English Language and Literature Commons^™

Spirits Of Defiance: National Prohibition And Jazz Age Literature, 1920-1933, Kathleen Morgan Drowne

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

National Prohibition (1920-1933) ranks as one of the most divisive political controversies of the twentieth century, and its reverberations echoed through nearly every facet of American popular culture. Not surprisingly, many novelists and short story writers added their voices to this contentious public debate by incorporating into their works their interpretations of the wildly controversial federal liquor laws. In Spirits of Defiance, the first book to examine how American writers responded to the far-reaching effects of the Eighteenth Amendment, Kathleen Drowne analyzes the literary portrayals of bootleggers, moonshiners, revenuers, speakeasies, cabarets, and other specifically Prohibition-era characters and settings in a …

Mad Art And The Essential Image: Unearthing The Conversation Between Oscar Wilde’S The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Roland Barthes’S Camera Lucida, Sarah Joy Cowger

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Roland Barthes's notion of "mad art" (introduced in Camera Lucida)--that is, art which is compelling, arresting, and uncovering-serves as a useful lens through which the portrait in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray may be viewed. In doing so, Wilde's framed image, behaving as mad art, must expose Dorian's authentic self. Such an expose is, importantly, both the product of a spectator's engaged eye as it is the result of a piece which always already contains an essence. When both elements are present (that is, both the essentialness of the art and the engagement of the viewer), the "text" …

Thalhimers Department Store: Story, History, And Theory, Elizabeth Thalhimer Smartt

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at Thalhimers department store through the lenses of story, history, and theory. It first introduces the intertwining narratives of the author's paternal family and the store's history, then shares the author's personal story of Thalhimers. The second half outlines the master narrative of the American department store then applies "fantasy-theme analysis" and the symbolic convergence theory to stories and artifacts related to Thalhimers. A conclusion discusses the end of the department store era including a deeply personal goodbye from the author.

The Internet World Of Fan Fiction, Melissa Jean Herzing

Theses and Dissertations

Fan fiction, the most popular creative outlet for fans, allows the amateur writer an opportunity to be published and receive immediate feedback from peers. As educators, we can learn from the fan communities as they participate in online activities, especially fan fiction. Students are more likely to embrace entertaining and creative assignments. And since much of the world is linked to the Internet in one way or another, we can allow students an opportunity to not only improve their writing skills, but also enhance their knowledge of the Internet and its capabilities. My study included online interviews with fan fiction …

Language Use And The Oral Tradition In Aaya (African American Young Adult) Literature, Kaavonia Hinton-Johnson

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) In elementary school my favorite teachers taught me that the language used in my home was incorrect, incoherent, and inappropriate. My second grade teacher Ms. Hull, a tall, thin, dark-skinned woman, stands out among the others. I can still see her hovering over us. “Was!” Ms. Hull shouted, “not wuz. Your tongue is lazy.” “You be what?” she’d ask in disgust with one hand on her hip. When this happened, I was sure to get yelled at and lectured. To avoid such humiliation, I quickly learned to, as we said in my neighborhood, “talk proper.” Shame nagged at …

Milton's "Covering Cherub": The Influence Of Stanley Fish's Surprised By Sin On Twentieth-Century Milton Criticism, Thomas Thoits

LSU Master's Theses

During a time when ideological debates between Milton critics remained largely unresolved, Stanley Fish reconciled both sides of the “Milton Controversy” with Surprised by Sin, positing a theoretically sophisticated method that centers the poem’s meaning in the reader’s experience. Christian and non-Christian critics became enfranchised in critical debate since their reactions, according to Fish, were valid and intended by Milton. Borrowing his intentionalist approach from A.J.A. Waldock, Fish asserts his version of both author and text while implicitly employing a radically subjective hermeneutics. Fish focuses on the multiple and contradictory linguistic meanings within Paradise Lost, locating the source of these …

Mordred: Treachery, Transference, And Border Pressure In British Arthurian Romance, George Gregory Molchan

LSU Master's Theses

This study focuses on the question of how Mordred comes to be portrayed as a traitor within the British Arthurian context. Chapter 1 introduces the question of Mordred’s treachery. Chapter 2 charts Mordred’s origins and development in Welsh and British literature. Chapter 3 focuses on the themes of unity, kinship, loyalty, adultery, and incest that emerge in connection with Mordred’s character. Chapter 4 deals with the idea that Mordred’s treacherous characteristics have been transferred upon him in the course of the British Arthurian narrative’s development. Chapter 5 discusses the possibility that Mordred’s development is in part due to Geoffrey of …

