Department of English
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RECOGNIZING POSSIBILITY: REFLECTIONS ON THE MESSIANIC DIMENSIONS OF BEING, LANGUAGE, AND SPACE
(2023-08-10)This thesis seeks to reveal the messianic potentialities that inhere in the fundamental categories of experience. I analyze diverse sources in western intellectual history, from the classical period to our contemporary ... -
POSTHUMAN NURTURING IN AMERICAN LITERARY FUTURITIES
(2021-08-16)This dissertation applies posthuman theories to the concept of nurture in American literatures of 1880-1920 and 1980-2020 to explore how writers construct and imagine futurities that increasingly critique the liberal ... -
INVOKING LA LLORONA: ABJECTION AS A SITE OF POWER IN JOVITA GONZÁLEZ, CHERRIE MORAGA, AND JAYRO BUSTAMANTE
(2023-05-19)This thesis seeks to analyze how La Llorona’s abjection allows her and those who call on her to exist as specters, haunting the space of their personal, cultural, or historical trauma to make sense of their abuses and gain ... -
EXPLORING THE SCP WIKI: COMMUNITY, DIGITAL HORROR, AND APOCALYPTIC FICTION
(2022-12-16)The SCP is a body of user-submitted fiction broadly classified as horror and often compared to other user-submitted horror such as Creepypasta. While these comparisons have been made in research and among the SCP community, ... -
Post-Factum Studies in Trans-corporeal Rhetoric: Triangularities of Genre, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault
(2022-08-17)This dissertation gives an account of and expands upon Stacy Alaimo’s term, “trans-corporeality,” in order to reconsider the rhetorical situation, through conceptualizations of how rhetorical bodies become embodied and ... -
Asian Modernities: The Historical Unconscious in Asian and Asian American Literatures
(2022-08-02)The question of modernity has been widely debated in postcolonial studies, with scholars such as Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo arguing that the emergence of alternate modernities unsettles the West as a cultural ... -
Identifying Loss, Animating Melancholy: Asian-American Narratives in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Spirited Away, and Bao
(2022-08-01)Animated film provides a complex illustration of the creativity behind constructing narratives. This thesis aims to explore the way that racial and cultural identity are displayed within animated film. The purpose of this ... -
(RE)FASHIONING GENDER: DRESS AS EMBODIED FEMINIST CRITIQUE IN MODERNIST WOMEN’S WRITING
(2022-05-18)In this dissertation I examine early twentieth century women writers’ use of fashion as a mode of critiquing gender, race, and class oppression. Through close reading of the novels of Nella Larsen, Edith Wharton, Anzia ... -
Accurate or Aspirational? A Rhetorical Analysis of One University's Representation of Student Diversity
(2022-05-17)When approaching diversity within higher education, colleges and universities champion diversity initiatives as significant goals. Prospective students may choose colleges based on the aspirational role model, which inspires ... -
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 ... -
Pandemic Pedagogy: A Case Study of Commenting Practices in a Pandemic
(2022-05-16)This thesis reviews best practices for commenting on student submission and reports the findings of a case study from the 2020 spring semester. -
A TEACHER GOES TO SCHOOL: A RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF PEDAGOGICAL INSIGHTS ON SECONDARY WRITING INSTRUCTION
(2022-05-09)High school English teachers are familiar with current masters in the field (Kittle, Burke, Gallagher), but are not familiar with the scholarly literature on the topics of composition. Although helpful, these professional ... -
A Quantification of Magnitude in the Writing of James Baldwin: A Digital Recovery Work
(2022-01-03)This thesis seeks to utilize a distant reading of seventeen essays written by James Baldwin alongside sustained close readings of three topics within those essays in order to understand why Baldwin has maintained increased ... -
Crip Mothering: Representation of Disability and Motherhood in Post-1980 American Films
(2021-08-30)Most scholarship on the topic of disability and motherhood tends to be of an empirical nature common to social, education, and psychology studies (Landsman 2008; Wilson and Cellio 2011, Filax and Taylor 2014). Despite the ... -
Ontological (Free) Agency: the Erasure, Commodification, and Autonomy of Black Athletes
(2021-09-03)The National Football League wields a powerful influence on American society and holds an authoritative sway over various sociopolitical discourses, each influencing the degrees of interaction between people of different ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
THROUGH THE NARROW GATE: CONDUCT, CONVERSION, AND COMMUNITY IN NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY WOMEN'S NOVELS
(2020-09-29)Conversion scenes and the theme of conversion are key in conduct fiction, a genre that developed from the medieval and early modern tradition of nonfiction conduct manuals. Conversion is a character’s entrance into the ... -
DECENTERING WHITE SPACE IN THE TWO-YEAR COLLEGE ENGLISH CLASSROOM: A PERSPECTIVE THROUGH CRT, TRIBALCRIT, AND LATCRIT
(2021-05-06)White space in the educational system is an attitude, environment, ideology dominated by the white dominant voice and creed. This white space intimidates and oppresses Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) students, ... -
JUSTICE FOR THE FALLEN WOMAN
(2021-04-27)By analyzing the experiences of four different incidents of shaming women—Dallas police officers photographing partially nude prostitutes during booking, Anita Hill, Monica Lewinksky, and Christine Blasey-Ford—in contemporary ...