Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Breeding Migrations, Survivorship, And Obligate Crayfish Burrow Use By Adult Crawfish Frogs (Lithobates Areolatus), Jennifer L. Heemeyer

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Movements are risky behaviors to animals, and amphibians are no exception. Being unable to cover long distances quickly, amphibians may find migrations challenging, yet many if not most species exhibit cyclic annual migrations. Crawfish Frogs (Lithobates areolatus), are a relatively understudied species of North American amphibian listed as endangered in Indiana and Iowa, and considered a species of conservation concern throughout much of their range. To better understand the biology of this species, and in particular, to assess the role that movements play in affecting survivorship, I radio tracked 48 Crawfish Frog adults, in 2009 and 2010. My study encompassed …

Persistent Revolutions In Colombia And Peru: A Comparative Analysis, Brandon Huson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis performs a comparative analysis of rural-based revolutionary movements in Latin America. The movements that are compared are the FARC, originating in Colombia, and the Shining Path, which emerged from the highlands of Peru. The comparison is meant to serve as a test for what variables are predictive of revolutionary success. Since these movements differ in their success in establishing permanent political, social and military movements in their countries over time, their dichotomous outcome can be used to point toward variables that warrant further consideration. Comparison of revolutionary movement makes sense in this case due to the similarities between …

A Liberating Intent: The American Civics Curriculum In Illinois High Schools And The Development Of A Critically Constructive Citizenry, Gustavo David Albear

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Civics education and constructive criticality are not usually found within the same curriculum. In America the two concepts tend to be considered as antithetical in content and practice. Students and teachers do not approach education about the citizen‘s responsibilities with great necessity or urgency, and when they do approach the subject it is from the perspective of inherent rights that should not be questioned, since they are by birth granted, albeit only to some. The idea of criticality is also not considered to be part of the developmental need of a citizen, since the overall sentiment associated with it is …

"The Way Of The World Is To Bloom And Flower And Die": The Palindrome Of Knowing In Cormac Mccarthy's The Road, Joseph Clark

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Meaning has been the topic of much commentary on Cormac McCarthy’s work. Critics posit an array of conclusions about meaning in his corpus, ranging from its impossibility to its excess. Much work concludes that if meaning exists, it is generated from an interplay between the natural world that McCarthy describes in his work and the characters who interact with it. With The Road, McCarthy offers his clearest presentation of meaning as it pertains to human knowing. In this presentation, McCarthy explores knowing through a beginning-in-ending, or palindromatic scheme; he arrives at the origins of knowing by reaching its terminus mirror. …

"Not Gone Or Vanished Either:" William Faulker's Use Of Memory And Imagination, Kevin Daniel Gleason

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines the role that memory and imagination play in three of William Faulkner’s novels: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished. While most scholars perceive Faulkner’s characters as burdened, debilitated, and destroyed by the past, I argue that Faulkner presents a wide spectrum of engagement with the past which includes the potential for memory to serve as a tool of redemption and power. Henri Bergson’s notion of the fluidity of all time past, present, and future forms the center of Faulkner’s understanding of time, and in this paradigm, Faulkner’s characters are capable of creating and …

Care Of The Self And The Will To Freedom: Michel Foucault, Critique And Ethics, Stephanie M. Batters

Senior Honors Projects

Care of the Self and the Will to Freedom

Stephanie Batters

Faculty Sponsor:  Stephen Barber, English

What do subjectivity, power and ethics have in common?  For French philosopher Michel Foucault, each of these concepts inherently resides within the others.  His works, spanning from the mid-1950s to his death in 1984, offer a profound theoretical approach to the complex questions that obtain between the individual and society.  Foucault’s works present careful and intricate theories about the relationships of the past with the present, the individual with society, and power with truth.  Many of his writings explore how the individual is made …

