Search Constraints
Filtering by:
Department
English
Remove constraint Department: English
Collection
Thesis
Remove constraint Collection: Thesis
« Previous |
1 - 100 of 779
|
Next »
Number of results to display per page
Search Results
- Creator:
- Alexander, Jacen Rynae
- Description:
- 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 little overboard or a lot? And what of Walter‟s thematic connection to God, if there is any? For that matter, does Griselda equate Job? Is she to be emulated or not? What of the Clerk? Yet analysis of the primary characters and their narrator can yield some interesting points about marriage, love, entitlement, sovereignty and, ultimately, despotism: the wife‟s unthinking acquiescence to the husband‟s tests justifies spousal abuse, and as royalty their twisted dynamic justifies the worst kind of tyranny. Therefore, this thesis will use theories and examples of modern tyranny and abusive relationships to examine Walter's disturbing power over Grisilde.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Iverson, Rebecca Anne
- Description:
- 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 perspective. The questions that I will explore deal with the brand of Christianity and social idealism with which Bronte was brought up, and how this is reflected in the text. Biography here is used to evaluate Bronte's attitudes concerning a multitude of Christianities, both prevalent and fledgling during the mid-eighteen hundreds. I will contextualize her faith, in hopes of broadening and enhancing our understanding of the text, and thus challenge aspects of the readings by critics who see her apparent feminism as a direct challenge to Christianity, (which they construe as a singular and monolithic social phenomenon). In chapter one I will contextualize Charlotte Bronte through the religious and social climate of her time and her own beliefs as they are revealed in her biography and letters. I will focus on the varying religious motifs of the novel as they are exemplified in the main characters. Chapter two will center on the character of St. John Rivers. Chapter three with Edward Rochester. Chapter four concerning Jane Eyre. At this point in my research, I have come to believe that Bronte studies in the recent past and present (1970's on) focus mainly on the feminist aspect of Jane Eyre while the Christian component is often marginalized or misunderstood.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Stock Stotler, Darlene
- Description:
- 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 era's ideology; however, since the Greek suffix "logy" signifies "the study of," the term ideology is not as specific, nor does it explain the role ofJesuitical equivocation in relation to the Renaissance as accurately as another term: the episteme. A brief discussion of the episteme is necessary to discover its relevancy to the puns William Shakespeare used in his Porter Scene in the tragedy Macbeth. An episteme (Greek for "knowledge") is most clearly defined by the new historicist scholar Michel Foucault as a verbal device that involves "[a] network ofdiscursive practices--of thoughts, concepts, and cultural codes-dominant during a given historical period; and ... the rules governing the transformation of those practices" (Murfin 149). Placing an emphasis on the phrase "rules governing" is extremely illuminating in identifying the interplay between the Jacobean monarchy that held public disdain, and executions of, Jesuits. The persecutions forced subjugated Jesuits to the point that ordinances, such as confessions, needed some form of protection, hence Father Henry Garnet's treatise regarding equivocation . This imbalanced reciprocity of a monarchy instilling fear in religious leaders illustrates Foucault's "transformation of ... practices" and is the basis of the Foucauldian concept of the episteme. Applying Foucault's theory to the Porter Scene reveals the way Shakespeare's satirical puns mirrored the Jacobean episteme of the blatant hatred directed at Catholics and the Jesuits.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Sergi, Stephanie Lynne
- Description:
- 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 within the poem is not due to an authorial failing but is instead an imperfect unification that may suggest a modernist view of unity. In short, the thesis focuses Tiresias in regards gender, prophecy, and mythology. This thesis argues that Tiresias fails to completely unify The Waste Land; nevertheless, it also maintains that he can, in fact, fuse the poem’s fragments in an unusual way. Tiresias allows for a nuanced view of the poem’s structure by suggesting incomplete connections hidden in the numerous vignettes. An image of a maypole can illustrate this modernist view of unity. A traditional maypole consists of a fixed pole that has ribbons or streamers extending down from the top, and the end of each ribbon is held by a person. Then, the people dance around the pole weaving the ribbons together. In contrast, a modernist maypole would lack some of these ribbons, and others may be frayed or torn. In The Waste Land, Tiresias is the stationary maypole; however, some of the ribbons connecting him to the other characters in the poem are either torn or missing. In true modernist fashion, the maypole, Tiresias, unifies the work by suggesting what it might have been.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Martinez, Lauren Elizabeth
- Description:
- 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 Robert Kimbrough, is based directly on this edition: “The first section of the present volume contains the only critical edition of The Turn of the Screw ever published and is the first modern text to follow the New York Edition, the one which had James’s final authority” (Kimbrough, ix). Kimbrough includes the notes that accompanied the serial version, as well as several of James’s personal letters about the story as well. Rather than choose sides and argue for or against the Governess’s sanity, I am studying James’s stylistic choices not to solve the debate over the ghosts’ existence, but to determine how, lingusitically and rhetorically, James created this unanswerable dilemma. Richard A. Lanham’s Analyzing Prose will serve as a starting point for my stylistic analysis, and I supplement with Aristotle’s theories of rhetoric. James wrote in his New York edition preface that this story is “a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the “fun” of the capture of the witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious” (120). My interest lies not in what ambiguity he created, but rather in how.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Kroll, Rebecca
- Description:
- 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 demonstrates the two authors maintained an enduring relationship, one that spanned from the forties up until Kenneth Burke’s death in 1993. In other words, the authors maintained a friendship lasting roughly half their lives. To that end, this project presents a chronology of selected correspondence in order to provide an initial set up, so that scholars may encounter the letters in one place and consider the role each author played in the development of the other’s ideas.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Wrisley, Brooke
- Description:
- 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 and affective possibilities of queer optimism, or optimism without futurity.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Soto, Erik M.
- Description:
- 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, religion, relationship dynamics, and the clash of between Mexican and American societies, I hope to give the reader an authentic perspective of the Mexican/Latinx/Chicanx experience. Scope: The scope of Children of Immigrants is always through the eyes of someone who is Mexican/Latinx/Chicanx. Everything about the characters in these poems is a reflection of the Mexican/Latinx/Chicanx and, by extension, people who interact with this identity. Approach: Because the purpose of Children of Immigrants is to illustrate an authentic Mexican/Latinx/Chicanx experience, my approach was to mimic and write about situations and locations that helped build a foundation to this experience. This included incorporating the Spanish language, including real locations, and writing with politically charged themes. Many of the experiences I wrote about come from my personal life or tales told by friends, family members or the news.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Davies, John William
- Description:
- 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 terms, depicted interiority in a unique way, allowing his characters to “overhear” themselves, to be self-reflective and existential (or proto-existential). Existentialism proper, along with the whole modern conception of self, has been merely catching up. It is my contention that the Romantics accelerated this paradigm shift by making the figure of The Poet highly subjective in a way it had not been before. Byron is the archetype. The “Byronic Hero” inaugurated in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and perfected in “Manfred” and “Don Juan,” is subjectivity (at least male subjectivity) personified, a titillating amalgam of ambition, weakness, androgyny, power, lust; mortality and immortality in locked combat like Jacob and the angel. Only Jacob is not an abstract, allegorical figure here. These characters are Byron, by his own admission “such a strange mélange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me". We have another name for this and it is “human nature.”
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
10. The Politics of cultural trauma and violence in Junot Díaz's The Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao
- Creator:
- Wong, Jana Lee
- Description:
- 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 Trujillo Molina. A history of genocide, highlighted by Diaz’s book, is also closely linked to American politics. As the main character, Oscar Cabral de León , tries to reclaim his Dominican past from his place of exile, the United States , he tries to blunt the spell of his family’s curse. This process compels him to tell his family history as part of a strategy of providing testimony. Through the recording of stories of many voiceless victims, Oscar reclaims their lost culture and lost power. Once in America, where Oscar’s family is forced to assimilate and work under extreme conditions to survive, they must find their collective history in order to face the injustices of the past and the present. This thesis also juxtaposes the fictional and historical narratives and motifs of Diaz’s novel with psychological studies that demonstrate that personal and political violence shape racist discrimination and that violent politics disrupt positive notions of self and cultural community.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Davis, Ashley B.
