Index Catalog // ScholarsArchive@OSU

Writing home : memoirs of a working-class student

Creator:: Lathrop, Arminda W.
Abstract:: This collection of personal essays, inspired by Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, raises questions about the separation that becomes apparent through writing, education, and transitions between class. The author uses her personal experience of writing in, and attending a private university to explore the interactions of class, literacy, and education....
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Elementary Music

Creator:: Treat, Tanya
Abstract:: The four stories and one essay within are linked by themes: love, sex, truth, and music. Three of the stories are told by first person narrators who are also musicians. In "Elementary Music," a young girl views her parents' divorce through the lens of an orchestra concert in which she...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Unfinished work : reading Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth

Creator:: Ridinger, Angela F.
Abstract:: Ralph Ellison died without ever completing his second novel. After his death, the executor of his literary estate, John F. Callahan, edited Ellison's work into a novel published under the title Juneteenth. This thesis examines the problems posed by Ellison's posthumously released text, especially the issues of authorial intent and...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The infinite margin : living in reading

Creator:: Kleiman, Alicia J. Alicia J.
Abstract:: This thesis, a collection of creative non-fiction essays, explores the nature and influence of reading and school in the author's life. After a brief introduction explaining the title, part one describes the sensory dimensions of reading. Part two discusses the author's work as a student and teacher and the contradictions...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Remaking myths and subverting the mainstream : teen girls come of age on and off the screen

Creator:: Hentges, Sarah Duncan
Abstract:: For at least 30 years American culture has failed to provide empowering myths and symbols to its adolescents as they come of age and try to make sense of their selves, sexuality and the culture that surrounds them. This lack of myths and symbols is especially harmful to girls and...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Speaking for the dead : funeral rhetoric and women's lament in ancient Athens

Creator:: Robertson, Wayne
Abstract:: Recently, feminist scholars have begun to question the traditional telling of the history of rhetoric. Dissatisfied with a history which is told in terms of privileged, white males to the exclusion of all other voices, these scholars have worked to recover "lost" female rhetoricians and have begun critically rereading the...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

A feminist love story : the cinematic possibilities of Shakespeare's Juliet

Creator:: Faherty, Dionna E.
Abstract:: Literary and feminist theory have recently begun to recognize William Shakespeare's character of Juliet as a possible feminist heroine, but communicating this interpretation on film will be complicated. Not only will the film need to deal with the issues of adaptation that come with moving any play onto film, but...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

"They called me the hyacinth girl" : T. S. Eliot, masculinity, and the Great War

Creator:: Query, Patrick
Abstract:: This thesis traces the relationship between the First World War, constructions of masculinity, and the life and poetry of T.S. Eliot. Central to this relationship is a study of homoeroticism, which the author characterizes as different from homosexuality but not exclusive of it, in late 19th and early 20th century...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Claire Lies and other stories

Creator:: Rosenberg, Valerie P.
Abstract:: The five short stories included in this thesis depict characters who struggle as they try to balance their responsibilities to each other, and their own independent desires. Whether those desires include personal freedom, another relationship, or self-protection, these characters are at least minimally aware that obtaining what they most want...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Double exposure

Creator:: Raleigh, Elisabeth A.
Abstract:: DOUBLE EXPOSURE is a novel concerned with the phenomenon of memory. The story explores such questions as: To what extent does "memory" (and the narratives we construct from it) explain who we are? How is memory influenced by others-and does it matter if it is? Can a memory that is...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Fortunate son

Creator:: Bernard, Sean
Abstract:: The narrator of Fortunate Son is Jake, a 21 year-old who has recently arrived in Tucson, Arizona, after the death of his mother. He's spent his entire life on the road with his mother, possibly followed and antagonized by his father, whom Jake has never seen. He has come to...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The Orient King, and other stories

Creator:: Hess, Demian
Abstract:: These six stories represent a child's search for identity. The first story, "Road Map," is intended to be independent from the other pieces in this collection, but has been included because it is clearly set in the same place and explores many of the same themes of the other pieces....
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Believing details

