Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Theses and Dissertations by Department "English"
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    A Life Less Gothic: Gothic Literature, Dark Reform, and the Nineteenth-Century American Periodical Press
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2017-03-20) Gray, Sarah B. ; Renfroe, Alicia ; Ostrowski, Carl ; Phillips, Philip ; English
    Gothic as a genre is particularly concerned with identifying and exposing anachronisms in social law and behavior. Though most scholars, both Gothic and otherwise, view this as a reactionary position, my study exposes how, especially in the hands of American dark reform writers, Gothic became an active genre, illuminating for readers not what they do fear, but what they should fear. Though many nineteenth-century reformers wrote tracts and sentimental novels in the service of social reform, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and George Lippard recognized that by paralleling nineteenth-century legal and social issues with Gothic literary elements—coverture with captivity, loss of female “purity” with live burial, and insane asylums and civil commitment with the veil—in short stories and serials published in popular periodicals, their calls for social reform would reach a much more vast and varied national audience.
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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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    The Afro-American novel, 1965-1975 : a descriptive bibliography of primary and secondary material /
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 1976) Houston, Helen ; English
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    The American epic : a divided stream.
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 1995) Hubele, Donald ; English
    Classical epic models remind the reader of the sadness, futility, and sterility of living in the past; chapter one of this study illustrates, however, that from Cotton Mather to Walt Whitman, American history is celebrated in epic as an anthropomorphism of the mind of God. Further, classical poets who knew the glories of Troy also knew that its fate is inexorable to all in the future; from Whitman to Steinbeck, however, there are American epics such as The Octopus and The Grapes of Wrath that fly in the face of that knowledge.
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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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    American Independent Female Filmmakers: Kelly Reichardt in Focus
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2014-03-11) Hall, Dawn ; Badley, Linda ; Hollings, Marion ; Helford, Elyce ; English
    Female directors are historically underrepresented in the film industry. By studying the careers of independent women directors, scholars can identify their opportunities and challenges to create a more diverse and equitable industry. After synthesizing recent studies of women in film, this project focuses on the career of Kelly Reichardt as one example of the creative methodology, production, and content of women's work in the indie sector.
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    Anabaptists to Zwieback: Textual Access and Exclusion in Russian Mennonite Community Cookbooks of South Central Kansas
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2020) Harris-Aber, Amy A ; Myatt, Julie A. ; Pantelides, Kate L. ; Jack, Jordynn ; McDaniel, Rhonda ; English
    Russian Mennonite immigrants who settled south central Kansas in the late 19th century and their descendants naturally developed a discourse community that differentiates them from the dominant culture in which they reside. Changing regional dynamics regarding diversity along with continued acculturation impacts this ethnoreligious community in a kind of dual displacement; the descendants of these Russian Mennonites not only live in the shadow of their ancestors’ collected memories and traumas related to migration, but have and are currently witnessing further shifts away from the once agricultural lifestyle they previously observed. Therefore, heritage preservation is increasingly vital for stakeholders engaged with the history of Anabaptist life in Kansas. My dissertation attempts to elucidate aspects of the Russian Mennonite discourse community of south central Kansas by engaging with regional foodways as they appear in community cookbooks. I combine interview and text analysis data with John Swales’ concepts of discourse communities to further define how cultural insiders worked in previous decades to create community through the production of food focused texts. By analyzing the Zwieback recipes from eight community cookbooks produced within the same cultural group, I examine which texts exclude certain audiences, and which are meant to provide an access point for cultural “outsiders.” I maintain that due to acculturation and shifting population demographics in the region, long term regional and familial proximity to the Russian Mennonite community of south central Kansas determines understanding of high-context cultural practices. Establishing digital archives for Kansas Mennonite community cooking texts is also the most accessible form of preservation for all stakeholders.
