English Language and Literature Commons^™

We Know Better And It's Time To Act Like It: Ending Written Feedback, Jacob S. Rees

Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have tried to demonstrate the effectiveness of written teacher feedback over the course of the last sixty years, and the results are inconclusive. Many studies point to improvement on subsequent drafts as evidence of student improvement; however, this only indicates students' abilities to follow directions. It is not an indication of autonomous writing ability. This study demonstrates that with proper curriculum support high school students can develop intentional transferability (the autonomous, intentional transferring of writing skills to varied rhetorical situations) throughout the course of one academic year without receiving any teacher written feedback.

Rae, Baby, Whitney Marissa Call

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a young adult fictional novel from the perspective of Rachel Jackson, or Rae, a seventeen year-old girl with Williams Syndrome, a rare developmental disorder caused by missing genes on chromosome 7 that causes those with it to lack logical connections, yet possess very gregarious, social, and musical personalities. Think of it as an inverted form of autism. At the genesis of the novel, Rae becomes pregnant. Upon misunderstanding her mother's sugar-coated reasoning for giving the baby up for adoption, Rae spends the novel trying to find a man to marry so that, in her understanding, she may …

Translation As Katabasis And Nekyia In Seamus Heaney's "The Riverbank Field", Gerrit Van Dyk

Theses and Dissertations

Translation has been at the heart of Seamus Heaney's career. In his poem, "The Riverbank Field," from his latest collection, Human Chain, Heaney engages in metatranslation, "Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / 'In a retired vale...a sequestered grove' / And I'll confound the Lethe in Moyola." Curiously, with a broad spectrum of classical works at his disposal, the poet chooses a particular moment in Virgil's Aeneid as an image for translation. What is it about this conversation between Aeneas and his dead father, Anchises, at the banks of the Lethe which makes it uniquely fitting for …

Saints In Gilead: Robinson's Revisionist Calvinism And John Ames As A Reconciliatory Figure In American Congregationalist History, Makayla Camille Steiner

Theses and Dissertations

A Congregationalist by choice and a Calvinist by tradition, Marilynne Robinson has a theological background that significantly influences the development of her fictional characters, especially in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead. Much has been written about Robinson's particular brand of Calvinism—by both Robinson herself and other literary critics—which tends to be far more hopeful about grace, agency, and the beauties of the natural world than traditional interpretations allow. Little, however, has been written about how the trajectory of Congregationalism as an organizational force in the national narrative influences the decisions of and relationships between her fictional characters. Gilead depicts …

"Sealing Their Two Fates With A Fracture": Ted Hughes's "Pyramus And Thisbe" As An Emblem Of The Paradox Of Translation, Carolyn Carter

Theses and Dissertations

This work explores how the 20th century English poet Ted Hughes translates one episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses (the "Pyramus and Thisbe" myth included in Hughes's Tales from Ovid) to make it an emblem for his notions about translation. In translating "Pyramus and Thisbe," Hughes removed many of the formal Ovidian elements and amplified the themes of violence and mingling latent in the myth. In doing so, he highlights the concept that communication sometimes necessitates breaking, symbolized primarily by the chink in the wall through which Pyramus and Thisbe whisper to one another. This metaphor for translation corroborates Hughes's discursive …

The Attraction Of Imperfection: Depreciating Social Capital In Victorian Marriage Plots, Catherine Clair England-Plisiewicz

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines the importance of social capital in British marriage plots. While most people imagine heroines of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels embody virtue, I argue that many of the most innocent heroines speculate that sacrificing good assets can produce better marriages. These marriage plots demonstrate that a heroine's reputation must be somewhat damaged before she receives her reward of marriage. In other words, these novels do not uniformly represent, or recommend, the preservation of a heroine's good reputation; rather, they implicitly suggest that some spoiling occur before the consummation of marriage. I study how this curious freckling of heroines' …

A Global Joyce: Early Sightings Of Cosmopolitan Ethics In Ulysses, Matthew Zeller

Theses and Dissertations

'Ulysses is like a great net let down upon the life of a microcosmic city-state, Dublin, wherein lie captured all sorts and conditions of men and minds,' wrote Stuart Gilbert, the famous literary scholar whose landmark 1930 book-length investigation into Joyce's magnum opus cemented his legacy as one of the first Joyceans. In saying so, Gilbert quietly proposes an early reading of Joyce's global ethics long before the study of humanities had developed the post-colonial focus necessary to more fully grasp the cosmopolitan ethics asserted in Ulysses. Gilbert was not alone. Because of his self-imposed exile and thematic insistence on …

The Rhetorical Event Of Modern Southern Humor: "A Requisite Element In Discourse", David Allen Wright

