English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Narrative Of Revolution: Socialism And The Masses 1911-1917, Stephen K. Walkiewicz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to situate The Masses magazine (1911-1917) within a specific discursive tradition of revolution, revealing a narrative pattern that is linked with discourse that began to emerge during and after the French Revolution. As the term “socialism” begins to resonate again within popular American political discourse (and as a potentially viable course of action rather than a curse for damnable offense), it is worthwhile to trace its significance within American history to better understand its aesthetic dimensions, its radical difference, and its way of devising problems and answers. In short, this thesis poses the question: what ideological structures …

Shakespeare's Villains: The Displacement Of Iago And Edmund, Julius C. Adena

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis argues that Shakespeare’s villains, Iago and Edmund, are displaced from their rightful positions and are left isolated from society. While many critics either condemn or defend Shakespeare’s villains, I will examine how both characters use their knowledge of rhetoric and persuasion to survive the displacement that they have experienced. The first chapter explores the importance of military ranks and the mentality of a soldier in Othello. War becomes a metaphor to Iago, and because of his displacement as lieutenant, he takes initiative to win the war. I will examine the different masks he wears, his powers as …

Transfer In The Writing Center: Tutors Facilitating Students' Understanding Of Transfer, Shannon Nicole Tuttle

Theses and Dissertations

Transfer, a highly researched topic in composition studies, is a topic of increasing interest to those in writing center studies. Writing centers are an ideal location for the application of transfer because tutors can provide more opportunities for guided practice, application, reflection, and metacognition in a one-on-one setting; thus, students may learn more effectively, through application, the writing skills they may receive via instruction in their classrooms. Previous writing center studies have implemented transfer-focused curricula to help tutors better facilitate transfer in their tutorials. These curricula have focused on training tutors to understand and apply transfer to their tutorials, but …

“Power In Repose”: Sleep And Agency In American Literature, 1875-1916, Hannah Leigh Huber

Theses and Dissertations

“Power in Repose” argues that American literature provided its own response to the cult of wakefulness that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Narratives by authors Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerged from a time in which conceptions of rest were reshaped by the coalescence of America’s Protestant work ethic and industrial advancement. By complicating the separation of public and private space, my chosen texts present characters exhausted by the permeation of the supposedly impervious aspects of modernity, such as artificial light, traffic commotion, and round-the-clock labor and social activity. Marginalized figures are …

A Conceptual Mapping Approach For Presenting A Practical Past: Addressing Responsibility Through Contextualization In Information System Design For The Ward One Mobile Application, Sadia Obaid Khan

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents and documents a model for telling history through technology using the Ward One application for iOS mobile devices as a test site for the idea of conceptual mapping. The historical-information delivery system was created to mobilize the rhetoricity of representation that is a procedural necessity of technological mediation.

The paper begins by explaining the exigence of the app—to tell the history of an African-American community displaced from the land now occupied by the University of South Carolina as a result of racially discriminating housing policies in Columbia, SC and across the United States. It then addresses the …

Troll-In-Chief: Donald Trump, Antinomic Rhetoric, And The Short-Circuiting Of Civic Discourse, Joseph Wayne Fisher

Theses and Dissertations

On November 9, 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. No aspect of the campaign was more remarkable than Trump’s rhetoric, which ranged from the candid and unexpected to the crude and incendiary. Now, two years later, his rhetoric—and the reasons for its widespread appeal—remain largely opaque, even under examination from proto-fascist or populist lenses. I seek for a partial account of Trump’s rhetoric using the concept of antinomic rhetoric coupled with the widespread popular perception of him as similar to an internet troll. In short, I believe it is his violation of the conventional standards (nomoi) …

Sand, Water, Salt: Managing The Elements In Literature Of The American West, 1880-1925, Jada Ach

Theses and Dissertations

Sand, Water, Salt focuses on Progressive Era American literature that explores the theme of land management set in the so-called wasteland spaces of the arid deserts, semi- arid high plains, and Pacific Ocean. The rhetoric of turn-of-the-century land managers, engineers, and developers insisted that humans and their environments remained separate, thus affording humans the ability to control land from a safe distance. However, the works I examine in my project demonstrate that even thoroughly regulated environments remain lively and beyond total control. My project archive, which includes Progressive Era fiction, memoirs, irrigation maps, aerial photographs, dry farming manifestos, and other …

Women’S Writing And The Poetics Of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740, Rachel Mann

Theses and Dissertations

Women’s Writing and the Poetics of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740 probes the porous boundary between science and literature, revealing that the methodologies undergirding scientific experimentation were developed communally and through a confluence of interdisciplinary and cultural concerns. Ultimately, it shows that our contemporary understanding of the natural world and the scientific method have a history that is largely one of fragments. Secondly, and more importantly, it demonstrates the value of reading imaginative writing alongside scientific developments of the day.

