English Language and Literature Commons^™

Waking Life, Dionne Irving

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Collection of short fiction dealing with themes of isolation and self-discovery. Contents include: Waking Life, Rice and Peas, Weaving, and Collage.

Bel-Imperia: The (Early) Modern Woman In Thomas Kyd’S Spanish Tragedy, Ann Mccauley Basso

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At the heart of Thomas Kyd's revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy lies an arranged marriage around which all of the other action revolves. Bel-Imperia of Spain has been betrothed against her will to Prince Balthazar of Portugal, but she is no ordinary woman, and she has plans of her own. Bel-Imperia's unwillingness to participate in the arranged marriage is indicative of the rise of the companionate marriage; it represents a rejection of the arranged marriage that dominated upper class society in earlier years.

This study seeks to throw light upon early modern attitudes towards marriage, focusing particularly on the arranged …

Sylvia Plath And The Crisis Of The Self: A Feminist Reading Of The Late Poetry, Rania Salah Mohamed

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The study of Sylvia Plath's poetry sheds light on the various approaches that can be used to read the crisis of the self in Plath's poetry. It reveals the latent power and talent of a woman poet who fought against the male tradition to express her voice and demand full recognition. Plath's late poems can be approached in different ways. The thesis examines the existential dilemma of the modern poet in a world of confusion and the psychology of defense against death and suffering in the feminist struggle against the other. These approaches are used to account for the richness …

Reclaiming The Human Self: Redemptive Suffering And Spiritual Service In The Works Of James Baldwin, Francine Larue Allen

English Dissertations

James Arthur Baldwin argues that the issue of humanity—what it means to be human and whether or not all people bear the same measure of human worth—supersedes all issues, including socially popular ones such as race and religion. As a former child preacher, Baldwin claims, like others shaped by both the African-American faith tradition and Judeo-Christianity, that human equality stands as a divinely mandated and philosophically sound concept. As a literary artist and social commentator, Baldwin argues that truth in any narrative text, whether fictional or non-fictional, lies in its embrace or rejection of human equality. Truth-telling narrative texts uphold …

Altered States Of Reality: The Theme Of Twinning In David Lynch's Lost Highway, Alan Edward Green Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a postmodern director, David Lynch makes films which are innovative, evocative, and uniquely his own. The theme of twinning, in particular, is recapitulated throughout the director's oeuvre; however, it is with Lost Highway that the thematic element he addresses takes center stage. The film's main character Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is unable to cope with the trauma in his life. After killing his wife and finding himself on death row, he has a parallel identity crisis; he manages a metamorphosis into a younger, virile Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The method which allows this transformation is the psychogenic fugue: a …

Peer Review In The Contemporary Corporation, Shannon Warren Wisdom

English Dissertations

My dissertation explores the history, pedagogy, and practice of peer review in academia and in the workplace, so that I could suggest strategies for improving peer review in the contemporary corporation. Several scholars have studied collaborative writing—of which peer review is just one type—but few have specifically and thoroughly treated the subject of peer review. I surveyed the technical writers in my organization as well as other local writers about their thoughts on peer review. For improving peer review in the workplace, two predominant themes emerged: improve the corporate culture and assign a manager to the process. Therefore, I explore …

"Life Into Dry Bones": Emergence Of The Female Artist And Community Integration In L.M. Montgomery's Novels Of Development, Laurie Elizabeth Stein

Honors Papers

"If I'm to be dragged at Anne's chariot wheels the rest of my life I'll bitterly repent having 'created' her."[ So wrote Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) in September 1908, a mere few months after the publication of her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, which had quickly become a bestseller. Of course Montgomery knew, and we can see with hindsight, that "Anne's chariot wheels" were and are nothing to scoff at. Quite clearly they propelled Montgomery to popular renown, financial success and literary acclaim - both then and now. Then, beginning in 1908 and continuing through her career, "Anne's chariot …

Literary Love Making In Nicholas Sparks Novels: Finding The Balance Between The Writer’S Life And The Writer’S Work In Bestselling Romantic Literature, Ryan Spanich

Honors Theses

For almost a decade now Nicholas Sparks has been writing love stories. Not only has he been publishing his stories, but they have received high acclaim in each of their installments. Several of his novels have been made into major motion pictures and increased his popularity quite significantly. His status as a successful romantic fiction writer is undeniable, but the question is, why? What is it about Nicholas Sparks that makes his novels so engaging, and personally, what do I need to do as an aspiring novelist to try and acquire the same literary status? Sparks’s novels reach readers at …

