English Language and Literature Commons^™

Creation, Destruction, And The Tension Between: A Cautionary Note On Individuation In Tristan Egolf, W. G. Sebald, And Niall Williams, Nicholas Kanaar

Masters Theses

The modern individual faces a psychological disconnect between his conscious mind and unconscious due primarily to the outward attachments that dictate false tenets of ontological worth. This thesis investigates the benchmark of creation and destruction and narrows in on its utility in the individual’s pursuit for individuation. The creation and destruction paradox is used to penetrate liminal space where personal transformation occurs, and it is used within those spaces to strip away old, ego-centric ideals in the service of new ones. C. G. Jung’s “archetypes of transformation” are the main tools of the psyche for assisting the conscious mind to …

Gender In Apocalyptic California: The Ecological Frontier, Marykate Eileen Messimer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is the consequence of ideologies that promote human reproduction and resource consumption by sacrificing human justice, nonhuman species, and the land. Both biology and queer ecologies resist this notion of human separation and supremacy by showing that no body is a singular, impermeable entity, that all beings are biologically and inexorably connected. My dissertation demonstrates that fiction writers use this knowledge to locate a utopian vision that can counteract the dystopian impotence of living within climate change. This argument is founded on novels written by women and set in California, a state that uniquely inhabits a utopian and …

English In France - Linguistic Dominance And Ambivalence, Chloe Kampf

Honors Projects

Whenever English is perceived as a threat to a nation’s language, English proficiency suffers, and France is guilty as charged. Many people know France as a nation with exceptional cuisine, famous artists, and breathtaking countrysides. What many are not aware of, on the other hand, is that France has the least proficient English speakers out of any EU country. Through in-depth research, literature reviews, interviews with French citizens, and analyzations of personal experiences, I attempt to expose the underlining truth behind this intriguing phenomenon.

The Red Front Door, A Memoir, Camila B. Sanabria

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This is a creative thesis that contains two components: 1) a critical introduction that defends the representation of mixed-status families and deportation narratives, and 2) a memoir that depicts my experience with deportation and as a member of a mixed-status family. The second component of this thesis will consist of the first four chapters of my memoir, with the remaining chapters to be completed post-graduation. These chapters take place the years before my parents’ deportation and the year immediately after. The memoir is a coming-of-age story that explores my ethnic identity, along with themes such as insider versus outsider. This …

Changing Access: Building A Culture Of Accessibility Within Normalized Technical Communication Practices, Sherena Huntsman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

As a field intricately connected to human experience and interaction, technical and professional communication (TPC) is historically, ethically, and practically tooled to address issues of equality, diversity, and access. While these important issues have not always been the focal point of TPC, the recent turn toward social justice has scholars asking critical questions about how users access information, how specific design practices may privilege some and disenfranchise others, and how we can be more inclusive across our communication practices. In this dissertation, I argue that it is within reach of TPC to address the specific problem of access—the gap between …

Thylacine Dreams: The Vernacular Resurrection Of An Extinct Marsupial, Daisy M. Ahlstone

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis explores the folk resurrection of the thylacine through artwork and symbolic interaction. The thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, is a marsupial that suffered a government-sanctioned massacre leading to its extinction in 1936. The thylacine’s status as a hidden animal has inspired what folklorists call “ostensive practice”; people not only actively seek out the thylacine in the wilderness of Tasmania today and share their sightings online, but they have also incorporated the thylacine as a symbol of hope and perseverance into various forms of folk art.