Skunk Hammock, Britton Cody Lumpkin

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Skunk Hammock: Poems, a poetry collection by Cody Lumpkin, explores the confluence of man-made objects with the natural world. Lumpkin’s subject matter varies widely. From poems derived from the detritus of popular culture like Spam and Mr. Snuffleupagus to poems where prairie dogs and egging houses are the focus, Lumpkin works to render material poetic that is typically not seen as poetic. A number of his poems concern themselves with the perception of animals. Influenced by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, David Bottoms, Robert Hayden, and Claudia Emerson, Lumpkin seeks to show animals not as mere symbolic vessels, but …

Mobilizing Sentiment: Popular American Women's Fiction Of The Great War, 1914–1922, Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines American women’s popular novels about the Great War published between 1914 and 1922, and offers a perspective that complicates our understanding of the American experience of WWI. Drawing on a historical framework that illuminates the subtleties of the nation’s the ever-shifting political stance in response to the European War, this study demonstrates how American response to the war was neither monolithic nor static. This study contributes to current efforts to recover women’s voices in the male-dominated terrain of war writing, and promotes the value of studying noncanonical texts. Rarely considered in scholarship of American war literature, women’s …

Towards A Theory Of Comic Book Adaptation, Colin Beineke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary adaptation studies/theories have tended to focus singularly on the movement from the novel/short story to film – largely ignoring mediums such as the theater, music, visual art, video games, and the comic book.  Such a limited view of adaptation has led to an underdeveloped and misplaced understanding of the adaptation process, which has in turn culminated in a convoluted perception of the products of artistic adaptation.  The necessity of combating the consequences of these limited outlooks – particularly in the field of comics studies – is as vital as the difficulties are manifold. In opposition to this current stream …

The Father Birth, Alissa Nutting

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This creative dissertation is a fabulist and satirical novel. The book follows the story of main character and narrator Earleen, an atypical and hyper-intelligent sixteen-year-old who continues to be traumatized by her sociopathic father even after he dies. A self-taught bookworm born in the early 1980s, her formative years were spent trapped inside her parents' rural methamphetamine cookhouse. When her parents blow up inside their house during a drug-manufacturing incident on the eve of Earleen's early adolescence, she finds herself in the arms of an affluent adoptive couple (Dennis Stark, a fertility specialist, and his homemaker wife Beverly) who have …

The Whiter Lotus: Asian Religions And Reform Movements In America, 1836-1933, Edgar A. Weir Jr.

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examines the influence of Asian religions and thought on various reform movements in America, including anti-slavery, labor rights, the alleviation of poverty, women's rights, and the rights of immigrants. The interactions between these two forces will be uncovered and analyzed from 1836, the year Ralph Waldo Emerson's ground-breaking work Nature was published, until 1933, the year that Dyer Daniel Lum, the last individual discussed in this work, passed away. Previous studies have demonstrated that those who incorporated Asian religions and thought into their own lives and worldviews also affixed great importance on affecting society in a positive manner. …

Woman Or Warrior? How Believable Femininity Shapes Warrior Women, Jessica D. Mccall

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My dissertation is an exploration of how femininity is constructed in the characters of warrior women. I define and apply my theory of believable femininity: the notion that in order for characters gendered female to be accepted by an audience, specific textual markers must render them submissive to a dominating male figure. I examine the following warrior women at length: Britomart and Radigund from Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Christine de Pizan's treatment of Amazons in her Book of the City of Ladies and Hippolyta's specific portrayal by de Pizan in comparison to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and the …

“'You Done Cheat Mose Out O' De Job, Anyways; We All Knows Dat'”: Faith Healing In The Fiction Of Kate Chopin, Karen Kel Roop

