Copyright (c) 2009 University of Nebraska - Lincoln All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss Recent documents in Dissertations, Department of English en-us Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:22:21 PST 3600 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/15 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/15 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:29:47 PDT During the pivotal years of Willa Cather's artistic development, she regularly engaged a variety of American arts communities that encouraged, challenged, and influenced her work and professional growth. Her interactions with these communities were an effort to locate a sustainable, meaningful relationship to her fellow artists. This dissertation explores her efforts by analyzing the character of the communities, chronicling Cather's involvement within them, and interpreting the impact on Cather's life and work. After the Introduction, the chapters are organized to follow Cather as she experimented with various communal forms and developed her own relationship to the literary scene. Chapter one explores Cather's relationship with Annie Adams Fields and the circle that gathered around Fields's Boston home. Fields, who was Cather's ideal of the literary hostess, demonstrated the power a community could have on an artist's work and engaged Cather's imagination as a representative of the American literary past. Chapter two investigates Cather's experience in Greenwich Village during the early twentieth century, a time when the neighborhood was popularly known as the home of political and artistic radicals. Cather's comments about the Village, particularly in her story "Coming, Aphrodite!," demonstrate her efforts to counter the Village's popular identity and define her own role within the community. In chapter three, I look at Cather's involvement in three formal artists' colonies: the Bread Loaf School of English, Mabel Dodge Luhan's colony, and the MacDowell Colony. Her involvement with and eventual rejection of these colonies suggests Cather's growing awareness of her own creative needs and worth as a legitimate artist. The final chapter details the most profound artistic relationships of Cather's life, the intimate circle of her friends and fellow writers. Examination of her professional exchanges with Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, and Edith Lewis reveals that Cather frequently relied on the encouragement and suggestions of these women while creating her work. Adviser: Susan J. Rosowski Andrew W. Jewell http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/13 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/13 Tue, 09 Dec 2008 07:32:23 PST Modern audiences have come to believe that the nineteenth-century woman was oppressed by a patriarchal society and that until women obtained the vote, they had no voice, and could exert no influence to improve either their lot or that of others. While many scholarly secondary sources, as well as popular culture, strongly support this view, this research challenges it, and posits that this generally accepted interpretation echoes stereotypes that became strong with the second wave of feminism, in the 1960s, but is not representative of nineteenth-century middle-class women in the Anglo-Saxon world. This research examines the British middle-class woman of the nineteenth century as she defined herself or as her male contemporaries saw her through works of fiction and non-fiction and through various areas where women were particularly active, within the home and without. The nineteenth century is considered here in its extended length: approximately from the dawn of the French Revolution to the sunset of Victorianism, immediately following the Great War. Drawing examples from history as well as from fiction, this study focuses on examining primary sources, whether biographies or essays, as well as short stories, novels, and occasionally poems, with women as authors or central characters. Furthermore, artwork, so abundant and so valued through the period, is used here to provide a more exhaustive understanding of nineteenth-century men and women and to see with their own eyes how they perceived life, their aspirations, and themselves rather than to rely on the image projected by contemporary scholars and echoed by the media. The British middleclass woman of the nineteenth century emerges from this study as multi-talented, educated, purposeful, extremely feminine, and widely influential upon her society, even without the vote. The span of the period studied further reveals that despite technological differences, the ideals and motivations of women, and men, remained much the same and were significantly infused with the strength of their Christian beliefs. Sylvie A. Shires http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/12 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/12 Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:13:56 PDT This dissertation explores Hispanic/Latino students' perceptions about language association and identity, the institution, and white professors at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. Issues addressed include the origin of a stigmatized relationship between Euro-Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. and its spill into academia, negative perceptions that affect students' performance and persistence in the university, discussing the culture of power of the institution with students as a form of sponsorship, and providing academic literacy sponsorship through an Academic Cultural Guide role. The dissertation concludes with examples of strategies I have used in the first-year writing classroom to establish transparency of my role as instructor, teach literacy narratives, and foster relationships with students to meet their academic needs. Luis Balmore Rivas http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/11 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/11 Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:21:23 PDT Working at the intersection of composition, writing assessment, and school reform, this dissertation draws on an archival study of Progressive Era educational journals and a year-long qualitative study in a small urban district to examine the ways standardize writing tests are implemented as tools in public school reform. In the first half of the dissertation, I argue that administratively-minded Progressive Era school reformers, in a response to a "writing problem" framed around teacher inefficiency, designed tools for teachers to measure writing "objectively" in their classrooms; however, these tools were quickly used against teachers by administrators interested in efficiently