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- Creator:
- Siegel, Stacey Beth
- Description:
- Women today are taught to believe that mothering is instinctual and that when they have children they are supposed to love taking care of them. This notion perplexes many women who give birth without immediately feeling kinship with their baby. Some, in fact, experience panic and guilt wondering what is wrong with them, and while they watch and listen to �other mothers, they desperately attempt to figure out if what they feel is justifiable. Often they keep their anxiety to themselves, fearing that they will not be accepted by society if they voice their refutation of the concept of intuitive maternity. What no one has told them is that the concept of inherent mothering is actually socially constructed. Although previously genre was defined exclusively in terms of form and content and referred to literary works, modern rhetorical theorists have recently redefined the term genre and applied it more broadly. Contemporary genre theorists have come to the conclusion that while form and content are still integral in examining genre, function and context are equally important. In other words, the social, historical and rhetorical forces that shape writing, the way writers use these forces, and the effect on the reader can reveal a great deal about a particular text. These forces strongly influence the purpose or function of a text, and it is the rhetorical activity or exigence behind that purpose which helps to classify genre. The exigence, which is something that strongly invites a response, helps to provide meaning and rhetorical character to writing. By examining the purpose and exigence of a text, the function and context can help to classify its audience or discourse community and therefore its genre. This project will examine parenting literature, specifically parenting magazines, beginning with an analysis of the rhetorical situation, which is the relationship between the reader, writer and social context in which the text is created. I intend to suggest that the audience of parenting magazine articles are significantly influenced by the social and rhetorical forces used by writers of these texts, and that the relationship is recursive because of the effect the readers have on their creation.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
22. Two trees
- Creator:
- Caruth, Elissa S.
- Description:
- Two Trees explores writing from a post-modern, post-sturcturalist perspective and experiments with form. Some of the works include elements of conventional poetry and fiction. Other poems combine the two genres of writing to create a poetic-fiction that expresses, through a poetic vision, non-conformity and rejection of accepted ideals. Two Trees is divided into four sections. Each section addresses different elements of survival from seemingly unimportant aspects of day to day coping to the societal victimization of women and different forms of rape.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- D'Andrea, April Lynn
- Description:
- A teenage girl grows up in the early nineteen eighties. Her parents are divorced, she rarely sees her father, and she doesn't get along with her stepfather. She moves to a new town and makes friends with popular kids. She meets an older boy and has a relationship. The relationship falls apart and her best friend moves to Oregon, so she struggles to with the loss. She gets closer to an old friend, makes new friends, and dates other boys; however, she holds on to the dream of winning her old boyfriend back and moving out with her best friend. When she finds out her best friend is pregnant and planning to get married, she does something that alienates her from all of her friends. Eventually she reconnects with her old boyfriend but decides she has outgrown him.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Kolarek, Tara
- Description:
- As a writer I have positioned myself within the framework of lesbian writing. The term 'lesbian writing', however, is varied and constantly in a state of definition. Yet, both in spite of, and because of this, I must construct a framework of lesbian writing that shapes and defines my writing. Lesbians disappear within the dominant ideology of heterosexuality as we are positioned/ defined in relation to heterosexual, as other, as object. This position is manifested in the institutions which reflect and affirm the heterosexual ideology, one of which is conventional narrative plot structure. If, as a lesbian writer, I utilize this structure and simply insert lesbians as central characters, I have only substituted pronouns and merely replicated gendered ideas, for at once there are butch(male) and femme(female) constructs and there exists only male desire. As a lesbian I am neither entirely outside nor entirely inside this dominant ideology and, as a lesbian writer, I must simultaneously challenge the structure and work within the structure to locate/define/identify a narrative as lesbian. In doing so, the work also seeks to create a narrative space in which the writer/ reader/ text come together in a relationship which can be defined as lesbian.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Maechler, Julie L.
