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Articles 1 - 30 of 144
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston
Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …
Apocalypse Then And Now: Narrative Influence And Thematic Subversion Of Victorian Literature In Modern American War Narratives, Douglas James Scully
Apocalypse Then And Now: Narrative Influence And Thematic Subversion Of Victorian Literature In Modern American War Narratives, Douglas James Scully
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I argue that by looking at the lasting impact of Victorian war literature on a variety of modern media, one can see that an increased cultural awareness of trauma has led to less humane depictions of the traumatized. The multitude of Sherlock Holmes adaptations produced and set in various time periods and covering assorted wars serves as a strong example in my first chapter of how a Victorian-produced text can have a lingering impact, and the veteran Watson serves as a strong tool for adaptors to use when commenting on the shifting nature of war and the …
Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius
Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in …
"A Sort Of Pain, Which Is New": Unresolved Grief In British Romantic Literature, Eta Farmacelia Nurulhady
"A Sort Of Pain, Which Is New": Unresolved Grief In British Romantic Literature, Eta Farmacelia Nurulhady
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines the cultural phenomenon of mourning in relation to British Romantic Literature. In chapters on the work of William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Felicia Hemans, and Charles Lamb, it argues that the Romantic period, as a time of increased mobility due to three revolutions, wars, and the expansion of empire, was a moment when unresolved grief became a common experience. Using the psychologist Pauline Boss’s concept of “ambiguous loss” as a lens for a new reading of British Romantic writing, and distinguishing this concept from the modern concept of “nostalgia,” this dissertation analyzes poetry, novels, and essays written by …
Responsible Classrooms: Unfinalizability, Responsibility, And Participatory Literacy In Secondary English Language Arts, Emma Jamilah Gist
Responsible Classrooms: Unfinalizability, Responsibility, And Participatory Literacy In Secondary English Language Arts, Emma Jamilah Gist
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This study examines participatory literacy practice in secondary English language arts classrooms. While literacy achievement in this context is often measured according to a student’s ability to receive and repeat predetermined information within the scope of mandated curricula and standardized tests, this study attends specifically to classroom literacy practice that centers authentic, unanticipated, dialogic student response. Within its consideration of literacy practice, this study applies the Bakhtinian notion of unfinalizability to consider those conditions that allow for learning experiences that are not predetermined but are rather uniquely, unpredictably, and unrepeatably co-constructed by individual students, student groups, and teachers. These unfinalizable …
'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott
'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
For this project, I am interested in the study of nuanced self-representations of Black rage that appear within African American literary traditions, specifically the blues aesthetic, wherein artists narrativize a wide spectrum of intelligent and specific emotion--not just melancholy. Blues narratives in which Black people self-represent are in direct opposition to flattened narratives of certain affective modes such as anger as a useless, backwards, pathologized, and flat feeling that appear within dominant U.S. and global iconographies. What I see in the blues aesthetic is the capacity for a multichromatic approach to studying rage and Black authorship in America. By using …
Literacy's Levels: An Analysis Of Neoliberal Literacy Sponsorship In The U.S., Misty Dawn Fuller
Literacy's Levels: An Analysis Of Neoliberal Literacy Sponsorship In The U.S., Misty Dawn Fuller
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
While much scholarship has considered Deborah Brandt’s concept of sponsors of literacy, there remains a need to consider relationships between literacy sponsors and larger implications of literacy sponsorship at national and institutional levels. Utilizing academic theories, U.S. federal government budgets and financed reports, and discoursal analysis, this dissertation investigates literacy sponsorship at the federal, postsecondary institutional, postsecondary institutional writing programmatic, and individual levels to tease out how, and in what ways, through “enabling” and “supporting” literacy these sponsors also” regulate, suppress, and withhold literacy” (Brandt 166). Rhetorical analysis determines that, at the U.S. federal level, literacy is promoted as a …
Eloquence In Talke And Vertue In Deedes: Education And Discontent In Early Modern England, Mary Alison Webb
Eloquence In Talke And Vertue In Deedes: Education And Discontent In Early Modern England, Mary Alison Webb
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The title for the project, Eloquence in Talke and Vertue in Deedes, comes from educational theorist William Kempe’s claim that the early modern humanist educational system was guaranteed to produce eloquence and virtue. It is, however, my argument that the educational failed in its promises. This project seeks to dissect the educational practices of the early modern period and reanimate the pieces to show how these practices were regularly critiqued on the early modern stage. More than showing the influence of the educational system in the production of drama, I point out that these practices are re-represented as rebuttals of …
Mixed Messages: Reading Contemporary U.S. Literature Of Biracial Girlhood, Candice Nicole Hale
