English Language and Literature Commons^™

"My Watch Begins" : Identification And Procedural Rhetoric On Second Screens And Social Networks., K. Shannon Howard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Digital rhetoric creates opportunities for examining rhetoric as it evolves daily. This evolution may be described in terms of network circulation and immediate opportunities for publishing and creating. This project analyzes mobile applications and live feeds used during television broadcasts, where rhetoric is closely tied to the work of identifying with another point of view. Producers and designers of dual-screen applications prompt us to answer how we would act if we assumed the role of protagonist and saw the world through her or his eyes. These questions support the idea that identification is not just a relative of empathy or …

Yours, Mine, And Ours : Confronting The Originality Burden Through Remix And Intertextuality., Barrie Olson Harvey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to ongoing conversations regarding the goal of composition instructors “to empower students to take responsibility for their ideas and their texts while developing their curiosity and persistence in the pursuit of knowledge” (Carpenter, 2014, par. 4). In particular, this dissertation, a classroom ethnography, examines how the originality burden-an encumbrance wherein students feel overwhelmed by the need to write an “original” paper-operates in one second-semester first-year composition course dedicated to relieving students from feeling like they must write “original” texts. More specifically, this study examines the potential of two concepts, remix and intertextuality, to help show students that …

Globalizing Literacies And Identities : Translingual And Transcultural Literacy Practices Of Bhutanese Refugees In The U.S., Tika R. Lamsal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This critical ethnographic study explores how language and literacy shape the social identities and cultural practices of the Bhutanese refugees in the U.S., and how an understanding of their literate practices contributes to new conceptualizations of language and literacies research. Involving fifty-six Bhutanese refugees from a Midwest city, this study highlights linguistic and cultural resources utilized by the Bhutanese refugees at key literacy sites – such as an Elderly Care Center, mandatory ESL classes, weekly cultural and musical gatherings, men’s and women’s Kirtan (religious singing) groups, and youth online forums – for creating, changing, and transforming their linguistic, cultural, musical, …

The Narrators And Narratees Of Kazuo Ishiguro, Katherine E. Harrell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis examines the narratees of three novels by Kazuo Ishiguro: An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go. In each novel, a first person narrator directs his or her story toward an unidentified narratee. Through their narration, the narrators reveal who they imagine their narratees to be and why they are telling their stories to these particular types of people. In relating their narratives, Ono, Stevens, and Kathy H., the respective narrators, each reveal a secret they have sought to hide from the other characters in the novel, …

The Ethos Of Conspiracy Argument : "Character" As Persuader In Conspiracy Rhetoric., Michael James Sobiech

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Conspiracy theory has, as Timothy Melley states in Empire of Conspiracy (2000), “animated our political culture from the early Republican period to the present, at times powerfully swaying popular opinion” (vii). Though it has attracted attention from a wide range of disciplines, conspiracy theory has not received significant notice within rhetoric and composition. My dissertation adds to the interdisciplinary body of scholarship concerning conspiracy theory by examining it as rhetoric, focusing on how the construction of a conspiracy proponent’s ethos/character affects the persuasiveness of a conspiracy theory. I argue that ethos construction plays a much more significant role in conspiracy …

Corn Cantos., John E. Burgett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis is a long poem based on experiences working in corn fields. It examines how migrant worker relationships have evolved over the recent decades, and offers a forecast of the future of migrant relationships with seed companies such as Pioneer and Dekalb. The poem's format draws from Ezra Pound's Cantos. The style shows some similarities to the works Charles Olson and Walt Whitman. The thesis is divided into nine smaller poems that can be considered chapters in a narrative. The style is non-lyrical, attempting to capture the idiomatic expressions and base language of the characters.

Servants Of My People First : An Examination Of The Political Literacies Of The Black Liberation Front International (Blfi), 1969-1973., Joilynn Karega-Mason

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a multifaceted project. First, it is a historical work of subversion and revision designed to do two things: (1) apply pressure to trends in rhetoric and composition historiography that have left under-challenged a politics of representation that historically and systematically marked Black college students of the late sixties and early seventies as under-prepared, lacking in linguistic and rhetorical resources and agency, and politically militant yet academically apathetic; and (2) construct a more nuanced portrait of the writer agency of the Black college students of the late sixties and early seventies by examining the political writings of members …

