English Language and Literature Commons^™

Coming-Of-Age And Parallel Worlds In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Reham Rabie

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Chameleon Boy: An Autobiographical Literary Critique Of Biracial Subjects In A Racialized Society, David Robinson

All NMU Master's Theses

In American society, race is a determining factor when realizing a salient identity. Social engagements, relationships, and the perception has of one’s self are all effected and choreographed by race. Deeply ingrained within our social structure race aims to categorize humanity into easily identifiable, yet reductive, categories. However, an issue arises when the addition of the mixed-race subject throws the sorting machine into a frenzy. Unable to categorize the racially ambiguous, American society chooses to conflate their physicality to another ethnic group or race or write them off as Other. The late Gloria Anzaldua’s investigation into the limitless possibilities present …

Unmade And Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity In Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction Through The Lens Of The Indian “Mutiny” Of 1857, Madison A. Bettle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Unmade and Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction through the Lens of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 examines the selected adventure fiction of George Alfred Henty, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad through the historico-political context of India’s First War of Independence, known in Victorian Britain as the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857. Examining masculine trauma in adventure fiction reveals how British men, who were themselves colonized by the Empire’s expectations of them, sought not only to recover from the scars inflicted by imperialism, but also to expose the Empire for inflicting the psychologically damaging expectations that …

Phantasms Of Hope: The Utopian Function Of Fantasy Literature, Alexander C. Morgan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Fantasy literature has long been considered an inherently conservative genre. However, Ernst Bloch’s Marxist theory of a utopian anticipatory consciousness and his concept of nonsynchronism recognize a progressive, utopian function within the archetypes and allegories of fairy tales, a precursor to modern fantasy. Bloch argues that archetypes are not static entities and can be repurposed to critique the world contemporary to a text’s production. Even archetypes produced under a past mode of production, like those used in fantasy, can therefore be anticipatory and utopian. By extending Bloch’s utopian function to include fantasy and integrating his philosophy with the historical-materialist hermeneutic …

Assyrian Aesthetics: Recovering The Modern Assyrian Art Of William Daniel (1903-88) And Andre Gvalevich (1911-85), Ryan Nazari

Canterbury Scholars

In response to the lack of scholarly attention to modern Assyrian culture (i.e., mid-20th century to present), this paper creates a conversation between two Assyrian pieces of art––William Daniel’s poem “The Problem” and Andre Gvalevich’s oil painting portrait of William Daniel. In my argument, I show how “The Problem” and the portrait advance themes of loneliness/intimacy based on the aesthetic relationship between the artists and their respective audiences. I first define Peter Balakian’s account of aesthetics in his article “Poetry as Civilization” for my theoretical context. Secondly, I summarize and critique the methodologies of current scholarship that exist on my …

The Merits Of Young Adult Literature: Examining The Mental States Of The Protagonists In The Catcher In The Rye, The Outsiders, The Book Thief, And The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Timothy P. Kelly Jr.

HON499 projects

Young adult literature, a genre of literature made to appeal to adolescents, has been a success within its target demographic for decades. Because of its intended audience and resulting subject matter, there are many who are either dismissive or ignorant of the genre, seeing it as inherently below other genres in terms of complexity or simply never bothering to give it the time of day. However, this paper argues that it is this effort to relate to this intended audience and their lives, most notably from a mental perspective, that grants the genre depth that is equal to more traditional …

Teaching Multicultural Literature In The College Classroom, Jordan K. Fleming

Selected Honors Theses

Due to a lack of research on the topic and events of 2020, this thesis aims to learn how professors teach multicultural literature to traditional undergraduate students and how students respond to these courses. I focus on pedagogical scholarship that notes the structure, challenges, and impact of teaching this genre in K-12 and higher education classrooms. My conclusions provide educators with a repertoire of teaching strategies, materials, and student feedback to help students critically respond to living in a multicultural nation and world. These conclusions also lessen a gap in research, as there is significantly less published information on teaching …

“Have You Come Out?”: Refutation Of Segdwick’S Theorization Of The Closet In Another Country And Lot: Stories, Mary Ross

Honors Projects

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick outlined in her book entitled Epistemology of the Closet a paradigm of expressing queer sexuality when it is known and when it is not know. In response to Sedgwick closet paradigm, Marlon Ross wrote his essay entitled “Beyond the Closet as a Raceless Paradigm” in which he demonstrated that Sedgwick’s paradigm is not applicable to marginalized class and racial groups. He also made a call to action to change the necessity of the closet paradigm when discussing queer sexuality. In this paper, I put James Baldwin’s Another Country and Bryan Washington’s Lot: Stories in conversation with Sedgwick …

Babylon Is Fallen, Is Fallen: Southern Morality In Go Set A Watchman, Anna G. Dowling

