English Language and Literature Commons^™

Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about how historical narratives developed in the context of a modern marketplace in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it explores British historicism through urban space with a focus on Rome and London. Both cities were invested with complex political, religious and cultural meanings central to the British imagination. These were favorite tourist destinations and the subjects of popular and professional history writing. Both cities operated as palimpsests, offering a variety of histories to be “tried on” across the span of time. In Rome, British consumers struggled when traditional histories were problematized by emerging scholarship and archaeology. In London, …

The Communal "I": Exclusion And Belonging In American Autobiography, Melissa Coss Aquino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Communal “I” in American autobiography emerges as an aesthetic response to the pressure of using “the master’s tools” to write from a community on the margins to disclose identity in the conflicts of exclusion and belonging. In this case “the master’s tools” to refer to several distinct elements the communal “I” is tasked with navigating: the use of what we have come to identify as standard English, the form and function of European autobiography as a celebration of individual exceptionalism, and the contradictory pressures on these autobiographies to both elevate and protect the communities in question from further marginalization. …

Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed …

Party Politics: Domestic Entertaining And The Reaches Of Sociability In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Andrew Forrester

English Theses and Dissertations

Literature in the nineteenth century often featured highly structured scenes of domestic entertaining. Party Politics makes a case for these parties as both literary devices and cultural touchstones, at once practices indicative of the period’s commitment to strict standards of etiquette and capacious arenas in which to test the already blurred boundary between the public and private spheres. Ultimately, this project contends that parties are staples of Victorian sociability and its depiction in literature; they therefore allow authors and their characters to register social, moral, economic, political, and even international developments of the period in the lives of middle- and …

Misrepresented And Unheard: The "Latino Rebels", Blanca V. Guzman

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

In today’s political climate, immigration, undocumented immigrants, and the Latinx identity have been pushed to the forefront of the news cycle, political campaigns, and social justice movements. The social justice movement associated with the undocumented will be explored through one alternative news source, "Latino Rebels." Through close textual analysis, it will become evident how "Latino Rebels" holds these identities of Latinx, undocumented, and immigrant very close to its own voice, and often amplifies a clear message for awareness and policy change, which goes beyond the traditional scope of objectivity in reporting.

Universal Truths, Verisimilitude, And Hyperreality: Baudrillard’S Simulacra And Simulation In Pride And Prejudice And The Lizzie Bennet Diaries., Kathryn M. Kohls

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project applies Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Hank Green and Bernie Su’s The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012). By applying Baudrillard’s theory, one can see that Austen’s marriage plot is a shrewd critique of how social simulacra, simulations of reality, dictate how society is structured and interacts. These manipulative simulations are able to be transgressed by the novel’s protagonists, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. Their ability to find an unsimulated real is appealing to contemporary audiences caught in the hyperreality of the internet age. This leads to a panicked production to …

“Mr. Nobody From Nowhere”: Ethnocentric Nationalism, Cultural Cosmopolitanism, And The Reinvention Of Personal Identity In F. Scott Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby And Mohsin Hamid’S The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hana Mohammed Smail

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This study examines the quest for the American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in light of the politics of ethnicity and national identity and cultural cosmopolitanism. The two novels are analyzed in the context of the city in early twentieth-century America and post-9/11 America, respectively. I interpret the texts’ quest for the American Dream as a quest for an inclusive national identity that is consistent with the cosmopolitan principles of coexistence and individual obligation toward others—beyond the social boundaries of ethnicity and culture and beyond the political boundary of citizenship. …

Iarwain Ben-Adar On The Road To Faerie: Tom Bombadil's Recovery Of Premodern Fantasy Values, Greta Rogers

Masters Theses

This thesis project discusses J. R. R. Tolkien's character Tom Bombadil as an agent of recovery of premodern fantasy values. Several premodern fantasy works espouse a sense of harmony with the world as God’s created order, a value that is missing from some postmodern fantasy works. Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil is examined as a means to recover that acceptance of the created order.

