English Theses

Is Pinterest Really Killing Feminism?

Lauren E. Alford — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:37:57 PDT

A response to the notion, popularized by Amy Odell’s article “How Pinterest is Killing Feminism,” that the social media site Pinterest, which is dominated by female users, is detrimental both to the feminist movement and women in general. A definition of feminism, contrary to the one employed by Odell, is established and applied to Pinterest users and Pinterest content. Two forms of content prevalent on Pinterest, domestic content and “thinspo” images, are evaluated in terms of their prevalence and how they are used on Pinterest and their overall effect on women and feminism. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth are also employed to address Odell’s claims that Pinterest content is reminiscent of the “retrograde, materialistic” content in women’s magazines.

Water's Weight

Mary Christine Swint — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 06:36:54 PDT

This collection of poetry narrates the emotional and psychic history of a woman and her family

The Rhetoric of Queer: Subverting Heteronormative Social Institutions and Creating New Meaning

Marissa Nolan — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:16:58 PDT

The word “queer” generates mixed feelings. For some, it is a way to denigrate gays and lesbians, though, in recent years, those in LGBT communities have re-appropriated the term and have given it a more positive spin. This project aims to investigate exactly that kind of social action, specifically, looking at the way some take socially constructed norms and queer them in order to develop new meanings. First, this thesis explores how social norms impacted identity creation in ancient Rome and Greece. It then surveys the theories behind norms, along with their formation and maintenance in current society. Next, this project looks at queer theory and how norms have shaped the ways we build our identities, and vice versa. Finally, this research takes a rhetorical perspective by applying components of the canon to different elements of identity cultivation and presentation, with invention representing the former and delivery the latter.

“Nature gave a second groan”: The Decay of Nature in Paradise Lost and Seventeenth-Century Discussion

Mary Grace Elliott — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:02:04 PDT

The thesis investigates the role of nature in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. By looking at seventeenth-century texts concerning the decay of nature by Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill, this thesis strives to determine how Milton’s poetry engaged in a contemporary debate. The thesis begins with an examination of Goodman and Hakewill’s texts alongside Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Naturam Non Pati Senium, and Lycidas. The second and third parts of the thesis examine the role of nature in pre- and postlapsarian Eden in Milton’s epic, while keeping in mind the seventeenth-century debate explored in the first section.

Migrating Ministry: New Media Literacy And Christian Communication

Frederick A. Cole III — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:31:53 PDT

This thesis explores ways evangelical Christian communicators remediate traditional ministry functions and community formation onto new media platforms. This exploration is framed by a discussion of literacy and digital composing reflecting Stuart Selber’s multiliteracy approach to teaching digital composition. The author positions evangelical churches’ approaches to texts, community, education, and communication as components of a distinct literacy that is often at odds with values, controls, and cultures found on the Internet and in new media. Discovering how church communicators use new media, how their education prepares them for effective digital communication, and how external sources, such as expert authors, aid the transition from print to new media helps us understand the gap between Selber’s ideal multiliteracy and the reality of new media literacy for this group. This also expands our understanding of digital composition, and the role it plays in both the classroom and in all students’ greater lives.

A Folkloristic Literary Analysis of Cultural Collision in the Work of Bobbie Ann Mason

Sally J. Newman — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:41:55 PDT

The clash of folk and popular cultures is central to the work of contemporary Southeastern American author Bobbie Ann Mason. Though Mason is often classified as a Kmart realist because of her style’s emphasis on the minutia of mass-produced culture, a more nuanced understanding of her work can be reached via a focus on the way she explores the complex, evolving relationship between folklore and popular culture. This thesis is a folkloristic literary analysis of selected Mason fiction and memoir. It examines the interplay between homogenized American popular culture, region-specific rural Southeastern American folk culture, gender roles, subregional history, and twentieth-century economics in order to explore and articulate the cultural collision of folk traditions and popular culture defining Mason’s rural/small-town Western Kentucky landscape. I highlight Mason’s portrayal of intangible folklore (folk speech and behavioral customs) and material folklore (foodways and quilting) in Nancy Culpepper Stories, “Love Life,” and Clear Springs.

