How do digital games convey meaning? Academic studies of video games seem concerned
with creating discipline-specific new methodologies for examining the medium. From the
standpoint of the rhetorical critic, however, new forms of communication can still be
examined with traditional techniques. This paper analyzes the 2001 video game Tropico
using...
This thesis situates a discussion of Thoreau's later natural history essays in the context of the author's other writings. Beginning with an examination of the writings of Thoreau's friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, this paper examines Thoreau's relation to and departure from Emerson's understanding of time, place, and pattern...
Knot Theory: In Imitation of Lewis Thomas is a collection of 14, 1200-word essays written in the style of Lewis Thomas, a physician who regularly contributed to The New England Journal of Medicine. His 1200-word column, "Notes of a Biology Watcher," ran from 1971 - 1980. The resulting compilations collectively...
In this thesis I argue that Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian serves as a critique of the American Western mythos by collapsing aspects of myth, ideology, and the sublime into the question of violence's relationship to language. In explicating the novel, I demonstrate how the ironies staged between the...
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce used
the form or structure of his language to connote a meaning which
supported the content of the text. The elements of form he used
most often were sentence and paragraph structure, punctuation,
rhythm, and classical rhetorical schemes....
This project examines the production histories of two films that Alfred Hitchcock directed, his Hollywood debut Rebecca (1940) and the memorable Psycho (1960). The first chapter explores how Hitchcock succeeded and failed at influencing the picture as he, despite directing the movie, had to follow the vision that his producer,...
For centuries, continental philosophy has clung to the belief that the world only meaningfully exists through human perception--that, in other words, when a tree falls in the forest, it does not make a sound. Literary theory, which has strong roots in continental philosophy, followed suit, remaining tied to humanism even...
On April 1, 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak entered into a partnership agreement to found Apple Computer. In the decade that followed, Apple experienced remarkable growth and success, as Jobs catapulted Apple to the Fortune 500 list of top‐flight companies faster than any other company in history. Under direction...
Ireland's Catholic Church played an important role in the turn-of-the-century nationalism that shaped James Joyce's identity and writing; yet it also played an important part in preventing that nationalism from achieving its goals of autonomy and cultural independence. For Joyce, this was particularly evident in the dialects and
thought structures...
In her novel, Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes examines the relationships and identities of diverse characters during the early 20th century. My paper investigates the depiction of inversion and how it challenges heteronormative structures. However, I argue that the depiction of queer relations is only available between feminized queer subjects. The...