There have been upwards of five thousand documented sightings of the …

The Long Horizon, Tiffany Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The idea for my thesis stemmed from a braided essay I wrote for a creative writing class. I didn’t initially plan on expanding my class essay into a memoir, but I have discovered that oftentimes the story finds us rather than the other way around. Using the memoir form allowed me to bridge quite naturally the subjects of grief and landscape by giving me space to reflect on a turbulent period in my life and arrive at some sort of conclusion. While I could see the importance of the natural world in my life, I didn’t realize at first how …

Remembering How To Listen: A Theoretical And Pedagogical Approach To Literacy, Adolescence, And Young Adult Literature, Stuart A. Morris

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a substantial and growing body of critical theory on young adult literature (YAL), and there are a multitude of publications dealing with how secondary English/ELA teachers incorporate YAL in their classroom. From a curricular perspective, however, YAL is still most often considered inferior to canonical novels (i.e., “classics” or “great books”); thus, there has been no substantive or concerted movement to include YAL in secondary English/ELA at a curricular level, particularly in grades ten, eleven, and twelve. While the scholarship on YAL is extensive, discussion of YAL is most often devoted to pedagogy or literary theory, as if …

Spirit Don't Ever Die: Apocalypse And Denial In An Infinite Universe, Nathan Riggs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh catalogs contemporary fiction’s failure to adequately engage with catastrophic climate change. In this thesis, I argue the engagement problem has a century-old analogue in fiction’s approach to entropy. Entropy was among the first secular apocalyptic modes in mainstream discourse, and this investigation of authors’ approaches to its portrayal provides a model for understanding fiction’s denial or acceptance of apocalypse. I first examine William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land, a far-future tale set in a post-solar Earth. I contend that Hodgson’s centering of the human experience prevents him from portraying a true end …

A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From Frank Kermode to Norman Cohn to John Hall, scholars agree that apocalypse historically has represented times of radical change to social and political systems as older orders are wiped away and replaced by a realignment of respective norms. This paradigm is predicated upon an understanding of apocalypse that emphasizes the rebuilding of communities after catastrophe has occurred. However, in the last half-century, narratives that emphasize the destruction of human civilization without this restorative component have begun to overshadow the more historically popular post-apocalyptic models that were particularly abundant during the early days of the Cold War. In light of …

Literary Legends: The Secret History Of Cather And Pound Halls, Harry Lime

Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany

No abstract provided.

My Ántonia And Czech Mushroom Folklore, Evelyn Funda

Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany

No abstract provided.

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Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany

No abstract provided.

A Luminous Haze; Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Plagiarism, Todd Richardson

Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany

“I really was never any more than what I was,” Bob Dylan writes in his autobiography Chronicles, “a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.” I’d call his proclamation inefficient if that didn’t imply that it gets a job done, albeit poorly. The sentence, rather, strikes me as grand-sounding balderdash. It begins with a promise of humility, after which it gradually evaporates into bleary images that never realize anything resembling actual meaning. On the whole, Dylan is exceedingly specific throughout Chronicles, recounting in detail …

The Great Games We Play: Fan Resistance And The Bbc Sherlock, Amanda Ewolt

Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany

Discontented with mainstream value systems, the Sherlock fandom is tireless in implementing various forms of resistance to question the balance of power and authority between producer, consumer, and text. One such method is slash fanfiction, which is both a tool for understanding and creating meaning from the source text and an act of defiance from those who feel marginalized by the dominant culture. Yet, I argue, Sherlock is a special case. Sherlock itself is a brilliant and intertextual rereading of Arthur Conan Doyle's original text; in other words, the show itself is elaborate fanfiction, which complicates the typical producer-fandom interaction …

Beasts And Bluebeards: Reader Reception, The Fairy Tale And Jane Eyre, Brittany Warman, Sara Cleto

Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany

The 19th-century novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë has been frequently mined for its folkloric allusions, particularly the fairy tales that haunt the narrative's characterization, plot, and atmosphere. Moving beyond so-called motif spotting, this article will explore the ways in which two of the main fairy tale intertexts of the novel - "Beauty and the Beast" and "Bluebeard" - duel for supremacy in the reader's mind, creating a tension that ultimately determines reception. Drawing primarily on narrative and reader- response theory, we will argue that the uncertainty regarding exactly which fairy tale is being called upon allows Brontë to create …

Introduction: What Kind Of Mother, Shelley Ingram

Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany

We’ve long studied the folklore in literature, but there is also literature in folklore, so we can also reverse our gaze to see how literature has been taken up and incorporated into the folk culture of groups – a book club, or a fandom, or a knitting circle. We study the ways in which authors use, for example, forms of folk narrative to structure a text, how they tap into the cultural knowledge of their myriad readerships to add depth to their pages. But we can also look inward to find certain ambiguities built into a text which invite or …

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Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany

No abstract provided.