Focusing on women’s imaginative writing in particular reveals the power and limits that ostensibly liminal voices have. As such, Women’s Writing and …

Russian Roots In Southern Soil, James Preston Edge

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the profound influence that 19th-century Russian authors had on 20th-century Southern writers. Recent analyses of the American South have looked to the fluid nature of this region’s borders, often spreading into the Caribbean, South America, and American West, but there has not yet been any book- length study of the ways in which several Russian literary masters, including Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, influenced Southern authors, particularly Ernest Gaines, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. In particular, these Southern authors, in interviews and essays, have repeatedly extolled these Russian figures for their elevation of communal folklore, …

Divine Absence, Divine Presence: The Theological Arguments Of Elizabeth Singer Rowe’S The History Of Joseph, Laura Macgowan

Theses and Dissertations

Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Biblical epic The History of Joseph (1736), which dramatizes the events of Genesis 37-45, stands out in her oeuvre not only generically—it is her only long narrative poem—but because of how rarely God appears as an intervening agent or subject of narrative attention. Rather than highlight God’s splendor by imbuing Scripture with poetic embellishment, as is her wont, Rowe’s language downplays God’s hand in a famously Providential story (Genesis 50.20). While God shows up most often as an entity to beseech or a cultural token to reference, pagan deities govern the plot’s action; Rowe relishes in …

“Chosen Instruments”: Tolkien’S Hobbits And The Rhetoric Of The Dispossessed, Samuel Bennett Watson

Theses and Dissertations

Tolkien’s hobbit characters are capable of a particular type of rhetorical persuasion, one which relies on their ability to leverage their status as outsiders among the other people of Middle-earth. The hobbits are uniquely suited to the task of bringing unity to Middle-earth’s people because of the simplicity of their rhetoric, which focuses on proving their own morality and presenting truths without elaboration. When compared with the text, the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings also help highlight the importance that Tolkien placed on the simplicity of hobbit rhetoric. These abilities of the hobbits become clear through a …

Moral Ambiguity In The Works Of Cormac Mccarthy, Christina Xan

Theses and Dissertations

Cormac McCarthy’s works have presented a question since he first published The Orchard Keeper in 1965 – what are his characters’ motivations? McCarthy’s novels are known for showing little to no interiority of his characters. This choice to depict action and not thought makes it nearly impossible to discern the reasoning behind the actions of the characters. Not being able to definitively know the motivations of the characters in his novels makes it hard to argue that his characters are simply “good” or “bad,” and morality becomes hard to discern. Although actions such as murder appear immoral without having an …

“A Solid Foundation Of Stable Possessions”: Gendered Genealogies In Shirley Jackson’S We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Andi Waddell

Theses and Dissertations

Shirley Jackson’s odd and unsettling novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, explores the relationship between family, gender roles, and property through the murdered and murderous Blackwood family. Throughout the novel, Jackson associates objects with either male or female legacies within the family. Constance, Julian, and Merricat Blackwood engage in repetitive, formalized handling of objects, and these ritualized interactions create family history. Even as items associated with the women constitute narratives of female history and thereby subvert the family’s patriarchal structure, objects in the text reveal the way patriarchy reproduces itself in the mundane and the personal. Merricat …

The Warped One: Nationalist Adaptations Of The Cuchulain Myth, Martha J. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I trace the use of the mythic Irish hero Cuchulain by early Irish nationalists. From 1878 to 1939, Standish James O’Grady, Lady Augusta Gregory, and William Butler Yeats employed this figure for specific political and cultural agendas. Cuchulain makes a fitting symbol for the “poet warrior” stereotype that was purposely and incidentally cultivated during the cultural nationalist phase of the Irish Literary Revival, when writers were beginning to explore the Cuchulain myth to demonstrate cultural and linguistic ideals. Nationalists found in Cuchulain a symbol that could tie the cultural to the political and the political to the …

