English Language and Literature Commons^™

Teaching Place: Heritage, Home And Community, The Heart Of Education, Judy Kay Lorenzen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines the implementation of a Place-conscious pedagogy as a means to teach heritage and sense of place. This pedagogy is framed upon the premise that trying to understand our heritage and place—ourselves—are crucial elements in our ability to live well as individuals who are connected school/community members, who help our schools/communities thrive, becoming Place-conscious citizens. I argue that in teaching in such a culturally diverse community, tensions rise as immigration has become a main focus. Our school/community has experienced many ethnic groups with vast social differences for which Place-conscious education offers practical solutions. These students have a great …

I Dreamed In Terms Of Novels: Dorothy Day And The Ethics Of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Katherine Thomsen Pierson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

To the extent that she is known, Dorothy Day, a twentieth-century American Catholic journalist and social reformer currently under consideration for sainthood by the Vatican, is recognized for her religious influences. Pope Francis, in his 2015 speech before the American Congress, said she was inspired by “the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.” Yet throughout her life Day was a consistent reader of secular texts and even said she “lived by” the vision of some of her favorite writers. This thesis examines Day’s secular influences—in particular Dickens’s David Copperfield and Little Dorrit—and begins to trace their …

Urgent News From The Front, Jennifer J. Gray

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative thesis is an original work in the genres of fiction and poetry. It consists of three short stories and a chapbook of poems. My work focuses on the ways we find to survive, to create meaning, and to connect to ourselves, to those around us, and to the world in which we live.

Advisor: Jonis Agee

A New Kind Of Social Dreaming: Diversifying Contemporary Dystopian Fiction, Brita M. Thielen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis argues that the dystopian genre lacks diversity not because dystopian novels with a focus on issues of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality have not been written, but because these novels are assigned to other genres. Reevaluating the importance of a future setting to dystopian fiction opens the genre to stories whose characters need not exist in a future temporal landscape because their oppression exists in the present. The entrenched norm of a future temporal setting in dystopian fiction privileges the perspectives of a group of people who largely do not experience systemic oppression in the present: white heterosexual men. …

Birth Family Search, Trauma, And Mel-Han-Cholia In Korean Adoptee Memoirs, Katelyn J. Hemmeke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Birth Family Search, Trauma, and Mel-han-cholia in Korean Adoptee Memoirs” analyzes the connections between adoption trauma and birth family search by examining three Korean-American adoptee memoirs: The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea, both by Jane Jeong Trenka; and Ghost of Sangju by Soojung Jo. I draw links between their work and studies on trauma by critical scholars Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Margaret Homans, and Jennifer Cho. According to Caruth, the pathology of a traumatic experience lies in the victim’s inability to fully experience the traumatic event as it happens; only …

“The World Broke In Two”: The Gendered Experience Of Trauma And Fractured Civilian Identity In Post-World War I Literature, Erin Cheatham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the complexities of civilian identity and the crisis of gender in twentieth century fiction produced after World War I. Of central concern are four novels written by prominent women authors, novels that deal with themes of trauma, violence, and shifting gender roles in a post-war society: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. Although these novels do not directly portray the battlefield experiences of war, I argue that, at their core, they are “war novels” in the fullest sense, concerned with the …

Jazz Epidemics And Deep Set Diseases: The De-Pathologization Of The Black Body In The Work Of Three Harlem Renaissance Writers, Shane C. Hunter

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation argues that the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, a response to Victorian-era medical and scientific racism, and that the three writers on which it centers, Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Wallace Thurman (1902-1934), and Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), participated in subverting these racist discourses. I focus on elements of their creative work that de-pathologize the black body. Specifically, I consider how these writers undermine Victorian-era medical racism that had, by the 1920s, come to inform American racial politics. Hughes’s, Thurman’s, and Nugent’s work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s is at least partly concerned with undermining medically racist ideology …

The Girl With The Fur Coat, Cameron S. Steele

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

THE GIRL WITH THE FUR COAT thesis is comprised of 40 poems and a five-page introduction that examine – with equal parts intimacy and distance – how interior and exterior violence threatens female subjecthood, as well as how girlhood is always – and will always be – transforming the female self. The thesis produces this intimate-yet-distancing effect through a close attention to the (primarily free-verse) forms of the individual poems and how those forms interact with the poems’ subjects, bodies, Surrealist moments and fabulist imagery. Also, the arrangement of the poems helps to create a sense of close, disturbing conversation …

Dreaming Free From The Chains: Teaching The Rhetorical Sovereignty Of Gerald Vizenor Through Bearheart , Lydia R. Presley

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this thesis is to examine Gerald Vizenor’s novel Bearheart, through the lens of rhetorical sovereignty. What this means is that the crux of my understanding of Bearheart begins with the knowledge that the language, terminology, and style used by Vizenor are not only his choices, but also his inherent Native right to use. I argue that it is important to teach Vizenor’s theoretical ideas through Bearheart because each of its relatively short episodes, or series of episodes, deals with a key theoretical idea that can be explored not only in a Native American literature setting, but in …