Theses
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1969.6/1140
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Browsing Theses by Department "English"
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Item Assimilating into the transnational: Examining transnational identity in global cities through immigrant narratives(2019-12) Walker, Callie T.; Pattison, Dale; Concannon, Kevin; Salter, SarahAs cities become more globalized due to technological advances and increasingly interconnected flows of humans, capital, and goods, movement of people into new spaces has raised questions about belonging and identity within a global system of national boundaries. Ideas about immigration and assimilation have fluctuated throughout modern history, often on a scale between liberal ideas of cosmopolitanism and modes of belonging that favor national identity as a defining characteristic of community. This thesis explores immigrant narratives written by transnational individuals in the late 20th and early 21st century for the purpose of reconceptualizing belonging, identity, and assimilation in increasingly transnational urban spaces. By establishing a framework within which postcolonial theories of hybridized identity such as those put forth by Homi Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldúa are applied to the work of urban theorists like Michael Peter Smith and Sassia Sasken, this thesis pushes against the notion of assimilation as working toward “sameness,” and asks readers to consider the ways in which transnationality and globalization complicate notions of belonging and community-building. Rather than thinking of assimilation as a process of acquiring national membership, I argue that membership in the transnational world should be considered locally within the communities in which individuals live and operate as a mode of the sort of civic citizenship described by urban theorist Benjamin Barber. Within the following chapters, the city provides a locus for the argument that true belonging and “assimilation” are achieved through engaging transnational identity and adaptability as a mode of moving through the transnational urban. Chapter one focuses on the transnational flexibility of individuals in the works of Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie. Chapter two challenges the notion of assimilation as developing a fixed identity based on cultural background through Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker. Chapters three and four look at hybridized identity within There There by Tommy Orange and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. These chapters explore transnational spaces more broadly by applying Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of smooth and striated space to describe the impacts of hegemonic systems on individuals who resist assimilation into the socioeconomic systems imposed on them by the nations in which they move.Item Beyond the writing: Students' perspectives of the Casa Writing Center(2023-05) Riojas, Brenda Elaine; Murphy, Susan; Pina, Manuel; Sollitto, Michael; Hinojosa, YndalecioAs an MA student in English studying writing center theory, I planned my thesis project around the CASA Writing Center services and the students who seek assistance with papers, projects, reports, and other writing needs across disciplines. In this study, I gathered qualitative data from students who visited the CASA Writing Center to answer the research question, Why did the student visit the CASA Writing Center that day and how did that experience make them feel? I gathered qualitative survey data because I wanted to explore what led students to the writing center and how they felt after receiving assistance from a tutor. This approach was the best approach because it calls attention to the implicit details of students’ thoughts and experiences related to the writing center. I surveyed 71 participants that met the following requirements: that they must be 18 years or older, must be enrolled as a full-time student, and made a tutoring appointment during the fall 2022 semester. Participants were asked the same nine open-ended questions on paper surveys. To analyze the data, I used a thematic approach because it allowed a deeper understanding for each participant’s reasoning for visiting the writing center. In this thesis, I will present the two major themes that appeared in my qualitative data, which were the writing center’s physical environment and the writing development of students. For the physical environment theme, students expressed interest with the setup and amenities of the writing center. Within this theme, the variants include the lounge area, computer section, and provided snacks and coffee. As for the writing development theme, variants detected in the data include students self-proclaiming themselves as “writers,” participants that sought assistance with APA format, and the writing resources provided to participants. The benefit of this study is to further understand how the writing center serves and impacts its students and adds to writing center literature concerning the physical environment.Item Constructing Ghetto Consciousness: Recognizing Class as Diversity and Acknowledging a Cultural Dissemblance in the Self(2017-05) Hernandez, Joe Anthony; Hinojosa, Yndalecio Isaac; Blalock, Glenn; Garza, SusanDespite the attention to socioeconomic class in scholarship, implementation of class-conscious pedagogy in writing studies is typically overlooked because race and gender take precedent over class. As a result, students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, such as myself, are forced to straddle their home and school communities in attempts to maintain