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the rhetorical nature and dynamics of Southern humor in the second half of the twentieth century by analyzing, from a distinctly rhetorical perspective, a selection of popular Southern humor texts. It seeks to understand how Southern humor happens--its methods and techniques--and it also seeks to understand, as much as possible, the implications of these events for the various interlocutors and participants involved. By investigating the stylistic, storytelling, and linguistic techniques of Southern humor, while relying on the scholarship of writers in a variety of academic disciplines, I hope to answer the following research question: how does Southern …

Childish Figuring: The Child As Symbol And Actor In Lillian Smith's Killers Of The Dream And James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Katherine Eveline Upton

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I examine the presentation of the child in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream as part of a rhetoric of growth. Both Agee and Smith present southerners as psychologically immature due to their traumatic childhood experiences of sexism, racism and poverty. Childhood is a recurring theme in both texts. Agee and Smith present childhood as a biological, developmental stage and a metaphor for growth in their texts. The child is a real, contextually-specific figure, drawn from Agee's and Smith's observations of children in Depression-era society. Images of children's …

(Mis)Classification And Creole Identity In Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness Of St. Rocque, Jillian Weber

Theses and Dissertations

particular, it examines The Goodness of St. Rocqueand New Orleans as a site of racial and ethnic confluence. Dunbar-Nelson deals closely with racial and ethnic identities of Creoles in New Orleans during the late nineteenth-century and attempts to show the ways in which markers of ethnicity and connections to other countries upset the black-white racial binary being forced upon residents of New Orleans by outside forces. Dunbar- Nelson uses spatial and sociocultural characteristics of space to comment on the ways in which classification is imposed upon her characters, but shows the disruptive and often dangerous consequences of this imposition. Through …

Southern Fiction: Southern Small-Town Culture And Its Landmarks, Candice W.N. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

Southern small-town culture is marked by a close-knit community's strict societal expectations and hierarchy, the undeniable familiarity of all the residents and their business in a particular small town such as Bloomingdale, Georgia; and a resistance or inability to be affected by time. The second element—familiarity—functions not always as a means of nosiness but as a direct result of the unavoidable interconnectivity that is formed by generations of neighbors and relatives growing up together and never leaving their hometown. A final characteristic of the small-town culture is the significance of landmarks—both in a geographical and manmade sense. These elements and …

Public Intellectuals: Styles, Publics, And Possibilities, Matthew David Kay

Theses and Dissertations

The status of the public intellectual is debated continuously in the United States, but what is not up for debate or theoretical examination is how public intellectual practice is mediated between style and publics. To that end, this study examines three public intellectual figures: Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Reich. Each examination analyzes and describes particular public intellectual styles — performances of culture — which trace three dominant public intellectual practices. These styles contain, invite, and deploy certain publics to engage with the public intellectual and vice versa. First, the study is a theoretical engagement with public intellectual practice …

"The Hollow Men": Divorce And Manhood In The Novels Of Howells, James, And Wharton, Melissa Pluta Parker

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the relationship between divorce and masculinity as presented in several realist novels written around the turn of the century, including A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells, What Maisie Knew by Henry James, and The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. It looks closely at how divorce, which saw a dramatic rise between the years 1880 and 1920, seemingly threatened an elite version of manhood that was already on the decline at this time, a version of manhood increasingly viewed within society as weak and effeminate and one represented in each of these novels by a …

Going Into The Word-Hoard: The Writing Process, Language, And Its Implications In The Poetry Of Medbh Mcguckian And Paul Muldoon, Elizabeth Peele

Theses and Dissertations

As two prominent figures of Northern Irish poetry, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon are often discussed as being "difficult" and "oblique." However, I argue that this categorization of their poetry is too simplistic and overlooks the dissimilarities in their writing process and view of language, and ultimately, in their poetry itself. By going back to the fundamentals of their works, I claim that the basis for this dissimilarity is, in fact, a differing view of the founding blocks of poetic language. McGuckian sees syntax as being the important factor while Muldoon focuses on the individual lexical meaning of words. These …

Heirlooms, Candace Gayle Wiley

Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis is a collection of poems and an essay that explores the concept of defining the self through the influence of personal and cultural heirlooms. It is particularly concerned with the inheritances that children receive, whether they are a pair of stockings or a political atmosphere. This collection consists of five sections, submitted in partial fulfillment of University of South Carolina's Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.