Building Worlds Out Of Inadequate Materials: Infrastucture And Affect In John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer And John Steinbeck’S The Grapes Of Wrath, David Scott Mathews

Theses and Dissertations

The beginning of the 20th century in America featured the rapid economic and infrastructural development of New York City, recently dubbed the “second metropolis.” The technological advancements in electric power and automobility made it possible, and economically desirable, for a larger and larger community to have access to the promise of good fortune that being connected to the metropolis signified. The result of this promise was the formation of the subway system and the highway system. Both John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath explore the space between these poles. In this essay I argue …

Walt Before Leaves: Complicating Whitman's Authorship Through Jack Engle, Christopher Preston Burright

Theses and Dissertations

The rediscovery of a number of Walt Whitman's early fictions prompts a discussion of where they belong within the larger web of Whitman scholarship. Though we have been aware of the existence of these writings for quite some time, frequently these works return to obscurity soon after being discovered due to the lack of research regarding them. This thesis presents an alternative framework whereby these novels can be integrated into a hypertextual model centered on Leaves of Grass (1855) and Whitman's overall authorial identity. I build on Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price's work creating a hypertext archive incorporating Whitman's works, …

"Yup, So-Jeer": Interlanguage And Ruptured Translation In Charles Dickens's The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners, Jacob Kurt Nielsen

Theses and Dissertations

Co-authored by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners is a tale of linguistic subversion in colonial spaces. Christian George King-a native "Sambo" that betrays the English colonists on Silver Store to a marauding band of pirates-demonstrates a linguistic phenomenon that scholars call interlanguage, or a quasi-language that partially resembles both English and his native language. Because of its status as a language between languages, King's interlanguage disrupts the linguistic hierarchy of the tale by opening possibilities for miscommunication. To combat this underlying tension, the colonists must rely on translation-specifically, on the mistaken belief that all …

Navigating Palimpsest’S Sea Garden: H.D.’S Spiritual Realism, Mari Anne Murdock

Theses and Dissertations

H.D.’s novel Palimpsest has often been analyzed using psychoanalytic theories due to her relationship with Sigmund Freud and his work. However, her own approach to the science of psychoanalysis reveals that she often complemented her scientific understanding with her syncretic religious beliefs, a perspective she referred to as “spiritual realism,” which suggests that analysis with a spiritual nuance may provide a deeper understanding of the novel’s intended purpose. Postsecular theory makes for a useful lens by which to analyze Palimpsest’s treatment of reintegrating spiritual knowledge into Freud’s secular understanding of the modern world by providing the benefits of such a …

The Uncanny Mind: Perpetrator Trauma In Poe’S “The Black Cat”, Bethanie Allyson Sonnefeld

Theses and Dissertations

Among the psychological interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” trauma theory has yet to make an appearance. However, the confessional nature of the story shifts—via a trauma reading—from an attempt by the narrator to ease his guilt to his attempt to understand what happened to him. The narrator’s murder of his wife traumatized him, causing erasures in the timeline and several forms of dissociation. These erasures and dissociations cause an uncanny effect within the story, which occurs as the past, present, and future are conflated and as the narrator’s mind is both known and hidden. The narrator’s tale …

The Effects Of Repeated Reading On The Fluency Of Intermediate-Level English-As-A-Second-Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study, Krista Carlene Rich

Theses and Dissertations

Most would agree that reading fluency is a concern of every L2 teacher. Repeated reading (RR) positively affects fluency development, supported by much research with L1 children. However, relatively little focus has been given to L2 RR. Most research on RR in L2 settings has focused on audio-assisted RR, used insufficient data collection methods prone to human error, and taken place in an EFL setting. In our experiment, we used eye–tracking as a direct mode of measurement of the effects that RR has on early and late reading measures. In this study, 30 intermediate-level English language learners studying in an …

Thornfield, Wragby, And Their Discontents: Nature And Civilization In Jane Eyre And Lady Chatterley’S Lover, Marianna Alvarado Teuscher

Theses and Dissertations

In Jane Eyre and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Charlotte Brontë and her literary inheritor, D.H. Lawrence, locate the potentially revolutionary romance between their protagonists in natural settings, distant from the social sphere, in order to demonstrate the un-naturalness of an administered capitalist society in which class distinctions work in dehumanizing ways.

