English Language and Literature Commons^™

“Speak For Yourself”: Ovidian Women And The Suppression Of Voice And Complaint In Metamorphoses And Heroides, Grayson Elizabeth Newman

Theses and Dissertations

Ovid’s portrayal and attitude towards women is one that is particularly puzzling and contradictory throughout his Metamorphoses and Heroides. Recent scholarship on Ovidian literature is only divided on whether or not Ovid’s intentions within these two works were to sympathize with the Roman woman’s experience or to reinforce the lack of female representation in Roman society; however, I argue that Ovid fails to achieve empathy for the Roman woman. In Heroides, these women are pining and tragic, often meeting some terrible fate shortly after being abandoned by their suitors and putting forth a complaint. Conversely, women in Metamorphoses …

Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, And Cringe, Katherine Anne Schell

Theses and Dissertations

Cringe, the negative reflexive reaction we experience when we witness something embarrassing or awkward, has a bad reputation in the queer community. In online and physical queer spaces, there is a pervading belief that “cringe culture” must be antithetical to queerness, that no queer community could possibly achieve liberation until it has eradicated the threat of cringe. This thesis revises that cringe vs. queer positioning by reimagining cringe as its own rhythm of queerness and examining the productive aspects of cringe through engagement with thinkers like Karen Barad and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The thesis, formatted as a response to a …

Identity In Literacy Narratives: Toward Reflexive Pedagogy In First Year Writing, Laiken Elizabeth Harrigan

Theses and Dissertations

An ongoing discussion for composition pedagogues is the relation of individuals’ identities and discourse histories in relation to academic discourses. In this thesis, I argue that academic discourse cannot be entirely separated from personal discourse, as individuals are always in conversation with their discoursal histories and identities. In order to better understand how students perceive their relationships to academic discourse, I analyze how First Year Writing (FYW) students experience the discourse of FYW— where they either intertwine their identities or we see their personal identities collide with the academic space. I used open coding to conduct a textual analysis of …

Hardly Working: The Labor Concerns Of Graduate Student Assistants In Writing Programs, Lily Victoria Howard-Hill

Theses and Dissertations

The instructors of undergraduate writing courses are very often graduate students who exist in a space between student and teacher, subsequently shouldering a dual burden of responsibility. This is particularly the case in freshman writing and composition classes. Graduate students that hold assistantships and work in writing programs have a number of concerns related to their academic labor, specifically the benefits and compensation they receive in exchange for their work. To further illustrate these issues, this project offers the results of an IRB-approved study that highlights the tight connection between graduate student assistants’ working conditions, the financial and material benefits …

Nature As Culture: Ecofeminist Narratives Of Environmental And Colonial History, Sydney Leimbach

Theses and Dissertations

“Nature as Culture: Ecofeminist Narratives of Environmental and Colonial History” is a cross-cultural, comparative, feminist investigation of two films, The Nightingale and Wolfwalkers, and two books, The Giving Tree and The Overstory. The narratives are analyzed through a combination of ecofeminism and decolonial feminism, revealing the four narratives’ investment in the effects of colonization on the environment. The two chapters explore the association of women with nature, traditionally used as a subordinating position, instead as a condition of empathetic understanding with both the colonized and the environment. Further, these narratives use the association of women with nature as …

Communicative Kissing With Alien Poetry: New Muses In Neil Gaiman’S “How To Talk To Girls At Parties”, Leanna Ashley Herbert

Theses and Dissertations

The representation of women in the fiction of Neil Gaiman is a topic that seems to obsess scholars, critics, fans, and (likely) the author himself. It is imperative that closer scholarly attention be paid to the figure of the muse, a figure defined in contemporary culture by her representability, as she appears across Gaiman’s works. This thesis traces the evolution of m/Muses or muse-like figures in the fiction of Neil Gaiman, arguing that the short story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” imagines an empowering evolution for those who are objectified or silenced by the assumption that they are …

Kurt Vonnegut, A Difficult Feminist: Investigating Female Characters In Bluebeard, Matthew Steven Medl

Theses and Dissertations

After a brief contextualization of Vonnegut’s work, this essay close-reads his 1987 novel, Bluebeard, and locates the feminism within. I argue that Vonnegut establishes women as agents of generative change, breakers of marital conventions, artistic sages, authors, expressionists, interlopers, and nonviolent activists. I primarily examine Circe Berman and Marilee Kemp, supplementing with evidence from Edith Taft and Dorothy, as well as wider scholarship.

