This thesis argues that the first two novels of Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy mark a sharp turn from the antihumanism of his earlier ‘Southern’ novels to a more affective exploration of posthumanist subjectivity within a world dominated by social discourse and metanarratives. In my examination of All the Pretty...
This thesis examines the internet phenomenon of the “Sad Girl,” a name given to young women who identify and present themselves as inherently melancholic people online. I position the internet community of the Sad Girl, which spans across three social media platforms, Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram, within a larger history...
Asian American poetry is often considered a subcategory of poetry centered on the poets’ backgrounds. However, this project engages with the complexity of Asian American identity and experience as they trickle down from the poets, to their works, to interpretations of their art. Thus, I contend that these poets’ engagement...
Many queer scholars have made the turn away from orientations that treat Victorian queerness as either “lost” or “hidden.” Adding more complexity to literary theories which center practices of “revealing” queer artifacts, Sharon Marcus, for instance, argues queer encounters exist at the surfaces of Victorian literature. In addition, Anjali Arondekar’s...
In the months preceding the 2016 presidential election and during the Trump presidency, rhetoric, composition, and communications scholars expressed an urgent concern about the threat that Trump and his political affiliates posed to the status of truth in political life (McComiskey; Rice; Harsin; Cloud). However, the conversations surrounding the discipline’s...
Feminist compositionists have long argued for addressing the feminization of composition, or its association with low value “women’s work,” by revaluing caring labor (Enos; Heinert and Phillips; Tuell). However, this argument assumes that writing teachers’ care work is beneficial for all students and teachers. Focusing on responding to student writing...
This thesis explores the common features that unite postcolonial and posthumanist theories, finding that the Cartesian notion of representationalism has enabled the humanist hierarchy that both fields decry. This humanist hierarchy coalesces in the figure of the author, and as such its most effective criticism takes the form of metafiction....
Within composition studies, rhetorical genre studies (RGS) and labor-based grading (LBG) are engaged in similar projects that consider students not only as individuals but also as always part of a community; as such, both have worked to understand how students learn, how students value themselves and their work, and how...
The ongoing “method war” in literary criticism that has manifested as the impasse between Critique and Postcritique, which are identified respectively with paranoid and reparative modes of reading, raises existential questions about criticism in the face of its declining social value under neoliberalism. This thesis enters that impasse to suggest...
Recognized as a site of risk, innovation, and inspiration, failure is a growing area of multidisciplinary inquiry. My thesis draws attention specifically to the way composition studies approaches failure in order to ask: how can we implement failure pedagogies safely, and how do rhetorics of failure move toward social justice...