English learners are one of the most rapidly growing student demographics in the United States. However, school systems have historically fallen short in providing English learners with adequate academic support. A review of the literature sheds light . . .

While many critics note the numerous musical allusions in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, this thesis examines the appropriation of jazz in particular to these three American texts. . . .

The Hmong are undergoing a process of acceptance and rejection in forming their new Hmong American identities. As borderlands citizens, the Hmong’s new identities reflect the bicultural communities around them, and therefore, exemplify both Hmong a . . .

After dissecting the dichotomy established through the opening monologues and examining the rhetoric behind the characters’ diction, the third chapter of my thesis presents a close reading of selected passages, which present the facts of Maria’s situa . . .

The purpose and intent of this thesis, then, is to discuss the stylistic variances throughout Melville’s works. These works have stylistic devices that are common among all of his works, such as hypotaxis, parataxis, attribution, and erotesis. These s . . .

In the century since its publication, Bram Stoker's horror novel Dracula has become the preeminent source of inspiration for a massive genre of fiction which continues to grow in popularity. The role of the vampire in fiction is varied and often highl . . .

Given that Flannery O’Connor openly claimed to incorporate her Catholicism into her works, many critics have noted the various types of violence in her stories that are often connected with those moments in which her characters become receptive to gra . . .

The purpose of this thesis is to understand and analyze Aldous Huxley’s presentation of neo-colonialism in his utopian novel Island. Particular attention will be given to his portrayal of economic relations between first world powers and the third wor . . .

This thesis is an investigation into the role of names within Olga Grushin’s Forty Rooms, in order to in understand the protagonist, Mrs. Caldwell, as an “everywoman” in which readers can see themselves. I use the names of the male characters to show . . .

American contemporary and multicultural literature focuses on issues surrounding race. This project analyzes race through differing spaces, places, and environments in three works of 20th and 21st century American literature. Despite their differences . . .

“Mother Outsider” is a collection of poems that explores non-conventional motherhood while also pushing against cultural assumptions of motherhood. Questioning these societal assumptions and the speaker’s own questions of herself are central to the po . . .

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a celebrated classic, and it is often the first favorite classic among young women who identify with the heroine and indulge in her fairy-tale romance with Edward Rochester. However, as Jane Eyre is the fairy tale of th . . .

This thesis incorporates, and attempts to reconcile, both sides of this debate. In doing so, it seeks to accomplish two purposes. First, it explores the possibility that The Scarlet Letter is a novel about sexual slavery for both men and women—on both . . .

Reading “The Clerk‟s Tale” can be a frustrating experience, for it seems to mean something, but—even barring modern sensibilities from the analysis—it seems confused or even self-contradictory in its conclusions. Is it the ideal marriage or not? A lit . . .

The textual, biographical and historical inquiry into Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre will center on the explicit and implicit Christianity of the novel and how it was possibly influenced by Charlotte Bronte's own unconventional religious perspecti . . .

A study of equivocation will yield that this practice commanded a vast amount of attention during the Renaissance, the time period of 1450-1600, in which Jesuitical equivocation was an ongoing phenomenon. The practice became part of the Renaissance er . . .

In this thesis, I seek to resolve the debate over Tiresias’s ability to unify The Waste Land by offering a new perspective—Tiresias as a Modernist Maypole. I propose that Tiresias’s inability to perfectly coalesce the different voices and themes withi . . .

Originally published in 1898 in serial form, The Turn of the Screw has undergone many incarnations. The short story was published again, complete with a preface, in Henry James’s New York Edition, 1907-1909. The version I have chosen to use, edited by . . .

To approach these concerns, this project seeks to provide an evaluation of the intellectual and personal relationship between authors Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke as viewed through the lens of personal correspondence. A review of selected letters d . . .

toogoodtobetrue is a fiction creative project containing a collection of queer short stories designed to examine the unifying and diverse experiences of a modern queer existence. Thematically, the collection seeks to create and explore the practical a . . .

Statement of Intent: The intent behind Children of Immigrants is to give a voice to people who are Latinx, Chicanx, or Mexican in a country which constantly shapes our narratives to benefit the Anglo-American narrative. By writing about the culture, r . . .

If Shakespeare “invented the human,” a claim made rather spectacularly by the critic Harold Bloom in a 1998 book, then the six British poets who comprised what was to become known as the Romantic Period perfected the mode. Shakespeare, in Bloom’s term . . .