- Description:
- 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 perhaps a little more personally. The most resistant of them all, the kid, is still annihilated by the judge despite having earned something akin to the judge’s favor at various intervals. These are the facts we have to deduce the forces at work in the text. Superimposed over the whole of Blood Meridian, the concept of evil does not satisfy, for there are too many unanswered questions. While the scholarship has shown “evil” to be a grey area in the novel, the reader can easily identify the judge as a destructive force, and thus closer to Aquinas’s concept of natural evil, or dissolution.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Gaumond, Theresa Anita McCarron
- Description:
- 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 virginity run through both. Her constant thematic repetitions have been considered by critics as a stylistic attempt to disassociate herself from the disturbances in her life, but she was never able to completely divorce her works from partially retelling her past. Her masterpiece, Nightwood, is no exception. It was written to cope with her anguish after her eight-year co-dependent relationship with Thelma Wood ended, and most of the characters are traceable to their real-life counterparts; for example, Thelma Wood is Robin Vote, and Djuna Barnes is Nora Flood. Nearly all of the characters in the book have been identified by researchers to their real-life counterparts. Barnes repeatedly called Nightwood “my life with Thelma,” and wrote to T. S. Eliot that the work was semi-autobiographical (Field 43). Nevertheless, care has to be taken not to confuse the events in the book with the reality of Barnes’s and Wood’s life together. The focus must remain upon the rhetorical and stylistics methods that Barnes uses within Nightwood to explicate the trauma of a failed relationship.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Jeanpierre, Shani
- Description:
- 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 with people who made an impact in his life, but few have considered what Fitzgerald’s motivations behind these parallels were and what purpose they serve. People often see similarities between Fitzgerald and the characters of Gatsby, Nick, and sometimes even Tom, but they do not often consider why he would create these parallels or what their significance is. The same can be said for the similarities between significant figures in his life, such as the women he loved, and different characters in the novel. After closely examining both his life and the connections that are often found in Gatsby and paying close attention to how the people and events are represented in his novel, it seems that Fitzgerald’s purpose in creating such connections was to criticize the materialistic society and attitudes of Americans of the 1920’s.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Ward Hubbard, Barbara
- Description:
- 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 mercilessly over the centuries. My interest has been to discover how and why Chaucer used so many Scriptural verses and Biblical references in the stories, most of which were adapted versions of familiar folktales and stories by contemporary writers, such as, Boccaccio and Petrarch. After a review of historical events occurring during that tumultuous 14th century, particularly those related to the religious unrest of the time, it became apparent that Chaucer was, in a very subtle way, using the characters and their stories as a veiled criticism of the Catholic Church. The prologues and stories told by The Wife of Bath, The Summoner, and The Pardoner illustrate how and why Chaucer used these characters as that criticism.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Wilson, Mark
- Description:
- 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 constantly updated, and usually breaks many of the traditional rules that instructors expect from “real” writing: text messages, online blog posts, wiki contributions, status updates, discussion boards, and page comments, just to name a few. Unfortunately, most students have been told throughout their lives that these kinds of writings are less valid and proper writing must conform to very strict academic rules in order to be correct. The truth is, despite their lack of academic reading and writing skills, by sheer exposure and daily practice, students today have greater untapped linguistic resources than perhaps any other generation in history. The difficulty for students of this technological age is harnessing and refining those innate expressive abilities, so they can adapt to the demands of the academic and professional types of writing needed for success in their educations and careers. Context: Reading and Writing in Today’s World attempts to bridge this gap by presenting useful reading and writing skills in an electronic format more convenient and accessible to students who already spend a great deal of their time online using electronic devices. It validates the experiences of students who may not realize how much reading and writing skills they have acquired and gives them the tools and practice needed to consciously create effective writing consistently. The student’s ability to recognize and utilize their own essential reading and writing skills, rather than occasionally stumble upon success, is at the heart of Context.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Canning, Denise
- Description:
- 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 that Chaucer’s tale is simply a retelling of the latter, I must contend that Chaucer makes a point with his story that the source tale does not make. Chaucer significantly and strategically changed “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell” in his version of the story, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Furthermore, in his tale, Chaucer emphasizes women and their roles, whereas the other story focuses on men. Also, in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the queen (a female) is the person who exercises control to determine the outcome of the knight’s life. His overall change was to demonstrate how men must be monitored closely in their actions in which women request of them. In doing this, Chaucer shows how women truly try to achieve sovereignty over the men in their lives in order for women to acquire freedom to make their own decisions, thus allowing them to have a sense of control over their own destiny. Chaucer changed the original tale in order to demonstrate that early on in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the women are the ones who hold the power over the outcome of the knight’s life, whereas in “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell,” the knight holds the power of the outcome of the king’s life. This is relevant to our reading of Chaucer’s version because Chaucer immediately wants to focus on women desiring sovereignty. To illustrate, in the Prologue and in the tale itself, the Wife focuses on the men in her life and her relationship with them in terms of sovereignty.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
17. Podloujny
- Creator:
- DeMartini, Paul
- Description:
- 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, exploring the hopes, fears and delusions within each character’s consciousness. While the work is grounded in traditional drama—scene, dialogue, action, consequence—the novel’s core is what occurs within. Beyond this framework, the novel focuses on what happens when the established solidity of a family unit begins to fray and crumble; in this case, the dementia diagnosis of the family’s elder and spiritual center acts as both a catalyst for change and a means to examine the past. Podloujny investigates thematic conflicts including harmony and dissonance, pride and shame, beauty and ugliness, realization and repression, falling apart and coming together.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Bates, Rebecca Joyce
- Description:
- 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 literary canon such as Jane Austen , Charlotte and Emily Bronte , and George Eliot, while being deeply interested in contemporary writers like Libba Bray and Brad Barkley. This has created a deep fascination in me for finding the balance between the traditional and the contemporary and what will happen when the two clash . The novel seeks to capture a moment in time and wrap its pages around the intense questions of identity in a time and place where traditional and contemporary society are grating against each other. The identity in question is that of eighteen-year-old Tara Worthington , the middle-child in an old-money southern family. The novel 's theme revolves around the idea of holding onto traditions of the past while also struggling to move forward and away from the old . What can stay and what must be left behind when the two worlds will not combine? I intend to set up as many dichotomies as possible such as the left and the right, north and south , the traditional and the contemporary. In placing all these ideas together I hope to illustrate the struggle that happens in one person when faced with all of them.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Henry, Lorelei Lee
- Description:
- 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 in ways similar to, and perhaps indebted to Hemingway and Conrad. However, I will also demonstrate that O'Brien is correct in seei11g differences between his own approach and that of these authors, and other war literature writers. Where the suggestive style of Hemingway and Conrad minimize horrid detail, O'Brien's style highlights horror in an evocative, Gothic depiction of the true horror of war: the degeneration of men, the impossibility of regeneration, and the absolute moral desolation that results from the experience of war. O'Brien will thus be seen as representative of his generation, given to exaggeration, excess, overt disgust, anger, and fear. Chapter I will address the way in which O'Brien's depiction of the Vietnam War aligns it with World War I. In many ways, the cultural climate of the 1960s made the war a battle not unlike The Great War, in which Romantic ideals of nationalism and patriotism crumbled at the hands of a more personal disillusionment with war. The horrific individual, social, and cultural ramifications of war are brought to the forefront in O'Brien's works. Like Hemingway, O'Brien discusses very similar issues, central to the war of his time, in which, like Hemingway, the wasteland of the battlefield becomes an individual wasteland. In many ways, society was not prepared for either war, or for the shock, horror and degradation that war entails. We can see this clearly in the depiction of war as a degenerative force on society and culture in both Hemingway and O'Brien. Aligning the two wars historically also sets up social and cultural parallels between O'Brien and Hemingway. O'Brien is quoted as stating his admiration for Hemingway's work, and critics have noted the similarities between O'Brien's Vietnam stories and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. However, a much clearer connection exists between O'Brien's works and Hemingway's In Our Time, which depicts the transformation of Romantic idealism at the hands of Modernist fragmentation and alienation. The similarities between O'Brien and Hemingway are seen most strikingly between "Speaking of Courage," from The Things They Carried and "Soldier's Home" from In Our Time. Like Hemingway, O'Brien points out the failure of a Romantic ideal of war, the loss of patriotism and nationalism, to reveal the impossibility of individual, social, or cultural post-war regeneration. The Modernist wasteland that begins with Krebs ends logically in O'Brien. In Chapter Two, I will compare O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Where Hemingway's style mutes some of the awful details of war, O'Brien's style elaborates these details in order that the horror of war, in both the realistic and the Conradian sense, can be more clearly depicted. In In the Lake of the Woods, as in Heart of Darkness, one character's journey toward another through a dark and mysterious outer landscape mirrors an inner, moral journey, and exposes a figurative darkness lurking within the novel's protagonist. John Wade, a Vietnam veteran who now faces the shame and guilt not only of losing a political election, but also of his participation in the My Lai Massacre, is haunted by a past he cannot reconcile with his present life. Wade's psyche, already overshadowed by a traumatic childhood, grows morally darker as a direct result of his violent and horrific Vietnam War experience, which takes place in a dark and chaotic jungle reminiscent of Conrad's Congo. Although O'Brien's works are clearly indebted to Hemingway for the depiction of war as degenerative, and also to Conrad for the depiction of war as horror and moral terror, the most profitable way to read them is in terms of those elements we think of as Gothic, for then they become like confessionals, attempting to justify and resolve the transgressive individual, social, and cultural conflicts created by war. Chapter Three examines O'Brien's novels in terms of the Gothic genre, which sheds new light on the victory of fear over bravery, of terror over courage, of the loss of self at the hands of "the other," and of ghosts, the memories of war that arise from that dark landscape to haunt those that survived. By placing soldiers within a haunted landscape, issues of bravery and courage no longer lie solely within the realm of the characters' will, but, as in Gothic novels, are subject to outside forces that are constantly at odds with reality. When we examine O'Brien's Vietnam stories as discussing the failure of a Romantic ideal, as the reflection of individual, historical, social, and cultural anxiety, then they can be seen in terms of horror, where the stripped-down wasteland of Hemingway and the festering horror of Conrad come together in a Gothic world. O' Brien's The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and Going After Cacciato, mediated by Gothic elements, reveal an individual, historical, social, and cultural anxiety beyond that which can be accomplished within the war literature genre.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
20. Marlow and the "necessary fiction" of morality in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim
- Creator:
- Theriault, Jennifer Marie
- Description:
- 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 of all forms of ideals that would come to characterize Modernism as a literary movement began to emerge. I show how Marlow transforms what would ordinarily be characterized as nihilistic lies into affirmations of life in order to sustain the illusion that traditional notions of Western morality are still in tact. Until Marlow reveals the truth about his lies and the corrupt European imperialism that they conceal in Heart of Darkness, he tells a series of untruths that effectively perpetrate for European bourgeois culture the myth that "civilizing" is benevolent. In telling lies that appear to compromise Marlow's own moral fidelity so that the existence of vast evil is concealed, Marlow comes into the "hard wisdom" that conventional morality is a facade. Despite Marlow's revelation about this, some twenty years later his aiding the criminal Jim in Lord Jim continues to sustain this illusion about morality. This is because in Marlow's collision -- and collusion -- with the European imperial enterprise in the African Congo, he learns that in the moral vacuum of "civilizing" lies that have a saving and stabilizing power are preferable to the truth that barbarism, and not benevolence, is at the "heart" of civilization. In illustrating this thesis, I show how Marlow's lies function as part of a Nietzschean "revaluation" of his rigid Victorian morality. In this process, Marlow reinterprets the traditional values that he associates with notions of "good" and "evil" so that his lies, once considered equivalent to death, are transformed into acts of "good" that sustain European colonial progress. These lies initially appear to compromise Marlow's own fidelity to his Victorian values because they make him what he has always loathed to become, a liar. However, these lies are really the hallmarks of Marlow's "revaluation." Marlow skews the truth in such a way that for a time his lies successfully function to confirm his allegiance to what he thinks is redeeming about the idea of a moral system - the efficiency and progress that sustain civilization.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- 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
- Creator:
- Molle, Kierstin E.
