UNT Theses and Dissertations - 163 Matching Results

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Finitness and Verb-Raising in Second Language Acquisition of French by Native Speakers of Moroccan Arabic

Description: In this thesis, the three hypotheses on the nature of early L2 acquisition (the Full Transfer/Full Access view of Schwartz and Sprouse (e.g., 1996), the Minimal Trees view of Vainikka and Young-Scholten (e.g., 1996), and the Valueless Features view of Eubank (e.g., 1996)), are discussed. Analysis of the early French production by two native speakers of Moroccan Arabic is done to determine if the L1 grammar is transferred onto the L2 grammar. In particular, the phenomena of verb-raising (as dete… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Aboutaj, Heidi H. (Heidi Huttar)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Female Inheritors of Hawthorne's New England Literary Tradition

Description: Nineteenth-century women were a mainstay in the New England literary tradition, both as readers and authors. Indeed, women were a large part of a growing reading public, a public that distanced itself from Puritanism and developed an appetite for novels and magazine short stories. It was a culture that survived in spite of patriarchal domination of the female in social and literary status. This dissertation is a study of selected works from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wi… more
Date: August 1994
Creator: Adams, Dana W. (Dana Wills)
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"Looking into the Heart of Light, the Silence": The Rule of Desire in T.S. Eliot's Poetry

Description: The poetry of T. S. Eliot represents intense yet discriminate expressions of desire. His poetry is a poetry of desire that extenuates the long tradition of love poetry in Occidental culture. The unique and paradoxical element of love in Occidental culture is that it is based on an ideal of the unconsummated love relationship between man and woman. The struggle to express desire, yet remain true to ideals that have deep sacred and secular significance is the key animating factor of Eliot's poetr… more
Date: August 1995
Creator: Adams, Stephen D. (Stephen Duane)
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T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday: a Philosophical Approach to Empowering the Feminine

Description: In his 1916 dissertation, Eliot asserted that individuals were locked into finite centers and that all knowledge was epistemologically relative, but he also believed that finite centers could be transcended through language. In the essay "Lancelot Andrewes,'" Eliot identified Andrewes's "relevant intensity," a method very close to nonsensical verse. Eliot used Andrewes's Word and the impersonality of nonsense verse in Ash Wednesday. The Word, God's logos, embodied the Virgin Mary as its source,… more
Date: August 1992
Creator: Adams, Stephen D. (Stephen Duane)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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"Beowulf": Myth as a Structural and Thematic Key

Description: Very little of the huge corpus of Beowulf criticism has been directed at discovering the function and meaning of myth in the poem. Scholars have noted many mythological elements, but there has never been a satisfactory explanation of the poet's use of this material. A close analysis of Beowulf reveals that myth does, in fact, inform its structure, plot, characters and even imagery. More significant than the poet's use of myth, however, is the way he interlaces the historical and Christian eleme… more
Date: May 1990
Creator: Aitches, Marian A. (Marian Annette)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty

Description: "The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty" examines certain prototypical natures of isolation as recurrent and underlying themes in selected short fiction of Chopin, Porter, and Welty. Despite the differing backgrounds of the three Southern women writers, and despite the variety of issues they treat, the theme of isolation permeates most of their short fiction. I categorize and analyze their short stories by the nature and the trea… more
Date: August 1998
Creator: Arima, Hiroko, 1959-
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Characteristics of Intensive English Program Directors

Description: The purpose of this study is to discover if there exists a difference between the perceived roles and functions of intensive English program (IEP) directors and what they actually are. The study is a partial replication of Matthies (1983). A total of 46 subjects participated in a nation-wide survey which asked the respondents to rate the importance of functions and skills in good job performance and in self-assessment of ability. The findings indicated that IEP directors rate the activities ass… more
Date: August 1994
Creator: Atkinson, Tamara D. (Tamara Dawn)
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Saul Bellow's Creation of Ambiguity and Deception in Herzog and The Dean's December

Description: Argues that Bellow purposefully creates ambiguity and deception using impersonal narration and free indirect discourse in order to present Herzog and The Dean's December as reflections of an ambiguous and deceptive world. The discussion of impersonal narration is based on Wayne Booth's theories about the confusion of distance resulting from impersonal narration; the discussion of free indirect discourse is drawn from a number of definitions. Utilizes a number of specific references to the texts… more
Date: August 1993
Creator: Banks, Paul J. (Paul Jerome)
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From Boyd City to the Big City and Beyond: Six Stories with a Critical Introduction

Description: The critical introduction to this collection of short fiction argues that writing is reading and that reading is writing. The argument draws descriptions of writing as reading from such diverse sources as Sherwood Anderson, Roland Barthes, Neil Simon, J. Hillis Miller and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as from the author's own experience. Descriptions of reading from phenomenological and subjective criticism, including the theories of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and David Bleic… more
Date: December 1993
Creator: Barringer, Bobby D. (Bobby Dewayne)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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East, West, Somewhere in the Middle

Description: A work of creative fiction in novella form, this dissertation follows the first-person travails of Mitch Zeller, a 26-year-old gay man who is faced with an unexpected choice. The dissertation opens with a preface which examines the form of the novella and the content of this particular work.
Date: December 1997
Creator: Behlen, Shawn Lee
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Wuthering Heights: A Proto-Darwinian Novel

