English Language and Literature Commons^™

Promethean Romanticism: A Study Of The Shelleys' Prometheus Figures, Madison Storm

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

In David Greene's translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, the figure Prometheus declares, “You would find it hard to bear these trials of mine, / since for me death is not decreed at all. / Death would indeed be a riddance of my suffering, / but, as it is, there is no limit set / for pain, save when Zeus falls from his seat of power.” The term “Promethean” is typically ascribed to narratives that contain themes or characters that relate to Prometheus: the ancient Greek Titan that gave fire to humanity as was eternally punished as a consequence by Zeus. …

Identifying Youth Appeals In Alcohol Alternative Social Media Content Through Framing, Melina Oneal

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Proposed regulations for alcohol advertising prevent beverage companies from targeting people under the legal drinking age. However, similar regulations for alcohol alternative beverages are less explored, which could allow alcohol alternative products to create awareness for alcoholic beverages among youth. Alcohol alternatives beverages, including no-alcohol and low-alcohol products, are increasing in popularity and can function as compliments to alcoholic products to decrease the total alcohol volume consumed or as substitutes for alcoholic products. Framing theory can be operationalized through the Content Appealing to Youth Index, an index of content elements found in research literature to be appealing to youth, to …

Anxieties About The Future: Ecocriticism And Dystopian Landscapes In The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch And Selected Fiction By Philip K. Dick, Nickolas Michael Sykora

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In a literary analysis of selected fiction by Philip K Dick through an ecocritical framework, the focus of this study reveals the consequences of ecological destruction on futuristic societies reflecting the Anthropocene. Drawing correlations between various texts by the author, the separation of nature from humanity demonstrates how dystopian landscapes influence the identity of the characters in these settings and how dystopia serves as a prism which distorts or reflects what it means to be human. With this, ontology and artificial intelligence are analyzed as a notable facet of his literature which addresses the progress of innovation in society and …

Penelope: Our Cunning Hero, Rossana Leal

CMC Senior Theses

In the literary world, Homer’s Odyssey has served as a fundamental text in the Western canon. It was influential to great writers such as Virgil and Dante, along with being a significant influence in Ancient Greek religion. The subject of both mystery and celebration, Homer remains one of the most prominent authors in literary history. His work has received several interpretations over the years. This thesis takes a feminist and modern approach to the epic poem, focusing on Penelope as the protagonist of the epic and argues for her status as not just an equal partner for her husband, but …

Auden: Body/Mind, Basil Lloyd-Moffett

CMC Senior Theses

On one hand Auden appears the most cerebral of poets. It is said that when he arrived at school, aged eight, he professed himself excited to study the different psychological types, and the cryptic verse that was to emerge over a decade later bears the scars of his reading, psychological or otherwise, as clearly as the relentlessly analytical Dichtung und Wahrheit and other late works.Absorbing and repurposing philosophical, psychological, religious, and scientific works was an essential part of his artistic strategy, and led to credible accusations of plagiarism on a number of occasions.And just as his collaborators and friends mocked …

Reframing Mourning: Liberatory Grief In Post-Tragedy Chinese American Women’S Fiction, Sophia Li

Honors Projects

My project approaches discussions of Asian American melancholia and mourning with a specific focus on contemporary Chinese American women’s fiction. Scholars such as David Eng, Shinhee Han, and Anne Anlin Cheng have long spotlighted the prevalence of depression among Asian American populations, particularly those with immigrant backgrounds, and they variously adopt psychoanalytic approaches to understand Asian American mental health and intersectional identities. Looking beyond psychoanalytic models, my project focuses on the works of Yiyun Li, Jenny Zhang, and K-Ming Chang to explore diverse forms of post-tragedy positionality. I read the authors paratextually, not only to locate them within legacies of …

Law And Literature In Pennsylvania: A Changing Landscape, Juliette Gaggini

Honors Theses

This thesis examines themes of American national identity perpetuated in Pennsylvania surrounding private property through historical, literary and legal analysis. Ideals of private property and land ownership are broken into three transitions throughout Pennsylvania history: the American frontier and initial land claiming by settlers, mass-deforestation and the introduction of widespread agriculture, and finally industrialization and the introduction of mining and fracking. Each of these transitions highlights the physical changes to the region and how they were influenced by American ideals of private property, productivity, and profitability.