Hunting and Writing the Whale: Masculine Responses to the Maternal in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

Seth A. Hagen — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:36:27 PDT

“Hunting and Writing the Whale” investigates the persistent resurfacing of the maternal body in Moby-Dick and examines how the masculine identities of the characters Ishmael and Ahab are constructed in response to their anxieties toward the maternal. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva and contemporary theory of womb envy, I argue that Ishmael and Ahab each struggle with defining and maintaining their identities in the presence of a maternal body that both attracts and repulses. Whereas Ahab’s dogged attempt to maintain a fixed identity results in annihilation, Ishmael embraces a more fluid existence informed by a maternal semiotic that he endeavors to manage through the project of writing.

Toward An Ethic of Failure in Three Novels by Herman Melville

Elinore Faustino — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:56:53 PST

Herman Melville’s final novel The Confidence-Man destabilizes conventional Western models of ethical behavior, particularly Kantian notions of moral agency, by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. The Confidence-Man shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in their understanding and justify their moral choices. I use these insights from The Confidence-Man to illuminate Melville’s opposition to the missionaries’ work of civilizing and Christianizing the South Seas islanders in his earlier travelogues. In Typee, his first novel, Melville demonstrates that layers of existence—in fact, real human lives—are denied when the story of human relations is framed as a narrative of progress. This thesis concludes by proposing that Melville reworks the idea of failure as a potential strategy against the totalizing narrative of advancing rationalism.

Writing Space, Righting Place: Language as a Heterotopic Space in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Lelania Ottoboni Watkins — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:21:36 PST

Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa may have had abolitionist motivations when writing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, but the function of the text is much different and self-serving. Specifically, in looking closely at the wording of the text, with its language of we versus they, in group versus out group, ours versus theirs, Equiano clearly feels he at no time belongs fully to any specific group or place; rather, he only partially belongs anywhere, and thus, creates this work of autobiography and appropriation of fiction and oral tradition to negotiate and cultivate his own liminal, or even heterotopic, space. In other words, I suggest he may have used the writing of this text to define his sense of self, creating a space in which he was both in control and fully belonged.

A True and Lonesome West: The Spaces of Sam Shepard and Martin McDonagh

Sarah A. Dyne — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:06:56 PST

In this project, I explore how Sam Shepard and Martin McDonagh treat concepts of space (both on stage and within a larger context that expands beyond the theatre), and I seek to identify how underlying anxieties about a mythologized past become manifest in the relationships between characters and landscapes by examining heterotopic and liminal elements in their scripts.

The Life of Thomas

Mark Elberfeld — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 11:47:31 PST

In this collection of linked stories and shorts, the narrator reflects on important people and events in his life, particularly his high school and college years, primarily through first and second person points of view. The stories “Joanna” and “Honor Roll” are first-person narratives, while “Mr. Finethreads” is told from the third person. “Pictures from a Wedding” and “College | Collage” are considered modular fiction, which create a mock-autobiography out of the disparate pieces of the overall mosaic.

Readings of Zwelethu Mthethwa's South African Photographs: Postcolonialsim, Abjection, and Cultural Studies

Dusty K. Ross — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 07:06:58 PST

South African painter turned photographer, Zwelethu Mthethwa, was born in Durban during Apartheid. In 1980 Mthethwa began taking his photographs in the shanty towns on the outskirts of Cape Town and later took pictures in Mozambique and New Orleans. His work has global significance. Using art and literary theory and criticism, I expand upon the significance of his photographs in the contemporary world. I do “readings” of eight photographs from eight different series of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s work using postcolonial theory, abjection, and cultural studies as theoretical constructs to provide three different angles for interpreting his work.

Evolution of Ethics in the Island of Doctor Moreau and Heart of Darkness

Christine D. Anlicker — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:50:41 PDT

This thesis analyzes H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness within the context of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. I explore how Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley used evolution by natural selection to develop differing explanations of the origins of ethics and how this impacted the place each scientist gave morality in civilization. By exploring how Huxley and Darwin understood morality to derive from the phenomena of sympathy and restrain, I illustrate how Wells’s and Conrad’s novellas interrogate these discourses of altruism.

The Trauma of Chattel Slavery: A Womanist Perspective Women on Georgia in Early American Times

Dionne Blasingame — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:50:38 PDT

This thesis explores the psycho-socio-cultural dynamics that surrounded black womanhood in antebellumGeorgia. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how slave narratives, testimonies, and interviews depicted the plight of enslaved black women through a womanist lens and second, to discover what political and socio-cultural constructions enabled the severe slave institution that was endemic toGeorgia. Womanist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and trauma theory are addressed in this study to focus on antebellum or pre-Civil WarGeorgia.

