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 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 . . .

"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 . . .

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 . . .

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 . . .

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 . . .

Black Market Heart is a collection of writing. It includes fiction, non-fiction, flash fiction, plays, poems, and some stuff that isn't any of that. It is the sort of bizarre and anarchic collection of writing that I have always wanted to produce, but . . .

Postmodern American fiction differs from the Modernist tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, and Fitzgerald in that it deals with “multiple realities.” While Modernist writers questioned the reliability of a narrator's perceptions, an underlying realit . . .

The creative portion of this thesis is The Girl Who Loved Gable, a psychological detective novel. Set in Los Angeles in the present, the novel is a first person narrative. The central character is Leda Swann, a 30 year old female detective who is assi . . .

"The Only Language To Describe..." enters the spaces of familial relationships, existence and decreation as if these extenstions of identity were mathematical problems. Each line contains it's own equation trying to understand and answer uncertainty a . . .

This final project is my attempt to step away from the confines of my genre box and explore a different type of story. I have always considered myself a horror writer, but over the time I have spent at CSUN, I have realized the value in exploration. S . . .

In the middle of the night, Mary breaks into the home of her former lover Kirk. Mary's desire to rekindle a memory of a night they shared together while in college was squelched by his inability to fully recognize her. However, in the dead of the nigh . . .

This paper is an investigation of the widows found in Jane Austen’s Lady Susan and Sanditon, two unpublished works during her lifetime. The paper presents a careful close read of both Lady Susan and Lady Denham and their methods of manipulation in ord . . .

The White Peacock is D. H. Lawrence's first novel and as such has generally been ignored by critics. It contains, however, what is quintessential in Lawrence's work and, in fact, possesses a striking similarity to Lawrence's masterpiece, Women in Love . . .

The Bible must be read historically. In the words of Dr. Baucham, "The Bible is a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. They report supernatural events that took place in the ful . . .

This creative endeavor represents the culmination of three years of theoretical study on the art of creative writing. Through my years at CSUN, I have been gifted with an understanding of theories on gender, sexuality, marginality, and freedom. This c . . .

Among and Between is a collection of dramatic works - two one-act plays and a comic solo performance piece. Although the individual pieces do not explicitly connect thematically, stylistically, or otherwise, they share a fascination with language. The . . .

Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars trilogy tells the story of a long-term and large-scale terraforming mission to render the surface of Mars habitable to human beings. Critics have pointed out what fertile soil the motif of terraforming provides in Scie . . .

Tongues is a collection of feminist ekphrastic poetry dealing with themes of power, voice, agency, and sexuality. The majority of the poems which comprise this collection are written in response to art by women and of feminist themes. These poems delv . . .

The concept of grace permeates every short story and the two novels of Flannery O'Connor. This doctrinal truth belongs in the context of Roman Catholic teaching and can be specifically related to the writings of Jacques Maritain, a theologian and phil . . .

What I propose to write for this project is a substantial piece of speculative narrative fiction in the style of a noir. Am I writing some sort of detective story? I don’t believe I am, but I identify with the noir figure. I feel similarly disconnecte . . .

This futuristic "cli-fi" play explores an exaggerated dependency on electricity, with a superimposing purpose of bringing awareness to climate change. Ultimately, the play is my attempt to effectively incorporate climate change into a fictional work. . . .

Freedom of choice is a predominant theme in modern literature, and it is a vital concern in twentieth century living. Molestation and Seduction: An Essay the Modern Time-Shift Technique describes an effective twentieth century narrative technique that . . .

The emergence and popularity of digital writing spaces and multimodal texts have led to discussions on changing notions of rhetorical practices. However, scholarship has yet to fully address viral internet memes as complex, rhetorical situations. My p . . .

"Yama," a forty-page chapter from an ongoing project, is a graphic memoir that blends images and words in order to tell a story of memory and mourning within an Afghani American Muslim family that loses their eldest son. As such, "Yama" joins a growin . . .

Jane Austen's Mansfield Park exposes her critical thoughts regarding Britain's social and economic structure in relation to slavery, gender, and social class. Sir Thomas Bertram's selfishness and position as an aristocratic, absentee-plantation owner . . .

Illustrating the maxim that the more things change the more they stay the same, my thesis, Kindling, focuses on two outsiders, a Swiss vagabond and a traumatized Slavic peasant woman, who seek refuge in an abandoned German church from the chaotic worl . . .

For this essay I will examine a number of works from 20th century American author Upton Sinclair that reflect his vision of how socialist thought fulfills the core humanist message of the Christian Gospels and serves as a welcome model for American so . . .

A strong anti-democratic theme appears in both Mardi and Moby-Dick. The central character in each book assumes a natural and consciously self-affirmed elitism which sets him outside the boundaries of normal social role expectations. Taji and Ahab do n . . .

Alfred is an elderly playwright in declining mental and physical health. His inner voice, Anima, a trickster-esque young woman, is haunting him day and night. As his unhealthy lifestyle begins to take its toll on him, his play starts to become more an . . .

This essay examines Edith Wharton's integration of the then-developing science of anthropology in her novels. Wharton's innovation here is to apply an anthropological lens not to a foreign culture but to America itself. Through this technique, Wharton . . .

Where the teaching of First Year Writing is concerned, developing coursework that students find valuable is a daunting task. Considering that many students in these courses are neither interested in pursuing writing after the completion of their compu . . .

Each of these short stories is told in first-person narrative perspective and explores the arbitrary and relational nature of language and how language functions in narratives. Although each piece aims to establish a distinct voice from the other stor . . .

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature learns of inequality and social injustice, “the strange system of human society was explained to me. I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble b . . .

While the Vietnam War has been extensively chronicled, the majority of the material produced has privileged the American experience with little attention paid to the enormous costs suffered by the Vietnamese people. In his novel The Sympathizer, Viet . . .

In this thesis I closely examine the trilogy of U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, and demonstrate that it is a significant literary text of American Modernism. Modernism was an aesthetic movement of radical change in response to the transformation of social . . .

This thesis examines the direct influence of the French Symbolists upon the poetry and aesthetics of W.B. Yeats. The first part defines French SYmbolist theory and includes a discussion of the major poets and words of the movement, from Baudelaire to . . .

The Armenian Genocide of 1915 is an ongoing scandalous issue for many political reasons regarding the Turkish government. While it has received recognition from 28 countries and 45 out of 50 of the United States, there is continued denial from the Tur . . .

Following Richard Slotkin's reading of the mythology of the West in American culture, I argue that Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 thesis "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" was a critical moment in defining the West as a primarily . . .

In my early twenties, I dropped out of a Ph.D program at Columbia University in New York. The ghost of Ph.D past has haunted me ever since. As a result, when I reached my fifth decade, I decided to return to school to start the process of making up fo . . .

Set in 1919 during the Great Migration, William Attaway's 1941 Proletarian novel, Blood on the Forge, a text too often overlooked by the mainstream of literary studies, follows the three Moss brothers from their experience tenant farming in the agrari . . .

The fiction writer's choice of a particular point of view must reflect the needs of the plot. Just as the poet has various forms to work in, so does the prose writer. For example, just as there are certain thoughts and feelings perhaps better suited f . . .