Mixed Messages: Reading Contemporary U.S. Literature Of Biracial Girlhood, Candice Nicole Hale
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The tragic mulatta character is no longer an accurate representation of biracial female characters in literature. This dissertation considers the vast history of the tragic mulatto genre and its tragic and mired representations of biracial women and how they are often portrayed in literature. Within a historical, legal, and political analysis, I highlight the ways perceptions, attitudes, and representations about biracial individuals have changed, so those same shifts should change in the literature. Because of the bourgeoning field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS), both scholars and authors are recasting and rewriting the narratives and discourses of mixed-race in the …
The Language Of Rats: Unwelcome Animals And Interspecies Connection In Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Kieran Leigh Lyons
The Language Of Rats: Unwelcome Animals And Interspecies Connection In Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Kieran Leigh Lyons
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The Language of Rats: Unwelcome Animals and Interspecies Connection in Global Contemporary Fiction consists of three essays examining the representation of what I call unwelcome animals in contemporary Anglophone novels from the United States, Nigeria, and India. These animals often live alongside humans yet are perceived as threats or annoyances. Literary depictions of this fraught relationship reveal, and sometimes critique, the intellectual structures that shape how we understand and represent interspecies connections. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the interspecies dimensions of contemporary fiction by bringing together the fields of environmental criticism, animal studies, postcolonialism, and U.S. Southern studies. …
Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson
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
"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
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 …
Will To Remember: Counter-Archives In The Work Of Alvarez, Danticat, And Díaz, Megan Elizabeth Feifer
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 20thand early 21st 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 …
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 …
Disease, Bread, Efficiency: Rhetorics Of Victorian Education Reform, Vicki Jean Davis
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 …
"In The School, Not Of The School": Co-Performing Critical Literacies With English Amped, Anna Catherine West
"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 …
The Rhetoric Of Hospitality: Conditions Of Death In America, Margaret Anne Callahan
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 …
The Darkest Nation: American Melancholia In Modernist Narratives Of The First World War, Michael Von Cannon
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, …
Unsettling Feminist Traditions: Domesticities And Agency In U.S. Black Women's Life Writing, 1850-1926, Martha Pitts
Unsettling Feminist Traditions: Domesticities And Agency In U.S. Black Women's Life Writing, 1850-1926, Martha Pitts
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Since its inception, black feminist criticism has produced a number of sophisticated theoretical works that have challenged traditional approaches to both black literature and U.S. women’s writing, as well as assumptions about canon, the concept of tradition, narrative conventions, and more. Far too often, black feminist criticism has been associated with essentialism and presumed to have an anti-theoretical bias. This project begins at this disjuncture and argues that as a mode of analysis and a strategy of reading, black feminist criticism has lost none of its strengths and potential, and that there are still new paths to take and new …
“Þe Inglis In Seruage”: Textual Englishness, 1175 – 1330, Joseph Richard Wingenbach
“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
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 …
Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier
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 …
"Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction In Victorian Literature And Culture, Mary Timothy Wilson
"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 …
Paradoxical Agency: The Ethics Of Women's Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Rome, Catherine Riley Godbold
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 …
Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising The Region In The Twenty-First Century, Matthew Dischinger
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 …
A Domesticated Idea: British Women Writers And The Victorian Recipe, 1845-1910, Helana E. Brigman
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 …
The Erotics Of Race Suicide: The Making Of Whiteness And The Death Drive In The Progressive Era, 1880-1920, Madoka Kishi
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 …
Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie
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 …
Lopsided, Scarred, And Squint-Eyed: Ugly Women In The Work Of Southern Women Writers, Monica C. Miller
Lopsided, Scarred, And Squint-Eyed: Ugly Women In The Work Of Southern Women Writers, Monica C. Miller
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The ubiquity of ugly female characters in the work of southern women calls into question what W. J. Cash termed “gyneolatry,” the worship of the beautiful white woman upon which so much of southern ideology has been based. If the South functions as an internal other for the nation, then examining this fiction’s multiplicity of ugly women illuminates the ways in which women defy not only the norms of southern gender but also those of the larger American culture, in which the southern woman often acts as a representation of the South in general. By considering ugliness as a category …