My thesis, entitled “The Clerk’s Tale: Literal Monstrosities and Allegorical Problems,” argues that Chaucer’s Clerk is engaging both sides of a binary system. The Clerk has situated himself in a precarious position between two major schools of thought in the medieval culture, Franciscan and Dominican; the former promotes the will...
This thesis examines depictions of medievalism in three central texts: Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Each of these texts provides an entry point for exploring the ways in which English and American writers have...
My thesis explores the later work of author J.D. Salinger, including two narratives featured in Nine Stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and "Teddy," and Franny and Zooey, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," and "Seymour: an Introduction." Through my analysis I argue that the religious nature of Salinger's fiction...
The Second World War was not just a military struggle but also a struggle between two different agriculture, food distribution, and nutrition systems in the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany. At the start of the war, both countries understood that food and nutrition would play an important role and carefully...
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...
This ethnographic research aims to discover the implications of the
commodification of production processes amongst the Ersu Tibetans of Sichuan,
China. This thesis examines the commodification of Ersu agriculture and ethnic
identity in the historical context of both China and the world-system. Ethnohistorical
and ethnoecological methodologies are utilized to answer...
France’s decision to test their nuclear weapons program in the Sahara in 1960 wholly reshaped how the Cold War infiltrated into West Africa. During a time of nation building, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah urged Ghana and Africa, more broadly, to break ties with colonial powers and rebuke further attempts of...
This thesis explores the roles of scripts in shaping minoritarian subjectivity through Kim Jee-woon’s film The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), Kim Fu’s novel For Today I Am a Boy (2014), and R. Zamora Linmark’s novel Rolling the R’s (1995). In all three works, diasporic characters of Asian descent...