Rewriting The Human: Death Anxiety And Posthuman Vision In Literature Since 1945, John Allen Brooks

Theses and Dissertations

ISS_para>The technology-driven years following the close of World War II provided a new lens through which the human subject could be rethought and, theoretically, improved: no longer did physical and mental shortcomings have to limit the capacity of the individual. The atomic bomb and Colossus computer, though destructive forces, pushed scientists and philosophers to consider new models of the human, including flesh/machine amalgamation and reinscription as downloadable, digital information. While these posthuman constructions promised to distance the human from its material shortcomings, especially its vulnerability to bodily decay and death, they encountered significant resistance in the twentieth century.

By …

Selling The Country’S Secrets: Willa Cather’S Eco(Self)Criticism In My Antonia And The Professor’S House, Elizabeth Nicole Morgan

Theses and Dissertations

This study considers Willa Cather's ecological consciousness as a writer of place, particularly in My Antonia and The Professor's House. In these two works, Cather's narrative distance provides her with the room to investigate the relationship between humans and their environments. Jim Burden, Godfrey St. Peter, and Tom Outland all exploit their environments to greater or lesser extents based on their way of seeing the world, which Cather draws attention to through her careful characterization and narrative distance. In each narrative, Cather forces readers to recognize the environmental consequences of egocentric vision, and the way such vision can be sustained …

Literacy Crisis, Technology, And The Radical Reversal Of Power, Erin Michelle Cromer

Theses and Dissertations

As new media is changing the way individuals communicate, efforts have already been made within universities to, once again, construct new literacy standards in the digital age, producing the appearance of a literacy crisis. I argue that rather than producing another literacy crisis, the fundamental reversal of the power structure concerning who dominates standard literacy places greater expectations on composition scholars and practitioners--rather than students--ultimately providing the conditions of possibility for using power productively to imagine a new pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity that reverses the role of expectations from standards to invention. Such a pedagogy offers rhetoric and composition a …

Fertility, Contraception, And Abortion And The Partnership Of Henry Miller And Anaïs Nin, Kathryn Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

During their creative and sexual relationship, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller together shaped their identities as artists. When they met, both were married and had tried writing before, but their partnership pushed them into a new kind of life in which writing took precedence. During this process, they described their relationship as literarily fertile; a few years later, Nin actually became pregnant with Miller's child and decided to have an abortion. In Nin's diary, metaphor and reality overlap as she anxiously makes sense of her decision that is informed by her belief that an artist cannot be a mother. In …

Ulysses In The Age Of Digital Remediation, Melissa Hart Higgins

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an in-depth study of the implications of digital technologies and information literacy for the reading and scholarly study of James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Because the reading experience of Ulysses depends heavily on both its physicality and the interaction of the reader with the text, the changes in reading practices and scholarly study brought about by digital adaptations and hypermediations of this novel can offer new modes of understanding and characterizing readers relationships with text, as well as how the readers' digital interactions with Ulysses might engender or inhibit potential interpretations.

Each of the three chapters in this …

Going Hard, Going Easy, Going Home: Death And Dying In 20th Century African American Literature, Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation answers the question: How can art represent the essential human experience of death, particularly when the creative context is one of extreme violence? And, what can be learned about the risks and rewards of the living's relationship with the dead by way of these artistic representations? Further, how do these aesthetic renderings of death construct the ethics of life for survivors? In the case of African America, discussion of, and responses to, these questions have been primarily explored in novelist and creative writing. This dissertation examines these novelistic treatments of death-tropes, or thanatropes in eight novels written by …

"The River Duddon" And William Wordsworth's Evolving Poetics Of Collection, Shannon Melee Stimpson

Theses and Dissertations

Despite its impact in generating a more positive reception toward Wordsworth's work among his contemporaries, The River Duddon volume has received comparatively little critical attention in recent scholarship. On some level, this is unsurprising given the relative unpopularity of Wordsworth's later work among modern readers, but I believe that the relative shortage of critical scholarship on The River Duddon is due, at least in part, to a symptomatic failure to read the volume in its entirety. This essay takes up the challenge of following Wordsworth's directive to read The River Duddon volume as a unified whole. While I cannot account …

‘Some Can’T Be That Simple’: Flannery O’Connor’S Debt To French Symbolism, Evan Howell

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I trace the influence of French Symbolist poetry on the works of Flannery O’Connor. Many of O’Connor’s influences are well-known and documented, including Catholicism, the South, modern fiction, and her battle with lupus. However, I argue that Symbolism, via its influence on Modernist literature, is another major influence. In particular, I focus on several aspects of O’Connor’s writing: the recurrence of the same symbol across multiple works, the central location of symbols in several stories, the use of private symbols of the author’s invention, and use of symbol, rather than language, to convey transcendence. Aided by the …

