Browsing Dissertations & Theses by Title
Now showing items 83-102 of 175
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"A Labor Of Love": A Social And Literary History Of The Blue Cloud Quarterly
(English, 2014-12)This thesis will explore the literary and historical context of a small magazine publication entitled the Blue Cloud Quarterly. The first publication of its kind to focus entirely on Native American poetry, the BCQ played ... -
Ladies And Loners: A Comparative Gender Study Of The Romance And Popular Western
(English, 2007-08-23)Despite the efforts of readers, writers and cultural critics, the fact remains that romance and the Western genres are considered low art. The real impetus behind this paper is not whether or not or even why they are ... -
Language, Order And The Problem Of The Other: Inventing A Postmodern Service-learning Pedagogy
(English, 2013-03-20)My dissertation argues for a different approach to implementing service-learning into composition pedagogy. I argue that because critical pedagogy has long been the primary vehicle for incorporating service-learning ... -
LEAF, BARK, THORN, ROOT: ARBOREAL ECOCRITICISM AND SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA
(2019-04-30)Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root traces the appearance of trees and their constituent parts in five Shakespearean plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and As You Like It. The dissertation shows how these plays ... -
Lilith Rising: American Gothic Fiction And The Evolution Of The Female Hero In Sarah Wood's Julia And The Illuminated Baron, E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand, And Joss Whedon's Buffy The Vampire Slayer
(English, 2008-09-17)The construction and gendered identity of the female hero has long been a pressing concern of feminist criticism. A female hero capable of sustaining a role as a central protagonist in terms of complexity of character and ... -
Liquid Assets: The Functions Of Forgetting In Shakespeare's Second Henriad
(English, 2013-03-20)This dissertation examines Shakespeare's second historical tetralogy in which the playwright employs forgetfulness despite its pathologized position in early modern culture and its seeming incompatibility with history. In ... -
"the Little White Dish Of My Faith": Anne Sexton, The Body, And Spirituality
(English, 2014-07-14)This thesis examines how Anne Sexton pits the body and soul against one another in her poems. Her work suggests that these two facets of being are more than just benignly and fundamentally different: they are enemies. Her ... -
The Magical Sublime: A New-old Lens On Magical Realism
(English, 2007-08-23)While magical realist critics often refer to magical realism's generic heritage of primitive cultures and indigenous mythology, Franz Roh's magischer realismus, and Surrealism, I will point to the sublime as a less recognized ... -
Make it plain, preacha': African American rhetorical license, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and a modern rendering of epideictic rhetoric
(2014-09-17)In this project, I contend that African American rhetoric, namely African American sermonic rhetoric, constitutes a distinct, culturally specialized variety of rhetoric generated out of the distinctive circumstances of the ... -
Making Selves as We Make Scholars: The Many Uses of Life Writing in College English
(2022-05-16)This dissertation addresses the perennial question, for both new and more seasoned English professors, “What should we teach in English?” In composition, “What types of writing should we teach?” And in literature, “what ... -
Mapping Men: Toward A Theory Of Material Masculinity
(English, 2013-07-22)This project interrogates the possibilities of material gender theory as an interdisciplinary bridge between critical theory—like gender studies and eco–criticism—and soft–scientific men's studies. The primary theoretical ... -
Marriage Or Career? Domestic Ideology In George Gissing's The Odd Women
(English, 2007-08-23)Although George Gissing is acclaimed for his progressive thoughts on liberating women from patriarchy by establishing financial independence, some critics challenge such praise for Gissing by arguing that he is still ... -
Masculinity and Chivalry: The Tenuous Relationship of the Sacred and Secular in Medieval Arthurian Literature
(2018-08-13)Concepts of masculinity and chivalry in the medieval period were socially constructed, within both the sacred and the secular realms. The different meanings of these concepts were not always easily compatible, causing ... -
Material Intimacy: Bearing Witness, Listening, and Wandering The Ruins
(2019-08-07)In this dissertation, I consider the rhetorical ecology of architectural ruins, specifically those of natural disaster, as actors in a system of human and nonhuman intra-action that has rhetorical potential for material ... -
Maternal Bodies, Ojibwe Histories And Materiality In The Novels And Memoirs Of Louise Erdrich
(English, 2009-09-16)This thesis examines uterine metaphors and birthing scenes in the novels and memoirs of Louise Erdrich. Specifically, it examines convergences between these images and material feminisms, as well as Ojibwe spirituality and ... -
Media And Literary Representations Of Latinos In Baseball And Baseball Fiction
The first chapter of this project looks at media representations of two Mexican-born baseball players – Fernando Valenzuela and Teodoro “Teddy” Higuera – pitchers who made their big league debuts in the 1980s and garnered ... -
Meming and Enthymeming: Persuasion in the Age of Social Media
(2018-12-06)While rhetoric as a field of study has existed for several millennia, social media can prove to be a difficult medium to analyze rhetorically. This thesis examines some traditional elements of rhetoric, including the ... -
Misreading Justice: The Rhetoric Of Revenge In Feminist Texts About Domestic Violence
(English, 2008-08-08)Feminist legal theories of battering homicides pose a challenge to feminist critics of American literature. Legal theorists argue that many women who are tried for killing their abusive partners should be acquitted on the ... -
"More Than Just A Piece In Their Games": Agency And The Docile Body In The Hunger Games And Reality Television
(English, 2014-12)In recent years, with the rise of social media and normalized forms of surveillance there has been an increase in the visibility of how female bodies are policed within Western society. As the fight for women's rights ... -
Moving Beyond This Moment: Employing Deleuze And Guattari's Rhizome In Postcolonialism
(English, 2011-10-11)The aim of this project is two-fold: to discuss the limits of Frantz Fanon's postcolonial theories, and to then present a possible model for turning "the `thing' colonized [into] a new man" (Wretched 2) by liberating "him" ...