- Description:
- 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 have been passionate about and it was my goal to imbue the historical setting I’ve chosen to work within with themes that can still be felt in the present day such as a search for one’s identity, the impact of war on those who fight it, the lengths people will go as a result of fervent patriotism. Having grown up in a period of conflict I find it cathartic in some ways to write what might be qualified as war literature in spite of the fact I myself have never experienced military service. I sincerely hope that my characters will read as real people with real struggles that the reader can connect and empathize with in spite of any inherent differences between themselves and the characters on the page. If I can provide a glimpse of representation for even one person who reads my thesis, I will have achieved the goal I set for myself as I crafted it.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Ganiy, Helen
- Description:
- 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 spiritual superiority” invigorated racial tensions of the time and encouraged white reader’s hyperbolic notions of Blackness. The undisputed architect of the Magical Negro trope, Stowe’s creation forces the enslaved into a position to prove themselves superhuman; that is, the trope burdens their humanity with inhumane assumptions. To contemporize my discussion of Stowe’s work, I assert that her character, Uncle Tom, was the largest and most significant influence on the production of the Magical Negro, which has become highly visible in film and literature of the past half century. Additionally, the trope positions Black individuals as divided into two categories: ordinary criminals or supernatural creatures. Both of these assumptions deny Black humanity in the same way that black exceptionalism denies the existence of a human spectrum in the Black community. This polarization of types works to story the black experience into extreme poles, forcing perceptions of Blackness to recede back into “Uncle Tom-isms”, relegated into the space of characters, stereotypes and relics. Shifting from this historical perspective into a speculative lens, I argue that Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon disavow the Magical Negro by engaging with Black Supernaturalism - a term that denotes a literary phenomenon which seeks to rework dominant notions of Black religious participation and traditional African Voodoo. My work excavates Black Supernaturalism through the anthropological and fictional works of Zora Neale Hurston, whose work formed the foundation upon which Morrison, and other Black authors, built their work. Further, Black Supernaturalism certifies and upholds communal traditions that certify magical storytelling, ghosts and impossible feats as palpably sourced in the scars of slavery borne by the black community.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Clark, Nicolette
- Description:
- 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 for Old Men, and The Road. This study examines the productive nature behind violence, which I argue, manifests through language. Beginning with Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s judge appropriates language through the manipulation of referents re-shaping truth, informing all violence throughout the novel. No Country For Old Men brings us to the language of the law and how it caters to the objectivity of the law, using it as a guiding principle, without the scope of morality. Through the characters of Chigurh and Flannery O’Connor’s The Misfit, we are asked to judge the validity of the state’s versus the vigilante’s truth, which are ultimately synonymous. Leaving us with Sheriff Bell, who relinquishes his position as sheriff because he is unwilling to be an accessory to a morally corrupt system. Then, in The Road, the ultimate violence occurs through the disintegration of language, resulting from the indifference of man. With the perspective as perceiver of violence throughout this range of McCarthy’s works, we are in the position to judge this violence and consider its productivity. Its productivity lies in the fact that great violence must occur for redemption to manifest—as in The Road, the preciousness and life of language is not discernible until it faces its own mortality.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Cassells, Breanne
- Description:
- 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 nature in her works, the symbiotic relationship between the three has remained largely unremarked upon. This project explores the similarities between white supremacy, misogyny, and the plundering of the natural world—which I refer to as types of biosubjugation—in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. Utilizing Simon Estok’s theory of ecophobia, this project examines how the interactions between characters and the natural world are influenced by linguistic, physical, and ecological trauma. In The Bluest Eye, internalized oppression causes female characters to judge and exclude other females for their perceived dirtiness, understood in floral and/or animalistic terms. In Sula, female sexuality is conflated with and expressed through natural landscapes. In Beloved, trauma is literalized through natural elements, such as the tree on Sethe’s back and the shrubs in which Denver hides. An exploration of Morrison’s use of language clarifies her invocations of nature, which in turn elucidates her depiction of the alienating nature of oppression. These systems of intersectional oppression cause the characters to react in ecophobic ways in order to assert their own humanity, but these exclusionary tactics amputate the communal connections which are necessary to heal from communal trauma, and thus the cycle continues.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Lo, Isabella
- Description:
- 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 conversation with Western perspective as to who they, the Hmong, really are. Through this thesis I hope to inform and teach a little more about the Hmong community. I want to help rhetoric and composition scholars to understand more on how to incorporate our Hmong stories and narratives into the field. With more generations being born in America, the Hmong are beginning to find agency in the midst of the dominant culture. Where there was silence before, a rhetoric from the Hmong community is starting to spill over and into the dominant culture, demanding to be heard. In this thesis I analyze many texts and artifacts in relation to and within the Hmong community in order to bring to the forefront the Hmong rhetoric that has been pushed aside due to the dominant culture’s idea of what counts as rhetoric. In Chapter 2: “Voices from the War,” I highlight personal narratives of the Hmong people and “the Secret War” through documentary evidence. In Chapter 3: “Voices of a Daughter,” I investigate Hmong weddings to highlight the cultural relevance of the wedding in The Bride Price through the use of critical rhetorical analysis. Finally, in Chapter 4: “Voices from the Cloth,” I investigate the cultural and rhetorical relevance of the Hmong stitching and quilting, as material rhetoric and cultural literacy.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Fresno
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Wilson, Veronica Lauren
- Description:
- 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 after taking their holy vows or took their vows as a way to escape a society who rejected them for being ruined, there is one thing that is certain: Catholic nuns of eighteenth century literature are clearly trouble. This theme is too pervasive to be a mere whim, so where does this negative view of Catholic women monastics come from? Some of the blame can certainly be placed on the anti-Catholic sentiment that saturated Protestant England’s society, but more of it can be place on the even more pervasive anti-woman sentiment in England at this time.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Abbassi, Susan
- Description:
- 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 repeatedly and often harshly judged by others based on his different ethnic background and special outward characteristics. Despite being a warrior of high status, he cannot be fully embraced by the white people around him due to his otherness.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Collins, Kim Maria
- Description:
- 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 instructors of individual basic writing classrooms need to know and do to contribute their piece to the complex puzzle of student success? This paper has three emphases. The first section considers the emotional and social needs of basic writing students and proposes that a classroom environment that emphasizes mastery, trust, cooperation, and interest best meets these needs. A mastery approach aids in restoring the confidence and self esteem of battle-worn students, and is also strongly correlated with promoting other desirable classroom characteristics. According to Senko et al, mastery encourages academic honesty and collaboration. The value of academic honesty is self evident. Collaboration is beneficial to all students but is especially advantageous for students who have been physically and emotionally marginalized from mainstream learning and often feel isolated and barred access to meaningful interactions. Finally, mastery promotes interest. Many basic learners have disengaged from actual learning and have settled for rote, formulaic memorization of rules and facts. Creating interest enhances students' subjective classroom experience and sparks engagement which results in objective gains (Senko et al. 35-36).
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Grigorian, Masha
- Description:
- 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. Although I explain and expand upon the underlying connection between these three characters, who ultimately create a trinity of sorts within the books, I focus mostly on evaluating each character as an individual, as well as within the trinity, through theories of gender, identity formation and development, sexuality, hybridity, language, psychoanalysis, abjection, and others. These theories are described not only as they pertain to the specific characters, but are contextualized in the larger scope of the novels, touching upon lucid central issues as well as veiled trivial issues.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
40. Collectors
- Creator:
- Chukhadarian, Lucin
- Description:
- 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 experience with the secret service that took place on one of my travels to Cairo, Egypt. The "Collectors" is a play based on true stories told by both my grandmothers of their experiences as children during the Armenian Genocide. "Chandra" on the other hand, is about growing old, finding inner peace, and regretting nothing and everything. It wasn't difficult recognizing the similarities in all my female characters, but the notion of bringing these plays together was very overwhelming. My passion for playwriting started with The Cryptogram by David Mamet, The Dumbwaiter by Harold Pinter, Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht, and Far Away by Caryl Churchill. I also think that age and experience have played a pivotal role in how I think and write. The courage that comes with age takes a person on an unknown journey for which one might not be ready for in the physical sense, but one is willing to fearlessly endeavor in the spiritual sense, since one is no longer worried about the aesthetic aspects of one's self. Initially, "Collectors" was going to be a play about certain women during a specific historical period; however, I decided to integrate women of different age groups and different time periods from my plays making appearances though-out the play. I believe history has a way of repeating itself. No matter where in the world, women under extreme conditions learn to adapt and survive. Women have found ways to challenge their natural abilities against the masculinity of society's expectations to conform and abide by. Women are not commodities, yet society dictates otherwise hence the title "Collectors." Virginia Wolf said, "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." I'm hoping that women writers including myself can change that one day.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Leavenworth-Keenberg, Gretchen Daria
- Description:
- 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, yet strangely alluring. W.G. Sebald, a German-born professor who spent most of his adult life living and teaching in England, challenged old notions of what a novel should look like and be about. His four “prose-narratives,” published between 1990 and 2002, explore intense themes such as trauma, loss, identity, time, sexuality, psychosis, war, and amnesia. Sebald strongly emphasizes the unspeakable horror of the holocaust and its aftermath, while incorporating non-traditional elements in his creative works such as photography, old postcards and scribbled notes, antiquated words, verbosity, and quite a few digressions.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Freeman, Daniel
- Description:
- 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 design of Fey's book-a woman, but with "manly" hands photoshopped on, in the same way "Bossypants" takes the term "boss" and cobble onto it the essence of "smartypants." "'Why can't we accept the human form as it is?' screams no one...we never have" Fey observes, "That's why people wore corsets and neck stretchers and powdered wigs" (Fey 245). In between impersonating Sarah Palin and informing the world "Fetch" will never happen, Fey's comedic oeuvre has consistently involved commentary on women, the body-and she's not alone. As Carol Hanisch put it decades ago, "The personal is political," and few things have consistently embodied the tension between those two elements of identity politics throughout modernity like the perceptions and depictions of the female body, especially in relation to women's role in society (Hanisch 23). To trace the manner in which English and French literature from the Early Modern Period onward has "dressed up" and presented women in relation to their bodies is to trace the evolution of modernity itself, from the advent of gender politics to the effects of new workers and capital to shifting societal roles and power relations. In particular, it examines the tension between conceptions of men, women, gender roles, and power relations which allow for the subversion implied by Fey's sight gag and title-namely, with men traditionally associated with power and the professional sphere, the process and, indeed, progress of modernity is reflected in women subverting social hierarchy and expectations while still running up against the challenges of that gender dynamic-tracing a narrative of modernity and the body from codpieces and corsets to bustles, Beauvoir, and back again.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Elisara, Unai
- Description:
- 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 requesting $15,000,000 for this expansion that will not only serve as extra storage for artifacts of Samoa's history, it will also serve as an emergency resource center as well as a multipurpose center that will hold many activities and demonstrations to promote wellness on all levels of the body, both mentally and physically, in order to also preserve the future of Samoa. This will serve as an area where locals of Pago Pago, as well as those from nearby islands can gather in a formal environment (meetings with the chiefs, tradition and cultural ceremonies, etc.) However, in adding on to the Feleti Barstow Public Library, this extension will also serve as an area for children to gather in an environment which encourages education and fosters a sense of culture pride in studying the artifacts housed here. During my time in graduate school I have come to realize that no matter how much an institution claims to promote "diversity and inclusion," the colonizers have now evolved; instead of "we come in peace," they now say they "encourage all voices." When really it is "most voices" from white faces. This grant will allow the people of American Samoa to be more self-sufficient during times of emergency, so we do not have to wait on the white man for "aid," or a prolonged genocide. This extension will serve as an entity in which artifacts and the cultural history is housed, is taught and passed on, as well as an area where the Samoan people can come for emergency shelter during times of crisis, while also serving as a safe space to embrace the history of our culture.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Narayanamurti, Krishna
- Description:
- 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,” presumably of Romany descent, surround Harriet and demand her purse. As a foreign element outside of Highbury’s rigid class structure, the parent-less gypsy children represent a corrupted reflection of Harriet, herself an orphan, in her attempts to assimilate into Emma’s social circle. Prior critical responses to this scene have trended in one of two directions—a sociopolitical interpretation through the lens of cultural studies and historicism or an analysis of the rhetorical and narratological devices Austen employs. By emphasizing particular interpretive methods over others, critics often miss opportunities for a multi-pronged analysis of how the formal elements of a narrative may inform the political ideology it knowingly or unknowingly promotes—and vice versa, how politics can influence the choice of aesthetic forms. When dealing with authors like Austen who eschew overt ideological statements, the New Formalist methods proposed by Caroline Levine and others can reveal hidden layers of thematic resonance and contradiction. Similarly, adopting Amy Devitt’s view of genre as a flexible rhetorical tool, rather than a fixed literary category, allows for an analysis of the gypsy scene’s function in harmony or contrast with other genres Austen employs in the novel. "Emma’s" abrupt placement of Harriet in distress provides what Levine might call a “collision” of multiple forms—story devices, social networks, and unifying structures—which unsettle each other but ultimately reshape and confirm the novel as both a political work with nationalist aims and a lighthearted comedy that satirizes its own insular preoccupations.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Lee, Ambre
- Description:
- 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 have the same expectations placed upon them. Primarily, this is due to time constraints, but the result is that secondary teachers do not always remain current in their field. To this point, a weekly writing practice can enable teachers to stay engaged and relevant in their particular field of study in regards to pedagogy and current research. Blogging enables teachers to understand writing for a purpose and for an audience, which increases credibility when insisting on the same from students. Since reflection is one of the most important aspects of improving one's teaching practice, the blog seems like an essential tool for every teacher. Finally, in an environment of questionable evaluation procedures for teachers, a teacher blog enables the teacher to highlight successes in the classroom and demonstrate his/her teaching pedagogy instead of being limited to one or two observations a year. I plan to utilize my teacher blog in a number of ways: Create a dialogue for secondary Special Day Class teachers about issues that aren't addressed anywhere else. Share and reflect on teaching practices. Read and write about current research in special education. Maintain a focus on potential interventions for both reading and writing at the secondary level. Lastly, increase my professional online presence.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Evans, Megan Day
- Description:
- 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 Feminist rhetoric, and how it situates itself in public feminist conversations online. My thesis brings forth questions about current understandings of feminist rhetoric online, and it calls for further study on how this new form is different or adding to the discussion of digital feminist rhetoric. I also suggest how future studies can be conducted by researchers looking at modern instances of feminist rhetoric online in order to answer the questions I pose.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Fresno
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Farrukh, Sawsan
- Description:
- 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 order to gain profit. The concepts of capitalism and colonization are also discussed within the paper to gain further understanding of the widows’ motivation for the incessant manipulation of the emotions of those surrounding them. They do this in order to acquire marriages that will provide financial security and high social standing; marriage is one of the few ways a person can instantly attain wealth during the Regency Era.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Beckman, Donna S.
- Description:
- 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 assigned a missing persons case involving a teenage runaway girl. Her search for the girl becomes a search for herself. In the tradition of the Oedipal detective, Leda is posed a riddle, and, like Oedipus, must undergo self discovery before she can arrive at its solution. Although The Girl Who Loved Gable derives its form from a popular genre, the detective novel, it utilizes literary techniques. One such element is the use of an unreliable first person narrator who is also the protagonist. The critical portion of this thesis is a study of the function of point of view as an element in the structure of the novel. Wayne Booth, in his essays on reliable commentary and reliable/unreliable narrators, stresses that there must be a character within the dramatic framework of the novel who can be trusted by the reader to function as a touchstone of objectivity. Booth overlooks an alternative structure. Both detective fiction and some modern novels are centered around a character who begins with limited or wrong knowledge and works his way through to truth. A series of epiphanies arising organically from the action of the novel bring the character and the reader to simultaneous revelation. Thus, in Willaim Styron's Sophie's Choice for example, discovering the objective truth becomes the central experience of the novel. The critical section of this thesis will address the question of whether Booth's touchstone is a prerequisite for a coherent novel, or if, by maintaining a Jamesian emphasis on dramatization, and by using the reader's experiences and expectations as a backdrop, the author can use an unreliable point of view to present a narrative that is "solved" as well as read.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Harris, Laura E
- Description:
- 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 professional world. The issues surrounding this problem are complicated and may appear to be unrelated; however, the connection between learning and instruction provides the solution. If instructors possess the concern and tenacity to understand and address how this connection relates to improving student learning, success rates of both the students and the academy can be improved. Learning must be understood in regards to diversity of style, cultural and social background, steps of knowledge building, the role of neuroscience, and the implications of the digital age on education.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Zumstein, John
- Description:
- 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 experience and research, I will argue in favor of the use of literature in First Year Composition classes by demonstrating its efficacy in helping students develop key composition skills, including critical thinking and command of rhetorical technique. Further still, I will argue that when assigned well-chosen literature texts, students are in fact more receptive to internalizing these skills in ways that are organic and long-lasting, rather than contextualizing them as something purely "academic" and thus separate from everyday life.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Postal, Caitlin
- Description:
- 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 and becomes king. By considering the etymology of the titles associated with Horn and the role of chivalry in the thirteenth century, I will explore how King Horn constructs narratives of social identity, specifically that of child, knight, and king. I argue that, despite being the narrative of King Horn, the story is not about Horn's life as king but rather about his journey to become king, which contributes to a greater understanding of kings in thirteenth century romance.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Kellenberger, Anne Elaine
- Description:
- 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 language over the intervening six hundred years make the poem unavailable to an untrained modern reader. This paper is a translation into Modern English of the Middle English Pearl, with a critical introduction and commentary. The opening essay and the commentary serve as an introduction to the critical and linguistic issues that make up the large body of scholarship on the poem. Questions concerning the nature of Pearl, the significance of its imagery, its relationship to other poems, and the identity and orthodoxy of its author have been raised and debated since Pearl was first published in 1864. The commentary in particular addresses textual matters such as the derivation of a debatable word or the effect a particular passage has on the interpretation of the poem as a whole. The guiding principle in making the translation itself was that it should be as true to the original as possible, both in meaning and structure, while eliminating archaic diction and syntax which might hamper a modern reader's enjoyment or understanding of the poem. The twelve-line stanza, four-beat rhythm, and some of the alliteration have been preserved, but much of the beauty of the language has been lost. Still, the poem's radiance and strength shine through and identify Pearl, in any translation, as the masterpiece it is.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Morrill, Bethany
- Description:
- 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 the trilogy readers are able to see Katniss in her "natural" state as the aggressive, stubborn, standoffish, young woman, and in her "drag" the Capitols' princess, the dress clad, makeup donning, performer. Although Katniss does not entirely reimagine what it means to be a woman her divergence from the traditional is notable and opens doors for both literary characters, as well audiences, in regard to gender identities by creating an identity for herself that exists very much outside traditional gender expectations/roles. Butler uses the image of the "Drag Queen" to magnify the concept that our ideas of identity are constructed. Katniss provides a unique same sex example of someone who must actively perform her gender for the entertainment and pleasure of others. Using a foundation built around children's literature, feminism, and gender theory I argue that Katniss in mind and body embodies the deconstructed alternative that is explored in the Hunger Game Series. I argue that her natural inclination towards masculinity subverts and destabilizes established gender norms.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Roche, Jason
- Description:
- 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 rise in recognition, many continue to criticize the genre for encouraging violence, claiming hip-hop does more harm than good. But what many fail to realize is the important revolutionary power of these artists on the national political consciousness. Like many other genres that have preceded it (such as folk, blues, punk, and rock), hip-hop has emerged as a leading musical genre of resistance and rebellion. These artists use their musical platform and lyrical prowess to express frustrations with American society and advocate for change. This project intends to examine a number of songs from Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly and how these songs simultaneously exhibit signs, desires and/or influence of Frantz Fanon's theory of Decolonization but challenge the idea that it has to be an act of violence. Looking at the specific characteristics of the violence depicted in Lamar's music (i.e. who are the victims? Who are the aggressors? Why is it happening in the first place? What's the general reaction to the violence? etc.) this work will explore the different ways in which violence has been a prominent theme in hip-hop and, while it is present in Lamar's music, his work actually advocates for music to take the place of violence in Fanon's definition of Decolonization.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Arellano, Alejandro
- Description:
- 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 dismissive and apathetic. The struggle of being a first generation immigrant and trying to define the lines between assimilation and tradition masks his every day struggles. Throughout his upbringing he bunts heads with those closest to him, fighting against their outdated beliefs. Witnessing the domestic abuse against his older brother and mother as a young child has left a sense of insecurity and a feeling that questions where he came from, where he is going, and how these events may shape who he becomes. Leandro questions his mother's self-worth and constantly wonders why his father is still in the picture. Through the eyes of a challenged teen we see how Leo copes with his everyday battles. This first hand perspective provides a subtle, but eye-opening perspective of the struggles first generation immigrant go through. His mother begins to fall susceptive to the controlling ways of her husband, Ezekiel, Leo's older brother challenges the cultural traditions and fends for himself in the streets. Leo is at a crossroads when the loss of someone near to him pushes Leandro closer to his breaking point.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Maki, Gary A.
