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Title: Illustration and Realism in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel.
Creator: Bighta, Anna, Kennedy, Meegan, Williamson, George S., Faulk, Barry J., Gants, David L., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This dissertation shows that print illustration – particularly its technologies, its financial implications, and its role in scientific representation – influenced three major nineteenth-century British writers as they built their versions of realism for their long fiction. William Makepeace Thackeray was inspired by lithography and the scientific atlas to make fast, socially-relevant characters which he catalogued in The Book of Snobs. Collaboration with John Everett Millais helped Anthony...
Show moreThis dissertation shows that print illustration – particularly its technologies, its financial implications, and its role in scientific representation – influenced three major nineteenth-century British writers as they built their versions of realism for their long fiction. William Makepeace Thackeray was inspired by lithography and the scientific atlas to make fast, socially-relevant characters which he catalogued in The Book of Snobs. Collaboration with John Everett Millais helped Anthony Trollope in the mid-century develop a realism in his Barsetshire novels that required close observation and included careful details. Toward the end of the century, Thomas Hardy’s engagement with George Du Maurier in A Laodicean helped Hardy develop a realism that both showed the instability of the visual representation and showed how images were made. All three novelists were interested, in their own ways, with the connection between seeing and knowing.
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: 2019_Spring_Bighta_fsu_0071E_15088
Format: Thesis

Title: Notes Toward a Panoramic View: A National Portrait of GTA Writing Pedagogy Education across Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition.
Creator: Cicchino, Amy Teresa, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Dennen, Vanessa P., Neal, Michael R., Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Coxwell-Teague, Deborah, Florida State University, College of Arts...
Show moreCicchino, Amy Teresa, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Dennen, Vanessa P., Neal, Michael R., Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Coxwell-Teague, Deborah, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: The preparation of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) for the college composition classroom has been a conversation in writing program administration scholarship for the last century. In that time, national position statements have been written articulating best practices for the design of these preparation programs in addition to the countless number of articles, chapters, and books taking up this topic. However, a large-scale study of these preparation programs has not been conducted for...
Show moreThe preparation of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) for the college composition classroom has been a conversation in writing program administration scholarship for the last century. In that time, national position statements have been written articulating best practices for the design of these preparation programs in addition to the countless number of articles, chapters, and books taking up this topic. However, a large-scale study of these preparation programs has not been conducted for twenty years. In seeking to update the field’s knowledge of large-scale GTA writing pedagogy education (WPE) preparation, this dissertation describes how doctoral programs across the nation prepare their GTA instructors to enter the undergraduate composition classroom. The study employs a mixed-methods approach to describe GTA education and professionalization across institutions granting doctoral degrees in Rhetoric and Composition and includes a national survey along with three local case studies. The findings for this dissertation include the following: 1) WPE must often balance multiple purposes including the development of local, pedagogical, and theoretical knowledges, 2) WPAs employ a variety of strategies to manage those purposes such as blending, loading, and embedding, 3) The greatest constraint in designing and delivering WPE, as identified by this study’s respondents, is time, 4) The design of WPE is highly local in that it is deeply impacted by programmatic and administrative histories, local constraints, and the population who deliver and receive WPE.
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: 2019_Spring_Cicchino_fsu_0071E_15117
Format: Thesis

Title: Images of Uncertainty: The Hallucinatory Simulacra in Post-1960s Fiction and Film.
Creator: Tooley, Thomas Charles, Epstein, Andrew, Wakamiya, Lisa Ryoko, Gontarski, S. E., Faulk, Barry J., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Critical examinations of the simulacrum have frozen, due in part to the overabundance and simplified applications of Jean Baudrillard's canonical theories. In a 2003 book review, David Banash voices this frustration, identifying "surprisingly little nuance" in the handling of "Baudrillard's theory of simulation." He faults critics and scholars who generally "treat [Baudrillard's] work as if it were an objective description of the world," as if "somehow DeLillo offers a kind of proof for...
Show moreCritical examinations of the simulacrum have frozen, due in part to the overabundance and simplified applications of Jean Baudrillard's canonical theories. In a 2003 book review, David Banash voices this frustration, identifying "surprisingly little nuance" in the handling of "Baudrillard's theory of simulation." He faults critics and scholars who generally "treat [Baudrillard's] work as if it were an objective description of the world," as if "somehow DeLillo offers a kind of proof for Baudrillard." We can note a similar dynamic at play in criticisms that evaluate postmodern literature according to Fredric Jameson's definition of the postmodern condition, or the "cultural logic of late capitalism." He too distinguishes postmodern aesthetics as reducing historical, critical, ethical work into "pseudo-events." Though aligned with two different theoretical "schools," both Baudrillard and Jameson offer a "nihilistic" account of postmodernism. In "apocalyptic" gestures, they situate the opportunity for genuine subversive art in the past, marking postmodern aesthetics as the end of all critical productivity. In this dissertation, however, I argue that postmodern authors and filmmakers employ the simulacrum for a purpose that till now has gone overlooked by the critical trend that prioritizes these theories and approaches. Through close readings and historical accounts of key texts from Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and David Lynch, I demonstrate how simulacral imagery also works to raise our awareness of the constructed nature of authenticity. Employed in this alternative function, the simulacrum does not contribute to the total evacuation of meaning. Rather, it both installs and subverts traditional "realist" methods of representation. The simulacral imagery in these works tempt us to read them according to traditional, rational reading practices, which would lead us to assign authenticity to representations based on preexisting cultural convention. Yet, by simultaneously undermining the authority of those conventions, these simulacra reveal how authenticity exists as a cultural value, a device laden with political significance and derived from the combination of various aesthetic elements. In this more recalcitrant way, the simulacrum resists and denaturalizes the conventions for representation that encourage dominant systems of power. I title these the "hallucinatory simulacrum" in order to underscore this imagery as contrary to traditional veridical modes of representation.
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: 2019_Summer_Tooley_fsu_0071E_15403
Format: Thesis

Title: Evolving Constructions of Love and Marriage in Austen, Eliot, and Wilde.
Creator: Anderson, Paula Jean, Ward, Candace, Boutin, Aimée, Faulk, Barry J., Walker, Eric C., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: British literature of the long nineteenth century, exemplified by three authors who lived and wrote in England from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth centuries, was deeply focused on understanding human relationships and increasing equality between the sexes. From the novels of Jane Austen in the late Romantic period, through George Eliot’s Victorian novels, to the prose and plays of Oscar Wilde written on the cusp of a new century, constructions of love and marriage matured...
Show moreBritish literature of the long nineteenth century, exemplified by three authors who lived and wrote in England from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth centuries, was deeply focused on understanding human relationships and increasing equality between the sexes. From the novels of Jane Austen in the late Romantic period, through George Eliot’s Victorian novels, to the prose and plays of Oscar Wilde written on the cusp of a new century, constructions of love and marriage matured within and throughout the authors’ life experiences and art, affecting and reflecting cultural changes in all levels of English society but most notably through the changing mores of the rising middle class. Attesting to their lasting universality in depicting male and female emotions, social standards, and cultural goals, the written works of Austen, Eliot, and Wilde influenced a century of contemporary readers and continue to draw audiences for their timeless understandings of, and insightful approaches to, human relationships. Through detailed analysis of the authors’ selected works, with references to contemporary and modern critical interpretations, I will focus on these ever evolving individual and collective constructs of love and marriage, from Austen’s practical approach to love and sometimes deceptively witty arguments for equal partnership in marriage, through Eliot’s complex studies of individuality and redefined concepts of marriage, to Wilde’s insistence that love, marriage, and partnership be redefine by and true to self, despite pressure to conform. Throughout this detailed study of increasing realism in English society and fiction, changing gender roles and rights, developing relationships between the sexes, and the evolution of conceptions of love, the institution of marriage, a partnership between and within the sexes, this dissertation will focus on the long-term effects of the literary contributions of Austen, Eliot, and Wilde to ever evolving constructions of love and marriage in nineteenth-century England and their enduring effects on the Western World.
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: 2018_Sp_Anderson_fsu_0071E_14293
Format: Thesis

Title: The Dislocation of Man in the Modern Age: The Pilgrim Condition and Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholic Literature.
Creator: Bevilacqua, Thomas, Parrish, Timothy, Gontarski, S. E., Kavka, Martin, Epstein, Andrew, Parker-Flynn, Christina Marie, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences,...
Show moreBevilacqua, Thomas, Parrish, Timothy, Gontarski, S. E., Kavka, Martin, Epstein, Andrew, Parker-Flynn, Christina Marie, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: “The dislocation of man in the modern age”: The Pilgrim Condition and Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholic Literature highlights the ways in which the major Catholic voices in mid-twentieth century America—Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Jack Kerouac, Martin Scorsese—all shared a conception of man as a pilgrim (what philosopher Gabriel Marcel described as homo viator), one striving for something that transcended the physical and present world and yet fundamentally and necessarily of it...
Show more“The dislocation of man in the modern age”: The Pilgrim Condition and Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholic Literature highlights the ways in which the major Catholic voices in mid-twentieth century America—Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Jack Kerouac, Martin Scorsese—all shared a conception of man as a pilgrim (what philosopher Gabriel Marcel described as homo viator), one striving for something that transcended the physical and present world and yet fundamentally and necessarily of it and moving through it and that emphasis on the pilgrim is very in keeping with shifts occurring surround the Church at that time. I begin with a discussion of two earlier texts in which Catholicism plays a role—Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—highlighting the ways in which the de facto American Catholic literature of the early twentieth century did not in fact address the concerns of the American Catholic, mirroring the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council that saw itself as a fortress against the modern world (of which America was closely associated). From there, I consider works such as O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Percy’s The Moviegoer, Kerouac’s On The Road and Visions of Gerard, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. In that discussion, I note the recurring notion of man being necessarily in the world and yet longing for something outside of it, embodying the condition of the pilgrim making their way and paying penance while heading towards something more transcendent. The emphasis on this pilgrim condition in the work of these four authors mirrors the changes occurring within the Catholic Church at that time that led up to and resulted in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, reforms that carried a profound resonance in America and emphasized the Catholic Church’s essential nature as a pilgrim church in the world.
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: 2018_Sp_Bevilacqua_fsu_0071E_14386
Format: Thesis

Title: Book Illustration and Intersemiotic Translation in Early Modern England.
Creator: Clement, Taylor, Coldiron, A. E. B., Leitch, Stephanie, Taylor, Gary, Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Book Illustration and Intersemiotic Translation in Early Modern England establishes new terms for assessing the effects of woodcut image reproduction on literary meaning in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed books. Specifically, this project considers the recycling of illustrations in England and across continental Europe that afforded vernacular readers a transnational advantage of shared visual language. As early modern printers and illustrators traced, copied, and reprinted images,...
Show moreBook Illustration and Intersemiotic Translation in Early Modern England establishes new terms for assessing the effects of woodcut image reproduction on literary meaning in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed books. Specifically, this project considers the recycling of illustrations in England and across continental Europe that afforded vernacular readers a transnational advantage of shared visual language. As early modern printers and illustrators traced, copied, and reprinted images, translators shifted verbal signifiers for new audiences. Each chapter examines the ways in which illustration can inflect form and genre in emblem, lyric, and epic poetry, respectively. Drawing on critical methods of literary and translation studies, book history, and illustration, this project contributes to an interdisciplinary understanding of illustrated poetry and the ways in which the production of pictures significantly affects textual reception.
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: 2018_Sp_Clement_fsu_0071E_14342
Format: Thesis