Creator:: Harrell, Anna M.
Abstract:: In this creative non-fiction thesis, the author reads her own life, suggesting that she believes in the details of experience and knows truth in and through experience even though the truth is not always clear. The first chapter includes several narratives from her childhood experience. In the second chapter, the...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The influence of imperialist ideology on the dichotomy of passion and reason in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Creator:: Dietrich, Rhonda
Abstract:: A prevalent belief during the Victorian age was that the world was divided between inferior beings governed by passion and superior reasoning beings. On the political level, this idea separated inferior passion-driven natives from superior reasoning Europeans. This division contributed to the maintenance and expansion of imperialist rule in distant...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Expression & identity : the word made flesh

Creator:: Beach, J. M.
Abstract:: This essay is an exploration of identity formation and expression. Humanity's identity formations create the orientations and languages with which we use to create our knowledge and understanding of the surrounding external environment (both social and physical) and our internal environment (psychological). This essay traces the sources of identity formation...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Angel of Tough Love and other stories

Creator:: Wells, Jerome B.
Abstract:: The overarching theme of these stories is the relationship between love and hate, especially the connection between kindness and violence. In this fictional world, love often begets hate, and hate, love: a man's capacity for empathy serves as the catalyst for an act of brutality; a character's loneliness, his desire...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Scenes from the Tarot

Creator:: Stephens, Nia C.
Abstract:: Scenes from the Tarot is a novella that explores the desire to control time. The narrator, Truth Aiken, spurred by fear of her own death, recounts the story of her sister Beauty's death and its effects on Truth's highly unusual family. Proceeding backwards through time, Truth describes her tumultuous relationships...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Foodmaster and three stories

Creator:: Starr, Peter W.
Abstract:: The purpose of this thesis was to create a sustained piece of fiction that both represented my growth as a writer throughout my time at Oregon State University, and wove together a mixture of imagination, language, and creativity. My hope was to write a novella that incorporated and drew from...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Book of changes

Creator:: Fawbush, Vanessa
Abstract:: I have elected to write a creative nonfiction thesis because it serves to demonstrate my proficiency in the areas of rhetoric and composition. This thesis consists of a series of personal essays based on my effort to reclaim my voice as a writer. In order to organize these essays, I...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Geographers of writing : the authorship of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe in Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe

Creator:: Klinikowski, Autumn
Abstract:: Themes of authorship in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe highlight locations in the stories that expose the author's concerns with their responsibilities and contributions to society. In order to frame a discussion of authorship in Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe, it is essential to position Behn and Crusoe...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Down the Road

Creator:: Morrison, Rowan
Abstract:: Down the road is a collection of short stories written in the post-Stonewall tradition of gay men's literature, which has focused on works that reflect gay experience and specifically autobiographical fiction; a desire to write for gay readers without having to explain circumstances or points of view to readers unfamiliar...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The dry country

Creator:: Van Handel, Lucinda S.
Abstract:: Set in the dryland farming country of Eastern Oregon in the late 1950's, this novel follows a year and a half in the life of a young girl as she comes of age. A water rights dispute, the plight of nearby ranchers, disappointments in her own family and a harrowing...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Fallow

Creator:: Lutz, Kevin W.
Abstract:: Fallow is a creative non-fiction book of memory and place. It chronicles the lives of William and Vera Lutz and their lives of struggle on the Northern Plains of North Dakota. It follows a narrator and his attempts to make sense of, and connect to their, lives following both of...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

You stay here

Creator:: Bluhm, Michael A.
Abstract:: You Stay Here is the beginning of a novel that centers on the notion of family, community, and the expectations that drive our interactions within these circles. The novel tells the story of brothers Mills and Nance O'Malley as they interact with their parents, Richard and Margaret. The brothers own...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Hamilton Falls

Creator:: Peters, Patrick J.
Abstract:: Hamilton Falls is a screenplay about a young attorney who returns home from WWII, is appointed District Attorney, and begins investigating an old murder. In the course of the investigation, he discovers that his mentor, the former district attorney, may have been the murderer. The story follows the film noir...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Rethinking the dualism : Don DeLillo's White Noise and the ecocritical possibilities of the nature/culture mix

Creator:: Bowman, Natalie A.
Abstract:: Rethinking the Dualism: Don DeLillo's White Noise and the Ecocritical Possibilities of the Nature/Culture Mix questions current applications of ecocriticism and offers that these applications are inadequate in dealing with the perceived nature/culture dualism. This thesis suggests that ecocritics need to stop thinking in dualistic terms, but instead must consider...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Stillness