- Description:
- 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 artist must be sensitive--must feel and suffer before he can create meaning through his art. Artists in modern existential literature conform.to Boleslavsky's prerequisite suffering and feeling. However, an existential artist can search for meaning without being a maker of art: Existentialist Herman Hesse view's the artist as any sensitive person condemned to-suffer and to endure life in an absurd universe: "They (artists) are not heroes, artists or thinkers in the same way that other men are judges, doctors, shoemakers or schoolmasters." Existential artists don't make a profession out of their suffering. He continues: ''Their life, consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and torn with pain, terrible and meaningless, unless one is ready to see its meaning in just those rare experiences, acts, thoughts and works that shine out above the chaos of such a life.” What Hesse refers to when he speaks of the artist, in existential terms, is really an artist-of-life, as opposed to a professional maker of art. A genuine artist-maker must be an artist-of-life, as Boleslavsky explains in his acting text. However, an artist-of-life does not have to paint or write a symphony to be sensitive, or to choose creatively in the process of his life. Zen writer D. T. Suzuki puts forth an even clearer insight into the theory of the artist-of-life in Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis: We cannot all be expected to be scientists, but we are so constituted by nature that we can-all be artists--not, indeed, artists of special kinds, such as painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, etc., but "artists of life". This profession, "artist of life", may sound new, and quite odd, but in point of fact we are all born artists of life, and not knowing it, most of us fail to be so, and the result is that we make a mess of our lives, asking "What is the meaning of life?" Are we not facing blank nothingness?” "After living 78 or even 90 years, where do we go?" "No- body knows," etc., etc. I am told that most modern men and women are neurotic on this account. But the Zen man can tell them that they all have forgotten that they are born artists, creative artists of life, and that as soon as they realize this fact and truth they will all be cured of neurosis or psy- chosis or whatever name they have for their trouble. (See more in text)
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
57. Gissing's search for the perfect wife : a study of the women in the early novels of George Gissing
- Creator:
- La Joie, Kathleen Joyce
- Description:
- 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 necessary occasionally to pause to reflect, for instance, whether it was some episode in reality or fiction that was remembered. Also, the circumstances of Gissing's life influenced the artistic tonality of his work, toward idealism during one stage of his career, toward realism during another. George Robert Gissing was born on November 22, 1857 in the industrial town of Wakefield, in Yorkshire, Victorian England. (See more in text.)
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Hasholian, Taleen Sandra
- Description:
- 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 time. This thesis will argue that the answer lies within an examination of the marriages that take place within her novels. The arguments will examine the contrasting concept of women, and more specifically marriage, in the Regency Period of Jane Austen and her novels. The paper will also include further elaboration on the societal requirements of a "good" marriage (such as wealth, status or accomplishments) in contrast with the qualities Austen finds irreplaceable and bestows upon her main good characters. Finally, it will explore Austen's deviant characters and discuss their contribution to the argument of Austen as more than a writer of light novels who was preoccupied with marriage. Rather, it will argue that Austen's novels reshape the conventions valued by her society and mold them to the advantage of women. The main female characters in Austen do enter marriages, but Austen gives them a voice and allows them to make their own decisions. This thesis will examine the marriages in three out of Austen's six novels. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion each offer their own illustrations on Austen's society, yet all three ultimately summon Austen's critique of society and the need to restructure it. Through her characters and more importantly the matches they make, Austen neither denounces marriage nor places extraneous value upon it. Rather, she uses it as a tool to further her arguments.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Lee, Richard
- Description:
- 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 plans and students' work samples. While such a portfolio is still necessary, the 21st century educator's portfolio must also have a digital component - preferably in the form of a website. Still, many who have written about portfolios have fallen short in correctly identifying exactly who the audience is for such portfolios. With this project, I argue that previous scholarship on portfolios has been limited because it has left out a core part of the potential interview panel: parents. Recent interviews with Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) administrators have revealed that this is a growing trend due to the school district's focus on improving parent engagement, for it has been proposed that when parents have a say in the hiring of the teachers that will be educating their children they are much more emotionally invested in the school. This investment translates to higher scores on the annual School Report Card, one of the primary tools used to evaluate a school's performance within the LAUSD. I instead propose a three-tiered approach for both new and veteran educators that will allow them to market themselves as true professionals to the LAUSD and like-minded school districts.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
60. Lady, Seventeen
- Creator:
- Poduje, Jennifer
- Description:
- 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 elements and working towards a theoretical truth. Much like Derrida, I posit the possibility of an objective truth outside subjective meaning-making, while simultaneously asserting this truth is impossible to access. Desire for a truth which can never be found is what I refer to as the "lack." Essentially, my culminating project, in the form of a novella, Lady, Seventeen, explores the "lack" within the American woman's experience. My narrative utilizes the dystopian genre to explore how as-of-yet unlived experiences of the American woman may reveal past, present, and future lacks and how we navigate the (im)possibility of answers to unanswerable questions. Through my narrative, I explore the tension that occurs through the process of searching for what can never be found. Contingent to human experience are lacks, unresolved (inexpressible, unrepresentable) elements to the experience; a truth which cannot be represented. The exploration of the lack(s) within our experiences is my defining motivation to write. My work is not a continuation, or reflection of experience, but is an attempt to create something outside of an experience: a gesture towards the lack, a gesture to create what is missing, yet will never be placeable. Therefore, my narrative is not supplementary to experience, but set apart from an experience, as a means to its own end, a way to actively desire the desired, to search for lack where there will always be lack, to search for answers to an unanswerable question.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Arabian, Shoushan
- Description:
- 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 purpose of this blog is to engage in meaningful discussions about what it means to be an instructor in the 21st century. I want to not only explore the ever-changing landscape of pedagogy, but to also highlight what our colleagues are doing, right next door in order to disseminate practical instructional strategies that are kid tested, teacher approved. While I will be writing from the perspective of a charter high school English teacher in Los Angeles, who has also worked in both public and private schools, I aim to incorporate some insight from teachers in other disciplines as well.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
62. Shadow realm
- Creator:
- Altman, Dylan
- Description:
- 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 contribute to the various state production needs by working and living within the Factories and producing: coal, wood, clothes, beds, food, etc. The Factory that Naifi lives in controls the city's coal production; therefore the children are used for menial labor as coal collectors, coal packagers, and chimney sweeps for the upper class. Naifi and the other orphans have no agency or control over their own lives within this world. Naifi has no power in the waking life. He lives at the will of his Overseers, under the gaze of the Watchers, and within the highly panoptic Factory. But, he begins to find that although they try to repress him at every angle, when he is asleep he has the control.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Sotelo, Emilio
- Description:
- 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 this project seeks to destabilize and agitate the method by which poetry has come to be defined by. Through vigorous exploration of the poetic form, the poems in this project seek to establish new branches of communication between writer and reader. The content of the poems reflects a similar wish to participate in a contemporary conversation that includes politics, technology, identity, shifting cultures, visibility, and a deteriorating relationship with facts.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Levi, Neda
- Description:
- 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 unpleasantly lovely instance called childhood, a time of simplicity and complication, a time which subsists on two contradictory planes. The path that a confessional poet travels can be identified as one navigated by their experiences; personal experiences that range in effortless to difficult proportions, and it was through the art of poetry that I realized that there was no need to further silence my own. Adopting the voice of verse offered the chance to speak in the midst of trauma. Disarming the Bittersweet is the vehicle I used to explore the paths that I have walked through, first as a writer interested in the past and second as a daughter who is grappling with the idea that there are two paths vying for her attention - one that exorcizes her demons and the other which counterintuitively yearns to maintain the despair. Fashioned upon the base of Psychoanalytic theory, these poems encompass my attachment to what represents the past, be it for better or for worse. Recurrent themes which revolve around mental abuse, the comatose absence of what was once a present paternalistic figure, the fear of sexual intimacy, the unraveling of marriage, and the simplicities of childhood wonder serve as the basis of this present struggle; the need to identify myself as a poet inseparably linked to the past. In this collection, the poetry mirrors the snide pull of the past and its charming knots and wounds, particularly with regard to the overarching male figure-the utmost symbol of patriarch. In these individual pieces, I have confessed my undying devotion at the feet of my father and waited in hopes of reciprocity. These confessions have highlighted the notion that I am sometimes lost in the bittersweet wish that the days of naiveté are there for the taking. Disarming the Bittersweet defines the struggle to maintain the only thing that I must defuse in order to save my sanity. I am self-aware, an autonomous body composed of revelations, and the narrative of my past is the only lifeline I have left. Through vivid chronicles calling to attention the vitality of my past, this collection illustrates the foundation of a carefree adolescence flawed by the catalyst of the instability that transpired and then rejects the polarization of the experiences reflected, therefore resulting instead in the flourish of their union. This collection embarks on a journey of engaging conversation with memory; to implant the experience of what once was and will never again be, of the bitter and the sweet, into one of present necessity. What is rewritten is the undying realm of a confessional poet's past, wherein with a heavy hand the faint lines of peace and panic transposed upon one another during childhood are once again traced, heartened in the hue of immortality.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Lewis, Phyllis N.
