English Language and Literature Commons^™

Tarot Fabula: Radical Digital Cards, Shuffled Narrative Structures, And Playing The Future In An Era Of Algorithms, Rachel M.L. Dixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since their earliest recorded use in the 1400s, tarot cards figure as objects for game play, artistic creativity, spiritual divination, and self-discovery. Tarot Fabula (https://tarot-fabula.com) introduces a ludic, interactive website interface that challenges 20th century tarot reading practices as linear narratives. Statistically random reshufflings of tarot decks from archival collections prompt the reader to become a narrative co-creator, drawing them into conversation with traditional reading and interpretive practices as they remix narrative elements portrayed on the cards. Tarot Fabula’s shuffling and reshuffling of cards as historical objects merges contemporary computational methods for generating random results with an interrogation of …

Self-Listening & Envisioning Audience Exercise & Assignment, Jacob Kose

Open Educational Resources

This assignment and exercise encourages students to pick a formative story, artifact, individual, or moment in their acquisition of language and/or literacy. Students record themselves telling this story, then type that recording, and make choices about how to edit that text.Instructors may invite students to read these aloud, and/or peer edit. Students may also submit reflections and comment on each others' reflection.

Exploring Friendships In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Novels And Adaptations: A Study In Social Media, Fandoms, And Variations, Ashley D. Anderson

Student Theses

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and their adaptations all reveal the importance of friendship and fandom. Utilizing theorists Walter Benjamin and Henry Jenkins the friendship theme is seen in the various stylistic elements in the films and novels; additionally, a look into the fandom presence on social media, their knowledge, and merchandise reveals why the stories have continued to interest audiences over many generations.

Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …

Syllabus For Com 310/Enl 313 Writing For Advertising And Public Relations, Rachel Kovacs

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Engl 110: College Writing (Comedy, Satire, & Persuasion), Scott R. Kapuscinski

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus provides a themed approach to Freshman composition. Students are tasked with composing three essays in three distinct styles. Student engagement is high through the use of student-sourced primary sources (funny videos from YouTube, etc.) and the emphasis on thesis building and critical thinking.

Section 1: Comedy & the thesis-based essay

Section 2: Satire & writing to persuade

Section 3: Satire in Art & independent research

"Nothing ‘Personal’ To Lose": Alice Notley’S “I” And The Poetics Of Encounter In Disobedience, Christina T. Baulch

Theses and Dissertations

Though the lyric-I has often been perceived as an isolated ego, Alice Notley's "I" in her long poem Disobedience (2001) necessitates plurality through what I call a "poetics of encounter." In response to the 1978 Language poetry manifesto "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry," and to the larger well-rehearsed debate about vocal homogeneity and persona centrism in poetry, this paper argues that Notley's poetics of encounter brings the "I" of Disobedience into continual and complex conversation with material history, politics, and mass culture, thus situating it within, and not sequestered from, the world and its mediation.

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

Writing Not Writing: Transdisciplinary Poetics, Institutional Critique, Miriam L. Atkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of transdisciplinary creative practice as a means of institutional critique. The artists I have chosen as my primary focus—Robert Kocik, Eleni Stecopoulos, Zora Neale Hurston, Jimmie Durham, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian—employ multiple mediums and fields of discourse to address the presumptions and exclusions that are structurally integral to the institutions that house them. They enact “architextural” interventions through their use of forms that move between the page and three dimensional space, incorporating architecture, sculpture, drawing, painting, film, performance, poetry and prose. My work aims at a renewed understanding of critique as such, and therefore—though …

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings On The Jetsons, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015).

Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …

Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …

“The Childish, The Transformative, And The Queer”: Queer Interventions As Praxis In Children’S Cartoons, Heather Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud considers “the simplified reality of the cartoon,” establishing a definition and theory for the medium (30). McCloud believes that cartoons possess “a special power” that is tied to their unique ability to “focus our attention on an idea” (31). Put simply, there is something about cartoons that allows for an easy exchange of concepts. Cartoons can teach. Using cartoons, a general term, to refer to both comics and animation, this thesis examines the transformative power of queer world building and intervention in recent children’s cartoons and how it functions, and can …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

“On Soulless Feet We Cross The Floor...” The Illusion Of Control In Grim Fandango And Virtual Spaces, Christina Cicchetti

Theses and Dissertations

Even though users can choose what they do in virtual spaces, they are forced to operate within the confines of realms designed by the invisible authors of the game’s code. The illusion of choice blinds users to an assessment of the hidden structure supporting immersive virtual worlds.

On Variety: The Avant-Garde Between Pornography And Narrative, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

This article analyzes Bette Gordon’s first feature film Variety (1983), reassessing how experimental novelist Kathy Acker’s contributions to the screenplay awkwardly positioned the film within contemporary cultural debates over pornography and the future of avant-garde filmmaking. While centered on an erotic thriller narrative concerning a woman’s entrée into the scuzzy world of New York City porno theaters, Gordon and Acker also take up in the film a series of three related representational problems for the 1980s: feminist approaches to pornography, narrative in an avant-garde tradition, and the role of speech and writing in film.

The Fantastic Manifesto: Monstrosity Of Memory And Epiphany Of Selfhood In The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), Layla Blodgett Carrillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish culture of storytelling suffered under the nearly forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The government-regulated cinema welcomed propaganda and melodrama, and denied the fantastic, the legendary, and the magical. These carefully manipulated histories, which served to romanticize the ideologies of the regime, also served to eulogize the delinquent and the depraved. In the early 1970s, at the heels of the collapse of Franco’s reign, the people of Spain bore witness to a new national cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), the feature debut from Victor Erice, exists at the threshold between a storied history of Spanish dictatorship and …

The Short Story And The Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts In And Of The Americas, Lucienne Muller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the visuality of the short story from an intermedial point of view, that is, with a focus on the relationship between the short story and the photographic visual. This analysis draws from photographic theory and from the writings of photographer and writer Julio Cortazar whose philosophy puts forward the idea of a reader who becomes the inventive co-creator of the fictional work.

Different Names For Bullying, Marco Poggio

Capstones

“There's all different forms of bullying,” says Steven Gray, a Lakota rancher and former law enforcement officer living in South Dakota. In this look into Gray’s life, we learn about two instances of bullying: the psychological and physical harassment that pushed his son, Tanner Thomas Gray, to commit suicide at age 12; And the controversial construction of an oil pipeline in an ancient tribal land that belongs to the Lakota people by rights of a treaty signed in 1851, which Gray sees as an institutional abuse infringing on the sovereignty of his people. Gray is involved in the movement that …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Aviation Cinema, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Collecting To The Core: American Crime Fiction, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

Overview of key secondary works analyzing American crime fiction: general works, works dealing with specific periods, works dealing with crime fiction by women and African Americans.

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Panting In The Dark: The Ambivalence Of Air In Cinema, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Cinema Of Control: On Diabetic Excess And Illness In Film, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

While not rare, films that do represent diabetes must work around the disease’s banal invisibility,and images of diabetics in film are thus especially susceptible to metaphor and exaggeration.This essay is the first to outline a diabetic filmography, discussing medical and cinematic strategies for visualizing the disease as well as how the illness informs family plots and heroic characters in horror films. Doing so, it participates in a larger discussion of the manner in which film images of ill or disabled groups sustain notions of “normalcy” by both representing and denying otherness.