informal life-writing to genuine literary accomplishment. Drawing on Phillip Lopate's differentiation of "memoiristic" essays from the more classic autobiographical form, this collection includes three of each …
A Survey Of Mormon Literary Criticism, Colin B. Douglas
A Survey Of Mormon Literary Criticism, Colin B. Douglas
Theses and Dissertations
Three general questions concerning literature have been addressed by the writers considered in this thesis: What constitutes a work of literary art? What ought to be valued by Latter-day Saints in a literary work? How should criticism be conducted by Latter-day Saints? To the first question, five basic answers have been proposed: significant form, uplifting thought content clothed in decorative form, typological symbol, ikon (as the word is used by C S lewis in An Experiment in Criticism), and capacity for helping the reader achieve a kind of "negative capability." These definitions also tend to be statements of value, …
Bayard Taylor's The Prophet: Mormonism As Literary Taboo; Calaveras County Comes Of Age; The Erosion Of Belief In The Poetry Of Clinton F. Larson, Thomas D. Schwartz
Bayard Taylor's The Prophet: Mormonism As Literary Taboo; Calaveras County Comes Of Age; The Erosion Of Belief In The Poetry Of Clinton F. Larson, Thomas D. Schwartz
Theses and Dissertations
The three papers included in this thesis reflect my development as a graduate student during the course of my master's program at Brigham Young Universtiy. I came to Brigham Young University interested in creative writing and developed a love for research and criticism. My work in nineteenth century American literature led to the first two papers. Both deal with literary history, the first narrow in scope, devoted to a study of the significance of a single play, the second broad in scope, devoted to a study of the unifying thread of anti-sentimentalism in the writings of the major American realists. …
The Song Of The Righteous: An Historical And Literary Analysis Of The Latter-Day Saint Hymnal, Ruth Alene Thomson Symons
The Song Of The Righteous: An Historical And Literary Analysis Of The Latter-Day Saint Hymnal, Ruth Alene Thomson Symons
Theses and Dissertations
The hymnal of the Latter-day Saints first proposed only shortly after the organization of the Church and published continually every few years between 1835 and 1871, is a remarkably accurate indicator of the changing fortunes and beliefs of the early Saints. The first hymnal, gathered by Emma Smith, uncompromisingly sets forth the basic Mormon belief in man's free agency, his innate perfectability, and his kinship to his Heavenly Father. Later editions reflect the missionary concerns of the church (1840), the tremendous persecution the saints are subjected to (1841), the Church difficulties after the martyrdom of Joseph Smith (1849), the call …