Description: Wuthering Heights was significantly shaped by the pre-Darwinian scientific debate in ways that look ahead to Darwin's evolutionary theory more than a decade later. Wuthering Heights represents a cultural response to new and disturbing ideas. Darwin's enterprise was scientific; Emily Brontë's poetic. Both, however, were seeking to find ways to express their vision of the nature of human beings. The language and metaphors of Wuthering Heights suggest that Emily Brontë's vision was, in many ways, … more
Date: August 1993
Creator: Bhattacharya, Sumangala
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"Mislike Me not for My Complexion": Shakespearean Intertextuality in the Works of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women

Description: Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, t… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Birge, Amy Anastasia
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Thais Taking Turns: How Thais Participate in Group Work in the American Classroom

Description: Using Ethnography of Communication, Conversational Analysis, and surveys, Thai students' participation in group work was studied to determine how they interact with native English-speaking students. Issues discussed are: (1) behaviors Thai students display during group work; including comparisons and contrasts to native students' behaviors, (2) prejudices native students have about including Thai students in group work, (3) Thais' strengths and weaknesses in group work, and (4) perceptions nati… more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Bischof, Janine Chere
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Evolution of Dexter and Me

Description: The Evolution of Dexter and Me is a collection of one vignette and four short stories. All of the stories deal with young men figuring out and coping with their daily life and environment. The "Dexter stories" deal with a character I developed and evolved, Dexter, a sane young man trying to find the best way to cope in an insane system.
Date: May 1996
Creator: Bond, Ray (Edgar Ray)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Non-Native Speakers of English and Denominal Regularization

Description: The purpose of this study was to determine whether nonnative speakers of English have access to specifically-linguistic constraints governing past tense morphology. Forty non-native speakers of English rated the naturalness of 29 exocentric, or headless, verbs in a partial replication of Kim, Pinker, Prince, and Prasada (1991) which looked at the same phenomenon in native speakers. Nonnative speaker performance was similar to the 40 subject native speaker control group. A correlation also exist… more
Date: August 1994
Creator: Borden, David S. (David Scott)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Edgar Allan Poe's Use of Archetypal Images in Selected Prose Works

Description: This study traces archetypal images in selected prose fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and shows his consistent use of such imagery throughout his career, and outlines the archetypal images that Poe uses repeatedly throughout his works: the death of the beautiful woman, death and resurrection, the hero's journey to the underworld, and the quest for forbidden knowledge. The study examines Poe's use of myth to establish and uphold archetypal patterns. Poe's goal when crafting his works was the creation… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Brackeen, Stephanie E. (Stephanie Ellen)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Mark Twain: "Cradle Skeptic"

Description: Critics discussing Mark Twain's early skepticism have, to date, confined their explorations to short studies (articles or book chapters), brief references in passing, or buried their insights in discussions on other topics. Other critics ignore Twain's atheistic statements and see his beliefs as theistic or deterministic. Others ascribe his attitudes in the "dark writings" to late life disappointments. This study demonstrates that Twain's later attitudes towards religion, determinism, social re… more
Date: August 1990
Creator: Britton, Wesley A. (Wesley Alan)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Red Dresses for Funerals

Description: Red Dresses for Funerals contains a scholarly preface concerning the nature of factuality versus credibility in the writing of fiction. Four original short stories are included in this thesis. "A Night With Lawrence Welk" explores the relationship between a patient and student intern psychologist. "Red Dresses for Funerals" is about a wedding that plays a significant role in a variety of the characters' lives. "Trace Elements" is the only story involving young children. "Trace Elements" explore… more
Date: May 1994
Creator: Brooks, Michelle Marie
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Ways of Pulling a Person Out of the Water

Description: Ways of Pulling A Person Out of the Water contains a preface, which discusses the writing process as well as a discussion of the short story form, ten original short stories, and two chapters of a novel-in-progress. A number of the short stories explore issues such as eating disorders, sexual violence, and artistic choice in the specialized context of the dance community. The novel chapters further develop one of the short stories, "When You Are the Camera and the Camera Is You." The narrator, … more
Date: December 1997
Creator: Brooks, Michelle Marie
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Whitman's Failures: "Children of Adam" in the Light of Feminist Ideals

Description: Walt Whitman was a feminist, and this assertion can be supported by excerpts from his prose, poetry, and conversation. Furthermore, the poet's circle of associates, chronology, and place of residence also lend credence to the hypothesis stating Whitman's subscription to feminist credos. A pro-feminine attitude is evident in much of Whitman's work, and his ties to the women's rights movement of the nineteenth century do influence the poet's portrayal of women. But the section of poems titled "Ch… more
Date: May 1991
Creator: Brown, Bryce Dean
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The Elusive Mother in William Faulkner's Major Yoknapatawpha Families

Description: Families in much of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction are built upon traditional patriarchal structure with the father as head and provider and the mother or mother figure in charge of keeping the home and raising the children. Even though the roles appear to be clearly defined and observed, the families decline and disintegrate.
Date: May 1995
Creator: Bunnell, Phyllis Ann
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Billy and Me and Other Stories

Description: The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that explains the problems that short story theorists encounter when they try to define the short story genre. Part of the problem results from the lack of a definition of the short story in the Aristotelian sense. A looser, less traditional definition of literary genres helps solve some of the problem. Six short stories follow the introduction. "Billy and Me," "Queen of Hearts," "The Whiskey Man," and "Psychedelic Trash Cans" are representative of… more
Date: August 1992
Creator: Champion, Laurie
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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