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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women today are taught to believe that mothering is instinctual and that when they have children they are supposed to love taking care of them. This notion perplexes many women who give birth without immediately feeling kinship with their baby. Some, . . .

Two Trees explores writing from a post-modern, post-sturcturalist perspective and experiments with form. Some of the works include elements of conventional poetry and fiction. Other poems combine the two genres of writing to create a poetic-fiction th . . .

A teenage girl grows up in the early nineteen eighties. Her parents are divorced, she rarely sees her father, and she doesn't get along with her stepfather. She moves to a new town and makes friends with popular kids. She meets an older boy and has a . . .

As a writer I have positioned myself within the framework of lesbian writing. The term 'lesbian writing', however, is varied and constantly in a state of definition. Yet, both in spite of, and because of this, I must construct a framework of lesbian w . . .

The plays of Lanford Wilson have interested scholars, critics and playgoers for more than three decades . Among other things, critics have focused on Wilson's use of language. Some assert that Wilson's evocative language has captured the voice of the . . .

This thesis suggests that Bertolt Brecht's play, Round Heads and Pointed Heads, has been underserved both critically and theatrically. Although it evolved from a previous attempt Brecht made to adapt Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure, there has b . . .

This thesis explores the manifestation of closed and open consciousness in conventional rhetoric of persuasion and the rhetoric of the rhizome. The rational mode of the Western discursive tradition has determined a pragmatic mode of consciousness, whi . . .

This thesis contains the first seven chapters of a novel in progress. The novel is set in the present. The protagonist and narrator is an engineer working at an aerospace company in the San Fernando Valley. The narrator is a remarkable figure in that . . .

Nobody’s Damn Business is a collection of autobiographical narratives that focus, primarily, on the author’s childhood. As a whole, the essays aim to convey the complicated nature of trauma in relation to familial relationships, while dealing with t . . .

This thesis project examines the role that narrative and memoir play in a writing classroom that is focused on growing and educating an entire student. I begin by examining critical expressivist and postpedagogical approaches to teaching writing; the . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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