English Language and Literature Commons^™

Sexual Exploration Of The Pastoral: Analyzing Queer Desire In “Goblin Market” And In Memoriam, Amanda Rajnauth

Theses and Dissertations

The term “queer pastoral” was coined by Vin Nardizzi to refer to the use of the pastoral setting to normalize homosexuality. While the queer pastoral has primarily remained within Renaissance studies, I seek to expand the reach of this concept by applying it to Victorian literature. This thesis argues that Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam both use the pastoral as a space to explore queer desire.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the systematic biases embedded within this genre, highlighting the ongoing battle between tokenism and inclusive storytelling. Thesis will also emphasize the importance of this genre, its tight grasp on popular culture, and showcase positive representations introduced by new creators over the years.

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

‘Let’S Rock!’: Analyzing Music As A Literary Precursor To The Sublime In The Works Of Lynch, Jesus Ivan Gonzalez

Theses and Dissertations

David Lynch’s style of cinema is easily recognizable, it is eccentric, bizarre, and surreal. Fans and film scholars alike hail the ‘Lynchian’ aspects within his films, moments that showcase incongruous images that do not line up within our sense of reality. Within the cinema of Lynch there exists a signature space that is a pure manifestation of sublimity. Within this space, anything goes; it is typically a vile and reprehensible place that feeds off the suffering of the film’s characters.

In four of Lynch’s selected films, Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me (1992), …

Mental Health In The Catcher In The Rye And Thirteen Reasons Why, Zugay Trevino

Theses and Dissertations

J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye shows the life of seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield and the aftermath of his expulsion from Pencey Prep. Jay Asher’s 2007 book Thirteen Reasons Why centers on seventeen-year-old Clay Jensen’s aftermath of his friend Hannah Baker’s death. Although both novels are written, published, and set decades apart, both have more in common than originally thought. Both books were originally heavily challenged or banned upon their initial release. Although they were challenged due to different reasons, both are better understood after analyzing mental health in the books. The books deal with unawareness of mental …

Race And Technology In Southern Literature, Civil War To Civil Rights, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers the intersection of technology and race in the literature of the American South from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though narratives about technology in American literature often promise democracy, equality, improvement, and progress, the role of technology in southern literature is more complex and ambivalent. Literature from and about the South from the Civil War to the civil rights era, by Black and white southern authors like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty reveals technology’s ability to uphold and naturalize southern white supremacy, but also to subvert it. Southern literature traces a pattern …

Restoring Paradise Through Providence: The Emergence Of The Serendipitous Hero In The Hunger Games, Alexandra Elizabeth Oberempt

Theses and Dissertations

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games enhanced the popularity of post-apocalyptic, young adult literature written between 2004 and 2014 (a genre I call millennial dystopia). A government that sends its people to war, spies on them, and sacrifices the sanctity of the community for personal profit while the powerful and wealthy watch from a secure distance is an anxiety addressed in this fiction. The hero of millennial dystopias satiates the suffering that emerges from this angst.

Through her story, Katniss is pushed to her destiny on a path that leads her to become the hero of The Hunger Games trilogy. In …

‘Conspiring Together’: Woolf’S Investigations On ‘Party Consciousness’ And Interwar Instability In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Madeline Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Woolf has been generalized popularly as enthusiastic about parties, relishing their effervescence and conversation, and she had a particular bent for imagining a party’s vivacity while often remaining distanced from it. This imagination and duality would mark Woolf’s thoughts as is recorded in her diary entries, and they became especially apparent in her fiction. In an entry on April 27^th, 1925, less than one month from Mrs. Dalloway’s May 14^th publication, she declares that “people have any number of states of consciousness” and reports that she “should like to investigate the party consciousness” (A Writer’s …

"Nothing ‘Personal’ To Lose": Alice Notley’S “I” And The Poetics Of Encounter In Disobedience, Christina T. Baulch

Theses and Dissertations

Though the lyric-I has often been perceived as an isolated ego, Alice Notley's "I" in her long poem Disobedience (2001) necessitates plurality through what I call a "poetics of encounter." In response to the 1978 Language poetry manifesto "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry," and to the larger well-rehearsed debate about vocal homogeneity and persona centrism in poetry, this paper argues that Notley's poetics of encounter brings the "I" of Disobedience into continual and complex conversation with material history, politics, and mass culture, thus situating it within, and not sequestered from, the world and its mediation.