Title: Revision and Collaboration in the Henry VI Plays.
Creator: Kim, Heejin, Taylor, Gary, Bourus, Terri, Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Faulk, Barry J., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Since 1928 The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York (texts printed separately in the 1590s) have been regarded as memorial reconstructions of two texts printed in 1623 in the folio edition of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, where they are instead identified as Henry the Sixth, Part Two and Henry the Sixth, Part Three. Although recent scholarship has called into question the validity of the memorial reconstruction hypothesis in general and has demonstrated...
Show moreSince 1928 The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York (texts printed separately in the 1590s) have been regarded as memorial reconstructions of two texts printed in 1623 in the folio edition of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, where they are instead identified as Henry the Sixth, Part Two and Henry the Sixth, Part Three. Although recent scholarship has called into question the validity of the memorial reconstruction hypothesis in general and has demonstrated aesthetic differences between the “bad quartos” and the 1623 Folio as a sign of distinctive authorial engagements, most reference works and critical editions of the Henry VI plays maintain the 1928 view. This dissertation challenges the validity of textual evidence presented in support of the memorial reconstruction hypothesis and argues that Contention and Duke of York are based on authentic manuscripts and Folio Henry VI plays are based on revised, collaborative texts. The alleged signs of memorial corruption are also found in contemporary authorial manuscripts of other plays, and an examination of textual disruptions in the Henry VI texts shows signs of authorial engagements. A number of passages unique to the earlier printings contain independent references to chronicle sources, which disputes the memorial reconstruction hypothesis that piratical actors improvised the passages that are absent in the Folio when their memory failed. Because the memorial reconstruction hypothesis was, from its origins, committed to the idea that Shakespeare was the sole author of all the Henry VI plays, the dissertation also critically reviews external and internal evidence in regard to the authorship and date of the Henry VI plays, ranging from contemporary documentary evidence to most recent computational analyses. It also examines the implication of collaborative intersection between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare in the plays written before the 1594 formation of the Chamberlain’s Men texts; in particular, it compares the two texts printed in the 1590s with the 1623 Folio texts by showing that Queen Margret in the Folio is a Shakespearean adaptation of an earlier Marlovian portrayal.
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: 2018_Su_Kim_fsu_0071E_14703
Format: Thesis

Title: Defining Dramatic and Theatrical Interruptions Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher.
Creator: Wagoner, Michael Martin, Taylor, Gary, Salata, Kris, Gontarski, S. E., Bourus, Terri, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This study reconsiders power dynamics and authorial style through a study of the structure of interruptions. By considering this everyday occurrence as an aesthetic phenomenon, literary critics can more fully understand the relationships inherent in drama, itself a relational art form. This dissertation illuminates how the everyday becomes aesthetic and how the aesthetic helps us to comprehend the everyday. Interruptions are ubiquitous both in everyday life as well as within literature. While...
Show moreThis study reconsiders power dynamics and authorial style through a study of the structure of interruptions. By considering this everyday occurrence as an aesthetic phenomenon, literary critics can more fully understand the relationships inherent in drama, itself a relational art form. This dissertation illuminates how the everyday becomes aesthetic and how the aesthetic helps us to comprehend the everyday. Interruptions are ubiquitous both in everyday life as well as within literature. While sociologists and linguists have studied them in their quotidian occurrences, literary and performance scholars have almost completely ignored their aesthetic iterations. Some recent studies into this structure evaluate poetry and prose, but rarely consider drama, and even in the studies of prose and poetry, interruptions are deployed as a structure inherently understood. This dissertation offers a fuller consideration and evaluation by studying interruptions through their comprising elements and their distinctive types. This study examines early modern drama as an exemplary, influential moment of dramatic output, focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher. Through an informed neo-formalism, this dissertation reveals two significant aspects of interruptive structures. First, interruptions demonstrate dynamic power relationships not only among characters within a play, but also between an audience and a performer or a reader and a text. Second, interruption usages indicate aspects of authorial style, emphasizing a playwright’s use and control of a text and its implications/expectations. The chapters of the dissertation explore four types of internal interruptions, or those which an author writes into the text. Chapter Two examines dialogic microinterruptions, which are specific moments within dialogue where a conversant speaks out of turn. Through exemplary scenes within Volpone, The Tempest, and The Humorous Lieutenant, the chapter develops an understanding of both the shifting power relationships among the characters and how the playwrights approach those shifts in building character and community. Chapter Three examines another type of internal microinterruption, the self-interruption. By considering the methodology and rhetoric of stopping oneself on stage, the chapter reveals the emotional, manipulative, and comedic usages of the structure, while developing a reading of each author’s approach to interiority and character. The final two chapters focus on macrointerruptions, or those that disrupt larger governing structures within a text. Chapter Four explores dramaturgical macrointerruptions through audience expectations of structure. Through Jonson’s Grex in Every Man Out, Shakespeare’s surprise reveal of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and Fletcher’s exposition in The Chances, each playwright explores the possibilities of rupturing dramatic structures and the effects that such ruptures create for audiences. The final chapter examines interruption of theatrical conventions, specifically through the convention of male to female crossdressing. As this type of crossdressing was not as prevalent as female to male in the period, it presents an already interrupted convention, that the authors, in plays such as Epicene and The Loyal Subject, further complicate through the relationship between the convention and the expectation.
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: 2018_Sp_Wagoner_fsu_0071E_14385
Format: Thesis

Title: Oxford Romance: Male Homosexuality in Modernist Literature.
Creator: Carper, Kelsey, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Gregory Woods states in A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, "It would be difficult – though many critics have managed it, perhaps inadvertently – to take an overview of flourishing Modernist fiction without acknowledging the emergence of male homosexuality as a significant issue in the make-up of incidental characters and even, in many cases, of central characters" (192). Homosexuality makes a large appearance in many modernist works, as Woods argues, and yet male homosexuality,...
Show moreGregory Woods states in A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, "It would be difficult – though many critics have managed it, perhaps inadvertently – to take an overview of flourishing Modernist fiction without acknowledging the emergence of male homosexuality as a significant issue in the make-up of incidental characters and even, in many cases, of central characters" (192). Homosexuality makes a large appearance in many modernist works, as Woods argues, and yet male homosexuality, in particular, is greatly overlooked or outright denied by scholars when discussing modernist novels. Woods' assertion is a response to early scholarship that has notably ignored and rejected the existence of romantic relationships between male characters that clearly shared intimate bonds. Unfortunately, there has continued to be a large gap of scholarship to really refute these statements of denial. In dismissing these relationships, critics ignore an important aspect of modernism. By including homoerotic relations in their novels, modernist writers presented a forum for their society to explore relations that would have been considered taboo or even punishable, which can be observed in the 1928 trial against Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, or the Labouchere Amendment that prosecuted homosexual men in Britain from 1885 until 1967.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0425
Format: Thesis

Title: Advice and Discontent: Staging Identity through Legal Representation on the British Stage, 1660-1800.
Creator: Cerniglia, Sarah Morrow, Burke, Helen M., Upchurch, Charles, Daileader, Celia R., Ward, Candace, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: One of the key issues that arises when discussing the long eighteenth century is that of identity: self/individual, and group/national. Whereas recent critical work in both literary studies and historiography has concerned itself with the circumstances surrounding the long eighteenth century's fundamental shifts in conceptions of identity, much of this work overlooks the potential for identity to be relational, rather than either exterior or interior to an individual/group. This dissertation...
Show moreOne of the key issues that arises when discussing the long eighteenth century is that of identity: self/individual, and group/national. Whereas recent critical work in both literary studies and historiography has concerned itself with the circumstances surrounding the long eighteenth century's fundamental shifts in conceptions of identity, much of this work overlooks the potential for identity to be relational, rather than either exterior or interior to an individual/group. This dissertation explores the relational nature of identity formation in the long eighteenth century by examining a literary genre and a character that depend upon relational interactions in order to sustain themselves: stage comedies and lawyers. Representative dramatic comedies by writers such as George Farquhar, Richard Cumberland, Thomas Lewis O'Beirne, William Wycherly, Christopher Bullock, Henry Fielding, John O'Keeffe, Colley Cibber, George Colman and David Garrick, and Samuel Foote, offer opportunities to study staged representations of lawyers whose clients' issues essentially become those of identity formation. This dissertation argues that, for many characters struggling to establish an identity that can participate in a national British identity, the key to such participation lies in access to real property; when access to real property is denied them, they must turn to someone who is himself struggling to establish an identity. At this point, lawyers in eighteenth-century British comedies become much more than stock characters or mere comic relief. Instead, the lawyer—often ostracized and derided himself—becomes a mediator not just of individual identity, but of "Britishness." Careful attention to lawyers' success representing different types of clients struggling to establish identities through access to real property highlights both the power of relational identity formation and the key roles that arguably minor characters have in arbitrating issues of national significance.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_2017SP_Cerniglia_fsu_0071E_13700
Format: Thesis

Title: The Laws of Fantasy Remix.
Creator: Dauphin, Matthew J., Faulk, Barry J., Nudd, Donna M., Mariano, Trinyan, Parker-Flynn, Christina, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This project establishes a critical framework for the examination of a recently emerged trend in speculative fictions texts, which I have dubbed "fantasy remix." Through close examination of two exemplary texts that exhibit the characteristics of fantasy remix, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, I establish a method by which fantasy remix can be identified and examined for its strength as a tool of resistance, subversion, and conformity. There are three major characteristics of the technique that...
Show moreThis project establishes a critical framework for the examination of a recently emerged trend in speculative fictions texts, which I have dubbed "fantasy remix." Through close examination of two exemplary texts that exhibit the characteristics of fantasy remix, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, I establish a method by which fantasy remix can be identified and examined for its strength as a tool of resistance, subversion, and conformity. There are three major characteristics of the technique that can be used to identify most fantasy remix texts: 1) the incorporation and adaptation of multiple pre-existing fantastic characters, plots, and motifs, such as from fairy tales, folklore, or mythology; 2) the juxtaposition of these fantasy elements with contemporary culture and/or settings; and 3) an emphasis on narrative and/or structural temporal complexity. Fantasy remix texts displaying these characteristics make liberal use of speculative fiction's tendency to subvert reality and to enable its consumers to resist the sometimes-overwhelming bombardment of cultural ideology that suffuses the real world. The fantasy remix's simultaneous tendency to conform, at least superficially, to the status quo increases its chances of effective subversion and resistance, creating a semi-paradoxical situation in which that which does not fit becomes a source of cultural reflection. This dissertation examines the way the fantasy remix technique helps to dismantle and critique ideological conceptions of morality, law, and justice; immanent causality, especially race and racism; and the temporal order inherent to causality, and thus to our ability to make meaning from the world. Meant as a means to expand speculative fiction scholarship with regard to a specific niche technique, the questions posed by this analysis serve as an example for new ways of approaching the dialectic possibilities of a contemporary culture that creatively cannibalizes its own past.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_2017SP_Dauphin_fsu_0071E_13722
Format: Thesis

