Dissertations & Theses, Department of English

Midwestern Mythologies

Adam Lee Hubrig — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:16:03 PDT

This collection of poems works toward unpacking the complications of moving from one geographical center to another. Its poems aim to work out changing and strained relationships, expectations and environments.

Advisor: Kwame Dawes

Symbolic Capital and the Performativity of Authorship: The Construction and Commodification of the Nineteenth-Century Authorial Celebrity

Whitney Helms — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:31:18 PDT

Victorian and Antebellum writers were the first literary figures to construct and perform their authorship within the sphere of celebrity. Unlike their Romantic predecessors who endured fame as an unexpected consequence of their popularity, the Victorians and their contemporaries understood celebrity as a condition of authorship. This dissertation takes as its subject the origins and development of symbolic power for authors as it was expressed in the trappings of celebrity and mass culture and argues that authorship became no longer strictly a profession of writing, but rather a performative endeavor that could be presented through diverse commercial markets. Investigating the changing conditions of the production and consumption of literature, this study contends that the public enterprises in which authorship was now being performed were not cheap acts of mass entertainment, as many would claim, but were in fact new forms of cultural capital and legitimate literary labor. Focusing on Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde, four of the greatest nineteenth-century authorial celebrities, this work traces the historical growth of celebrity culture within the authorial profession from the inception of the Victorian and Antebellum periods to the fin de siècle. In doing so, it seeks to understand how each of these writers effectively reconciled publicity and self-commodification with respectability and authorial legitimacy. Incorporating cultural studies, new historicism, gender studies, and the discourse of the recently emerging study of celebrity culture, each chapter is a microhistory that focuses on the respective promotional tours of these authors. Because the tours offered Dickens, Stowe, Collins, and Wilde with a new medium in which to perform their authorial role, they illustrate the ways in which notions of authorship and literary labor were being reconceived in popular culture. Specifically, they show how celebrity and visibility played increasingly major roles in the public reception of these writers’ work within a mass market. Together, the chapters of this dissertation offer detailed discussions on four canonical writers while also providing an analysis of the larger structural, cultural, and social forces that helped to develop and sustain the nineteenth-century authorial celebrity within the literary realm.

Adviser: Laura M. White

“IN COUNTERFEIT PASSION”: CROSS-DRESSING, TRANSGRESSION, AND FRAUD IN SHAKESPEARE AND MIDDLETON

Anastasia S. Bierman — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:36:19 PDT

This thesis examines the way women cross-dressing as men functions as a crime in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night. While many modern scholars have discussed cross-dressing in these plays, many look to the end of the plays as the foundation for their analysis rather than the play as a whole. Because of this oversight, scholars deem the characters in the plays not transgressive, when, in fact, cross-dressing is transgressive. They ignore the way cross-dressing is often presented in writing in the Renaissance, i.e. as a type of crime, alongside thieves, adulterers, and vagabonds amongst others. If cross-dressing is synonymous with these other crimes, it is then a transgression, no matter if a person were to suddenly stop cross-dressing. While all cross-dressing is transgressive, not all cross-dressing is fraudulent, as in the case of Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl. Since she does not hide her cross-dressing, she is not a fraud. Shakespeare writes Rosalind and Viola to both transgress their prescribed gender roles and deceive other characters within the respective plays. Therefore, while Shakespeare overlooks it by ignoring the early modern English concerns about cross-dressing, using it as a comedic device, Middleton and Dekker directly pry apart transgression from fraud. In doing so, Middleton and Dekker’s Moll ultimately has more agency for she is able to become a self-actualized character who can maintain the hold and position her cross-dressing gives her even at the end of the play in women’s clothing.

