Masters Theses

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Browsing Masters Theses by Department "English"
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    A Myrrovre for Magistrates: The Sociology of a Mid-Tudor Text
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2018) Sirles, Michael Timothy ; English
    William Baldwin’s mid-sixteenth century collection, A Mirror for Magistrates, enormously popular in its own time, had been relegated to the footnotes and appendices of what were considered by scholars of literary history to be more prominent Tudor texts. Its timely and topical subjects combined with a problematic narrative frame and complicated publication history—not to mention a verse style that critics have long seen as tedious—renders A Mirror for Magistrates more noteworthy as historical artifact than a work worthy of study as meaningful, imaginative literature. Recent scholarship has changed the way that A Mirror for Magistrates is viewed. Paul Budra, Scott Lucas, Harriet Archer, Andrew Hadfield, Sherri Geller, and Mike Pincombe, among others, have brought A Mirror for Magistrates into the mainstream of academic research, and scholars have explored it beyond its simple place as a bridge text between the medieval works of Chaucer or Boccaccio, for instance, and the early modern works of Shakespeare and Spenser. Following Scott Lucas’s lead, I examine A Mirror for Magistrates as a voice in the dialogue of the English Reformation. Focusing specifically on the suppressed 1554, the 1559, and the 1563 editions, my dissertation claims that in laying bare the sociological history of A Mirror for Magistrates as a material object, genre piece, and political commentary, a distinctly Protestant form of collaborative composition emerges. The first chapter introduces the significance of A Mirror for Magistrates by giving a brief overview of its composition and critical reception. The second chapter addresses the material study of books in the age of the printing press and the biography of William Baldwin in the context of mid-Tudor print culture. Chapter Three examines the de casibus tradition, its medieval roots/routes, and the ways in which A Mirror for Magistrates both embraces and confounds the parameters of the genre. Chapters Four and Five examine, respectively, mid-Tudor political and religious crises to relocate within them the textual difficulties of A Mirror for Magistrates as emblematic of a specific mid-Tudor moment. Reconsidering this important book, long-neglected by scholars, in the light of recently renewed interest, I take a multi-faceted approach to study what D.F. McKenzie (whose Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts inspired this dissertation’s title) called “the social and technical circumstances of . . . production.” In studying the Mirror and attempting to position it within its historical, political, religious, and sociological context, I have found it necessary to construct a portrait of its times that is panoramic in scope. This portrait consistently finds A Mirror for Magistrates at its center—a focal point and crossroads of a mid-Tudor panorama that encompasses all these various socio-political elements and combined, provides a clearer understanding of mid-sixteenth-century England. My contention is that study of A Mirror for Magistrates can act as a proxy and an exemplar for the study of an age.
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    Accessibility in the Age of Compliance: Using Flexible Heuristics to Promote Greater Writing Program Access
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2019) Donegan, Rachel ; Pantelides, Kate L. ; Detweiler, Eric ; Myatt, Julie ; Vidali, Amy ; English
    Almost thirty years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (1990), writing program administrators (WPAs) still wrestle with what access means and what it entails. Numerous questions, each with serious implications for faculty, students, and administrators, have arisen from this struggle: What does compliance look like? Is institutional compliance the same as accessibility? Who should perform the work of addressing widespread, systemic accessibility issues? In Accessibility in the Age of Compliance: Using Flexible Heuristic to Promote Greater Writing Program Access, I answer these questions in the form of a flexible heuristic, one designed to complement Tennessee's legislatively mandated accessibility audit for public colleges and universities. Unlike these prescribed access efforts, my heuristic centers on how to create accessible classrooms and writing programs for mentally disabled students. Informed by Universal Design for Learning, writing program administration theory, disability theory, and data from interviews with disabled graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), this heuristic contains two domains representing two aspects of writing programs. The first, which focuses on syllabus policies, pushes WPAs to consider how access statements, technology policies, and participation grades can expand or constrict access for mentally disabled students. The second, which covers programmatic and administrative efforts, prompts WPAs to evaluate their institution’s ADA policies and procedures for disabled faculty, GTAs, and students. By examining these policies, WPAs can determine what accommodations students are using in first-year writing courses, to look for ways to redesign, and to create specific spaces where disabled GTAs, faculty, and students can provide authentic feedback. Understanding that every university and writing program is unique, I frame this heuristic not as orthodoxy or as containing all exhaustive possibilities for WPAs, but rather as starting points for further examination and as possible avenues for accessible imagination. By engaging with this heuristic, this project models strategies to gain a deeper awareness of how systemic inaccessibility can exist within a writing program, but a better understanding of how to and how we might view access work as a starting place, rather than a destination.
