Composition scholars who have written about trauma have typically focused on creating classrooms that are conducive to healing and learning. In doing this work, however, they have considered neither how PTSD nor other people’s responses to it can impact one’s perceived rhetoricity in the college classroom. In other words, they...
My mother named me after Hollywood icon Katharine Hepburn, but what made a working-class girl grow to love this posh celebrity so much? The obvious answer is that my mother aspired to be posh herself; but lack of money or sophistication were not the only things impacting her potential— there...
This thesis explores the ways in which creative placemaking, a neighborhood-based practice for building community, can offer community-building and civic action wisdom as a model for composition. This model brings attention to spatial metaphors for rhetoric and teaching that have persisted for millennia; it re-focuses us on community; it encourages...
Recent work in moral philosophy has displayed a renewed interest in ethics and ontology that consider the social constitution of the subject. However, these approaches to ethics, exemplified in Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself, often neglect the problem of antiblackness, which Afro-pessimist scholars argue operates at...
One reading of the post-postmodern literary period argues that as formal aesthetics have (re)engaged with ethics there has been a concomitant move to treat literature as a space of ethical potential. Adam Kelly has called this attitude, when combined with the appropriation of certain metafictional and postmodern techniques, the “New...
Hypermediation, as described by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation, is a style of writing, recording, presenting, etc. that “makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (34). This mode of production...
A majority of eighteenth-century novels remain in regular print over two hundred years since their inception. Yet with the possible exception of Robinson Crusoe, they have largely fallen out of popularity, rarely appearing on "The Summer's Hottest Reading" lists or receiving celebrity endorsement. I consider Ian Watt's foundational study, The...
The following thesis explores the potential for autoethnography to serve as an enabling method for developing a grounded understanding of literacy, performance, gender and sexuality. As autoethnographic writing insists that even the seemingly most personal aspects of a researcher's character are deeply embedded in larger political and sociocultural narratives, this...
This thesis examines the characterization of the femme fatale and the implications of this trope for late-Victorian gender and sexuality in the ghost stories of female aesthete Vernon Lee. In her treatment of the femme fatale figure, Lee both reinforces and complicates the image of the sexualized, often bestialized woman...
Traditionally, Renaissance studies have neglected or overlooked the contributions of early modern female poets, many of whom produced lively, engaging, and highly creative work despite the limitations imposed on them by a rigidly patriarchal society. In my thesis, I examine the life and work of Aemilia Lanyer, a 17th century...