Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the most widely read novels written by an Oregonian. A mute Native American, a boisterous Irish white man, and numerous African Americans working behind the scenes of the narrative all converge in this struggle for autonomy. Little to no...
While a number of scholars in the field of Rhetoric and Composition continue to reassert the importance of whiteness as an object of study, a sense of anxiety about the effectiveness of extant antiracist rhetorical practices permeate recent scholarship. This thesis engages with thinking from black studies, afropessimism, and transnational...
Recent work in moral philosophy has displayed a renewed interest in ethics and ontology that consider the social constitution of the subject. However, these approaches to ethics, exemplified in Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself, often neglect the problem of antiblackness, which Afro-pessimist scholars argue operates at...
Traditional interpretations of James Joyce's Dubliners have often focused on the pervasive "paralysis" of the city, covered in the stories' range of "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life." However, these approaches have limited their focus on the women in the stories, often spotlighting the male characters--and the author--through a Freudian...
Contrasting the productive ground gained in ecological rhetorical theory through embedded fieldwork, composition as a discipline has yet to enact such transformative engagements with ecology. In this thesis, I put forward a praxis for ecological rhetoric and composition through permaculture design, utilizing the design framework’s system of ethics and principles...
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...
The rate of physician dissatisfaction is steadily rising. Between 2011 and 2012, the number of physicians that would not choose a career in medicine if given the opportunity to decide again increased by 15% (Adams). This discontentment has major repercussions in the midst of the rising need for physicians: it...
During the depression era, millions of Americans listened to the weekly radio
addresses given by Father Charles Edward Coughlin. He devoted his career to
speaking out against the evils of America and felt it his duty to warn Americans
against the perpetrators of this evil. But after 1934, the tone...
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 Romantic period sits in a liminal historical space when radically different ideas about the
categories of past, future, progress, and change coexisted in popular consciousness. The French Revolution inaugurated the concept of an Event, something that appears to come out of nowhere, and that not even the most well-informed...