Adviser: Julia Schleck

Intersections in Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri

Abigail Lowe — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:15:52 PDT

The connection between French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Italian political theorist Antonio Negri has drawn attention in academic publications over the last decade. For both thinkers, the philosophical concept of immanence is central to how both respectively conceptualize the world. However, in order to consider their work with regard to a metaphysical grounding, one may benefit from turning to each thinker’s engagement with Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose immanent ontology, or monism, was indeed his Ethics. This essay concentrates on drawing out an ontological distinction between the philosophical projects of Deleuze and Negri by way of a close reading of their interpretation of Spinoza’s work. It is through Deleuze's and Negri’s respective readings of Spinoza that we can contrast the two in terms of their ontologies, which, in the end, is ultimately a discussion of modality, of ethics, and of positive limits.

Advisor: Marco Abel

MONSTROSITY

Karen N. Wohlgemuth — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 06:35:23 PDT

The Early Gothic Period of English Literature was widely scrutinized for its sensationalism. This thesis explores the value of the genre by offering an alternative view of the monster typically portrayed. A close textual analysis of The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, and Frankenstein prove that the real monster is society, and more importantly ourselves. While this thesis dissects the innate characteristics of humankind in the novels, the author hopes that the readers will recognize the same themes in contemporary society. As students of the learned world, we all can acknowledge that Gothic fiction can teach us more than we ever thought we could learn.

Intermodality in Teaching Writing

Margarette Christensen — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:21:00 PST

This dissertation articulates a writing pedagogy based on a theory of intermodality to help writing instructors navigate the affordances and challenges of multimodal composition. Drawing from recent discoveries in neuroscience about how the brain makes meaning, I situate this pedagogy of intermodality – literally, “between the modes” – within the Rhetoric and Composition traditions of embodied rhetoric and visual/multi-sensory rhetoric. A pedagogy attuned to intermodality capitalizes on how the senses (“modes”) work together to create meaning when composing with sound, image, movement, and text. In addition to the five senses, intermodality also incorporates the cultural, social, and material aspects of meaning-making.

This study focuses on my own writing classrooms as sites of inquiry for implementing intermodality at key points in the writing process – invention, revision, reflection, and moments of resistance – as students compose digital literacy narratives. The digital literacy narrative provides an ideal opportunity to study intermodality in the writing classroom because of its invitation for students to reflect critically on their perceptions of digital writing specifically and literacy more generally, and its ability to encourage students to (re)position themselves as agents in their own stories. The text describes the synergistic, imagistic, and embodied dimensions of a pedagogy of intermodality and suggests the increased avenues for student expression, analysis, and persuasion when writing digitally. A pedagogy of intermodality reinforces the embodied, sensory aspects of writing by opening students to the affiliative elements of writing such as emotion, memory, and experience. The dissertation argues that, coupled with more traditional rhetorical instruction, a writing pedagogy attentive to intermodality helps students construct and implement effective rhetorical decision-making processes as they compose multimodally.

Advisor: Deborah W. Minter

WHAT I MEAN WHEN I SAY AUTISM: RE-THINKING THE ROLES OF LANGUAGE AND LITERACY IN AUTISM DISCOURSE

Bernice M. Olivas — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 10:05:03 PDT

Literacy studies are deeply intertwined with issues of identity. Olivas explores the ways that public discourses of autism have constructed an autism “Identity kit,” as defined by James Paul Gee, which harms autistic students and communities more than it helps. This is particularly true for adult autistics. Considering the growing presence of the autistic learner in the composition classroom, it is important to understand how public discourse influences classroom dynamics. Drawing heavily on her own experience as the mother of autistic sons and on Melanie Yergeau’s “Circle Wars: Reshaping the Typical Autism Essay,” Olivas explores how her children have been affected by public discourse and how her own identity as both a member of the autistic community and a teacher of composition has shaped her views on that discourse.