- Description:
- 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 individual to government, as the repository for fresh thinking and progressive ideas. Mill found that repression of free thought by government. or by interest - based groups in society, held the seeds of destruction for democracy. His ideas are discussed here, with reference to the role that the interrelationships between society and government play in the viability of a twentieth century democracy. In addition, Mill was the subject of an unusual and concentrated form of education. His ideas about curriculum and motivations for teaching are discussed in a way which permits us to apply them to the development of people differently equipped to deal with modern society.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Vasquez, Robert Joseph
- Description:
- 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 the war and his experiences, with particular focus on an incident with a young Vietnamese woman. At Bartlett he meets another young woman, a rich, beautiful, and self-possessed student named Julia Abernathy with whom he falls in love. As the story progesses Tom and Julia decide to marry, but complicating factors must be overcome, and they undergo a separation. Tom learns that his novel will be published, and he meets an old love whom he hasn't seen in several years. Tom Red Hawk must make some crucial decisions about his life and his future, and attempts to do so while on assignment to write a magazine article in Viet Nam, where he is wounded. He returns to the States and confronts his dilemma, only to have it further complicated by unforseen events. Finally, he makes his decision, and his life takes several unanticipated turns.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Solis, Enrique
- Description:
- 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 where students are presented a model and then expected to view that model as something to work towards, but rarely are students expected to explicitly challenge or change a given genre. Teaching the blending of genres affirms agency in the writing process, especially for students who feel that they must already give up so much of their cultural-linguistic identities in universities. There is plenty of service learning rhetoric in composition studies with the goal of providing our students with the awareness of how a genre functions, but gives students few tools for actually challenging the boarders of genre categories. The last section of this paper strives to provide in-the-classroom strategies for teaching genre through blending Englishes, modalities, and genres themselves.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Fernandez, Sandra
- Description:
- 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 will critique higher education and white nerd culture, while also recognizing and acknowledging the rise of the brown artistic nerd. I will shadow some non-linear narrative techniques and ideas from feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha, and use some critical quotes from both her and other intellectuals to break down power dynamics and oppression. I plan to input some words from my past final ENGL 638 essay of spring semester 2018, to portray the conventions of representation, while also resisting strict academic forms. Lastly, I will "weave" all quotes together with experimental poetic verse, along with images. I want my project to show readers the power at play when it comes to higher education, the flaws of hegemonic culture, and the reclamation of space in the stereotypical nerd domain as a woman of color.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
69. Family justice
- Creator:
- Blake, Lesley King
- Description:
- 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 respected member of civilized society, given the right circumstances, we are all capable of violence. But, what if, instead of suppressing the evil within as societal constructs of behavior and propriety demand, we give it free reign? Through the first-person limited narrator, Katharine, the reader is placed in the female serial killer's high heels and must decide which direction to follow: her mother's, Miranda, or her grandfather's, Peter Connolly. Miranda, a lawyer, represents society and its mores. She wants her daughter to assimilate to civilized society where revenge is not honored but punished. On the other hand, Grandfather Connolly represents man's instinct and his primeval desire for revenge. He not only encourages vengeance but valorizes it and expects his granddaughter to adhere to his code of conduct. Family Justice investigates and answers the philosophical conflict between codified human and natural law.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Goldowitz, Michael Daniel
- Description:
- 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 Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853) and Great Expectations (1861). Generally, in the earlier works we see fantastic, almost supernatural depictions of evil. Most often, the characters are either thoroughly good or totally evil. As Dickens grew artistically, the evil depictions became more realistic and believable. Also, we see more ambiguous treatments of evil. In the middle and later books, the characters gain depth and complexity. While there are still wholly good and bad characters, the important ones are often combinations of good and evil. In order to blend good and evil, Dickens uses character doubling. By means of this technique, seemingly dissimilar characters are bound together in alter-ego relationships. He also increasingly creates more complex social interrelations, and these intricate interweavings also serve to bind good and evil together. Inherent in this study is the question of the origin of evil. This too is treated more carefully by Dickens in the later books. In his early fiction, evil (like good) seems to be innate. In the later books Dickens confronts us with more perplexed and perplexing portraits of the birth and development of evil.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- D'Amato, Robert
- Description:
- 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 after he had spent the Christmas holiday with her family at their Long Island home: “1939 was a very decisive year for me and one of its most important events was meeting you. I'm not going to say you can't imagine what peace and joy you give to me every time because you know it very well . . . I must stop now and do a dreary chore of a review, when I want to start my poem to you.” Mrs. Mayer, who became Auden's confidant in 1936, provided him with the feminine friendship and the maternal affection which was an aspect of his homosexuality--Auden's brother, John, notes during this period that Mrs. Mayer strongly resembled his mother—and she was soon to become, in “New Year Letter,” the central focal point around which Auden would harmonize the various feelings and thoughts that he held in 1939. (See more in text.)
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Millstein, Bruce
- Description:
- 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 surrealist dramatic comedy, bio-socio gender politics, meta semi-autobiographical performance theatre, and literary theory. The work attempts to show human beings as flawed and fragile; fluid and uncertain; absurdly hyper-self-aware; and beautifully exigent, through binary and singular relationships and power dynamics. Often and purely, the work refers to itself, reifying the creative Nature of existence. The goal of this culminating work is to magnify and satirize the core and essential contradictory nature of the human condition. It is as spiritual as it is existential. Wholly. In its current state, it fails impeccably to meet these lofty words; but to its point, it strives and seeks...without ending.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Petrosyan, Anna
- Description:
- 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 of convention, family values, and upstanding morality, cosmopolitanism represents the straying away from the bourgeois tradition of strict societal and ethical expectations. Though Tolstoy presents Anna as an alienated adulterer, he also creates her character as the most sympathetic as she represents humanity behind nonconformity. We follow her indescribable struggle of being shunned in aristocratic society, her ruthless husband's vendetta, the loss of her relationship with her son, and her eventual suicide. Though Anna is later crushed by a society that refuses to allow any deviation, Tolstoy writes of her in a way that garners empathy from readers as we find her the most open and vulnerable character, despite the novel's in-depth detailing of many other character's lives. Tolstoy's innovation and genius harvests from that he strove to put a face on Victorian cosmopolitanism, as a burgeoning global phenomenon that was more than simply what traditionalists deemed as an immoral erasing of society's greatest attributes-it was a difficult, yet necessary, transition into a culture that allowing a relaxing of ironclad rules that often served to keep women under the thumb of men.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Muller, Janet Mason
- Description:
- 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 work, but also the tone of the work. Through such translations, readers can not only realize the universal oneness of humanity, but also the fascinating differences in the world's cultures both past and present. The translator must decide whether he will preserve the original text by making a completely faithful and perhaps unreadable rendering of the original, or if he will interpret the original and create a readable, interesting work of art for his peers. This decision has resulted in a long-standing d1.sagreement over the principles of translation. Is the task of the translator to convert symbols or to interpret? A good translator is by turns, literal and free, imitative and creative, and his translation will be a flow between the two. For an effective translation, the translator must know both the cultures and the histories of his source and target languages. To translate an idiom, he or she must understand an idiom's underlying meaning in the source language as well as an understanding of all its possible counterparts in the target language. The task involves the transferring of style, meaning, and emotion from one culture to another as well as from one language to another. Gregory Rabassa has used his skill and sensitivity to create his exceptional translation of Cien años de soledad. He has brought us the magic vitality of Latin American literature. The ongoing task of translators will be to bring us the newly discovered wealth of meaning to be found in the literature of cultures throughout the world.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Noh, Miguel
- Description:
- 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 speaker continuously questions the role of God in his life while struggling to bridge his identity as part religious and part gay. The speaker's deep childhood involvement within the church informs the poetry pieces, as they develop from an arduous past into a state of self-spirituality. There's continuous friction between sexual indulgence and holy scriptures; the work challenges how God can be perceived through the lens of a devout Catholic whose queer community is often marginalized. Although the wok investigates if a male can identify as gay and Catholic, it also sheds light into divinity and investigates the flaws within it. It is not a collection showcasing the hypocrisy, pitfalls, or weaknesses of Catholicism, but coming to terms with how the divine and the church are accessible because they are flawed. The speaker continuously searches for weaknesses within scriptures, within teachings, and within believes, and expands or correlates them to previous experiences drawing a comparison that aberrant natures and divinity are closer than previously thought. While thematically align, this exploration of experimental poems also focuses on form and how such forms relate to the individual poetic pieces. There are various physical structure found throughout the collection, and each structure is in consequence of the individual themes within the poem. The collection suggest that the form of the poem is important to create more meaning than just the written text, and adds another layer of context allowing readers to decipher such meaning as they see fit. While form is not the main driving force of the poetry, it does inform on the communicative property between poem and reader, where the poem can give more context through its formation. Just as Catholics ingest the body of Christ to be one with the church, so too the poems offer their body as a consumable for the reader to interact closely with the collection as a whole.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Brummet, Ross
- Description:
- 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 blood” (Shelley 135). Here and elsewhere in the novel, Mary Shelley presents a radical critique of the hierarchical social structures that framed the contours of early nineteenth century society. In this paper, I attempt to contextualize this critique through the historical epoch in which she lived. By reading Frankenstein not as an isolated text, but one in conversation with other works of the period, I argue that Mary Shelley further articulates the proto-socialist legacy of her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. I further argue that Mary Shelley’s intervention in this conversation is not proto-Marxist, as it has occasionally been considered, but can instead be seen as a radical precursor to modern postcolonial theorists. In particular, I consider the twentieth century Martiniquan theorist Frantz Fanon’s foundational book The Wretched of the Earth, and the contemporary Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe’s landmark article “Necropolitics.” It is within this postcolonial framework that we can configure Shelley’s creature as the revolting, colonized subject in opposition to the necropolitical power of Victor Frankenstein. Through these depictions, Frankenstein can be understood as a novel that articulates the ties between economic injustice and colonial oppression: a story in protest of Victor Frankenstein and other vile masters of mankind.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Mathews, Barbara Anne
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Hayne, Alexandra
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
79. Bunraku
- Creator:
- Mitchell-Askar, Kathleen
- Description:
- 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 position in greater questions of fate and the significance of the brevity of human life. In other words, I am interested in the "drama" and narrative of a human life and what occurs behind the curtain of human understanding. The mother-daughter relationship is the ideal representation of this concern, as the body of the daughter emerges from the body of the mother as humanity emerges from creation. The daughter's successive capability to perpetuate life serves as a representation of humans' ongoing stake on this planet. This project also seeks to explore the ability of language to capture what Lacan calls "the real" and how language locates the thinking individual in an unspeaking, biological/physiological/visceral reality. As Lacan says, "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think." The format of this project will allow me juxtapose long-form poetic prose with what I think of as mathematical proofs of embodiment, as a way to conceptually and formally express the experiences of thinking and being and whether or not the two can exist simultaneously in the mind. Is a complete conception of language and what moves behind language possible?