Gloria Naylor’S Conversation With The Tempest, Kelly Mcavoy-Giarrusso

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on how Gloria Naylor used Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest as inspiration for her character George, and how her evolution of the character reveals issues within the literary and academic community at the time of her writing. George fulfills Caliban’s limitations in that he has more power and autonomy than Caliban, but the tragedy of his death reveals that he has lost part of himself in order to gain that power. This idea that education and society can cause a loss of self is personal for Naylor, who encountered only white male authors in school and struggled …

Rhetoric Of Collaboration: Using Ethics Of Social Justice And Activism Through Writing Communities, Tina M. Iemma

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines emerging writing community collectives that seek to challenge the normative hierarchy of higher education in both composition and curricula. I conduct empirical research to explore the ways activist writers, those with exposure to social justice literacies from across and outside academic communities, influence an ethics of collaboration and overall expansion of more public-facing, engaged and inclusive research pedagogy and scholarship. The act of writing in collectives is needed if a move toward advocacy and opportunity for equity is to be upheld within and beyond academia. By examining social justice literacies occurring both in and out of the …

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …

The “Muddle” Of Landscape And Machinery In E.M. Forster’S Howard’S End And A Passage To India: An Ecocritical Reading, Ryan Ignatius Vera

Theses and Dissertations

This is an ecocritical reading of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Howard's End. I argue that Forster is concerned with imperial power structures that damaged the environment, as well as the looming aftereffects of the Industrial Revolution on both landscape and the people that reside in it.

Another Time, Another Place: The Truth Of Silence In J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Sara T. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

Through Lucy’s rejection of the criminal justice system, Coetzee's Disgrace operates as an allegory for the failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to provide individual justice and reparations to victims of Apartheid.

Postcapitalist Desert Visions From Earth To Anarres, David J. Goff

Theses and Dissertations

Human industrial and economic activity around the world—happening either directly in the global North (recall the coal-choked London of Dickens) or, increasingly, in (un)developing nations of the global South because of the North’s demand— has burned and pumped so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that climate has noticeably changed even over the span of a single generation. As long as the world and its people are held in the clutches of the hegemonic capitalist politico-economic system, the environment will continue to degrade, and so will life for all the people of Earth, especially those most vulnerable. …

Reimagining Prince Hall: Race, Freemasonry, And Material Culture In Boston, 1775-1870, Sueanna Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation revisits the subject of early black freemasonry and draws upon a new wealth of archival material to recontextualize it through the lens of social history and print and material culture. This study explores the way that freemasonry operated in the daily lives of black masons and presents a new social history of the formation of Boston’s first black masonic lodge. Turning specifically to print and material culture, it traces the way that the earliest black masons engaged in the broader print and material culture of the society, thus promoting interracial engagement. This study also traces how the Prince …

Amazing Stories: Science Fiction’S Inception In Interwar Pulp Magazines, Zachary Doe

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the creation of the science fiction genre through the pulp magazines of the 1920s. Hugo Gernsback, the creator of Amazing Stories is the first to title the budding genre as science fiction. Through his editorials, one can see a desire to create a wide community heavily involved in genre creation. By exploring these initial stories and editorials we can better understand how science fiction began as well as evolved into what it is today.

Escaping Machismo: Educating A New Generation Of Mentors For Latina Students, Nayeli Elizavet Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

Machismo has been a traditional reality for most Latino communities for much too long and unfortunately, it does not seem to be making an exit any time soon. To serve as a counteract for machismo, this thesis encourages for Universities to add onto training programs for faculty and staff so that they can serve as mentors for future Latina students. Creating future mentors that help guide Latina students may impact Latina students and their retention rates as well as encourage them to go beyond an undergraduate degree. To serve as a mentor, staff and faculty should be educated in the …

Transatlantic Triangulations: Genre And Traumatic Memory In The Novels Of Esmeralda Santiago And Alejandro Zambra, Amanda A. Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

When a traumatic event collectively happens to a group or body of people, be that geographically, emotionally or physically, an imprint is left behind which impacts a part of a culture or society. The larger the scale of the incident, the wider the scope in terms of lives affected and memory established, which creates a new history for many.

In Alejandro Zambra’s (2011) Ways of Going Home, Zambra remembers his traumatic childhood growing up under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in war torn Chile in the 1980s. While this postmodern novel uses memory and historical perceptions from a child’s …

Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …

Mapping The “Ungeographic” In Jesmyn Ward’S Where The Line Bleeds, Beth B. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This essay examines the ways in which author Jesmyn Ward guides her reader in reimagining a small Mississippi town in her novel Where the Line Bleeds (2008) by uncovering the antagonisms and ambivalences found in the Dirty South and reflecting on the physical and interior geography of her characters.