Title: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the Seventeenth Century: Transmission, Translation, Reception.
Creator: Day, Patrick V., Johnson, David F. (David Frame), Brewer, Charles E. (Charles Everett), Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Florida State...
Show moreDay, Patrick V., Johnson, David F. (David Frame), Brewer, Charles E. (Charles Everett), Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of an intense interest in Anglo-Saxon history and artifacts that accompanied the transcription, translation, and dissemintation of the contents of England's monastic libraries following the Reformation begun in the 1530s. The tide of religious reform turned to more secular, legal concerns under the two early Stuart kings, and the pre-Norman past was used to simultaneously legitimize and criticize early-seventeenth-century monarchy and its...
Show moreThe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of an intense interest in Anglo-Saxon history and artifacts that accompanied the transcription, translation, and dissemintation of the contents of England's monastic libraries following the Reformation begun in the 1530s. The tide of religious reform turned to more secular, legal concerns under the two early Stuart kings, and the pre-Norman past was used to simultaneously legitimize and criticize early-seventeenth-century monarchy and its ancient privileges by free monarchists and constitutionalists, respectively. Much of the modern criticism surrounding the constitutional crises of the reigns of James VI and I and Charles I as it relates to the Anglo-Saxon past focuses on Bede and the Benedictine Reformers of the tenth century. The present study, however, considers an often-cited text typically relegated to the periphery: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle makes its debut in print under the direction of Abraham Wheelock and the Cambridge University Press in 1643. The annalistic history appears alongside Bede's Historia Ecclesisatica, and, in the 1644 reprint and augmentation, the laws from Ine to Alfred and the later Anglo-Norman kings. Wheelock's editio princeps of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle appears at the height of the First English Civil War in 1643, and it is often treated by modern critics as an appendix to the Old English Historia to which it is attached. This dissertation argues that the Chronicle is not peripheral, and that it participates in a larger royalist campaign to establish the West Saxons as the institutional forbears of the first two Stuart kings. The opening chapters establish Wheelock and his literary circle as participants in the ongoing constitutional debate that culminated in the Personal Rule of Charles in 1629 and the opening years of the Civil Wars a decade later. After the political alleigances of those who surround the production of the 1643 Chronicle have been thoroughly considered, the focus of this study then turns to the text of the Chronicle itself. Wheelock inserts himself into the Chronicle's narrative by means of excision, substitution, and inconsistent translation so that the Chronicle may more easily conform to early modern perceptions of kingship. Specifically, his intervention into and manipulation of the genealogical West Saxon Regnal Table and his interpretation of the advisory body of the Anglo-Saxons known as the witan provide a lens through which to read the medieval Chronicle as a polticial document suitable for seventeenth-century purposes. Lastly, this dissertation traces the influences of the 1643 edition upon the only other Chronicle printed in that century—the 1692 version compiled and edited by Bishop Edmund Gibson. This final chapter argues that Gibson, like Wheelock, uses the Chronicle for political, and in the latter antiquary's case, nationalistic ends.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_2017SP_Day_fsu_0071E_13770
Format: Thesis

Title: Whirlwind into Heaven.
Creator: Stephens, Jaclyn Anne, Butler, Robert Olen, Contreras, Robert J. (Robert John), Kirby, David, Hamby, Barbara, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department...
Show moreStephens, Jaclyn Anne, Butler, Robert Olen, Contreras, Robert J. (Robert John), Kirby, David, Hamby, Barbara, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: Some saints have poverty. Others, the ill or indigent. Evelyn Ellenberger has herself. This novel deals with themes of asceticism and sainthood as the main character, Evelyn, experiences mystic visions of St. Catherine of Siena and tries to prove to her family and to herself that she, too, is destined for sainthood. As a young girl, Evelyn Ellenberger experiences a freak accident with a neighbor's bull. Though she miraculously survives the encounter, the incident leaves her permanently...
Show moreSome saints have poverty. Others, the ill or indigent. Evelyn Ellenberger has herself. This novel deals with themes of asceticism and sainthood as the main character, Evelyn, experiences mystic visions of St. Catherine of Siena and tries to prove to her family and to herself that she, too, is destined for sainthood. As a young girl, Evelyn Ellenberger experiences a freak accident with a neighbor's bull. Though she miraculously survives the encounter, the incident leaves her permanently scarred and inspired. Throughout her adolescence Evelyn is isolated and ostracized for a mysterious illness, which her psychiatrist father diagnoses as a case of Anorexia Mirabilis, a miraculous lack of appetite most commonly seen among medieval saints. Initially, her father is her only supporter until he tries to exploit his daughter's extreme asceticism for personal gain. Years later, Evelyn Ellenberger suspects that she is pregnant and risks her relationship with her husband to pursue her own veneration as the saint she believes she is destined to become. A semi-recovered and pregnant Evelyn returns to her childhood home just as Hurricane Sandy is about to hit. Convinced that her pregnancy is the second miracle needed for sainthood, Evelyn scours her father's home and office determined to prove her case for canonization. Over the course of the novel, the characters discover that no one is as pure and holy as they claim to be. At the height of the storm, Evelyn realizes that saints aren't extraordinary people but ordinary people who do extraordinary things and that all of us could be saints if you catch us in the right moment.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SP_Stephens_fsu_0071E_13106
Format: Thesis

Title: Negative Bonds: White Creoles and Affect in Romantic Women’s Fiction.
Creator: Murphy, Taylor Lynn, Walker, Eric ., Wakamiya, Lisa, Hanson, Meegan, Ward, Candace, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This dissertation examines the unique social relationships formed between white Creole characters and their Anglo-English counterparts in Romantic-era women’s fiction. Guided by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, my dissertation terms these social relationships "negative bonds," which are defined as affective exchanges of both sympathy and negative feeling. Guilt, disgust, and shame—all negative affects—occur in tandem with sympathy during moments when white Creole characters attempt to...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the unique social relationships formed between white Creole characters and their Anglo-English counterparts in Romantic-era women’s fiction. Guided by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, my dissertation terms these social relationships "negative bonds," which are defined as affective exchanges of both sympathy and negative feeling. Guilt, disgust, and shame—all negative affects—occur in tandem with sympathy during moments when white Creole characters attempt to assimilate to British culture. Through their eventual failure, white Creole characters engender sympathy and experience negative affects from the Anglo-English characters, creating negative bonds that reinforce racial binaries and national boundaries. In using Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings to further conceptualize negative bonds, I extend the discussion to include contemporary theories of affective exchanges. While Ngai’s text explores figures who are oppressed by negative affects, my dissertation looks to the oppressors themselves, illuminating the role that affect plays within racialized discourse. Thus, analysis of negative bonds puts pressure upon texts that participate in maintaining social systems that continually exclude women from social equality and political rights. Negative bonds are most explicitly rendered through interactions with white Creole characters because they exist in geographical (Caribbean/Britain), national (Anglo-English/British-Caribbean), and racial (white/black) liminal spaces. Initially accepted into the ranks of elite social circles, white Creole characters threaten the "purity" of British society and test the limits of inclusionary and abolitionist discourse. While Romantic-era women’s fiction should position white Creole characters to dismantle social, racial, and economic systems of oppression, negative bonds confirm the Anglo-English characters’ superiority through affective exchanges with the "other." Ultimately, negative bonds solidify the white Creole’s "otherness" and maintain social order by ensuring the reproduction of British social hierarchies.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_FA2016_Murphy_fsu_0071E_13518
Format: Thesis

Title: (Un)Sure Writers: Potential Fluctuations in Self-Efficacy during the Writing Process.
Creator: Brooks, Amanda Marie, Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Neal, Michael R., Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: In “Some Thoughts about Feelings,” Susan McLeod encourages teachers to develop a “theory of affect” that could account for the various emotional processes that students encounter while writing (433). One contribution to such a theory concerns self-efficacy, a mechanism by which students interpret this emotional, sensory input. Self-efficacy plays a crucial role in understanding how students write as both a cognitive and affective activity. As students engage with various texts, they enter...
Show moreIn “Some Thoughts about Feelings,” Susan McLeod encourages teachers to develop a “theory of affect” that could account for the various emotional processes that students encounter while writing (433). One contribution to such a theory concerns self-efficacy, a mechanism by which students interpret this emotional, sensory input. Self-efficacy plays a crucial role in understanding how students write as both a cognitive and affective activity. As students engage with various texts, they enter into a process wherein they must mediate and interpret the skills they possess. These interpretations, and the beliefs on which they are based, can significantly enable or hinder writers as they engage in the composing process. Therefore, students' self-efficacy beliefs are vital to their success as writers, both inside and outside of the classroom. Although a significant amount of research explores self-efficacy as related to motivation and performance outcomes, little has been done to map the potential fluctuations of students’ self-efficacy beliefs throughout the composing process. As students progress through a writing assignment, they encounter challenges to their self-efficacy, such as reading the assignment sheet, drafting, receiving feedback, revising, and assessment. These challenges suggest that self-efficacy is not a stable phenomenon; rather, self-efficacy very probably fluctuates as students engage with the challenges presented by a specific task. Understanding the nature of potential fluctuations is important, then, both in a theory of self-efficacy and in teaching writing. Accordingly, this study seeks to determine if, how, when, and from what causes students’ self-efficacy fluctuates over the course of a single writing assignment involving multiple drafts. To examine potential fluctuations in students’ self-efficacy, I conducted a case study with two students enrolled in a single section of ENC 1101. I interviewed each of the participants face to face twice—once before they reviewed the assignment and again after they submitted the assignment to be graded—in order to create a narrative arc of their sense of self-efficacy throughout the assignment. These interviews were supplemented by self-assessment questionnaires that were completed by students at four designated moments chosen by the researcher and one spontaneous moment chosen by the subjects. The questionnaires consist of two parts: a quantitative self-assessment and a qualitative reflection. The quantitative self-assessment operates as a self-efficacy scale in order to determine how students perceive their abilities at specific moments in the writing process. Following each of the five quantitative assessment occasions, students were then asked to respond to a prompt designed to engage them in a qualitative reflection. These qualitative reflections were coded to determine self-efficacy fluctuations, sources of self-efficacy beliefs, and strategies that students evolved to cope with potential fluctuations. I triangulated these data to generate a rich description of the potential ebbs and flows of self-efficacy across the composing process. My data reveals that self-efficacy does fluctuate as students engage with a single assignment involving multiple drafts. However, the fluctuations manifested in different ways and to different degrees. Fluctuations occurred both from moment to moment during the composing process as well as within each discrete moment of the writing process. Additionally, the students reported that performance accomplishments, social persuasion, and physiological reactions played a role in determining their efficacy perceptions and, thus, in triggering fluctuations. The students drew from these sources to varying degrees, and interpreted the sources differently. These data suggest that the sources students draw from to determine their efficacy beliefs vary from study to student and that the more influential sources are most likely to trigger fluctuations. Finally, this study explores the strategies students evolved to address fluctuations. The results of this study illustrate the need for compositionists to attend to what points in the writing process fluctuations are likely to occur, what factors in the writing process might trigger those fluctuations, and what strategies students evolve to address fluctuations. To that end, these findings invite compositionists to reconsider the role of self-efficacy in the writing classroom, and subsequently alter our pedagogy to account for fluctuations in self-efficacy beliefs as our students compose.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SU_Brooks_fsu_0071N_13375
Format: Thesis

Title: Seeing the Self: Personal Motivation in Late-Medieval British Travel Accounts.
Creator: Hall, Kelly E. (Kelly Elizabeth), Johnson, David F. (David Frame), Brewer, Charles E. (Charles Everett), Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Gants, David L., Warren,...
Show moreHall, Kelly E. (Kelly Elizabeth), Johnson, David F. (David Frame), Brewer, Charles E. (Charles Everett), Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Gants, David L., Warren, Nancy Bradley, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: This dissertation argues that certain late-medieval British travelers intended more than simply to journey from place to place. Their travel writing reveals that they had other goals to accomplish, beyond the expected ones of seeing a new place or visiting a particular holy site. I am using three traveler-authors and their works: William Wey’s The Itineraries of William Wey (1458-62), Gerald of Wales’s The Description of Wales and The Journey Through Wales (c. 1191), and Margery Kempe, The...
Show moreThis dissertation argues that certain late-medieval British travelers intended more than simply to journey from place to place. Their travel writing reveals that they had other goals to accomplish, beyond the expected ones of seeing a new place or visiting a particular holy site. I am using three traveler-authors and their works: William Wey’s The Itineraries of William Wey (1458-62), Gerald of Wales’s The Description of Wales and The Journey Through Wales (c. 1191), and Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1436). This study begins with two chapters devoted to the nature of travel and travel writing in the Middle Ages, and an introduction of the three travelers. Why and how did people travel, and why did they leave written accounts? I will address two important discussions in the field—the idea of curiosity as a motivator for medieval travelers, and the debate best described as “communitas vs. the individual.” Chapters 3-5 will then address the individual authors. While all three certainly traveled for religious reasons such as pilgrimage or Crusade recruitment, each had multiple objectives for having their travels committed to paper. William Wey wanted to give helpful advice to others, and provide a substitute pilgrimage experience for those back in England who were unable to make the journey themselves. Gerald of Wales was traveling with high-ranking churchmen to encourage the Welsh to go on Crusade, but his ultimate goal was that of self-promotion, both for his literary travails and his future employment opportunities. Margery Kempe didn’t begin her travels with a specific goal in mind, other than to visit popular pilgrimage sites. However, once abroad, she develops a female fellowship—something she often lacked at home, and something she did not find amongst her travel companions. The conclusion will summarize my assessment of each author’s account, proving that each formed his/her identity through travel and travel writing. I will also address what they ultimately gained or lost by writing their accounts. Wey successfully guides future pilgrims, actual and virtual. Gerald hopes to highlight his own worth, but never gains the position he desires. Kempe is the most successful, finally finding a welcoming, feminine sphere.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SU_Hall_fsu_0071E_13310
Format: Thesis