Man Thinking About Nature: The Evolution Of The Poet's Form And Function In The Journal Of Henry David Thoreau 1837-1852, Sh Bagley

Honors Papers

The real question at hand with the study of any work of prose literature is not related at all to the textual contents-the who, the what and the how that comprise its narrative-but the why. The attempt to understand the reasons behind the events described is often undergone in conjunction with a degree of considering the author's own role or purpose in the given written endeavor. These considerations are framed in their relationship to the reader, forcing the reader to become an active participant in something which amounts to an interaction with a text. This three-step process is, at bottom, …

Christina Rossetti, Sarah Grand, And The Expression Of Sexual Liminality In Nineteenth Century Literature, Jennifer Persinger Adams

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study defines sexual liminality as a transient, threshold moment in which textual characters explore not only their sexual desires, but also their gender identities. During the nineteenth century, social critics reveal that sexuality and gender play a vital role in laws, social practices, and family structure. Thus, when authors such as Christina Rossetti and Sarah Grand produce characters that embark upon introspective journeys of their sexualities against the background of social expectation, one clearly identifies the influence of life upon art. Rossetti’s Prince in The Prince’s Progress and Grand’s Angelica in The Heavenly Twins enter into the realm of …

“Since Merlin Paid His Demon All The Monstrous Debt”: The Celtic In Keats, Brandy Bagar Fraley

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis argues that the Keatsian critical canon refuses to acknowledge the influence of Celticism in the works of John Keats and that such a gap displaces his poems from their cultural context and also prevents re-readings that might add depth and distinction to his place in the Romantic canon. After discussing the Celticism inherent in the literature, art, and social phenomenon of Keats’s day and briefly reviewing the scarce criticism that exists on the topic, the author reveals the prevalence of Celtic philosophies, figures, myths, and settings in Keats’s poetry. Then, she further argues that Keats through the feminized …

Isolated But Not Oblivious: A Re-Evaluation Of Emily Dickinson’S Relationship To The Civil War, Peggy Henderson Murphy

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Emily Dickinson’s physical isolation and her disinterest in publishing have led scholars to conclude that Dickinson had no interest in the outside world. Although Dickinson’s poems do contain war imagery, scholars have argued that these images are used by Dickinson to deal with her own inner struggles and are not directly related to the Civil War. However, Karen Dandurand’s discovery of poems published by Dickinson in a Civil War fund-raising magazine compels us to reconsider Dickinson’s supposed disinterest. It is evident by Dickinson’s letters and her poems that the war energizes and inspires her by providing questions about life, death, …

Situating The Cetacean: Science And Storytelling In Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider, Lee Elton Dionne

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis analyzes two major discourses that intersect and inform one another in Witi Ihimaera's The whale rider: storytelling and modern science.

"What Now?": Willa Cather's Successful Male Professionals At Middle Age, Deena Michelle Baker

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines three male characters from Willa Cather's writing that epitomize the American Dream of professional and material success but they find no contentment once they achieve it. This disillusionment is particularly so with Cather's driven male professionals, Bartley Alexander (an architectural scholar), and Clement Sebastian (a critically acclaimed, international opera singer). Cather situates these characters at middle age and at the peak of their professional careers, which makes the examination of them an interesting study as to the effects of the encroaching modern age on successful men. This thesis begins with a brief overview of Cather's work, including …

Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl Novels: Contemporary Subversive Tales, Amy Ruth Wilson Clark

Theses Digitization Project

Drawing especially on Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg, this thesis argues that Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl novels, through their depiction of the cyborg and their use of metafiction, intertextuality, and irony, subvert binaries and hierarchies that cause social injustice. Chapter one argues that Colfer's characters disrupt the oppressive binary opposition between innocence and experience that characterizes children's literature. Chapter two argues that Colfer's fairy hierarchy satirizes the human hierarchy. Chapter three argues that Colfer's cyborg, by disrupting the boundary between machine and organism, breaches the wall around the pervasive garden hierarchy of childhood innocence. Chapter four argues against the …

Irony, Rhetoric, And The Portrayal Of "No Place": Construing The Elaborate Discourse Of Thomas More's Utopia, Davina Sun Padgett

Theses Digitization Project

While traditional readings of Thomas More's Utopia have largely relied upon literal interpretations, and accordingly have emphasized the significance of Utopia as a model of the ideal society, this thesis endeavors to explore beyond the conventional or literal appearance of More's language to consider the possible meanings, intentions, and strategies underlying Utopia's elaborate discourse, concentrating specifically on the significance of More's use of humor and irony and his familiarity with the conventions of satiric fiction.