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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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    Arab American Poetry 1967-Present: Songs of Defiance and Hope in the Face of Arab-U.S. Political Tension
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2014-11-14) Moqbel, Nedhal Saleh Mohsen ; Hibbard, Allen ; Johnson, Newtona (Tina) ; Albakry, Mohammed ; English
    This study examines Arab American poetry 1967-Present in light of the political tension between the United States and the Arab World. It explores the ways in which the Arab American community has been greatly impacted by such frequent political pressures as the Arab-Israeli conflict, violent events in the Middle East, and America's foreign policy in the region. The poems discussed in this dissertation reveal the community's collective anxieties, alienation, and fears due to hostility, anti-Arab racism, and media misrepresentation that often escalate during every crisis involving the U.S. and the Middle East. Analysis of these poems demonstrates a defiant response to a tense situation coupled with glimpses of hope for a better future. It also reveals the complexities of Arab American identity evident in the constantly ambivalent relationship between Arab and American contexts that is exacerbated by frequent political crises. Arab American poets address themes of war, violence, injustice, and hegemony, simultaneously touching upon deeper issues of belonging, hybridity, interrogation of identity, and reconciliation.
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    Archetype and metaphor : an approach to the early novels of Elie Wiesel.
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 1981) French, Ellen ; English
    This dissertation explores the development of Elie Wiesel's art as seen in his early novels. Since the late 1950's when the publication of Night first brought Wiesel to the attention of critics, his work has continued to command the respect of international critics and scholars. In fact, Wiesel has emerged in the United States as a leading spokesman for the survivors of the Holocaust, espousing a point of view that has wide appeal for its philosophical and humanitarian bases. The present study aproaches Night, Dawn, and The Accident as a trilogy linked by a single structural pattern of development, a single protagonist, and a single metaphoric and symbolic system.
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    The art of dying: suicide in the works of Kate Chopin and Sylvia Plath.
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 1992) Gentry, Deborah ; English
    Although the representation of suicide is commonplace in literature, few studies have explicitly dealt with the meaning of suicide in the works of women writers. Margaret Higonnet classifies representations of suicide as "masculine" or "feminine," and finds that since the Romantic age, literary suicides have been feminized. Masculine suicides are those where the characters, male or female, choose to die as an heroic act of protest against individual or social wrongs, while feminine suicides are the result of mental illness. Chapter I applies Higonnet's theories and those of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar concerning the division of women literary figures into angels or monsters to representative literary suicides of nineteenth century.
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    Baconian epistemology and the test for vocation in George Herbert's The temple /
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2007) Haynes, Katherine ; English
    While Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning was being translated into the elegant Latin of De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, a translation credited to George Herbert, Herbert was composing a series of religious English lyrics that would be published posthumously as The Temple. Public Orator for Cambridge University and Fellow, George Herbert was a candidate for Francis Bacon's call to begin the great instauration of learning that Bacon believed would ultimately usher in the Solomonic society that Bacon hoped would be established in England during the reign of James I. Part of his call was to open the experimentation to all who would be willing to share their results for the mutual advancement of knowledge.
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    Becoming frauds: unconventional heroines in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sensation fiction.
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2000) Schipper, Jan ; English
    By focusing on three of her early sensation novels, this study examines how Mary Elizabeth Braddon's fiction challenged conventional assumptions about the feminine and spoke to women's growing discontent with their limited roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. Her novels suggest how a number of women became frauds, in the sense of using deception, inventing false identities, and committing crimes in order to meet conventional society's expectations for the proper female. Braddon's female frauds subverted dominant Victorian ideology's representation of women as domestic ideals by defying the impractical and impossible role of "angel" and rejecting gender and class-based discrimination.