Sites Of Peace And Pain: The Black Grandmother Figure In Toni Morrison’S Beloved, Jazz, And Sula, Alexus Joannea Ray

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Toni Morrison captures the genuine lived unique experiences of Black grandmothers and their granddaughters throughout her novels and specifically in Beloved, Jazz, and Sula. My analysis takes a closer look at the complications behind Morrison’s grandmothers in order to demonstrate that, while she is strong, supportive, and family oriented, the Black grandmother figure can also be a person of peril. The main characters, Denver, Violet, and Sula must come to terms with the contradictions of strength and sacrifice that the novels insist are better left in the past. Drawing on Morrison scholarship and Black women’s …

"Where Sex Is Directly Concerned" Agatha Christie And The Feminization Of Detective Fiction, Barbara Javori

Theses and Dissertations

Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the Whodunit. She is without a doubt one the most popular and best selling authors of all time. Christie’s work built upon the first examples of detective fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Christie’s embrace of the traditionally female spaces, her subversion of expectations, and her unlikely detectives set her apart from her predecessors with their focus on male intellect, patriarchal superiority, and absent female characters. Christie’s novels established recognizable patterns still used today in books, television and movies. This project examines the arc of detective fiction …

The Unstoppable Anthropocene Engine: Animal Studies In Literature And The Lack Of Individual Animal Study, Paul Spampanato

Theses and Dissertations

Animal studies is a growing field in the Humanities and, in particular, Literature studies. This dissertation, The Unstoppable Anthropocene Engine, focuses on canonical literature of the fin de siècle and Modernist eras that utilize animals in their narratives. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood are the literary texts examined throughout the dissertation to discuss the importance of looking at specific animals that represent particular groups. Through these novels and poem, readers will see that when we …

Feminism And Identity In Victorian Novels Of Brontës, The Interchangeability Of The Binaries: Center And Margin, Reality And Appearance, Original And Copy, Mutsuko Takahashi

Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation approaches feminism and identity in the novels of the Brontë sisters, in which characters have struggled with the tension between outsider and insider. The study will discuss, in Part I, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), and in Part II, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), seen through multiple lenses such as feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, etc. Various versions of powerless male protagonists in the Brontës are examined, for they help illuminate the situation of the female protagonists. Marginal males try to take over the central position by using …

The Monsters And Their Racial Identities In Frankenstein And The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, Sara N. Rodia

Theses and Dissertations

By examining the monsters through a racial lens in Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, this thesis aims to show how the creature and Hyde can be reflective of the racial stereotypes in Britain in the 19th century. This thesis maps out how the monsters in the novels embody nonwhite races and how the narrative can either keep them in the category of monster, or humanize them. The creature represents nonwhite races, and Shelley critiques racist ideologies of the early 19th century through the creature’s narration in the novel. Further, Shelley demonstrates the monstrous nature …

Adaptations Of World War I Stories Into Screen Dramas: The New “Heritage Films”, Elizabeth Carroll

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines both written and filmic texts to determine the way World War I trauma was depicted in the postwar period and how it is now presented to a modern audience. This study begins with texts written in the immediate postwar period: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Vera Brittain’s war memoir Testament of Youth and R.C. Sherriff’s play and novel Journey’s End and draws comparisons to their twentieth and twenty-first century film adaptations. A coda also examines the novel and film The Hours. Using psychology, history, literary criticism, and film theory, I conclude the films are generally more invested in …

Fascism In Sci-Fi: "Mobilizing Passions" In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Alton C. Ayers

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis responds to criticism of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) as a “fascist” novel by further investigating the claim through a close reading of the novel that applies political theory scholarship on fascism. Chapters I and II introduce the novel along with its general reception and controversy. These chapters consider the accusations of “fascism” given to the novel while at the same time understanding that a clear, exact definition of “fascism” has long been grappled with by scholars since the rise of the regimes in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Chapters III and IV apply political theory to …

Dismembering Monstrous Metaphors In Latinx Speculative Fiction, Danielle Garcia-Karr