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    American Frontiers: Pathways to Masculine Identity Realization
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2019) Hedgepath, Capron Mitchell ; English
    This dissertation explores and analyzes a recurring artistic impulse that emerges time and time again in narratives of American frontier mythology. From nineteenth-century texts such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick, through current, reconfigured representations of frontier spaces in works like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Stephen Hunter’s novel Pale Horse Coming, the path to meaningful masculine identity realization occurs by entering various iterations of the frontier. In this light, each narrative in this study is characterized by a longing to flee civilization and the negative effects of navigating America’s socio-cultural norms as they relate to frontier closure, industrialization, the gendered separation of domestic and work spheres, and the proliferation of a cultural emphasis on the extrinsic values perpetuated and reinforced by American affluence. As a consequence of the trajectory of such socio-cultural and institutional progress, American society has become almost entirely de-tribalized, divorced from our human evolutionary past in ways that have done much to contribute to significant rises in anxiety, loneliness, isolation, alienation, depression, and suicide. In the realm of American fiction, this cultural and existential malaise becomes expressed through frontier narratives by characters, men and women alike, who long for the meaningful masculine identity realization that is enabled when one is part of an inter-reliant group in which the three basic, intrinsic human needs of self-determination theory are met. Through various trials of confronting the inherent chaos and hardships found in either traditional or reconfigured frontier spaces, the male and female characters in this study can be read as seeking a return to our tribal past. The relative successes and cautionary failures of their journeys reveal much about the biological and cultural influences that shape masculine performances as they are characterized, assessed, and evaluated through artistic representations. In this context, this study explores the following works: The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Hidden Hand (1888), Pale Horse Coming (2001), Moby-Dick (1851), McTeague (1899), The Awakening (1899), No Country for Old Men (2005), The Call of the Wild (1903), Song of Solomon (1977), Fight Club (1996), and Captain Fantastic (2016).
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    Apologia pro Semanalyse: Kristeva and Wordsworth’s Maternal Sublime
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2016-04-25) Latham, Mary Marley ; Hollings, Marion ; Neth, Michael ; English
    Julia Kristeva’s critical approach to poetic revolution reclaims hitherto neglected feminine elements of the sublime. Her process of “semanalysis”—which combines semiotics and psychoanalysis—presents a gendered dynamic in psycholinguistics. Semanalysis exposes the artificiality of communication to unsettle any illusion of fundamental order in language. Wordsworth’s Prelude, in its interminable coming-into-being, exposes the speaking subject as constituted fluidly in “spots of time.” Wordsworth’s “speaking subject” feels continuous in time but also dissolute within his universe. Driven by a desire to embody and inscribe his moments, the speaking subject of The Prelude struggles against the limits of language in meaning-making.
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    BETWEEN FRENCH AND ARABIC: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND CODE SWITCHING IN MOROCCO
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2018-04-13) Fahmi, Zakaria ; Albakry, Mohammed ; Lyons, Leah ; Pieroni, Roger ; English
    The language situation in Morocco is an ongoing process jointly influenced by historical, political, sociocultural, and educational forces. The ethnocultural diversity, colonialism, post-independence discourse, and language policy are all dynamic structures that have shaped the multilingual landscape and particularly influenced the status and use of Moroccan Arabic. The aim of this study is to contextualize these forces in relation to the linguistic evolution of Moroccan Arabic and its frequent use of code switching. To this end, I review the language contact and code switching between Moroccan Arabic and French and its constraints at the covert and the overt levels. Adopting this approach is crucial for the understanding of language shift and language attitudes and the implications for Moroccan society and language policy in education.
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    COBALT-CATALYZED ACCEPTORLESS DEHYDROGENATIVE HOMOCOUPLING OF PRIMARY ALCOHOLS TO ESTERS
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2019) Pandey, Bedraj ; English
    Esters are an important class of organic compounds widely used by human beings in their daily life. Currently existing industrial methods for esterification involve harmful starting compounds, toxic byproducts and high manufacturing costs. In this work, tripodal tetradentate iPrPPPNHPyMe cobalt complex is synthesized for use as a catalyst for the acceptorless dehydrogenative homocoupling of primary aliphatic and aromatic alcohols to esters. This method is economical, oxidant free and environmentally benign. KOtBu is found as the best co-catalyst for the acceptorless dehydrogenative homocoupling. Primary aromatic alcohols with electron releasing or withdrawing groups at the ortho position are converted to esters with higher yields. Primary aliphatic alcohols also showed outstanding reactivity but slightly higher temperature and catalyst/co-catalyst loading are required. Lactones are also obtained in good yield from diol substrates. The mechanistic study suggests a two step reaction pathway. In the first step, cobalt complex catalyzes dehydrogenation of alcohol to intermediate aldehyde. In the second step, co-catalyst KOtBu mediates Tishchenko-type condensation of intermediate aldehydes to esters.
