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Articles 61 - 90 of 312

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Aave Be-Deletion In Quotative Be Like, Hayley Franklin Apr 2017

Aave Be-Deletion In Quotative Be Like, Hayley Franklin

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


The Fooding Of Narrative In Contemporary Women's Transnational Fiction, Stacey Marie Amo Jan 2017

The Fooding Of Narrative In Contemporary Women's Transnational Fiction, Stacey Marie Amo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Fooding of Narrative in Contemporary Women’s Transnational Fiction examines how foodstuffs are strategically deployed in recent fiction about migration to the United States. The novels examined, all set in the period following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, depict the experience of resettlement from a diverse set of postcolonial sites: Haiti, Cuba, Vietnam, and India. The Fooding of Narrative argues that food is deployed as a structuring trope and acquires narrative significance in articulating the profound sense of identity crisis that frequently accompanies the immigration experience. By focusing on food’s narrative significance in a broad …


The Rhetoric Of Hospitality: Conditions Of Death In America, Margaret Anne Callahan Jan 2017

The Rhetoric Of Hospitality: Conditions Of Death In America, Margaret Anne Callahan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Right of Hospitality: Conditions of Death in America calls Western biomedicine’s approach to death into question. Death unifies all human experiences and is always possible, despite the human tendency to deny its existence and, instead, orient the self towards a futurity that is always out of reach. This project investigates the structures influencing how death in America occurs, and traces the roots of Western culture’s rejection of death to the execution by hemlock of Socrates’ immortalized in the Phaedo. Western biomedicine’s institutionalization of medicine requires that both patients and doctors enter into imbalanced hospitable relationships, and these pressures, along …


Descendants Of Abraham: A Comparative Approach To Jewish And Islamic Rhetorics, Brandon Katzir Jan 2017

Descendants Of Abraham: A Comparative Approach To Jewish And Islamic Rhetorics, Brandon Katzir

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Descendants of Abraham: A Comparative Approach to Jewish and Islamic Rhetorics provides two important correctives to modern scholarship. It emphasizes the importance of Jewish and Islamic rhetorics typically neglected by Western-centric historians of rhetoric, and it showcases the cultural relationship between Jews and Muslims that has been typically occluded by modern scholarship. Focusing on the early Islamic world, I demonstrate instantiations of interconnectivity between Jewish and Islamic rhetoric in Arabic from the 9th-12th centuries CE. Specifically, I look at how judicial rhetoric plays an important role in the adjudication of halakha and sharia, followed by a consideration of theological rhetoric …


The West As Fiction In First-Generation Arab Immigrant Literature, Rimun Murad Jan 2017

The West As Fiction In First-Generation Arab Immigrant Literature, Rimun Murad

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The West as Fiction in First-Generation Arab Immigrant Literature investigates the resemblance between the Arab immigrant experience, in first-generation Arab immigrant literature, and the experience of fiction reading. This dissertation analyzes Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966), Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), Walid Al Hajjar’s trilogy The Search for the Self (1973, 1979, and 1984), Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999), Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago: A Novel (2007), and Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001). Drawing from genre, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, this project argues that the West, for first-generation …


"In The School, Not Of The School": Co-Performing Critical Literacies With English Amped, Anna Catherine West Jan 2017

"In The School, Not Of The School": Co-Performing Critical Literacies With English Amped, Anna Catherine West

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore the possibilities and limitations of “amplifying” critical literacy practices within an urban high school English and creative writing class. This action research project defamiliarized English education and created conditions for participants to imagine and perform alternative possibilities by bringing together critical research, community involvement, creative writing and performance in an extended class with high school, university, and community-based collaborators. Participants were high school juniors, partnering teachers, university-based student teachers, and community members who collaborated to form the English Amped program in the 2014-2015 academic year. Ethnographic methods were used to collect data …


Disease, Bread, Efficiency: Rhetorics Of Victorian Education Reform, Vicki Jean Davis Jan 2017

Disease, Bread, Efficiency: Rhetorics Of Victorian Education Reform, Vicki Jean Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Disease, Bread, Efficiency: Rhetorics of Victorian Education Reform arose from my observation that, historically speaking, Anglo-American schools have always been “in crisis.” I argue that the crisis of the “failing school” is a rhetorical problem rather than an economic problem as most scholarship suggests. Much like the cultural myth of “the One True Love,” education reform debates tend to position the school as an institution that can rescue the nation from all perceived social ills. Not only is this unrealistic, the patterns of language are inconsistent as ideas about the purpose of school are translated into policy. This causes further …


White Trash Compactor, Jacob Heflin Apr 2016

White Trash Compactor, Jacob Heflin

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


“Ain’T He A Beauty”: Black Queer Aesthetics And Disidentification In American Literature And Film, Rory Tolbert Boothe Apr 2016

“Ain’T He A Beauty”: Black Queer Aesthetics And Disidentification In American Literature And Film, Rory Tolbert Boothe