Increasing Faculty-Librarian Collaboration Through Critical Librarianship, Adrienne Gosselin, Mandi Goodsett

Michael Schwartz Library Publications

Through the lens of critical librarianship, librarians are becoming increasingly involved in social justice, civic engagement, and human rights issues. This paper examines the collaboration between a subject librarian and a faculty member in an assignment that engaged in Public Sphere Pedagogy (PSP), a teaching strategy with the goal of increasing students’ sense of civic agency and personal and social responsibility by connecting their classwork to public arenas; and project-based learning, wherein students develop a question to research and create projects that reflect their knowledge, which they share with a select audience.

"Blown Through The Tube At 50 Miles An Hour" : Transportation, Motion And Mobility In Virginia Woolf's Novels, Deyan Meng

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

At the turn of the 20th century the rapid development of transportation technology significantly transformed the physical world as well as people’s subjective perceptions of it. Virginia Woolf’s fascination with various modes of transportation, both as a traveler and as a keen observer, is translated into her fiction and non-fiction writings. The representation of physical transportation in Woolf’s works has received the attention of a number of scholars. However, the ways in which Woolf was inspired by the transport revolution and employed this as a vehicle for modernist narrative experimentation have not been fully explored. This dissertation therefore investigates the …

Violence And The Other In The Novels Of Carmel Bird, Donna Yannakis

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis argues that throughout her fictional work, Carmel Bird interrogates multiple forms of violence against the gendered and racialised other. Using Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity and the discursive construction of race, the thesis shows how these constructions not only inform or incite violence against the other, but are inherently violent in themselves. To chart these multiple forms of violence, the thesis uses Slavoj Žižek’s delineation of a triumvirate of violence: symbolic, systemic and subjective violence. He describes subjective violence as the most visible, physical violence of an actor or actors against an other. He determines that this …

Manifest Destiny Continued: The Reification And Colonization Of Time, Blake Reno

Theses and Dissertations

With the end of the settlement of what became the continental United States, capitalism and imperialism by nature needed to continue in their growth. In the late 19th and early 20th century up through World War I, history and the time of laborers were the sites of expansion for capitalism. There was a realization that public relations and journalism were in essence writing history as it was happening, and capitalists took note and moved into adjusting these spheres in their favor. In addition, capitalists began attempting to expand their influence over the time of their laborers in order to increase …

Female Protagonist Mega-Archetypes: A Study In Medieval European Romances, Doaa Omran

English Language and Literature ETDs

Despite the claim that structuralism has sung its swan song, my research offers new insights in the field of structuralism through archetypal criticism by exploring four female hero mega-archetypes as narrative structures inspired by the Qur’an and the Bible. These scriptural narratives offer tenets, based on narratives and motifs, that, as structural units, create and identify mega-archetypes. This study posits how, rather than being extensions of existing structuralist taxonomies on the male hero monomyth, the female mega-archetypes enrich that monomythical narrative. This work details the structure of the mega-archetypes Zulaikhah (Potiphar’s wife), Sarah and Hagar, the Virgin Mary, and Queen …

Exploring Madness And Ableism In The Context Of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Sara Dorsten

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Editor's Notes, Mckay Hansen, Hailey Kate Chatlin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Food And Boundaries In Jessica Hagedorn's The Gangster Of Love, Yuxin Zheng

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

A Carnival With Restraint, Yangzi Zhou

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Forum Prompt, Dennis Cutchins

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Identity And Ecriture Feminine In Beyonce's Lemonade, Morgan Lewis

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.