Senior Theses

A crucial theme throughout Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee is the struggle between individual morality and collective consciousness, as exemplified by black and white relations in the American South. In this thesis, I explore the biblical concept of a “watchman” as referenced in the novel’s title and what conclusions can be drawn from delving into the literary and biblical contexts of this allusion. I utilize this as a framework to explore how and why the characters of Watchman exist in such fragmented, defensive states as opposed to their Mockingbird counterparts, and what these differences imply regarding the importance …

Resonances: An Examination Of Republication Through Four Case Studies, F S. Nakhaie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Republication, with or without textual changes, keeps a work in circulation. This protects the work from destruction but also affects how we receive it, because publication is always a socializing act. Despite its consequences for works and their reception, republication has not yet been theorized in textual studies. My dissertation addresses this research gap by employing the term resonance to discuss the relationships—between versions, contexts, and ideas—that develop out of republication. I explore republication at its extremes with four case studies of works that underwent major changes in republication. The first chapter examines Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray …

"I Can Sing And Tell A Tale:" Perception And The Self-Reflexive Nature Of The Old English Poet, Danielle Williams

English Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

More than one contemporary scholar has written about the “search” for the Anglo-Saxon oral poet. They consider historical texts and poetry and every other possible place where some record of who the Anglo-Saxon scop may have been might be found. Some claim to recognize the Old English poet by the end of their search while others declare the entire pursuit to be futile for lack of substantial evidence. This study is somewhat of a combination of the two. Each chapter does take part in the search for the Old English poet figure, but it is not for the sake of …

A Difference In Rhythm: John Burroughs As Rhythmanalyst, Jennifer Macdonald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nature writer John Burroughs wrote about the rhythms of life in nature, people, and places, sharing his experiences of his surroundings for readers to learn from, get inspired by, or escape through. In this literature review, using Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, in which rhythm is the “interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy” (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 15), I explore some of Burroughs’ writing, asserting that Burroughs himself was a rhythmanalyst. Burroughs is typically read as a literary naturalist who hoped to relay any scene as it truly was (to perfect the “art of seeing things” or …

Between The Visual And The Verbal: An Aesthetic Of Open Wounds In Post-Traumatic Experience Of The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Maryam Ghodrati

Doctoral Dissertations

Trauma theory of the 1990s pioneered by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman has been criticized by postcolonial scholars such as Irene Visser, Michael Balaev, and Stef Craps for being neglectful of the trauma of the colonial world in adopting a deconstructivist approach and psychologization of experiences of trauma. This antagonism between the traditional and postcolonial trauma theory has resulted in even deeper isolation of the human subject at the center of this argument. In my research, I highlight the reality and materiality of traumatic suffering in the shared realm of the human body to suggest a need for …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

“Woman’S Legitimate Empire”: Fabricating Asianness In Gaskell’S North And South And Mary Elizabeth Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Hailey Lam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that the fabrication of Asianness in Victorian literature is indebted to the subtle, yet frequent gestures, habits, and interactions that occur in the literary works of Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. By specifically focusing on Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), I explore a methodological approach for literary studies that is capacious enough to reckon with the material histories and materiality of race that pervade the cultural imagination of an eighteenth and nineteenth century England. Queer of color criticism by scholars like Sara Ahmed and meditations on aesthetics, race, and culture …

Unthinkable Conditions: Affect And Environment In Romanticism And Speculative Fiction, Amelia Z. Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unthinkable Conditions bridges two literary periods and two theoretical modes in order to illustrate important parallels between historical periods and the writers who attempted to approach the changing environmental conditions of their respective eras. Each chapter names and theorizes a unique form of feeling which then serves as a framework for eco-affective analysis, drawing from existing studies in the environmental humanities and in studies of affect in order to construct a hybrid theoretical model which more fully accounts for the work of the writer treated in each chapter. The central claim of this dissertation is that vital affective innovations accompany …

Here Time Becomes Space: The Victorian Spatial Imaginary, Jonathan E. Rachmani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, “Here Time Becomes Space: The Spatiality of the Victorian Novel,” addresses the Victorian realist representation of space as the open zone of interaction where the circulation of affect among embodied subjects and the places and things in their environment challenges the individualist axis of Victorian plots. I envision this spatiality as a composite literary practice emerging from contact with eighteenth-century realism, the Gothic novel, and the radical revision of the social imagination under the Romantics. Through an analysis of major works by Charlotte Brontё, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, I trace the dialectical development of realist …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

Negotiating Space: Spatial Violation On The Early Modern Stage, 1587-1638, Gregory W. Sargent

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent criticism proves the malleability of theatrical space as a lens through which the discussion of Renaissance drama proliferates. Negotiating Space works towards the articulation of the importance of space in the representational mimesis of performance by examining moments of violence, violation, misuse, and misappropriation. I draw a connection between the lived, material sites of the plays’ action and the ideological import of representing those spaces dramatically using a focus on violation. Though much good scholarship exists detailing London-centric approaches to dramatic space, this study discursively reifies identifiable staged spaces to connect with the lives of theatrical patrons no matter …