Creator:: Lont, Steven
Abstract:: This collection of stories explores moments of stillness in human relationships: moments during an argument when there is nothing to say, moments of quiet contemplation which precedes inevitable--and often unwelcome--life changes, moments of frustration, confusion, despair, and grace. In the chaotic lives of these characters, stillness is neither tranquil nor...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The long house

Creator:: Harris, Gregory A.
Abstract:: The Long House explores belonging and commitment. Jennifer Hawley, an American graduate student in linguistic anthropology, arrives in the early 1990s in Long Awan, a Dayak village in the remote highlands of Borneo. Her research concerns oral history among Punan families, traditionally nomadic, which have recently decided to settle in...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Violence and voice

Creator:: Dahlin, Angela
Abstract:: Violence and voice seem to be related. In this thesis I detail personal experiences with violence, and then put them into the context of research done about the ways in which violence affects the writing voice, as well as the speaking voice. Helene Cixous' writings about the writing voice and...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Living by the wayside and other stories

Creator:: Buchanan, Sherry
Abstract:: Living by the Wayside and Other Stories explores the tension between control and dependence and how that tension affects the ability to sustain intimate relationships. These are stories about women who struggle for independence, but experience the cost of self-rule as isolation. Living by the Wayside and Other Stories focuses...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Penitence

Creator:: Jaramillo, John Paul
Abstract:: In 7 composite stories--shifting from the roads of Southern Colorado neighborhoods, the fields and unpaved roads of Northern New Mexico, and the streets of Culver City, California--Penitence follows Relles Ortiz and the bleak peripheral existence of the voiceless suburban people living in disorder and disorientation within the harshness of their...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

"Present fears" and "Horrible Imaginings" : Gothic elements in Shakespearean Tragedy

Creator:: Appel, Ian S.
Abstract:: Gothic literary works are characterized as such by their ability to represent and evoke terror. The form this representation takes is varied; often terror originates in the atmospheric effects of settings, in the appearance of mysterious, supposedly supernatural phenomena, and, perhaps most significantly, in the behavior of villainous characters. Shakespearean...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Mike Rose : composing a reading of inclusion

Creator:: Jameson, Sara
Abstract:: Mike Rose researcher, professor, scholar, and author of numerous articles and books including the literacy memoir - Lives on the Boundary - has been active in the field of education and composition for over 30 years. This thesis looks back at the development of the discipline of composition studies to...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

West of Ellis

Creator:: Tafolla Young, Kathryne M.
Abstract:: Ellis, a booming mid-sized town in California's Central Valley, is packed with farmers and commuters, and plagued with a dwindling sense of itself and its history. Set against the backdrop of a failed murder-suicide, a secret affair and a wealthy local mogul's attempt to develop the town into something it's...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Steelhead

Creator:: Willis, Stephen E.
Abstract:: The thesis is the first third of a novel entitled Steelhead. The story takes place in and around a small southern Oregon town in the summer of 1967. The narrator, eighteen-year-old hot-rodding Emil Reese, discovers hippies swimming naked in the river near his house. The hippies, newly arrived from San...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The Yogiebogeybox

Creator:: Boothman Duyck, Tracy
Abstract:: The Yogiebogeybox is a novel-in-stories. This novel explores spiritual transcendence and the connection of art to that spiritual journey. A variety of points of view are employed in the narrative in order to depict the journey of the protagonist, Ant Malo, through this journey. Some of the narrative threads are...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Of mice and bunnies : Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner, and the age of consensus

Creator:: Allen-Spencer, Patricia C.
Abstract:: Post World War II victory culture and its fallout-the consensus ideology-led to the creation of a middle class willing to conform to a prescribed set of ideals, safely removed from all danger, and enjoying the material benefits of a growing middle-class income bracket. Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner, two seemingly...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Breeding the new woman : the eugenic discourse of motherhood in Shaw, Yeats, and Lawless

Creator:: Tracy, Hannah R.
Abstract:: The popularity and pervasiveness of eugenic discourse during the modernist period in England and Ireland raised many questions about race, class, and gender. While Hitler's Nazi "experiment" ultimately demonstrated the consequences of implementing eugenic ideas, forcing eugenicists to abandon, or at least mask, their theories, the eugenics movement before World...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The problems [of Paul Ricoeur's symbols] of evil

