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What Spins Away

Description: What Spins Away is a novel about a man named Caleb who, in the process, of searching for a brother who has been missing for ten years, discovers that his inability to commit to a job or his primary relationships is both the result of his history with that older missing brother, and his own misconceptions about the meaning of that history. On a formal level, the novel explores the ability of traditional narrative structures to carry postmodern themes. The theme, in this case, is the struggle for… more
Date: May 1999
Creator: Irwin, Keith
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Night of No Exile

Description: Night of no Exile is a collection of poems preceded by a critical article entitled "‘Exile seems both a blessing and a curse': A Blissful Reading of Li-Young Lee's Poetry." That article discusses Lee's quest to achieve communication, truth, and transcendence through poetic language and concludes that he finally reaches his goal through a leap from narrative poetry to lyricism. The "exile" alluded to in the title of the article is not only geographic, but also interioran exile due to the natural… more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Jones, Marie C.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Asleep in the Arms of God

Description: A work of creative fiction in the form of a short novel, Asleep in the Arms of God is a limited-omniscient and omniscient narrative describing the experiences of a man named Wafer Roberts, born in Jack County, Texas, in 1900. The novel spans the years from 1900 to 1925, and moves from the Keechi Valley of North Texas, to Fort Worth and then France during World War One, and back again to the Keechi Valley. The dissertation opens with a preface, which examines the form of the novel, and regional … more
Date: December 1999
Creator: Clay, Kevin M.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Redemption and the Other: The Supernatural Narrator and the Intertextual (Sub)version of the Miltonic Command

Description: In literary discourse from the Genesis creation myth through John Milton's Paradise Lost and beyond, Eve has been patriarchally considered to be the bringer of Sin and Death into the world. In Paradise Lost Eve is depicted as deceiving Adam into the Fall by way of the Serpent. Paradise Lost creates a Miltonic command that helps to further blame Woman for Sin and Death. Milton's poem is based on the Genesis creation myth written by Canaanite authors. In this myth the Canaanite authors wished to … more
Date: May 2000
Creator: Gowdy, Robert Douglas
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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No Slip-Shod Muse: A Performance Analysis of Some of Susanna Centlivre's Plays

Description: In 1982, Richard C. Frushell urged the necessity for a critical study of Susanna Centlivre's plays. Since then, only a handful of books and articles briefly discuss herand many attempt wrongly to force her into various critical models. Drawing on performativity models, my reading of several Centlivre plays (Love's Contrivance, The Gamester, The Basset-Table and A Bold Stroke for a Wife) asks the question, "What was it like to see these plays in performance?" Occupying somewhat uneasy ground be… more
Date: May 2000
Creator: Herrell, LuAnn R. Venden
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Body Matters: Gary Snyder, The Self and Ecopoetics

Description: Gary Snyder has offered, in poems and essays, ways to acknowledge the interrelationships of humans with the more-than-human. He questions common notions of selfness as well as understandings of what it is to be human in relationship to other species and ecosystems, and he offers new paradigms for the relationship between cultures and the ecosystems in which these cultures reside. These new paradigms are rooted in a reevaluation of our attitudes toward our physical bodies which impacts our relat… more
Date: May 2000
Creator: Murray, Matthew
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Calling Up the Dead

Description: Calling Up the Dead is a collection of seven short stories which all take place over the final hours of December 31, 1999 and the first few hours of January 1, 2000. The themes of time, history, and the reactions toward the new millennium (positive, negative, indifferent) of a variety of cultures are addressed. Each of the six major continents has a story, along with its cultural perspective, delivered by narrators both young and old, three female, three male and one balcony.
Date: May 2000
Creator: Weaver, Brett
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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The Evolution of AIDS as Subject Matter in Select American Dramas

Description: Dramatic works from America with AIDS as subject matter have evolved over the past twenty years. In the early 1980s, dramas like Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, William Hoffman's As Is, and Robert Chesley's Night Sweat educated primarily homosexual men about AIDS, its causes, and its effects on the gay community while combating the dominant discourse promoted by the media, government, and medical establishments that AIDS was either unimportant because it affected primarily the homosexual popul… more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Sorrells, David J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Imagining The Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature

Description: William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they forma… more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Walther, James T.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Questioning Voices: Dissention and Dialogue in the Poetry of Emily and Anne Brontë

Description: My dissertation examines the roles of Emily and Anne Brontë as nineteenth-century women poets, composing in a literary form dominated by androcentric language and metaphor. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly concerning spoken and implied dialogue, and feminists who have pioneered an exploration of feminist dialogics provide crucial tools for examining the importance and uses of the dialogic form in the development of a powerful and creative feminine voice. As such, I propose to view Emil… more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Kalkwarf, Tracy Lin
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Wandering Women: Sexual and Social Stigma in the Mid-Victorian Novel

Description: The changing role of women was arguably the most fundamental area of concern and crisis in the Victorian era. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the evolving role of women, particularly in regard to the development of the New Woman. I propose that there is an intermediary character type that exists between Coventry Patmore's "angel of the house" and the New Woman of the fin de siecle. I call this character the Wandering Woman. This new archetypal character adheres to the following l… more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Jackson, Lisa Hartsell
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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A Thousand Miles Out of My Mind

Description: The dissertation is a collection of creative and non-fiction work, including a novel with critical introduction, four short stories, and three essays. The novel is a modern day Grail quest that takes place primarily in the Southwestern United States. The short stories are mostly set in the southwest as well, and take for their topic what Paul Fussel refers to as "hope abridged." The essays are non-fiction.
Date: August 2000
Creator: Sisk, Grant
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Dark Houses: Navigating Space and Negotiating Silence in the Novels of Faulkner, Warren and Morrison

