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Knowing is Seaing: Conceptual Metaphor in the Fiction of Kate Chopin

Description: This paper examines the metaphoric structures that underlie Chopin's major novel, The Awakening, as well as those underlying selected short stories. Drawing on the modern theory of metaphor described by Mark Turner, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, the author argues that conceptual metaphors are the structural elements that underlie our experiences, thoughts, and words, and that their presence is revealed through our everyday language. Since these conceptual structures are representative of hum… more
Date: May 1997
Creator: Green, Suzanne Disheroon, 1963-
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Rebellion and Reconciliation: Social Psychology, Genre, and the Teen Film 1980-1989

Description: In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social… more
Date: December 1996
Creator: Hubbard, Christine Karen Reeves
open access

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)
open access

Reverberating Reflections of Whitman: A Dark Romantic Revealed

Description: Walt Whitman has long been celebrated as a Romantic writer who celebrates the self, reveres Nature, claims unity in all things, and sings praises to humanity. However, some of what Whitman has to say has been overlooked. Whitman often questioned the goodness of humanity. He recognized evil in various shapes. He pondered death and the imperturbability of Nature to human death. He exhibited nightmarish imagery in some of his works and gory violence in others. While Whitman has long been called a … more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Lundy, Lisa Kirkpatrick
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Dickens in the Context of Victorian Culture: an Interpretation of Three of Dickens's Novels from the Viewpoint of Darwinian Nature

Description: The worlds of Dickens's novels and of Darwin's science reveal striking similarity in spite of their involvement in different areas. The similarity comes from the fact that they shared the ethos of Victorian society: laissez-faire capitalism. In The Origin of Species, which was published on 1859, Charles Darwin theorizes that nature has evolved through the rules of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the struggle for existence. Although his conclusion comes from the scientific eviden… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Moon, Sangwha
open access

Visions of Light In the Poetry of William Blake and Emily Dickinson

Description: In this study the author compares the broad outlines of Blake's and Dickinson's thought, pointing out evidence of decisive Biblical influence not only on the content of their thought but on their attitude toward language as well. the author argues that both poets assumed the philosophical position of Job as they interpreted the Bible independently and as they explored many dimensions of experience in the fallen world. The author represents their thought not as a fixed system but as a faith-base… more
Date: December 1996
Creator: Nuckels, Rosa Turner
open access

Language Contact in the Inner City: the Acquisition of AAVE Features by Bilingual Hispanic Adolescents

Description: Sociolinguists working in Northern urban areas have shown that Hispanics who come in contact with African Americans sometimes acquire features of African American vernacular English (AAVE). However, the acquisition of AAVE features by Hispanics in the South has yet to be documented. Specifically, no one has studied the kind of English that Hispanics in Texas are acquiring. The present study investigates this issue through research in an inner-city area of Dallas: Oak Cliff. During the past twen… more
Date: August 1998
Creator: Coleman, Jeffrey Alan
open access

Maelstrom: the Last Coyote Tale

Description: It is a dark future, where corporations have taken the place of governmental bodies, and Earth is a myth, forgotten in the reconstruction after the Second Dark Age. One man--a clone--investigates a murder [that] leads him deep into a spirit quest of his own that will answer the questions of Man's heritage as well as his own identity. This story is a science fiction, but it is similar in structure to a Coyote tale and involves quite a bit of Navajo mythology. The use of Native American imagery i… more
Date: December 1997
Creator: Claiborne, J. Taylor (John Taylor)
open access

The Disfigured Muse : Supreme Readers in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Description: In "Discourse in the Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that "Every discourse presupposes a special conception of the listener, of his apperceptive background and the degree of his responsiveness." My study of Wallace Stevens's poetry examines Stevens's "conception of the listener"—in the form of his intratextual readers, their responsiveness, and the shapes that responsiveness takes—and attempts to formulate out of that examination Stevens's theory of reading embodied in his canon of poems.
Date: August 1993
Creator: Hobbs, Michael B. (Michael Boyd)
open access

In Awesome Wonder

Description: The dissertation is a collection of eighteen short stories. These stories relate the life experiences of the first-person narrator and chronicle a period of twenty years. They are arranged in five thematic groups: Expectations, Questions, Lighter Moments, Answers, and Separation. The focus of each one represents the narrator's experiences with his father, as the narrator attempts to understand a man who exerts such control over his life. Expectations contains three stories, with the first depic… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: McMurtry, William Charlie
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Friendship, Politics, and the Literary Imagination: the Impact of Franklin Pierce on Hawthorne's Works

Description: This dissertation attempts to demonstrate how Nathaniel Hawthorne's lifelong friendship with Franklin Pierce influenced the author's literary imagination, often prompting him to transform Pierce from his historical personage into a romanticized figure of notably Jacksonian qualities. It is also an assessment of how Hawthorne's friendship with Pierce profoundly influenced a wide range of his work, from his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), to the Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) and such later works a… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Williamson, Richard Joseph, 1962-
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The Incest Taboo in Wuthering Heights : A Modern Appraisal

Description: A modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Catherine and her foster brother, Heathcliff, from achieving normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. Insights from anthropology, psychology, and sociology provide a key to many of the subtleties of the novel by broadening our perspectives on the causes of incest, its manifestations, and its consequences. Anthropology links the incest taboo to primitive systems of totemism and rules… more
Date: August 1992
Creator: McGuire, Kathryn B. (Kathryn Bezard)
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Iconic Ida: Tennyson's The Princess and Her Uses