Throughout this thesis, I analyze both literary and legal texts to examine societal beliefs …

Vision, Love, And The Church: An Analysis Of Key Themes In William Blake's Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience, Anna Tolkien

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis engages in a close reading and interpretation of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The first chapter examines his visionary imagery, symbolism, and language in The Songs. The second chapter explores his nuanced views on love and sexuality – addressing both a pure, mutually pleasurable love as well as a darker, destructive form of love. Lastly, I discuss his critique of the Church as a repressive and corrupt institution. In each chapter I draw from both Blake’s poetry and visual art. Through this extensive study of Blake’s Songs, I present crucial insights on …

‘Poetry Is Not A Luxury’, Rage Should Not Be A Privilege: The Potential Power Of The ‘Racial Imaginary’, Georgia Mcgovern

CMC Senior Theses

Female rage exists outside of the constructed masculine ideal of anger. To examine female rage, one must analyze the intersections between gender and race. I examine white women's privilege and access to female rage in reality and the fictional world. I explore Black Feminist poetry as a form of storage for rage at gender-based prejudice, racial injustice, and their intersection. Using Myisha Cherry’s term “Lordean Rage”, I recognize this specialized manifestation of female rage as an artistic, intergenerational source of energy for change.

I examine Claudia Rankine’s term “racial imaginary” as an imaginative space in which white people draw lines …

#Booktok: Social Media’S Influence On Literature, Madison Hyatt

Honors Theses

Exploring the social media phenomenon, TikTok, and its influence on the community, #Booktok is the newest way readers stay up to date on new books, and what to read. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? And how has this new way of consuming books influenced reading and literature?

Departure From Magical Realism: Female Agency In Latin American Post-Boom Literature, Nicole Darian Llacza Morazzani

Honors Theses

his thesis explores depictions of female agency in post-colonial Latin American literature. I highlight three primary texts: Gabriel García Márquez's (1927-2014) 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude, a canonical magical realist novel; Isabel Allende's (1942-present) 1982 The House of Spirits, her debut novel and a multi-generational story similar to Márquez's, and Isabel Allende's 2022 Violeta, a historical novel offering an autodiegetic narrative of a woman's 100 years of life in an unnamed South American country, to analyze how female characters evolve in response to changing sociopolitical landscapes and literary movements in Latin America. My central focus is Allende's most recent …

The Othered Mothers: Monstrous Motherhood In Dracula, Dawn, And Nightbitch, Makay C. Walsh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the monstrous mothers in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn (1987), and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021). Stoker’s Dracula serves as the foundational, or “mother,” text in terms of the model monstrous mothers: Dracula and Lucy Westenra. Dawn and Nightbitch provide more contemporary examples of monstrous mothers, yet they are different enough to contrast each other: Lilith in Dawn must navigate motherhood living amongst an alien species, and Nightbitch is a stay-at-home mom who starts turning into a dog. This thesis also establishes 7 Markers of Monstrous Motherhood as a critical framework for classifying monstrous mothers. …

The Lighthouse Keepers Daughter: The Life And Work Of Celia Laighton Thaxter, Haley J. Parker

Honors Theses and Capstones

Living on the edge of the American empire, Celia Thaxter explored the dimensions of her life in ways that transcended, yet never fully abandoned traditional gender boundaries by cultivating her lifelong relationship with nature through creative expression. The lighthouse keeper's daughter constructed her identity based on the experiences that shaped her on the very edge of civilization. Coming of age on the Isles of Shoals, Celia reveled in flexibility and unrestricted freedom of her natural environment isolated from the cultural spheres on the mainland that reinforced the ideology of domestic femininity. This ideology was dominant in the 19th century in …

Stomach And Womb: Early Modern Recipes For The Perinatal Woman, Grace E. Beacham

English Theses

Stomach and Womb examines the recipes from early modern obstetrical treatises and midwifery manuals, revealing an ontology of parturiency that winds through the concurrent Shakespearean plays, Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale. Gynecological and obstetrical texts from the era detail how pregnant women were to order themselves after conception with utmost concern for their diet, governing the outputs of their bodies by managing the inputs, the foods they ingested before, during, and after pregnancy and childbirth. Further, the associated images of the stomach and the womb during this time present an essential link between foodways and a construct of …

Teaching Community College Composition Students How To Use Ai Technology Ethically Through The Research Process, Amber H. Mabus

Doctor of Arts in English Pedagogy Capstones

Composition and rhetoric instructors' concern about the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on education has dramatically amplified since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, leading some to fear the end of our discipline as we know it. The controversy surrounding GenAI has led some educators to call for a complete ban on AI programs in the classroom, while others blindly accept what the technology has to offer without considering the risks involved, with a final group resting somewhere in the middle. Inspired by this debate, this study seeks to answer the research question: "Could teaching students how to …

Atlas: Targeting Student Writing Deficiencies Through Assessment & Mentoring In The College Classroom, Leanna Brunner