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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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    Between Grace and Grit: Modernity, Liminality, and Grace King
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2016-08-01) Lute, Khristeena Marie ; Bradley, Pat ; Renfroe, Mischa ; Donovan, Ellen ; English
    Critics and literary scholars typically associate American modernism with World War I and its effects on American society. Tenets of the movement, however, are evident in southern literature as early as Reconstruction; economic depression, social disillusionment, and a general sense of decay appear regularly in some southern literature texts of the late nineteenth century as well as in modernist literature of the 1920s. Southern writers use elements typically associated with Modernism, such as grotesque imagery and characterization, advanced linguistic play, narratives of community, and social liminality, decades before other national writers. Grace King, traditionally viewed as a New Orleans regionalist, is associated with a past era of pastoral novels and local color fiction, but in re-examining her work, one can identify techniques that would later be referred to as “modernist,” in particular, social liminality as described by anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner. King’s New Orleans characters express universal gender, racial, socioeconomic, and national liminalities as the South attempted to recover after the Civil War. Through the use of close readings of King’s fiction and life writing, I explore the concepts of modernity and liminality in her writing and her place among more widely celebrated modernists. Identifying and exploring King’s pre-modernist techniques can clarify how her texts, lesser known in contemporary studies, may have played a part as early mentor-texts to a major literary movement. Numerous scholars now support the notion that King did not have the economic stability to take outward, radical stances and therefore needed her writing to express her own evolving opinions on social issues; this rhetorical strategy is part of the beauty of King’s writing, a liminal ambiguity that generates a multiplicity of interpretations, and is our final link to seeing Grace King as a pre-modernist writer.
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    'Between the house and the chicken yard' : the masks of Mary Flannery O'Connor /
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2008) Sharp, Jolly ; English
    Mary Flannery O'Connor's personal idiosyncrasies and literary talents enabled her to don multiple masks that both concealed and revealed segments of herself as she desired. While O'Connor's personal and social masks were shaped by her Southern and Catholic roots, her vivid imagination and artistry fashioned her literary masks, allowing her to explore life's grotesqueness. Many of O'Connor's literary characters shelter features of her own disposition and purpose.
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    BIRTHING AN ARCHETYPE: WAR AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE EPIC CHILD HERO
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2018-04-13) Cain, Jennifer M. ; Hixon, Martha ; Petersen, Robert ; McCluskey, Pete ; English
    ABSTRACT
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    Borders and blood : creativity in Beowulf /
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 2010) Brown, Lisa ; English
    In Dimensions of Creativity, Margaret A. Boden defines a bordered, conceptual space as the realm of creativity; therefore, one may argue that the ubiquitous presence of boundaries throughout the Old English poem Beowulf suggests that it is a work about creativity. Since Beowulf creates stories from his exploits, and since those exploits consist of shedding blood as a result of both geographic and corporeal crossings, the blood must be seen as the inspiration for his narratives from the border. Not only does he prove himself to be a maker because of the stories he generates, but Beowulf also fits both the personality profile and behavior pattern of creators. Although Grendel also kills, he absorbs the blood rather than making something from it and thereby becomes a representation of the evil creative act. Beowulf, however, is a man with social and political duties, and his struggle with these as they conflict with his need for personal and private creativity culminates in his experience in the creative realm itself, the cave in the mere with the mother and the sword of the giants. Using Dorothy L. Sayers' arguments from The Mind of the Maker that humanity mirrors God in one major aspect, the need to create, and that culture is at odds with this need, Beowulf may be viewed as heeding his social responsibilities and out of necessity negating his creativity. In doing so, he suppresses violence and bloodshed, trying to find a way to negotiate between them and public duty. The result is tragic: he becomes almost non-productive in order to preserve his kingdom. As a work that regards creativity ambiguously, Beowulf may also be seen to speak to the concerns of the monastics who produced it and their struggles with the problem of trying to determine when the creative act is worship and when it is idolatry.
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    CAI Portfolio English 111 : a new direction for freshman composition at Middle Tennessee State University.
    (Middle Tennessee State University, 1998) Clayton, Maria ; English
    A paradigm shift occurred in writing instruction theory and pedagogy during the 1970's, a shift that mandated a move away from the current-traditional emphasis on product and towards a new, more rhetorically-based focus on the composition process. As a result of this shift, two different but complementary pedagogies emerged almost simultaneously, portfolio-based composition, also propelled by needs in the field of assessment, and computer-assisted composition, made possible by the rise in computer applications in the classroom. Portfolio-based and computer-assisted programs have enjoyed a solid following well into the 1990's and, in fact, continue to gain status among academic disciplines, particularly in composition studies. In the past decade the symbiotic potential of portfolio and computer methodologies has been recognized by many institutions of higher education where they have been implemented as natural partners in the teaching of writing.