- Description:
- The plays of Lanford Wilson have interested scholars, critics and playgoers for more than three decades . Among other things, critics have focused on Wilson's use of language. Some assert that Wilson's evocative language has captured the voice of the American people, resulting in the generally accepted notion that Lanford Wilson is an �American Voice.� In this study I examined the way Wilson uses language to create characters that speak in an �American� way about "American" concerns. My objective was to develop a criteria by which Wilson's language could be judged "American." This criteria includes three general features: elements of sound in terms of dialect, rhythm and colloquialism( aspects of national personality, identity, experience and mythos; and the themes and associations made available through the expanding signs of Roland Barthes' semiotic codes. This study applies the definition to three of Lanford Wilson's plays: Fifth of July, Talley's Folly, and Talley and Son. These three plays all focus on members of a single Midwestern family, the Talleys, during significant times in American history, and all take place on the uniquely American and semiotically significant Independence Day. Wilson's "American voice" is established linguistically in the elements of "sound" that can be detected through dialect and colloquialism; it is also present in the national identity and perspective as expressed by the characters.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Saunders, Judith
- Description:
- This thesis suggests that Bertolt Brecht's play, Round Heads and Pointed Heads, has been underserved both critically and theatrically. Although it evolved from a previous attempt Brecht made to adapt Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure, there has been little scholarly discussion of Round Heads and Pointed Heads in light of its Shakespearean original. It is the intention of this thesis to revisit Brecht's play and argue that a comparative analysis of the two plays serves to rescue Brecht's play from its reputation as a failed Nazi satire and a na'ive Marxist account of the rise of fascism in Germany. This thesis also proposes that a study of Brecht's early, incomplete attempt to adapt Measure for Measure, which exists in the Bertolt Brecht Archives in fragmented form, strengthens the link between Round Heads and Pointed Heads and Shakespeare's play. I have included a working translation of these manuscript pages, which comprise the appendix to this thesis. Identifying Round heads and Pointed Heads as Brecht's final, free adaptation of Measure for Measure encourages a critical re-evaluation of the play, rescuing it from its reputation as an anti-Hitler satire and resurrecting it as a complex and sophisticated political parable with multiple implications.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Babayeva, Syuzanna
- Description:
- This thesis explores the manifestation of closed and open consciousness in conventional rhetoric of persuasion and the rhetoric of the rhizome. The rational mode of the Western discursive tradition has determined a pragmatic mode of consciousness, which gravitates toward discovering the rationality of truth opposed to the eternal motion of desire. Desire as a meaningful part of existence is examined in the works of Epicurus, Spinoza, Bergson, Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, and others. While emphasizing the vital role of desire, these theorists primarily associate desire with pleasure or lack and consider the notion of desire to be an indeterminate and antagonistic attribute in the logical contest of rational and irrational entities. This way of thinking creates a linear type of consciousness expressed in a cause-effect frame of persuasive argumentation dominant in Western thought since Aristotle. French scholars Deleuze and Guattari have problematized the notion of desire by locating desire in the rhizome as the main driving force of organic and nonorganic beings. They describe the rhizome as a nonhierarchical web of connections where all material matters are in a constant process of becoming. The rhizome excludes an idea of the finality of truth, offering a picture of the world based on difference and perpetual movement. The philosophy of the rhizome demonstrates an open type of consciousness which is not defined or limited by any conventions. My thesis demonstrates the manifestation of the conventional, or Aristotelian, type of consciousness through the rhetorical analysis of contemporary US nonfiction texts that offer finality as answers to the problems explored: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff in Love by Richard Carlson and Kristine Carlson, Stiffed by Susan Faludi, and What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage by Amy Sutherland. I contend that each of these texts has a clear line of argument related to essential concerns of existence such as relationships, love, and the construction of social values framed as a clear-cut resolution presenting answer to the question posed. To illustrate the rhetoric of the rhizome, I analyze a different type of nonfiction that is not organized around one central point of view on the topics explored. Employing Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome, I call this type of nonfiction "rhizomatic" because it is written in a reflective mode and invites the audience to contemplate the ideas for possibilities and potentials. In the context of the rhetoric of the rhizome, I examine three contemporary works of US nonfiction: Against Love by Laura Kipnis, Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz, and Husbandry by Stephen Fried. Addressing principles of deterritorialization, multiplicity, and becoming as the vital categories of the rhizome, I demonstrate through the analysis of the rhizomatic texts an open consciousness of composing ourselves" (Lunsford). I compare the results of the conventional rhetorical approach to the rhetoric of the rhizome and suggest that the limits of truth that we impose on ourselves can be opened through incorporating the open consciousness of the rhizome into our lives.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Garcia, Mario Steven
- Description:
- This thesis contains the first seven chapters of a novel in progress. The novel is set in the present. The protagonist and narrator is an engineer working at an aerospace company in the San Fernando Valley. The narrator is a remarkable figure in that he has repressed the memories of the death of his mother and father. He operates in the present by insulating himself within a false past. This insulation allows him to postpone experiencing the trauma associated with the death of his parents. We encounter the narrator soon after his repression begins to falter. As a manifestation of the faltering repression, the narrator experiences a recurring dream in which he sees a man and piano joined as one. Additionally, the narrator begins to suffer paranoid episodes in which he experiences mild distortions of reality. The narrator engages both of these features of his life unaware that he has engaged his potent and repressed past. Much of the narrative occurs while on a road trip to Yosemite with his girlfriend and another couple. Although this road trip is an ostensible get-away, events occur which act as catalysts, enabling the narrator's crisis. The novel is written as an interior monologue. This point of view is useful in that it allows an economical explication of manifold distortions of reality experienced by the narrator. In this work, all four characters suffer from their own personality quirks and therefore it is problematic to point to any one objective reality. The narrative relies on the reader to absorb disparate points of view and establish a virtual reality through narration, dialogue and action.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Senteney, Natasha D.
- Description:
- Nobody’s Damn Business is a collection of autobiographical narratives that focus, primarily, on the author’s childhood. As a whole, the essays aim to convey the complicated nature of trauma in relation to familial relationships, while dealing with topics such as child abuse, domestic violence, addiction, mental illness, and poverty.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Rouley, Hannah
- Description:
- This thesis project examines the role that narrative and memoir play in a writing classroom that is focused on growing and educating an entire student. I begin by examining critical expressivist and postpedagogical approaches to teaching writing; these pedagogies, I argue, support the work that memoir and narrative writing can do in helping students build effective and diverse literacies, and towards the end of the first chapter, I define memoir and narrative; these definitions emphasize the humanizing effect on students who read the writing of others about being human. In doing this, I aim to set a precedent for a writing classroom that asks students to engage with their own experience, which provides them with an education which is far more than a final term grade, and instead offers them a way of relating to the entirety of humanity through story and experience.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English