Creation’S Face In Moby-Dick, Richard Jackson Guignard Wells

Theses and Dissertations

In 1973, Gerhard T. Alexis published “Two Footnotes on a Faceless Whale” (AN&Q, vol. 11, pp. 99-100) to point out how Melville was alluding to an exchange between Yahweh and Moses in Exodus 33 during a commentary by Ishmael in Chapter 86 “The Tail” of Moby-Dick (1851). By using Ishmael’s allusion to the facelessness of Yahweh in relation to his hand in Exodus 33 as a window, I meditate on the relationship between the hand and face images more properly to propose how they are functioning in Melville’s epic in regard to the phenomenon of veiling. The corporeal body in …

“Where Beauty And Anguish Had Contended”: Eden, Gender, And Creativity In Melville’S Pierre, Kersey Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations

Much critical interest regarding incest in Pierre has been focused horizontally on the Glendinning family tree, in terms of the brother-sister relationship forged between Pierre Glendinning and Isabel Banford. But this thesis evaluates incest within Melville’s scheme of creativity and gender in the novel. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have established, to author a text is to become owner of its subjects—a father of one’s “brain-children” (Gilbert and Gubar 7). So, as Pierre writes Isabel into the Glendinning name, the incestuous relationship between Pierre and Isabel may be viewed through the lens of a father-daughter dynamic between the …

“Everything Will Be As It Is Now, Just A Little Different”: Affectively Imagining Alternative Worlds In Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Grace Riley

Theses and Dissertations

One of the most crucial concerns of cultural criticism today is the question of how to grapple with what Mark Fisher refers to as the “malaise” of the present; the pervasive belief that capitalism is the only viable option, that there is no alternative ‘other.’ However, there remains a vibrant scholarship committed to resisting such pessimism that theorizes the possibility of alternative, utopian futures that lie athwart the apocalyptic present. This thesis explores the question of how one begins to imagine such alternative futures from within a capitalist order that constantly works to pre-emptively subsume any possibilities of resistance. Art …

Transgressive Migrations: Gender Roles, Space, And Place In American Novels, 1900-1999, Selena Gail Larkin

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine how gender roles combine with changes in space and place to affect women protagonists in twentieth-century American literature. I argue that as these characters migrate, the (self-)perception of their identities shift. Particularly, their outward performances as well as their internal awareness change. My analysis concentrates on the novel genre because of specific characteristics—plot, characterization, and narration. The chosen literary works on which I focus are The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Quicksand (1928), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Dollmaker (1954), and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996).

Concepts that I …

“What Can There Be But Witchcraft?”: History, Women, And Witches In Sylvia Townsend Warner’S Lolly Willowes And Graham Swift’S Waterland, Thomas Bedenbaugh

Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous relationship between history, women and witchcraft in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Graham Swift’s Waterland foregrounds the constructedness of historical narratives while also recuperating women’s marginalized positions within history. Both novels link historical narratives with the received ideas upon which norms of gender, sexuality, and the nation are constructed. In recognizing this, both authors challenge the monolithic male gaze of history, revealing it to be a story which, totalizing as it may be, is not in fact “natural.” While many women in both novels are configured as haunting figures - women who confuse the boundary separation presence …

Sanctuary Poetics And Contemporary Us Culture, Alex Howerton

Theses and Dissertations

Sanctuary Poetics and Contemporary US Culture argues that contemporary poets of color create spaces of safety, relation, and justice through the act of writing as resistance itself. Sanctuary Poetics discusses poetry responding to the myriad crises of our contemporary moment, and considers how poets, through formal techniques such as ekphrasis or synecdoche, envision moments of shelter and connection that provide necessary relief to imperiled populations. I introduce the idea of a sanctuary poetics through Amanda Gorman’s recent poem “The Hill We Climb,” performed at Joseph Biden’s inauguration. The first chapter covers citizenship and the work of the Undocupoets, a multiracial …

“Power And The Orientations Of Resistance In Twentieth-Century American Literature”, Victoria Eleanor Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

"Power and the Orientations of Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Literature” analyzes the intersections of space, power, and the possibility for alternatives to power structures. I argue that social power circumscribes the spatial possibilities of normative and non-normative subjectivities. In particular, power curtails the ability of marginalized subjects (such as women, queer people, and people of color) to forge alternatives to the current social order. In dialogue with recent scholars of race studies, feminism, and queer theory, this project reveals how dominated subjects employ their quotidian spaces as sites of resistance and survival. The literature I examine in this dissertation identifies …