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


The Rat Kingdom, Laura Gauggel Apr 2016

The Rat Kingdom, Laura Gauggel

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


“Þe Inglis In Seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 – 1330, Joseph Richard Wingenbach Jan 2016

“Þe Inglis In Seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 – 1330, Joseph Richard Wingenbach

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For some time, scholars who study English identity formation in the literature produced between the Norman Conquest and the Hundred Years War have addressed the manifold ways English writers imagined and reconstructed the Anglo-Saxon past as a golden era free of the taint of foreign domination. I find the cultural memory of pre-Conquest England to be only a fraction of what constituted literary Englishness, and my research calls for a more nuanced description of English literary identity during the period in question. The hybrid critical approach I employ is a blend of historicist and structural linguistic methodologies that takes both …


Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman And The American City, 1830-1900, Jordan L. Von Cannon Jan 2016

Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman And The American City, 1830-1900, Jordan L. Von Cannon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman and the American City, 1830-1900, I explore urban narratives of female non-development. In city novels featuring female protagonists, there are two normative arcs of development: either women find new opportunities for marriage, work, and, in some cases, independence in the city, or they fall prey to threats of seduction, poverty, and even death. However, these two plotlines fail to accommodate stories of women who wait to develop, fail at it, or otherwise resist what might be considered character growth. By problematizing distinctions between idleness and the American “work ethic” often tied to the industrialized …


The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia In Modernist Narratives Of The First World War, Michael Von Cannon Jan 2016

The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia In Modernist Narratives Of The First World War, Michael Von Cannon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, entitled The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia in Modernist Narratives of the First World War, re-conceptualizes U.S. modernism by attending to how the historical event of WWI inaugurated melancholia, or sustained grief, as the cornerstone of a new form of nationalism. Scholars have focused either on how consolatory mourning bolstered patriotism or how melancholia led to the demise of such an imagined community and to the growth of cosmopolitanism. I consider, however, an American modernist commitment to the nation of loss expressed, surprisingly enough, in narratives about noncombatants. For a country that entered the military conflict near its end, …


Our Cosmogonies: Creation Myth In Everyday Moments, Samantha Bares Apr 2015

Our Cosmogonies: Creation Myth In Everyday Moments, Samantha Bares

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising The Region In The Twenty-First Century, Matthew Dischinger Jan 2015

Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising The Region In The Twenty-First Century, Matthew Dischinger

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Postsouthern Melancholia offers a new way of conceptualizing the elusive concept of melancholia through contemporary fiction, particularly fiction of or about the American South. Critics have long discussed national literature through the lens of melancholia: an unceasing attachment to a lost object or ideal that a subject or culture internalizes. My project positions melancholia as a literary strategy—one that contemporary southern fiction frequently contests and critiques. I read fiction that has been called “postsouthern,” a term applied to texts that reassess the bedrock concepts of southern literature such as community, storytelling, and sense of place. While much scholarship has focused …


The Erotics Of Race Suicide: The Making Of Whiteness And The Death Drive In The Progressive Era, 1880-1920, Madoka Kishi Jan 2015

The Erotics Of Race Suicide: The Making Of Whiteness And The Death Drive In The Progressive Era, 1880-1920, Madoka Kishi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

"The Erotics of Race Suicide" examines the frequent representation of suicide in Progressive Era American literature in light of a widely proclaimed socio-political concept of the time: “race suicide.” Coined by the sociologist Edward Ross, the term “race suicide” nominates a nativist fear over the racial enervation of indigenous white Americans. Ross and other commentators on race suicide, most notably Theodore Roosevelt, proclaimed that the diminution of the indigenous white Americans was caused by their unwillingness to breed, signaling the self-destructive, “suicidal” tendency of the race. Consequently, through such means as the enactment of immigration restrictions, the reinforcement of anti-miscegenation …


Paradoxical Agency: The Ethics Of Women's Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Rome, Catherine Riley Godbold Jan 2015

Paradoxical Agency: The Ethics Of Women's Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Rome, Catherine Riley Godbold

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I address the problems of ethics and agency for women’s speech in Shakepseare’s Roman plays—Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus—and the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Regardless of their rhetorical skill, virtue, or agency, it seems that the Roman women in these works are doomed to fail: either their lives become unlivable or they lose the people most important to them. This prompts the project’s initiating question: why do Shakespeare’s Roman women speak if their words have no long-term effect? For these characters, rhetorical success in Shakespeare’s Rome is dependent upon a particular …


"Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction In Victorian Literature And Culture, Mary Timothy Wilson Jan 2015

"Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction In Victorian Literature And Culture, Mary Timothy Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Examining a broad range of texts,“‘Superbly Sterile:’ Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture,” argues that Thomas Hardy’s final naturalist novels, popular nineteenth-century vampire narratives, and the fiction of Oscar Wilde queered the bildungsroman (or novel of development) through characters who failed or refused to progress along sexual and maturational timelines. Where these texts’ critics have tended to read them as cautionary tales about homosexuality or predatory female sexuality, this dissertation contends that they also presented alternate forms of kinship and reproduction. They do so through the use of recursive, inverted, or otherwise backward relationships to time. Where Victorian sexology …