Creator:: Ritenour, Karen E.
Abstract:: In the early part of his philosophical career, Paul Ricoeur worked out a general theory of symbols which he illustrated with the symbols of evil. He subsequently explained this theory in several essays (his final major statement on symbols can be found in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The athlete and two stories

Creator:: McDonnell, Peter A.
Abstract:: The purpose of this document is to display a portion of the work I have completed over the last two years. The Athlete is the recently written opening to a novel of the same name. I've decided not to excerpt a longer section of the novel because the novel isn't...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Connections

Creator:: Millet, Terrance Lane
Abstract:: This thesis, a collection of short fiction, attempts to surface some of the discrepancy between inner and outer lives, between who these characters want to be and who they've become, between the lives they might have had and those they've chosen because the former are too chancy and the latter...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Vicarious power : masculinity, access and the hard-boiled detective

Creator:: Winsor, Shiloh
Abstract:: Dashiell Hammett's fiction and detective pulps generally, offered the reader a chance to participate in vicarious power, by giving them a sense of the profession of detection, both in and out of the stories. It was the realism of the detective figure that allowed the audience to relate to him....
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

There were bears and rumors of bears

Creator:: Miftaraj, Andre M.
Abstract:: There Were Bears and Rumors of Bears is a collection of stories that explores spiritual injury and recovery using a variety of interior and exterior narrative approaches to depict the profane and sacred, the mundane and non-ordinary, aspects of experience. In each story, the characters encounter situations in the physical...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick : hermeneutics and epistemology in Ishmael's seafaring

Creator:: Goodrum, Emily A.
Abstract:: This paper defends a reading of Hennan Melville's Moby-Dick that elevates Ishmael's status from mere narrator of Ahab's tragedy to that of protagonist of his own story, a novel of epistemological seafaring. As a metaphysical quester, Ishmael provides the novel's only reliable and complex vision of the condition of man...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Comic toast

Creator:: Ruch, Alison Louise
Abstract:: Comic Toast is a novel depicting a transition period in the life of the comic book artist character, Monica Holliday. This document includes a prologue, which provides details of a trauma in Monica's distant past, in order to inform Monica's adult reactions to the situations she finds herself entangled in....
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Six stories

Creator:: Kovatch, Sarah
Abstract:: The purpose of this document is to display a portion of the work I have completed over the last two years.
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Outside our periphery

Creator:: Sharp, Kimberly A.
Abstract:: The characters in each of these pieces exist outside the periphery of the so-called norm. In "Through Parted Curtains," "What They Do Besides Eat," and "Two Lambs," June wishes to enter the adult world that tends to exclude her (though she will only enter conditionally). June is, of course, about...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The fading

Creator:: Ni Bhraonain, Lisa
Abstract:: As I began to explore the evocative nature of language, the creation of themes and images, and the rhythm and beauty of words that I feel must accompany meaning, I discovered that I had always seen and heard and felt the world as many of my characters do; in this...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Things I lost in Istanbul

Creator:: Bush, H. Takken
Abstract:: This thesis is the first half of a novel in progress called Things I Lost In Istanbul. In the selection, Simon Wells, an American expat living in Turkey, is trying to ignore the changes taking place in his life and in Istanbul--his adopted home and sanctuary. The novel tracks Simon's...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Always talk to strangers

Creator:: Buck, C. Nathan
Abstract:: Always Talk to Strangers contains the first seven chapters to a novel. The novel focuses on the friendship between Amanda and Maria, two fourteen-year-old girls who are experiencing their last summer before high school in Madison, Wisconsin. Their friendship is a complicated one: Maria was kidnapped four years ago, the...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Confusion and disappointment in the dream world: the allegorical senses, courtly language, and poetic landscape in Pearl

Creator:: Lewis, Michael Stewart
Abstract:: My current Project on the late fourteenth-century Pearl observes the workings of allegory, courtly language, and poetic landscape. During this study, I pursue the elements of the poem that suggest a lack of spiritual growth and change, and an abundance of pain, torment, and confusion for the poem's narrator. I...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Scenes of language