Title: The Uniqueness of Shakespeare's Prose.
Creator: Nance, John V., Taylor, Gary, Dahl, Mary Karen, Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Gants, David L., Spiller, Elizabeth, Florida State University, College of Arts and...
Show moreNance, John V., Taylor, Gary, Dahl, Mary Karen, Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Gants, David L., Spiller, Elizabeth, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: Most early modern playwrights exploit the tonal and representational advantages of prose on stage, and this is especially true of Shakespeare: with the exception of King John and Richard II, all of Shakespeare’s unassisted plays incorporate dramatic prose speeches as a complement to and deviation from dramatic verse. Yet despite the incontrovertible ubiquity of dramatic prose in Shakespeare’s works and on the early modern stage more generally, we currently lack the analytical and...
Show moreMost early modern playwrights exploit the tonal and representational advantages of prose on stage, and this is especially true of Shakespeare: with the exception of King John and Richard II, all of Shakespeare’s unassisted plays incorporate dramatic prose speeches as a complement to and deviation from dramatic verse. Yet despite the incontrovertible ubiquity of dramatic prose in Shakespeare’s works and on the early modern stage more generally, we currently lack the analytical and methodological terminology necessary to describe how Shakespeare’s prose is different from anyone else’s. This descriptive lapse becomes especially important when we realize that with the exception of 1 and 3 Henry VI, every play with a contested attribution to Shakespeare incorporates dramatic prose speeches. My dissertation examines three separate but interrelated problems in early modern studies: what constitutes dramatic prose? What specific forms does it assume in Shakespeare’s canon? And can we differentiate Shakespeare’s dramatic prose from dramatic prose written by his contemporaries? Drawing on a sustained engagement with the dramatic prose of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, my project illuminates the critical and literary grounds for determining the unique characteristics of Shakespeare’s dramatic prose. The structure and scope of my analysis position this aspect of Shakespeare’s style on interconnected critical and computational trajectories with marked theoretical and empirical outcomes.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SU_Nance_fsu_0071E_13387
Format: Thesis

Title: Lyric Resistance: Twentieth-Century Verse Drama Against the Lyric.
Creator: Walker, Andrew Scott, Epstein, Andrew, Wakamiya, Lisa Ryoko, Gontarski, S. E., Stilling, Robert, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Taking up recent arguments associated with New Lyric Studies, contemporary genre theory, and historical poetics, this dissertation examines the trajectory of the dramatic element in twentieth-century poetry and its specific practice in the verse drama. Particularly, it argues that the persistent interest among twentieth-century poets in composing verse drama arises out of a resistance to what has been called the lyricization of poetry. By investigating the dramas of poets as diverse as...
Show moreTaking up recent arguments associated with New Lyric Studies, contemporary genre theory, and historical poetics, this dissertation examines the trajectory of the dramatic element in twentieth-century poetry and its specific practice in the verse drama. Particularly, it argues that the persistent interest among twentieth-century poets in composing verse drama arises out of a resistance to what has been called the lyricization of poetry. By investigating the dramas of poets as diverse as Sadakichi Hartmann, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Robert Lowell, and Derek Walcott, among others, this study reconsiders poets’ engagements with the theater as endeavors vital to poetic, and not merely theatrical history. Through an examination of the poetic dramas of Hartmann and Eliot, I argue that the ways modernist poets deploy ritual are not merely anthropological, disinterested acts, but part of a larger interest in creating liturgical, actionable works of poetry, reforming our ideas of modernist interest in religious practices and communal experiences of poetry. Further, I argue that the verse dramas of Stein and Barnes help us to re-frame narratives of poetic subjectivity and repudiate the purported “death of tragedy” in a lyric age, developing a more full picture of poetry’s ability to engage with and present traumatic experience. In the final chapter, I demonstrate by looking to the verse dramas of Lowell and Walcott the ways that the verse drama challenges the lyric’s perceived a-historical status, finding in the theater a place for historical and political engagement. Thus, this dissertation addresses a current scholarly gap in the study of twentieth-century poetry by examining an oft-overlooked, yet vital form created during an era associated with the dominance of the lyric, and argues that by including verse dramas in contemporary accounts of poetry, we find a more fully-formed perspective of twentieth-century poetics and, particularly, the possibilities of poetic practice beyond the boundaries of the lyric.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SU_Walker_fsu_0071E_13424
Format: Thesis

Title: Count Four.
Creator: Kopka, Keith, Belieu, Erin, Walters, Lori, Hamby, Barbara, Kimbrell, James, Vitkus, Daniel J., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: The dissertation manuscript Count Four is a collection of poems that attempts to address the often-conflicting identities of their speakers. Thematically, these poems cover a broad array of personal topics such as family, suicide, fame, fear, violence, and intimate relationships. All of these often-disparate subjects connect with each other, often in the same poem, in order to create an origin story for a speaker whose life is in constant contradiction with itself. The speaker in these poems...
Show moreThe dissertation manuscript Count Four is a collection of poems that attempts to address the often-conflicting identities of their speakers. Thematically, these poems cover a broad array of personal topics such as family, suicide, fame, fear, violence, and intimate relationships. All of these often-disparate subjects connect with each other, often in the same poem, in order to create an origin story for a speaker whose life is in constant contradiction with itself. The speaker in these poems has spent his life maneuvering the space on the fringes of society, and the consequences of this lifestyle have left the speaker to deal with the emotional trauma. Stylistically, these poems are in direct conversation with the free-verse tradition of American contemporary and confessional poetry. However, the formal and stylistic choices in this manuscript have the genealogy of a literary mongrel because they draw not only from a wide range of poetic styles, but also from a large pool of cultural and musical influences that allow the poems to translate personal experience through the lens of cultural identity.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SP_Kopka_fsu_0071E_13053
Format: Thesis

Title: Anchor and Knife.
Creator: Goolsby, Jesse, Butler, Robert Olen, Piehler, G. Kurt, Shacochis, Bob, Roberts, Diane, Winegardner, Mark, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of...
Show moreGoolsby, Jesse, Butler, Robert Olen, Piehler, G. Kurt, Shacochis, Bob, Roberts, Diane, Winegardner, Mark, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: This collection of personal essays and short fiction investigates a post-9/11 America locked in forever war. Centered upon the American veteran and the veteran family experience, Anchor & Knife showcases wide-ranging narratives that challenge conventional models of war literature by combining fiction and creative nonfiction genres into a single work as well as expanding the aperture of battle-scene focus to a much larger, holistic investigation of individuals searching for peace while...
Show moreThis collection of personal essays and short fiction investigates a post-9/11 America locked in forever war. Centered upon the American veteran and the veteran family experience, Anchor & Knife showcases wide-ranging narratives that challenge conventional models of war literature by combining fiction and creative nonfiction genres into a single work as well as expanding the aperture of battle-scene focus to a much larger, holistic investigation of individuals searching for peace while wrestling with their culpability in violence. As important, this collection explores the close proximity of trauma, not only through the lens of war, but also in family, religion, sex, and popular American culture.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SP_Goolsby_fsu_0071E_13073
Format: Thesis

Title: Reading the Cosmos and Reading the Poem in Early Modern English Poetry, 1579-1674.
Creator: Hause, Marie, Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Slaveva-Griffin, Svetla, Spiller, Elizabeth, Taylor, Gary, Florida State University, College of...
Show moreHause, Marie, Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Slaveva-Griffin, Svetla, Spiller, Elizabeth, Taylor, Gary, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: Reading the Cosmos and Reading the Poem in Early Modern English Poetry, 1579-1674 explores the relationship between early modern cosmology and poetry in England, arguing that the way the heavens are treated in poetry relates to the way the process of reading is understood in that poetry. By considering a range of poetic works across a period of about a century, the dissertation demonstrates an early modern poetic connection between ideas about astronomy and about reading. The multiple...
Show moreReading the Cosmos and Reading the Poem in Early Modern English Poetry, 1579-1674 explores the relationship between early modern cosmology and poetry in England, arguing that the way the heavens are treated in poetry relates to the way the process of reading is understood in that poetry. By considering a range of poetic works across a period of about a century, the dissertation demonstrates an early modern poetic connection between ideas about astronomy and about reading. The multiple viewpoints in astronomy and cosmology in this period form a part of a larger history of uncertainty about the heavens that offers the means for poetic exploration of ideas about perception, self-definition, and world-creation. The first chapter considers the related concerns with the human microcosm and linguistic indeterminacy in works by Spenser and Donne. The second chapter deals with the astronomical imagery for reading the gendered other in the lyric sequences of the Sidney family. The third chapter addresses Milton’s attitude toward cosmology as an analogue for his process of interpreting the Bible, the natural world, and the poem. The fourth chapter considers Cavendish’s presentation of the plurality of worlds in the context of her natural philosophy and her poetics. Taken together, these works reveal strong ties between cosmology and the concepts of writing and reading poetry, the self, and the world in early modern English poetry. This dissertation, then, adds to the body of knowledge about early modern reading and perception by connecting the early modern experiences of perceiving the written word and the physical world.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SU_Hause_fsu_0071E_13306
Format: Thesis

Title: Teenage Rebellion: The Ideological State Apparatus in Young Adult Literature Origins.
Creator: Abshier, Kristine Lake, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This thesis examines the presence of anti-Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) themes in three influential young adult literature novels: The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Due to their time of publishing, this project refers to these books as origins of American young adult literature. Through use of reader-response theory, I find that the novels encourage readers to seek a place outside ISAs for the remainder of their adolescence and approaching adulthood.
Date Issued: 2015
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0524
Format: Thesis

Title: Authority of Space/Spaces of Authority: Modernism, Power, and the Production of Space.
Creator: McKee, Adam R., Faulk, Barry J., Leushuis, Reinier, Epstein, Andrew, Gontarski, S. E., Goodman, Robin Truth, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department...
Show moreMcKee, Adam R., Faulk, Barry J., Leushuis, Reinier, Epstein, Andrew, Gontarski, S. E., Goodman, Robin Truth, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: This project seeks to examine the way in which modernist novelists John Dos Passos, Claude McKay, Louis Aragon, and Virginia Woolf depict urban spaces in the early-twentieth century metropolises of New York, Paris, and London. These writers depict spaces that have been influenced by capitalist and imperialist powers, yet they also depict places within the urban environment that serve as locations of resistance where they depict power's damaging effects on the spaces of the city. Drawing on...
Show moreThis project seeks to examine the way in which modernist novelists John Dos Passos, Claude McKay, Louis Aragon, and Virginia Woolf depict urban spaces in the early-twentieth century metropolises of New York, Paris, and London. These writers depict spaces that have been influenced by capitalist and imperialist powers, yet they also depict places within the urban environment that serve as locations of resistance where they depict power's damaging effects on the spaces of the city. Drawing on significant conversations in the field of postmodern geography, my project situates these modernist writers as critics of the power's ability to produce its own spaces that it, in turn, uses to control and produce docile urban subjectivities.
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Date Issued: 2015
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9398
Format: Thesis