Mobilizing Modernist Magazines : Peter Sloterdijk And The Transatlantic Review., Daniel Lee Conrad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many early examinations of “little magazines,” or avant-garde modernist publications, tend to focus on the biographical narratives of their editors or center their discussion on early versions of canonical works in order to develop a greater understanding of the body of work itself. Works like Bernard Poli’s Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review follow this biographical model, and while well researched and informative, Poli's study strictly focuses on the role Ford played in the publication; in doing so, it limits what can be said about the review’s project to the local editorial level. This thesis, by contrast, seeks to …

The Language Politics Of Doctoral Studies In Rhetoric And Composition : Toward A Translingual Revision Of Graduate Education In The Field., Carrie Byars Kilfoil

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation critiques graduate education in rhetoric and composition in relationship to recent calls for a “translingual” approach to the teaching of writing and a transnational, cross-cultural approach to writing research (Horner, Lu, Royster, Trimbur; Canagarajah; Donahue). Building on this scholarship, I attend to the (re)production of disciplinary dispositions toward language difference in rhetoric and composition doctoral studies. Through textual analysis of the Rhetoric Review surveys of doctoral programs in the field (1987, 1995, 2000, 2007, and the current wiki), archival materials from various programs (including three focal schools), and a survey of doctoral students currently enrolled in the University …

Competing Conceptions Of Literacy : Intersections In A Dual-Credit Writing Program., Caroline Wilkinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses how as dual-credit offerings rise, university writing programs work to respond to the pedagogical, material, and institutional concerns that inform teaching “college-level writing” in this unique space. Recent composition scholarship, such as Christine Farris and Kristine Hansen’s College Credit for Writing in High School: The “Taking Care of” Business, addresses the acceleration of these courses, questioning the extent to which the efficiency of dual credit designates writing as a “commodity easily appropriated, sold, outsourced, and knocked off” (272). My project further studies the implications of accelerated writing courses by interviewing dual-credit students, instructors, and administrators at one …

Undoings : Reversals And Dissolutions Of Binaries In The Narrative Films Of Peter Greenaway., Kristina Sue Bohleber Groves 1978-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, discussed and analyzed are the narrative films of British film director Peter Greenaway through lenses of queer theory, feminism, and theories of the monstrous to investigate Greenaway’s notion of the Other in his films. Nearly all his films include a “nonstandard” Othering of characters, a breaking down of societal binaries, as well as crossing the line of what is taboo in our society. This Othering forces viewers to reevaluate their own subjectivity, and to evaluate which groups they see themselves as a part of. In creating fantastic worlds in which the characters do not function within the …

Covered In Dust: Coming Of Age In A Gazebo Factory, Jason A. Ney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Covered in Dust: Coming of Age in a Gazebo Factory is a memoir that chronicles the three summers I spent working in the factories at Chestnut Hill Gazebos. The memoir focuses on three narrative strands: the day-to-day life of a factory worker, the struggles within and eventual breakdown of my relationship with my girlfriend, and how my job at Chestnut Hill helped me critique my fundamentalist Christian roots by forcing me into a deeper understanding of my faith and its relationship to the world outside the confines of my upbringing. The critical afterword uses essays by Leona Toker and other …

Cold War Pulp: Gender And Fiction In The Age Of Liberation, James Lewis Hood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The early decades of the twentieth century saw incredible changes in both literacy and general publishing. Once literature had been the domain of the elite, but now it was the daily pleasure of compeople. The changes in American culture in the middle of the century, combined with this revolution in publishing and literacy, combined to produce texts frequently referred to as pulp-fiction, works easily and cheaply produced for a mass-market. This market actively catered to diverse interests, perhaps most significantly the sexually alienated. Works of gay and feminist pulp fiction served to show alienated gay men and women, as well …

“Between The Dream And Reality”: Divination In The Novels Of Cormac Mccarthy, Robert A. Kottage

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Divination is a trope Cormac McCarthy employs time and again in his work. Augury, haruspicy, cartomancy, voodoo, sortition and oneiromancy all take their places in the texts, overtly or otherwise, as well as divination by bloodshed (a practice so ubiquitous as to have no formal name). But mantic practices which aim at an understanding of the divine mind prove problematic in a universe that often appears godless—or worse.

