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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
In this collection of essays, I am looking at a young woman trying to find direction and decide what kind of woman she will be. Growing up, I have often felt like a woman of contradictions. I wanted to be tough, but not so tough that I...
This qualitative research study examined whether or not reflection facilitates transfer. While scholars have addressed the role that transfer may play in the composition classroom (e.g. Beaufort 2007), none has addressed the role of...
The stories in this collection are an exploration of the diasporic Puerto Rican identity, and span both Puerto Rico and the U.S. American south to make sense of the overlapping fascination with death, the grotesque, and the fabulous....
This project explores the emergence and development of researched-writing in first-year composition as it is represented in English Journal, College English, and Indiana University Archives circa 1912-1962. By analyzing this corpus...
This study addresses the work of James McNab McCrimmon and his significance to the discipline of composition studies. James McCrimmon has attracted the attention of composition historians and theorists largely because he is the founding...
This study focuses on the period between the late twelfth century and the late fifteenth century and the changes in perception toward sexual relations and gender politics, especially those pertaining to rape. While there is much to be...
The Optimists' Birthdayis a collection of poems that blends the autobiographical lyric of the confessional mode with persona poems and prayer poems to explore themes of anxiety, marriage, religious doubt, and spiritual longing. The first...
This thesis analyzes C.S. Lewis's concepts of imagination and truth, focusing mainly on his ideas as expressed in The Abolition of Man (1944) and That Hideous Strength (1945). I argue that these works demonstrate an essential connection...
A discourse on the language of James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this thesis engages the roles of particular words in these texts for the purpose of demonstrating Joyce's later poetics. Often these words communicate their own...
As If We Were Already Free is a novel narrated in the first person by Mackenna Doyle, a 26-year old man in prison for murdering a high school classmate when he was sixteen, a crime of which he admits culpability at the outset of the...
Since everything is a text, if only we can learn how to read it, the prose poems in the dissertation manuscript Speak Universe are about interpretations, or rather, reinterpretations, or better still, productive misinterpretations of the...
This dissertation addresses the problem of teacher self-efficacy theory being largely absent as a concept of study in composition studies, despite the field maintaining a primary focus on issues like teacher development and effective...
Though the influence of penny fiction on the sensation novel was widely recognized by Victorians and is acknowledged by modern critics, there has been little examination of the relationship between these genres. My dissertation addresses...
I wrote this collection of poems from a fascination with both the Cosmos and the mythology that illustrates its elusiveness and integrity, its ability to accommodate the entirety of the Unknown as well as the already beloved. These poems...
This dissertation analyzes Quality Enhancement Plans (QEPs) focused on improving writing. The study’s first research question asks how the construct of writing is defined, and what is described as valuable about writing, in the language...
Gulf is one part ode and one part elegy to Smith’s Louisiana. It is a book that, all at once, questions, praises, and eulogizes its muse. Smith’s poetry works to elevate people, places, and things that are often looked over as unpoetic....
A Man To Blame traces the story of a young woman, June Wells, returning to a family that is struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy after a devastating accusation. Ten years prior to the start of the novel, June's younger brother was...
An Appropriate Age is a novel told through the alternating third-person perspectives of three women in the same family: Anna, Presley, and Gigi. It is divided into three parts. It is set in a fictional retirement community in central...
His Visible Bones follows its speaker from active illness and addiction through recovery and into a long-term relationship. The poems focus on lived experiences of queerness, mental illness, addiction, recovery, and romance. They operate...
Set in the near future, North imagines a world where the oceans have risen faster than expected, triggering economic and political dysfunction. The novel has two storylines that ultimately intertwine. In the first, 20-year-old Olin...
In Snatched, I bring together historical accounts of kidnappings, as recorded in the Old Bailey Proceedings, and fictional accounts of kidnappings, as popularized by Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Oliver Goldsmith, and John Gay....
Shimming the Glass House is a collection of poems, many of which address what the title suggests: an attempt to balance what is, by nature, fragile. Whether dealing with personal relationships, or mortality, or the quirky ways we try to...
This dissertation is a collection of poems that draws on a variety of 20th century American poetic traditions, as a way to pay homage to Walt Whitman's vision of America as a democracy of diversity. These poems celebrate the diversity...
The dissertation manuscript Gog chronicles my experiences as a Jehovah's Witness from a working-class family, investigating larger issues of poverty, religious persecution, and generational cycles of violence while also exploring the...
For my project, I have taken Queen Elizabeth I's last speech to Parliament in November 1601, the Golden Speech, and looked at every time it was printed under King James I, King Charles I, the Interregnum, and King Charles II. The first...