Feminism In Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners Of The Americans, The Vicar Of Wrexhill, The Life And Adventures Of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw And Jessie Phillips, Jessica S. Boulard

LSU Master's Theses

In The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), the travelogue that launched Trollope's career as a literary figure, she accounts the four years spent living in America with the majority of her children and without her husband. The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836), published fifteen years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, is the first anti-slavery novel written in English. Other novels, like The Vicar of Wrexhill (1834) and Jessie Phillips (1844) discuss legal matters. A common thread connects much of Trollope's work. That thread is feminism, which places her in the company of (and somewhere in between) Mary …

Castle To Condo, Country To Corporation: What Becomes Of Hamlet In Almereyda's Modern World, Melissa Trosclair Daigle

LSU Master's Theses

This paper looks into the inner workings of Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000). Even though Almereyda updates the setting and cuts many of the lines, sometimes entire scenes, from the source text, he is able to convey the some of the themes through his use of technology and media. While some themes do transfer into the postmodern setting, the places of discord are most interesting. Of particular interest is his use of modern technologies to display the corruption found in Shakespeare's play. These technologies, including speakerphone, surveillance equipment, wiring devices, handheld camcorders, and still photography, create an atmosphere of both continual …

Dangerous Memories: Lynching And The U.S. Literary Imagination, Anne P. Rice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The terrorization of African Americans through lynching was a national cultural trauma producing a struggle over the meaning of suffering, victimization and moral responsibility. The lesson you were meant to learn from white supremacy and terror powerfully affected how you remembered lynching. My dissertation asks who remembered (and did not remember) what about lynching and how these habits of memory influenced literary and visual representations. I consider the impact of race, gender, class, and sexuality on how lynching was textualized and performed, avoided and blocked. While much recent scholarship has concentrated on the visual technologies of lynching, lynching was also …

The Cultural-Historical Origins Of The Literary Vampire In Germany, Heidi Crawford

Journal of Dracula Studies

Before British authors began writing vampire literature, culminating in 1897 with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, eighteenth-century German poets, most significantly Heinrich August Ossenfelder, Gottfried August Bürger, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, had begun to adapt the curious phenomenon of vampirism from Central Europe for the creative literature they were producing in the enlightened West. Possibly the most striking observation about the origins of the vampire figure in German poetry is that the German poets seem to have drawn more on Central European than German folklore. The reason for this is that the literary vampire was introduced into eighteenth-century German ballad poetry …

"Betwixt Sunset And Sunrise": Liminality In Dracula, Mark M. Hennelly Jr.

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Echoes Of Dracula: Racial Politics And The Failure Of Segregated Spaces In Richard Matheson's I Am Legend., Kathy Davis Patterson

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Dracula And The Afterlife: A Psychological Explanation, Jack D. Maser

Journal of Dracula Studies

Until relatively recently, the primary psychological approach to understanding Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the folklore of vampires has been psychoanalysis. Maurice Richardson asserted in 1956 that Dracula must be seen from a Freudian standpoint, since “from no other does the story really make any sense” (427). However, the psychoanalytic approach shares little with modern, scientifically based psychology. Fascinating though it may be, psychoanalytic theory has almost no measurable attributes and may itself be as mythical as vampires and an afterlife. Rather, psychoanalysis is a creative theory of human cognition and behavior that can be neither proven false, objectively replicated, nor …

The People Of Bram Stoker's Transylvania, Duncan Light

Journal of Dracula Studies

One of the defining features of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the “specific and detailed geographical context that sets this novel apart from other gothic novels” (Florescu & McNally 5). Indeed, although Stoker had not visited Transylvania, he is known to have read widely in preparing Dracula.1 While his historical research has come under particular scrutiny, little attention has been paid to his representation and understanding of the region’s geography.2 As a human geographer with research interests in Romania, I find that there is something not “quite right” about Stoker’s Transylvania. In particular, where are the Romanians? And why are there …

Intentionalism: On The Assumption Of Authority In Literature, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

How Much Does Chaos Scare You?: Politics, Religion, And Philosophy In The Fiction Of Philip K. Dick, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

"Certain themes appear with surprising consistency in Dick’s fiction. They crop up in the early short stories, called by some critics, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Dick’s “apprentice” fiction. They appear in the novels of Dick’s most productive period, the 1960s. And they are a part of the last novels, the VALIS trilogy and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer—written when Dick was, according to Eric Rabkin and others, insane. These themes fall into three inter-related categories: metaphysics, religion, and politics. The first concerns perception and the world, and the individual’s interaction with both. The second, the moralities of creator/creation relationships. The …