A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers And The Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910, Helana E. Brigman Jan 2015

A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers And The Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910, Helana E. Brigman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Until recently, critics have devalued the Victorian cookbook as an object of literary inquiry, regularly dismissing it as “Victoriana”—cultural, anthropological histories detailing bland culinary traditions. A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers and the Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910 seeks to provide a framework by which we can explore the Victorian cookbook as a literary text appropriated by writers responding to and advocating for cultural, educational, and artistic reform during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Looking specifically at how women used recipes to discuss food preparation, dining, and household management, I argue that British women writers participated in a collaborative tradition, borrowing and sharing …


Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier Jan 2015

Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that out of postmodernity, subjectivity has seen distinct mutations inflected by consumer technology. As postmodern mediators of ordinary people, reality TV, Facebook, and YouTube are steeped in concerns about authenticity. Reality TV, for example, cannot escape its authenticity problem because of the conventional hierarchy of production it maintains, a hierarchy that prompts consumer skepticism regarding its truth value. However, seemingly democratic Internet platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, promise consumer engagement in which users can break down those hierarchical barriers preventing authentic expression. Under the guise of presumed mediational accuracy, the resulting feedback loop between …


Iron Redemption: A Biographical Documentary With Ethnographic Elements, Natalie Domingue May 2014

Iron Redemption: A Biographical Documentary With Ethnographic Elements, Natalie Domingue

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


On The River’S Surface, Ashten Landry May 2014

On The River’S Surface, Ashten Landry

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Shifting Stability: Identity In The World Of Louise Erdrich, Karah M. Mitchell May 2014

Shifting Stability: Identity In The World Of Louise Erdrich, Karah M. Mitchell

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


We Were Just Like Them A Collection Of Short Fiction, Jacqueline Derobertis May 2014

We Were Just Like Them A Collection Of Short Fiction, Jacqueline Derobertis

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


The Women Of Shakespeare’S Hamlet In Modern Film Adaptations, Meredith Will May 2014

The Women Of Shakespeare’S Hamlet In Modern Film Adaptations, Meredith Will

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Rope, Dylan Evers Apr 2014

Rope, Dylan Evers

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas Jan 2014

Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Thrillology: Affective Intensities and the Everyday-Spectacular in American Literature and Culture” presents thrill as a powerful thematic component centered on immediate affective gratification informing character development and narrative. This perspective rethinks theme as always having an affective dimension that accompanies its conceptual articulations, with the former, in many cases, being the more important element. Thrilled psycho-emotional states emerge, in their own right, as legitimizations of individuality and cultural autonomy from the perspective of the passional subject. Engaging with a broad spectrum of literary and cultural sources spanning the last hundred years, this project investigates various ways in which the self-fulfilling …


Intersections Of Race And Class In 1830s Othello Burlesques, Laura Michelle Keigan Jan 2014

Intersections Of Race And Class In 1830s Othello Burlesques, Laura Michelle Keigan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In recent years, we have come to better understand how nineteenth-century burlesques critiqued and lampooned the respectable humbuggery of patent theater productions and middle-class culture. Their carnivalesque spectacle and low humor turned topsy-turvy what was falsely revered or pretentious in English society. This study, however, explores the extent to which some burlesques responded conservatively to social and legislative change, which supposedly weakened established hierarchies constituting English culture and society. My chapters examine how two burlesques of Shakespeare’s Othello—Charles M. Westmacott’s Othello, the Moor of Fleet Street (1833) and Maurice M. M. G. Dowling’s Othello Travestie (1834)—contributed to discourse surrounding debate …


Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality And Sociality In Literary Productions, 1974-1997, Jaime Cantrell Jan 2014

Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality And Sociality In Literary Productions, 1974-1997, Jaime Cantrell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Southern Sapphisms: Sexuality and Sociality in Literary Productions, 1974-1997, considers how queer and feminist theories illuminate and complicate the intersections between canonical and obscure, queer and normative, and regional and national narratives in southern literary representations produced during a crucial but understudied period in the historical politicization of sexuality. The advent of New Southern Studies—and its nascent emphasis on sexuality as an organizing principle of social relations—has focused almost exclusively on midcentury texts from the Southern Renascence, largely neglecting post-1970 queer literatures. At the same time, despite these developments in southern studies, most scholarship in women’s and feminist studies continue …


Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie Jan 2014

Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, through a closer examination of the controversies over Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), I seek to identify the elements of a defensible postcolonial vision. While postcolonialism is afflicted with many problematic assumptions, the exclusively liberal perspective which these authors seek to reaffirm in its place has its own plethora of defects. Ali, Hosseini and Nafisi merit a closer attention not only for their exposing some of the flawed views underlying postcolonialism but also for their demonstrating why an unqualified reversion to liberalism may …