Creator:: Duerst, Gretchen
Abstract:: In this creative non-fiction thesis, I present a collection of personal essays that examine my significant moments of awkwardness with failed communications or frustrated relationships when I wanted to draw people closer with language, but was unsuccessful. In the twelve stories, I discuss these issues in my interpersonal communication interwoven...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Headwater

Creator:: Martens, Jacob L.
Abstract:: These essays are an attempt to rebuild memories that explore the nature of work and family. They explore how work knocks against the joints of the body and against the joints between family members, and, as time passes, how the next generation inherits the family line of work only to...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Cutting off the Medusa's head : mythological transcendence in Emily Brontë and Eudora Welty

Creator:: Caputi, Roseanne Pascalette
Abstract:: The purpose of this project is to draw a more explicit connection between Eudora Welty and the literary influence Emily Brönte had on her, revealing Welty as a writer who is more integrated into literary tradition and history than many readers and critics have acknowledged. Both writers rely heavily on...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The Gospel : according to Matt

Creator:: Weber, Joshua D.
Abstract:: The Gospel: According to Matt is a novel, told in the first person, simple past tense, depicting the struggle of a young man attempting to make sense of his relationship with his estranged father as he wrestles with a growing crisis of faith. Matt is deeply sincere in his desire...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Space and movement : dance, art, and the poetry of William Carlos Williams

Creator:: Hoch, Jamie
Abstract:: The Modern era, roughly the time between 1860-1930, brought about a significant restructuring of artistic mediums. From the canvas to the page, artists of the twentieth century turned towards collaboration as a means by which they could reconfigure their works. Painters, writers, and dancers, borrowed aesthetic techniques from one another...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The control, resistance, and evolution of digital artifacts: a materialist study of internet culture

Creator:: Villemarette, Chris
Abstract:: My goal is to demonstrate that a coevolutionary relationship exists between decentralized networks over which digital media are used and the control mechanisms placed on those networks and digital media. The resisting digital media and the control mechanisms placed on them push each other toward further decentralization. The aspects of...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Whitman and technology: a modern romance

Creator:: Turner, David N.
Abstract:: Walt Whitman looked to the natural world, which he considered an original example of divine creation, for insights into the methods and patterns of the Creative Force; the poet then intuited connections between these divine natural patterns and human existence and spirituality. Convinced of the divinity of the human body,...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Tacit collusion : evidence of price leadership and sticky downward pricing in retail gasoline markets

Creator:: Russell, Scott P.
Abstract:: In this study, I test for tacit collusion in retail gasoline markets by testing for sticky downward pricing and price leadership. Using an extensive dataset consisting of twenty-five gasoline markets located in the greater Willamette Valley region of Oregon, I find evidence of sticky downward pricing in every market. I...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

How we live with words

Creator:: Rhoten, Karalee N.
Abstract:: The words we use to define our lives are often determined by the way we render any given moment. Every instance of writing is a moment of remembering, and a non-fiction essay gives the author free rein to unravel an instance, paint a portrait of what time has already come...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The Oregon State University Writing Center : history and context

Creator:: Weintraub, Melissa R.
Abstract:: The Oregon State University (OSU) Writing Center: History and Context provides a detailed and multi-faceted view of the Writing Center from its start in 1976 through the present. The information was gathered from interviews, annual reports, archival sources, and scholarly research. Chapter One examines the scholarly conversation about writing centers,...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Responsible pedagogy : (re)framing contemporary educational theory and American cultural politics

Creator:: Rust, Stephen
Abstract:: Responsible Pedagogy is examination of contemporary education in the United States. Responsible educators are dedicated to being representative, responsive, and respectful. These three principles guide the best teaching and learning that are taking place in classrooms across the country. Launched in 2003, Shakespeare in American Communities is the most ambitious...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Sound and death in John Haines's poetry

Creator:: Noble, Darren L.
Abstract:: Poet John Haines is best known for his first book of poetry, Winter News, which was published in 1966. The book contains poems about the Alaskan landscape that surrounded Haines during his many years of living in Richardson, Alaska. The recurring motifs in his poems include hunting, trapping, the Arctic...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Literacy politics and literacy education : thematic perspectives in contemporary Chicana/o narrative