Advisor: Robert Brooke

"To Bend Without Breaking": American Women's Authorship and the New Woman, 1900-1935

Amber Harris Leichner — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 09:31:50 PDT

This dissertation focuses on constructions of female authorship in selected prose narratives of four American women writers in the early twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zitkala-Ša, and Gertrude Schalk. Specifically, it examines portraits of women in pieces that appeared in national magazines from 1900-1935 that bracket these writers’ careers and that reflect anxieties about their professional authorial identities complicated by gender and, in the case of Native American Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux) and African American Gertrude Schalk, race as well. In a period characterized by fierce debates over the role of women in a dawning modern age, these writers participated in cultural fascination with the New Woman by fashioning narratives that spoke to that interest but that also reflected conflicts or issues in the writer’s own life impacting her construction of literary authority in the public eye. I see a pattern of interest in the project of authorship across all four of these writers from the beginning of their careers until the end in my study of some of their first published pieces and some of their last.

After a contextual overview, I move chronologically through my four writers. I focus first on Wharton’s novella The Touchstone (1900) and its resonance in the story "Pomegranate Seed" (1931), tracing Wharton’s efforts to construct herself as a professional writer entering a male-dominated public arena. I next explore Cather’s "Office Wives" stories (1916-1919) and novel Lucy Gayheart (1935), connecting her anxious position as a professional female author with her critical attitudes toward the office and artistic production. Finally, I examine Zitkala-Ša’s construction of literary authority and her paradoxical status as a New Woman through themes of domesticity and liberty in her autobiographical sketches (1900) and story "The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman" (1921). I then identify prominent themes Schalk carries over from her late 1920’s urban realism fiction to her 1930’s romance formula fiction to reveal her constructions of gender, class, and race as at once fixed and fluid negotiations.

Advisor: Maureen Honey

Using Place Conscious Education and Social Action to Plug The "Rural Brain Drain"

Danielle M. Helzer — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 06:27:25 PDT

The following thesis will explore the Rural Brain Drain phenomenon as outlined by researchers Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas and its relation to a rural Nebraska school. In order to take action against the exodus of small-town America’s best and brightest, I propose a pedagogical solution that is a blend of Place Conscious Education and Social Action. The last part of the document features a narrative section describing how I’ve implemented the aforementioned solution into English 9 classes at Ogallala High School and the impact this had on students involved.

Adviser: Robert Brooke

Disciplinary Permeations: Complicating the "Public" and the "Private" Dualism in Composition and Rhetoric

Erica E. Rogers — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 20:00:51 PDT

As Composition and Rhetoric rose in disciplinary status and academic legitimacy the discourse practice of negation, the positioning of texts in oppositional binaries that set the “new” over the “old,” the “novel” over the “familiar,” became embedded in academic tradition, seeming to be an inherited part of scholarship instead of an individual’s rhetorical choice and deliberate ethos strategy. Negation, when one idea or set of ideas constructed by another is critiqued, advocated, and/or redeveloped by another scholar, is a discourse practice firmly established in the Rhetorical Tradition as part of Socratic dialogues, reappears in “modern rhetoric”, and remains today as the standard. To practice negation, despite its dialect violence, is to be the quintessential qualitative researcher, even as negation proves limiting to the trajectory of both logic and the making of new knowledge. Ideas, theories, and their implications are posited as opponents within a competitive market instead of interdependent collaborations building a body of knowledge within the discipline. This qualitative analysis reflects John Muckelbauer’s (2008) invitation to explore an idea/text beyond the “critique, advocate, and/or develop” strategies of negation (Muckelbauer 43) in order to forge “experimental pathways” toward interrelated and collaborative knowledge. By bringing plurality to inquiry, I position knowledge as a postmodern constellation of interrelated ideas instead of a singularity “discovered.” This approach to inquiry and analysis will demonstrate the circuitry, the interrelatedness of meanings, while at the same time reflecting the field’s larger commitments to equity, representation, and social justice that have not yet been reflected within the dominant discourses brokered within the field. Rhetorical choice, even within the professional text, thus becomes personal-public, a permeated dualism at once mapped and traced.

