Creative nonfiction is a genre replete with contradictions--the name itself shows that: nonfiction writing is true and factual, but creative writing is imaginative and inventive. Because of fundamental contradictions like this, there is no standardized or even most common definition of the genre. This creates confusion for both critics and...
This thesis analyzes Sophocles’ classic Greek tragedy Antigone as it relates to biopolitics, biopower, democratic language and non-normative principles of politics. I argue that the figure of Antigone enables a better understanding of exclusive biopolitical philosophy. Antigone is a figure not recognized as human because her gender is tortured and...
At first glance, Edgar Rice Burroughs's wildly popular romantic fantasy novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1912), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist science fiction-utopian novel, Herland (1915), with its dystopian companion, With Her in Ourland (1916), may appear to have little in common. Tarzan celebrates the human connection with wild nature...
This thesis seeks to explain how Lord George Gordon
Byron achieves catharsis through the writing of his truth
in Don Juan. In the poem the narrator expresses Byron's
innermost emotion while at the same time the protagonist,
Juan, relates to readers on a more conscious level. The
ability that Byron...
This thesis examines the nature of evidence in scholarship on peer review in composition studies. I argue that the nature of evidence present in scholarship on peer review over the past three decades is typically anecdotal, theoretical, and based on limited case studies. I argue that peer review research in...
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...
Recent changes in the historiography of American Transcendentalism
have inspired a reappraisal of the relationship between the Transcendentalist
movement in New England and the pietistic wing of the Unitarian church. This
thesis explores this reappraisal through a close reading of selected writings by
Henry Ware Jr. in juxtaposition to the...
In this thesis, I read the teachers in four mid-century Victorian novels--Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1850) and Hard Times (1854), Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Charlotte Brontё's Villette (1853)-- within the context of mid-century English educational debate in an effort to explicate the ways in which these characters...
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...