English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …

Hannah & Nana: A Personal Memoir On Appalachian Intergenerational Trauma, Womanhood, & Family, Hannah Dunn

Honors Projects

I was deeply affected by the death of my beloved nana in 2018. After her death, my family asked me to be the storyteller for us. Thus, for my Honors Project at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), I decided to write a personal memoir on my family. This memoir explores how we fit into notions of womanhood and family in Appalachia, as well as studying the effects of intergenerational trauma on us. Qualitative research, in the form of the autoethnography, serves as the methodology for this project. In writing a creative memoir, I have transformed my personal to the academic.

A Leap Into Communion: Kierkegaard And Spiritual Practices In _To The Wonder_, Madeleine Hall

Honors Theses

The study of metaethics contains the question of where value comes from. Different theories of goodness encourage tracing goodness back to God, saying that goodness is that which is like God (the resemblance thesis) or that which perfects nature (the perfection thesis). Kierkegaard participates in these questions of goodness, and in Fear and Trembling concludes that the moral absolute of the akedah reveals a good, Divine mystery. Fear and Trembling is a work of Christian existentialism that encourages an internal faith that embraces mystery rather than attempting to conquer it. Rather than trying to understand exactly who God is, Kierkegaard …

The Christian Right In Translation: Christian Conservative Discourse In Contemporary American Literature, Elizabeth Richardson Duke

English Theses and Dissertations

Religion in contemporary American politics and religion in contemporary American Literature: are they independent phenomena? Literary scholars have largely assumed so. Scholars have attended to nontraditional, liberal religion in postwar American literature, while overlooking how this literature represents and critiques the rise of the Christian Right. Since white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians allied with the Republican party in the late 1970s, Christian conservatives have transformed American politics. As the GOP’s most influential interest group, the Christian Right has set the terms for many of the last four decades’ most contentious and consequential debates. Historians, political scientists, and contemporary American writers …

Murder She Sang: How Contemporary Country Murder Ballads Alleviate Blame, Alyssa Hubbard

Honors College Theses

Murder ballads, or narrative songs centered on a murder and/or its aftermath, were historically used as a tool to emphasize a criminal’s guilt, cruelty, and inhumanity. Ballads centered on women in particular underlined the idea that women are naturally inclined to sin and easily corrupted, and because they were often written by men in an imitation of the woman’s voice, any regret or repentance within them is falsified or exaggerated, intended to warn other women away from committing similar transgressions.

In contrast, contemporary murder ballads, such as those sung by country music artists like Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, and The …

Phantasms Of Hope: The Utopian Function Of Fantasy Literature, Alexander C. Morgan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Fantasy literature has long been considered an inherently conservative genre. However, Ernst Bloch’s Marxist theory of a utopian anticipatory consciousness and his concept of nonsynchronism recognize a progressive, utopian function within the archetypes and allegories of fairy tales, a precursor to modern fantasy. Bloch argues that archetypes are not static entities and can be repurposed to critique the world contemporary to a text’s production. Even archetypes produced under a past mode of production, like those used in fantasy, can therefore be anticipatory and utopian. By extending Bloch’s utopian function to include fantasy and integrating his philosophy with the historical-materialist hermeneutic …

Babylon Is Fallen, Is Fallen: Southern Morality In Go Set A Watchman, Anna G. Dowling

Senior Theses

A crucial theme throughout Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee is the struggle between individual morality and collective consciousness, as exemplified by black and white relations in the American South. In this thesis, I explore the biblical concept of a “watchman” as referenced in the novel’s title and what conclusions can be drawn from delving into the literary and biblical contexts of this allusion. I utilize this as a framework to explore how and why the characters of Watchman exist in such fragmented, defensive states as opposed to their Mockingbird counterparts, and what these differences imply regarding the importance …

Resonances: An Examination Of Republication Through Four Case Studies, F S. Nakhaie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Republication, with or without textual changes, keeps a work in circulation. This protects the work from destruction but also affects how we receive it, because publication is always a socializing act. Despite its consequences for works and their reception, republication has not yet been theorized in textual studies. My dissertation addresses this research gap by employing the term resonance to discuss the relationships—between versions, contexts, and ideas—that develop out of republication. I explore republication at its extremes with four case studies of works that underwent major changes in republication. The first chapter examines Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

Unthinkable Conditions: Affect And Environment In Romanticism And Speculative Fiction, Amelia Z. Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unthinkable Conditions bridges two literary periods and two theoretical modes in order to illustrate important parallels between historical periods and the writers who attempted to approach the changing environmental conditions of their respective eras. Each chapter names and theorizes a unique form of feeling which then serves as a framework for eco-affective analysis, drawing from existing studies in the environmental humanities and in studies of affect in order to construct a hybrid theoretical model which more fully accounts for the work of the writer treated in each chapter. The central claim of this dissertation is that vital affective innovations accompany …

Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages with literary trauma theory and rape studies by investigating how scholars through the 1990s theorized the relationship among trauma, narration, and silence, and how the #MeToo movement causes us to rethink these views. Attending to the specific silence generated in the wake of sexual violation reveals how power structures influence the act of telling, challenging the idea that trauma is untellable. I argue that literary trauma theory needs to push beyond its foundation in biomedical models of trauma—in which the (in)ability to recall or articulate traumatic events is rooted in neurology—to examine the ways traumatic narratives are …