This thesis, entitled “The Politics of Cultural Trauma and Violence in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” asserts that transgenerational trauma takes place in the aftermath of the 1930-1961 reign of Dominican president Rafael Leonidas . . .

The text offers a barren landscape and desolate setting, governed by a violent zealot. We are presented with characters whose minds we cannot penetrate and an unresolved ending, with our only potential hero dying off just like the rest of them, except . . .

Barnes’s works are steeped in overt grief and rage, and all of her longer works can be directly traced back to traumatic events in her life. Antiphon and Ryder both are vicious retellings of her early family life. Themes of incest, rape and stolen vir . . .

Critics have been known to connect Fitzgerald’s personal life with the characters and events in Gatsby. Once a reader does research on Fitzgerald’s life, obvious connections can be made such as the attitudes and names that some of his characters share . . .

Much research and critical analyses have been done concerning Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem, The Canterbury Tales. The various characters in this work have been examined thoroughly and the mechanics of the poem have been scrutinized and dissected mercilessl . . .

University and college students today are reading and writing more than ever before, but in spite of this they often do not consider themselves successful writers. This is because the material they read and respond to is mostly electronic, is constant . . .

In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” does Chaucer merely retell the story popularly known as “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell?” These two stories are essentially the same, except that Chaucer’s is more humorous. In order to argue against the claim . . .

Podloujny is a creative thesis in the form of a fiction novel. The thesis features the generational dynamics of a family experiencing a series of profound crises. The narrative form of Podloujny shifts perspectives between each family member, explorin . . .

To become part of any literary tradition is to call upon the classics while inventing new and individual ideas and concepts. In my writing I strive to find a balance between the old and the new . I have been heavily influenced by authors in the litera . . .

My thesis will focus on three of O'Brien's Vietnam War novels: The Things They Carried, Going After Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods. I will show how O'Brien develops these stories in terms of individual, social, cultural, and historical aspects . . .

This thesis explores the moral evolution of Joseph Conrad's protagonist, Marlow, in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Marlow appears uniquely in literature as the omnipotence of cloistered Victorian moral ideals began to fade and just as the shattering . . .

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, . . .

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 th . . .

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 . . .

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 w . . .

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 . . .

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 b . . .

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, whi . . .

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 . . .

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 t . . .

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; the . . .

My intent with Through the Valley was, in part, to provide representation in a genre I so rarely find for myself and for others who fall into similar identities as myself in terms of gender and sexuality. Historical fiction has always been a genre I h . . .

My thesis begins by interrogating the ways in which two texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe--Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its follow-up, Dred--construct Black supernatural ability as racially innate and divinely specific. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s notion of “Black . . .

Violence is a fundamental truth in the works of Cormac McCarthy. More than just violence for the sake of violence, McCarthy employs violence in a way that is productive within his works: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, No Country . . .

Throughout Toni Morrison’s novels, characters struggle to reclaim their own humanity in the face of domination and trauma. While countless scholars have remarked upon the themes of oppression and language, and several others upon the symbolism of natu . . .

The Hmong people are a group of Southeast Asians who came to America around 45 years ago. Because they are still so new and still such a small group, their stories have only began to come to light. As a group of becoming, the Hmong are now engaging in . . .

The literature and drama of the long eighteenth century is overpopulated with nuns, and they are all transgressors of patriarchal society in one way or another. These nuns are all vow-breakers, fornicators, and fallen women; whether they were ruined a . . .

In the play of Othello, Shakespeare perfectly explores the issue of racial tension that existed in the Elizabethan era. Othello, a loyal soldier and the protagonist of the play, appears as an outsider in Venice because of his dark skin; he is repeated . . .

This paper is dedicated to improving the classroom experience of students enrolled in writing courses one level below university level composition. Everyone's goal is persistence and completion. The question this paper seeks to answer is, what do inst . . .

This thesis is concerned with analyzing the characters of Harry Potter, Lord Voldemort, and Professor Severus Snape from the sensational children's book series, Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling through the perspective of literary and critical theory. Alth . . .

This thesis brings together three shorter plays, "Reverse Intimidation," "Collectors," and "Chandra," each of which I've been working for some time. Each play explores the courage and the fragility of women. "Reverse Intimidation" is based on personal . . .