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    A Corpus-Based Study of the Function and Structure of Numeral Classifier Constructions in S'gaw Karen
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2014-03-28) Olson, Collin ; Blackwell, Aleka ; Strawman, Tom ; English
    This thesis examines the numeral classifier system in S'gaw Karen, a language in the Tibeto-Burman subfamily. Numeral classifiers are an areal feature of Sino-Tibetan languages. This thesis contributes to our understanding of numeral classifier systems in this language family by examining both the function of numeral classifiers in S'gaw Karen and the structure of noun phrases when numeral classifiers are present. The data for this project include a phonetically transcribed corpus of four stories created in consultation with three native speakers from Eastern Burma and targeted elicitations. A detailed phonological analysis of the S'gaw Karen variety spoken by the consultants is included. In S'gaw Karen, numeral classifiers individuate and enumerate the noun, specify salient semantic features of the noun, and are used as anaphoric devices. The syntactic structure of noun phrases involving numerals and classifiers are examined in several different NP contexts, including those with modifiers and determiners.
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    The Cultural (R)evolution of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2013-05-15) Warenik, Victoria ; Lavery, David ; Hixon, Martha ; English
    In 1978, British-born Douglas Adams (1952-2001) wrote what would become six episodes of the celebrated The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show for BBC's Radio 4. Adams's career was marked by his constant return to his original work, reworking and adding on to what most critics deem his best idea into a bestselling book, a miniseries, comic books, sequels, radio adaptations of later Hitchhiker's novels, and finally a feature film. Over the course of thirty-five years, fans have been listening, reading, and watching The Hitchhiker's Guide and its four subsequent sequels. As this thesis ascertains, Adams's works need further investigation because of their prominence in contemporary culture and their relevance as subjects for such multiple academic spheres as literature, media, and fan studies.
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    Death and Rebirth in Chivalric Quest Narratives
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2018) Bronson, Gregory Webb ; English
    The image of the knight in shining armor setting upon a perilous quest is embedded in the popular consciousness as the archetypal conception of the Middle Ages in fiction, and while there is no shortage of scholarship on many aspects of chivalric romance, little so far has been done to define its sub-genres or establish its structures; the quest narrative in particular has not been adequately explored as a sub-genre in its own right. By studying a selection of exemplar texts in Middle English, including Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Le Morte Darthur, this thesis will explore chivalric quest narratives as a unique sub-genre of chivalric romance. Based on the literary theory of Dante Alighieri, chivalric quest romances will be examined on an anagogical level to discern a basic pattern of death, rebirth, sin, and salvation at the core of these narratives.
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    DEMONIZING, DEHUMANIZING, AND WHITEWASHING: LINGUISTIC EXAMINATION OF THE CONNECTICUT COURANT'S COVERAGE OF SLAVERY
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2013-03-30) Williams, Rhoesmary Rheniece ; Albakry, Mohammed ; Dubek, Laura ; Donovan, Kevin ; Strawman, Tom ; English
    Slavery and racism existed in the American Northeast as in the South. New England, however, did not suffer the same negative representations for its involvement in slavery or the slave trade, and some of its states tried to whitewash their contributions to the revolts of their African American population. This study analyzes a corpus from the historical newspaper The Connecticut Courant (TCC), which spans 70 years (1764-1827). It utilizes van Dijk's (2006) ideological discourse analysis model and his socio-cognitive approach (2009) to determine how African Americans were represented in TCC. The results indicate that racist discourse in TCC was used to reproduce social domination and to magnify the brutality of slave treatment in southern states in order to overshadow its region's involvement in slavery. A significant contribution of this study is combining empirical linguistic data with the CDA paradigm to shed light on the Northeast's complicity in colonial America's racist ideology.
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    Dorothy Parker and New Yorker satire.