Creator:: Bowman, Christine D.
Abstract:: Literacy is often considered to be a basic set of skills to be mastered by the student; the conventional wisdom maintains that the individual who has mastered these skills is then literate. Scholars in the field of literacy studies, however, argue that such assumptions about literacy fail to take into...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Asynthesis & act: the evental sublime in Badiou, Byron, and Barker

Creator:: Drury, Adam Marshall
Abstract:: Asynthesis & Act is a signiﬁcant intervention into the discourse of the sublime. Through a deep investigation of the critical metaphysics of Immanuel Kant, the ﬁrst chapter of this thesis puts forth the claim that the sublime is a radical experience that occasions a possibility for the individual to commit...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Edith Wharton’s dark ecology : representations of nature in three major novels

Creator:: Bacon, Julie M.
Abstract:: This thesis is arranged in three chapters which explore Wharton’s representations of nature in three novels: The House of Mirth (1905), The Fruit of the Tree (1907), and The Custom of the County (1913). This thesis contends that Wharton’s novels reveal changes in the interplay between representations of nature and...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Porchless staircase

Creator:: Jordan, Robin Lee
Abstract:: Porchless Staircase is a collection of poetry investigating a wide range of themes: consumerism, death, sexuality, alcoholism, religion, writing, family, and, most frequently, isolation. At times toying with notions of the sublime and surrealism, the confessional and the imagistic, these poems vary in form, process, and style, but are loosely...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Patriarchal power and punishment : the trickster figure in the short fiction of Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates

Creator:: Strempke-Durgin, Heather D.
Abstract:: This thesis is an exploration of how male trickster figures operate in the Gothic fiction of 20th century American female authors. Specifically, I look at the short stories “The Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson, “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor, and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Truth, justice, and the American way : what Superman teaches us about the American Dream and changing values within the United States

Creator:: Karp, Lauren N.
Abstract:: This thesis is a study of the changes in the cultural definition of the American Dream. I have chosen to use Superman comics, from 1938 to the present day, as litmus tests for how we have societally interpreted our ideas of “success” and the “American Way.” This work is primarily...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The postwar novel as postmodern : revisiting Catch-22 & Slaughterhouse-five

Creator:: Spreitzer, Peter
Abstract:: This thesis is an exploration of Catch-22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), two early documents of American postmodern literature. In particular, this thesis attempts to present the critical discussions surrounding each novel as parallel to the broader theoretical discussions surrounding the concept of postmodernism. My contention is that, in both of...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Music for strings

Creator:: deTal, Vicki
Abstract:: In this collection of linked stories, four characters navigate space between selves they’ve been and those to come. Alice must invent an autonomous identity after her husband dies in a bike crash. As she casts about to populate a new life, a geographer, a violinist, and a clarinetist emerge at...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Leaving the body : an elegy

Creator:: Harwell, Sarah
Abstract:: The death of a child is, for many, a fear too terrifying to imagine. The poems collected here explore this difficult loss; they examine the realities that form, and fall away, after the realization of a parent?s worst fear. Through the poems? speaker, a bereaved mother, a multitude of worlds...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Visible man

Creator:: Boisvert, Jon
Abstract:: This collection of poems discusses the human body, the desires to have control over that body, and the memories contained within. In some poems, the body is overt; in others, the probing spills from man into the animal world, and even poems that depict landscape often do so in bodily...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Wild west love songs

Creator:: Hinderliter, Robert
Abstract:: The eight stories in Wild West Love Songs explore issues such as loss, suffering, and betrayal, but perhaps the most consistent theme is the examination of the ways we are haunted by our past. All the protagonists in these stories are haunted. Sometimes they are haunted literally, by a ghost...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Freeway : poems

Creator:: Dickey, Eric Wayne
Abstract:: This collection of poems focuses on a range of content. They pose many questions that consider issues surrounding driving, cars and independence, as well as masculinity, fatherhood, domesticity and parental identity. The collection consists of three parts, Freeway, Menace, and Control. Freeway contains poems on driving and cars, some of...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Many sparrows

Creator:: Gustie, Michael J.
Abstract:: This collection of poetry explores faith and isolation while questioning the ability of language to adequately express subjective experience. Gustie has provided a deeply contemplative, though rarely completely serious, romp through the lives of others who, ultimately, are reflections of the self. The three sections of the collection establish a...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Learning by imitation : the scholarly works of David Bartholomae