An Incurable Malady? Representations Of Female Madness In Nineteenth Century-Twenty-First Century Literature, Kimberly Sooklall

Theses and Dissertations

From the mad heroines of classic Victorian literature to the depictions of female insanity in modern Western writing, women suffering from mental instability have been a common recurrence at the center of plotlines. This thesis will explore the historical context of madness as a gendered concept by examining several literary works published in different centuries.

Virginia Woolf And Gertrude Stein’S Repurposing Of Feminine Domestic Language Through The Lens Of Bakhtinian Heteroglossia And Dialogic Theory, Samantha Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

This essay examines the ways that Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own and Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and “The Good Anna” recapture feminine domestic language in order to produce a new form of feminist heteroglossia, a reworking of Bakhtinian heteroglossia and dialogic theory.

"Mute Flesh": Women's Death-Worlds In David's Story And Waiting For The Barbarians, Kate Finley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis expands upon Achille Mbembe's theory on necropower and death-worlds to incorporate the consideration of gender. This is done using the lens of violence against women during South African apartheid and through an examination of two novels: Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.

"I Dare Not Venture A Judgement”: Spirituality And The Postsecular In Hogg’S Confessions, Conor Bruce Hilton

Theses and Dissertations

Reading James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner through a postsecular lens provides a new framework for spirituality. This framework establishes spirituality as a place of tension and uncertainty between the text’s main ideologies—Enlightenment rationality and religious, specifically Calvinist, fanaticism. The text explores this place of tension through its doubled narrative structure and by demonstrating the crisis of faith that the fictional Editor of the text undergoes. Confessions brings a compelling new paradigm to discussions of the postsecular that allows insight into the complex intersections of Enlightenment rationality and empiricism as well as religious …

“The Healing Balm Of Sympathy Denied”: Moral Sense Philosophy, Patriarchy, And Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Estefania Velez

Theses and Dissertations

Though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein produces an ideology of sympathy consistent with the literary and philosophical aims of Romanticism, this essay examines Shelley’s critique of patriarchy which posits that though sympathetic companionship in Frankenstein remains an ethical necessity, it is unattainable within a social order marred by misogynist structures of power.

Epic Stories: Sequence Fiction, Young Readers, And The Aesthetics Of World Building, Jordana Estelle Hall

Theses and Dissertations

This study theorizes the world building processes that sequence fiction engages within a framework of intratextual structuralism and cognitive aesthetic stage theory. The study begins with an interdisciplinary overview of fictional and possible worlds theory before proposing a structural adaptation of this lens that explains the developmental, aesthetic benefits of the genre for young readers. Chapter II is an application of the adapted lens to a canonical epic, the His Dark Materials sequence by Philip Pullman. I interpret the intentional structure of the story world across novels to discuss how these engage readers at different aesthetic milestones and encourage a …

English Puritans: Their History, Theology, Practice, And Joy English Puritan Devotional, Jacquelyn Hutchinson

Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on the English Puritans' history, theology, religious practice, and joy. The historical context of the group is crucial to understanding their literature and culture. They lived in a time where they were persecuted for their strict beliefs, fighting for their idea of the purity of God's word. Their theology came out of the Reformation and continued to evolve as scholars and theologians expounded on texts of the Bible. The theology that they held dear bled into the practice of their religion that undoubtedly had joy. My textual analysis of The Valley of Vision shows the Puritans' hearts …

Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices And Radical Adaptation In Multi-Ethnic American Literary And Visual Culture, Michael M. Means

Theses and Dissertations

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant …

The Mountains At The End Of The World: Subcultural Appropriations Of Appalachia And The Hillbilly Image, 1990-2010, Paul L. Robertson

Theses and Dissertations

There is an aversion within the field of Appalachian Studies to addressing the cultural formulations of the Appalachian/hillbilly/mountaineer as an icon of aggressive resistance. The aversion is understandable, as for far too long images of the irrationally and savagely violent mountaineer were integral to the most gross popular culture stereotypes of Appalachia. Media consumers often take pleasure or comfort in these images, which usually occur in a reactionary context with the hillbilly as either a type of nationally necessary savage OR as an unregenerate barbarian against whom a national civilization will triumph and benefit by the struggle.

I bookend my …