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages with literary trauma theory and rape studies by investigating how scholars through the 1990s theorized the relationship among trauma, narration, and silence, and how the #MeToo movement causes us to rethink these views. Attending to the specific silence generated in the wake of sexual violation reveals how power structures influence the act of telling, challenging the idea that trauma is untellable. I argue that literary trauma theory needs to push beyond its foundation in biomedical models of trauma—in which the (in)ability to recall or articulate traumatic events is rooted in neurology—to examine the ways traumatic narratives are …

Crossing The Threshold: An Analysis Of The Hero's Journey, Megan C. Hulings

Theses - ALL

The Hero's Journey is well-known amongst storytellers the world over as a useful structure to create compelling characters and engaging plots, though many see its use as derivative and uninspired. After its explosion in popularity in the 1970s, audiences have come to expect stories to hit every step of the Hero's Journey beat-for-beat.

This thesis will explore the history of the Hero's Journey, from its conception to its modern interpretation. It will examine the individual parts that can elevate this simple structure into a complex narrative. By navigating the works of both Christopher Vogler and John Yorke, this thesis will …

Embodying Resilience In The Writing Center: A Study Of Tutor Training Handbooks And Videos Towards An Understanding Of The "Ideal" Tutoring Session, Katelyn Emily Parsons

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines two distinct datasets (handbooks and videos) to explore whether writing tutors embody their training. This research project was grounded in Bruffee’s (1984; 1995) work with collaboration and its link to conversation (both verbal and nonverbal communicative acts) to analyze the peer-to-peer relationships that are observable in writing center tutorials. Research on collaboration and conversation provided a useful framework for qualitatively coding six (6) tutor training handbooks and sixteen (16) tutor training videos. In taking up Thompson’s (2009) and Olinger’s (2014; 2020) calls for further research on writers’ embodied understandings of language, the video component of this research …

Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory And British Literary Modernism, Samuel Smith

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory and British Literary Modernism, I argue that a range of British writers of literary modernism responded to a moment of institutional and economic instability by engaging with heterodox economic theories in their literary works. Paying close attention to the institutional history of the academic disciplines of Literary Studies and Economics and to the state of heterodox economic theorization in the first half of the twentieth century, I assemble a group of writers I term “Modernist Amateur Economists,” who rejected the tendency of professional economists to abstract economic questions from broader cultural contexts. In …

Another Time, Another Place: The Truth Of Silence In J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Sara T. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

Through Lucy’s rejection of the criminal justice system, Coetzee's Disgrace operates as an allegory for the failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to provide individual justice and reparations to victims of Apartheid.

Procedural Rhetoric And Language: How The Orwell Videogames Series Emphasizes The Importance Of Context In Content, Jessica Kimber

English Theses

Procedural Rhetoric and Language: How the Orwell Videogames Series Emphasizes the Importance of Context in Content

Excremental Ecofeminism: Unearthing Waste’S Feminine And Narrative Agency In Early Modern Literature, Courtney Druzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to understand the role of forms of waste in early modern literary texts. It both offers up a theory—known as early modern excremental ecofeminism—for reading period specific texts in relation to waste and articulates how we may do so through close analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the elegies of Mary Sidney Herbert, the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Mary Wroth, John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, and finally, William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. It chooses a variety of genres across texts from the 1580s to the 1660s both to interrogate …

A Social Media Misinformation Label And The Postrhetorical Presidency, Ethan Mcginty

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In May 2020, presidential communication on social media was—for the first time—subject to a misinformation label applied by the social media site on which the communication originated. This development indicates a turning point in social media sites’ relationship with presidential communication and demands adaptation in the scholarly understanding of presidential rhetoric during the present era. Drawing from the theoretical framework of the postrhetorical presidency, I perform dual rhetorical analyses of this landmark artifact. The first round of analysis ignores the label and analyzes the presidential communication alone to understand its function, while the second analysis reveals the rhetorical impact of …

Implementing Process Pedagogy In The High School Classroom: How To Improve Student Writing While Helping Students Enjoy Writing, Laura Mahaney

English Theses

Traditionally and currently, teachers also focus on the product and not the process in their own classroom. They will assign a paper with a final due date, students turn in their papers without having anyone else look at it beforehand, and students will get a final grade on what is their first draft. This way of teaching writing does not show students how to improve their writing. With this type of assessment, the natural processes of a person’s mind while writing is ignored; students are expected to have everything in their paper in the first draft and without support. Process …

Fear Then And Now: The Vampire As A Reflection Of Society, Mackenzie Phelps

English (MA) Theses

Over the expanse of centuries, human society has created monsters in order to give a physical form to their abstract fears. Society has gone from speaking of them in oral traditions to watching them on a screen in more recent decades, but the written works of these monstrosities have occurred in the multitudes across multiple eras. The globalized monster I have chosen to focus on here is the vampire. Said vampires are witnessed as changing over time to adjust to the awakening or loss of certain human fears, distresses, and perceived threats—whether that be war, religion, race, etc. While …