Browsing Dissertations & Theses by Title
Now showing items 11-30 of 175
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Becomes a Woman Best: Female Prophetic Figures in Shakespeare's Plays
(2015-12-09)This dissertation argues that female characters in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, Richard III, Macbeth, and 1 Henry VI function as prophets in the style of the Old Testament. In a culture that venerates Holy ... -
"The Best And The Brightest:" The Overachievement Rhetoric During America's Polio Epidemics
(English, 2013-03-20)In 1985, Dr. Richard Bruno, a post polio syndrome specialist, conducted a study on the personality traits of polio survivors, ultimately concluding that polio survivors have a significantly higher incidence of reporting ... -
Beyond Good And Evil: Sister Leopolda's Traumatic Will To Power
(English, 2007-08-23)This is an in-depth analysis of one of Louise Erdrich's most extraordinary characters, Sister Leopolda. I examine Leopolda first as a trauma victim who has suffered the loss of family, witnessed the death and assault of ... -
Biography As A Searchlight: Finding The Frank Stanford Story Cycle In Ellen Gilchrist's Fiction
(English, 2011-03-03)Ellen Gilchrist's short stories and novels form several story cycles that connect her characters and tie her work together into interdependent story groups. Her work is also strikingly autobiographical, featuring protagonists ... -
Black Rhetoric: The Art Of Thinking Being
(English, 05-16-2013)This dissertation examines the Black Hermeneutic Situation in order to uncover Black Rhetoric's possibilities for thinking Being. Martin Heidegger's phenomenological hermeneutics and his theories on thinking and Being ... -
"Black Sounds": Hemingway And Duende
(English, 2007-08-23)Along with his efforts to revitalize the Spanish arts in the 1920's and 1930's, Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca gave an address entitled "Play and Theory of Duende" in which he claims duende as a distinctly ... -
Blood Path: An Original Screenplay Based On The Life And Works Of John Rollin Ridge
(English, 2013-03-20)Blood Path is an original, feature-length screenplay based on the life of John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867), a mixed-blood Cherokee whose work of sensational fiction, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, is considered ... -
Borges And New Media: Connections Via Heterotopic Spaces
(English, 2011-03-03)Borges' short stories such as "The Aleph" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" were uncanny in their foreshadowing of hypertext and internet developments in the 1990's. His work was often credited as inspiration for various ... -
BORN OR MADE: PROBLEMS OF PROSE STYLE & STYLISTIC IMPROVABILITY AT THE SENTENCE LEVEL, AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH
(2019-05-02)In this interdisciplinary dissertation, I problematize the issue of style at the sentence level from a variety of perspectives, past and present, literary and compositional. My two-fold driving question throughout is, Can ... -
Breaking Trauma's Empire: Trauma And Resolution In Boardwalk Empire And Breaking Bad
(English, 2014-03-12)The purpose of this research is to analyze the performance of trauma and its resolutions in television, generally, and in Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad, specifically. The first chapter of this project analyzes Jacques ... -
Bug-eyed Monsters And The Encounter With The Postcolonial Other: An Analysis Of The Common Postcolonial Themes And Characteristics In Science Fiction
(English, 2012-07-25)Recently, a number of non-Western postcolonial authors have begun to use science fiction to express some of the common concerns of non-Western cultures such as hybridity, alterity and subalternity, as well as other issues ... -
Building Cultural Bridges Across Generational Chasms: Comparing Chicano And Jewish American Literature
(English, 2011-07-14)This study compares Arturo Islas's novel, The Rain God: A Desert Tale with Cynthia Ozick's novella, "Envy; or Yiddish in America." Specifically, I argue that during the 1970s, these authors fictionalized the discourse ... -
Chaucer's De-colonized Custance
(English, 2014-07-14)Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale (MLT) contains several non-Western views, religious practices, cultures and laws. Most importantly, within the MLT readers can discover an alternative to viewing non-Western people as enemies. ... -
Chicken And Dumplings: The Motif Of Food In Appalachian Literature
(English, 2011-03-03)Food is an important element of literature. It can help to establish setting, conflicts, a hero and heroine, relationships with nature and other humans, comfort to readers as well as characters in fictional texts, class ... -
Children Of Israel: Jacob Figures And Themes In The Novels Of Chaim Potok
(English, 2011-03-03)The twentieth-century novelist Chaim Potok made central to his fiction what he called “culture war,” juxtaposing his Jewish-American characters' inner spiritual lives with key elements of Western secularism. In five of ... -
Colonial Shame and its Effect on Puerto Rican Culture
(2017-06-01)I explore how American influence affects Puerto Rican culture through colonial shame. My dissertation is informed by the following questions: (1) In what ways does Puerto Rican culture attempt to move away from colonial ... -
Colorblind Fraternity: Unseating Racism, Males,
(English, 2007-08-23)This thesis examines four works by Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Typee, Omoo, and Benito Cereno as examples of a minority of nineteenth-century American literature that deconstruct negative black male stereotypes and promote ... -
The Commentary On Female Self-discipline In Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple And Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette
(English, 2011-07-14)This thesis studies Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette to explore the embedded commentary about the discourse of female selfdiscipline in the two novels. As two best-selling seduction ... -
"A Condition Of Potentiality": American Women's Utopian And Science Fiction, 1920-1960
(English, 2009-09-16)The 1920-1960 period of women-authored United States utopian and science fiction deserves a reassessment. This study focuses on utopian texts and science fiction texts with strong utopian emphasis and recovers 41 women-authored ... -
Confronting The Spectacle Of The Other (than Human): Posthumanism And The Convergence Of Art, Aesthetics, And Ethics
This project argues that humans should recognize the intersection of aesthetics and ethics in literature, film, and art that use or represent nonhuman animals. Too often, the right of artists to express their "message" ...