English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Focused Study Of The Social Outcast In Literature: A Healing For America's Youth, Darcey A. Voyles

Masters Theses

Adolescence can be a difficult time in life, and today's teenagers face even more difficult situations in the high school atmosphere. A frequent element in the high school social scene is alienation of the "uncool" kids. This social isolation can have devastating effects on the outcasts and school community as a whole. Within this thesis, I reveal my plan for alleviating the emotional trauma of social isolation by bringing the discussion of social outcasts into the literature classroom. Literature reflects society, thereby giving young readers a lens through which to view the alienation in our global world that they may …

The Fool, Jonathan M. Cook

Masters Theses

The Fool is a detective story written in the vein of the crime fiction of the thirties, forties, and fifties. It is a work that simultaneously pays homage to its influences while giving a postmodern update to the genre conventions in an attempt to bring validity to an all-too-often disregarded form of fiction. The story has been written in a minimalist style so that the reader might engage the story on a much more primal level than traditional genre fiction.

This thesis includes the first two chapters of The Fool, along with an outline for the final chapter. A critical …

The Sadness Of Great Fame: The Conflict Between Individuality And Expectation In The Works Of Don Delillo And Jim Morrison, Sue Ellen Norton Francis

Masters Theses

In their work and in their lives, Don DeLillo and Jim Morrison have been fascinated by the dialectic between famous figures and those whose adoration makes them famous. Each writer has written extensively about (and lived with) the conflict between a famous figure's individuality and the expectations of his fans. DeLillo depicts tensions between famous figures and admiring crowds in several ofhis novels, especially in his most thorough analyses ofthe subject, Great Jones Street, a portrait of a suddenly reclusive rock star, and Mao II, where he depicts a legendarily reclusive novelist. Morrison also has a personal connection with the …

Politics And Gendered Spirituality In The Short Stories Of Sridaoru'ang, Rachel Ann Vaughn

Masters Theses

This project pinpoints specific rudimentary concepts of the Thai Theravadan Buddhist philosophy, as they surface in the short stories of SriDaoRu’ang. Through these short stories, many of the ritualistic practices of this particular Buddhist philosophy are exemplified, presenting a dire need for the reformation of the rituals which tend to genderize and politicize the spiritual realm. This suggestion for the reformation of such practices and beliefs attempts to persuade the Theravadan world against polarized gender-specific practices that merely accentuate the differences between members of the Buddhist world, and act as a socio-political barrier for women and the poor. However, the …

The Tunnel At The End Of The Light: Victimization In The Films Of Roman Polanski, Christopher Weedman

Masters Theses

Polish-expatriate film director Roman Polanski's career has been largely overshadowed by the bizarre and tragic events of his personal life. After a horrific childhood that saw him watch helplessly as his Jewish parents were taken away by the Nazis to the concentration camps, Polanski again experienced familial tragedy when his eight-month pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four houseguests were brutally murdered in 1969 by members of the Charles Manson cult. In the aftermath of the Manson murders, the director was further victimized by the American popular press, which, according to biographer Barbara Leaming, unfairly suggested that he unwittingly "brought the …

Feminist Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction As Political Protest In The Tradition Of Women Proletarian Writers Of The 1930s, Laura Ellen Ng

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary feminist hard-boiled detective fiction has been studied as an adaptation of the traditional masculine hard-boiled detective genre. Writers such as Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Muller create compelling feminist protagonists to fill the role of detective. The successes and failures of these feminist detectives have then been measured against the standards created in the classic genre by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain. The classic hard-boiled masculine genre came of age in the 1930s and 1940s at the same time as proletarian literature. The two genres share many characteristics including reliance upon first person narrative, the …

The Hobbledehoy's Choice: Anthony Trollope's Awkward Young Men And Their Road To Gentlemanliness, Mark King

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study reads the rise, reign, and fall of the English gentleman through the lens of the hobbledehoy novels of Anthony Trollope. It explores Trollope’s use of the hobbledehoy (a term, now almost archaic, for an awkward young man) in eight novels appearing between 1857 and 1879: The Three Clerks (1857), The Small House at Allington (1864), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), Phineas Finn (1869), Phineas Redux (1874), John Caldigate (1879), The Way We Live Now (1875), and The Prime Minister (1876). Since the hobbledehoy figure serves as a cultural reference point or touchstone, then by examining the permutations …

"We Are No Preacher" [Electronic Resource] : Margaret Oliphant's Textual Authority, Shannon Landry Brown