Title: Autocorrect Awareness: Categorizing Autocorrect Changes and Measuring Authorial Perceptions.
Creator: Wood, Nicola, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This thesis studies changes made by Autocorrect software and authorial awareness and perceptions of those changes through analysis of case studies conducted on five volunteers aged 19 to 22. The study consisted of two phases: 1. three writing tasks, and 2. a post-writing survey given to the authors. For the first task, each subject completed three predetermined writing prompts: an email message, a text message, and a Facebook status—each with a specific intended audience—on their iPhones....
Show moreThis thesis studies changes made by Autocorrect software and authorial awareness and perceptions of those changes through analysis of case studies conducted on five volunteers aged 19 to 22. The study consisted of two phases: 1. three writing tasks, and 2. a post-writing survey given to the authors. For the first task, each subject completed three predetermined writing prompts: an email message, a text message, and a Facebook status—each with a specific intended audience—on their iPhones. Subjects then completed the survey to self-report their level of awareness of AutoCorrect's changes. Correction data was coded and categorized into one of four types of changes. The change type was determined by analyzing video recordings of each prompt. Type B changes—made when the subject accidentally hit the wrong key—proved to be the most common, followed by Type A changes (made when the subject seemed unable to spell the word), Type C changes (made as a result of incorrect capitalization or punctuation), and Type D changes (changes that did not fit into another category). Four out of five subjects self-reported that AutoCorrect changed their writing over 10 times. The fifth participant reported that AutoCorrect made 6-10 changes, though the program had actually altered his work 18 times. His response suggests that AutoCorrect may be becoming invisible to some users. The observations in this thesis are not generalizable; instead, they serve to provide a starting point for further exploration into authorial awareness in digital writing contexts.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0351
Format: Thesis

Title: Dead Elements.
Creator: White, Barrett, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This thesis, an interdisciplinary project entitled DEAD ELEMENTS, seeks to explore the complex relationship between performance and text. Seven common literary elements were selected and then interpreted both in a performative action and a written work. The work engages the traditions of both performance art and conceptual writing, blurring the distinction between physical body and textual body. Ultimately, DEAD ELEMENTS serves as a critique of academic literature, a reification of...
Show moreThis thesis, an interdisciplinary project entitled DEAD ELEMENTS, seeks to explore the complex relationship between performance and text. Seven common literary elements were selected and then interpreted both in a performative action and a written work. The work engages the traditions of both performance art and conceptual writing, blurring the distinction between physical body and textual body. Ultimately, DEAD ELEMENTS serves as a critique of academic literature, a reification of abstractions, a meditation on the body, and an engagement with my own idiosyncratic artistic practice.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0370
Format: Thesis

Title: Fights of Funny People: How the Wodehouse/Milne Literary Feud Changed Their Writing and Legacies.
Creator: Lockaby, Curtis D., Department of English
Abstract/Description: A.A. Milne and P.G. Wodehouse are two of the most famous English writers and humorists of their time, with Milne being known for the creation of Winnie the Pooh and Wodehouse celebrated for his Wooster and Jeeves novels. Not only that, these two literary giants were contemporaries and friendly adversaries for the majority of their careers. That is why it is so interesting when, with the development of World War Two, a brutal feud erupted between them. My essay will examine the literary and...
Show moreA.A. Milne and P.G. Wodehouse are two of the most famous English writers and humorists of their time, with Milne being known for the creation of Winnie the Pooh and Wodehouse celebrated for his Wooster and Jeeves novels. Not only that, these two literary giants were contemporaries and friendly adversaries for the majority of their careers. That is why it is so interesting when, with the development of World War Two, a brutal feud erupted between them. My essay will examine the literary and personal feud between A.A. Milne and P.G. Wodehouse, detailing its origins, outcomes, and how it manifested itself in their written work. First the paper will outline Milne and Wodehouse's work prior to the war and touch on their collaborations to display their status as friendly competitors. Then it will describe the events leading up to and the immediate results of the infamous Berlin broadcast, including Milne's response which kicked off the feud. Next we shall outline the post-war lives of both authors and highlight their relevant literary output, all of which was influenced by their feud. And finally the works will be (the tone, style and subject matter) examined. While a good deal of this may seem biographical, it is necessary to provide background for the literary argument. The main focus in the paper will be the effects seen in the post-war writings and the exact impact that these texts have had on their writer's legacies and the literary world.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0468
Format: Thesis

Title: Dead Elements.
Creator: White, Barrett, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This thesis, an interdisciplinary project entitled DEAD ELEMENTS, seeks to explore the complex relationship between performance and text. Seven common literary elements were selected and then interpreted both in a performative action and a written work. The work engages the traditions of both performance art and conceptual writing, blurring the distinction between physical body and textual body. Ultimately, DEAD ELEMENTS serves as a critique of academic literature, a reification of...
Show moreThis thesis, an interdisciplinary project entitled DEAD ELEMENTS, seeks to explore the complex relationship between performance and text. Seven common literary elements were selected and then interpreted both in a performative action and a written work. The work engages the traditions of both performance art and conceptual writing, blurring the distinction between physical body and textual body. Ultimately, DEAD ELEMENTS serves as a critique of academic literature, a reification of abstractions, a meditation on the body, and an engagement with my own idiosyncratic artistic practice.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0466
Format: Thesis

Title: Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad.
Creator: Donahue, Jennifer, Ward, Candace, Munro, Martin, Montgomery, Maxine, McGregory, Jerrilyn, Suarez, Virgil, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad closely examines Caribbean women's prose fiction published from 1959 to 2011. This project illustrates the power of the diasporic voice. This study explores how flight serves as a recurring response to exile in Caribbean women's writing by transnational authors as diverse as Edwidge Danticat, Pauline Melville and Michelle Cliff. In the semi-autobiographical novels under study, flight serves as a vehicle for coming to terms with conflictions...
Show moreTaking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad closely examines Caribbean women's prose fiction published from 1959 to 2011. This project illustrates the power of the diasporic voice. This study explores how flight serves as a recurring response to exile in Caribbean women's writing by transnational authors as diverse as Edwidge Danticat, Pauline Melville and Michelle Cliff. In the semi-autobiographical novels under study, flight serves as a vehicle for coming to terms with conflictions of place and identity. While analyzing the transformative power of flight in novels such as Breath, Eyes, Memory and Abeng, I read women in various states of exile. Drawing distinctions between literal and figurative, or mental, flight, this project proffers figurative flight as a form of resuscitation and healing for the protagonists. Moving beyond traditional understandings of flight, Taking Flight asserts the centrality of figurative flight to the transformative process for authors as well as the protagonists they depict. Rather than operating in binary opposition, symbolic flight is facilitated by the most literal of flights, migration. In the works under consideration, figurative flight functions as a rehearsal and preparation for literal flight, offering a haven or temporary home to those displaced by the process of migration. Drawing on women's studies, post-colonial studies, and sociological studies, particularly theories of migration, I investigate the relation between gender, location and literary production in novels by or about Caribbean women. With over 232 million migrants worldwide, this research not only opens up a new space in the discussion of Caribbean women's writing but also sheds light on a growing cultural reality. By discussing these connections within the scope of this study, I move beyond seeing these women simply as hybrid products of migration to appreciating the contradictions their works present as not merely indicative or reflective of the Caribbean but of the impact of migration on Caribbean women.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8768
Format: Thesis

Title: Thomas Middleton in Performance 1960-2013: A History of Reception.
Creator: Lechler, Kate, Daileader, Celia R., Dahl, Mary Karen, Taylor, Gary, Boehrer, Bruce, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This is a history of reception of Thomas Middleton. Literary critics and theater directors in the US and the UK have responded to a growing interest in Middleton by publishing and producing more Middleton-related work in the past 50 years. However, there is as yet no comprehensive stage history of his plays that is informed by the recent scholarship. My project, using archival production records such as video, photography, design sketches, prompt books, playbills, and reviews, fills this...
Show moreThis is a history of reception of Thomas Middleton. Literary critics and theater directors in the US and the UK have responded to a growing interest in Middleton by publishing and producing more Middleton-related work in the past 50 years. However, there is as yet no comprehensive stage history of his plays that is informed by the recent scholarship. My project, using archival production records such as video, photography, design sketches, prompt books, playbills, and reviews, fills this significant gap in current Middleton scholarship. I argue that, during the five decades that comprise Middleton's modern revival, theater companies respond to Middleton's texts in ways that strongly correspond with both social and artistic movements of their cultural moment. In the sixties and seventies, productions of Middleton's plays focused strongly on the female sexuality displayed in The Changeling, The Revenger's Tragedy, and Women Beware Women. In the eighties, directors utilized productions of these plays and The Roaring Girl to subvert other structures of authority beyond gender, such as class and race. In the last twenty years, the interest in recreating early modern staging has resulted in several Middleton Original Practices productions; I examine several OP productions of A Mad World, My Masters, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Honest Whore, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Finally, more recently, directors and playwrights have used Middleton's plays as springboards for adaptations and original works of their own, resulting in a musical adaptation of The Roaring Girl and a jazz opera based on The Revenger's Tragedy.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8831
Format: Thesis

Title: A City of Shallow Craters.
Creator: Hoover, Michael, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Roberts, Diane K., Shacochis, Robert G., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In A City of Shallow Craters the chapters oscillate between two POV characters, Leona Orfe and Kenneth Cartwright. Leona, a senior in high school, struggles to understand her brother's suicide attempt and can only reconcile the situation by blaming the manufacturer of his anti-depressant medication. Kenneth, an employee at the pharmaceutical company, is unable to tell his coworkers that his wife has left him. Instead, he chooses to live a lie, pretending he is still married. Complications...
Show moreIn A City of Shallow Craters the chapters oscillate between two POV characters, Leona Orfe and Kenneth Cartwright. Leona, a senior in high school, struggles to understand her brother's suicide attempt and can only reconcile the situation by blaming the manufacturer of his anti-depressant medication. Kenneth, an employee at the pharmaceutical company, is unable to tell his coworkers that his wife has left him. Instead, he chooses to live a lie, pretending he is still married. Complications ensue when his wife returns home with an aggressive form of cancer. Meanwhile, on her eighteenth birthday Leona flees her parents' house and begins working with Kenneth to carry out a bomb plot. When her secret is revealed, it tangles both of their lives, as they struggle to find redemption and forgiveness.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8808
Format: Thesis

Title: Else.
Creator: Goch, Bethany, Kirby, David, Hamby, Barbara, Kimbrell, James, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The poems in Else are lyric explorations of paradox. Specifically, they meditate on the idea that what gives comfort also has the potential to cause great harm. The central focus of the collection is a troubled relationship, but regional history, religion, and personal narrative are also important subjects.
Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8790
Format: Thesis

Title: Three Needles.
Creator: Liu, Jie, Roberts, Diane, Stuckey-French, Ned, Crucet, Jennine Capó, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: My thesis contains one novella and two short stories about only children in China. My novella is woven around a Chinese only child with needles in her head. Not long after Fang left home for college, she meets a doctor who finds out that there are three needles in her brain, which must have been put there before she was one year old, when her skull was still soft. Suddenly all her headaches and motor incoordination have a different meaning. Unable to face this cruel reality, Fang first...
Show moreMy thesis contains one novella and two short stories about only children in China. My novella is woven around a Chinese only child with needles in her head. Not long after Fang left home for college, she meets a doctor who finds out that there are three needles in her brain, which must have been put there before she was one year old, when her skull was still soft. Suddenly all her headaches and motor incoordination have a different meaning. Unable to face this cruel reality, Fang first struggles with her new conflicting feelings toward her body. Then she moves painfully forward to find out the truth, suspecting her family members. Attempting to take revenge, she begins to feel another type of pain. The second thread of the novella shows the struggles of Fang's family members. Fang's mother was a woman trying to control her own fate. In order to get rid of her oppressing family in the country, she married Fang's father and moved to the city, where things were not as good as she expected. She soon realized the irresistible fate and her failure after giving birth to a girl. For years, she has lived with a broken spirit. Fang's grandmother, a tough woman, has her own secret and a past she cannot face. After surviving wars, famines, and other hardships, she didn't want to bow to fate. Widowed at an early age, she sees her son as her only hope. While Fang is not the grandson she expected, she has learned to value this girl for her vitality, realizing the awakening power Fang possesses. While Fang's father appears to be a stern man, he hides a softness inside. Under the weight of masculinity, he has to live with a mask he has put on since childhood. After an accident at the steel plant where he works, he tries to save what he has lost but fails. The two short stories depict the other side of only children's life. In China girls born in cities as only children live in an unprecedented situation. In many families, they are valued as little princesses, enjoying resources and opportunities that would never have been given to them if they had brothers. Not simply shaped by the traditional requirements for women, as the only inheritors of their families who carry all the hope, now they are also expected to overcome more challenges and fight for glory like a son. "The Day Kaimo Died" shows the cut-throat academic competition these only children have to face. "Blind Date" highlights the new spirit of an only daughter trying to find a husband.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8834
Format: Thesis