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 1985) Bone, Martha ; English
    Satire is central to the New Yorker magazine, an influential arbiter of taste in American life for sixty years. This study analyzes the satiric voice of the New Yorker as exemplified in the works of Dorothy Parker and, secondarily, Ring Lardner and H. L. Mencken. The study is primarily concerned with Parker, an early and influential New Yorker writer who helped to invent the typical New Yorker satiric style. During the first fifteen years of its publication, 1925-1940, her satiric touch is present in nearly all of the 149 pieces she published in the New Yorker. The sophistication and style of the satire of the New Yorker are also evident, to a lesser extent, in the contributions of Lardner and Mencken.
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    The Estranged World: The Grotesque in Sofia Coppola's Young Girls Trilogy
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2014-04-08) Graves, Stephanie A. ; Lavery, David ; Holtzclaw, Robert ; English
    Steeped in collision and disjuncture, connoting both the grisly and the fantastic, and combining the aberrant and the quotidian, the modern construct of the grotesque synthesizes contradictions. The grotesque is a liminal concept, occupying gaps and existing on the edges, transgressing and destabilizing boundaries. Highly visual, it is a combinatory creature, a means of combining disparate concepts or objects to challenge established hierarchies of order and stability and to create new ambivalently-encoded composites. A common reaction to these grotesque elements is the compulsion to pull away, to avert one's gaze--the grotesque elicits the desire to escape the discomfort it stirs up in us at the same time that it induces fascination and the inability to look away. This sense of unease is a particular element of the grotesque that contemporary auteur Sofia Coppola exploits in her films in order to elicit specific emotional responses to her subject matter.
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    FAIRY TALES REINTERPRETED: PASSIVE PROTAGONISTS TRANSFORMED INTO ACTIVE HEROINES
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2014-06-30) Price, Lauren Ashley ; Hixon, Martha ; Gaitely, Patricia ; Strawman, Tom ; English
    Much of the foundational folk and fairy tale scholarship regarding gender roles was written in response to the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s, harshly criticizing the female protagonists as poor role models and lackluster heroines. Surprisingly, these decades-old concepts are still influential, with modern academics often following suit without question or deeper analysis, continuing to argue that fairy tales are merely stories that portray women as passive and weak or victims. This thesis challenges these rigidly established but under-questioned theories by reinterpreting the actions of the protagonists in Charles Perrault's 1697 "Cinderella" and 1694 "Donkey-Skin," and Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 "The Little Mermaid." Although many modern critics continue to dismissively label these women as passive, if Jungian theory is applied, each woman's intellectual, psychological, and spiritual development becomes indicative of an active and intentional quest. All three protagonists embark upon a physical journey, which allows each to cultivate a unique identity--a true self--while also effectively navigating the confines of her current situation, assertively working against any imposed limitations, as she actively chooses and pursues her destiny.
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    Female Roles and Moral Education in Maria Edgeworth's Works
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2013-03-18) Evans, Jessica ; Lutz, Alfred ; Hixon, Martha ; English
    Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) devoted her life to educating her readers, children as well as adults, in a variety of genres--educational treatises, moral tales, novels, and children's stories to name a few. Edgeworth's career-long devotion to reforming the educational system of her time was a way for her to further her desire to improve women's status in society. Edgeworth's skillful techniques of changing, correcting, and questioning gender stereotypes from within the patriarchal system made her appear to her contemporaries as a dedicated educational reformist without an interest in larger political concerns, even as an outright conservative, but as this thesis shows, many of Edgeworth's ideas on education are virtually indistinguishable from those advanced by eighteenth-century women writers often categorized as political radicals.
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    Females and Feminism Reclaim the Mainstream: New Superheroines in Marvel Comics
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2015-10-29) Kern, Sara Marie ; Hixon, Martha ; Lavery, David ; English
    FEMALES AND FEMINISM RECLAIM THE MAINSTREAM:
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    From Historical Narratives to Trauma Narratives: Universal Reactions to Surviving the Vietnam War
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2014-07-05) Buchanan, Evan ; Cain, Jimmie ; Hibbard, Allen ; Sayward, Amy ; English
    Regardless of nationality, culture, spirituality, ideology, or gender, survivors (including combatants and noncombatants) of war express the symptoms of combat trauma in undeniably similar ways. Veterans' Administration (VA) psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Shay has noted the most destructive of these symptoms in the factual accounts of his Vietnam veteran patients. This thesis argues, though, that the same symptomatic manifestations recognized by Shay also appear with regularity in the fictional record of the Vietnam War. Foremost among these are a tendency to remain combat-ready; a reliance on misdirection and misrepresentation; and a dependency on drugs and alcohol.
