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- Creator:
- Gates, Andrew E.
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Penuliar, Jonathan Bernard
- Description:
- 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 on academic tracking as a major factor in restricting access to the rigorous coursework English learners need to achieve at levels commensurate with their English-only speaking peers. Students tracked into the English language development pipeline have difficulty exiting. Those who do not reclassify and persist in this track experience lower levels of high school graduation and college completion. Several recent shifts in educational policy are seeking to address this problem. New language and curriculum standards, as well as detracking practices, have given rise to a more distributed approach to teaching English learners where all teachers have a responsibility to support this population. Through an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, this study examined the social networks a school has built around teaching English learners and how those networks impact the flow of social capital used to support this demographic of students. Research questions include: 1. Who do educators turn to for advice and information regarding the education of English learners? 2. How do social networks shape opportunities for educators to build social capital around teaching English learners? The first phase collected survey data in order to highlight advice and information seeking behaviors. After social network analysis, the results from phase one informed phase two. The second phase included interviews from salient actors to provide further depth into creating a rich description of the ELD networks at the research site and how they impact the English learner experience.
- Resource Type:
- Dissertation
- Campus Tesim:
- San Marcos
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Gravelle, Jessica Spike
- Description:
- 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. Because of its own hybrid roots, jazz represents a voice of multiculturalism, and emerges as a symbol in all three texts of the inherent hybridity of American culture.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Northridge
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Vang, Linda.
- Description:
- 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 and American values. In their formation of this identity, the Hmong are reevaluating all aspects of their history and culture, and their rhetorical gestures illustrate a reconceptualization of Hmong ways within the context of America, thereby reconfiguring Hmong American hybridity. As the Hmong accept certain western ideals and preserve certain Hmong traditions, their transnational, collective, and individual identities and ideologies change accordingly. Organizations like Stone Soup and Lao Family are assisting Hmong Americans in this process through the programs they offer, while also promoting Hmong visibility. Their gestures and language highlight the Hmong people as an asset to the wider community. The Hmong’s identity negotiation is particularly influencing the lives of Hmong American women as they struggle for gender equality. Their stories and their negotiation of a new identity are being portrayed through the literary works of Hmong American women, particularly those of Kou Vang. Through rhetorically significant acts, Hmong Americans are all obtaining new identities and voices, marking the start of a new era for the Hmong people in America.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Fresno
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Righteous, Aimee
- Description:
- 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 situation. Just like in a court case, in incorporating a close look at the facts through an examination of Didion’s use of metal and water imagery and placing them within the context of Western and capitalist history, Chapter 3 serves to challenge some of the points made by the critics as a means to provide a more realistic account that debunks superficial explanations of the novel as just another story portraying another failed American dream in the mythologized Western frontier. By looking at the rhetoric and structure of the novel, by revealing the collective patterns made by water and metal imagery, and by placing these elements within the story’s broader context, my thesis provides a more realistic examination of Maria’s life.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Metzger-Andersen, Kristal Eilein
- Description:
- 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 staple devices allow Melville to write complex subordinate clauses that invoke various concepts or emphasize particular ideas. Although important to Melville’s stylistic repertoire it is the different stylistic choices he makes that is most intriguing. There are manifold explanations for the changes to his stylistics, but the primary concern here is not in the why, but rather in the how.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Green, Michael
- Description:
- 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 highly contradictory, but vampires themselves have become so rooted in Stoker's work that each iteration can be seen as a reinterpretation of his ideas about what a vampire is and how they should be used in literature. There are currently four major types of vampire that appear in fiction, the monster, the villain, the antihero, and the superhero. All four have their roots in Stoker's work, and each one in turn digs deeper into his writing to find a new way of showcasing this very old myth. By examining these four subtypes one by one, exploring how each grows out of the other, how each new author pulls from Stoker's novel and how critical interpretations of the vampire evolve to both conform and inspire, we can see how Bram Stoker continues to guide the work of other authors more than a hundred years later, and how the character of Dracula looms over an entire world of genre fiction.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Frevert, Marianne Jane
- Description:
- 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 grace. As O’Connor stated, “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character” who either accepts it or rejects it (Habit 275). For young Francis Marion Tarwater, the central character in The Violent Bear It Away, his acceptance of Divine grace comes after he “suffereth violence” at the hands of a rapist. Tracing the progression of Tarwater’s decline and the inseparable relationship of violence and redemption makes it evident that Tarwater’s stubborn pride runs deep; therefore, his final purging comes at a great price. The irony in the novel is that as Tarwater falls into the abyss he is creating for himself, his acts of violence grow more severe while his encroaching redemption draws nearer.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Phillips, Noah
- Description:
- 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 world in this novel. Furthermore, his fictional rendition of military intervention and foreign policy by the United States and Britain and the role it has played in the developing world during the 20th century will be the central focus of this thesis. Huxley’s claims and critique presented in Island of the process by which first world powers dominate international politics, world markets and peripheral economies through the use of military intervention and foreign policy will be supported by historical accounts. An application of Dependence Theory and World Systems Theory will also be included in order to substantiate claims made in the novel regarding neo-colonialism and imperialism. Theorists of Dependence Theory, World Systems Theory and economic history such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank and Anthony Brewer and their scholarship on the economic and military relationships between core and peripheral nations will serve as the theoretical framework for this thesis.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Gates, Andrew E.
- Description:
- 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 them as the patriarchy, and I use their actions to show them as oppressors. Conversely, I investigate the names of the women to show their universality and characteristics that keep them blind to their existence in an oppressive social atmosphere. I go on to emphasize the importance of the protagonist’s namelessness and show how several rhetorical devices and images – namely the use of pronoun confusion, first to third person narrative perspective switch, mermaids and mirrors – are used to help readers understand the protagonist as a hybrid and representing the masses of oppressed women.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Ellet, Hannah Camille
- Description:
- 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 in time and place, each novel deals with the restriction or removal of a marginalized group from a space or environment. Because an essential part of one’s identity is rooted in their relationship to the various physical environments or spaces of which they are a part, this project asks questions surrounding identity, heritage, and the creation of self. It also looks at the movement of individuals between spaces, focusing on the different ways an individual’s identity changes within urban and rural environments.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
12. Mother outsider
- Creator:
- D'Augelli, Carissa
- Description:
- “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 poems in this collection. Uncertainties surrounding whether or not step-mothers are “true” mothers is also a major aspect. Some poems in this collection will talk back to the societal voices saying that motherhood happens when a woman gives birth. “Mother Outsider” invites readers to see an alternative mother on a journey through legitimacy and validation.
- Resource Type:
- Graduate project
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Birch, Dotty
- Description:
- 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 the Victorian woman’s life, which portrays the heroine happily married to her dour master, Villette is the mimetic portrayal of the Victorian woman and her true quest for love, acceptance, identity, and above all liberation from her masters. It is this story of a spinster set adrift in a male-supremacist society that has captivated critics. Prominent critics, from the nineteenth-century literary critics Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar to the well-known feminist writer Kate Millett, insist the story of Lucy Snowe is an important psychic drama that portrays the real effects of female deprivation in Victorian society.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Visokey, Andrew David
- Description:
- 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 a societal and personal level—as reflected in Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. Second, it analyzes Pearl as the only “free” character of Hawthorne’s story, and how she models Hawthorne’s vision for the future between the sexes.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Bakersfield
- Department:
- English
- 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
21. toogoodtobetrue
- 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
24. 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
31. 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
34. 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
36. 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