Adviser: Deborah Minter

The Dutch Smuggler's Story [abstract only]

Devin Murphy — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:49:55 PDT

The Dutch Smuggler’s Story, is a novel about Jacob Jonker, a Sea Captain, whose secret, early life comes to light in the wake of his arrest for human trafficking. Jacob grew up in a fishing family in Holland, and was conscripted into the German Navy as a teenager in 1943. Due to his seafaring ability, he was used as a test dummy for a new Nazi weapon, a one person midget submarine. When Jacob has success as a midget sub operator, he is bestowed The Knight’s Cross by the Germans as a propaganda ploy to lore more Dutch youth into the German service. This escalates a full scale crisis of identity, and ultimately his fleeing on foot through occupied Europe in the winter.

Advisor: Jonis Agee

Not: The full text of this work is not available; only the abstract is included.

Cumberland [abstract]

Megan M. Gannon — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:47:12 PDT

Set in a fictional town on the coast of Georgia in July of 1972, Cumberland is the story of two fifteen-year-old twin sisters, Ansel and Isabel (“Izzy”) Mackenzie, who have lived with their frugal, eccentric grandmother since the age of eight when their parents were killed in a car accident and Isabel was paralyzed. Over the years, the burden of caring for her sister has fallen increasingly on Ansel. However, as Ansel cultivates a romantic relationship with a local boy, as well as an artistic apprenticeship with a visiting photographer, her growing desires for selfhood and independence compromise her ability to care for her sister, thereby threatening their sororal connection, and ultimately, Isabel’s life.

Adviser: Jonis Agee

Note: The full text of this work is not available. Only the abstract is included.

Traumatized Voices: The Transformation of Personal Trauma into Public Writing During the Romantic Era

Karalyne S. Lowery — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:44:08 PDT

Beginning as early as the 1790s and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, it is possible to trace in British literature a distinctive line of fascination among authors with what we now understand to be trauma and its profound effects on the lives and behaviors of it victims/survivors. With today’s neurological proof of the changes that take place in the brains of traumatized individuals, it stands to reason that these changes have taken place in every century, not just the century in which we have had the technology to view it or the vocabulary to describe it. This means that psychological trauma is biologically and psychologically universal. Using Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery and empathetic readings, this study examines the personal traumas of several authors as related in their private writings and traces the transformation of that private trauma into the authors’ published works. The study examines traumatic grief, the results of an unsuccessful grieving process, and the possible traumatic captivity of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and how they manifest in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner;” traumatic loss combined with the dissociation cultivated by William Godwin as an abused child is discussed in conjunction with the writing of Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Mary Shelley’s many traumatic interpersonal relationships and the unique view they provided into the victimology of Frankenstein;and the role of empathy in creating healing relationships and in recovering from traumas in the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb along with the difference between sympathy and empathy in authors. Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is used as the example for sympathetic writing and Charles Lamb’s “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago” is used as the example of empathetic writing. As a whole, this study proposes that empathetic readings when combined with a trauma theory lens provide new insights into Romantic works.

Advisor: Stephen C. Behrendt

Trans-spatiality as the Horizon of the Coming Community: Ethico-ontology and Aesthetics in Asian Immigrant Literature

Dae-Joong Kim — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:10:38 PDT

This study centers on the potential scope and significance of trans-spatiality as a new literary concept. I employ the concept of trans-spatiality as a means of understanding Asian immigrants’ transnational experiences as represented by Asian immigrant writers in the Anglophone world. Trans-spatiality is a grounding term and methodological orientation, and its scope is relational and appositional. Thus, previous studies such as postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, diaspora studies, and globalization are related to trans-spatiality, but, in this dissertation, I strictly limit its use to an ethico-ontological and aesthetic understanding of Asian immigrant writers’ literary works. For this methodology, I explore and analyze various Western philosophers’ theories, especially Giorgio Agamben’s ethico-ontology. Also, I employ Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation and commonplace (lieux communs) as well as Walter Benjamin’s constellation to transit this theoretical exploration to literary studies.