Title: My Left Arm, Her Twin Blades: Narratives of Resistance in Black Speculative Fiction.
Creator: Burnett, Joshua, Ikard, David, Jones, Maxine, Gaines, Alisha, Ward, Candace, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: My Left Arm, Her Twin Blades: Narratives of Resistance in Black Speculative Fiction, explores contemporary (1979-2010) Black Speculative novels by four key writers in the genre, including Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, The Shadow Speaker and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, and Tales of Nevèrÿon (the first volume of the four-part Return to Nevèrÿon series) by Samuel R. Delany. Using these five texts, I explore resistance to both everyday and political...
Show moreMy Left Arm, Her Twin Blades: Narratives of Resistance in Black Speculative Fiction, explores contemporary (1979-2010) Black Speculative novels by four key writers in the genre, including Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, The Shadow Speaker and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, and Tales of Nevèrÿon (the first volume of the four-part Return to Nevèrÿon series) by Samuel R. Delany. Using these five texts, I explore resistance to both everyday and political oppression, as well as to hegemonic racist, sexist, and homophobic ideology as a persistent theme within the field of Black Speculative Fiction. Not only are these five texts (and others in the genre) interested in resistance, they challenge and trouble our understanding of what resistance means. Central to all five is the question of resistance's potential (or lack thereof) for producing meaningful counterhegemonic change. What's more, they simultaneously pose and complicate new models for resistance and identity in the African American and Diasporic African cultural context, particularly queerness and sexuality as models for resistance. My Left Arm, Her Twin Blades explores and analyzes these critiques of and new models for resistance, and argues that these texts point toward a new conceptualization of black identity, which I am calling "Speculative Blackness." Speculative Blackness is a deessentialized vision of blackness (and broader racial identity) which nevertheless insists upon the constant interrogation of race and racial history as both a personal and political imperative. Furthermore, Speculative Blackness integrates queerness into blackness, locating non-heteronormative sexuality (be it same-sex attraction, interracial coupling, nontraditional forms of polygamy, BDSM, or radically equitable heterosexuality) as a key site for black resistance to oppression. Speculative Blackness draws on Foucauldian conceptualizations of of sexuality and identity as culturally constructed categories that relate and respond to power relationships in complicated ways. While scholastic engagement with Black Speculative Fiction is hardly new, most existing criticism that treats the field as a whole has tended to be historical in scope, establishing the genre through unearthing its often neglected history. While this focus has been useful in establishing a Black Speculative canon and dispelling notions of African American Literature and Speculative Fiction as mutually exclusive categories, insufficient critical attention has been paid to mapping out the tropes and cultural constructions that distinguish Black Speculative Fiction from mainstream/white Speculative Fiction, as well as to theorizing how these tropes and contributions play out across the genre. With the intent of addressing these difficulties, my dissertation utilizes an intersectional approach to Black Speculative Fiction's unique formulations of black identity with particular attention to exploring how gender and queerness inform diverse experiences of racialized subjectivity and resistance strategies.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8747
Format: Thesis

Title: The Devil's Swallows.
Creator: Alford, Emily, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Young, Patricia, Capo-Crucet, Jennine, Kennedy, Meegan, Roberts, Diane, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: My creative dissertation is a novel entitled The Devil's Swallows. The novel is the an extension of a novella I wrote in Elizabeth Stuckey-French's 2011 fiction workshop that I called Dead Man's Float. The Devil's Swallows is based on my experiences growing up in an evangelical Southern Baptist church in North Louisiana in the mid nineteen-nineties. The book is set at a fictional Bible camp called Camp New Caney and focuses on questions of sexuality and sin and also on the prejudice fostered...
Show moreMy creative dissertation is a novel entitled The Devil's Swallows. The novel is the an extension of a novella I wrote in Elizabeth Stuckey-French's 2011 fiction workshop that I called Dead Man's Float. The Devil's Swallows is based on my experiences growing up in an evangelical Southern Baptist church in North Louisiana in the mid nineteen-nineties. The book is set at a fictional Bible camp called Camp New Caney and focuses on questions of sexuality and sin and also on the prejudice fostered in children by often well-meaning adults. The novel is told from the perspectives of many different characters: from the well-meaning youth pastor determined to save his job at all costs to the optimistic, yet troubled owner of the camp to a young girl looking to overcome her family's scandalous reputation and find sexual fulfillment far away from home at Camp New Caney. The conflicting narratives serve to drive the action of the novel, with each character unwittingly thwarting the best intentions of the others until finally, all of the action culminates in the accidental drowning of one of the campers. To save their own reputations, characters turn on one another, implicating and blaming their neighbors, revealing a self serving side of human nature that causes the campers at Camp New Caney to question both their own faith and the faiths of those closest to them: their friends, relatives, spouses, and even their own pastor.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8723
Format: Thesis

Title: Perception Sickness: Modernist Literature and the Dangers of a Heightened Awareness.
Creator: Ardoin, Paul, Gontarski, S. E., Jumonville, Neil, Epstein, Andrew, Faulk, Barry J., Vitkus, Daniel J., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Modernist literature positioned itself as the principal imaginer of what I call a "perception sickness." One character after another--usually an artist or artist figure--suffers from a too-keen perception with dangerous consequences. While tracking the consequences of this sickness through its various stages, I revisit and reframe numerous familiar elements of modernist literature--paralysis, an acute sensitivity to a daily bombardment of stimuli, the stream of consciousness, and the artistic...
Show moreModernist literature positioned itself as the principal imaginer of what I call a "perception sickness." One character after another--usually an artist or artist figure--suffers from a too-keen perception with dangerous consequences. While tracking the consequences of this sickness through its various stages, I revisit and reframe numerous familiar elements of modernist literature--paralysis, an acute sensitivity to a daily bombardment of stimuli, the stream of consciousness, and the artistic temperament, among others. These issues become a sort of extension of contemporary sociology of crowds and urban life, clinical and popular psychology, and philosophy, taken to their extreme ends.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8726
Format: Thesis

Title: Labor and Leisure in the Tropical Environment: Race, Class, and the Enjoyment of Nature.
Creator: Bowman, Robert, Edwards, Leigh H., Outka, Paul, Davis, Frederick R., Moore, Dennis D., Roberts, Diane, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: There is no shortage of encomiums to Florida's natural environment. Many writers have conventionally depicted it as a tropical paradise, a latter-day Eden in which leisure awaits the fortunate visitor. Building on this conventional attitude that aestheticizes Florida's nature, my dissertation argues that writers have repeatedly racialized and classed the tropical environment of Florida by using the frequently competing activities of labor and leisure. As an advocate for the development of...
Show moreThere is no shortage of encomiums to Florida's natural environment. Many writers have conventionally depicted it as a tropical paradise, a latter-day Eden in which leisure awaits the fortunate visitor. Building on this conventional attitude that aestheticizes Florida's nature, my dissertation argues that writers have repeatedly racialized and classed the tropical environment of Florida by using the frequently competing activities of labor and leisure. As an advocate for the development of Florida tourism, Harriet Beecher Stowe naturalizes black labor, using it as a foil to the white appreciation of natural beauty. Broadening the view of labor, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings romanticizes the rural work of poor whites while continuing to privilege the leisurely observation of nature as a superior behavior that allows for the philosophical and aesthetic contemplation of the natural environment. In contrast to these two writers, Zora Neale Hurston offers a more thorough and thoughtful treatment of African-American labor, seeing its cultural value as well as its relationship to an exploitative labor system. In the epilogue, I use Carl Hiaasen's work to discuss the way in which contemporary Florida theme parks intensify these romanticized attitudes toward labor, leisure, and nature.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8738
Format: Thesis

Title: Inscriptions.
Creator: Blais, Craig, Kirby, David, Jolles, Adam, Epstein, Andrew, Hamby, Barbara, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Inscriptions is a collection of poems inspired, in part, by the twenty-four poem opening section of Walt Whitman's 1892 "Death-bed" edition of Leaves of Grass, entitled "Inscriptions." The poems of direct address in the first section appropriate and reimagine the traditional inscriptive poetic mode in a series of "For..." poems. In the second section, the "Jalopy Sonnets" explore the physical practice out of which the inscriptive mode emerged--particularly its modern day incarnation of...
Show moreInscriptions is a collection of poems inspired, in part, by the twenty-four poem opening section of Walt Whitman's 1892 "Death-bed" edition of Leaves of Grass, entitled "Inscriptions." The poems of direct address in the first section appropriate and reimagine the traditional inscriptive poetic mode in a series of "For..." poems. In the second section, the "Jalopy Sonnets" explore the physical practice out of which the inscriptive mode emerged--particularly its modern day incarnation of signage and advertising--through the incorporation of found language from various public sources. The third section inscribes place, real and imagined, physical and dream-state, unified by place names and GPS coordinates. Throughout, the poems share an "avant-pop" aesthetic that values both experimentation and accessibility equally.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8733
Format: Thesis

Title: The Man with Two Souls.
Creator: Anderson, Justin, Winegardner, Mark, Butler, Robert Olen, Roberts, Diane, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This novel is a comedy. It contains the quixotic adventure of a twenty-five-year-old lawn man living in a state of extended adolescence who decides to investigate a murder allegedly committed by his boss. In his quest, he is aided by two young Guatemalans, a four-hundred-pound drug dealer, and a black prophet and street hustler. It is a story of brotherhood, friendship, and sacrifice and uses the philosophies of certain outsider religious traditions to explore the meaning of Love--sexual, non...
Show moreThis novel is a comedy. It contains the quixotic adventure of a twenty-five-year-old lawn man living in a state of extended adolescence who decides to investigate a murder allegedly committed by his boss. In his quest, he is aided by two young Guatemalans, a four-hundred-pound drug dealer, and a black prophet and street hustler. It is a story of brotherhood, friendship, and sacrifice and uses the philosophies of certain outsider religious traditions to explore the meaning of Love--sexual, non-sexual, and otherwise.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8725
Format: Thesis

Title: The Calculation of Love.
Creator: Crotty, Marian, Winegardner, Mark, Corrigan, John, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Ward, Susan, Yancey, Kathleen, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The Calculation of Love, a novel, follows a precocious fourteen-year-old girl's first semester of high school. After watching her brother have sex with his pregnant teenage girlfriend, Mallory Shreckengost begins reading about the science of depravity. When her research uncovers a New York Times article stating that violent sex criminals begin by spying and escalate into criminality, she decides she must diagnose herself as soon as possible. She seeks out a series of increasingly dangerous...
Show moreThe Calculation of Love, a novel, follows a precocious fourteen-year-old girl's first semester of high school. After watching her brother have sex with his pregnant teenage girlfriend, Mallory Shreckengost begins reading about the science of depravity. When her research uncovers a New York Times article stating that violent sex criminals begin by spying and escalate into criminality, she decides she must diagnose herself as soon as possible. She seeks out a series of increasingly dangerous encounters with strangers, believing that the hunting lessons she's receiving from her grandfather will ensure her safety. Although she soon abandons her project out of boredom, she is outed by a classmate and must confront bullying online and in person and renegotiate her relationship with her family.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8966
Format: Thesis