their relationships outside of the classroom while attempting to find acceptance into academic communities. Providing students with the opportunity to express themselves in an outlet that supports both communities they are straddling allows for students to develop a “ghetto consciousness,” a phrase I coined for this project. A “ghetto consciousness” recognizes the cultural dissemblance, rather than disparity, between an academic and a home community. I suggest that while experience may differ, coming from a lower socioeconomic class is not necessarily a disadvantage or negative outcome, but rather an oppositional cultural background that offers an alternate perspective to the more normative view of socioeconomic class. To be successful in both communities, the lower socioeconomic student must have class-consciousness and realize the benefits that low socioeconomic communities can provide to advance their academic achievement. Relying on Gloria Anzaldua’s concepts and theories such as la facultad, nepantla, mestiza consciousness, and conocimiento, in this thesis, I apply these concepts to my personal experiences of navigating both academic and home cultures and explain my construction of ghetto consciousness. Through my understanding of class consciousness, I explain the rhetorical maneuvers and gamification that I utilize as straddling devices to ensure success in both communities. In recognizing the obstacles faced by students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, this thesis critiques current pedagogical approaches utilized by writing instructors as well as urges instructors to reevaluate current frameworks to ensure that students from diverse populations are successful.Item Deconstructing the savior narrative: The Brownings, agency, and their cultural afterlife(2020-12) Sifers, Krista Diane; Sheehan, Lucy; Sorensen, Jennifer; Wiehe, JarredRobert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love story has quite the cultural afterlife. Articles describing their epic literary love often appear around Valentine’s Day, and there have been many fictionalized narratives re-telling their story. However, this project’s main goal is to show the problems with the Browning-as-savior narrative these narratives create. Whereas re-tellings might lead readers to believe that Browning or his love “saved” EBB from her life before him, close analysis of the Brownings’ letters and poetry complicate this idea by showing the complexities of ideas behind gender, power, and disability. These analyses show we should not buy into these fictionalized salvific ableist heterosexual narratives that require re- writing the past and controlling the future. Rather, this project seeks to influence readers to consider three things: 1) EBB’s disability and the numerous ways it affected her embodied experiences as a woman and a writer within her relationship to Browning, 2) the problems fictionalized narratives have created in terms of understanding disability, gender and power, and 3) the ways in which Browning and EBB slipped in and out of stereotypical gender roles over the course of their relationship.Item “It cam wi’ a lass and it will gang wi’ a lass!”, or Mary Stuart, the Woman of Scotland(2019-12) Moreno, Emille; Carstensen, Robin; Etheridge, Charles; Sorensen, JenniferThis manuscript explores the controversial life of Mary Stuart, a sixteenth century Scottish Queen through the lens of intimate household staff and the Edinburgh citizenry. Traditionally, Mary Stuart has been portrayed in relation to the various men in her life, including her three husbands, half-brothers, and son. However, less work explores her relationship with noble women, and even less about the historically overlooked lives of her Scottish household. This creative thesis explores the socio-political hierarchy of the sixteenth century, warring religious ideologies, and the power of privileged information, amongst others, to create a narrative that embodies life, while simultaneously respecting the lives overlooked by the archive. By exploring the lives of those virtually silenced in an incomplete archive, this creative exploration begins the conversation of how these private lives were ultimately affected by Mary Stuart’s mediation of religion and politics. This creative thesis will broaden the historical and literary exploration of untold stories, and assist in the development of Mary Stuart, the woman of Scotland.Item Lonesome Dream: A novel constructed as a subversive genre fusion of the cozy mystery and the gothic romance, exploring themes of trauma and feminist destabilization of toxic masculinity(2022-08) Tudor, Benjamin; Etheridge, Charles; Carstensen, Robin; Bezio, KellyThis creative thesis is a novel that attempts to tell a character-focused mystery through a feminist perspective. By fusing two sub-genres, the cozy mystery and the Gothic romance, the novel subverts genre tropes to create a complex female protagonist who subsequently subverts social expectations of women in society. As well, the protagonist’s actions challenge toxic masculinity, and in the role of an “accidental sleuth,” represents a pursuit of attainable justice, when many individuals historically and in today’s world often find themselves victims of unchecked and unacknowledged injustice. Further, this work explores the impact trauma and loss has on an individual, how it shapes one’s life and how it never fully goes away. With these goals, the novel works to be a meditation on human behavior and feminism, attempting as well to challenge past genre stereotypes of female protagonists in both the sub-genres this thesis explores.Item "My name is Sara" a biomythography exploring the life of Sakine