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    From Near Darkness: Experimenting a Way Into Contemporary Poetry
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2016-03-20) Brown, William ; Brewer, Gaylord ; Lavery, David ; English
    This thesis explores the creative process of writing poetry through the course of fourteen months, beginning in March 2014 through May 2015. These poems are organized around different theoretical influences and demonstrate an intentional course of action in attempting to write engaging verse that it current with today’s publishable modes, thoughts, and forms. My purpose was to begin with the little knowledge of contemporary poetry I had, and by reading and engaging poet’s work from the last fifty years, experiment my way into publication and discover for myself a positive and productive method of working. These poems are introduced by a process/ contextualization essay that frames the four sections of verse with the philosophical lenses I was using as I wrote them and follows my thoughts as I put each group together. As a whole, they form a snapshot of a rigorously creative time and demonstrate a progression in thought from Postmodernism to lyricism
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    FROM WULDRES HYRDE TO FOLCES HYRDE: THE MERITS OF A METAPHORICAL TRANSLATION OF HIRD- SUBSTANTIVES IN BEOWULF
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2016-06-24) Guertin, Nicole Marie ; Sherman, Ted ; McDaniel, Rhonda ; English
    The Old English substantive hird- appears in Beowulf 17 times, 16 times in the form of a noun-plus-genitive-noun phrase and once as a compound word. It is used to describe God, conscience, four kings, four monsters, and two men. Though scholars agree that the primary signification of hird- is “a keeper of a herd or flock of domestic animals; a herdsman” (OED), none of the characters to which the word is applied is an animal herdsman. Further, each one is possessed of power and authority far in excess of that which could derive from a reference to its literal counterpart alone. In their translations of the word in Beowulf, particularly since the publication of Klaeber’s edition in 1922, translators have tended to favor transferred senses of the word (“guardian” or “keeper”) over metaphorical ones (“herdsman” or “shepherd”). Using the results of fragmentary searches of all five spellings of the substantive (hird-, hierd-, hiord-, heord-, and hyrd-) in the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, I demonstrate that the use of the word in Beowulf is situated within a larger context of dominantly religious figurative use in the corpus and could be evidence of a biblical allusion that spans both the Old and New Testaments. Considering especially the references which occur in texts an Anglo-Saxon lay audience could have encountered, such as homilies, saints’s lives, and religious poetry, I encourage translators to consider the historical and cultural merits of the metaphorical translation of this word.
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    The Game Studio: Developing Literacy Through the Lens of Game Design
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2015-06-25) Bentley, Thomas Mark ; Barger, Julie ; Smith, Allison ; English
    In this thesis, I propose a curriculum for first year composition (FYC), called the Game Studio curriculum, in which students learn writing through experiences playing, analyzing, and designing games. In Chapter 1, I review the ways in which many students are already learning in video game spaces and argue that the study of games has potential to alter FYC instruction for the better. In Chapter 2, I frame the scholarship behind the Game Studio using James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy and Jesse Schnell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. I also provide context for Middle Tennessee State University’s “Literacy for Life” objectives and discuss how the Game Studio curriculum supplements these objectives. In Chapter 3, I provide a detailed list of introductory projects designed to give both students and instructors a running knowledge of game jargon and game design concepts. In Chapter 4, I provide details for the final two projects, which involve the development of student-designed games. I conclude in Chapter 5 with my reflections on student responses to an exit survey at the end of the Game Studio semester.
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    Gdel, Hofstadter, Wallace: The Gdelian Metalogical Narrative Structure of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2015-07-10) Hudson, Cory ; Hibbard, Allen ; Hollings, Marion ; English
    Despite acknowledgements that it forms an intellectual predecessor to Infinite Jest, the influence that Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gdel, Escher, Bach (GEB) had upon the structure of David Foster Wallace's novel has resisted critical exploration. Filling this gap in Wallace scholarship, this study fully probes the degree to which the structure of IJ mimics Kurt Gdel's notions of incompleteness and recursion as explained by Hofstadter. Gdel, via a self-referential mathematical formula designated, established the impossibility for a calculus to account for every true mathematical statement about natural numbers. Wallace used Gdel's notions as a formal principal to structure IJ. The recursive incompleteness of a closed fictional system modeled on such a proof opens finally toward the reader, inviting exit from the experience of reading the novel. In that transcendent movement to the outside of the novel's textual system, writer and readers form an empathetic bond with one another beyond the experience of inhabiting impossible formulae.