Doctor of Arts in English Pedagogy Capstones

The landscape of the college classroom is changing at warp speed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and developing technologies such as artificial intelligence. As such, it is time for those in leadership at the administrative level to redefine what it means for students to be successful in their college classrooms. Placing students with different educational experiences and skillsets into one class is no longer working, and many students who could be successful with a little bit of understanding and assistance are slipping through the proverbial cracks of failure. Some of these students never step foot in college again. …

Ethics In Literature: A Case Study Of Hades And Persephone, Mckenzie A. Howard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The increased ethical scrutiny on art in the modern era places an emphasis on how those art forms are being taught in the classroom. This thesis seeks to answer the question: how do we teach ethics, if we should at all, when we teach literature to a modern audience? This thesis explores this question by looking at how modern adaptations of an ancient text, the “Hymn to Demeter,” change the ethical issues in the original text, to show the relevance of these issues in the source text and the modern adaptations. Through an argument that the ethical concerns are often …

The Monster Mash: A Monster Studies Approach To Literature In The University Classroom, Megan L. Bowen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Monster Mash is a course proposal for an upper-division undergraduate literature course focused on exploring monsters in literature and building connections between classic and more contemporary texts using high-impact practices (HIPs) with student success in mind. I build on previous work in the field of Monster Studies and introduce my own original monster pattern that prompts students to interpret monsters as they trek through Origin, Separation, Power, Threat, and Diminishment. This pattern highlights commonalities when it comes to the representation of monsters and their stories, allowing students to identify them across texts. I also divide monsters into three categories …

There And Back Again: Nick Adams' Masculine Journey From 'Indian Camp' To 'Fathers And Sons.', Michael F. Basista

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the following paper, I discuss how Ernest Hemingway’s hyper-masculine persona influences how his male characters are interpreted by some readers. More specifically, I take the character of Nick Adams and look at him as being a representation of one of Hemingway’s male characters that diverges from the hyper-masculine persona that Hemingway had created for himself. To do so, I focus on eight of Hemingway’s short stories, with those being “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “Ten Indians,” “The End of Something,” “The Three-Day Blow,” “The Battler,” “Cross-Country Snow,” and “Fathers and Sons.” The development of Nick Adams …

My Deepest, Most Tender Wound: Stories, Katie K. Strubel

WWU Graduate School Collection

This short story collection investigates dynamics of violence, grief, and rage when perpetrated by and against female characters. Each story finds comfort in the complexities of trauma, so much so that emotions such as anger and sadness are often synonymous with moments of all-consuming intimacy. In my writing process, I discovered the strength of compassion, towards my characters and myself, and found that my process of creating strong female characters and discovering the power of feminine rage in contemporary literature comes from a place inside me that is driven explicitly by own instances of love and loss. Where there is …

Foreign Expert: A Memoir Manuscript, Jenny L. Rowe

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This is a full memoir manuscript that I wrote for my MFA thesis, which is tentatively titled Foreign Expert. In this manuscript, we follow myself as narrator as I struggle to adapt to life in Beijing (prior to the pandemic) while also recovering from a recent divorce. The man I’d been married to for five years back in Iowa had become violently mentally ill, and though I’d been fortunate enough to remove myself from him, I quickly learned that being a foreign expert in China—my residential visa title—required more work than basic survival. By the end of my two years …

Decolonization Of The Writing Classroom: Creating Space For Decolonial Theory, Tools, Anti-Racist Pedagogy, And Methods To Improve The Emerging Bilingual Student Experience, Desiree L. Brown

Masters Theses

In this thesis, the author addresses the colonial roots of the secondary writing classroom and the origin of standard academic English which enables strict standardized testing and writing assessment requirements that in-turn incite linguistic violence towards emerging bilingual students. The author frames her study within the framework of April Baker-Bell and Asao B. Inoue through a reflective/reflexive study of her teaching in a ninth grade writing classroom in a primarily Hispanic school district in South Texas, which is assessed by the state of Texas through STAAR. This study seeks to identify instances of linguistic violence being perpetuated in the writing …

The Impact Of Emma: Destroying Stereotypes Through Nuanced Characters In Text And Film, Julia Mccool

English MA Theses

This paper explores Jane Austen’s Emma as a response to stereotypes in 18th century novels and moral tales, and Autumn De Wildes’s Emma. from a feminist lens. Examining both of these works reveals that Emma was originally, and still is over 200 years later, transforming stereotypes in literature and film adaptations. The novel seems to be responding to a common stereotypical female villain found in many 18th century novels. In viewing Emma as a subversion of this stereotype, it is clear that Austen was responding to the sexist notions behind the character type, and writing a heroine more in line …