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, the half-way mark of the century in which the country itself would be broken in two, Kate Chopin was destined to bear witness to the many divisions that have distinguished the United States. Especially noticeable in the post-Reconstruction period in which she wrote was the expanding chasm between the races. This dissertation argues that even Chopin's most seemingly orthodox Southern stories betray a quest for a theology capable of healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual ills omnipresent in the country and especially apparent in the post-Civil War South. The alternative to mainstream Protestantism …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Sew Speak! Needlework As The Voice Of Ideology Critique In The Scarlet Letter , "A New England Nun," And The Age Of Innocence, Laura L. Powell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the Nineteenth Century, needlework, and embroidery in particular, became a signifier of feminine identity. Needlework was such a significant part of women’s lives and so integral to the construction of femininity in nineteenth-century America that both pictoral and narrative art demonstrate numerous representations of women embroidering. The sheer volume of these representations in the Nineteenth Century suggests that the practice of embroidery provides a way of speaking for women—a representation of the voice of subjectivity silenced by patriarchal ideology. Because needlework serves as a signifier of ideal femininity, it provides uniquely fruitful and previously unexplored opportunities for investigating how …

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

A Montage In Its Leaves, Andrew S. Nicholson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation consists of a series of lyric poems preceded by an introduction to those poems. The introduction gives a background to the method of composition and historical precedents to the poems, connecting the lyric poems to the writing and thoughts of William Blake, Martin Heidegger, and Robert Creeley. The poems are presented in three parts, and cover a variety of subjects, frequently favoring the presentation of subjective experience over an imagined objectivity.

City Of Slow Dissolve, John M. Chavez

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

City of Slow Dissolve examines identity, displacement, and construction of the self. Beginning with the persona’s root location of Colorado Springs, Colorado, moving to Detroit, Michigan and concluding with Las Cruces, New Mexico, the speaker of the included poems articulates the complexities of lived emotion (e.g., anxiety, anger, guilt, and eventual acceptance), of the critical evaluation of one’s surroundings, and of the fractures of the self as the result of elected displacement in the service of personal advancement. It is with this in mind that these poems avoid thematizing what it means to be a Latin@ living in the United …

Reasonable Conversions: Susanna Rowan's Mentoria And Conversion Narratives For Young Readers, Karen Roggenkamp

Faculty Publications

Though not well known, Rowson's Mentoria-a curious conglomeration of thematically-related pieces from multiple genres, including the essay, epistolary novel, conduct book, and fairy tale-offers particularly fertile ground for thinking about the nexus between eighteenth-century didactic books and earlier works for young readers.2 At the heart of Mentoria is a series of letters describing girls who yield, with dire and frequently deadly consequences, to the passionate pleas of male suitors.3 Fallen women populate Rowson's world, and scholars have traditionally read Mentoria within the familiar bounds of the eighteenth-century seduction novel.4 However, Rowson's creation transforms the older tradition of didactic, child-centered conversion …

Captivating Malaeska: Reading The First Dime Novel As A Captivity Narrative, Elisabeth Ziemba

All Theses And Dissertations

Regardless of the genre under which Malaeska was marketed, the cross-genre tropes and lessons can be seen which mark the novel as one that has been influenced by captivity narratives. Perhaps more so because of the subtle way it has been integrated into popular culture, the heritage of the Native American captivity tale remains even after physical Indian captivity has ceased, providing readers with a multilayered reading which asks them to think about the events of the time in which the story was written as well as the time in which the story is set, while critiquing the white supremacist …

Scout's Daughters : Race And Creative Development In Contemporary Adolescent Literature, Amanda Malloy

Honors Theses

At the heart of what Roberta S. Trites titles ―adolescent literature‖ – works written both for and about young adults—is a question of agency (Disturbing 7). In Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, Trites asserts that adolescent novels attempt to answer the question of young adults who wonder if they ―should or even can affect the world in which they live‖ (1). Trites‘ argument is based on the idea that the distinguishing characteristic of adolescent literature is its focus on ―the social forces‖ that …

My Secret Life In Film: A Memoir, Kelly Grey Carlisle

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative dissertation is an original work in the genre of memoir, and consists of the first two sections of my book, My Secret Life in Film. I believe that my book speaks to contemporary experiences of childhood, violence, sexuality, and faith, and complicates conceptions of a ‘normal’ family. When I was three weeks old, my mother, who worked as a prostitute, was murdered near downtown Los Angeles. Her case remains unsolved, and I do not know my father. Her own parents were unwed. At first I lived with my maternal grandmother and the woman I believe to have been …