My thesis uses divination as the starting point for a close reading of each of McCarthy’s novels. Research into Babylonian, Greek, Roman and African soothsaying practices is included, as well as the …

Translingualism In Post-Secondary Writing And Language Instruction : Negotiating Language Ideologies In Policies And Pedagogical Practices., Nancy Bou Ayash

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on text-oriented data from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, this study examines how writing teachers and students constantly negotiate tensions between translingual sociolinguistic realities on one hand and monolingualist assumptions about language and language relations on another that dominate curricular and pedagogical designs in first year writing courses. The study involves a multiplicity of data sources, such as official institutional documents, individual instructional materials, classroom observations, structured interviews, and a method of "talk around texts." Writing teachers in this study sensitively grappled with tensions between the constant political pressures of generating the status quo and their ideological orientations …

Editorial Collaboration And Control: Laura Riding And The Seizen Press Years, Christina Cain Whitney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the founding of Seizin Press in 1927, Laura Riding began a new epoch in her career as poet and literary theorist. Along with her partner, Robert Graves, Riding worked among and with important literary tastemakers of the Modernist era, such as Gertrude Stein, Len Lye and James Reeves. Riding's demanding and intense editorial and collaborative style resulted in some unique and fascinating works, such as the bizarrely beautiful Life of the Dead and the egomaniacal The World and Ourselves. Beyond close literary examination of the above works, this study looks at the pressures both within the Seizin Press …

The Caustic Pen Is Mightiest: A Tradition Of Female Satire In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, And Muriel Spark, Jaclyn Andrea Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female satirists have long been treated by critics as anomalies within an androcentric genre because of the reticence to acknowledge women's right to express aggression through their writing. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), A House and Its Head (1935), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), and Muriel Spark (1918-2006) all combine elements of realism and satire within the vehicle of the domestic novel to target institutions of their patriarchal societies, including marriage and family dynamics, as well as the evolving conceptions of domesticity and femininity, with a subtle feminism. These female satirists illuminate …

'Everything Looks Different Up Close': Perception In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake And The Year Of The Flood, Jennifer Leora Nessel Cassidy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the first two books of her MaddAdam series (a projected trilogy), Margaret Atwood explores a series of events from three very different perspectives. A close reading of the two texts suggests that the specific focalizers chosen, and their very different ways of perceiving the world around them, are central issues in the novels. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood establishes the apocalypse as a problem of dystopian vision through the book's deeply flawed focalizer. In The Year of the Flood two alternative visions are offered in order to rehabilitate the perceptual problems of the first text. In the three …

Pedagogy And Identity In "The Night Lessons" Of Finnegans Wake, Zachary Paul Smola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores chapter II.ii of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939)—commonly called "The Night Lessons"—and its peculiar use of the conventions of the textbook as a form. In the midst of the Wake's abstraction, Joyce uses the textbook to undertake a rigorous exploration of epistemology and education. By looking at the specific expectations of and ambitions for textbooks in 19th century Irish national schools, this thesis aims to provide a more specific historical context for what textbooks might mean as they appear in Finnegans Wake. As instruments of cultural conditioning, Irish textbooks were fraught with tension arising from their investment …

Generative Space: Embodiment And Identity At The Margins On The Early Modern Stage, Sallie Anglin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In "Generative Space: Embodiment and Identity at the Margins on the Early Modern Stage," I argue that the early modern stage provides a space in which emerging, marginal and unsanctioned identities can be shaped through the physical interactions between characters and their environments. Spaces that are marginalized on the stage, set apart from the main action of the play, or considered culturally or environmentally offensive, harbor figures that are not socially accepted or alloto exist legitimately outside of those spaces. This is in some ways liberating to the characters, but at the same time their identities are contingent upon the …

The Epitome And Portrait Of Modern Society: Ouida As Social Barometer Of The Victorian Era, Lorraine Michelle Dubuisson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Victorian Era was one of great social flux; tremendous advances in science and technology called into question deeply held religious beliefs while the changing legal status of women threatened to undermine traditional views of gender roles. Industrialization and the driving economic force of capitalism led to rapid urbanization as well as contributing to shifting class boundaries. In addition, the purpose and responsibilities of the Artist/Poet and, indeed, of art itself were closely scrutinized and hotly contested. Most frequently, historians and scholars of literature have looked to authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson …

Alchemical Transformation And The Grief-Threshold In H.D.'S Helen In Egypt, Eliza C. Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In H.D's lyric epic, Helen in Egypt, Helen of Troy experiences a phenomenological transformation in the brazier of the heart, which burns both on the beach of her new home in Egypt and in the depths of her psychic life. I have envisioned a process by which Helen psychologically enters into the brazier's flames to begin an alchemical process, so that she might see the beauty of the earth emerge and understand the rhythmic significance of the heart's perception. I call the brazier's (or the heart's) place of alchemical transformation the grief-threshold, which balances Helen on the edge …