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Kufs, Eric
- Description:
- 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, race, class are performances of identity, the case can clearly be made that written communication of all forms, in the expanding social space of the Internet is a consistent public performance. Therefore, the first-year writing classroom should reflect the publicness of the worlds in which students inhabit. Combining theoretical research, anecdotal teaching evidence, as well as a short IRB approved study of written reflections from twenty-three freshman writing students, this article makes a case for a pedagogical approach to writing that places student work on a safe environment of a cohort class. The open stage workshop environment forces individuals to consistently present writing and considers concepts of audience, tone, genre and rhetorical argument without overwhelming fear or anxiety. Student writers become models for each other as they cross learning thresholds together. Works Cited Goffman, Erving. (1956) 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Meyer, Jan H. F., and Ray Land. "Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (2): Epistemological Considerations and a Conceptual Framework for Teaching and Learning." Higher Education 49.3 (2005): 373-88. Print.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
81. Bano Boxing Club
- Creator:
- Martin-Rowe, Scott
- Description:
- 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 who open their daily reading book to the same page every day who I set out to write for in this thesis. My desire was to craft a story that took on socioeconomic concerns in an area of Los Angeles that fails to show up on screen. The story itself is one that many YA novels take on: that of fitting in. Where it diverges is in its exploration of the outside concerns that swirl around this struggle. I approached the text knowing that my audience may not have the strongest reading habits or skills, so I deliberately crafted the language to suit their skills.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
82. No mere protest novel: obfuscating criticism, psychological warfare, and legal realism in Native Son
- Creator:
- Fragoso, Robert
- Description:
- 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 directed by Rashid Johnson that adapts Native Son to the sensibilities of contemporary audiences. Needless to say, Native Son has been a major part of American culture. The novel's initial reviews were mostly positive but mixed. Notable authors such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin have dismissed Wright's work as a mere "protest novel." This paper will contribute to this criticism and expose how it was generally short-sighted and obfuscatory. More importantly, this essay will reveal Bigger Thomas as a test case and symbolic character of social engineering and psychological warfare via mass media. My essay will also elucidate the legal realism portrayed by Thomas' lawyer, Boris Max.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Nowell, Trevor
- Description:
- 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 meets low life”. This is exactly what I want to examine in Babylon. The city of Kampala, Uganda has become the most important and largest city of earth by the year 2072. It has been nicknamed “Babylon” for its enormity and opulence. The reason for this is that a “space elevator” has been built there. It’s an enormous spire and cable that reaches out beyond earth’s atmosphere and has a space station on the end. It allows for comparatively easy space travel and the hauling of minerals from asteroid and lunar mining. This makes it a hub for trade on earth, and wherever there is an abundance of wealth, crime follows. In this sci-fi setting cybercrime has become the preferred method of theft and not all criminals are human. Sentient robots called “synthetics” are a workforce that yearns for something more. The questions of “what is human?” and who deserves rights begin to blur. Humans and synthetics campaign peacefully for rights while terrorists bomb and hack to make their voices heard above the din. The world has never been more advanced, yet it spirals out of control. Each of the short stories will involve different characters from different walks of life. They will all have their own views and experiences with the city of Babylon, but they all reside in the megalopolis. The theories I will be leveraging in these stories will mostly involve post-modernism and Marxism. Synthetic workers are both proletariat and the means of production, throwing a wrench in traditional Marxist theory. With new technologies come new questions of morality and fairness. I will confront these questions in the concrete jungle of Babylon..
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Hild, Kurt Lynn
- Description:
- 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 interpretation reveals a changing development as he practiced his hermeneutics in his prose writings. He devoted his early tracts to the antiprelatical controversy, the conflict concerning ecclesiastical authority. As a Puritan, Milton believed that the Scriptures clearly taught a presbyterian church government structure or rule by the assembly rather than the episcopacy of the Anglican Church, which imposed a hierarchy of bishops on people regardless of those bishops’ qualifications. In these tracts Milton held that Scriptures were clear and could be understood by anyone who read with an open heart and mind. A few years after the antiprelatical tracts, Milton wrote a series of tracts discussing divorce. He believed that men should be allowed the right and responsibility to divorce if they found that their minds were incompatible with that of their marriage partner's. He believed that God desired a mutual communion of reason for a proper marriage between a man and a woman. Incompatibility of minds could be grounds for divorce. In these tracts Milton saw himself as the sole advocate for a discountenanced truth and as one who had the proper medicine to heal men's eyes so that they could see the truth clearly. In the divorce tracts Milton's hermeneutics changed from holding to a literal interpretation to an interpretation that needs to be made by someone enlightened with the proper understanding. He believed that he was so enlightened. Milton's theological compendium, De Doctrina Christiana, or, Christian Doctrine, summarizes his years of Biblical studies; and this work shows clearly yet another development in his hermeneutics. Milton said that the rule and canon of faith are the Scriptures. He sounded like an orthodox Protestant in this statement, but he believed that Scripture was two-fold: the external record of the written Scriptures and, almost more significantly, the internal witness of the Holy Spirit, the inner Scripture. Milton thought the external Scriptures had suffered corruption, but the inner Spirit could not. Therefore, a man was to accept the witness of the inner Scripture above all outside human sources since the Spirit would teach the truth to the believing heart. The position that Milton presented in his Christian Doctrine is the underlying premise of his three major poetic works: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. His inner Scripture principle affects his view of God, Christ, and man, since he sought to justify the ways of God to man. He said that he depended upon the Spirit to teach him as he wrote so that God might be seen more clearly. His last two major poems give a different picture of their subjects, Christ and Samson, than the Scriptures portray; but Milton depended upon his inner light to conclude that man was to obey as he was taught from Scripture.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Valente, Leticia
- Description:
- 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 structure of body parts. It illustrates the writing about death while experiencing the grief and the complicated emotions that follow. The second piece, Hallelujah, represents grief through the various point of views of family members experiencing death within one story. Finally, in the last piece, A Body Remembering Another, the narrator experiences death and ultimately dies, creating a journal that gets more erratic as the narrator accepts their death. The first narrative is the raw narration of grief as it appeared the moment my father passed away in 2010, it is a work that has had many incarnations. As it stands it is a work that takes apart what it means to write a text and become aware of the writing process. The second piece, is an exploration of multiple perspectives within one narrative story, and how grief varies through character interaction with the deceased. The third piece is a metafiction piece portraying the two sides of grief, the normal text representing the “outer shell” and the comments in red that are “the inner thoughts” of the character and of grief. I chose to examine death and grief because it has had the most impact on my writing. I want to create a text that is universal to those who have experienced it, but also as an homage to my father whose death has impacted me the most as a writer and being.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
86. Zodiac Menagerie
- Creator:
- Xu, Louise
- Description:
- 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 creative channels to discover my limits and go beyond them. An example is my poem “Crossssword” is actually written in a crossword format. Both the top portion and the clue section are parts of the poem. I also created the poem “Lost Bull in Northridge” that resembles a newspaper ad. It is my hope that the various styles and formats that are expressed here will pleasantly surprise anyone who reads this collection. In addition to the experimentation of form, I also limited my work to follow an important part of my culture. As a Chinese American, I have grown up to stories about the thirteen zodiac animals and their story of how they were chosen. The 12 animals were originally chosen as a way to tell time: each animal represents two hours of time on a twenty-four hour clock. The story went that a god gave all the animals a race and the first twelve to win were chosen. Thus the order was Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Boar. The cat was also supposed to participate but was betrayed by the rat. According to the story, this is why cats have always chased rats. The twelve animals eventually appeared on the lunar calendar. In my collection, I have also included the cat despite its lack of place on the zodiac cycle. I feel the cat plays an important role in the tale and that is why I have integrated it into my collection. Each animal has two poems dedicated to it in my collection. Some are closely intertwined with my emotions while others play out as memories. For example, “Neko-rosis” is a story about an experience with my pet cat. In contrast to this, my other poem, “Void” is about the feeling of gluttony that is associated with boars. It is not linked to any one person. Not all of my poems are about the animal: some embody a spirit or element I associate with the animal while others are about a person that was born in the year of that animal. The Chinese believe that personality is related to whatever animal a person is born under. It is uncertain whether a person is born under an animal because their soul reflects the animal or because the animal influences the person that is born in its year. Regardless, the year a person is born under plays a diverse role for each individual. All of these sorts of exchanges are reflected in my poetry.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Rodrick, Jennifer
- Description:
- 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 professor must relay the rhetorical strategies needed to succeed in writing, at both the collegiate level and the professional level. In order to show proof of such knowledge, MA graduates will need to employ their own writing strategies to showcase their abilities through a cover letter, a curriculum vitae, a teaching philosophy, even a sample syllabus with a schedule included. With these items a prospective academic can show her knowledge and her ability to apply said knowledge to aid in the success of student writing.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Spaccia, Gina
- Description:
- Character Development is a non-fiction collection of vignettes in which each chapter focuses mainly on one person or topic that is influential to the author's life. The purpose of this piece is to illustrate how each of the subjects are significant to the narrator's developed character. Every chapter is titled a letter of the alphabet that identifies the focus of that section. Through short clips of her life, the speaker takes the reader on a dark journey of family, addiction, and what it was like to be a prison wife. The suffering, pain, and frustrations of the author are catalysts in driving the collection's main themes of compassion and unconditional love. Without darkness, there is no gratitude nor desire for light.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Levenson, Shirley Eleanor
- Description:
