PhD Dissertations - DO NOT EDIT: Recent submissions
Now showing items 1-20 of 79
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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 ... -
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 ... -
(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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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, ... -
SERMONIC FUGUES EVALUATED IN A THEMATIC COLLECTION OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN HOMILETICAL RESPONSES TO THE 9/11 TRAGEDY USING DISTANT READING ANALYTICS
(2021-05-05)This dissertation project introduces and evaluates the coined rhetorical/homiletical concept of the sermonic fugue. The term is an expanded adaptation of the musico-literary fugue principally in the context of thematic ... -
STRONGER THAN FICTION: LITERARY AND CULTURAL MERIT OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN CHRISTIAN FICTION
(2020-12-08)My primary goals with this dissertation are to take a close look at how contemporary African American Christian fiction performs important literary and cultural functions and explore how these works reinforce or subvert ... -
Space Opera: The Aesthetics of Personhood in the Works and Worlds of Philip K. Dick
(2020-07-31)In this dissertation, I examine the major novels of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick in light of his non-fictional and speculatively mystical writings. After establishing an approach to science fiction in general and ... -
WRAITHS AND WHITE MEN: THE IMPACT OF PRIVILEGE ON PARANORMAL REALITY TELEVISION
(2020-08-05)Modern paranormal TV walks the fine line between infotainment and propaganda that older white men are rational while marginalized communities, such as youths, lower social classes, women, and minorities are hysterical and ... -
Teaching Elsewhere: Curating↔Calibrating Posthumanist Possibilities
(2018-08-28)Following the material and ontological turns and working within the recent conversation applying posthumanist theory to education and educational research, this dissertation argues that professors can materialize immediate, ... -
I, Gamer: Addressing Toxic Ludology and Narratology in the Gamer Discourse Community Through Reinterpreting Video Games as Hypertexts
(2019-11-22)My research examines two points crucial to the continuing discipline of video game rhetoric. First, it discusses the formation of toxic ludology and narratology in the gamer discourse community over the course of decades. ... -
The Domestic Bible: William Tyndale's Vernacular Translation
(2019-09-06)This translation study of William Tyndale’s revised New Testament of 1534 identifies the translator’s motivations and strategies then explores the effect of the translation on the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) and ... -
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 ... -
Disabling Sex Education: Science, Narrative, and the Female Body in Feminist Medical Fiction, 1874-1916
(2017-05-05)This dissertation offers a feminist disability theory approach to women’s medical fiction during the Comstock Law Era. I argue that, in responding to Comstockian censorship, women authors of medical fiction resisted sexed ...