After Scotland: Irvine Welsh And The Ethic Of Emergence, Benjamin George Lanier-Nabors

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In “After Scotland: Irvine Welsh and the Ethic of Emergence,” the author’s objective is to mirror what he argues is the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh’s objective: to chart out a future Scotland guided by a generative life ethic. In order to achieve this objective, the author lays open and reengages Scotland’s past, discovers and commits to neglected or submerged materials and energies in its past, demonstrates how Welsh’s work is faithful to those and newly produced materials and energies, and suggests that Welsh’s use of those materials and energies enables readers to envision a new Scotland that will be integral …

Exploring Classical And Contemporary Conception Of Ethos Applied Case-The Rhetorical Ethos Of President George W. Bush, Bobby J. Antrobus

Theses and Dissertations

By exploring classical and contemporary conceptions of rhetorical ethos, this thesis assembles theories of analysis and then applies them in the form of rhetorical analysis of the rhetorical ethos exhibited by President George W. Bush in his presidential speeches. The theoretical investigation reveals the extensive use of the ethical appeal in all manner of rhetorical situations in the contemporary world but especially focuses on how political rhetoric has come to rely predominantly on this persuasive appeal. The study examines several speeches given by President Bush and concludes that his success as president is attributed largely to the sophisticated rhetorical strategies …

A More Porous Postmodernity: Absurdity, Politics, Consumerism And The Cultural Authority Of Spongebob Squarepants, Annie Gaus

Honors Papers

In the wake of the recent election, there's been some talk of healing, but until today no single figure has emerged with the capacity to repair the deep fissures in the body politic. We are so hung up on blue states and red states that our only hope may lie in the primary color that has been left off the map. We need something-or someone-yellow, and also absorbent and porous enough to soak up the ill will and scrub away the lingering bad feelings...Now more than ever, the country needs Spongebob Squarepants."

In his New York Times film review of …

Reading And Teaching Third World Women's Literature In The First World: Colonialism And Feminism In Crick Crack, Monkey And Nervous Conditions, Elvie Miller

Honors Papers

In this essay, I examine two novels by Third World women writers, with a view to exploring how to read and teach Third World texts in a First World context. Teaching these (and other Third World texts), I contend, must entail negotiating their status as "other" to First-World, Western texts and must include recognizing this status as imposed by the First World readership and as a heuristic to develop an understanding and a pedagogy that is able critically to examine the First World or West's naturalizations of its own pedagogical and knowledge-based claims. To do this, I focus specifically on …

What's Really In Alaska?, Renata Perri Silberblatt

Honors Papers

It has often been remarked that the writings of early American nature writers have led to current day environmental protection, and individual nature writers (such as John Muir) have long been connected to American environmentalism. In Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement, Daniel J. Philippon points out, "In at least five separate cases, a nature writer was prominently involved in the formation and development of an environmental organization," and goes on to give the examples of Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, John Muir and the …

Solitary Blessings: Solitude In The Fiction Of Hawthrone, Melville, And Kate Chopin, Virginia Massie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Solitary Blessings: Solitude in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, and Kate Chopin” examines a construction of solitude in which nature is alien and perilous, the self confronts rejection and death, the subject is subordinated to an unknown, and the revealed truth is experienced as both gift and curse. Arising out of fictional portraits of people under duress, this interpretation counters a more dominant construction in American literature, enunciated by Edwards, Emerson, and Thoreau, that shows solitude as composed and calming, subordinating nature to mind, and revealing an underlying truth in presentable form. Solitude has been equated with privation and exile …

"I Knew There Was Something Wrong With That Paper": Scientific Rhetorical Styles And Scientific Misunderstandings, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's "favorite clause type," the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development.

Life Lessons In Shirley Jackson’S Late Fiction: Ethics, Cosmology, Eschatology, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Women’S Wisconsin: From Native Matriarchies To The New Millennium, Edited By Genevieve G. Mcbride, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Turn Of The Screw Metatextually, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Shusaku Endo’S Deep River: Trauma, Screen-Memories, And Autobiographical Confessions, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Charlotte Dacre’S Zofloya: The Gothic Demonization Of The Jew, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Austin Clarke And The Consolations Of Irish Catholicism, Tyler Farrell

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.