This thesis complicates the traditional associations between authorship and alphabetic composition within the comics medium and examines how the contributions of line artists and writers differ and may alter an audience's perceptions of the medium. As a fundamentally multimodal and collaborative work, the popular superhero comic muddies authorial claims and...
This thesis examines the postmodern confrontation of representation throughout the oeuvre of Martin McDonagh. I particularly look to his later body of work, which directly and self-reflexively confronts issues of artistic representation & masculinity, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of his earliest and most controversial plays. In...
This thesis is a collection of three short stories and the
beginnings of a novel. A similar thread is woven through all the
stories: in the attempt to know spiritual truth, what it is to be a
woman, and to know themselves, the various protagonists precariously
oscillate between the seemingly...
This thesis analyzes the efficacy of emancipatory (critical) pedagogical practices in an educational climate of standards-based reform. Using two films noir of the blacklist era--Body and Soul and Crossfire--as the core texts of a unit in a secondary school curriculum, I argue that an emphasis on student agency and a...
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...
In 1965 Malcolm X said that we are living in a time of extremism. People in power have misused it now there has to be a change, and a better world has to be built, and the only way it's going to be built is with extreme methods. And I,...
Nineteenth-century England witnessed burgeoning urban growth and the resultant struggle of the poor to find adequate shelter. Against this backdrop, Charles Dickens was a fierce advocate for the rights of the street people of London to have sanitary and adequate housing, earning him the title of radical. By combining sentimentality...
Discussions of ecopoetics often seek to investigate how poetics as a form can be rendered more ecological, often in contrast to nature poetry. These conversations tend to concentrate on this generic contrast and the formal qualities of an ecological poetics. Ecopoetics as a field emerged largely as a response to...
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...
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s 1922 modernist poem The Waste Land presents itself as an alternative to the decaying society Eliot found himself inhabiting. It begins as a personal means of pulling together one’s fragmented consciousness, but in doing so Eliot manages to present a solution to a world of selfishness—looking beyond...