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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Twentieth Century Pandemic Narratives And Mental Health Discourse, Kristy R. Barraza Jan 2021

Twentieth Century Pandemic Narratives And Mental Health Discourse, Kristy R. Barraza

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper utilizes René Girard’s theories concerning plague literature to examine twentieth century pandemic novels’ engagement with mental health discourses surrounding anxiety and melancholia. Girard argues that plague literature consists of four main elements: contamination, dissipation of differences, doubles, and sacrifice; he also argues that the plague represents violence. In 1918, a plague of influenza killed more people in the United States than all the wars from the twentieth century combined. William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider depict the trauma caused by the 1918 pandemic; Maxwell shows how the 1918 influenza disrupted …


War Of Words: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Military's Sexual Assault Prevention Posters, Nancy Thurman Clemens Jan 2021

War Of Words: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Military's Sexual Assault Prevention Posters, Nancy Thurman Clemens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Joining the expanding discourse surrounding language and its effects, specifically regarding the performance of gender in a hypermasculine environment, this dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the United States Department of Defense's sexual assault prevention and response training materials, particularly posters created between 2009 and 2012. This dissertation examines the context of sexual harassment and assault within the military from the late 1970s until the mid-2000s. Presenting scandals that led up to the development of the Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) program, I give a brief history of the establishment and scope of responsibility for the program in …


Hot Fruit, Erinrose Mager Jan 2021

Hot Fruit, Erinrose Mager

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The creative component of this dissertation is a collection of short prose that investigates the longing for the self, the longing for another, and the longing for connection between the self and another during periods of mourning and transition. Hot Fruit, though vocally, stylistically, and perspectivally fragmented, finds its unification through attention to the minute, the quotidian, and the domestic. It likewise attends to small actions performed as acts of care, empathy, and discovery, foregrounding the minor exchange or the minor memory as a means of understanding. Transracial adoptee and Asian American identities; food, ritual, and home; potentiality and …


The Orient In The Empire’S Poetry: Scholarship, Translation, And Imaginative Geography (1770-1857), Zeeshan Riyaz Reshamwala Jan 2021

The Orient In The Empire’S Poetry: Scholarship, Translation, And Imaginative Geography (1770-1857), Zeeshan Riyaz Reshamwala

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uses the idea of imaginative geography to study literary and scholarly representations of what writers in Europe referred to as the Orient during the long nineteenth century. Imaginative geography refers to a subjective collection of associations that accumulate around a place about which positive knowledge is limited, such that the imaginative associations overpower and structure any empirical knowledge about it, even when further knowledge is acquired. The imaginative geography of the Orient emerged from texts, images, and artifacts that traveled from Asia to Europe through sustained colonial contact. This dissertation studies how writers in India and Britain constituted, …


Material Interactions: Early Modern Women’S Textual Embodiments, Olivia R. Tracy Jan 2021

Material Interactions: Early Modern Women’S Textual Embodiments, Olivia R. Tracy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Material Interactions: Early Modern Women’s Textual Embodiments claims that early modern women writers present embodied constructions of the sensory-domestic—the bodily practices of herbal and culinary labor, which were shared with medical and scientific practices—to locate an ethos at the intersection of medical, scientific and literary discourse communities. Drawing from approaches including ethos-as-location, rhetorical genre, and early modern ecofeminism, my articulation of a sensory-domestic ethos offers new ways to explore the ways writers construct ethos by navigating their individual standpoint, their writing context, and their “acceptable” social labor. My first section argues that early modern women engaged ingredients as agents in …


Adding A Dimension: Illustrating Triple Consciousness Theory In The African American Literary Tradition, Asia Wesley Jan 2021

Adding A Dimension: Illustrating Triple Consciousness Theory In The African American Literary Tradition, Asia Wesley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way gender expands and nuances W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness theory, which depicts the African American identity as a doubleness that is both American and Negro. Black feminist criticism’s nuanced formulation of DuBois’s formulation of Black identity allows the African American literary tradition to be seen through three lenses: an American, a Negro, and an African American’s gender identity. In order to further contemporize the pre-existing Black feminist criticism, I examine Hurston, Brooks, and Morrison in the three time periods that followed DuBois’s coining of double consciousness theory: (1) the Harlem Renaissance, (2) the Civil Rights Movement …