- This study examines the psychological meaning behind the addiction to alcohol of Geoffrey Firmin, the hero of Malcolm Lowry's novel, Under the Volcano. The investigation centers on the motives which lead Firmin on a compulsive search for drink on the day he meets his death. My thesis is that behind the search for alcohol is a quest for love, specifically, a quest for maternal love, whereby Firmin, through his alcoholic bottle, seeks to re-establish the loving relationship he once knew with his mother, both in the nursing situation and in the womb. Support for this thesis is drawn from two principle sources: (1) Mythological and archetypal criticism, which claims that the quest motif derives from man's eternal search for reunion with the mother, who was his first object of love; (2) Psychological principles, mainly Freudian, which attribute alcoholic addiction to the need to regress to a state of childlike dependency whenever love and comfort are desired. Building my analysis upon opinion expressed by these authorities, I attempt to show that Geoffrey Firmin, through his quest for alcohol, is in effect seeking an incestuous union with his mother, in order to realize the ultimate love experience. Conspicuous among the many archetypal and mythological allusions in the novel which lend support to the thesis that Firmin’s addiction is symptomatic of his yearning for maternal love are those having reference to the magna mater cults of ancient culture. These allusions tend to suggest that Lowry's hero, in seeking to find maternal love through alcohol, is participating in the drinking rites required of an initiate into worship of the Great Mother. (See more in text)
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Dominguez, Tania
- Description:
- The documents contained herein are professional materials which are necessary to achieve a position within the publishing industry. Each document is specifically designed to market academic skills which can be applied towards a career in editing. These documents demonstrate a competency in the anticipated field and serve to illustrate to potential employers the qualifications and skill set achieved through an academic pursuit in English. Ultimately, the various materials such as cover letter and resume will be utilized in actively finding employment post graduation.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Sever, Kirk
- Description:
- The Labyrinth of the Mancuto, Part One is the first of three parts of a novel that follows the Arthurian wizard, Merlin, as he tries to escape from a medieval labyrinth. Part One details Merlin's initial struggles as he fumbles and crawls through the blackness of the labyrinth in search of daylight. In order to escape, Merlin's soul travels outside of his body and journeys through space and time; he enters various peoples, objects, and animals as he searches for a map to find the labyrinth's exit. His travels take him from Earth's Ice Age, to modern day California, to a distant future where humans made from baby-parts orbit a methane-crusted Earth. This text breaks conventional boundaries of the novel in a number of ways. For one, the text conflates the notion of author and character; Merlin increasingly converses with the author, questioning the author's language and plot choices. Additionally, the text incorporates poetry to offset the traditional prose-narrative, disrupting conventional labels of long-form prose. A major goal of the narrative is to explore the notion of the mind as a labyrinth of thought by constructing a narrative that is always trying to navigate a maze, and in doing so embeds itself further in the labyrinth of consciousness.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Barr, Louise Glynn
- Description:
- While unforgettable characterizations of thoroughly destructive anti-mothers have proliferated in twentieth century American novels, the constructive mother has been rather neglected in American letters. Her portrayal has most often been marred by a sentimentality incompatible with the demands of literary realism and art. Where she has been rendered with depth and particularity, the Good Mother has very often been only a fleeting apparition in the story. She has rarely existed as a major character in a major American novel. The purpose of this study was to search out the most significant Good Mother characterizations in the twentieth century American novel and to examine them, both for their literary value as portraits of "real" women and for the deepening insight which the authors have brought to the mother role. This thesis examines the following works: William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Carson McCuller's The Member of the Wedding, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, Joyce Carol Oates' them, and Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays as representative novels in which Good Mothers play major roles. These six novels appeared over a forty year span of time and thus happily lend themselves to a progressive study of the character development of the mother image in the American novel.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Antonelli, Daniele M.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Zavaleta, Rebeca
- Description:
- Cat husbands. Alien ghost ants. Misplaced sisters. My cumulating project embraces experimental fiction as a genre that destabilizes common conceptual categories readers typically expect. By colliding the familiar with an uncanny nuance or marked difference, I am able to alter the trajectory of plot, enhance character development, and invigorate point of view. Magical realism is my preferred genre because I find it is easier for the reader to accept fragmented sentences, unattributed dialogue, and purposefully half-formed ideas when there are magical creatures or surreal environments to navigate through, as well. Quirky grammar in this realm forgivingly adds to the atmosphere and the weird ambiance allows for experimentation in content, form, and style. Within the genre of magical realism, my collection also incorporates conventions inherent in dark comedy, campy comedy, science fiction, Southern Gothic, mystery, and Surrealism. I am also including the beginnings of a graphic novel that is a collaborative effort and based on a longer piece. My goal as a writer is that readers will find some aspect in one of my stories that resonates. I want to draw readers into an internal dialogue about topical issues I feel are culturally significant. At the very minimum, I want readers to be entertained. One story I have included centers upon a young fashion model who suddenly acquires a persistent skin rash. This metaphoric ailment warns her of imminent danger by forming letters and eventually words on scratched areas of her body. In this piece, I am exploring how rape within the context of a romantic relationship is often unrecognized, even by the victim. Recurrent threads in this collection include characters who find themselves in difficult, even ridiculous situations and seem to be able to function well due to an excessively optimistic worldview. Issues arise when they realize their positive outlook is firmly rooted in self-delusion and a misinterpretation of reality.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Berns, Michael
- Description:
- John Guillory in his article "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want" in The journal of Modern Language Association of America discusses the seemingly problematic nature of the current status of the curriculum within graduate programs. Guillory and various other rhetoricians, scholars, and administrators, have argued that such curriculum is dated and is no longer prepare graduates for transitioning into the professional sphere. In this study, I seek to further complicate this argument by providing a student centered approach to this discussion. Rather than analyzing the landscape of graduate curriculum solely through scholarly articles, journals, and studies, I am introducing non-academic sources and authors outside of academia. My aim is to address the gap in graduate curriculum both from the lens of academics and non-academics, and to look at possible steps to align such curriculum to prepare students for life outside of the academy.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Heglin, Jeffrey
- Description:
- The vision in Sylvia Plath's work is an annihilistic one of surrender to death. Ariel and The Bell Jar are its matured expressions, but when considered with her lesser known poetry, these works reflect a gradual withdrawal and present the reader with Plath's attempt to reconcile idealism in the imagination with the realities of experience. A biographical approach provides a necessary foundation to an understanding of her poetry and her vision. Plath's major predicament is recounted in her short story, 0CEAN 1212-W. Here, at the age of three she experienced a realization of the "separateness of everything," the "objectness" or "otherness" of natural objects and animal life, as well as that of herself. No longer did she feel a total fusion with the world around her--a “bell jar” had been placed over her. The result was an increasing sense of rejection and alienation from the natural world, the social world of man, and the world of her own mind. Plath felt isolated in each of these three worlds. Her responses, though, were ambivalent--she wanted to be united once again on each level but she also desired the distance because of the pain and disappointment present everywhere. In her personal life, Plath vacillated between desire and withdrawal. She saw the positive aspects of motherhood, of being a wife, and of the life of an intellectual and poet; but she was more sensitive to the negative qualities. Too, she saw the roles as conflicting, yet she wanted each and all of them. Even men were seen as "something beautiful, but annihilating." She thus longed to have ''two mutually exclusive things,” but could not make an either/or choice, and instead withdrew further. Death was eventually seen as a resolution, but this too was alluring but terrifying. Ultimately, however, the condition of anesthetized expectations and responses that she experienced in the hospital became preferred to excitable life, and death--the supreme state of nothingness and elimination of consciousness--became the final thrust toward dissolution.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Lipton, David Allen
- Description:
- Auger's Adjustment, a comic novela, is a purely fictional account of an American success story and therefore its characters are not intended to resemble any particular persons, living or dead. Even so, the writer must always remain true to his dream of reality, even if that dream is a nightmare.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Fuentes-Chung, Mildred
- Description:
- Gloria Anzaldúa writes about individuals who are composed of many cultures and ethnicities (p. 37). Her concept of choosing to live on Borderlands to embrace all the differences in oneself, is the foundation of my research. My project focuses and explores one of the many borderlands of Latino students. Theorist have spoken about code-meshing, bilingualism and dual identities, but have not tied these specifically to the idea that these occur because individuals live on a Borderland where different languages meet or different selves meet (see Young et al., 2014; Clark, 2012; Anzaldúa, 1999). Therefore, I investigate how Bilingual students' dual language, dual rhetoric, and dual "cultural thought patterns," (Kaplan, 1966) create a Composition Borderland in academia, where an activity system also takes place. English and Spanish Composition genre sets allow students on the borderland to use both uniquely. The activity system consists of dual rhetorical structures that give individuals many possible applications. The Composition Borderland rhetorical structures and strategies can be uptaken to write in both genres; to translate composition rhetorical structures; and educators can "generalize" (Wardle, 2007, p. 67) genre sets to understand and diagnose misused rhetoric and grammar by bilingual students.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Ugalde, Zuleima
- Description:
- The path to an academic career and the career of an academic is long. Throughout that journey, an academic’s interests and goals develop and change. While scholarly interests, projects, and even one’s academic position may evolve, maintaining an intellectual curiosity and a sense of purpose in one’s research, teaching, and service activities is a key component to professional fulfillment. Touching upon the areas of service, teaching, and research, this portfolio contains documents that articulate personal philosophies that will help align a burgeoning scholar’s values and intellectual interests with short-term and long-term career goals. Such documents include: a statement of professional identity, a teaching philosophy statement, a CV, and a terminal degree report.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- O'Neill, Hope Franklin
- Description:
- Based on the view that a major source of English language writing difficulty is the influence of the student's own language or dialect, this study explores in detail the influence of Spanish language forms and stylistics on the written sentence structure of Hispanic bilinguals at the college level. Eight major categories of error are established based on a complete error analysis of 10 in-class writing samples. The body of the paper illustrates these categories and their subcategories by presenting representative examples from the texts together with analyses of the interference phenomena involved and resultant remedial suggestions. The conclusion affirms the relevance of such contrastive study to teaching, presents some general precepts of bilingual remediation, and suggests an area for further research.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English