English Language and Literature Commons^™

Girlpwrd: Amplifying Silenced Voices Of Women Through Digital Storytelling, Brooke Schumann

English Theses

Drawing on data from a multi-month digital storytelling community project, this qualitative case study offers portraits of three marginalized women who re-author pivotal moments of silencing in their lives. The foundational framework blends scholarship on rhetorical silence, rhetorical listening, and semiotics of multimodal expression. These cases demonstrate how digital storytelling allows women a space to form and give voice to their silence, where they are the empowered agents of their own stories. The digital platform elevates these underrepresented narratives by creating new pathways for listening.

Regional Domesticities: Recalling, Rewriting, And Redefining Gender And Domesticity In The Greater Southwest, A. Laurie Lowrance

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native American and Mexican American women in the greater Southwest negotiated domestic expectations within their own cultures while navigating the demands of encroaching Anglo culture to produce something new: hybrid domesticities rooted in the region, which I call regional domesticities. Chapter 1 focuses on María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and connects her novels Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don to the rhetoric of the Overland Monthly. Chapter 2 explores bicultural collaborations between Native American and Anglo women and focuses on Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes and Helen Sekaqueptewa’s Me …

From Governess To Wife: How Women On The Fringe Of Society Upset And Restore Victorian Homes, Elsa C. Torgersen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In middle-class Victorian homes, wives were responsible for the care of the home, the raising of children, and the maintenance and upward mobility of her family’s social standing. She was the heart of the home and her purity and commitment to the home would not only affect her family, but also society. Yet the women who were qualified according to societal standards were a small group, carefully chosen to maintain the standards of society. In the novels Bleak House and Jane Eyre, the authors push back against strict societal expectations. They ask the audience to consider if women should …

“True Darkness And True Womanness” : A Study Of Sisterhood In Marlon James’ The Book Of Night Women, Jessica Schwartz

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper focuses on the obstacles to building sisterhood and community in Marlon James’ novel The Book of Night Women (2009). I examine the acts of violence that the enslaved women at Montpelier Estate perform against one another and consider the influence the plantation environment has on these relationships. The violence that takes place among the enslaved women is especially prevalent within the group of “night women,” which consists of Lilith, Homer, Pallas, Iphigenia, Hippolyta, Callisto, and Gorgon. Despite the biological and symbolic sisterhood between these women, they more frequently express feelings of enmity than ones of community. By highlighting …

"What Camelot Means": Women And Lgbtq+ Authors Paving The Way For A More Inclusive Arthuriana Through Young Adult Literature, Jeddie Mae Bristow

MSU Graduate Theses

Arthurian literature has long been regarded as the domain of “dead white men,” dominated by Thomas Malory and Lord Alfred Tennyson. However, since medieval times, women have also been producing Arthurian literature that not only treats the women characters of the story more equitably, but makes social commentary on how the marginalized of their societies are treated. More recently, women and LGBTQ+ authors (basically, authors who are not cisgender white men) have answered the call for more diverse Young Adult literature with an Arthuriana that has a place for all, both creating a more diverse and equitable Camelot and giving …

Big Community In Little Chinatown: How Asian Americans (Re)Present Their Community Today, Meghan Morrison

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper looks at a series of modern Asian American pieces of media in order to analyze how women and LGBT+ depict and create their community, especially in relation to another marginalized ethnic group. By examining the relationship between these groups within popular media, we can uncover how Asian Americans choose to represent themselves and gain a deeper understanding on how marginalized groups choose to portray themselves.

Transgressive Migrations: Gender Roles, Space, And Place In American Novels, 1900-1999, Selena Gail Larkin

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine how gender roles combine with changes in space and place to affect women protagonists in twentieth-century American literature. I argue that as these characters migrate, the (self-)perception of their identities shift. Particularly, their outward performances as well as their internal awareness change. My analysis concentrates on the novel genre because of specific characteristics—plot, characterization, and narration. The chosen literary works on which I focus are The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Quicksand (1928), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Dollmaker (1954), and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996).

Concepts that I …

How She Haunts: Missed Endings, The Fragmentary, And The Female Figure In British Romanticism, Jane Clare Bolin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I discuss a relatively small grouping of fragmentary texts by Coleridge (Sibylline Leaves, “The Three Graves,” “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan”), De Quincey (Suspiria de Profundis), and Keats (“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and Lamia). In critical discussions of the Romantic fragment, it is most often referred to as incomplete, lacking closure, and unintentionally so. The fragments I have chosen to include transcend such a reading of lack and embrace a perpetuation of possibility. My claim is not that these are exemplary British Romantic fragments but rather that they lend themselves to a …

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 …