In chapter one of my study, which follows a brief preface, I address Asian immigrants’ negative (animalized or Otherized) humanities by analyzing two Asian American poets’ poems and Glissant’s poem alongside a theoretical critique of Heidegger’s Western-oriented ontology and ethics. In chapters two and three, I analyze Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan to discuss Lee’s trans-spatial beings in terms of coming community and form-of-life, and Kogawa’s aesthetic testimony of Japanese Canadians’ internment during WWII via artistic signs. The fourth chapter shifts away from trans-spatiality in America-centered and anthropocentric narratives to a clone-centered science fiction and the critical space created by Kazuo Ishiguro, an Asian English novelist. This chapter ends with aesthetic and ethical inquiries into the clone as artist as a cornerstone of the relations between life and art. In the last chapter, I take on the topic of the relations between life and art via an overarching image of a bowl with the void in the center as a form of constellation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. I conclude this dissertation with a brief analysis of my own trans-spatial teaching experience.

Advisor: Seanna Sumalee Oakley

URBAN PLACE-CONSCIOUS EDUCATION: PRIDE IN THE INNER CITY

Tamara A. Zwick — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:22:34 PDT

Many educators are turning to place-conscious education as a means of making students’ education relevant and meaningful, as well as encouraging them to contribute to their local communities in positive ways. While many scholars focus their research on place-conscious education on rural areas, a growing body of scholarship examines how place-conscious principles can be applied in inner city schools. Differences in emphasis and approach exist between the rural and urban scholarship, however. This work analyzes some key differences as well as examining why they might exist. Urban students’ relationship with place is complicated by societal messages which make fostering a pride of place a difficult but necessary task for place-conscious educators.

Thirdspace Professional Development as Effective Response to the Contested Spaces of Computers and Writing

Jason L. McIntosh — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:40:19 PDT

In the physical spaces of writing classrooms and the conceptual spaces of writing practice and pedagogy, knowledge about computers is constructed by many individuals, groups, and institutions. Each has a stake in defining what computers mean for education and the role computers should play in the everyday life schools. Some of these stakeholders are immediate members of our school communities, such as students, teachers, administrators, and technology support staff. Some are not, such as politicians, researchers, and computer manufacturers. The effect of these often competing stakeholders is one of contested space. Writing teachers encounter contested space when we decide to make computers a considered part of our teaching. Contested space too often creates a lack of technical and pedagogical resources for computers and writing instruction. The most successful writing teachers are able to improvise and collaborate in order to create or gain access to these resources.

This dissertation draws on Edward Soja’s Thirdspace theory and case studies of three successful computers and writing teachers to describe contested space, its effects on writing instruction, and approaches to professional development. Soja’s theory helps us identify how the physical Firstspaces and conceptual Secondspaces of computers in our schools are shaped by powerful stakeholders. Thirdspace, the third spatiality of Soja’s trialectics, describes the improvisational experience of computers and writing instruction. It also suggests a set of core beliefs that we can use to help plan and facilitate professional development activities that support the multiliteracies and sense of agency teachers need to transform the contested spaces of computers and writing in their classrooms and schools.

Adviser: Robert Brooke

Leeched Stories, Layered Selves: Appropriating Narratives and Finding Voice in El Salvador

Kaitlyn E. Palacios — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:49:40 PST

Issues of shifting identity, border crossing, and layered systems of power have long been discussed and examined by scholars of Chicano/a and queer theory. This collection of creative nonfiction essays gives a personal, anecdotal perspective on those themes. The essays narrate the story of the U.S.-born author and her Salvadorian husband who is applying for his permanent residency in the United States. As the author travels to and from El Salvador, she contemplates her own positions of power and the problems of appropriating narratives of those outside of her community. In addition, as she learns her husband’s stories and the history of his country, she finds that her own identity and stories become more complex and hybrid. Even as she enters the narratives of others, she too is touched and transformed.