Melancholy, enigmatic, haunting, spectral. These are words often used to describe W.G. Sebald’s prose style. Critics and lay readers who find themselves enmeshed in Sebald’s enchanting, dark web of words sometimes find his work difficult to categorize . . .

A comedienne clasping a manly-man hand to her face-that's the sight gag splashed across the cover of Tina Fey's bestselling memoir Bossypants, a joke and title with centuries' worth of setup. A subversion of expectations is reflected in the cover desi . . .

In this grant I will be addressing the need for an expansion of Feleti Barstow Public Library of Pago Pago, American Samoa. This Library is the only library on the island and houses many of the island's cultural and historical artifacts. I am requesti . . .

Late in Jane Austen’s "Emma," a peculiar scene of harrowing adventure disrupts an otherwise realistic novel. On an early morning walk, Harriet Smith takes a wrong turn into the woods outside the posh village of Highbury. A “gang” of young “gypsies,” p . . .

Establishing and maintaining a professional teacher blog enables teachers to publish, reflect, share, collaborate, and enrich their professional presence. While publishing has long been the standard for university professors, secondary teachers do not . . .

Feminist rhetoric often looks back in history to find instances of women’s voices in writings, but for my thesis, I argue the importance of looking at modern forms of feminist rhetoric in academia. I am specifically looking at what I term as Rouge Fem . . .

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 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 . . .

One of the biggest problems facing incoming freshmen in American colleges today is lack of preparation in appropriate reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. These abilities are necessary for success not only in college but also in the profess . . .

This essay enters the ongoing disciplinary debate regarding the place of literature in the composition classroom, with special emphasis on first-year college college composition courses. Drawing on the work of past scholars, as well as on my own field . . .

King Horn, like many verse poems of the thirteenth century, is interested in courtly culture and what it means to be king. The poem follows the development of Horn, heir to Suddene, through his exile-and-vengeance plot before he takes back the throne . . .

Pearl, a twelve hundred line poem, is recognized as one of the most important products of the Alliterative Revival which took place in England during the fourteenth century. Yet, its obscure dialect and the changes that have occurred in the English la . . .

This paper explores and examines Katniss Everdeen, the star of Suzanne Collins' hit trilogy, as a modern interpretation of Judith Butler's "Drag Queen" as discussed in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Through the analysis of th . . .

In recent years, hip-hop has propelled its way into the mainstream. The genre has produced some of the most commercially successful albums of the 21st century namely from artists such as Kanye West, Jay-Z, Eminem, Rihanna, and OutKast. Despite this ri . . .

Fighting the Mindset By: Alejandro Arellano Masters of Arts in English This project introduces the collision of a character, Leandro Montejo, with an illness he's been fighting his whole life. Unfortunately, given his upbringing, his family is dismiss . . .

Richard Boleslavsky, in his Acting: The First Six Lessons, details two conditions necessary to the conception of art: "You suffered just now; you felt deeply. Those are two things without which you cannot do in any art." According to Boleslavsky, an a . . .

It is virtually impossible to survey George Gissing's novelistic ideas on women and feminism without occasionally introducing biographical data. The data of his literary thoughts and his marital difficulties are so heavily intermingled that it is nece . . .

Jane Austen is often simultaneously placed under two conflicting areas of thought. Scholarly research views her novels as indicative of either a woman whose main concern is marriage or an early feminist who refused to submit to the conventions of her . . .

The educator's portfolio is seen by most as both a tool for reflecting on one's teaching practice and as a marketing tool to prospective employers. In the past, an educator's standard portfolio consisted of a three-ring binder that included lesson pla . . .

An inaccessible truth does not negate the existence of truth. My relationship to writing is an ontological investigation of the lack (derived from Lacan). My writing process typifies the investigative process of finding patterns in seemingly disparate . . .

Between scrambling to piece together the all-star, standards-savvy curriculum, grading piles of papers, and attending more meetings than one can count, it's no wonder that teachers rarely have to time to pause and reflect on...well, anything! The purp . . .

In this Dystopic Factory-Dickensian setting, Naifi, the protagonist, is at the bottom rung of the social order. Naifi is an orphan and therefore property of the state; within this world, the Factories are workhouses where children are forced to contri . . .

This project consists of experimentation in form, legibility, hybridity, and challenges the notion by which poetry is to be understood. Ranging from poems with unreadable text to images of artwork being substituted in place of language, the work in th . . .

