Jorge Luis Borges's oeuvre yields various incarnations of Borges as a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Borges's works contain multiple levels of simultaneous meanings that often incorporate autobiography into allegorical metafiction. His oeuvre con . . .

Little criticism exists on Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves due in part to the limited research of animal studies in novel form and science fiction. This paper encourages environmental and humane scholars to consider how nonhu . . .

In Zoo and Voices in the Park, Anthony Browne deploys postmodern metafictive devices to diffuse the meaning of the ideologies that give cultural, political, and social significance to the public, institutional spaces in England. However, in 2003, Brow . . .

My original seminar paper focused on the use of the doppelgänger motif in Charles Williams' novel Descent into Hell. In that novel, a doppelgänger repeatedly appears to Pauline Anstruther, terrorizing her; this initially frightening apparition becomes . . .

Marie de France held tremendous success and status in the twelfth-century, yet she suffered and still suffers from marginalization. Many people focus only on her justly famous Lais and give ample attention to her Fables, yet tacitly marginalize her tr . . .

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as works of realist fiction portraying the dystopic conditions of life in nineteenth century Europe while functioning as an authorial call to t . . .

These are metaphors employed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince: PEOPLE ARE PLANTS; A LIFETIME IS A DAY; DEATH IS GOING TO A FINAL DESTINATION. Blending between mental spaces is the use of story in a profound way. What we see in everyda . . .

This thesis is comprised of two main parts. The first is the creative text--a novella entitled Reflecting Dénouement. In essence, it is the tale of a teenage girl coming of age, discovering herself through writing. Along the way, she finds herself cau . . .

Modernism in Relief looks at how minor modernist texts utilize literary conventions in order to reshape what those conventions can produce. Attempting to thwart notions of the stabilized generic forms used to account for narrative subjects and their l . . .

The popularity of the Black Power Movement--its focus on direct action, its emphasis on addressing the concerns of urban blacks, and, chiefly, its message and hard-line pursuit of a potent masculinity and patriarchy--did more to derail the progress of . . .

This pedagogical portfolio presents a curriculum designed specifically for first year college students. The course is meant to strengthen and further develop students' writing and critical thinking skills so that they can effectively communicate and e . . .

The language of trauma is often used to discuss today's fractured, frenetic world and the way that people feel continually disconnected, even as they yearn for union. While trauma can be a powerful theoretical tool for revealing an ethical obligation, . . .

Critiquing common nineteenth-century practices of charity as perpetuating paternal authority and hindering mutual confidence between subjects, Melville offers an alternative: "fellow-feeling." But an examination of three of Melville's texts suggests t . . .

Little criticism exists on John Sanford’s The People from Heaven due in part to the novel’s unpopularity. The People from Heaven is a proletarian novel that diverges from the form and themes associated with the genre. Unlike most proletarian novels, T . . .

Much of recent scholarship on teaching grammar has asserted it to be unfruitful in the grand scheme of writing. This paper contends that teaching grammar is a part of teaching composition and that when taught in conjunction, students learn and retain . . .

Remarkably little has been written about E.M. Forster’s lesser-known, posthumously published short stories, largely for their inability to fit neatly within the confines of the Forster canon. This project explores how Forster’s “The Life to Come” and . . .

My article uses Smith's theory of ecological ethics to explain how face-to-face experiences with animals cause T. to recognize animal Others as ethically significant persons. Furthermore, experiencing animals' subjectivities and taking them seriously . . .

This thesis proposes a new one-semester first year composition course in which the broad cultural interest readings typically found in first year composition courses are replaced by texts about writing studies, a so-called “Writing about Writing” curr . . .

In my original seminar paper I identified the ways in which Equiano's text, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oludah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, appropriates themes of an abolitionist discourse, specifically elements of Christian Humanism and r . . .

The popularity of the Black Power Movement--its focus on direct action, its emphasis on addressing the concerns of urban blacks, and, chiefly, its message and hard-line pursuit of a potent masculinity and patriarchy--did more to derail the progress of . . .

Madness permeates in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse as a kind of cryptic language that exposes the human condition of the characters at the Ramsay beach house. The irrational scenes in the novel serve to illustrate the inextricability of the priva . . .

This collection of poetry grew not only out of my time at CSULA, but also the journey and paths I have personally walked in life. As the poetry developed, themes of war and battle began to emerge, not only in the literal sense but also within deeper, . . .

Thesis (M.A.) California State University, Los Angeles, 2012

This essay explores the textual and paratextual details in Margarita Engle’s verse novel Jazz Owls. The analysis endeavors to show that despite her valiant efforts to retell the tale of the Zoot Suit Riots from the perspective of the jazz owls, Lorena . . .

Until the end, Smith seems like the classic coming of age working class hero. In intentionally losing the race for the Borstal Cup, he turns the tables on the governor and the imperious power structure that he represents. Yet, after his release from p . . .