Theses and Dissertations

U.S. public discourse and popular media are rife with monstrous metaphors of Latinxs. This thesis argues that these gothic monstrous metaphors construct an affective economy of fear, which results in material violence and the devastation of Latinx lives. I further argue that to intervene within this affective economy, Latinx authors write speculative fiction, employing critical race methodologies, to negotiate monstrosity in relation to citizenship. In other words, speculative Latinx authors disidentify with monsters and enact epistemic disobedience, problematizing the known and naturalized and delinking Latinx people from monstrous metaphors to interrupt cycles of fear and violence. In exploring this metaphoric …

Intensa: Writings In English And Spanish From A Feminist Immigrant, Nubia Sarahi Reyna Melendez

Theses and Dissertations

INTENSA: WRITINGS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH FROM A MEXICAN FEMINIST is a bilingual work written in hybrid literature. The writings, in both English and Spanish, are free prose poetry and tell the story of its narrator through a feminist and immigrant point of view coming from a overwhelmingly majority catholic country, religion that does not view men and women as equals. The thesis details the narrator's life through a feminist point of view as well as her relationship with her mother, her personal relationships, what it means to be an immigrant and what it is like for her, and many …

Hawthorne’S Human Nature And Sin: Criticisms Of Puritanism And Progressivism, Oscar Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

One of America’s greatest authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a time of rapid scientific, material, and intellectual advancement. However, unlike many of his peers who went all-in on utopian reform movements, Hawthorne took a cautious and reserved approach to progress even though he supported the idea abstractly. Using six tales written acrossHawthorne’s career, this work will examine what each has to say about Hawthorne’s belief in human nature and why he takes such a skeptical position against movements aiming to fundamentally reshape people and society. The tales from the 1830s, “The Gentle Boy,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Minister’s Black …

The Structures Of Intra-National Class Divisions In Neoliberalism: The Women Of “Light” And “Dark” In The White Tiger, Sneha Madimi

Theses and Dissertations

Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, represents gender hierarchies and the class struggle of India’s neoliberal present. Adiga uses elements of satire and allegory to teach us something about how women are differently positioned in the neoliberal system. David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2). I will consider the novel, alongside Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” …

Literature As A Monument: Uncle Tom’S Cabin Reflecting The Morality Of A Nation, Shalane Parcenue Conrads

Theses and Dissertations

This essay studies the critical response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by studying the novel’s critical reception from publication and into contemporary America to understand how the novel remains an institution of Civil War remembrance. In accepting the polemical status of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as both a literary and historical document, I argue that the novel is a monument in American culture. In studying the wide spectrum of critical response to the novel since its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes a social barometer that reflects the controversial race relations in the United States from the Civil …

Speculative Pasts: American Historical Fiction In An Age Of Empire, Gregory William Deinert

Theses and Dissertations

This study identifies a new generic form termed here the “Speculative Historical Novel” within contemporary American fiction. The works that Speculative Pasts collect all agonize over the erasure of the past, and question how we can incorporate history into the present while accepting that full recuperation may be impossible. In their emphasis on the erasure of the past, these novels trace the manifold silences created by the imperial conquest of the New World and articulate how this past continues to structure the lived experiences of everyone on this continent.

This speculation is, on the one hand, necessarily suppositional. When faced …

Embodied Participation In Digital Publics: Somnambulance, Surveillance, And The Construction Of Identity, Adam S. Padgett

Theses and Dissertations

In our current information landscape, routine surveillance has changed the nature of rhetorical engagement in public spheres. Scholarship in publics theory have done productive work to map out the complex field of discursive participation. Michael Warner has demonstrated how, through the circulation of common texts, people no longer have to be in public in order to participate in publics. However, in the wake of ubiquitous surveillance, this focus on publicness has offered little attention to privacy in publics theory. I argue that legal and postmodern theories of bodies-as-texts is problematic for reading and writing bodies online. Intersecting with embodiment and …

“The Time Has Not Been Wasted”: The Accounting Diaries Of Marian Evans And Louisa May Alcott, Ashley A. Alvarado

Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, the Victorian desire for utility, respectability, and self-improvement became deeply ingrained in daily life, and consequently, the diary grew to be a popular tool to measure and evaluate time management and personal development. Accounting diaries, in particular, set out to provide a record of activity and achievement (or conversely, inactivity and failure). This thesis performs a case study of the accounting diaries of Marian Evans (George Eliot) and Louisa May Alcott, exploring how they document progress towards their personal goals of utility, morality, and productivity. Specific diary-writing techniques—such as an efficient style, income tracking, illness recording, …