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine four of Margaret Oliphant's novels, her supernatural fiction, and her literary reviews, revealing how she relies on her knowledge of the cultural sign system, domesticity, and women's value to show how women may successfully navigate middle-class Victorian society. She accomplishes this by identifying the places where women's strengths lie: the boundaries between work and family, between the spiritual and material, amid the everyday details that she herself realizes reveal the workings of society. She sets herself up as a voice of authority within the system itself, not as a distant, all-knowing sage but as someone …

"To The Latest Generation": Cold War And Post Cold War U.S. Civil War Novels In Their Social Contexts, Jeffrey Neal Smithpeters

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that readings of the Civil War novels published in America since 1955 should be informed by a consciousness of the social forces at work in each author’s time. Part One consists of a study of the popular Civil War novel, 1955’s Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor; part two, 1974’s The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Chapters One through Three explain that Kantor was especially fitted for the ideological work going on in Andersonville, then outlines the way that novel tried to contribute to the transition between World War II and the Cold War. The book attempted to aid …

Observing, Navigating, Exploring: The Fourfold Path Of Nourishing Wrath And Others, Greg Holden

Masters Theses

A good poet to illustrate the distinction between modernism and postmodernism would be George Oppen (1908-1986). I believe Oppen's "objectivism" - coupled with a judicious use of deliberate ambiguity - nicely gets us past the postmodern insistence on the illusions of selfhood, reason, and order by insisting on the centrality of the perceiver/thinker amid the objective chaos of perceptions/ideas, while at the same time recognizing the multi-vocal construction of the perceiver/thinker. I believe the self may project its illusions onto reality, but not all reality (including the "self') is always thereby a false image. I have tried to fulfill Oppen's …

Passing As Modernism, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Passing has once again become a hot topic in contemporary popular culture and a major trope for our critical and professional activity. One thinks of Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998); Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) and the 2003 film version directed by Robert Benton; and in literary and cultural criticism, Gayle Wald's Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2000), Kathleen Pfeiffer's Race Passing and American Individualism (2003), and Brooke Kroeger's Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are (2003), to name only a few examples. In Passing and Pedagogy I explore this concept largely in …

Jane Kenyon, Jayme Stayer

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The pastoral emphasis and New England setting of Jane Kenyon's poetry has invited comparisons to Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. The uncluttered spareness of her work and her interrelated themes of faith, guilt, empathy, and pessimism also place her among that collection of people known as New England poets. Kenyon's own love of John Keats-and his haunted experiences of pain and beauty-also informs her work.

When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead: The Poetry Of Bob Kaufman, Mona Lisa Saloy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation begins with the premise that critical attention to the work of Bob Kaufman is long overdue, and that Bob Kaufman is a significant American poet in the African American and Beat traditions. The purpose of this dissertation begins to rectify this need with a study of Bob Kaufman’s verse. My exploration of Kaufman necessitates some pointed attention to the cultural, social, and psychological influences that gave rise to his work, specifically his upbringing in the south, his travels, and the misrepresented times of his life in current biographical entries and some present scholarship. I will also address the …

Leona Queyrouze (1861-1938): Louisiana French Creole Poet, Essayist, And Composer, Donna M. Meletio

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This new historicist study chronicles the life and work of a Louisiana French Creole, Leona Queyrouze (1861-1938) who grew up in the turbulent era following the Civil War. Her articles and poetry, mostly written in French, were published in the local periodicals, L’Abeille, Comptes-Rendus, the Picayune and the Crusader under the pseudonyms, Constant Beauvais, Salamandra, and Adamas. She also translated plays from French into English in New York under at the request of Harpers Bazar and wrote two symphonies that were performed at the World Exposition in New Orleans in 1884. Through an ever-widening critical lens, I focus upon her …

Conspiracy Culture In America After World War Ii, Valerie Rose Holliday

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Feminism has all too often been reified as a theoretical category. Specifically, Marxist critical categories fail to account for the integral importance of gender in any sociopolitical critique. This dissertation attempts to dereify gender and demonstrate a theoretical model that seamlessly integrates psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism. Conspiracy culture in America since World War II is an ideal aperture through which we may envision such a theoretical approach, and indeed see the critical need for such an approach. This dissertation looks at several post-war American conspiracy narratives, including Oliver Stone’s JFK and Nixon, Don DeLillo’s Libra, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, John …