Adviser: Joy Castro

Imaginary You

Joshua A. Ware — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:45:57 PST

Imaginary You is a multi-genre collection subdivided into three sections: “Impossible Motels,” “Imaginary Portraits,” and “Writing through Nightwood.” One of the manuscript’s main concerns is the exploration of an in-between space formed by the conflation of real and imagined experience. More specifically, the writing puts pressure on Wallace Stevens’ aphorisms, as stated in his Adagia, that “In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality,” and “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” Similarly, Imaginary You seeks to integrate a classical theory of lyric address into its fabric by abjuring the hermetic, solipsistic, and meditative voice fostered during the twentieth-century by poet-critics (such as T.S. Eliot) and championed within contemporary lyric studies. To this extent, the book is, as R.W. Johnson writes in his monograph The Idea of Lyric, a collection of “I-You poem[s], in which the poet addresses or pretends to address his thoughts and feelings to another person”; likewise, the speaker of these poems re-creates “universal emotions in a specific context, a compressed, stylized story,” all the while “'sharing...these emotions” with an audience. Moreover, these lyric poems divide their “emphasis among speaker, discourse, and hearer,” so much so that the speaker becomes subservient to the other elements in that he forms his identity by carefully considering both discourse and hearer.

“The grin of the skull beneath the skin:” Reassessing the Power of Comic Characters in Gothic Literature

Amanda D. Drake — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:30:54 PST

Neither representative of aesthetic flaws or mere comic relief, comic characters within Gothic narratives challenge and redefine the genre in ways that open up, rather than confuse, critical avenues. Comic characters in the Gothic texts of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Clara Reeve establish the comic as a serious and legitimate part of the Gothic aesthetic. Comic characters continue to appear in all forms of the Gothic, including its parodies, well into the nineteenth-century, suggesting that these characters endure as necessary and vital elements within the evolving Gothic genre. As the genre evolves, the characters evolve as well, progressing from fool to humorist and then wit. This evolution reflects a shift in comic agency and the changing theories of humor between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The comic character’s creation of humor, in a literary genre whose sole claim to fame often seems to be the development of terror, creates an axis which reveals much about the Gothic author’s aesthetic concerns. In the context of insightful cultural readings delineated by recent Gothic scholars, I demonstrate how a formal reading of Gothic convention can establish not just cultural legitimacy for the genre, but also aesthetic legitimacy by reassessing the ways in which comic characters’ humorous wordplay deliberately disrupts readers’ expectations about the emotionally charged tenor of the conventional Gothic narrative.

Advisor: Dr. Stephen Behrendt

Living Well: The Value of Teaching Place

Catherine M. English — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:08:11 PST

This dissertation is a teaching memoir that examines the implementation of a place conscious pedagogy as a means to teach sustainable living practices into a secondary English classroom in a rural Nebraska school. It is framed upon the premise of instilling five senses of place consciousness into students as defined by Haas and Nachtigal (1998) including living well in community or a sense of belonging; living well spiritually or a sense of connection; living well economically or a sense of worth; living well politically or a sense of civic involvement; and living well ecologically or a sense of place. I argue that the five senses of place conscious pedagogy parallel three key concepts of sustainability: economic, social and environmental well-being. I illustrate several teaching practices as a means to instill these senses and sustainable well-being into students’ lives and consciousness, including oral history narratives in digital format, a deep mapping exercise, a writing marathon, work ethnographies, individualized local inquiries, and interdisciplinary local inquiries. I analyze and critique the value of connecting students within a writing classroom to other members of a community, which often involve intergenerational connections. I argue that these genuine inquiries and connections provide practice and mastery of basic writing and verbal communication skills and critical thinking skills.

I present the theoretical framework of place conscious education and sustainability in each chapter before presenting and critiquing student writing examples by exploring the kinds of rhetorical strategies students utilize within the framework of each writing practice.

Advisor: Robert Brooke