Building upon Dean MacCannell’s tourism theory in “Staged Authenticity,” this project develops literary tourism as a new form of literary analysis, with which we can examine how physical and discursive spaces are employed in periodical literature to f . . .

This Creative Writing thesis project is a bilingual, literary and artistic exploration of Gloria Anzaldúa's academic theory of Borderland as posited in her book, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Written in Spanish and English and using lyri . . .

This thesis examines the works of three diasporic Arab women writers who challenge patriarchy and Orientalism in their novels. Two novels by Fadia Faqir are examined herein. The first novel, The Cry of the Dove, traces the life of a village woman, Sal . . .

Arab and Arab-American female writers have more recently paved the field of study on issues concerning the various representations of Feminism in the Middle-East and the U.S. For this study, I argue that the works of Arab/Arab-American feminist writer . . .

This project presents a course curriculum designed specifically to guide basic writing students through the complexities of the writing process. Since one obstacle impeding the success of college writing students is the challenge of effectively planni . . .

Threshold concepts of writing are formulated in part from the discipline of education by Meyer and Land who envision disciplinary knowledge, or threshold concepts, as potentially transformative to student understandings and identities. Furthermore, th . . .

This collection of poetry reflects the growing sense of alienation in America, as it results from capitalism and economic oppression. The poems are separated into three sections (Poems of Escapism, Poems of Submission, and Poems of Resistance) to illu . . .

"TSON-TSON: Fragmented Selves Post-Death" is a creative thesis in the form of poems accompanied by an analytical commentary. The poetry collection is divided into two parts in order to present two specific periods of grief in the author's life. The fi . . .

Despite publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in weekly installments, and being one of the first black operated periodicals, both The National Era and The Colored American, respectively have garnered limited scholarly inquiry. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom . . .

Although many critics have written extensively on the character of Eve in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, her response to the Fall remains under-examined. A close reading of Eve’s birth narrative foregrounds her hermeneutic capabilities, while her initia . . .

Many critics have read <italic>The Golden Bowl<italic> as a fairy tale because the novelist Henry James designs his protagonist, Maggie Verver, as a young woman who in her innocence flees from life until the Prince ironically awakens her to the redeem . . .

This pedagogical portfolio presents a curriculum designed specifically for fifth through twelfth grade English Language Arts students. Story Circle is a writing program dedicated to encouraging students to find their authentic voices through storytell . . .

Early incarnations of science fiction (SF) literature and media adopted themes of alienation and enslavement, projecting them onto distant futures and far off planets. Creators in the SF genre ventured deep into the blackness of space, seeking out the . . .

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, raises many pertinent questions concerning human rights especially when applied to the future of cloning. Reading NLMG in light of two competing theorists, Lynn Hunt author of Inventing Human Rights: A History and M . . .

My thesis comprises three short stories which are all set in the Los Angeles area. Each story serves to represent the unique identity of each neighborhood chosen as a narrative setting. In this thesis, I hope to illustrate a proper grasp of the major . . .

This thesis examines the construction of national identity in short stories and other works by Jorge Luis Borges. In texts written from the 1930s onwards, Borges posits two definitions of nationhood. The first definition is Argentine-centric and defin . . .

This thesis consists of a critical introduction and a novel that explore the relation of contemporary narratives to late neoliberal ideologies and material conditions, climate change, and discursive practices that might disrupt neoliberal hegemony, an . . .

This project examines the economic alternatives presented in Henry David Thoreau’s and Walt Whitman’s texts in conjunction with their manipulation of print culture and affect. Both authors saw capitalism as an economic system that degraded the worker’ . . .

The ERWC text provides teachers with the means to provide inner-city, native bilingual and immigrant English-language learners with the rhetorical sophistication necessary to succeed in American colleges and universities. While these two groups have t . . .

Ghost in the Shell was cast with a white actress, Scarlett Johansson, taking on the role of a Japanese individual. Much like the Major’s non-reproductive body destabilized the goal of using her body as a vessel to create a new line of white prosthetic . . .

The media uses "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as an ominous allegory to dismiss protests like Occupy! Wall Street as "passive" and "idle" resistance. The “Bartleby” critical industry’s authority endorses this simplistic interpretation, which in the media n . . .

Committee members: Jim Garrett, Michelle Hawley, Ruben Quintero

'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman is a story about immigration and adaptation. The gods of the old world are confronted with a very large problem: adapt or die. In the fast-paced environment of the turn of the millennium, the gods of myth are forced to c . . .

This collection of creative work is composed of three short stories and a body of poetry tracing the invention, corruption, and reclamation of identity. I examine these stages through a style of writing that blurs the lines between physical and emotio . . .

Despite her status as one of the most prominent figures in American literature, Emily Dickinson avoided publishing publicly. Instead, I argue that Dickinson subverts and exploits letter-writing practices of her time in an attempt to manage a system of . . .