The Presentation Of Postmodern Sexuality In Short Fiction, Allie J. Kapus

Senior Honors Theses

Shifting norms in twentieth century western society, coupled with emerging postmodern thought in the 1960s, radically changed the ways in which people viewed sexuality, gender roles, and the institutions of marriage and the family. The literature of the postmodern era, namely short fiction, also reflects such ideological shifts. Literature is a powerful communicator of the human condition as well as a crucial means for reflecting the customs, beliefs, and norms of a society at the time of its writing. Such evolving differences as were occurring in the realm of sexuality came to be represented in postmodern literature. This thesis aims …

On The Mantelpiece For You: Letters In The Novels Of Thomas Hardy, Morgan Sanford

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Even as modern technology continues to introduce new modes of communication, people still write letters. Letters are a primary vehicle for written communication and have played a key role in forming, maintaining, and preserving relationships for centuries. Particularly in Victorian England, letters facilitated communication over a range of space and time, capturing the momentary and immortalizing the impermanent. At the height of the letter’s popularity, Thomas Hardy included letters in his novels to further plot, develop characters, and think critically about the function of written communication in society. Hardy’s exploration of this medium changed over the course of his career. …

Bertha Harris' Confessions Of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine To The Gothic South, Kara Russell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by her obsession with the South and informed by the liberating socio-political changes born from the 1970s lesbian feminist movement, North Carolinian author Bertha Harris (1937-2005) provides a poetic exploration of Southern Gothic Sapphism in her complex and tormented novel Confessions of Cherubino (1972). Despite fleeting second-wave era recognition as “one of the most stylistically innovative American fiction writers to emerge since Stonewall,” Harris’s innovation remains largely neglected by readers and cultural theorists alike. Nearly all academic engagements with her work, of which there are few, address her 1976 novel Lover. Instead, this thesis focuses on Confessions of Cherubino …

New Criticism—Not So New To Tennessee’S High School English Teachers, Seth Grindstaff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Tennessee Department of Education adopted Common Core in 2010, Tennessee implemented New Critical ideas associated with the college classroom, but did not present this connection to English teachers. Comparing high school education reforms like A Nation at Risk (1983) and TNCore to the New Critical works of Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, reveals that New Criticism is the literary method grounding current ELA education reform. Referencing Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015), Diana Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010), and …

Environmental Deterioration In Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis Of Serena And Strange As This Weather Has Been, Alexandria C. Craft

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ron Rash’s Serena and Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been are two contemporary Appalachian novels that have yet to be analyzed from a biblical ecocritical perspective. While some literary scholars acknowledge the environmental aspects of the novels, little of their research goes beyond examining the land and its resources as commodities or metaphorical extensions for the characters. In this thesis, I elaborate on those interpretations by scrutinizing the natural descriptions in both novels and comparing those findings to some of the landscapes and environmental verses located within the Bible. Unlike the pastoral ideal found in a portion of …

Gothic Voids: Nineteenth-Century Reader Experience And Participation, Garrett Chapman Jeter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Characterization of nineteenth-century literary Gothic is usually confined to affective response. This project argues that literary Gothic works constitute an intellectual, empirical endeavor. Because authors of literary Gothic intentionally left voids in their narratives, they invited their readers to participate in making narrative through speculation and conjecture about missing information. The practice of Gothic reading makes the reader an active partaker in filling those voids with rational conclusions. Reading is not just textual encounter. Rather, it incorporates making meaning of one’s surroundings. In their experiences, literary works’ characters “read” their environments: people, objects, events, etc. Chapter 1 characterizes Gothic reading …

A Flourynge Aege: Tracing The Sacred And Secular In The Book Of St. Albans, Allison Treese

