Online fanfiction communities have received attention for providing spaces of creativity and individual empowerment. Yet as critics have sought to establish fanfiction as a worthy object of study, many have not grappled with the ways that fanfictions not only trouble, but also reinforce various discourses and ideas of gender and...
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...
This thesis is a study of the shifting philosophical trends in the works of Samuel Beckett, Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut as representations of a greater shift from modernism to postmodernism. I have chosen to explore Beckett's plays Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape, Barthelme's short stories "Nothing: A...
This thesis explores the artistic imperatives and internal struggles of women painters in two novels, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). I identify Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe as painters who exhibit Impressionist strains, both in how they paint and how they...
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...
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....
This project blends personal narrative with scholarly work to recognize the interplay between these genre categorizations and to affirm the academic value of lived experience. Through this method, I play in the intersections of trans pedagogies, queer pedagogies, and pedagogies of love and care. By recounting how I blended these...
Within The Lamplighter, a novel written in 1854, Maria
Susanna Cummins defines a version of the sentimental novel
that significantly differs from the prescriptive analysis
male critics have offered for the genre. This thesis
argues that feminist theory and recent rhetorical theory
have caused a critical paradigm shift that has...
This thesis is based on a two-part study that analyzes the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the Hawaii student population at Oregon State University (OSU). I designed and conducted a survey among Hawaii students at OSU. Then I interviewed ten Hawaii students who self-identified as Hawaii Creole English (a.k.a. Pidgin)...
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...