Cansiz(2020-12) Avsar, Carolina; Carstensen, Robin; Salter, Sarah; Hinojosa, YndalecioThis creative thesis explores the story of Sakine Cansiz, one of the first women activists and a central figure of the Kurdish liberation movement. By taking into account different sources of Sakine Cansiz’s life and role in paving the way for women’s equality in the Kurdish freedom struggle, and using Gloria Anzaldua’s autohistoria teoría, the final product, a biomythography, will attempt to make her life and legacy more attainable to the mainstream population. This project seeks to increase the representation of Kurdish history and the role women play in it, as well as de-fantasize the Western narratives surrounding Kurdish women and open a space and a public interest for future narratives on and from Kurdish women and their contributions to the struggles of freedom and women’s equality.Item “Not definite or tangible”: Imagining multiracial identities and recognizing multiplicity in passing novels(2019-05) Gentry, Victoria Ramirez; Concannon, Kevin; Salter, Sarah; Santos, Kathryn VomeroScholars have long focused on the significance of race in passing novels of the Harlem Renaissance and have recently explored the intersections of gender in these texts. However, discussions about the characters of these novels lack significant focus on their identities as multiracial. Rather, scholars tend to analyze these novels through a binary lens, viewing black characters as “crossing over” to pass as white. Describing passing in this way perpetuates the simple, ideological binaries (black vs. white) that have formed in the racial imaginary. These imaginaries inform how we see race and encourage us to understand identity in terms of opposition. Looking at passing as unidirectional supports this racial imaginary as it ignores the experiences of multiracial individuals who neither fit in the binary nor move only in one direction. To work against this problem, I draw from Michael Hames-García’s theory of multiplicity, Judith Butler’s performativity, and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality. I use these theories to articulate the subversive frameworks in passing novels as they explore the multidirectional and often contradictory paths of passing and destabilize the racial imaginary. On the one hand, performativity establishes the pressures multiracial individuals experience to adhere to the standards of the racial imaginary which leads to racial erasure. One the other hand, however, characters use performativity to gain mobility and to subvert the racial imaginary. The lens of multiplicity builds on intersectionality to express the complexity of multiracial identities, revealing how passing is a multidirectional movement and how racial identification is often informed by gender inequity. Thus, my project develops a lens to examine passing as multidirectional. I apply this lens to passing novels that actively critique the racial imaginary: Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928) and Comedy: American Style (1933). These novels depict examples of how multiracial individuals reject the racial imaginary through multiplicity. Looking at how the novels expose this complex multiplicity reveals how the novels construct theoretical frames for understanding intersectional identities. Lastly, I explore how contemporary passing novels depict the way the racial imaginary persists, and, despite laws preventing racist segregation, racism still limits intersectional identity expression.Item the Protagonists in For Whom the Bell Tolls as heroes on Joseph Campbell's journey(2021-12) Chriss, William; Etheridge, Charles; Concannon, Kevin; Pattison, DaleErnest Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (FWTBT), portrays its protagonists in ways that illustrate Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey and his theory of the mono-myth. This thesis will argue that the book’s characters of Robert Jordan, Maria, and Pilar provide different embodiments of the Campbellian universal heroic archetype. My project seeks to enter into scholarly conversations about this novel and its primary characters, as well as about Campbellian anthropology as applied to literary criticism in general. The thesis concludes that while each of these three characters exhibit aspects of Campbell’s monomyth, the one that most clearly follows the hero’s journey is Maria. This may be a controversial claim among traditional Hemingway readers that enthusiastically embraced his macho image, but it is consistent with later scholarly criticism that sees Hemingway’s strong female characters as indicating a more nuanced and less misogynistic view of femininity. Thus, this project helps to refine literary criticism of Hemingway and to increase understanding of the interplay between myth, social psychology, and modern English literature.Item Re-defining medical empathy: Du Boisian double consciousness in memoirs written by doctors of color(2018-12) Fonseca, Danyela M.; Fonseca, Danyela M.; Bezio, Kelly L.; Bezio, Kelly L.Bezio, Kelly L.; Concannon, Kevin; Hinojosa, Yndalecio; Concannon, Kevin; Hinojosa, Yndalecio; Hinojosa, YndalecioThrough ongoing technological and scientific advancements, the science of American medicine progresses every day. Comparatively, however, the culture and cultural approaches of the field fall short with the problem of medical othering. Medical scholars discuss the problem of othering as one between patient and doctor. To avoid othering, medical instruction prioritizes the psychological concept of empathy. Thus, empathy and othering are considered conceptual inverses of one another. To exemplify and indoctrinate this construction of empathy, medical training often turns to the