Creator:: Gallup, Sarah E.
Abstract:: This thesis examines the scholarship in pedagogical theory and practice of David Bartholomae over the past thirty-five years, in particular examining the role that the rhetorical construct of imitation has played in its development. Through my research, I trace the evolution of Bartholomae’s pedagogical stances and practices, as these both...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

A quest to redefine feminine heroism : heroines of the Brothers Grimm and Angela Carter

Creator:: Butler, Kelly E.
Abstract:: Literary fairy tales facilitate a specific inquiry into heroine quests. Due to the flexibility of the fairy tale genre, a variety of heroine tales have been produced. The specific stages of a heroine quest must be described in order to understand the direction and goals of these quests. In order...
Resource Type:: Undergraduate Thesis

A circle of response : addressing the tensions of teacher responseto student writing

Creator:: Carothers, April D.
Abstract:: What students need most from instructors’ written response on their texts is commentary that evokes a sense of exchange. Teachers often believe that their job is to point out the deficits in a student’s paper and help eliminate those deficits. While this is a part of the function of response,...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The mercurial : stories and essays

Creator:: Dmitriev, Vladena Aleksandra
Abstract:: Vladena Aleksandra Dmitriev, in her collection of fiction and nonfiction The Mercurial: Stories and Essays, examines the conflicts inherent in language, whether in her own experiences as a non-English speaking immigrant from the Soviet Union to the submersed anger and resentment that emerges quietly in disintegrating relationships. What unites these...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

From the encoded to the explicit in the 20th Century Irish romance : a study of Elizabeth Bowen's The last September and Edna O'Brien's The country girl's trilogy

Creator:: Breeden, Shobana L.
Abstract:: This thesis uses both feminist and new historic theories to argue that the women's romance novels The Last September (1929) by Elizabeth Bowen and The Country Girl's Trilogy (1960, 1962, 1964) by Edna O'Brien are tragic bildungsroman that subvert and challenge the Irish patriarchal marriage expectations of their respective time...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Kiddie pool : stories

Creator:: Haskins, Isabelle
Abstract:: Kiddie Pool is a collection of eight short stories dealing in general terms with themes of culpability and control. The characters in the stories have their share of problems—car accidents, domestic violence, manic depression, obesity, unexpected deaths, truth or dare, religious crises—but they are resilient souls who keep on keeping...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Half-life : essays

Creator:: Fath, Lauren
Abstract:: Lauren Fath, in her non-fiction collection Half-Life: Essays, examines the underpinnings of her upbringing in suburban Fort Wayne, Indiana, focusing primarily on familial relationships and the importance of hindsight in understanding how our families make an imprint on our lives. By looking at our relationships through the lens offered by...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Modern apostles

Creator:: Casas, Ruben
Abstract:: Modern Apostles actively attempts to blur the line between academic scholarship and narrative fiction for the purpose of satirizing the social and the political assumptions of its contemporary moment. By appropriating the loudest voices in dominant American culture, the inter-textual narratives (1) call attention to the voices that go unheard,...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The accessible Chaucer

Creator:: Luepke, Natasha M.
Abstract:: In this thesis I explore the ways in which twenty-first century Americans have access to Geoffrey Chaucer and his works. I look at issues surrounding Chaucer within the canon debate, high school history and literature textbooks, and Chaucer in popular culture, such as in movies like A Knight's Tale. I...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Water, fire, and stone : images and meaning in Melville

Creator:: Martin, Brian D.
Abstract:: This thesis is a study of Herman Melville’s symbolism. I have chosen to investigate the elemental images of water, fire, and stone in Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852), and Clarel; A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). This work is a semiotic study, insofar as the...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

May we all wake up one by one

Creator:: Ludden, Jason
Abstract:: May We All Wake Up One By One is the beginning of a novel set in the West African country of Guinea. The story follows Sean Wake, a twenty-something American who finds himself working for the Feed the World Program as the country falls apart around him. While his co-workers...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Mirage

Creator:: Houghton, Melissa G.
Abstract:: This collection of poems spans a range of content. They pose many questions that consider issues surrounding identity, perception, and the relationship between the self and other. The collection consists of four parts. Parts I and IV explore the self and other by using personal experience and persona. Part II...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Beneath this roof : stories