A Teacher's Guide In Creating Linguistic Diverse Classroom: Code-Meshing And Translingual Practice In First-Year Composition, Yvonne Liu

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis and portfolio are inspired by the recent code-meshing pedagogy movement to promote linguistic justice in the composition classroom along with the author’s personal journey in English learning. The traditional, monolingual practice in the composition classroom often isolates international students who have multilingual abilities above the rest of the students. The idea that there is only one correct use of English—standard English—assumes that one type of English is better than others. However, most native speakers cannot explain the rules and mechanism of standard English, which leaves international students often feeling frustrated and lowers their confidence in English writing and …

Tracey Budworth Master's Portfolio, Tracey Budworth

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains examples of my work in association with familiarizing myself with the subaltern and working to incorporate the concept of the "other" into my teaching.

“The Seal Set On Our Nationhood”: Canadian Literary Responses To The South African War (1899-1902), Alicia C. Robinet

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation seeks to modify the widely held view that the Great War (1914-18) was the defining military event in Canadian identity by turning to Canadian literary responses to the nation’s participation in early post-Confederation overseas combats: Garibaldi’s expedition against Rome, to which a regiment of French-Canadian Papal Zouaves went in support of Pope Pius IX (1868-70); the Nile Expedition (1884-85); and the Boer or South African War (1899-1902). In exploring these literary responses, the dissertation demonstrates that the construction of a national identity was articulated through overseas military engagement long before Canada’s collective reflections on Vimy, Passchendaele, and the …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Very Two, Very One: Reading As Friendship, Amelia Marini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Very Two, Very One: Reading as Friendship” embarks upon what the American philosopher John Dewey might describe as an act of “cultivated naïveté” by asking the reader to imagine that one of the study of literature’s highest goods is the feeling of friendship that it can inspire between the studious reader and the multivalent text. This dissertation proposes that our readerly interactions with texts have many of the same interpersonal complexities and satisfactions of lived friendship, and the chapters that follow will offer a vocabulary for describing those complex interactions in ways that allow us to speak, write, and think …

Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) and Mary Norbert Korte (b. 1934) are two poets whose contributions to postwar American poetry are vitally important, and yet their status on the margins of mainstream literary culture has left their work largely unstudied. Di Prima, the granddaughter of Italian Anarchist Domenico Mallozzi (with whom she shared a close relationship) grew up in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn and bore witness to the cultural schizophrenia of WWII as a child. Korte was raised in an affluent Bay Area family, and encountered hardships (including the death of her father when she was 12) that affected her …

"A Mind Of Metal And Wheels": Agrarian Ruralism In Joss Whedon's Firefly And J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Christopher Hines

English (MA) Theses

Both Joss Whedon's Firefly and J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings present settings that are just as much influenced by the environments in which they occur as they are by the characters who act within those environments. For J.R.R. Tolkien, it was his lived experience of having grown up in a changing England that influenced his depiction of the world, while Joss Whedon's Firefly revisits and readapts the American mythos of the Western and the cowboy and re-appropriates it to science fiction, placing the action in the far future and in space where humanity is once again exploring and …

Decolonizing The Body, Daniel Miess

English (MA) Theses

The prevailing narrative about California’s history, and in specific the way that it discusses the Spanish Colonial system and the Gold Rush, glosses over the genocide of her indigenous inhabitants and the oppression experienced by those who survived these historical traumas. By focusing on the works of three indigenous poets (Deborah Miranda, Natalie Diaz, and Tommy Pico) who were born in Southern California and whose indigenous history predates White Settler Colonialism in this state, we can gain a fuller picture about the truth of California’s past. Through the lens of Indigenous Queer Theory, we can understand how these three Queer …

Fan Fiction And The Trojan War: Contemporary Euripidean Perspective On The Treatment Of Enslaved Women In The Silence Of The Girls, A Thousand Ships, And For The Most Beautiful, Richard K. Sheldon

LSU Master's Theses

This study examines three contemporary novels of fan fiction, authored by women, that retell the Trojan War: Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful (2016), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018), and Nathalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019). This study offers a reading of contemporary Homeric reception by analyzing the conversations that the novels initiate between each other, Homer’s Iliad, and Euripides’ tragedies, Hecuba (424 BCE) and Trojan Women (415 BCE). The study establishes a connection between the three authors and Euripides by treating the novels as works of fan fiction. In so doing, the study identifies …

Using Big Data To Facilitate A Lyrical Analysis Of Poetry And Rap, Remington Yve Giller

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

Poetry and rap are dissected using text mining techniques in order to determine overall trends in the words used by both. With this data, the way in which ideas and concepts are expressed can be compared and contrasted as a way of showing the legitimacy of rap as a form of literary expression. Other topics within the paper are: a background of the history of rap and the digital humanities, and an example of a close reading featuring a medieval poem and a rap by Eminem. This demonstrates how even in a traditional way of handling texts, both poetry and …