Reconciling Eros And Agape: The English Catholic Artistic Response To Reforms, Nicole M. Coonradt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the English Catholic artistic response to reforms--reforms being both internal and external to the Catholic Church--as part of the Catholic Reformation. "Response," for the purposes of this project, may be defined in terms of an "answer" in an ongoing dialogue about the Catholic position and may be seen as both conciliatory and apologetic in nature. Understanding this response is useful when we consider the role of rhetoric and poetry in society and the attendant contemporary theories thereof, in their historical context, especially the duty of the poet. The recent "revisionist" history is central to understanding art contextually. …

Transformational Leadership In The Life And Works Of C.S. Lewis, Crystal L. Hurd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The author of this study explored the works of C.S. Lewis as well as memoirs and scholarship concerning his work to illustrate his transformational leadership. Works reviewed included Lewis's fiction, such as his science fiction trilogy and his children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as his works of nonfiction, such as essays that addressed social issues. The secondary aim for the author of this study was to determine whether the transformational qualities Lewis exhibited also existed in his characters.

Transformational leadership served as the conceptual framework for the descriptive explanatory qualitative design. Essentially the study analyzed the primary …

Exiled As The Ship Itself: Liminality And Transnational Identity In Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine, Under The Volcano, And Dark As The Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, Spencer Tricker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The themes of empire, nationality, and self-imposed exile constitute underexplored topics in critical discussions of modernist author Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957). Until recently, most academic studies have approached his work from biographical, mythological, and psychoanalytic perspectives. While a few studies have performed historical readings of his novels, such investigations tend, primarily, to focus on his engagement with western literary and theoretical movements of the early twentieth century. Of the few studies that address the cross-cultural reach of his novels, most are limited to discussions of Mexican history and traditions, thus prioritizing a specific geographical region when they might, instead, illuminate the …

Feminine Realism In Cornhill Magazine: Anne Thackeray Ritchie And Frances Parthenope Verney, Alexandra Virginia Scamahorn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the literature published by two lesser known women writers in Cornhill Magazine during the 1860s: Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Frances Parthenope Verney. By using the magazine as a context for their fiction, I examine the ways in which these writers both reflect Cornhill's brand of realism, which privileged masculine ideology, and diverge from it, inserting a feminine perspective. Because the magazine's representation of the multiple facets of its society is varied and complex, my thesis examines a particular aspect of societal representation: one that depicts mid-nineteenth-century society in transition from traditional to progressive values. Caught between …

Star Lake, Arda Collins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Star Lake is a collection of poems.

The Hyperspatial Self: Henry James And Posthuman Modalities, Christina Patsiokas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the era of computing and ubiquitous media, scholars across disciplines have been developing new models for how humans operate in complex environments. This line of inquiry can be bracketed under the larger term of posthuman thought. This thesis attempts to engage the critical and fictional work of Henry James with several posthumanist texts to challenge the temporal limitations of both. Against the backdrop of posthuman discourse, James emerges not as the cherished father of modernism but rather as a pioneer of distant territories far beyond the ways in which the modernist novel conceptualized the self and its consciousness. James …

The Sacrament Of Violence: Myth And War In C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, Tanya Engelhardt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My primary aim for this study is to illuminate the Ransom trilogy's inherent psychological and spiritual themes, as well as demonstrate how these themes clarify Lewis's philosophical and political goals for the text. Specifically, by investigating Lewis's mythic imagery and suffering motifs in light of psychoanalytic and theological literary criticisms, I elucidate the reasoning behind Lewis's unique—and at times, horrific—portrayal of fear, violence, and death. I also investigate how Lewis integrates his theology with the horrors of personal and intrapersonal suffering, as well as how he utilizes imagination and myth to explicate the practical (or political) implications of his theodicy. …

Clamor: Malefica, Protest, And The Occult Economy In Early Modern England, Charles Mock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to figure witchcraft practices within a larger economic context whereby cursing and maleficent acts in general might be read as a means of political protest against the political and economic destabilization of comrights. By reading cursing and prophecy as epistemological weaponry, the thesis establishes a theory of early modern terror that corresponds to the effects of these tactics on local and national levels. Readings of traditional witchcraft literature and Shakespeare's Macbeth will hopefully allow for an understanding of witchcraft that is heavily concerned over the nature of agency within the period, particularly with regard to the ways …