This dissertation explores the ways writing assessment manifests within everyday writing, a category of writing wherein writers write for their own purposes and under their own volition, in order to provide an alternate approach to...
My thesis 'Swamp Fire' began with the essay of the same name. After I wrote this essay, I decided to do a nonfiction thesis and began asking my family questions. I wanted to know about my parents' struggles, about how we ended up where...
My dissertation, The Alchemy of Sexuality in Early Modern English Lyric Poetry examines the complex relationship of poetry, sexuality and religion to alchemy in early modern England. I analyze poetic representations of transgressive...
The genre of Arthurian literature is defined by its presentation of a noble society of knights and ladies, most often utilized in literary texts as a kind of medieval shorthand for acceptable social behavior, perhaps especially in...
"Representation and the Modern Female Subject" examines the socio-cultural work of the fictional woman painter in novels by women authors writing in or about the United States between the years 1870-1930. I focus on representations of...
This thesis is a novel. It is the story of Frank, a pickpocket who moonlights as a children's magician. He falls in love with Nasya who is a volunteer at a hospice for children with horrible and strange diseases. The book follows their...
Despite This Pearl is a memoir inspired by the incidental discovery of a brain tumor. Living with the constant possibility, the constant probability, of the tumor growing and one day requiring surgical removal incites the author to...
In late summer of 1854 in the small town of Mayfly in western North Carolina sixteenyear- old Rex Benjamin stumbles upon a telegram sent to his devious stepfather by a mysterious "Mr. L" who claims to be coming across the mountains from...
This work is a collection of short stories entitled The Way of Mothers. This collection consists of four stories that were originally produced in writing workshops and two stories that I wrote on my own. I have heard many times a quote...
My thesis, REWIND, is an homage to the life of my brother, Shane—and my own life, which today wouldn’t be possible without him. I break the thesis down into two sections, WEDGEWOOD WAY and I DO MY BEST TO REMEMBER YOU. While the first...
In this novel, a small Kansas town sits in the shadow of a corrupt meatpacking plant called Pig City, the region's only major employer. The town is reliant on the plant to give them a living, but resentful of it for sending them home...
One of the key issues that arises when discussing the long eighteenth century is that of identity: self/individual, and group/national. Whereas recent critical work in both literary studies and historiography has concerned itself with...
Because Milton wanted his readers to recognize the theological ideas depicted in Paradise Lost as opportunities to meditate and pray, I will focus on the dramatization, definition, and descriptions of prayer in Paradise Lost. The body of...
Darker Matters: Racial Theorizing through Alternate History, Transhistorical Black Bodies, and Towards a Literature of Black Mecha in the Science Fiction Novels of Steven Barnes
This dissertation seeks to provide a critical investigation of several novels written by African American science- and speculative fiction author, Steven Barnes. In exploring Lion's Blood (2002), Blood Brothers (1996), the Aubry Knight...
The person of the expert witness presents several problems for rhetoricians. This thesis considers what resources are available for judges to decide between competing expert testimony over subjects where they themselves do not have...
This project establishes a critical framework for the examination of a recently emerged trend in speculative fictions texts, which I have dubbed "fantasy remix." Through close examination of two exemplary texts that exhibit the...
Janet Fitch's _White Oleander_ is a complex novel that on the surface appears to be about Astrid's journey from one foster home to the next. The complexity of the novel, however, lies within the relationships between Astrid and the women...
Modernist literature positioned itself as the principal imaginer of what I call a "perception sickness." One character after another--usually an artist or artist figure--suffers from a too-keen perception with dangerous consequences....
Virginia Woolf's novels have been read often as texts that speak only to the private sphere, the home, the parties, the inner lives, etc., and neglect the political realm. Many define Woolf as a timid writer who either could not or would...
This dissertation has two aims. The first is to further expand the scope of composition studies to include examinations of contemporary and historical instances of composing processes and textual production. The second aim is to develop...
This project is an attempt to reexamine the linguistic shifts that memory events force in Beckett and Joyce, specifically how spatialization and mapping affect memory in the work these authors. By considering the headway made by...
Chinua Achebe has remarked "that the English language will be able to carry the weight of [his] African experience" (103). However, he warns that "it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but...
While social media has garnered attention for its entertainment and market value, it has received less consideration for its contribution to transnational activism. In particular, we have yet to examine the practices of individual users...
The poems in the following dissertation are centered on the theme of bodily transformations, from the involuntary changes of illness and aging to the voluntary ones of plastic surgery and gender reassignment. The poems in the...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
