The classroom practices discussed in this thesis come slowly and at a "slant" to feminism through critical reading of texts, a practice that I call a (re)presentation of the silent women in texts. Given our patriarchal western culture, making meaning, and especially making sense, of the role and representations of...
Violent right-wing groups have emerged in the German youth scene since reunification in 1990. By the early 1990's, many groups of people have had to face racist violence and harassment as a threatening part of everyday life.
With the social, political, economic, demographical and ideological changes which have taken place...
The alien abduction phenomenon has garnered considerable media attention in the last fifteen years, including many representations in books, film, and television. An overview of significant abduction literature is presented. Contrasts and comparisons are noted between popular written accounts and both the visual representations they engender and reports outside the...
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,...
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...
In Culture and Imperialism, Said illustrates that we have no "autonomous cultural forms," but rather "impure" ones that are the products of historically "discrepant experiences." American culture has an interesting relationship with the history of imperialism. The Europeans that settled the U.S. imported slave labor to assist in the growth...
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...
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...
The field of composition studies has concerned itself with the way in which people learn to write and the role schooling plays in writing development. Recently a trend has developed within the field towards exploring writing development outside of the classroom, termed the extracurriculum. Much of the scholarship thus far...
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...
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...
Traditional readings of George Bernard Shaw's texts suggest that he is not a pure
Marxist socialist because of the spiritual and nationalist aspects of his vision. This thesis
attempts to confront Shaw's politics in order to demonstrate that he indeed offers a viable
socialist program. Overlaying his socialism with Louis...
This thesis situates a discussion of Thoreau's later natural history essays in the context of the author's other writings. Beginning with an examination of the writings of Thoreau's friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, this paper examines Thoreau's relation to and departure from Emerson's understanding of time, place, and pattern...
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...
This thesis proposes expanding the locations where literacy narratives are currently used as readings and as writing assignments and considering broad conceptions of the types and uses of literacy narratives read in classrooms. In particular, this thesis asserts the value of expanding the literacy narratives read beyond the current canonical...
Presenting and synthesizing several paradigms for the teaching of literature in American colleges, I investigate how definitions of reading, readers, texts, interpretations, and knowledge affect student acts of reading and writing. In addition, I draw upon specific examples of text-based, reader-based, and social-cultural based models for the teaching of reading...
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...
My primary purpose in this thesis is to continue the refocused attention given to American "proletarian" fiction of the 1930's. Because of their politics and supposed artistic inferiority, many of these works have been marginalized by American literary critics. However, many contemporary scholars are reconsidering this genre and devoting more...
First year college writing classes originated in the United States at Harvard University in 1874. Since then, theorizing such a course has proven a place of contention, as its purposes and subjects have proven difficult to sort and impossible to agree upon. When Harvard first began teaching introductory composition, literature...
Kate Chopin, author of the proto-feminist novel The Awakening, was also a prolific writer of short stories. Nineteen of her stories were originally published in Vogue magazine between 1893 and 1900. This study looks at six of these stories, "The Father of Desiree's Baby," "A Respectable Woman," "The Dream of...
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...
Doris Lessing and Tsitsi Dangarembga write fiction set in Zimbabwe, the former Southern Rhodesia. Although Lessing grew up as a white settler and Dangarembga, a generation later, as part of the colonized African population, the women sometimes address similar issues. Both write of young girls trying to find a speaking...
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...
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...
Curricular models and teaching techniques that support college students as the primary authors of their writing-across-the-curriculum experiences remain largely unexplored. This thesis addresses that research gap by investigating the use of a start-of-term writing self-assessment and goal-setting questionnaire (STQ) for upper-division undergraduates taking writing-intensive (WI) college courses in their majors....
The eighteenth-century female of sensibility was characterized by delicate nerves that allowed her to feel her surroundings and enabled her to choose virtue over vice more consistently than males. While females were considered virtuous, their "innate" delicacy or weakness became their dominant trait and the true focus of male admiration....
The study of the social dimensions of Shakespeare's art is represented by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, C.L. Barber, Robert Weimann, Edward Berry, and Michael Bristol. Their work analyzes the background in Elizabethan social practices and popular dramatic traditions that contribute to the form, structure, and meaning of Shakespeare's comedies....
Recent conflicts in America concerning the environment (the harvesting of old growth timber in the Pacific Northwest, or the proposed opening of public lands in southern Utah to mining interests, for instance) have precipitated a personal examination of "historical others" (Jensen 64), individuals that possess very different sensibilities from a...
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...
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...