Creator:: Carpenter, Claire
Abstract:: These stories follow the lives of women in a variety of roles—housewife, deli employee, artist, bird keeper, and sitter for the elderly—and at different stages of life. In “Beneath this Roof,” a young housewife’s life is rocked by a visit from an old friend who has changed in unexpected ways....
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

"Style upon style": The Handmaid's Tale as a palimpsest of genres

Creator:: Boulware, Taylor J.
Abstract:: This thesis undertakes an examination of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, as a layering of genres. A futuristic dystopia that imagines late twentieth-century America as having fallen into neo-Puritanism and totalitarianism following widespread infertility and violence, The Handmaid’s Tale invites contemplation of various forms of fundamentalism, radicalism, and...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Fitzgerald’s idealism and the question of wealth

Creator:: Wood, Amy
Abstract:: In This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and several of his short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald questions the importance of wealth as a factor in supporting happiness and fostering the American Dream on an individual basis. With these texts, Fitzgerald acknowledges that wealth is a factor and, simultaneously, a...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Imagining Kenya in Ngugi's fiction

Creator:: Prasansak, Ram
Abstract:: The relationship between literature and nation-building has been one of the most crucial issues in postcolonial studies. The novel in particular is regarded as a means by which writers forge national consciousness among the colonized during the time of colonization. Many African writers themselves, for example, conceive of their work...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Traversing the city of blogs : pedagogy, performance, and public spheres

Creator:: Faris, Michael J.
Abstract:: In this thesis, I conduct an analysis of blogs in order to understand their potential use in the composition classroom with the goals of students writing for a public audience and developing their rhetorical and civic agency. I do so by exploring the potential for the blogosphere as a public...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Constructing heroic identities : masculinity and the western film

Creator:: Foster, Brad D.
Abstract:: This thesis employs the study of gender to demonstrate how recent Hollywood western films have constructed a hero that is reflective of contemporary beliefs regarding masculinity. Beginning with a New Historicist approach at studying gender, this work first considers the construction of masculinity in post World War II America and...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Ms. Miles is missing

Creator:: Wisniewski, Stephanie E.
Abstract:: Ms. Miles is Missing—the beginning of a novel—is the story of a woman who, in her early thirties comes to realize that the life she is living is not the life she wants. She yearns for her lost childhood, and tries to come to terms with her mother’s death. Martha...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

"A dissonant element" : the difficulty of Anais Nin

Creator:: Burghauser, Sarah B.
Abstract:: This thesis is arranged in three main chapters, each of which focuses on a particular type of Anaїs Nin text, and each of which is intended to enlarge Nin's complexities through distinct but overlapping perspectives. The idea connecting these three chapters is that Nin, who has been radically misrepresented by...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

The Clerk’s Tale : literal monstrosities and allegorical problems

Creator:: Brock, Christopher J.
Abstract:: My thesis, entitled “The Clerk’s Tale: Literal Monstrosities and Allegorical Problems,” argues that Chaucer’s Clerk is engaging both sides of a binary system. The Clerk has situated himself in a precarious position between two major schools of thought in the medieval culture, Franciscan and Dominican; the former promotes the will...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Revisioning grandeur : an exploration of intertextuality in Alice Munro and Virginia Woolf

Creator:: King, Michelle L.
Abstract:: In this thesis I argue that Alice Munro’s work takes part in an ongoing feminist discourse that examines alterations in male and female gender relations, as they have been represented in domestic fiction by women writers since the late nineteenth century. I analyze two short stories written by Munro: “Meneseteung,”...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Fighting tradition : Hemingway’s Nick Adams and shell shock

Creator:: McGrath, Cole P.
Abstract:: In his Nick Adams stories, Ernest Hemingway traces the life of a single man as he moves from boyhood to adolescence to adulthood to fatherhood. From the beginning of Nick Adams life, it is clear that he does not fit into the role of the traditional hero. In addition, Nick...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

Patoka : four stories of Southern Indiana

Creator:: Drew, Christopher M. (Christopher Max)
Abstract:: These stories are an attempt to give a distinct literary voice to the people and places of rural Southern Indiana. They also strive to deal with certain elements indigenous to that region, some of which can be described generally as the tension between modernization and tradition, family and marriage as...
Resource Type:: Masters Thesis

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