"A Kindler, Gentler Time": How Pleasantville And The Truman Show "Fix" The 1950s Suburban Ideal, Sophie Cohen

English Honors Theses

The Truman Show and Pleasantville both present a vision of the 1950s that is manufactured and mediated by television. I attempt to explain this using Lauren Berlant's model of the pilgrimage narrative, in which a character encounters true America in Washington, DC. Instead of locating America in the nation’s capital, though, I argue that these films locate America in the idealized suburbs of the 1950s. I propose that this pilgrimage differs from the one Berlant outlines in one crucial way: the capital can be visited at any time, but if America is really located in 1950s suburbia, then citizens of …

Unicorns Are Not Real And Neither Are You: Peter S. Beagle's Postmodern Fairy Tale, Athena Hayes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although considered by many readers to be a “cult classic,” Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel The Last Unicorn has been unrepresented in literary scholarship. Many fantasy critics in the past have dismissed the work as lacking a sense of reality through its mixing of modern language with a medieval, fantasy setting. However, the novel’s purposeful muddling of reality raises questions of ontology and the nature of storytelling/world-projection. The objective of this study is to not only to act as a sort of apologetic for The Last Unicorn, but also read the novel in the context of fairy tale/mythic studies …

Within The Shadow Of The Cowboy: Myths And Realities Of The Old American West, Katherine Lamb

Undergraduate Theses

It has been argued that the American cowboy is the most widely misunderstood and misinterpreted figure in American history. This mythic figure does not look like the real ranch hands who littered the American West throughout the nineteenth century, nor does he act like them. Instead, he is set apart, as a figurehead of masculinity and American ideals, determined to roam the frontier as a guardian of justice and stability. This version of the cowboy, however, is not bound within the pages of novels or within limitations of film. Instead, the cowboy’s ideals, persona, look, and code remain a vivid …

Satire In The Cold War Era: Graham Greene's Our Man In Havana And Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast Of Champions, Sara Eslami

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Both Graham Greene and Kurt Vonnegut use satire to interrogate the social uneasiness during the Cold War; however, each author uses satire in different ways. Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana demonstrates this unease, as almost every character is paranoid besides the vacuum salesman and inept “spy” Wormold, who uses fiction to fabricate the reports he sends to the Secret Intelligence Service. Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions also has a protagonist who is strongly impacted by fiction, as Dwayne Hoover is so affected by Kilgore Trout’s literature that it drives him insane. Both authors use different satiric techniques as a …

Reinvestigating Masculinity In The Works Of Ernest Hemingway, Neidy D. Mchugh

English Department Theses

This thesis examines the conception and destruction of masculine identities in Ernest Hemingway’s fictive works as resultant of a male dependence on societal acceptance. Utilizing both protagonists that fully align with a machismo persona and protagonists that seem disparate from Hemingway’s oeuvre of hyper masculinity, this thesis examines the uniform concerns of Hemingway’s men—their perception in society, threats to their masculinity, and their code of ethics. Through a three-pronged approach, this thesis looks at the male place in society, concerns about masculine identities, and responses to threats against masculinity. First, the recurrent figures of the father, the hunter, the son, …

Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Lucas R. Nossaman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the …

Taoist Principles In Walt Whitman's "Song Of Myself", Annika Cerini

English Literature | Senior Theses

One of the most influential and well recognized writers of the 19th century is Walt Whitman. He created works that changed the way that individuals saw the world around them and themselves. Walt Whitman was vocal about the absolut originality of his work and that he never took ideas from outside influence, but regardless of his own claims, his work presents a clear allusion to Eastern thought that particularly resembles that of the Tao te Ching. Some of the concepts that he underlines in his own work include but are not limited to simplicity, compassion, and patience. These aren’t the …

Into The Abyss: Self-Destruction As Feminist Resistance In Ottessa Moshfegh’S My Year Of Rest And Relaxation And Han Kang’S The Vegetarian, Camille Bernt

English Literature | Senior Theses

This paper is a comparative literary analysis of two contemporary novels: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007) and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). With a focus on self-destruction as a mode of feminist resistance, I explore the two novel’s overlapping themes, specifically the ways in which radical transformation offers a means to escape social and cultural oppressions impressed upon women. My inquiry into these processes aims to trace methods of resistance in response to patriarchal and anthropocentric ideologies, through forms of social deprogramming, the embodiment of vegetal and animal alterity and a recuperation of the maternal semiotic …

Journeying To A Third Space Of Sovereignty: Explorations Of Land, Cultural Hybridity, And Sovereignty In Ceremony And There There, Jillian Eve Sanchez

English (MA) Theses

In Native American literature, there is a discourse that solely focuses on the relationship between Indigenous people and the land. This relationship is vital to understanding the traditions, rituals, storytelling, and practices of Native Americans. The presence of settler colonialism changes the relationship, effectively changing the nature of cultural and spiritual relationships as well. Indigenous literature provides examples of the modern relationship Native people have with their land; an example of this is Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Tommy Orange’s There There Despite modernity, assimilation, and ways of life introduced by settler colonialism, Native people maintain a relationship to the …