This thesis is an exploration of literary representation of professors, specificially in Willa Cather's The Professor's House and Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin. I explicate the political unconscious of these texts by teasing out the tensions and ironies stemming from the conflict between the radical political consequences of the titular characters' scholarship...
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...
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...
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Peter Betjemann
This thesis is an exploration of how male trickster figures operate in the
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...
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Peter Betjemann
This thesis is arranged in three chapters which explore Wharton’s representations
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...
Within literacy and composition studies, writing, as a
social act, is believed by many to have the potential to effect
change in and transform situations of injustice. Community literacy,
as an emergent practice within composition studies, embraces
and stretches this notion of linking literacy to social
change. Community literacy also...
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...
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...
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...
In this thesis I argue that Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian serves as a critique of the American Western mythos by collapsing aspects of myth, ideology, and the sublime into the question of violence's relationship to language. In explicating the novel, I demonstrate how the ironies staged between the...