Clara-An Elsewhere, Travis G. Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Clara an elsewhere seeks to convey to a reader the immediate and sensory rich experience of walking down Main Street in Clara, ME one fine summer morning and encountering the lives of two characters, Aaron and Katy even as their lives encounter each other. The work follows a concept in astrophysics, the elsewhere-a time and space outside of the now, past the known future and as yet unseen by the known past- and applies it to a literary context. The effect upon a reader being that he or she is not reading a story that has occurred or will occur …

The Story Of A Picture Book: A Process Analysis, Christy Evans

Honors Theses

Creating a successful picture book is neither an easy nor simple process. The illustrations must-harmonize with the text, move the reader smoothly through a story, and be, as Burningham puts it, "verdant." To achieve this, an author/illustrator must be prepared for constant revision. In my story The Fantastic Transformation of Frog the main character experiences some bizarre changes, but reverts to his normal state in the end. Through my process of creating a picture book, my story also went through numerous changes, but, unlike the main character's changes, these changes were not reversed. They led to other changes.

Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit : An Examination Of The Alterical Dimensions, Racial Consciousness, And Silence Of The Southern Woman, Syrena Bothe

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In the 1944 publication of Strange Fruit. Lillian Smith attempts to identify the contradictions between external racial hierarchy, social class, and female whiteness by identifying them first as internal struggles that affected a southerner’s external existence. This is, instead, mis-read as a catastrophic love story between a white boy, Tracy Deen, and a black girl, Non Anderson.

However, this struggle of racial consciousness is a motif and driving force that heavily weights the intentions and choices of both white and black people in Strange Fruit. It is breath and instinct that lives in each southern inhabitant, it is the air …

Third Wave Language In Bust And Bitch Magazine, Emily Hoeflinger

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Where does feminism fall in contemporary American culture? Has it lost its relevance as a result of waning interest in feminist politics? In today’s feminist troupe, a culture of inheritance has stepped into many of the advantages the Second Wave pushed so hard to acquire. What becomes the point of contention is the approach these inheritors now take to feminism or, more so, the perception of the Third Wave by its predecessors, as well as the persistent misrepresentation of feminism by mass culture. A great amount of speculation exists about the movement of feminism since the heyday of the Second …

Gonna Spread The News All Around: Early, African-American Popular Song As Spoken Newspaper, Randall Lawrence Stamper

Theses and Dissertations

Most research into blues music over the past thirty years has examined either how the blues contribute to or reflect African-American identity, or how blues lyrics may be used as windows into African-American culture, values, and attitudes. Scholars have generally relied on more conventional songs about male-female relationships in this research, largely ignoring the subset of topical blues songs that related information about current events. Given the widespread illiteracy among African Americans during the height of the blues' popularity, these topical songs are particularly compelling. To date, however, no one has coupled topical blues together with their consumers' educational attainment …

The Manner Of Mystery: Free Indirect Discourse And Epiphany In The Stories Of Flannery O'Connor, Denise Hopkins

LSU Master's Theses

This project addresses the narrative voice(s) in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, particularly in relation to her conception of art. O’Connor critics often polarize the cultural and religious worth of her stories. As a Catholic, O’Connor was convinced that the “the ultimate reality is the Incarnation” (HB 92). As an artist, O’Connor believed that fiction should begin with a writer’s attention to the natural world as she comprehends it through the senses. It is no wonder, then, that her fiction lends itself well to critics interested in both her theology and her presentation of issues of race, class, and gender. My …

Betweenness Unveiled: Poetry As A Connective Force, Wilson Clement

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent history, literary criticism attempted to maintain absolute standards by which the quality of literature was to be judged. The literary community's partial submission to attacks on this position has made it possible for its members to recognize that these rigid standards can never be universally accepted. We argue that they must therefore accept, as legitimate modes of critique, both Seamus Heaney's claim that it is the duty of poetry to redress wrongs of whatever type and his unspoken claim that this redress is done by poetry's working for opposing realities. The work for these often contradictory realities, says …

Observation On Foreign Children's Literature In Taiwan: The Future Of Local Children's Literature In Taiwan, Han-Lin Lin

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Formosa-Taiwan is a small island with a unique culture. Because of its blood relationship with China, Taiwan inherits the traditional Chinese cultural features from mainland China. Inside Taiwan, the indigenous cultures are going to fade, while the increasing number of the children of foreign brides will play an important role in the future. On the other hand, culture from Japan and the West keep influencing Taiwan. We mix all resources together and hope to keep our culture growing in this rich land.