managing schools based on the ideology of Frederick Taylor's scientific management. In the qualitative study, I examine how Butler Public Schools (BPS) created a Writing Graduation Exam (WGE), as a response to a perceived threat of accountability from outside the district. In both historical and contemporary contexts, I demonstrate how the framing of the problem led to the implementation of standardized tools and school structures that work to manage teachers, students and writing. Juxtaposing the historical and contemporary sites, I trace how a piecemeal version of scientific management is embedded in large-scale writing assessment in order to yield efficient and accountable teachers, students, and writing in schools. The second half of the dissertation exposes moments of fissure that exist within BPS's system of accountability. Through the fissures, teacher's subjugated knowledges (Foucault) surface and provide a critique of the intended and unintended consequences of the WGE. In chapter two, I explore counter-narratives of the "official story" to illuminate the intended and unintended consequences of BPS's school reform; chapter three examines disruptions in a scoring session over concerns of test validity; and chapter four exposes how teachers negotiate their judgment between disparate theories of writing. I contend that excavating teachers' subjugated knowledges serves as a potential space to reimagine current practices of school accountability and writing assessment. Eric Turley http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/9 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/9 Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:04:51 PST E. B. White called Walden his favorite book and found in it "an invitation to life's dance." To read White ecocritically is to accept a similar invitation to broaden our environmental imagination. Although one or two of his essays are often anthologized as nature writing, critics have not read White environmentally. While emphasizing White's three books for children, this dissertation reads across genre lines to examine his lifelong work. Drawing on Laurence Buell's prismatic term, the study explores how White's engagement with the natural world contributes to the renewal of our collective environmental imagination. Examining White's affinity for animals, evident across the spectrum of his work, this study concludes that for White the world is fundamentally inhabited both by humans and non-human animals; his work reflects concern for the habitat of both. White's three books for children, considered within a framework of Joseph W. Meeker's literary ecology, form a bridge connecting children's literature and ecocriticism. This study presents Stuart Little as a series of place-based adventures and a comedy of survival. In Charlotte's Web, White's environmental magnum opus, he presents his biophilic sense of the web of life and invites the animal world to speak for itself, Fern showing the rest of us how to pay attention to other species. A braided story of human and animal habitat, The Trumpet of the Swan continues Stuart's quest underway at the end of the earlier book. An initial chapter exploring White's literary ecology (his childhood in the age of nature study, his early sense of place, and his affinity for animals) also examines representative essays, poems and other writings. Closing the study is a chapter connecting White to the wider web of environmental literature through a focus on the nature of story, an emphasis on animal presence, and an expansive sense of ecocriticism that includes children's literature. Finding the root of the environmental imagination to be in childhood experience, the study treats each of White's children's books in separate chapters Lynn Overholt Wake http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/8 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/8 Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:49:45 PST This dissertation traces the gender differences of black rage expressed in African American literature before the Civil Rights Movement. It begins with the captivating theme of white silence and black rage battling each other throughout the century of 1845-1946. After providing a scholarly overview of this theme in literature, I provide some personal reflections on black rage and African American literature during slavery and Jim Crow in Chapter One. Chapter Two provides an excellent starting point for examining black rage with the two most famous nineteenth century slavery narratives. Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) exemplifies the angry black male as he demonstrates how racism drove him to physically lash out against his slave master. However, Harriet Ann Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) provides the opposite reaction; she buries her pain within. Chapter Three leaves the days of slavery and journeys into the post-Reconstruction era with Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Their writings eerily mirror the experiences of Douglass and Jacobs, but there are notable differences. Biracial males battle with rage by passing for white men, whereas biracial females internalize their rage. Finally, Chapter Four reveals a new perspective on black rage that was present in the inner cities of America during the 1930s and 1940s with Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ann Petry's The Street (1946). Black rage is much more violent when compared to the previous texts. Wright's male protagonist is led to the death chair because of his violence, and Petry's female protagonist experiences a murderous rage. Some of the most important scholars and thinkers who frame my dissertation are Robert Stepto, William L. Andrews, Noam Chomsky, Jean Fagan Yellin, Barbara Christian, Julianne Malveaux, David L. Blackmore, Martha J. Cutter, Deborah E. McDowell, James Baldwin, bell hooks, and Cornel West. Steven T. Moore http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/6 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/6 Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:59:51 PDT In this dissertation, I build upon the notion that for writing centers to thrive in the twenty-first century, they must reposition themselves not as marginal but as central to alliance building within the institution (Brannon and North). I tell the story of establishing one writing center's mission that thrives on building democratic relationships within the institution and dissolving traditional academic hierarchies. At the core of our mission is the dialogical exchange that allows for student writers to be heard. The true work of establishing and preserving the integrity of the open forum we have created for