Title: Now with More Modes?: The Curricular Design and Implementation of Multimodality in Undergraduate Major Programs in Writing/Rhetoric.
Creator: Lee, Rory, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Opel, Andy, Fleckenstein, Kristie, Neal, Michael, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This project explores the intersection of two relatively recent phenomena in the field of rhetoric and composition: (1) the proliferation of undergraduate major programs in writing and rhetoric, particularly over the past decade, and (2) the increase in multimodal composing and the scholarship surrounding it. While many in the field have made scholarly contributions to each area of inquiry, we have yet to investigate the ways in which multimodal composing is implemented within undergraduate...
Show moreThis project explores the intersection of two relatively recent phenomena in the field of rhetoric and composition: (1) the proliferation of undergraduate major programs in writing and rhetoric, particularly over the past decade, and (2) the increase in multimodal composing and the scholarship surrounding it. While many in the field have made scholarly contributions to each area of inquiry, we have yet to investigate the ways in which multimodal composing is implemented within undergraduate major programs in writing and rhetoric. This study attends to this exigence through a mixed methods approach that includes (1) administering a survey to 19 participating program representatives and (2) conducting case studies of three major programs in particular, each of which contains a different level of multimodal activity (low, medium, or high), is offered at a different institutional type, and is located within a different geographical region. Both the survey and the case studies gather data about the ways those staffing undergraduate major programs in writing and rhetoric teach, assess, and support multimodal composing, and the macro- and micro-level portraits provided via the data offer the field a lens through which to view the ways that curricula attentive to multimodality are designed and implemented within undergraduate major programs in writing and rhetoric.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9025
Format: Thesis

Title: When Experts Disagree: A Pentadic Analysis of Kitzmiller v. Dover.
Creator: Eskew, Joshua, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Graban, Tarez Samra, Mariano, Trinyan, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The person of the expert witness presents several problems for rhetoricians. This thesis considers what resources are available for judges to decide between competing expert testimony over subjects where they themselves do not have expert knowledge. Applying Kenneth Burke's Pentad to the expert testimony and the written decision of Kitzmiller v. Dover, a 2005 case where experts disputed whether "intelligent design" should or should not be considered science, I argue that 1) there exist...
Show moreThe person of the expert witness presents several problems for rhetoricians. This thesis considers what resources are available for judges to decide between competing expert testimony over subjects where they themselves do not have expert knowledge. Applying Kenneth Burke's Pentad to the expert testimony and the written decision of Kitzmiller v. Dover, a 2005 case where experts disputed whether "intelligent design" should or should not be considered science, I argue that 1) there exist rhetorical features apart from subject knowledge which constitute the performance of expertise and 2) the judge's decision in this case relied more on how these features constituted a scientific ethos rather than on the propositional content that was disputed.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8980
Format: Thesis

Title: Reconstructing Florida's Ethos.
Creator: Powers, Elizabeth, Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Opel, Andy, Spiller, Elizabeth, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation investigates place ethos, a crucial component of rhetorics on place: visual and verbal texts that construct specific geographical locations. Through examining rhetorical representations of place, we can better understand the interplay of environments and occupants in order to enact sustainable, ethical practices in our living and teaching contexts. Drawing on Aristotelian and Isocratean descriptions of ethos as based both in text and community, this study argues that place...
Show moreThis dissertation investigates place ethos, a crucial component of rhetorics on place: visual and verbal texts that construct specific geographical locations. Through examining rhetorical representations of place, we can better understand the interplay of environments and occupants in order to enact sustainable, ethical practices in our living and teaching contexts. Drawing on Aristotelian and Isocratean descriptions of ethos as based both in text and community, this study argues that place ethos is a dynamic rhetorical strategy that contributes significantly to rhetorics on place by shaping how we perceive places through texts. To demonstrate the contribution of place ethos to rhetorics on place, this study examines place ethos as constructed through interrelated representations of Reconstruction era Florida, a time of regional re-imagining, as stakeholders constructed competing visions to draw Northern tourists and entrepreneurs to the southern state. My line of inquiry in this project includes the following key questions: 1) How do classical models of ethos apply in contemporary critical study of rhetorical character construction, and how might these models be expanded? and 2) How is ethos constructed verbally and visually for a place, and how do these constructions complement and challenge each other? I address these questions through a rhetorical analysis of discursive and visual texts designed to reconfigure postbellum Florida as an attractive destination for Northern tourists in the 1870s. As a way into understanding how a variety of materials can together function to build a place ethos, I examine nineteenth-century travel guidebooks, stereoscopic photographs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Florida-themed essay collection, Palmetto Leaves. The critical framework that serves as a lens to analyze place ethos in these texts is a hybrid classical model of rhetorical ethos drawing on the Aristotelian triadic notion of ethos as arete, phronesis, and eunoia, and Isocratean notions of community-shaped perceptions and practices of goodness. This analytic lens reveals that widely circulated nineteenth-century Florida travel texts, both verbal and visual, construed Florida as a paradisiacal getaway for reform-minded Northerners; at the same time, these texts build conflicting arguments about the role of Northern action in Florida commercial and moral development. Through applying a hybrid classical model of rhetorical ethos to a specific socio-historical context, this study extends our understanding of rhetorics on place, which circulate as texts of places that can interact and effect a place through visual and verbal representation. The study finds that verbal rhetorics on place build a place ethos through multiple descriptive components, which act together persuasively, and that visual rhetorics on place build a place ethos through multiple textual components acting together with viewing practices and technologies. Additionally, the study finds that rhetorics on place, with co-dominant visual and verbal aspects, construct place ethos through visual-verbal interplay, and that this construction can be relationally understood to other ethē in and related to the text. These three iterations of place ethos are not mutually exclusive, and provide multiple, overlapping options for exploring the dynamic of place ethos in action with all of its contradictions. The implications for this study are fourfold. First, the study extends how we understand the rhetoric of place, or the rhetorical power of a location's material composition, through the conception of rhetorics on place, or the textual artifacts that influence, create, and interact with perceptions of a place. Second, this study introduces the concept of place ethos, a complex rhetorical structure that significantly contributes to rhetorics on place by constructing character for a location. Third, in tracing the rhetorical work of verbal and visual representation, this project illuminates the multiple strategies by which place ethos emerges. Lastly, the dissertation holds implications for rhetorical ethos more widely, as it participates in a contemporary move to extend the reach of ethos by dislodging its conventional position directed by an individual rhetor and into a more dynamic, interactive rhetorical world.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9072
Format: Thesis

Title: Clearing Space for Our Own Voices: The (Re)Writings of Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, and Emma Tennant.
Creator: Syrjanen, Sarah, Gontarski, Stanley E., Carbonell, Joyce, Faulk, Barry, Berry, Ralph, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This study articulates the reinvention of rewriting in postmodern fiction from the 1980s to present, focusing particularly on the writings of Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, and Emma Tennant. These three authors have made history and their characters' personal and political engagements with the past and the rewriting of previous narratives and works of fiction central features of their own fiction. Postmodernism, with its belief in the instability, and essential sameness of history and...
Show moreThis study articulates the reinvention of rewriting in postmodern fiction from the 1980s to present, focusing particularly on the writings of Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, and Emma Tennant. These three authors have made history and their characters' personal and political engagements with the past and the rewriting of previous narratives and works of fiction central features of their own fiction. Postmodernism, with its belief in the instability, and essential sameness of history and literature, has enabled writers to blur the factual and the imagined. What Smith, Winterson, Tennant and many other contemporary women writers seek to explore is the present's relationship with the past and the inescapability of the historical in the contemporary, while using theories of intertextuality problematize the concept of authorship. Particularly for the woman author and reader, there is an imperative to deconstruct the gendered assumptions of literature and, in doing so, find a new potential for women's literary production. While contemporary women writers of historical fiction and their various agendas resist neat categorization, what these writers have in common is their self-conscious project of problematizing the very nature of the authored and authorized character of historical narrative.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9103
Format: Thesis

Title: Ten-Headed Ecstasies.
Creator: Vyas, Avni, Kirby, David, Erndl, Kathleen, Epstein, Andrew, Neal, Michael, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Abstract The poems in this series seek to relocate Valmiki's Hindu epic The Ramayana to a contemporary, American voice. The confessional tone and the focus on Sita as a primary character seeks to marry the speaker to the epic, to personalize and universalize the transcendent, ages-old story. In a simultaneously productive and destructive vein, reinventing Sita becomes imperative for the primary speaker. She written into her scenery as well as psychology, wondering what has been learned in the...
Show moreAbstract The poems in this series seek to relocate Valmiki's Hindu epic The Ramayana to a contemporary, American voice. The confessional tone and the focus on Sita as a primary character seeks to marry the speaker to the epic, to personalize and universalize the transcendent, ages-old story. In a simultaneously productive and destructive vein, reinventing Sita becomes imperative for the primary speaker. She written into her scenery as well as psychology, wondering what has been learned in the years since Sita was swallowed up by the earthÍ¾ and instead of Indra's bow, our speaker is manhandling a hand-me-down acoustic guitar. The dreams here are palpable: how does one grow out of the earth, into a mountain, along the lip of a heaven-hell, and then return to the earth? What are the metaphorical implications for a new generation of American female poets, for Sita, and for our speaker? These poems seek to explore these questions, but not fully resolve them.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9111
Format: Thesis

Title: The Swan and the Lights.
Creator: Nelson, Christopher, Butler, Robert Olen, Shacochis, Robert, Roberts, Diane, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This is a collection of seven short stories submitted as a thesis project to Florida State University in the spring of 2014. Although most of the stories take place in the state of New York, they are all set in America and they all deal with issues of national identity such as class, community, and culture. On a more personal level, the stories are about gender, the relationship between the past and the present, communication, parenting, aging, mental health, the fear of death, and death...
Show moreThis is a collection of seven short stories submitted as a thesis project to Florida State University in the spring of 2014. Although most of the stories take place in the state of New York, they are all set in America and they all deal with issues of national identity such as class, community, and culture. On a more personal level, the stories are about gender, the relationship between the past and the present, communication, parenting, aging, mental health, the fear of death, and death itself. The stories are also explorations of style as much as they are of themes. The tense, unfolding of time, reliability of narrators, and narrative distance vary between stories, and the point of view in "Homecoming" is a hybrid of first- and second-person. Taken together, the content and form serve to illuminate characters in the midst of existential crises. In essence, the stories examine, often indirectly, how people can seek meaningful, even spiritual, connections with external structures, others, and themselves in what is an increasingly impersonal world.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8856
Format: Thesis