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the introduction of the printing press to England around the mid-fifteenth century, English authors were not only writing under the lingering influence of Chaucer and the conventions of established medieval genres, but now had to confront the implications for reading and readership that printing brought with it along with the already turbulent political climate of the fifteenth century. Though this cultural shift was arguably a gradual one, with the earliest printers taking special care to remain faithful to the manuscripts they were copying, and conventional scribes likewise being commissioned to make copies of printed works, there were nevertheless radical …

An Examination Of The Queer, The Macho, And The Ambiguous Male In Arturo Islas's The Rain God, Delilah Marie Farias

Theses and Dissertations

Mexican-American males are shaped by their cultural values, history, religion, and family values. They are measured by the standard set forth in machismo and are expected to act accordingly. Machismo is a concept that is deeply rooted in Catholicism, the Aztec culture, the Mexican-American nuclear family, and it is handed down in the upbringing of men and women. In Arturo Islas’s novel, The Rain God, he creates a representation of the three different identities that men are subjugated to. He creates the machista within the patriarchal character of Miguel Grande, the ambiguous male in his son Miguel Chico, and …

Mrs. Venus's Class Exploring Jim Crow, Kiana Reece, Sara Leach, Emily Duggan, Zoe Boals, Tucker Mcclendon

United States Race and Childhood Fiction

Mrs. Venus’s Class Exploring Jim Crow. This story revolves around a classroom on a different planet full of alien children who are learning about American history, specifically the Jim Crow era. The teacher and the students discuss the injustices and oppression experienced by African Americans and other non-white citizens. The next day, American student Jimmy Turner joins them, and he is faced with animosity by some of the alien children in the class. The alien teacher points to the similarities in the children’s prejudice against the human and the prejudice that was prominent during the Jim Crow era.

Sky's Limit, Cheyenne Pearson, Caleb Dockery, Kristen Elliot, Lucas Gallon, Houston Nichols

United States Race and Childhood Fiction

Sky’s Limit is about a 5-year-old biracial girl named Sky, growing up during the Civil Rights period. As she reaches the age of understanding, Sky begins to wonder why her mom cannot join her and her dad on their adventures. One day, her dad takes her to the ice cream shop and Sky realizes that no one else looks like her, nor do the other moms look like her mom. She eventually questions her dad about why her mom can never get ice cream with them. Her dad then reaches for her hand and begins to describe the racial tension …

The Unexpected Alliance, Chase Clark, Roman Penney, Olivia Matlock, Jacob Davis, Carter Kilpatrick

United States Race and Childhood Fiction

An Unexpected Alliance, which is set in the United States during WWII. The main character of our book is an adventurous seven-year-old girl named Betty whose father is fighting in the war. To help her father win the war, Betty sets off one day to go ‘scrapping’ for metal. Along the way, she meets an African American boy named Stanley who is also out ‘scrapping’ to help his brother who is away at war. Despite their societal differences, the unlikely duo combines their resources to not only find scrap metal to help their loved ones, they also develop a friendship …

Between Settlers And Sovereignty: Literary Solidarity And Anti-Colonial Discourse In Territorial Hawai‘I, 1887–1959, Trevor J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project reclaims a history of anti-colonial discourse and collaborations among Asian settlers and Native Hawaiians between 1887-1959 in Territorial Hawai‘i, drawing from archival works, including King David Kalākaua’s poetry, correspondence, and speeches regarding the Hawaiian monarch’s responsibilities toward Asian laborers, Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana‘ole’s speeches about Hawaiian land rights and Asian farmers, and texts written by local Asian authors of the early 20th century, including Fred Kinzaburō Makino, Takie Okumura, James T. Hamada, Wai Chee Chun, and Noboru Itamura. Through this recovery of texts, I show how the racialization of Native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants by the U.S. territorial …