Description: Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Princess: A Medley has posed interpretative difficulties for readers since its 1847 debut. Critics, editors, and artists contemporary with Tennyson as well as in this century have puzzled over the poem's stance on the issue of the so-called Woman Question. Treating Tennyson as the first reader of the poem yields an understanding of the title character, Princess Ida, as an ambassador of Tennyson's optimistic and evolutionary views of human development and links his wor… more
Date: May 1997
Creator: Guidici, Cynthia (Cynthia Dianne)
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The American Eve: Gender, Tragedy, and the American Dream

Description: America has adopted as its own the Eden myth, which has provided the mythology of the American dream. This New Garden of America, consequently, has been a masculine garden because of its dependence on the myth of the Fall. Implied in the American dream is the idea of a garden without Eve, or at least without Eve's sin, traditionally associated with sexuality. Our canonical literature has reflected these attitudes of devaluing feminine power or making it a negative force: The Scarlet Letter, Mob… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Long, Kim Martin
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Women's and Men's Perceptions Regarding Perceived Speaker Sex and Politeness of Given Utterances

Description: Women's and men's responses regarding perceived speaker sex and the politeness of given utterances were examined through the use of a questionnaire administered to 90 people, 45 men and 45 women. The questionnaire required respondents to rate the politeness of each utterance and label each as being more likely spoken by a man or by a woman. Factors possibly affecting perceptions--such as power, prestige, and the stereotypical conversational structures of both men and women--were addressed throu… more
Date: May 1995
Creator: Johnson, Deanna Michelle
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Historical Reconstruction and Self-Search: A Study of Thomas Pynchon's V.. John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Nicrht. Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel

Description: A search for self through historical reconstruction constitutes a crucial concern of the American postmodern historical novels of Pynchon, Barth, Mailer, Coover, and Doctorow. This concern consists of a self-conscious dramatization, paralleled by contemporary theorists' arguments, of the constructedness of history and individual subject. A historian-character's process of historical inquiry and narrative-making foregrounded in these novels represents the efforts by the postmodern self to (re)co… more
Date: August 1995
Creator: Pak, Inchan
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Inventions, Dreams, Imitations

Description: Eight short selections of fiction. "Inventions" consists of two invented creation myths. The three stories in "Dreams" are fantasy tales set in a common dream-world. The selections in "Imitations" are neither fantasy nor science fiction: "Time's Tapering Blade" is an experiment in form; "The Wake" concerns a group of friends dealing with a death; and "Janie, Hold the Light" is based on stories from the author's family about Christmas during the depression of the 1930's.
Date: August 1997
Creator: Gatlin, Charles Morgan
open access

The West African Trickster Tradition and the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

Description: Analyzing Chesnutt's fiction from the angle of the West African trickster tradition explains the varying interpretations of his texts and his authorial intentions. The discussion also illustrates the influence that audience and editorial concerns may have had on African-American authors at the turn of the century.
Date: August 1995
Creator: Coleman, Arvis R. (Arvis Renette), 1961-
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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)
open access

Getting It On Home: Ways of Telling the Story

Description: In this collection of poems and essays, the author demonstrates two different methods for examining the same theme: the notion of "home"—how to get there, how to remain there and bear articulate witness to the forces which drive that author to write. The introduction sets forth an explanation for the use of the specific form chosen for expression, with an analysis of the intent behind that form. In these essays and poems, the author accounts for her years on the Texas Panhandle, in Montana, an… more
Date: May 1996
Creator: Vanek, Mary
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The Matters of Troy and Thebes and Their Role in a Critique of Courtly Life in Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet

Description: Both Chaucer and the Gawain-poet use the Matters of Troy and Thebes as material for a critique of courtly life, applying these literary matters to the events and actions in and around Ricardian England. They use these classical matters to express concerns about the effectiveness of the court of Richard II. Chaucer uses his earlier works as a testing ground to develop his views about the value of duty over courtly pursuits, ideas discussed more completely in Troilus and Criseyde. The Gawain-poet… more
Date: May 1999
Creator: Jones, Oliver M.
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Eudora Welty's "Flowers for Marjorie" : Toward the Caesura of the Unconscious

Description: Eudora Welty's short story "Flowers for Marjorie" appears in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, her first volume of collected stories published in 1941. Since the story's publication, literary scholars have interpreted the protagonist's murder of his wife, and the unusual events that follow, in terms of somatic realities that inform the text. This thesis is a psychoanalytic rereading/rewriting of "Flowers for Maijorie" that attempts to analyze its text as a possible dream narrative. By psych… more
Date: May 1996
Creator: Gowdy, Robert Douglas
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Moments: a Diary

Description: In my preface I have tried to show what a diary is, why they might be of interest to others, why I think they are valid and should be considered as such. I have defended my diary as being worthy material for a thesis, or myself as worthy of being called a writer. (Traditionally, writing in a diary doesn't qualify one as being a writer, even though you might write millions of pages and spend your entire lives doing it.) Edited selections of my diary make up the body of the thesis. These selectio… more
Date: May 1998
Creator: Craig, Mendy J. (Mendy Jeneen)
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