Regional Consciousness In American Literature, 1860-1930, Kelsey Louise Squire

Dissertations (1934 -)

This study establishes a conversation between regional literary theory, ecocriticism, and places studies as a necessary component of a more nuanced understanding of regionalism as depicted by mobile American authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1860 and 1930, regional writers faced the challenge of making place relevant in an increasingly mobile world. In contrast to scholarly studies that situate the relevance of regionalism as a vehicle for a larger cause (for example, nationalism or feminism), or conversely, studies that focus on articulating an overly rigid "regional identity" of places or authors, I employ the term "regional …

Bad Girls And Biopolitics: Abortion, Popular Fiction, And Population Control, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Word~River Literary Review (2011), John Quinn, Gary Pullman, Susan Nyikos, Steven Kunert, Denise M. Rogers, Bruce Wyse, Victoria Large, Kate Sweeney, Jeremy Beatson, Blase Drexler, Thea Cervone, Victor Hawk, Andrew Madigan, Ross Talarico, Akin Taiwo, Dianna Calareso, Jeffrey Arnett, Gail Radley, Gene Washington, Laurie Duesing, Brian R. Young, Anne Stark, I.M. Chapman, Natalie Ivnik Mount, Rebecca Leah Păpucaru, Katy E. Whittingham, Judy Shearer, Alex M. Frankel, Nina Schneider, Rosann Kozlowski, Norah Bowman-Broz, Maggie Wheeler, Jade Hidle, Susan Howard, Eddie Malone

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Our premier issue was published in Spring 2009. We are always looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published.

We define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching under part-time contracts during the summer or …

Cold War Playboys: Models Of Masculinity In The Literature Of Playboy, Taylor Joy Mitchell

Humanities & Communication - Daytona Beach

“Cold War Playboys: Models of Masculinity in the Literature of Playboy” emphasizes the literary voices that emerged in response to the Cold War’s redefinitions of space and sexuality and, thus, adds to the growing national discourse of Cold War literary and masculinity studies. I argue that the literature Playboy includes has always been a necessary feature to creating its masculinity model; however, that very literature often destabilizes the magazine’s grand narrative because it presents readers with alternative models of masculinity. To make that argument, I presume five things: 1) masculinity, like femininity, is a construct; 2) the mid-century masculinity crisis …

Illuminating The Need For Fiction To Love Within A Postmodern Reality, Alexandria Lightsey

English

Jonathan Safran Foer in his novel Everything is Illuminated (2002), engages and overturns traditional notions of love. In his work, love, as an exalted feeling, does not exist outside of animalistic desire. Instead, as Foer proposes through the numerous and complex relationships of his characters, love exists in an illusion as the individual defines and creates it. To love is to willfully choose to believe in this idealism. For this idealism, whose existence is impossible within the broken nature of this world, must be sustained in an artifice once-removed from reality. Everything is Illuminated thus suggests that without fiction, reality …

The Cyborg Griffin: A Speculative Fiction Literary Journal, Hollins University

Cyborg Griffin: a Speculative Fiction Literary Journal

Notes:

copyrighted

Hollins Student Publication

Scope: short stories, artwork, poetry, essays, and comics

Paper copies shelved in University Archives.

"Atlas Shrugged" And Third-Wave Feminism: An Unlikely Alliance, Paul Mcmahan

MA in English Theses

Ayn Rand and her work are often ignored by feminist critics because of Rand's personal life, her views on sex, and her vehement rejections of collectivism. Feminism has moved through overlapping waves known as first, second, and third-wave feminism. Throughout its life feminism has been marked by two strands: relational and individual. The strand of individual feminism has been more prevalent in Anglo-American feminism while relational feminism has been more predominant in European feminism. Atlas Shrugged was published six years prior to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique , a text generally agreed upon as the starting point for second-wave feminism. …

Smallpox Inoculation And Race Relations In Eighteenth And Nineteenth Century America, Kristen Schaibly

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.