The “Man Walks Outside Time Now”: Verbal Representations Of Photographic Images In The Poems Of Larry Levis, Lauren Miner

Theses and Dissertations

The poet Larry Levis often employed ekphrasis as an elegiac device—particularly with his verbal descriptions of photographic images—to explore human suffering and reconcile feelings of loss. Through the ekphrastic mode, Levis could juxtapose otherwise disparate images, manipulating their temporal and spatial relationships, to achieve what he conceived an authentic portrait of the human experience. The poet, through his verbal descriptions of photographic images, does not try to evade the pain or joy of being human; instead, he confronts his grief directly and, in so doing, transcends that suffering to better understand himself and his own human position. This thesis analyzes …

Healing The Cartesian Split: Understanding And Renewing Pathos In Academic Writing, Travis Washburn

Theses and Dissertations

There have always been rogues who dared to go against the traditional "intellectual" writing style of science and academia, a style that seems bent on transcending the "merely personal." Those who take this risk are embracing the rhetorical tradition of pathos, one that goes as far back as Aristotle. Current academic trends support a genre devoid of pathos and lacking true ethos—a deviation from classic rhetoric, and one that supports the Cartesian split of mind-body dualism. Neurological studies done by Antonio Damasio and others suggest that a holistic view is a more accurate picture of how a human soul functions. …

Gilded Age Travelers: Transatlantic Marriages And The Anglophone Divide In Burnett's The Shuttle, Rebecca L. Peterson

Theses and Dissertations

Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1907 novel, The Shuttle, is an important contribution to turn-of-the-century transatlantic literature because it offers a unifying perspective on Anglo-American relations. Rather than a conventional emphasis on the problematic tensions between the U.S. and Britain, Burnett tells a second story of complementary national traits that highlights the dynamic aspect of transatlantic relations and affords each nation a share of their Anglophone heritage. Burnett employs transatlantic travel to advance her notion of a common heritage. As a tool for understanding the narrative logic of The Shuttle, Michel de Certeau's theory of narrative space explains how Burnett uses movement …

Identification Through Inhabitation In Literature, Film, And Video Games, Charlotte Palfreyman Smith

Theses and Dissertations

In real life we each experience the world separately through our individual bodies, which necessitates what Kenneth Burke calls "identification." In this paper, I assert that as artistic media have structured our aesthetic experience in a way that increasingly resembles our lived, embodied experiences, our identification with fictional characters requires less imaginative effort and is more automatic and powerful. I will show this by analyzing how we inhabit characters through sensory engagement, point of view, and narrative form in literature, film, and video games (specifically action/adventure games, RPGs, and MMORPGs). I will then build off of Burke's foundational theory to …

The Virgin's Kiss: Gender, Leprosy, And Romance In The Life Of St. Frideswide, Gary Stephen Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

The longer thirteenth-century Middle English verse life of Saint Frideswide found in the collection of saints' lives known as the South English Legendary (SEL) narrates an event unique to medieval hagiography. In the poem, a leper asks the virgin saint to kiss him with her "sweet mouth," which she does in spite of her feelings of considerable shame, and the leper is healed. The erotic nature of the leper's request, Frideswide's reluctance to grant it, and her shame throughout the incident represent a significant departure from the twelfth-century Latin texts on which the SEL version of the saint's …

De-Centering The Dictator: Trujillo Narratives And Articulating Resistance In Angie Cruz's Let It Rain Coffee And Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Kelsy Ann Mortensen

Theses and Dissertations

Narratives of resisting the Trujillo regime are so prevalent in Dominican-American literature that it seems Dominican-American authors must write about Trujillo to be deemed authentically Dominican-American. Within these Trujillo narratives there seems to be two main ways to talk about resistance. “The resistance,” an organized entity that actively and consciously opposes the Trujillo regime, can be seen in stories like those told about the Mirabal sisters. The other resistance narrates how characters capitalize on opportunities to disrupt business or political functions, thus disrupting the Trujillo machine. This resistance works much like Ben Highmore's explanation of de Certeau's resistance in that …

Seeing (The Other) Through A Terministic Screen Of Spirituality: Emotional Integrity As A Strategy For Facilitating Identification, Jarron Benjamin Slater

Theses and Dissertations

Although philosopher Robert Solomon and rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote in isolation from one another, they discuss similar concepts and ideas. Since its introduction in Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, identification has always been important to rhetorical theory, and recent studies in emotion, such as Solomon's, provide new insight into modes of identification—that human beings can identify with one another on an emotional level. This paper places Solomon and Burke in conversation with one another, arguing that both terministic screens and emotions are ways of seeing, acting, engaging, and judging. Hence, terministic screens and emotions affect ethos, or character, both …