Who Is It For? Personal Writing And Antagonistic Readers, Dana Glaser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Feminist accounts of how “the personal” is used in feminist critical nonfiction have theorized that the effect of the personal is to connect the writer with readers who share a sense of her investment in the subject matter. Looking at two recent, prominent works about gender and sexuality, and race, respectively that combine genres of criticism and narrative memoir – Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me – this paper considers how personal writing is shaped not by readers it wants to connect to, but by anxious, even dreadful, anticipation of being read by its …

Representations Of Mental Health In Young Adult Literature: A Cultural Analysis Of The Three Ps Of Patient, Practitioner And Population, Christine Gonzales Severn

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the representations of mental health in young adult literature by categorizing texts into a new framework established by this thesis as the Three Ps of patient, practitioner and population. Looking at the Three Ps from an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural view recognizes ways in which literature with themes of mental health is progressively changing with the times. In analyzing John Neufeld’s Lisa, Bright and Dark (1969), Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012), and Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2006), this thesis identifies the changes in mental health visibility and awareness, Sexual Orientation Change Efforts’ …

"This Dreadful Web": Alienation And Miscommunication In The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Debbie Clark

Senior Theses

Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame hinges on the idea of fate and characters being caught up in situations and fantasies that seem to be out of their control. Esmeralda is the fly caught in Frollo’s web, and yet her beauty and allure attracts and ensnares him in turn. Quasimodo is ensnared by Esmeralda’s beauty but also by society’s perceptions of him. The characters in Hunchback are so caught up in the webs of fantasies and perceptions spun by themselves or society that they can no longer communicate effectively with others, resulting in alienation from the very society …

Frankenstem? Technology Ethics In Silicon Valley (Flyer With Text, Version 1), San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature

Promotional Materials

“Deep Humanities,” One-Day Symposium, Organized by Dr. Revathi Krishnaswamy & Dr. Katherine D. Harris, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Jose State University.

May 1, 2018, 10-4pm, Room 225, King Library, San Jose State University

Frankenstem? Technology Ethics In Silicon Valley (Flyer With Text, Version 2), San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature

Promotional Materials

“Deep Humanities,” One-Day Symposium, Organized by Dr. Revathi Krishnaswamy & Dr. Katherine D. Harris, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Jose State University

May 1, 2018, 10-4pm, Room 225, King Library, San Jose State University

Frankenstem? Technology Ethics In Silicon Valley (Flyer With Image Only), San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature

Promotional Materials

“Deep Humanities,” One-Day Symposium, Organized by Dr. Revathi Krishnaswamy & Dr. Katherine D. Harris, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Jose State University

May 1, 2018, 10-4pm, Room 225, King Library, San Jose State University

Science Vs Nature: Frankenstein By Mary Shelley, Jamie Jara, Ellie Siegel, Malorie Allen, Stevey Beall, Juan Miguel Adea

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

The way science overpowers nature is especially relevant to the prioritization and advancement of science and technology in the Silicon Valley.

Will Artificial Intelligence Have Free-Will?, Guadalupe Rodriguez

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

Will Artificial Intelligence have free will the way the Creature did?

Redactándome A Mi Misma: Writing Place, Process, And Identity Across Two Languages, Jenna Ziegelmayer

Senior Honors Projects

Emily Dickinson once wrote a poem titled “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” where she advises writers to do just that. One should tell the truth about their experiences, but tell it through their own unique perspective in order to make it “dazzle” on the page. My slant? Una segunda lengua.

As a student of Spanish, learning a different language has impacted the way that I see the world and my place in it. Studying abroad taught me about the language and culture of Spain, but it also taught me a lot about myself, my own native language, …

You Are What You Wear: Clothing And American Authors Of The Early 20th Century, Alyssa Quinn Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Though clothes are often said to “make the man,” they are not frequently said to build a character. This thesis explores the ways in which clothing was a performative tool for those who wore it during the 1920s in America as well as for authors who wrote about this world in which they lived. This study’s theoretical framework is inspired by Judith Butler’s concept of the performative; it is also influenced by historical research into the clothing of the 1920s. Primary texts explored include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and …