"A Special Cause Of Corrupting Their Youth": The Long History Of Censorship, Hysteria, And The Representation Of Queer Desire In Literature, Kenia Torres

Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will focus on queer representation in literature, going all the way back to the works of Milton and Shakespeare and include an exploration of contemporary text Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. I will trace queer representation back to these authors from the canon to show that queer representation in literature and societies’ hysterical reaction to it are neither new nor emergent. Chapter 1 addresses the trending outrage towards books that include LGBTQ+ representation, framing it as a “new” and “emergent” occurrence. Chapter 2 refutes the claims that LGBTQ+ representation is either of those things by introducing Milton’s angels— …

Honeysuckles & Irises: Effigies Of The Land, Ami` L. Hanna-Huff

English Creative Writing Theses

Here is a memoir of my paternal line through the lens of my Great-Grandmother and myself. A reclamation of the land I hail from and a connection to a history previously felt distant, this examination of race and gender explicitly focused on the African American Southern female experience; I try to make sense of the juxtaposing positions in our lives. The culture built from its creation through Tennessee personified. Here, I integrate history and theory with lyrics and prose to experience the eighty-one years of progress brought between our births and the lingering anxiety of slavery. My great-grandmother, Hazel Irene …

Probing And Enhancing The Reliance Of Transformer Models On Poetic Information, Almas Abdibayev

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Transformer models have achieved remarkable success in the widest variety of domains, spanning not just a multitude of tasks within natural language processing, but also those in computer vision, speech, and reinforcement learning. The key to this success is largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, particularly its ability to scale in performance as it grows in the number of parameters. Extensive effort has been underway to study the major linguistic properties learned by these models during the course of their pretraining. However, the role of certain finer linguistic phenomena present in language and their utilization by Transformers has not been …

Chilean Canadian Literature In English: Memories Of Home And Belonging, From The Postcolonial To Decolonial Practice, Luis Jaimes-Domínguez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation aims to present a compelling exploration of identity and cultural hybridity, and of the intricate tapestry of diasporic experiences. As such, it delves into the significance of Chilean Canadian literature written directly in English, with a specific focus on the works authored by female writers as part and parcel of an emerging diasporic literature. Employing a postcolonial and hemispheric lens, this research employs a multidimensional methodology embedded in cultural memory, border studies, and representational intersectionality. Within this framework, this study attempts to unravel how Chilean Canadian literature written in English might contribute to a repository of Chilean Canadian …

Inoculant To Influence: Cultivating Critical Citizenship By Foregrounding Ontology Through Kenneth Burke And Walter Fisher’S Rhetorical Frameworks, Mark Griffin

English Department Theses

Scholars interested in exploring the potency of the writing modality of critical pedagogy for molding students into proactive citizens will find the integration of Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism and Walter Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm instrumental, offering tools essential for cultivating a rhetorical awareness adept at navigating narratives in the 21st century. Synthesizing Burke’s rhetorical dialectic between the nature of reality and our understanding of it with Fisher’s concept that the human condition is a narrative condition yields insights into the critical writing process. This integration fosters a rhetorical awareness, serving as an inoculant to influence, countering the prevailing persuasive elements within today’s …

Conceptualizing First-Year Writing Agency: The Transfer-Rhetorical Genre-Voice Triad As An Enactment Of Rhetorical Agency, Amanda Kerr

English Department Theses

In First-Year Composition, Teaching for Transfer is an evidence-based pedagogy that teaches students to write across contexts, a goal specified in the WPA Outcomes Statements for First-Year Composition (3.0). However, the implicit relationships shared between Teaching for Transfer, expressivism, and Rhetorical Genre Studies pedagogies are an underexplored area in the teaching of first-year composition. Given the presence of an implicit relationship between transfer, proficiency in rhetorical genres, and student voice in the WPA Outcomes, this thesis defines a dynamic interrelationship between pedagogies of transfer, expressivism, and Rhetorical Genre Studies. In an effort to foreground a comprehensive first-year composition pedagogy that …

The Last Puritans: Confessional Poetics In The New England Gothic, Emma Stratman

English Honors Theses

This paper proposes that the confessional mode has a place within the evolving genre of the New England Gothic, an assertion that within the scope of this project focuses primarily on the work of Anne Sexton as an example of the convergence of the New England confessional poets and the New England Gothic. Moving from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to Anne Sexton’s poem “The Double Image,” this paper evaluates the status of hereditary guilt, secrets, social critique, and madness within the framework of the New England Gothic and in doing so, situates the confessional mode within that framework. It combines …