The thesis will focus on the development of local children's literature in Taiwan: the importance, influence, and problems …

Rich, Attractive People In Attractive Places Doing Attractive Things, Tonya Walker

Theses and Dissertations

Rich, Attractive People in Attractive Places Doing Attractive Things is a fictional memoir of a dead Manhattan socialite from the 1950's named Sunny Marcus. The novel is Sunny's monologue from Hell and features many well-known figures from American pop culture including Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, William Powell and Babe Paley. It traces the upward trajectory of Sunny's life from a modest childhood in 1920's Los Angeles to the heights of social success in the unforgiving world of Café Society to her murder.

Cultural Stereotypes: From Dracula's Myth To Contemporary Diasporic Productions, Ileana F. Popa

Theses and Dissertations

This study is focused on a highly topical theme, which belongs to the pluralist practice of cultural studies, and aims at investigating a remarkable phenomenon of identity-shaping and cross-cultural exchange. Starting from an analysis of Dracula as the epitomized image of the Balkans (and of Romania, more specifically) abroad, this paper provides a comprehensive historical and (con)textual analysis of the myth, enlarged to incorporate it into the fictions of exile and to draw the reader's attention to the "demonic" dimension of the Balkan area in general, and the Romanian area in particular. The first chapter provides a theoretical overview meant …

Modernist Success In A Postmodern Failure: Jackson Pollock And Abstract Expressionism, The Avant-Garde And The Ascension Of Late Capitalism, Art After 1945, Russell Gullette

Honors Theses

It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the events at the end of World War II. The thought produced in the face of a myriad of deaths is almost unfeasible sixty years after the fact, but the energy was integral to the changing social landscape. Because of the country's prominence in and fortitude after the war, the U.S. was left responsible for reshaping and rejuvenating the international landscape that was destroyed by the years of brutal fighting and vile contestation. The American establishment was granted a major opportunity to establish itself amongst the global leaders. Such a grand responsibility …

League Of Their Own: The Competition For Jewish-American Identity In The Novels Of Philip Roth, Rebeccah Amendola

Honors Theses

In his insightful and sometimes troubled contemporary writings, Philip Roth demonstrates a nuanced understanding of how the development of Jewish-American identity is a painful and often hilariously paradoxical journey of discovery as Jewish traditions intersect (and often collide) with the American ideal of vertical advancement. Since the successful fulfillment of the American Dream requires some measure of assimilation into the majority American culture known as Americanization, Roth's Jewish-American characters are continually and precariously ill-balanced between retaining and abandoning their Jewish heritage in favor of a new American identity. Thus, if Americanization necessitates Anglo-conformity and the abandonment of immigrant mores, the …

Creative Writing: An Elective Course For High School Students, Megan Theresa Myers

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

This thesis project outlines a course in creative writing designed for students in grades 9-12. The course is an elective and is expected to be taken in addition to general English classes taken as a graduation requirement.

The course is designed as a genre study on an immersion principle, which requires that students focus their attention on the characteristics that make up various genres through both reading and writing in those genres. Students are introduced to the overall workshop format of the class and to the procedure of conferencing on and revising drafts through the basic study of the genres …

"To Live Outside The Law, You Must Be Honest" -- Words, Walls, And The Rhetorical Practices Of The Angolite, Scott Howard Whiddon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest”: Words, Walls, and the Rhetorical Practices of The Angolite examines the 50 year history of The Angolite, a news magazine published and edited by inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary. While The Angolite and the efforts of former editor Wilbert Rideau have been discussed in the public media, especially here in Louisiana, my dissertation is the first extended scholarly account of this prison publication. Specifically, I examine how inmate writers held in one of the most historically violent penitentiaries in the United States choose to represent themselves, their multiple literacies, and their …