Unshap'd Monsters: Political Farce On The London Stage, 1717-1737, Melissa Ann Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reexamines the role of John Gay's and Henry Fielding's anti-government satirical farces during the politically contentious 1720s and 1730s in London. Although their plays were and still are considered, variously, burlesques, entertainments, farces, and satires, I call them satirical farce for two reasons. First, contemporaries used the term farce as much to signify political and social stances as dramatic type or function. Those political and social stances are the central focus of this dissertation. Second, I see in this collection of plays—Gay's Three Hours After Marriage (1717) and The Beggar's Opera (1728), Fielding's The Author's Farce (1730), The …

“Neither In Nor Out Of Blackwood's": The Marketing Of Edgar Allan Poe’S Prose Address, Jonathan Hartmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to help explain Poe's circulation of his journalism by performing close readings of both canonical works including "William Wilson" (1839) and "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) and lesser-known articles such as "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." (1844) and "Loss of Breath" (1832/5). Chapter One describes Poe's involvement in the transatlantic literary marketplace prior to the enforcement of literary copyright. Chapters Two and Three treat his development of a literary brand in works including "Letter to B" (1831/6) and "A Reviewer Reviewed" by playing off his critical assertions against his practice as a critic. Chapters Four …

Strategic Writing: Moving Beyond The Classroom Assignment, Deborah Dean

Faculty Publications

By focusing on specific strategies that they could apply to different stages of the writing process, Deborah Dean helped students acquire control over their writing in varying contexts.

I would never think of teaching a reading strategy that worked for only one text. And students do not consider predicting or summarizing to be strategies unique to a specific text, either. Why, then, do students so often look at writing strategies as practices useful for only one assignment? Why do they complete freewrites or webs after they have finished the paper? Or "mess up" a copy of a paper just to …

Parting Of The Ways: The End Of The Spirit Of Empire In Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, Blake Strong

Masters Theses

Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet consists of four novels dealing with the waning of British imperial control of India: The Jewel in the Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1972), and A Division of the Spoils (1976). This thesis analyzes the Quartet as historical fiction, defined according to the criteria laid out by Georg Lukacs in The Historical Novel (1937). The characters that populate Scott's Quartet live in an age of historical transition: they are shaped by reverberations from World War II as well as the more immediate struggle for Indian independence. As drawn …

Re-Assessing State Writing Assessment, Tracy Wright

Masters Theses

Because standardized testing is the means by which most student skills are assessed, it is important to ensure that such tests are accurately portraying student abilities. In the case of standardized writing tests it has become apparent that such tests are both unreliable and invalid and the tests, are, therefore, not doing what they are intended to do. Standardized writing tests do not create typical representations of student writing and in most cases only lead to the creation of formulaic writing-the five-paragraph essay. To achieve a more reliable and accurate measure of students' abilities to write states should look to …

Reginald Shepherd's The Iowa Anthology Of New American Poetries, Michael Theune

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hogging The Limelight: The Queen's Wake And The Rise Of Celebrity Authorship, Jason N. Goldsmith

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the following essay, Goldsmith argues that The Queen's Wake is commentary on the literary name branding inaugurated by the periodical culture of Hogg's day. For Goldsmith, the "crisis of reception" staged in the poem--sixteenth-century provincial bards in a first encounter with royal spectacle--is not unlike the uneasy celebrity Hogg experienced as the Ettrick Shepherd of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

Fighting The Good Fight: The Real And The Moral In The Contemporary Hollywood Combat Film, Philippa Gates

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Seasonal Allergies: An Intertextual Explanation, Nathaniel Abel Nieman

Honors Program Theses

A collection of short stories.

Back Cover

Short Story

No abstract provided.

If Seeing Could Satisfy, Ewing Campbell

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Short Story, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 2005 [Download Entire Issue]

Short Story

No abstract provided.

The Afterlife Of Limbs, Holly Wilson

Short Story

No abstract provided.

A Thematic Approach To Vietnamese-American Short Story Written In English, Quan Manh Ha

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Writing A Short Science Fiction Novel For Young Adults, Cheryl Robson

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this project is to write a dystopian science fiction short novel for young adults, in tum raising awareness of the genre among young people, as well as causing them to consider today's technology issues from a different viewpoint. Background research commenced on characteristics, history, and readership of science fiction. The sub genre of dystopian science fiction was reviewed through the examination of scholarly research in this particular area. After additional reading of science fiction books, the first chapter of the researcher's science fiction novel was written. Next, students in three sections of high school language arts classes …