Description: Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," as early as 1839, reveals an uneasiness about the space of the house. Most literary scholars accept that this anxiety exists and causes some tension, since it seems antithetical to another dominant motif, that of the power of place and the home as sanctuary. My critical persona, like Poe's narrator in "The House of Usher," looks into a dark, silent tarn and shudders to see in it not only the reflection of the House of Usher, but perhaps the whole of what … more
Date: December 2000
Creator: Berger, Aimee E.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Happiness Is a By-Product of Function: William Burroughs and the American Pragmatist Tradition

Description: This dissertation examines the techniques and themes of William Burroughs by placing him in the American Pragmatist tradition. Chapter One presents a pragmatic critical approach to literature based on Richard Rorty and John Dewey, focusing on the primacy of narration over argumentation, redescription and dialectic, the importance of texts as experiences, the end-products of textual experiences, and the role of critic as guide to experience rather than judge. Chapter Two uses this pragmatic crit… more
Date: December 2000
Creator: Goeman, James Robert
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Themes of Exodus and Revolution in Ellison's Invisible Man, Morrison's Beloved, and Doctorow's Ragtime

Description: In my dissertation I examine the steps in and performance of revolution through the writings of three Postmodern authors, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and E. L. Doctorow, in light of the model of the biblical Exodus journey and the revolution which precipitated that movement. I suggest that the revolution which began with the Israelites' bondage in Egypt has provided the foundation for American literature. I show that Invisible Man, Beloved, and Ragtime not only employ the motif of the Exodus … more
Date: December 2000
Creator: Turner, Tracy Peterson
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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John Graves and the Pastoral Tradition

Description: John Graves's creative non-fiction has earned him respect in Texas letters as a seminal writer but scarce critical commentary of his work outside the region. Ecological criticism examines how language, culture and the land interact, providing a context in which to discuss Graves in relation to the southwestern literary tradition of J. Frank Dobie, Walter P. Webb, and Roy Bedichek, to southern pastoral in the Virgilian mode, and to American nature writing. Graves's rhetorical strategies, includi… more
Date: August 2001
Creator: Anderson, David Roy
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Moral Training for Nature's Egotists: Mentoring Relationships in George Eliot's Fiction

Description: George Eliot's fiction is filled with mentoring relationships which generally consist of a wise male mentor and a foolish, egotistic female mentee. The mentoring narratives relate the conversion of the mentee from narcissism to selfless devotion to the community. By retaining the Christian value of self-abnegation and the Christian tendency to devalue nature, Eliot, nominally a secular humanist who abandoned Christianity, reveals herself still to be a covert Christian. In Chapter 1 I introduce… more
Date: August 2001
Creator: Schweers, Ellen H.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Working Whiteness: Performing And Transgressing Cultural Identity Through Work

Description: Early in Richard Wright's Native Son, we see Bigger and his friend Gus “playing white.” Taking on the role of “J. P. Morgan,” the two young black men give orders and act powerful, thus performing their perceived role of whiteness. This scene is more than an ironic comment on the characters' distance from the lifestyle of the J. P. Morgans of the world; their acts of whiteness are a representation of how whiteness is constructed. Such an analysis is similar to my own foc… more
Date: May 2002
Creator: Polizzi, Allessandria
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Anything Like Us

Description: Anything Like Us is a collection of poems with a critical introduction. In this introduction, I explore modern alternatives to Romantic and Neo-Romantic lyric expression. I conclude that a contemporary lyric that desires to be, in some fashion, about itself, must exhibit an acceptance of the mediating influences of time and language, while cultivating an inter-subjective point-of-view that does not insist too much on the authority of a single, coherent voice. The poems in Anything Like Us r… more
Date: August 2002
Creator: Roth, Matthew
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Metaphors, Myths, and Archetypes: Equal Paradigmatic Functions in Human Cognition?

Description: The overview of contributions to metaphor theory in Chapters 1 and 2, examined in reference to recent scholarship, suggests that the current theory of metaphor derives from long-standing traditions that regard metaphor as a crucial process of cognition. This overview calls to attention the necessity of a closer inspection of previous theories of metaphor. Chapter 3 takes initial steps in synthesizing views of domains of inquiry into cognitive processes of the human mind. It draws from cognitive… more
Date: December 2002
Creator: Kalpakidis, Charalabos
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction

Description: This dissertation explores how contemporary, small-press, speculative fiction deviates from other genres in depicting the processes of consciousness in narrative. I study how the confluence of contemporary cognitive theory and experimental, small-press, speculative fiction has produced a new narrative mode, one wherein literature portrays not the product of consciousness but its process instead. Unlike authors who worked previously in the stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue modes, wri… more
Date: May 2007
Creator: Bradley, Darin Colbert
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Blurring the Lines Between Instructor-Led and Online Learning: an Evaluation of an Online Composition Curriculum on the Bleeding Edge

Description: The contemporary classroom currently faces an evolving world of computer based training, online courses, instructor-led learning and several blended approaches in-between. With the increased presence of computers and communication in every facet of students' lives, students have changed to adapt to the continuous presence of technology in their daily lives. These recent rapid developments have changed the relationship between technology and communication. Indeed, communication and technology ha… more
Date: August 2007
Creator: Deranger, Brant
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Detecting Masculinity: The Positive Masculine Qualities of Fictional Detectives.

Description: Detective fiction highlights those qualities of masculinity that are most valuable to a contemporary culture. In mysteries a cultural context is more thoroughly revealed than in any other genre of literature. Through the crimes, an audience can understand not only the fears of a particular society but also the level of calumny that society assigns to a crime. As each generation has needed a particular set of qualities in its defense, so the detective has provided them. Through the detective's r… more
Date: August 2007
Creator: Griswold, Amy Herring
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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