Title: The Paradigm That Always Was: Scientific Discourse in Young-Earth Creationist Textbooks.
Creator: Maynard, Travis, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Rice, Diana, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Bob Jones University Press (BJU Press) is a publishing house owned by the Greenville, South Carolina university of the same name. Fulfilling Bob Jones' mission beyond the college classroom, BJU Press prints a full K-12 educational program that spans all subjects and meets national core content standards. These materials are nationally circulated in homeschooling environments and conservative Christian private schools, a growing portion of America's educational landscape: according to a...
Show moreBob Jones University Press (BJU Press) is a publishing house owned by the Greenville, South Carolina university of the same name. Fulfilling Bob Jones' mission beyond the college classroom, BJU Press prints a full K-12 educational program that spans all subjects and meets national core content standards. These materials are nationally circulated in homeschooling environments and conservative Christian private schools, a growing portion of America's educational landscape: according to a Department of Education 2009 report, enrollment in these schools represented 885,000 students. Research in rhetoric facilitates our understanding of various discourse communities, especially those that appropriate the discourse of a separate community to forward an argument that runs counter to the purposes of the original community. An interesting example of this rhetorical strategy is BJU Press' educational philosophy called Biblical Integration, in which teachers are invoked to "call into question the secular assumptions of each subject and then encourage the student to rebuild the discipline from biblical presuppositions." Using this technique, teachers using BJU Press materials attempt to shape students' ideologies by teaching a literal reading of the Bible dictating a 6,000-year-old Earth. The most interesting subject area in which BJU Press deploys Biblical Integration is the natural sciences, wherein to achieve this goal, textbook authors must make two rhetorical moves: first, re-frame a biblical ideology as being equally scientific to its secular counterparts; and, second, argue for the superiority of a science based in the Bible. This thesis analyzes a science textbook produced by BJU Press, exploring how the authors meet these exigencies. Specifically, I argue that the authors of the eighth grade title Earth Science both adopt and adapt the discourse of science in order to validate Evangelical Christian Science as being legitimately engaged in scientific endeavors. Within the context of natural sciences, Biblical Integration is particularly compelling: in formulating an alternative view of science and arguing for its superiority over secular science, the authors at BJU Press are implicitly employing the discourse of Kuhnian scientific revolution, adding a layer of scientific credibility to their efforts by mimicking the historical progress of the sciences. In adopting a Kuhnian approach, the authors craft a hybrid discourse that blends science with scripture, working against the secular status quo of the sciences. Accordingly, to analyze this hybrid discourse, this thesis draws upon work within the rhetoric of science directly influenced by Thomas Kuhn. This analysis is conducted via two case studies. The first focuses on the textbook's introductory chapter, highlighting how the chapter appropriates the epistemological practices of scientific research by presenting an overarching argument that forwards a threefold purpose: (1) establishing the purpose of Christian Science; (2) highlighting the inherently ideological nature of scientific epistemology; and (3) providing a dualistic definition that polarizes Christian and secular science. By emphasizing the ideological nature of science, the authors of this textbook create a rhetorical space in which they can articulate their alternative view of science as being theoretically valid. The second case study analyzes a discipline-specific application of Christian Science: two textbook chapters that focus on geology. When the textbook attempts to operationalize Christian Science, this view falls short of the standards of science due to Evangelical faith in the infallibility of scripture. Despite this shortcoming, these two chapters still employ strategies indicative of Kuhnian paradigmatic arguments: highlighting fundamental anomalies in scientific consensus and utilizing arguments from familiarity to gain audiences' tentative acceptance. In using these argumentative strategies, the textbook authors mimic scientific argument, but do not fully meet the criteria of science.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9041
Format: Thesis

Title: Selling the Shadow, Supporting the Substance: Representing the Black Body in Abolitionist Literature and Culture, 1830-1865.
Creator: McWilliam, Fiona M., Moore, Dennis, Frank, Andrew, Ikard, David, Montgomery, Maxine, Roberts, Diane K., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation analyzes antislavery literature between the years 1830 and 1865. Antislavery activists often cast themselves as messengers, responsible for showing the truth about slavery to the American public. The changing print culture allowed abolitionists to spread their message in a way that was previously not possible, in the form of pamphlets, newspapers, novels, poetry, gift books, and children's periodicals. Within the pages of these works, abolitionist often relied on--perhaps...
Show moreThis dissertation analyzes antislavery literature between the years 1830 and 1865. Antislavery activists often cast themselves as messengers, responsible for showing the truth about slavery to the American public. The changing print culture allowed abolitionists to spread their message in a way that was previously not possible, in the form of pamphlets, newspapers, novels, poetry, gift books, and children's periodicals. Within the pages of these works, abolitionist often relied on--perhaps appropriated--black authority to lend credence to their assertions, as the testimony from an ex- or escaped slave added a type of evidence unavailable to white abolitionists. Here, though, a problematic dynamic emerges: the use of black identity and authority to fuel claims against slavery's barbarism simultaneously undermines the agency and authority of the very people these works seek to liberate. This project examines the implications of using the already-commodified body of the slave in the fight to end slavery.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9046
Format: Thesis

Title: Writing as a Social Practice: How Interaction and Circulation Are Enacted in the First-Year Writing Class.
Creator: O’Malley, Jennifer L., Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Rice, Diana, Fleckenstein, Kristie, Neal, Michael, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The underlying goal of this study was to answer the central question: How do teachers design for and implement their understanding of writing as a social practice in the classroom by way of assignments (text) and pedagogy (context)? Writing as a social practice is here defined as a function of the interrelationships among five key terms--context, community, audience, interaction, and circulation. I have chosen to focus particularly on two main processes of the social: interaction and...
Show moreThe underlying goal of this study was to answer the central question: How do teachers design for and implement their understanding of writing as a social practice in the classroom by way of assignments (text) and pedagogy (context)? Writing as a social practice is here defined as a function of the interrelationships among five key terms--context, community, audience, interaction, and circulation. I have chosen to focus particularly on two main processes of the social: interaction and circulation, what I call the social-in-action. This dissertation has examined the role of the social nature of writing in terms of interaction and circulation in a single case study comprised of three scenes. These three scenes are second semester first-year composition courses. To answer the central question, I chose to look at a single assignment in each of the three scenes. This case study has shown that the social was enacted in each of the three scenes in what I refer to as mechanisms of the social. A mechanism of the social is the means by which a teacher enacted the social in terms of interaction and/or circulation in connection to a single assignment. Each mechanism took on a different role in the context of each scene in one or more of three ways: as extension, as enrichment, or as integral. Each scene speaks to the social nature of writing; however, they do so in very different ways, and some are more visible to students than others. Based on this information, we can surmise that an enactment of the social makes integral to an assignment layered mechanisms of the social. Put differently, multiple mechanisms that speak to each other and play off of one another are structured into the design and implementation of the assignment. They are interrelated, and at their core exists a focus on writing. If students are to understand writing as a social practice and to engage in writing as a social act, these findings suggest that the strategic integration of multiple layered mechanisms is one approach that helps facilitate this kind of understanding and engagement.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9065
Format: Thesis

Title: Mourning the Dead: Living Memorials, Rhetorical Functions, and Everyday Multimodality.
Creator: Graziano, Leigh, Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Proffitt, Jennifer, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Neal, Michael, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation begins the important work of bringing living memorials, the spontaneous and everyday construction of memorials following in a tragedy, into the landscape of rhetorical theory. The value of investigating living memorials is considerable. First, living memorials enrich our growing understanding of human persuasion in the twenty-first century. Second, they suggest new practices of multimodality, illustrating how materials, not just words, can be used to advance social action....
Show moreThis dissertation begins the important work of bringing living memorials, the spontaneous and everyday construction of memorials following in a tragedy, into the landscape of rhetorical theory. The value of investigating living memorials is considerable. First, living memorials enrich our growing understanding of human persuasion in the twenty-first century. Second, they suggest new practices of multimodality, illustrating how materials, not just words, can be used to advance social action. Finally, they contribute to our understanding of the construction of community as collaboration between human and nonhuman agents. Living memorials enhance not only our knowledge of rhetoric but also of the ways performance pervades everyday life, expanding the boundaries of what we consider rhetorical performances. With the goal of bringing living memorials into the landscape of rhetorical theory, this project advances four research questions: 1) What are living memorials? Given their diverse appearance, how might we characterize their nature? 2) What work do living memorials perform? In other words, what is their function(s)? 3) Given their nature and function(s), what insights do we derive from their evaluation? 4) Given their evaluation, what conclusions can we draw about what living memorials persuade into existence? To answer those questions, this project establishes a spectrum of living memorials based on a survey of extant memorial types. That spectrum ranges from living memorials that bleed into national memorials to living memorials that dialogue with vernacular and institutional agents to living memorials that are completely everyday. Then, with this spectrum as a guide, this study explores selected living memorials according to a three-part analysis based on a framework devised by Sonja Foss to explore visual rhetorical artifacts. That framework directs attention to nature, function, and evaluation yielding a rich array of insights on living memorials. First, using a broad selection of memorials from across the spectrum, the analysis ascertained the nature of living memorials, identifying that polyvocal--a collection of many "voices"--is the organizing principle of living memorials, and it manifests itself in five ways: living memories manifest polyvocality in that they are instable, material, communal, interruptive, and self-authorizing. Together the terms that comprise the nature of living memorials challenge a discourse-based rhetorical theory by drawing attention to how different rhetorical elements function visually. Second, enriching Foss's analytic of function with Aristotle's theory of discourse types, this project focuses on selected representative examples from key points on the spectrum. This dissertation uses Aristotle as the starting point for function because he organizes discourse forms according to social function, according to the action it is used to accomplish. The AIDS Memorial Quilt performs an epideictic function (Chapter three, "Individual Quilts, Collected Together"). The Quilt communicates a message of praise and blame and fulfills a purpose of communal education, an education oriented towards motivating future political action to alleviate the AIDS crisis. The NYC Ghost Bikes perform a function of deliberate rhetoric (Chapter four, "Ghost Riders"). Ghost Bikes share a deliberative emphasis on future action, transforming the site of the memorial from one of grief to one of protest--one that threatens mainstream automobile culture. The Caylee Anthony memorial performs a function of forensic rhetoric, albeit an everyday version of this Aristotelian discourse function (Chapter five, "(Unrealized) Justice for Caylee"). The community performs a forensic rhetoric of their own, to pursue justice on their own terms instead of according to the prescribed procedures of the official legal system. This project concludes that to varying degrees each living memorial possesses features of the other Aristotelian functions, revealing that these discourse genres are not as stable as previously conceived. Third, the dialogue between living memorials and the Aristotelian topology offers key findings into evaluation, or the effectiveness of the text's ability to perform its function. For instance, the AIDS Memorial Quilt yields insights into a latent characteristic of epideictic rhetoric: revisionary (Chapter three). I define revisionary epideictic as a visual event where the primary purpose is to compare stories so as to amplify something the community needs to take up. Furthermore, the NYC Ghost Bikes require us to re-conceptualize the role of rhetor in deliberative rhetoric, a role that can be occupied by a nonhuman artifact (Chapter four). The things that make up our lives have value not only sentimentally but also have persuasive force of their own. Once we position the Ghost Bikes as speakers, they perform their work of providing counsel about a problem that needs to be addressed. Finally, the Caylee Anthony Memorial derives a forensic forum to match its function of everyday forensic rhetoric (Chapter five). In the shared creation of the memorial site, the community also shares in the construction of an everyday courtroom, a forum where they can discuss issues of justice and prevention. Together, the evaluation of living memorials reveals new applications of the Aristotelian discourse functions. Finally, the combination of nature, function, and evaluation establish living memorials phenomena important to rhetorical studies. This analysis highlights four key implications. First, living memorials challenge public memory, identifying an alternative to what and who should be remembered. Second, living memorials transform Aristotle's tripartite typology, revising them in light of composing practices today particularly in terms of visual-material texts and revealing characteristics latent within the verbal speech genres. Third, living memorials shift our focus to the everyday sphere, to ordinary performances of the everyday. Finally, living memorials enact new practices of multimodality, particularly emphasizing the agency within the material mode, the ability to ordinary objects to enact social action.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8993
Format: Thesis

Title: Boatyard Holiness.
Creator: Smith, Laura, Winegardner, Mark, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Crucet, Jennine Capó, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: These stories explore various tensions within the fictional community of Boatyard, Alabama. Though each story in the collection aims to present clear conflicts between characters, many of the stories also consider the natural dangers inherent in a town like Boatyard: alligators, wild hogs, and snakes, for example. The stories also examine the cultural establishments of a town like Boatyard: the influence of religion, the expected roles within a family, and the problems caused by racial...
Show moreThese stories explore various tensions within the fictional community of Boatyard, Alabama. Though each story in the collection aims to present clear conflicts between characters, many of the stories also consider the natural dangers inherent in a town like Boatyard: alligators, wild hogs, and snakes, for example. The stories also examine the cultural establishments of a town like Boatyard: the influence of religion, the expected roles within a family, and the problems caused by racial tensions and prejudice. I hope that, taken together, the stories provide a depiction of the lived experiences in Boatyard that is both broad and deep. My goal in Boatyard Holiness is to use the specificity of a single community to investigate more universal human truths. I also hope that I can explore new tensions within a dynamic region as it progresses into the twenty-first century and leaves the world of previous Southern authors--i.e. Welty, O'Connor, and Faulkner--to history.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8890
Format: Thesis

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