student writers involves making democracy an institutional way of life not only within consultations but also with each other as writing center professionals, with the faculty, and with administration. The main goal of this dissertation is to help my fellow colleagues in writing centers and composition conceive of the various forces within an institution not as potential problems to avoid, but as institutional relationships to develop and foster. Relying throughout on Dewey's notion of democracy, I share representative anecdotes from our writing center to illustrate the process of relationship building and provide conceptual tools to put them into a useful context for readers: dialogue (Freire); rhetorical listening (Ratcliffe); critical colleagueship (Lord); institutional critique (Porter et al); and critical administration (Lee; Shor and Freire). Throughout, I argue for the writing center's capacity to democratize various forms of institutional communication and effect meaningful change. This project also answers calls from Elizabeth Boquet and Nancy Maloney Grimm to move writing center scholarship from the familiar declaration of independence brand of manifestos to work that conveys the intellectual and pedagogical value of writing centers. Overall, this dissertation offers for writing center directors and other educators interested in promoting democracy a form of institutional literacy (Gallagher) that provides an alternate way to read the role of the writing center within the institution. Adviser: Chris W. Gallagher Katie Hupp Stahlnecker http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/5 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/5 Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:32:23 PDT My research began with the question, "How did former journalists depict aspects of the newspaper environment in late-nineteenth, early-twentieth-century fiction?" A historical reading of journalism and fiction places the emphasis on what historical moments or trends these writers documented, and how they presented their worldview. To present findings on how a journalism career proved beneficial for a novelist, I examine arguments debating the shared space between fact and fiction when writers tried to raise their readers' cultural awareness. My study pays particular attention to newspapers such as the New York Herald, the New York World, and the Atchison [Kansas] Globe. I also find evidence in journals devoted to literature and the writing process such as Forum, Writer, and the New York Times Book Review.My study constructs journalism-derived definitions of realism, naturalism, and modernism to chart America's literary developments. These developments regularly cross through urban sensationalism, country journalism, exposes, editorials, and hyper-textual presentation. I organize these developments through fact-fiction dialogs where both journalists and novelists attempted to engage readers in their material. Ultimately, I conclude texts by the paired journalists-turned-novelists covered similar topics in both genres. However, in each case the second writer portrayed the shared topic with increased cynicism toward American society.Each chapter explores the literary reputations, journalism, and newspaper-related literature of ten journalists-turned-novelists: Mark Twain, E. W. Howe, W. D. Howells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, George Samuel Schuyler, Willa Cather, and John Dos Passos. My conclusion offers other avenues available for a study in a journalism-literature discussion, such as travel writing by journalists-turned-novelists, or explorations of the journalist-turned-novelist trend in other countries. My research continues the journalism-literature discussion by such scholars as Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Michael Robertson, John C. Hartsock, Nicole Parisier, and David T. Humphries. Derek John Driedger http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/4 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/4 Fri, 09 Jun 2006 11:31:31 PDT This Is My Idaho is a collection of short stories set in or around the fictional town of Eagle City, Idaho, in southeast Idaho near the borders with Montana and Wyoming. There is a wildness in this part of the world, circled by high, unforgiving mountains, that resonates within the people there. The characters of this collection must hammer out their lives against this landscape. Some, like Mary in "What the Good Is," and Ginny in "The Sugar Shell," feel the mountains as a kind of barrier between them and the rest of the world and yearn to escape. Others, such as the curator for the Philo T. Farnsworth television museum in "Evidence," go to the mountains looking for answers. And some, like Colleen in "Silvertip," and Andy in "Andy's story," are forced to confront the harsh way Idaho shapes them into the people they will grow up to become. The writers who influenced this collection, especially Elizabeth Bowen, Carol Bly, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Jane Smiley, were committed to giving us truth through a sense of place. As Welty says, "Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course," and Idaho, in this sense, proves to be fertile ground. But this collection in more than a book about people from Idaho. It is about the way we all, against the obstacles of nature and love, must come to define ourselves as something born out of and separate from the places we come from. Cynthia L. Struloeff http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/3 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/3 Fri, 21 Apr 2006 06:50:06 PDT This collection explores of some of the many ways in which Native American, Irish, and immigrant Irish-American cultures negotiate the complexities of how they are represented as "other," and how they represent themselves, through the literary and cultural practices and productions that define identity and construct meaning. The core issue that each chapter examines is one of authenticity and the means through which this often contested and vexed notion is performed. The Irish and American Indian points of view which I explore are certainly not the only ones that shed light on this issue, but these are the ones I know best from my own life and studies. I have sought to combine main stream scholarly rigor with the ways of theorizing that reside within these two cultures, ways that have been excluded from the academy except in very limited and very recent forms. Literary criticism is combined with elements of personal essay in some chapters. In addition, the final chapter explores authenticity and identity through a chapbook collection of original poetry. Advisor: Jonis Agee Drucilla M. Wall