Through the Looking Glass: Another Reading of Willa Cather's The Professor's House

Rebecca H. Bonacchi — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:50:35 PDT

This project examines Cather’s experimentation with conflicting voices of narrative authority in the presentation of four central female characters in The Professor’s House, using St. Peter and an entity termed the implied narrator as lenses through which we view other characters. The project is broken down into four chapters, each dealing one addressing the central issues involving that specific female character.

Carnival, Convents, and the Cult of St. Rocque: Cultural Subterfuge in the Work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Sibongile B. Lynch — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 12:27:57 PDT

In the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson the city and culture of 19^th century New Orleans figures prominently, and is a major character affecting the lives of her protagonists. While race, class, and gender are among the focuses of many scholars the eccentricity and cultural history of the most exotic American city, and its impact on Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is unmistakable. This essay will discuss how the diverse cultural environment of New Orleans in the 19^th century allowed Alice Dunbar Nelson to create narratives which allowed her short stories to speak to the shifting identities of women and the social uncertainty of African Americans in the Jim Crow south. A consideration of New Orleans’ cultural history is important when reading Dunbar-Nelson’s work, whose significance has often been disregarded because of what some considered its lack of racial markers.

Gothic Romance and Poe's Authorial Intent in "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Robert F. Hiatt — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 10:46:39 PDT

In my thesis I will discuss Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in relation to the expectations that scholars have of the gothic genre. I will break this project into four chapters, along with an introduction: (Ch.1) a critical review of scholarship on Poe’s “Usher” that will demonstrate the difficulty in coming to a critical consensus on the tale, (Ch.2) a discussion of Brown’s outline of Gothic conventions, (Ch.3) a look at Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” juxtaposed with Aristotle’s Poetics to illumine aspects of Poe’s approach to writing and how it has been informed, and (Ch.4) a close reading of Poe’s “Usher.”

Revealing and Concealing Hitler's Visual Discourse: Considering "Forbidden" Images with Rhetorics of Display

Matthew G. Donald — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 09:11:30 PDT

Typically, when considering Adolf Hitler, we see him in one of two ways: A parodied figure or a monolithic figure of power. I argue that instead of only viewing images of Hitler he wanted us to see, we should expand our view and overall consideration of images he did not want his audiences to bear witness. By examining a collection of photographs that Hitler censored from his audiences, I question what remains hidden about Hitler’s image when we are constantly shown widely circulated images of Hitler. To satisfy this inquiry, I utilize rhetorics of display to argue that when we analyze and include these hidden images into the Hitlerian visual discourse, we further complicate and disrupt the Hitler Myth. This study aims to contribute to recent scholarship that aims to learn more about the “hidden” Hitler as well as to rhetorical studies of display.

It's Different for Girls: Coming of Age in Two Victorian Novels

Jamila McTizic — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 10:22:26 PDT

This thesis examines the feminine coming-of-age stories in The Mill on the Floss and Hard Times and seeks to redefine coming-of-age for Victorian girls as a movement into personal agency. The traditional bildungsroman has been defined in a way that largely excludes the experiences and stories of girls born during the early nineteenth century. Because these girls lacked the options and choices of their male counterparts, it becomes important to redefine what coming-of-age means when there are limited opportunities for personal growth. The middle-class Victorian woman led a largely prescribed existence and her well-being and security was often directly and indirectly tied to the status and conduct of the men in her life, usually her father. Given this, this paper also explores the father’s role in his daughter’s coming-of-age story and how he influences the choices she makes in her life.

Phenomenology of Space and TIme in Rudyard Kipling's Kim: Understanding Identity in the Chronotope

Daniel S. Parker — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:12:14 PDT

This thesis intends to investigate the ways in which the changing perceptions of landscape during the nineteenth century play out in Kipling’s treatment of Kim’s phenomenological and epistemological questions of identity by examining the indelible influence of space— geopolitical, narrative, and imaginative—on Kim’s identity. By interrogating the extent to which maps encode certain ideological assumptions, I will assess the problematic issues of Kim’s multi-faceted identity through an exploration of both geographical and narrative landscapes and the various chronotopes—Bakhtin’s term for coexisting frameworks of time and space—that ultimately provide a new reading of identity-formation in Kim.