The Divine Consumptive: The Depiction Of Tuberculosis In Jane Eyre, Haley Highfield

Theses and Dissertations

Disease was a constant and unavoidable facet of life in British society during the Victorian Era. Despite the overwhelming prevalence of disease, the true cause of these illnesses remained mysterious until the turn of the century. With the origins of many of these diseases being either unknown or ascribed to mistaken sources, effective treatment was an impossibility. Tuberculosis is a prime example of this conundrum. Even with an estimated twenty-five percent of the British population dying from this particular disease during the nineteenth century, the actual provenance for infection was not discovered until 1882 with Robert Koch’s identification of the …

The Worst Horror Of All: Greene’S Political And Salvific Imagination In Brighton Rock, James C. Mcguire

Theses and Dissertations

An evaluation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock as it apprehends the Catholic novel as form. With ample assistance from Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Robert Hugh Benson's The Lord of the World, and select works of Fredric Jameson—most notably The Political Unconscious—this analysis seeks to clarify the politico-spiritual "horizon" evident in Greene's first "Catholic novel." By reviewing the novel through the lens of both Catholic theology and modern historical dialectic material criticism, this evaluation reclaims Graham Greene's early political radicalism that critics identify better in his later, less-religious texts. Discovered most clearly in the ending …

Cinematic Poe: A Survey Of Films Inspired By Edgar Allan Poe And Their Importance In Film History, Devon V. Bradley

Theses and Dissertations

The relationship of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, their respective adaptations, and their place in film history remains underappreciated in contemporary scholarship. Additionally, many of the most significant director/auteurs in cinema history have Poe inspired films. This project explores the filmic legacy Poe and his stories share across a survey of significant filmmakers, who have created memorable interpretations of Poe’s works. This thesis seeks to consider connections between several well-known Poe film adaptations and what I consider to be their significance in the development of film as a medium over its history. My investigation compares a range of films inspired by …

"The Personal Is The Political And The Political Is Personal:" Engendering Understanding Through Global Allegory In Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist And Exit West, Nicole Ordonez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West by British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. In both novels, Hamid uses the representational literary device of allegory to present what I will frame as works of “global allegory,” or novels of global literature that present the world as one interconnected space rather than as one divided by borders and nations. In doing so, I will be situating my argument as a rebuttal of Frederic Jameson’s “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson draws a distinction between works of third world and first world literature along the lines of allegory. …

Methodological Mutability: Shifting Research In The Rhetoric Of Health And Medicine, John Schuler Benson Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) is a growing body of scholarship that pulls from technical communication, rhetorical theory, and a number of other disciplines to inquire about the capacities of rhetoric at the intersection of medical practitioners and scholars, the medical humanities, and the publics they inform and treat. Among RHM scholars there is a consensus that the field’s methodological diversity is one of its greatest strengths; indeed, field leaders articulate one of RHM’s exigencies as “encouraging methodological collaboration and experimentation” (Melonçon and Scott, Methodologies 4). This dissertation takes up these calls with the introduction of shifting, a …

Trans-Atlantic Composition: The History Of British Academic Writing, Gareth George Rees-White

Theses and Dissertations

I author a revisionary comparative history of British Academic Writing and American Composition studies. My core argument is that the Composition story has always, ultimately, been a Trans-Atlantic one. This project serves two key goals: 1) it offers a comprehensive history of UK writing education; while 2) simultaneously offering a revisionist US history that fights the claim that uniquely American exigencies led to a uniquely American education system that therefore has little to learn from other global Compositions. This project tracks the history of university level writing education in the UK from the 1200s to the modern day, and follows …

Marianismo And The Catholic Autobiographer: A Comparative Analysis, Nina Lee

Theses and Dissertations

As a version of femininity that derives from the figure of the Mother Mary, marianismo emphasizes the traditional roles of self-sacrifice, motherhood, spirituality, and nurturance. While marianismo is most often associated with Latin America, it can be traced back to Catholicism’s origins in Europe. Early and medieval Catholic theologians, such as Saint Augustine of Hippo and Peter Abelard, demonstrate marianista beliefs within their autobiographical writings. As autobiography is purported to be the most intimate window into both the personal and larger social situations of a given time and place, the autobiographies of such Catholic male theologians provide insight into the …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …