English Language and Literature Commons^™

How Cypress Tress Become Mangroves: An Analysis Of The Works Of Amitav Ghosh And Climate Change, Alyssa D. Dobson

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Flood, Elizabeth Haley

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Women’S Disabled Bodies In The Novels Of Agatha Christie, Victoria Pfeifer

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I articulate a hermeneutics for reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal text Nature through drawing on the insights of the contemporary philosopher Sebastian Rödl. Particularly, the performative, literary characteristics of Rödl’s quite conceptual work resonate with the poetic strategies that Emerson employs in Nature. In the section on the work of Rödl, I make the performative aspects of his philosophy explicit through a close reading of the way self-consciousness happens in his texts through the language he employs. Rödl refers to his elucidation of self-consciousness as idealism. In the section on Emerson, I show how Emerson’s project …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …

Intimate Fictions: The Rhetorical Strategies Of Obscene Violence In Four Novels, Steven Monk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Richard Wright, Marlon James, Cormac McCarthy and Ken Levine are each celebrated in their respective fields but notorious for their obscene depictions of violence. Contrary to trauma theorists’ claims that violence shatters language and cannot be spoken, these writers speak violence in its most disturbing forms: torn eyeballs, dead infants, forced fecal consumption and mechanized rape. I argue that obscene violence, much like obscene language, creates a space of intimacy in which transgressive, subversive and oppositional thoughts may be spoken. By alienating their texts from the larger reading public, these writers entice a smaller group of sympathetic readers to develop …

“A Body Knows:” Time, Affect, And Change In Post-Civil War African American Literature, Charity Ringel

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

American Waste, Jason Allen Christian

LSU Master's Theses

American Waste is an interlinking story cycle told in the first person by a character called Rice. The stories follow Rice from his childhood (in rural Oklahoma) into adulthood, first when lives in a “punk house” with other young punk rockers in Oklahoma City, and later as he travels by freight train around the country. While he travels he reports on what he sees and experiences in the subculture that he is part of, whose members are called gutter punks and crusties. Theirs is a lifestyle bent on risk and adventure and also often plagued with drug and alcohol addiction. …

Fragments And Flânerie: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, And The Art Of Wandering, Charla Allyn Hughes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that wandering, whether across cities (flânerie) or across geographic regions and countries (travel), is a process of not only finding meaning but also one of confronting alienation and dislocation, conditions of the fragmentariness of modern life, which is signified by transnationalism, media, technology, and consumerism. This examination of flânerie, travel, and cosmopolitanism investigates three women writers’ representations of navigating an alienating, fragmented world—or, more simply, of the search for a sense of home and/or belonging. Transatlantic writers Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Zadie Smith not only consider specific places and suspended in-betweens but also …

The Child Ethnographer In The Field: Examples From English, Spanish, And French Caribbean Literature, Emily Ann O'Dell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I consider the child to be an ethnographer in works of fiction and autofiction from the Caribbean islands. Through their liminality as culturally and developmentally betwixt or between, their cultural malleability, their linguistic fluidity, and their curiosity, the child becomes a "native" ethnographer who is capable of translating the culture (both linguistically and culturally) for the reader in order to establish understandings of Caribbean cultures. This is accomplished through the creation of hybridized or creolized texts that have many of the same characteristics as postmodern ethnographies.

In the English Caribbean Xuela provides an ethnographic perspective of Dominican …

Novel Media: Global Contemporary Fiction In The Digital Age, Mary Catherine Pappalardo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Novel Media argues that contemporary literature—particularly the novel form—is best decoded in terms of the new media forms that have proliferated since the dawn of the internet. Perhaps no other development has so dramatically shaped contemporary life than the ubiquity of the internet, internet-capable devices, and the myriad social networks that have blossomed within. Fiction is no different; the social media forms that dominate our lives online have also, I argue, rewired the way novels work in the twenty-first century. As such, a new reading practice is required that attends to these seismic changes to the novelistic terrain. The project …

Carceral Dreams: Punishment In Contemporary Utopian Fiction, Amandine Faucheux

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the representation of legal violence—punishment—is an essential definitional axis to utopian literature. Utopian scholarship tends to position the political or economic system that a text imagines as the key determinant of that text’s identity as a Utopia, a dystopia, or an anti-Utopia. I propose instead that the propensity of the imaginary society to inflict violence in a legal or official context defines its utopian or dystopian quality. Through an analysis of twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone utopian novels and stories by George Orwell, Octavia E. Butler, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Adam Roberts, and Kelley Eskridge, …

The Effect Of The Oxford Movement On The Family And Eucharistic Symbolism In Victorian Literature, Elizabeth Vukovics

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Intertwined Markings: Metafiction In The Digital Age, Taylor Danielle Orgeron

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Intertwined Markings: Metafiction in the Digital Age maps the historical and thematic relationship between video games and contemporary works of metafiction first by detailing the intertwined histories of video games and contemporary metafiction, and then by applying new materialist and game studies methodologies to both video games and contemporary novels. Not only does the height of postmodern metafiction directly coincide with the introduction of home consoles and the golden age of arcade video games in the 1970s, but the same postmodern works considered to be canonical in metafiction studies are also those lauded as the first hypertexts in new media …

The Criminal Justice Systems And Psychological Disfranchisement, Morgan Johnson

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

A Poetics Of Temperance: Gender, Genre, And Meaning-Making In Early Modern England, Cristina Maria Rosell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For several hundred years, the scholarly discussion of temperance was dominated by the legacy of classical models. This dissertation, titled A Poetics of Temperance: Gender, Genre, and Meaning-Making in Early Modern England, develops said discussion in a new way by forging a language about ethics and aesthetics into a poetics of temperance. The term poiesis derives from Greek and signifies “to make, create, produce” (OED). Accordingly, Aristotle uses the Greek poietes, “from which our word ‘poet’ derives,” to denote a “maker” (Murray xxxii). In brief, this project understands the role of women in emergent genres as …

Will To Remember: Counter-Archives In The Work Of Alvarez, Danticat, And Díaz, Megan Elizabeth Feifer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues the essays, fiction, non-fiction, and non-profit work of authors Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz produce counter-narratives that when assembled, create a counter-archive of the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship and its lasting effects. To support this claim, I analyze the various genres and medias they employ throughout the late 20^thand early 21^st centuries as redressing not only the “official” state history of the dictatorship, but also the overarching construction of history with a capital “H”. Through a close reading of form and the thematic concerns present in their work, I demonstrate how they …

Ethics, Aesthetics, And The Representation Of Intellectual Disability In The Realist Narrative, Elizabeth Wells

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for a renewed approach to realist texts that rely on conventional perspective and minor characters in their representation of intellectually disabled characters. While disability studies' concepts like narrative prosthesis and the normate have done essential work in arguing for the need for disability's representation from the perspective of the disabled, these ideologies have also negatively influenced the critical reception of texts that do not respond to this need in an immediate or obvious way. By offering new readings of novels with disabled characters whose representations have been frequently questioned, my aim is to complicate the …

"Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall": Reflections On Colorism, Healing, And Resistance In Literature And Social Media, Sarah Lorena Webb

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Colorism is a warped mirror image problem. A mirror is anything we refer to, consciously or not, for feedback about ourselves. A mirror is warped to the extent that it disempowers or disenfranchises those reflected in it. Speculative mirrors expose the distortion of warped mirrors by revealing positive or subversive alternatives. Speculative mirrors help us conceive of theories that resist harmful ideology. Newly aware of the distortion of warped mirrors and newly equipped with the tool of speculative mirrors, we may choose to engage in self-reflection—the process of composing one's own affective and empowering or tactical self-concept. Projecting one's self-reflection …

Jane Austen's Hidden Bodies: Adaptation As Critical Commentary, Elizabeth Gilliland

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Much of adaptation theory calls for a shift away from fidelity discourse, arguing that an adaptation does not need to be a faithful translation of the original, but should rather be viewed as literature in its own right. As such, adaptations are often studied separately from their source texts; yet even so, an unofficial hierarchy sometimes remains in deeming some types of adaptations more ripe for study than others. Further, in separating the adaptation from the original, some of the more radical alterations can be routinely dismissed as an “added” element to the text, rather than exploring what commentary these …

"Swallowing A World": Globalization And The Maximalist Novel, Benjamin S. Bergholtz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the maximalist novel is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. To support this claim, I analyze the ways in which four maximalist novels—William Gaddis’s J R (1975), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014)—both map and formally mimic different elements of globalization. Each of these novels, I argue, is organized around a significant feature or, to put it simply, “effect” of globalization. This organization is so extensive that not only the vast majority …

Development Of A Literary Dispositif: Convening Diasporan, Blues, And Cosmopolitan Lines Of Inquiry To Reveal The Cultural Dialogue Among Giuseppe Ungaretti, Langston Hughes, And Antonio D’Alfonso, Anna Ciamparella

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to create a literary dialogue among the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the African American author Langston Hughes, and the Quebecois writer Antonio D’Alfonso. Giuseppe Ungaretti and Langston Hughes were more or less contemporaries. Ungaretti was born in 1888 and Hughes in 1902, and both were active in modernist movements that shaped the literary history of their own countries. D’Alfonso was born in Canada about half a center after Ungaretti and Hughes. Besides significant generational differences, these three authors also underwent personal and intellectual experiences that shaped their writing in seemingly incomparable ways. While a traditional comparative approach …

Book Proposal: Evangeline: A Murder On The Cajun Prairie, Jordan Lahaye

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

An Inexhaustible Source Of Magic: How Fanfiction Turned One World Into A Thousand, Taylor Pernini

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Medium Is The Movement: The Internet's Influence On Feminist Rhetorical Strategies, Christine Nicole Jeansonne

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In The Medium Is the Movement: The Internet’s Influence on Feminist Rhetorical Strategies, I assert that recent scholarship on online feminism identifies feminist approaches to using the Internet as a tool to achieve activist causes but does not fully consider the active role of the Internet, itself, in changing feminist rhetoric. In response to this oversight, each of my chapters first attends to a popular critique of online feminism and then illuminates the digital framework’s influence in prompting distinct changes to feminist rhetorical practices. In Chapter I, entitled, “Hashtag ‘Slacktivism’: Posturing and Positioning in #OnlineFeminism,” I explore the productive …

Chaucer's Divided "I": Narrative Voice And Performance Dynamics In Late Fourteenth-Century English Literature, Isaac Mcduffie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the twentieth century, various Chaucer scholars have worked to achieve the now-consensus opinion that Chaucer wrote his works expecting them to be both listened to within a group setting and read privately in an individual setting. These scholars have either assumed or expressly stated that the experience of listening to and reading Chaucer’s works would have been the same. This dissertation argues otherwise. I show that in the late fourteenth century, English vernacular was only starting to be understood as a written language, and this peculiar circumstance created tensions between both listening and reading modes of reception. Such tensions …

Limbo: An Exploration Of The Spaces Between, April Ahmed

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Restorative Rhetoric And Community Action In Response To The 2016 Baton Rouge Flood, Madeline Elizabeth Munch

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Rewriting Reality: The Interplay Of Journalism And Literature In Mid-Twentieth Century America, France, And Mexico, Victoria Sidener Primeaux

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

“Whate’Er I Be”: The Body Liminal And The Permeable Limits Of Sovereignty In Early Modern Drama, Linda Anne Riley

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.