othering present in the literary text of Frankenstein. Moreover, medical scholars emphasize the potential of literacy—that is, reading and writing literature—to counter cultural disparities, including medical othering. A particular literary genre of interest is medical narratives, included in which is the medical memoir. The literacy of medical narratives, scholars posit, allows for the mitigation between the objective self and subjective other(s) in medicine. This project therefore focuses on the convergences of considerations of medical othering and empathy with a re-reading of the empathy-othering binary in Frankenstein, and tracing that reading through memoirs written by doctors of color. Using W. E. B Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness and Kimberle Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, I analyze the double consciousness expressed in memoirs written by doctors of color to offer a more complex, critical framework of empathy. Shifting previous conversations regarding the medical empathy-othering binary as a patient problem, I examine doctor-doctor interactions in which medical authority and power should ostensibly be balanced. Revealing the limitations of Victor Frankenstein’s similarity-based empathy, I describe how empathy is constructed normatively and nonnormatively in non-others and others, respectively. I argue that empathy, more than anti-othering, is an involved process that requires reciprocity to shift from its potential to actualized form.Item There is a Rebel in Me': The Shadow-Beast and Diverse Feminine Subjectivities in Chicana Young Adult Literature(2016-05) Rhodes, Cristina Susana; Catherine QuickAs diverse young adult literature (YA) garners more interest, the necessity to study and promote it becomes urgent. While the sample size of diverse children’s and YA literature is still small, the growing significance of diversity in children’s literature scholarship indicates the need for a lens with which to examine the nuances and particulars of these books. To this end, I have positioned Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s identity-theory surrounding the image Shadow-Beast as a central figure in informing the self-affirmed identity of diverse female protagonists in YA literature. The Shadow-Beast is representative of counterhegemonic subjectivities posed against the normative patriarchy. The Shadow-Beast is a reactionary figure whose agency is derived from directly opposing the normative philosophies that surround her. Whereas other powerful feminine figures that occur throughout literary history demonstrate subversive tendencies, the Shadow-Beast’s entire existence is predicated upon her ability to exist counter to the dominant ideal. While the subversive figure of the Shadow-Beast works within the ulterior spaces of the world, she also learns to refigure herself within social spheres by acting as a savior to her chosen community. To demonstrate the ways the Shadow-Beast identity is actualized, I have focused on studying her emergence in Chicana YA literature. Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, published in the 1980’s, triggered a shift in the critical attention paid to adolescent Chicanas in YA literature through the advent of a subversive, Shadow-Beast-like identity in Cisneros’s adolescent narrator, Esperanza. In recognizing the significance of the figure of the Shadow-Beast identity in Chicana YA literature, this thesis proposes the continued and invested study of this identity in both Chicana and diverse YA literature. By developing a critical lens with which to view diverse YA books, the theory of the Shadow-Beast exposes the power potential of diverse, female, adolescent protagonists.Item Thought We Wouldn't Notice, but We Did': An Analysis of Critical Transmedia Literacy Among Consumers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe(2016-12) Moon, Meghan R.; Susan GarzaAs transmedia, or what Jenkins (2010) describes as a “new mode of storytelling” (p. 948), the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) thrives on its ability to drive consumers to continue to invest in its network. However, the MCU’s lack of diversity compels marginalized MCU consumers to try to gain the attentions of Marvel Studios’ creators, whom they hope will enact changes in the future MCU. The purpose of the following thesis was to analyze both the MCU’s non-inclusive Avengers narrative, and the attention-seeking counter-narratives that its critical consumers construct in response. This analysis reassesses the MCU’s hegemonic narrative construction through the lens of its transmediated framework. Applying Althusser’s (1971/2007) concept of ideological interpellation, this analysis concludes that the MCU’s massive framework belies a limiting discourse of heterosexual, cisgender white male privilege that disempowers women and/or other minorities. In turn, marginalized female and/or minority MCU consumers use their visible difference as leverage; affronted by the gaps in representation that distinguish the MCU’s fictional world from their real world experiences, they construct digital counter-narratives that emphasize diversity and inclusion. This strategic reworking of transmedia to redress critical concerns entails a dramatic change in the relationship between media creators and their global audiences, and portends media creators’ irreversible loss of power in the digital age. Still, in order to recognize the purpose of critical MCU consumers’ practices in their full context, it is best to develop a new theoretical understanding of transmediated discourse and consumers’ digital interactivities, one identifiable as a new mode of resistance: critical transmedia literacy.