As a poet, the one thing that I find the most redemptive is the power of confession that language affords me, even though within that power lies a struggle of bittersweet magnitude. My poetic confessions speak to the torrential downpour of an unpleasa . . .

One of the seminal minds of the nineteenth century was the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Perhaps better than any other man of his age, Mill understood that the democratic form of government was fragile. He wrote at length on the value of . . .

The Heart of the Hawk is a novel about a young American Indian named Tom Red Hawk who returns from the Viet Nam war to attend college in Vermont at Bartlett University. Red Hawk is a complex person, and aspires to be a writer. He begins a novel about . . .

This paper argues that genre awareness can be taught more effectively by challenging the boundaries of genre by genre blending. This approach exists to supplement and augment the current ways in which genre is taught in a first year composition class . . .

Public education and the university have stricter, more basic rules and forms of self-expression when it comes to literature and language, usually neglecting creative empowering ways of communication and representation. For my culminating project, I w . . .

In Family Justice, I take the reader on a rollercoaster of exploration which seeks the answer to which instinct is more dominant when combined with the societal gender expectations of being a "woman": nature or nurture. Even growing up and becoming a . . .

Throughout his lifetime, Dickens was fascinated by the nature of evil. I believe there is a distinct pattern of development in his portrayal of evil. In order to show this, I treat four novels spanning over twenty years: Oliver Twist (1838), David Cop . . .

W. H. Auden's “New Year Letter” is a poem which was written as an epistle to his dear friend and fellow exile, Mrs. Elizabeth Mayer. The poem is best understood in the light of what Auden said in a note which he sent to Mrs. Mayer on January 1, 1940 a . . .

My Graduating Project is a one-act theatrical play, entitled The Writer vs. the World. To situate and categorize the performative text historically, theoretically, and aesthetically: it is a hybrid creative and academic postmodern amalgamation of surr . . .

The title character of Anna Karenina represents a resentment and hypocrisy from 19th century Russian traditionalists as well as a severe resistance to an ever-growing globalized Victorian cosmopolitanism. Commonly referred to as a negative breaching o . . .

Languages are partially shaped by both genetic and functional constraints, but all have a fundamental core that lies below the linguistic utterance. The literary translator must take this fundamental core and not only transform the literal meaning of . . .

A compilation of poems, The Deviant and the Divine is an explorative piece from a single, queer speaker scrutinizing the relationship between Catholicism and self-identity. Being born and raised int the Catholic Church condemning homosexuality, the sp . . .

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 . . .

This project combines a lyric essay on Bunraku Japanese theater with "staged" poems that explore the mother-daughter relationship. The lyric essay sections seek to provide a theory for the relationship between the body and spiritual mind and its posit . . .

The sociologist Erving Goffman's theory from over a half a century ago suggests that all communication between one or more individuals is essentially a performance. Considering the many critical arguments made that socio-political norms such as gender . . .

For my master's thesis, my intent was to craft a story for the students who come in my classroom and proclaim their disdain for reading. While I take great joy in the students who walk from classroom to classroom with their nose in a book, it is those . . .

Richard Wright's novel, Native Son, published in 1940, has seen itself adapted to a stage drama directed by Orson Wells in 1941, and various film adaptions--one of them starring the author himself. Most recently, an HBO film was released in 2019 direc . . .

This piece will be a series of short stories in the sci-fi speculative fiction genre exploring what crime looks like in the year 2072. The sci-fi author and creator of the “cyberpunk” genre, William Gibson, described cyberpunk as being “high tech meet . . .

John Milton’s hermeneutics developed over a period of years. He embraced the Protestant position that accepted the Bible as the sole arbiter in issues affecting man’s relationship to God and other men. However, a study of Milton’s Biblical interpretat . . .

The following compositions of work are meant to examine how grief is viewed through all point of views, as well as the structure of literature. The First piece, A Body of Work, is a long prose poem representing the stages of grief through the structur . . .

This collection was an experiment to push the boundaries of my comfort zone to explore what I can create. Many of these works are created in new and different formats to seek a different way of expression. I decided to play with innovative ideas and c . . .

When contemplating the entering of the academic arena as a professional, one must rely on both the pedagogical theory learned as a student and the application of said scholarship. While not everything can be covered in the course of a semester, the pr . . .